Read Winter Garden Online

Authors: Beryl Bainbridge

Winter Garden (8 page)

At the last moment, when the car was actually at the kerb, Olga Fiodorovna, murmuring that she had business to attend to, turned back and was gone for quite ten minutes.
Ashburner, waiting in the car with Enid, dwelt on the events of the previous day. In the aeroplane Nina had asked him if he was happy, though she herself had looked rather miserable. But then, frankly, it had never been apparent that Nina had any capacity for happiness or that she appreciated it in others. In the restaurant she had told him to stop laughing, that the sound he was making was absurd. It was difficult to think of an acceptable way of laughing when she behaved so distantly yet lay so close to his heart, and of course he had been suffering from the effects of that unusual afternoon tea. He imagined the squeal, so repugnant to Nina, that had issued from his lips had been the result of repression rather than amusement. One way or the other, he had been repressed for the last twenty-four hours.
‘I could wring Nina’s neck,’ he said. ‘I really could.’ He was astonished at the ferocity of this outburst.
‘I know what you mean,’ Enid said. She was thinking of the unobtainable Bernard. ‘It would be more peaceful if she was dead.’
‘Good God,’ cried Ashburner. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘Or in prison,’ ventured Enid. ‘At least you’d know where she was.’
There was a second, unexplained halt when they reached the outskirts of the city. They drove into the courtyard of a block of flats. Ashburner, fancying that they had reached their destination, was manoeuvring himself to follow Olga Fiodorovna from the car when she shut the door in his face. She turned once to look back, hand held up like a traffic controller, and then, silk scarf fluttering in the wind, ran across the yard. The driver took out his cigarettes.
‘She’s always on the go, isn’t she?’ remarked Ashburner, irritated by the high-handed manner in which the interpreter had departed.
‘She’s probably visiting her Mamotchka,’ Enid said. ‘She’s having a spot of bother with her at the moment.’ Enid herself had been bothered by her own mother for many years. ‘I suppose,’ she said, looking out at the bleak vista of concrete and snow, ‘that you get on well with your Mum.’
‘Not too badly,’ admitted Ashburner. ‘Though she’s frightfully shy.’ He was telling Enid how his wife still went down with raging headaches on the anniversary of
her
mother’s birthday when the driver, who had been slumped contentedly in a cloud of smoke, sat up abruptly and stubbed out his cigarette. A car was nosing into the courtyard behind them.
‘After her mother’s death’, said Ashburner, ‘she perked up for a year or two. She wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. I sent a wreath of course. But then her Uncle Robert died and she became depressed again.’
‘The uncle with the money?’ asked Enid. The light was going from the sky. She watched as two men, one carrying a suitcase wrapped in canvas against the weather, passed the windows of the car.
‘I don’t understand depressions,’ said Ashburner. ‘Do you?’
‘Only when my work’s not going well,’ Enid said.
Ashburner gathered she was alluding to her art; Nina often referred to her painting as work. ‘I’m afraid I’m far too active to give way to it,’ he said. ‘I’m always doing things, mending sash cords, making fires.’ But even as he spoke a peculiar feeling of lassitude stole over him. He peered out of the window of the car as though from the interior of a cave and had the greatest difficulty raising his eyes from the footprints in the darkening snow. A little church music would have reduced him to tears. He was far too worldly to imagine that his mood had anything to do with his separation from Nina. What I’m experiencing, he told himself, isn’t unhappiness but fatigue.
10
The studio of the illustrator Andrei Petrov was housed in a five-storey building surrounded by trees and set beside a frozen lake. There was a bicycle shed in the grounds and the statue of a man bending down to admire a leaping fish.
The short journey from car to entrance hall was sufficient to chill Ashburner to the bone. In the lift he thought he heard someone groaning but it was merely the chafing of the ancient cable.
Olga Fiodorovna escorted them to the artist’s door and then, explaining that she had visited Mr Petrov on numerous other occasions, left them. She didn’t use the lift. They heard her running down the stone stairs.
The room they entered was more like an English bedsitter than a studio. Though there was a couch, table and chairs, and a small kitchen half-concealed behind a curtain, it contained neither easel nor drawing board. A collection of cotton squares printed with koala bears, maps of Tasmania and kangaroos, some framed behind glass, some stretched on wooden battens, hung on the wall above the fireplace. The artist’s wife, a motherly woman in a pinny, was cutting a chocolate cake into portions. Introduced to the visitors by her husband, her hand shook noticeably and she was too bashful to look them candidly in the eye. Andrei Petrov, though more confident than his wife, spoke with one hand partially covering his mouth as if he hardly believed what he was saying. The Secretary of the Union, Mr Karlovitch, was strolling in the grounds and would join them shortly. In the meantime he himself, with the limited amount of English at his disposal, would try to acquaint his distinguished guests with his work and aspirations: as could be seen, he wasn’t only an illustrator but something of a connoisseur of folk-art. ‘Them’, he said, indicating the cloths above the fireplace, ‘I unearthed in Sydney, Australia.’
‘Charming,’ Ashburner said.
Encouraged, the illustrator pointed to the table on which lay a small charcoal drawing of a child hugging a teddy bear. He said deferntially to Ashburner: ‘That is the frontispiece of my latest book. I hesitate to show it to a man so forward in his field.’
Bernard was no help. He sat morosely in an armchair, balancing a plate of crumbs on his knee.
‘It is for the six- to nine-year-olds,’ elaborated Andrei Petrov.
‘It’s awfully good,’ Ashburner said. He was to remember later the exact positioning of the white woolly rug he so thoughtfully side-stepped as he advanced across the polished wooden floor.
On his return to the Peking Hotel he immediately telephoned Nina’s room. As he had expected, he received no reply. There wasn’t any point in his going upstairs; he had nothing to change into and his shower didn’t work. Disturbed, he prowled the lobby, buffeted by numerous women who, swaddled in furs, waited in a disorderly queue for the services of the cloakroom attendant. It was impossible for Ashburner to tell to which class they belonged. If he had been at home he might have referred to them as day trippers; his own wife, in winter, beyond a faint reddening of the nostrils, remained inescapably Kensington. Divested of hats and coats and scarves, the women emerged several inches thinner though still formidably stout-busted in layers of brightly coloured jumpers worn above minuscule skirts. It wasn’t surprising, he thought, that there had been an October Revolution: really cold weather was a great leavener of society. It was also possible that arctic conditions affected people in much the same way as heat waves; the Secretary of the Union had certainly behaved very oddly, going for a stroll in sub-zero temperatures, but perhaps that had something to do with his Siberian background.
Entering the restaurant and choosing a table nearest to the swing doors, Ashburner took from his pocket the large brown envelope Mr Karlovitch had given him earlier. Opening it, he draped Nina’s pink scarf across his knee and read her note again.
Sweetheart, wear this and keep your little old head warm in memory of me. See you when you get back
. Though she had never written to him before the levity of her message struck him as characteristic. It was the wording of the last sentence that he found peculiar. How convenient that she had happened to have a large envelope handy. Picking up the scarf he held it to his cheek and was sitting in this vulnerable attitude when Bernard came into the restaurant.
‘Listen, Douglas,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ve been up to her room and she’s not there. I’ll tell it once more and then leave me alone. I’ve just about had it.’
‘I don’t need to hear it again,’ said Ashburner. ‘I know your side of it.’ He folded both note and scarf and stuffed them in the pocket of his jacket. ‘But just answer me this if you can. Why did Olga say there was no need to disturb Nina this morning when she already knew Nina was having lunch with Prince Nevsky and that Boris chap?’
‘What Prince?’ said Bernard. ‘He’s as dead as a dodo.’
‘Well, why didn’t she give the note to you?’ asked Ashburner.
‘I told you, mate. She was leaving when I got there. They both were. He was taking her to see Pasternak’s grave. I wish to Christ I’d gone with them.’
‘She was looking quite well, was she?’ persisted Ashburner.
‘As well as could be expected after seeing that bloody folk-art,’ shouted Bernard, exasperated.
‘I gather they were only tea-towels,’ Ashburner said. ‘Even so, I thought one or two of them were rather pretty.’
Enid, when she joined them, was wearing a black taffeta dress and carrying a dorothy bag made of threadbare velvet. When she sat down she rustled like falling tissue paper.
‘Smashing texture,’ enthused Bernard, and he stroked the surface of her bag as though it were a cat.
Ashburner, complimenting Enid insincerely on her smart appearance, considered her frock outmoded, to say the least; it was beginning to irritate him the way they all affected to admire anything old and second-hand no matter how appalling its condition. His wife had inherited an evening reticule embroidered with seed pearls from Uncle Robert’s aunt. It was as good as new, strictly for show and insured for one hundred pounds. He was in the middle of telling them about it, describing the silver clasp, the flawlessness of its inner lining of ivory-coloured silk, when Bernard cried out belligerently, ‘I’m warning you both, if the work exhibited this evening is of the same standard as that crap we were subjected to this afternoon, I’m walking out.’
Ashburner was both bewildered and offended. It was true that his wife sometimes acquired a far-away look in her eyes when he spoke to her for longer than a minute, but that was understandable, and though it would have been an exaggeration to pretend that his professional colleagues hung on his every word they would never had interrupted him in mid-sentence. It was part of his job to assess character and from what he had observed of Bernard over the last forty-eight hours it was difficult, despite his often boorish behaviour, to dismiss him as merely an ignorant fellow. There were depths of sensitivity in Bernard which, if the man had not been an artist, Ashburner would have found disconcerting. There were only two rational explanations for his display of rudeness: either he was overtired from being up or down all night with Enid, or he was more worried than he cared to admit at the continuing absence of Nina.
Summoned by Olga Fiodorovna they left the restaurant and collected their coats from the cloakroom. Ashburner was astounded to see Bernard donning a Sherlock Holmes affair in expensive check tweed with a sort of cape attached to the shoulders. He couldn’t understand how Bernard had managed to fit such a voluminous garment into a carrier bag. He was so markedly silent during the short drive to the People’s Institute that Olga Fiodorovna linked her arm in his and begged him to cheer up.
‘Tomorrow, Mr Douglas,’ she promised, ‘we shall find your suitcase. I give you my word.’
‘Lovely,’ he said and watching Bernard, who sat slumped in the front of the car, wondered if there was any significance in the dispirited droop of his head.
The lecture took place in a large room divided in half by a table and a row of metal chairs. Behind the table stood a dozen screens hung with drawings executed in very thin pencil. The audience faced the table. The English visitors sat self-consciously in front of the screens as though part of the exhibition. Throughout the lecture Olga Fiodorovna translated in an urgent whisper, loud enough to embarrass Ashburner but too low in pitch for him to hear distinctly. The phrase ‘animal-lover’ reached his ears, though he couldn’t be sure of the context. He was on tenterhooks lest Bernard should erupt into anger; apart from having twisted round in his chair so that he now sat with his back to the audience, he appeared to be calmly studying those drawings closest to him. Once there was a commotion in the corridor outside and Ashburner looked up expectantly, heart racing, hoping as the door was flung open to see Nina sailing in, a ship come safe to port. He was acutely disappointed when a powerfully built man, dressed as a factory worker in blue overalls and wearing a peaked cap like a harbour master, entered the room. In spite of his hat the fellow definitely wasn’t a sissy, but, there was something so luminous and compelling about his face that Ashburner found he was ogling him in much the same manner as he ogled Nina during those rare moments when she was nice to him. Closing the door boisterously behind him, the man sat down in the back row and tugged his cap over his eyes. Even with his face hidden he was obtrusive; arms spread wide he gripped the metal chairs on either side of him, as though otherwise he might hurtle through the body of the hall.
Now and then the lecturer addressed the English visitors directly. Enid regarded the speaker intently and with such an expression of anxiety that she gave the impression she was sitting beneath a tree that might fall on her. Every time she drew breath her taffeta frock crackled like a forest fire. Ashburner heard nothing. Listening to a foreign language, he thought, was similar to listening to classical music, which wasn’t something he did often. If the sound was tuneful enough one noticed the first and last noises made by the orchestra; all the rest was drowned in day-dreams. As a youth with a boil on his neck he had gone once to a Promenade concert. The orchestra had played a particularly thunderous piece, and when the percussionist had stood up to clash his cymbals the boil had burst. Ashburner still bore the scar. Such faded blemishes were a tell-tale sign of a nineteen-forties adolescence, which was how he knew that Bernard was a post-war baby. Of course it was more difficult to tell with women because they had all that hair hanging down. He tried and failed to remember, except that her skin was a little too dark and her eyes somewhat too blue, the face of Nina. It was funny how women differed. His wife had been enormously fond of her Uncle Robert, but she had never been back to Norwich since the funeral, not even to see the headstone, and yet Nina was quite content to rush off in a blizzard to gawp at the grave of a perfect stranger. He wasn’t sure how he should behave when he met her later in the evening. He would lose out if he attempted to be censorious or even if he capitulated and showed that he had missed her. He had missed – did miss – her dreadfully. There came to him the words of a song his wife was apt to sing, quaveringly, if the weather perked up.
I’ll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again
. Startled, he clutched his pocket. Olga Fiodorovna jogged his elbow. Suddenly aware of applause he let go of Nina’s scarf and clapped enthusiastically, head modestly inclined, for at that moment the lecturer was bowing to him.

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