Hot Siberian (8 page)

“Someone highly accomplished, an expert, a maestro. Fabergé had hundreds of workers and specialists, many fine goldsmiths, silversmiths, and other craftsmen, but only a few workmasters. The designation was not easy to come by.” Nikolai enjoyed explaining it to her. “I remember my Grandfather Maksim telling me about this mouse, how making it was such a pleasure for him.”

Her eyes had gone shinier, Nikolai noticed. Even in the subdued light of the room they had wet glints. (Later she would tell him that knowing he'd taken time to go to Sotheby's to pay homage to his grandfather had greatly moved her.)

“Today at Sotheby's,” he went on, “while you and the others were bidding I could almost sense my grandfather's presence. I suppose you think that's strange.”

“Quite the contrary.”

“I had the feeling that he was flying and hovering around.”

“He probably was.” She smiled knowingly and forked up to her mouth much more than a morsel of walnut spice cake. While she chewed and after she swallowed her eyes kept on him. She was guessing his age at thirty-six, which turned out to be a year short, and allowing herself to feel the effectiveness of his dark, thickly lashed eyes, black-outlined pupils. (Later she would tell him that was what she was doing and how also it was then that she'd realized how much boy there was still left in him, in appealing contrast to his maturity.)

He didn't spoil the moment with words.

Finally she broke it, asked: “Are you a Russian emigré?”

“No. My home is Leningrad.”

“It's just that you seem so Western. At least you're not my idea of a Russian. Where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”

“I started studying English when I was seven.”

“Are you terribly political?” Hoping not.

“No, but I am a Communist.”

“I suppose in a way that's like belonging to a club.”

He nodded. “It's also as much of a requirement as being able to speak English.”

“Nosy me, but how do you earn your living?”

“I'm with a Soviet trade mission here in London.”

“Trading what?”

Normally Nikolai avoided answering that question or answered it vaguely. This time, however, he thought it might be to his credit and he was hoping to impress her as much as he could. “Diamonds,” he said casually.

She wasn't impressed, told him: “I much prefer rubies and sapphires.”

The earclips she had on were sapphires, cabochons of about ten carats each. Nikolai had gotten glimpses of them whenever her hair swished back enough. He commented on their fine quality.

She wasn't in the mood for fibbing. “They're synthetics,” she said.

“Safer to wear fakes these days.”

She disagreed. “A mugger wouldn't know they were fakes. He'd knock you on the head and be disappointed after.” Then again, in that way she had of changing subjects in the same breath, she asked: “Do you travel back and forth from Russia?”

“Most of the time I'm here in London. I keep a place here.”

“Whereabouts here?”

“South Kensington off Cromwell Road.”

“No doubt you've got it decorated with old Catherine the Great hand-me-downs.”

“It's a furnished studio flat, a walk-up on the seventh floor.”

“How aerobic.”

“An unsuccessful artist lived there until he died.”

“Of exhaustion, no doubt. I suppose by the time a person climbs up to your digs she's all the more eager to lie down.”

“A few have made it to the fifth.”

“And those most promising you gallantly carried up the rest of the way.”

“
That
has yet to happen.”

“I'd rather believe it has, and I don't want to hear about it.” She burlesqued jealousy.

He wished she honestly felt it. How quickly his outlook had shifted, he thought. It was now impossible for him to see beyond her.

“Anyway,” she went on, “one would think Mother Russia would do better by you than a seventh-floor cubbyhole.” She said it as though if Mother Russia had been there she would have vehemently denounced the slight. She paused and appraised Nikolai's appearance, down and up. “I must say from your appearance I would have thought a roomy maisonette in Mayfair or at the very least something airy in Knightsbridge … with a lift, of course. It's quite misleading, you know. Are you by chance a showcase Russian?”

“To some extent.”

“Well, I daresay they made an excellent choice.”

A somewhat backhanded compliment; nevertheless, it was precious fuel. He cautioned himself to take care—everything he said would be crucial. “It's now mandatory that we make a better impression,” he told her. “No more lifelong suits or ten-year shoes, if you know what I mean.”

“I like your tie,” she said. “A man's tie says a lot about him.”

“Oh?”

“And even more revealing is the way he knots it.”

Nikolai was thinking ahead, so he only half-heard her. As well he was caught up with watching her lips in motion, enjoying glimpses of her tongue, flashes of her perfect teeth when she said certain words and with each smile.

“For instance,” she confided seriously, “a loose sloppy knot gives away a man who lacks conviction. A knot too tight exposes a self-strangler, someone afraid of letting his inside out.” Her fingers reached over and assessed the knot of Nikolai's tie with a couple of squeezes. “A firm four-in-hand,” she declared.

“What does that tell you about me?”

“Plenty,” she evaded archly.

“Actually, I prefer no tie.”

“Or socks? Are you one of those? Did you know the Duke of Windsor disliked having to wear socks? I understand he embarrassed Wally countless times. There he'd be dressed to the nines with his bony ankles showing.”

“You seem to be all wrapped up in clothes.”

“Not always,” she said with precise wickedness.

A short while after that she became less talkative, not withdrawn but just allowing her near-silence to draw him out. She seemed earnestly interested, didn't hang on his every word but most of the while kept eye contact. She also crossed and recrossed her legs quite a lot. (Two months later she told him that was a phrase of her body language which communicated, both to herself and to anyone who knew, erotic arousal.)

Nikolai wanted her to know him. If it had been possible he would have opened his head and his heart and poured himself into her all at once. He told her about his Leningrad, told her the closest relatives he had were some distant cousins in Tallin, told her about his longtime friend Lev, told her about his position with the trade mission and how if he somehow avoided all the many ways of committing vocational suicide he stood a chance of getting to be a deputy minister of trade, told her some of the privileges that went along with that level—not money, privileges. He touched upon cross-country skiing, which he missed being able to do, and also on gathering mushrooms. And she was the first ever that he told about the time he'd spent in his secret room in the palace of Prince Menshikov.

All that he learned about her during that long tea at Brown's was her name, her divorced status, and a few light opinions.

However, the following evening during and after dinner at an unpredictable but reasonably priced northern Italian restaurant on Sloane Street, which she considerately insisted was her favorite, she let him really meet her. For instance:

“Years ago I had a shop on Fulham Road,” she said, “a small, sort of squeezed-between place that I fixed up and made appear inviting. I put quite a bit of hope into it, properly crowded it with nice old things: consoles, pairs of chairs, some ancestral portraits that weren't all that unattractive, an armoire or two. No clutter, though—no china figurines with kissy-kissy lips and vulnerable fingers, no preserved ostrich eggs or little bare-assed bronzes. And perhaps that was my mistake. I guess people like things they can pick up and therefore feel instantly attached to.

“Not that the shop was drab. I always had an enormous bouquet of cut flowers, and there were some good leather bindings placed about. Anyway, there I sat imagining big spenders on their way, about to arrive any moment. It was a different kind of loneliness, hour after hour of anonymous rejection. When people finally did come in to browse I think what most irritated me was their asking, ‘What's the best you can do on this?'—as though my price wasn't fair in the first place. It's a question I've never asked in my entire life, never shall. I tried not to, but at times I got somewhat snippy about it.”

“Then one miserable raining November afternoon I was at the shop sorting and folding some antique bed linens that I'd managed to practically steal at an estate sale in Sussex. Very fine sheets and shams with intricately embroidered monograms and handworked hems. They were the kind much in demand and I was delighted with having gotten them, stood to make a bundle. Well …”

The memory deserved a pause and a resigned sigh. “I got to thinking about all the loving that had been done on those sheets and things, and for a while there I enjoyed some quite vivid fancies, I must say. But then, all at once, the damn things turned on me. I couldn't help but imagine the arguments and the pains and the deaths they had known, and quick as that down on me came a terrible funk, a veritable deluge of depression. Possibly it might not have been the sheets and shams that caused it, but at the least they opened the floodgates. Within minutes I was out of there. I left in such a hurry I forgot to lock up, had to go back to do that.”

“What happened to the shop?” Nikolai asked.

“A swift, sacrificial sale. I sold everything but the paint on the walls, allowed myself to be financially raped by some of the scroungiest dealers in town. And that was that.” Vivian smiled the sort of smile that stopped Nikolai from expressing sympathy.

With prompting single words, grunts and mmms, he kept her talking about herself. He was infatuated with the quality of her voice. It suited her, unique her, had a natural huskiness, was a bit gravelly, especially on some words.

“One ought to do what one is best at,” she said. “After the Fulham Road shop debacle I asked myself what it was I excelled at, and quite obviously the answer was
spending
. So, I took up that for a living. Arranged with the Connaught and the Berkeley and a couple of the other better hotels to show any of their guests where and how to spend. Most of my clients were bored wives far more interested in the offerings of New Bond Street than those of the British Museum. It never went as well as I thought it would. Simply because
I
wasn't doing the spending. To be perfectly honest, it was rather excruciating for me.”

To go with a sweet, some vintage port. The restaurant tried to pawn off some that was much too young, representing it as a 1968. Nikolai didn't let them get away with it, asked for the bottle it had been poured from, which was true enough, but had been filled and refilled dozens of times. Nikolai made the waiter bring a fresh bottle and open it at the table, a W & J Graham Finest Reserve 1969. “Port has to be at least seventeen years old,” Nikolai said. (Vivian commented after several other such occasions that his restaurant deportment was a surprising plus. She doubted there was a maître d' or headwaiter alive who could out-savoir-faire him.)

“Then there was Christie's, the auction house,” Vivian went on. I worked there for a while, even took several of their training courses in recognizing the finer things, as though I weren't already marvelous at that. During the important auctions, I was one of those assigned to a telephone. Certain people make all their bids by phone.”

“Why?” Just to keep her going.

“Oh, perhaps they're laid up with something or someone or think their face is too famous to be in public. Whatever. Anyway, picture, if you can, me with a phone to my ear having to do someone's bidding. It was rather hectic and not at all fulfilling. I found out how much it wasn't for me soon enough. During an auction of important Chinese ceramics I became so caught up in the spirit of the bidding on a Tang Dynasty female figure that I completely forgot about the person I had on my line. Went bidding on my own above the hundred-thousand level. I swear, I was only vaguely aware of the person's voice cursing and shouting at me to stop. Fortunately, I came to my senses just short of the one hundred twenty-five thousand the piece went for. A complaint must have been registered, because the following day I was given notice.” She laughed at the recollection and took a sip of the port.

Nikolai watched her tongue. Just the perfect pink tip of it emerged and licked taste from her lips. (Later, at an appropriate moment, she told him she was aware of how much of his attention was focused on her mouth.)

She let him know many things that night. She let him know she was an incurable gambler and said that even if someone came up with a remedy she'd refuse to take it. She didn't keep written records, just a running account in her head, and she figured she was as much of a winner as she was a loser. She claimed that whenever she lost she did so with quiet grace. (Nikolai later learned how untrue that was. She always had a supply of ugly vases and odd plates that she could smash to vent her loser's spleen.)

She let him know that she owned two houses. One there in London, a flat, really, with a seventy-five-year crown lease that she herself had bought, and one down in Devon that had been left to her. Both, she admitted insouciantly, were mortgaged up to their chimneys, but the men who counted at the bank evidently liked the looks of her, were understanding, didn't press, just politely reminded her when she got a few mortgage installments in arrears. She'd perish, she said, if ever she lost her place in Devon. The mere thought of that possibility gave her the willies. Her place in Devon was her soul.

“I wish I could pay off all your mortgages,” Nikolai said.

“Do you?”