Midnight in St. Petersburg (48 page)

Speechless at the discovery that her two possible ways of escape had diminished to just one, Inna nodded and Selifan disappeared.

The old man, cringing away from her, brought hot water and tea. Then, after staring silently as she undid Horace's bandage and lowered his foot into the basin of water, he disappeared too.

For a long while, in the interior twilight, with half a dozen thin strips of bright sunlight from between the shutters making the dust motes in the air dance, Inna soaked Horace's foot in the slowly cooling water.

Sitting on a chair beside his bed, she wiped his hot forehead with a damp cloth. She whispered, to the rhythm of her own movement, ‘Come back, come back, come back,' but more to comfort herself than to connect with him, for Horace was elsewhere. He was utterly absent from this cool, dark room, with its gracious reminder of yesterday's space and care, with its flowery basins and recently pressed linen and curved mirrors and fresh paint. The fear in Yalta could only have come in the past day or so; that there were candles and matches laid out on the tray, at least, spoke of ease and plenty to anyone recently living in Petrograd. Horace groaned, every now and then; sometimes he seemed to say a word; but he was too feverish to make sense.

Outside her room, Inna could half hear the creaking of someone moving softly around. The old man, she thought; and even though she thought he was probably scared of her, she was scared of him, too, tiptoeing around out there, in the artificial dark, in yesterday's luxury, with his mysterious thoughts.

What she heard next at the door was less a knock than a scrabble: the sound a mouse might make. It alarmed her, imagining the old man out there, waiting for her. When she opened the door, just a crack, with her heart thumping, half expecting to have to push him back in some ugly tussle, she found him patiently standing, a big step back, with his head humbly lowered and something she couldn't make out in his hand.

She opened the door a little wider. She could see better now. In his hand, the man had a folded cloth of fine linen, which must have come fresh from the hotel's laundry cupboard, and a flat metal can, the kind men carry tobacco in, or maggots for fishing.

‘If you'll pardon the liberty, your excellency,' he said hoarsely, not lifting his eyes to hers. ‘I think I could do something for that wound.'

His white-flecked chin was trembling. She didn't think he'd be able to give any real help, but she warmed anyway to the sound of the south in his voice and to the timid concern, so she stepped aside.

He sidled over to the bedside with Inna following close behind. ‘No need for you to trouble yourself, your excellency,' he said without turning. ‘I'll just put a little poultice on it; it'll be all done in a minute.' When she stayed where she was, he ran a trembly hand over his chin and looked cautiously round at her. ‘Now, your excellency, you take these leaves I've got here and mash them up with your tea, see,' he added, in his quavery voice. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out a twist of paper. ‘We'll put a little of that down him too.'

‘What is it?' Inna asked, half wanting to believe in a miracle.

‘Dandelion,' the old man said proudly. ‘It's full of healing, is dandelion.'

‘I see,' Inna said, gently, feeling the flicker of hope go out of her, but still grateful for his kind intentions. She crushed the weed's leaves up with her fingers and a spoon till the tea smelled fresh and sharp with the green tangle floating on top. It was something to do, after all.

When they'd fished out the fibrous greenery, she passed the glass to the old man, who gently spooned a few drops of the liquid over Horace's lips. Inna couldn't really even tell if any had gone in, but the old man seemed pleased.

‘There,' he said softly, touching the crucifix at his neck. ‘Now, you leave him be, and, if you would be so good, your excellency, don't you touch that cloth I've wrapped round his foot with the poultice for the rest of the night. Just leave it to do its good work, and, God willing, he'll be feeling a bit better by the time he wakes up.' And, without waiting to acknowledge her whispered thanks, he crept to the door again.

Inna washed the dirty rags the man had removed – the last of the bandages, as Horace's other set had finally disintegrated – and the rest of the linen they'd been wearing, and hung them up to dry near the window.

Horace carried on sweating and muttering. From time to time, she murmured something encouraging; ‘
That'
s better,' or ‘
Now
we're on the mend.' But she gradually fell silent. From time to time, she wiped his face.

She drank the cold tea and put the glass outside.

And then there was nothing left but to listen to the sound of the sea, and the gulls, and the creeping outside, as she watched Horace. After what seemed hours, he subsided into what looked more like a restless, dream-filled sleep.

‘I'll look after you,' she whispered to him, willing this to be the turning point; willing him to wake up refreshed and himself again. ‘You'll be well again soon. Everything is going to be all right.' But she couldn't sound sure. She'd staked everything on her hunch that, down here, they'd have a better chance of safety. It had never crossed her mind that journey's end would look so empty, or that, just as she was realizing all that he meant to her, he might die.

The shadows in that dusty room thickened and the dust-flights dimmed, like hope fading. To stop herself panicking at having ended up like this, alone with her thoughts, in a hotel room in a town about to be overrun by the enemy, to stop herself wondering just how safe she might be without him, she made herself think instead of the Lemans, of how much she missed them all. She called to mind the yellow room, and Marcus proudly watching his Olympia toss back her hair and declaim her poems, and Barbarians and Agrippina's boisterous squabbling, and Madame Leman, chatting peacefully to her dead husband's portrait, as she sometimes did while she sat there sewing. For a moment, she even thought of Yasha, whom she'd run away from, and whose very memory she'd started to fear …

But conjuring up
his
face made her shrivel inside. She couldn't help but be aware that it was her attempt to escape the dangerous overcrowding of her married life – which she alone had sought out, and for which her husband was in no way to blame – that had landed Horace and her in their predicament here.

Looking penitently down at the noble profile, the proud nose, the cleft in his chin, the line of neck and shoulder – all so familiar, yet strange too, now that Horace's form wasn't lit up with his usual kindly amusement but lying so still – she asked why she had been so slow to appreciate her husband, to understand.

She could never have left him. She hadn't just chosen him for the security he'd provided until now. She loved him: the look of him, the laughter, the gentle life that no longer animated his face. She knew that now. She couldn't imagine – couldn't bear to think of – a world without him.

‘It's you,' she said aloud, touching his clammy hand. ‘It always was, really. I don't know why I didn't realize.'

Yet the sound of her own voice, so small and uncertain in the eerie silence, only unnerved her further. Getting up from the chair, longing for the touch of him and the reassurance of his warmth, she lay down gingerly beside him, careful not to touch his foot. She curled herself along his back and laid an arm over his shoulder, excruciatingly aware, now that it might be too late, of how naturally her body fitted to his. ‘Don't go. Don't go, my darling,' she said, though perhaps the voice was only in her head, because he didn't stir.

There was a great deal of grey in his wiry hair, she saw, trying to keep her fear at bay, but feeling it seep in anyway. There were deep lines on his cheek. ‘It will all be all right, don't worry,' she repeated, feeling desperate. ‘I'll make it be.' But what would she do when even the brilliant bars of sunlight had faded, and there was nothing between her and the silence?

*   *   *

Who sleeps in an empty house after dark, in a war, when anything is possible?

Back on her chair, Inna listened to sounds. Little whispery sounds, coming closer: creaks underfoot and the clangs and bangs of possible steps, or the wind, at the window. Then it got so quiet, she wondered whether the old man was still here at all, or whether he'd run away, or was whispering with men in the street. She wondered what she would hit them with if they burst in.

To keep her spirits up, she found herself humming under her breath as she padded around, checking things, fretting at the candle's wick with her fingernail – how was it burning so slowly, when it had been dark for so long? – and wondering why the bandages wouldn't dry.

The frisky tune on her mind was from long ago. She stopped when she realized it was the Scriabin piece. The memories it brought flooding back, of the yellow room, were too poignant now.

She could open the window and get a breeze through. That might help with the bandages and linen, she thought. But she shivered at the thought of letting the night in, and whatever was out there wandering around in it.

Inna tried to put her dulled mind to thinking what to do if the bandages weren't fit to use by morning. There was nothing else dry.

If the rags weren't ready, she might be reduced to finding the untouched little pile of cloths she'd put into her bag for her own use, for her monthly bleeding.

No, of course not, she thought, a moment later, almost relieved to have had that absurd, taboo idea for which she could laugh at herself. They weren't that desperate. She was, for tonight at least, back in the land of gracious living. She'd just take one of the hotel's pillowcases, or a towel, and rip it into strips.

And then, less certainly, she began to wonder: why were the rags untouched? She hadn't thought, hadn't counted; but shouldn't she have needed those rags a good fortnight ago? Why, after all these weeks – what, three, four weeks – away?

Her breath caught.

The thought that struck her now was so utterly unexpected that she couldn't give it a name. Oblivious, all at once, to the wind and gulls, to all the possible creeping of feet outside, and even to what sounded like banging at the front door, she bit her lip and hunched forward. She'd intended not to think of Petrograd, or what had happened in those frenzied final days, for a long while, perhaps forever. She could still avoid thinking, maybe. But she needed to count.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

When Yasha walked into the room, that's how she was: frantic-eyed, with her fingers up in a circle of candlelight, muttering numbers under her breath.

She looked up at him in the doorway – flickering and uplit from the candle he was carrying, and stubble-bearded from the train – as if he were a ghost.

He was carrying a bag, and had a violin strapped to his back.

For a long moment, she just stared. ‘Is it really you?' she whispered, wondering if she were dreaming. ‘Yasha?'

There was nothing ghostly about his grin.

She sighed away all her fears, put a finger to her lips, got up, picked her candle up, and drew Yasha out into the corridor, away from Horace's sickbed, with a trembling hand. Yes, she breathed to herself, he was really there. She was suffused with a golden feeling that she would once simply have called happiness, though now, with all she'd been learning on this long journey, she also thought it might just be the relief of not being alone with her imaginings any more.

There'd been moments – all right, she would admit to them – when she'd believed that never touching Yasha again would be a kind of death. She'd felt, in all the moments when her mind, skirting the edge of sleep, had escaped its inner policemen and had run away into unpatrolled, unthinkable byways, that if she ever saw him again, they'd kiss; fling themselves at each other; pull each other's clothes away. She'd put her lips to his skin, and fill her nostrils with his smell. At other times she'd thought she would accuse him of things she couldn't, for the moment, even remember; argue about things that no longer seemed important. And, just an instant ago, she'd been yearning to have him there to help her with her frantic counting. But now the sheer wonder of his reappearance outweighed everything else. She realized she didn't want to do anything more sensual than feel the reality of his back under her hand, and his hand on her hip, and smile at him.

In the hotel corridor's curly art-nouveau mirrors, hung between dusty potted palms, their two intersecting circles of gold were reflected from glass to foggy, speckled glass. His reflections were staring at her, none of them exactly like the Yasha she remembered, and all of them were smiling too.

She watched her many reflections lean towards his. But then she stopped watching them, and just looked into Yasha's long eyes.

‘I thought I'd never see you again,' she whispered. ‘But you've come.' She could smell him; see the creases round his eyes as he grinned. He was really here, as handsome as he'd ever been, and so warm under her hands. Yet something was missing. She was still aware of every movement, of the way his eyelashes brushed his cheeks when he closed his eyelids, but it only was the near-miraculous familiarity of that sight that moved her now. There was none of the disconcerting heat and giddiness she remembered from before.

‘I've been so lonely,' she stammered, wondering at its absence. ‘So afraid, and worried, because Horace is ill, you see, terribly ill, and I think he might…' She couldn't finish that thought. It was too complicated, too painful, and it might let in all the contradictions her mind didn't have room for right now. Yasha didn't respond, anyway. She hadn't expected him to. He only liked big, bold ideas and had always treated Horace as an unnecessary encumbrance.

She sat down, rather suddenly, on one of the ornate sofas. He sat down too, and she laughed when he winced and wriggled as the violin dug into the sofa back, rejoicing at the comfort of his being here, now, by her side. She went on uncertainly, ‘But how did you get all this way? Why are you here?'