Midnight in St. Petersburg (49 page)

‘You went away,' he said. She couldn't help the sudden lurch of her heart, the twinge of uneasy pleasure, as he added, ‘You didn't say goodbye. I needed to see you again.' He'd never said he loved her, never put her above all the other things he valued; but surely this action spoke louder than any words?

But when, a moment later, he continued, ‘Because you've got the wrong violin,' the illusion that whatever he was about to say might, after all, sweep her away on a tide of uncontrollable feeling gave way to the scratchy, dawning disappointment of reality. He added, with satisfaction, ‘I've brought you down the Strad.'

She didn't believe him, at first; she made him get his violin out of its box.

She tiptoed into the bedroom, and got out the one she'd been carrying.

It was only when she'd picked up the two golden-brown bodies, and turned them round, and compared them, that she saw he was telling the truth.

‘You see?' he said. He looked pleased.

At first, all Inna could do was shake her head in astonishment. How could they have been carrying that box around with them for all these weeks, guarding it so carefully, when it hadn't even had the right violin in it? How could she have just taken Barbarian's word for it that he'd got the Strad up from the store? Had she really been so dazed, before they left, that she hadn't checked for herself? The thought of Felix Youssoupoff accusing her of stealing his violin was making her go hot and cold with shame.

‘Thank you,' she kept murmuring. ‘I don't know how to thank you.'

She so wanted to be grateful; she so wanted Yasha to have made this heroic dash south purely to save her. But had he really, prompted a niggling voice inside her, or was this just his way of escaping the dangerous mess he'd got himself into back there? Yet it was graceless even to think that, she told herself, her head spinning, for how incredible it also seemed, how single-minded, how devoted, to have tracked her down here, right at the other end of Russia …

‘But how did you find me?' she finally remembered to ask.

He only grinned wider. ‘Maxim said you'd gone,' he said simply. ‘And Marcus told me where. And this is the only hotel still working in Yalta.'

So it took a while before she plucked up courage to ask the other, harder question that had been slowly forming in her mind. ‘But why did you have the Strad anyway?'

He laughed. ‘Oh, it was a mistake,' he said carelessly. ‘I've never been one for detail. I put the copy and the real one in the wrong boxes, ages ago. I'd been meaning to come back and sort it out for months. I just didn't realize you'd take off like that.'

He swung her to him, and she let him. Again she was quietly surprised that she didn't melt into him, as she once would have been unable to prevent herself from doing. Her body seemed have unlearned how to fit his. She could feel the cautious stiffness in her limbs.

‘None of that matters, anyway,' Yasha finished. ‘The details. What matters is that I've found you, and here we both are.'

He sounded so happy, as if he hadn't noticed how strangely detached she was feeling. For his sake, she wanted, or almost wanted, to be able to share his pleasure; to lose herself in this moment, to forget Horace and tomorrow. She certainly didn't want the prickle of unease she now felt, the knowledge that something Yasha had said was wrong – something separate, that is, from the bigger wrongness that she felt of being in his arms at all.

‘Yasha,' she whispered, stepping back, trying to work out where this suspicion might have come from. ‘There's something I have to ask, something I've been wondering. Did you send those men to beat up Horace?'

He gave her a blank stare. ‘Me?' he asked, looking bewildered. ‘Why would I do that?'

Almost against her will, she believed him. Relieved, she squeezed his hand, mutely asking forgiveness for her question.

It took a moment more for her to realize that whether or not Yasha had tried to harm Horace no longer made any difference to what happened now. What mattered was that she'd realized the damage
she'd
done him. What mattered was the new, trembling, overwhelming desire she'd become aware of in these past few days to get to safety with Horace; the hazy vision beginning to emerge in her mind of how they would be happy afterwards. That was what had stopped her humming the Scriabin tune, earlier on, she suddenly saw: not just the memory of playing it to the Lemans, long ago, but the hope of playing it again in some other yellow room, in some other time, with Horace listening. That was what she wanted.

She held tenderly on to Yasha, wishing she could somehow convey all this to him without hurting him, wanting him to know how much he still meant to her, even so …

And then it came to her.

‘I remember when you last touched those violins,' she said, suddenly. Yes, she'd put her finger on it. All the doubts she'd ever had came crowding in. ‘It was months ago, a year or more. You came round to hand in the fiddle you'd been varnishing to the workshop – your copy. You went off to the storeroom to compare it with the real Strad. And then you left. It couldn't have been just a mistake that you left with the Strad. You weren't supposed to leave with anything.'

‘Well,' he said, looking cornered now. ‘Well…'

He hung his head, and then looked at her reluctantly.

‘All right,' he said eventually. ‘It wasn't a mistake. I did mean to take it.'

She nodded, bleakly disappointed to have caught him in a theft, or at best a lie; thinking how sad the Lemans would have been if they'd heard; remembering the darker side of Yasha that she'd tried to forget on the train. He'd have some explanation, of course. He always did. That was how he'd always been, wasn't it? Seeing everything too simply; sweeping aside what he called ‘details' and she thought of as ‘other people'. She'd wanted to believe it was just the revolutionary in him, and that falling out of love with the Revolution had changed him. But this was who he was.

‘It's not what you think,' he added, and, for a moment, she was moved by the unfamiliar note of uncertainty in his voice, the pleading. Surely that hadn't been there before? Then, looking ashamed, and scuffing at his feet, he added: ‘I didn't steal it. Well, I did think, for a while, that I might requisition it, and give it to the Commissariat of Enlightenment, as a Former Aristocratic Person's belongings. But that was just … an excuse I was making to myself. Really I just took it to look at for a while. Because I didn't think I'd see you again. And it reminded me of you, sitting in the workshop, with your hair falling down over it, concentrating…'

Inna was surprised at the tears in her eyes.

‘You must believe me,' he whispered. ‘You do, don't you? I was just a fool. I didn't know how to put things right. And I put off even thinking about it, because I was nervous of going back to the Lemans' …'

He took her back in his arms. The clear lines she'd felt she was drawing began to sway and dissolve.

For a while, neither of them said anything. They just clung together, teetering between past and future.

‘Did you know', Yasha said, eventually, ‘that there are English ships moored in the next bay over?'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘Well,' he said, nuzzling at her neck, ‘I've been thinking.'

‘Mmm?'

‘If I go with you tomorrow, to those ships, and help you get your Englishman on board. If we make sure he's safe among his own kind…'

She stiffened. Waited.

‘… will you stay with me?'

He made it sound so easy. He raised his head, and looked at her, as if all she had to do was to say yes.

‘And do what?' she asked.

‘I don't know,' he admitted candidly. ‘Go down the coast to Constantinople, I suppose, if we can get there, get jobs, find a ship to take …

‘We'd be all right together,' he said after a moment, and she almost believed it. ‘We'd get somewhere we could make a proper living sooner or later. Mending violins, even, maybe. We'd get by.'

She put her hands together over her belly, thinking. Wishing she didn't remember all the details Yasha had forgotten: that, quite apart from her own feelings, she had a husband who loved her, and how devastated he'd be to wake up on board an English ship and find her gone.

‘We have the violins, after all,' Yasha was saying. ‘Two of them, and one's a Strad. It would fetch a good bit of money, if we could only get somewhere we could sell it.'

But,
a shocked voice in her mind said,
I wouldn't want to sell it.

‘We might even make it to Chicago. My parents are there. They write, you know. They want me to join them. They say there's a trade union movement there that could use a person of my experience: because who better than me to teach the workers how to campaign for better conditions?'

She smiled, sadly. So that was his new dream, the one that had replaced the Revolution. He always had big ideas.

‘I can't, Yash,' she said softly, ‘I think I'm going to have a baby.'

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was the old man who woke Inna. Slumped on the chair beside Horace, she looked around in a daze. The creeping terror of the night had gone. Instead there was the cool expectancy of a hot day in the air, and dust motes dancing in the shaft of sunlight coming in through the windows. The old man had another basin of hot water and another two immaculate hotel towels.

Inna hastily rose to her feet, rubbing her eyes. All her limbs were stiff and achy. She muttered something grateful, but the stubbly old man only darted a cautious glance at her and sat down in the seat she'd vacated before uncovering Horace's leg and, very carefully, unwrapping the poultice over his foot.

‘Don't you look now, girl,' the old man said, not unkindly. His elaborate hotel formality seemed to have gone with the night. Now, with Horace's foot in his lap, and his back hunched over it, blocking the sight from Inna, he sounded more as if she was just another girl in a country inn, needing to be comforted. ‘You fetch in the tea I left outside for you.'

And, because she could see at a glance that Horace's breathing was steady, and there was a little colour in his cheeks, Inna dully obeyed.

It was only when she stepped outside the room for the tray in the corridor that she saw the long shape lying curled up on a hard gilt-backed divan several sizes too small for proper sleep, under a coat, with a kitbag on the floor, and two violin boxes. It all came rushing back: the decision she had to make.

Yasha was here, asleep. For a moment she almost laughed when she recalled how he'd looked when she'd told him about the baby, the way his mouth and eyes had seemed slowly to turn into a series of big, astonished Os, and he'd forgotten all about taking ship to Chicago and leading the trade union movement there.

She'd half thought he might immediately ask who the father was, as if he doubted. She'd half expected him to look mortified – or trapped – at the answer. But she hadn't had time to imagine in advance how he might take it, so all she'd really had to go on was that she didn't remember him ever talking about children, and, if she was honest, that she often thought of him as still just a boy himself.

In the event, all that had happened was that his face had slowly softened into an expression of something close to wonder. ‘That afternoon in my room,' he'd whispered. ‘It was then, wasn't it?'

And she'd nodded, overwhelmed by the simple fact of having put this secret thought into words.

It was Yasha who'd broken into the quiet that had fallen on them both, speaking so gently that it almost broke her heart, and looking so serious that he seemed somehow older. ‘What do you want to do now, Innochka?'

When she'd opened her mouth to reply, no words had come. She'd just shaken her head dumbly and felt tears forming in her eyes. She couldn't think beyond this quiet conversation on this sofa; she couldn't. She'd lived for so long with the belief that she faced an impossible choice between the man she loved and the one she'd married. And now that the moment for choosing was here, the choice had become bafflingly different: between the man she now knew she loved and the father of her child. But it was no easier. The altered, gentler Yasha had gathered her in his arms again, and repeated, very kindly, in the heartbreaking certainty that he understood the reasons for her turmoil, ‘It's all right; it's all right. Don't say anything now. There's time. I'll still be here in the morning, and we'll all walk together as far as the English ship. This will wait. I will wait, I promise,' until she'd composed herself.

‘Go back and sit with him.' Yasha had nudged her. ‘I'll sleep out here.'

And here he still was, saying something she couldn't hear in his fitful sleep, waiting for her to choose.

Quietly, Inna bent and picked up the tray, and went back inside.

*   *   *

The walk was beautiful: a coastal road through cypresses and pines and, sometimes, walnut and hazelnut and apricot trees.

Inna had never seen water so glittering as the sea at their side. The air smelled of thyme and rosemary, salt and heat. She listened to footsteps, birdsong, wheels crunching over grit and the patient clop of hooves.

As midday approached on the road, it was properly hot. In crumpled linen stretched tight over his belly, Selifan was sitting on the rough bench at the front of the cart, holding the reins loosely in one hand as the horse plodded on. Inna, who had taken off her coat and was walking beside him in her own faded skirt and blouse, thought that she might easily be taken by anyone who didn't know them for another local peasant like him.

Horace was lying in the back of the cart, facing back towards Yalta, on the boards where the driver had lain him. He had his foot up on the blindingly white hotel pillow Inna had taken from the room, his head on Inna's bag, which now contained the Strad, and Inna's coat wrapped round him like a blanket. Inna had reached down for his hand as they left town. She was still holding it now as she walked, and she could feel that he knew, because there was answering pressure from his fingers. He was holding on to her.