The Steppes of Paris (11 page)

Seeing Irina like this, in context, he felt much kindlier disposed towards her than at any time. Not only had she acquired
here a convincing carat mark of Russianness, even some of her quirks made more sense; for example, her abrasiveness, which he now saw as the ferocious struggle of a fly to free itself from the gluey golden amber in which it was trapped.

What had the old people made of him when they came up to say hello? He sincerely hoped they were all too old and proper to have put two and two together and made five. It was true none of them had seemed to show much curiosity about his presence as Irina’s guest. But then, of course, he hadn’t understood a word they said.

He felt cheered to be on thoroughly foreign soil for the first time since he came to Paris. The happy exhilaration of discovery enveloped him as he looked around at the dark icons watching over the silver heads. As a guide to her unlikely kingdom, Irina could certainly create a diversion.

It wasn’t long before this transient optimism receded, washed away, doubtless, by the depressing music. It was pathetic to be reduced to feeling cheered because he had in a smelly church discovered a fossilised version of a country. He thought how totally ironic and back-to-front and sad it was that instead of travelling forwards into some dynamic and vibrant future, as he was meant to when he moved abroad, all Paris had been able to offer him was a journey sixty years backwards.

He greeted the end of the final chant with relief.

Irina scooped up her bag and gloves and said briskly, “Right, let’s be on our way,” as though to make up for the fact that she had visibly been moved by the music.

The goodbyes took a further ten or fifteen minutes and then they headed out onto the Boulevard de Courcelles again, pushing back towards Great-Aunt Elena’s apartment house into what had become a bitterly cold wind. Neither Irina nor Great-Aunt Elena seemed especially troubled by the wind and Edward couldn’t help admiring the way they kept up their conversation the length of the boulevard, shrieking their questions and answers at one another in the teeth of the wind. One of their exchanges caught Edward’s attention. Although it was in Russian, he could understand it was about food because the food words were all in French;
quenelles
de
saumon,
escalopes
de
dindon,
pudding
au
riz.
His apprehensions were confirmed when Irina leant across her great-aunt and called
to him, “Are you hungry, Edouard? We’re going to eat at Elena’s.”

He began, “I didn’t realise –” but Irina shouted cheerily, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

He tried again. “I didn’t realise we were going to eat. I’m afraid I had something to eat beforehand.”

Irina pouted. “You disappoint me yet again.”

Great-Aunt Elena interrupted. “What? What did he say?”

“He’s not hungry,” Irina shouted at her. “We’ll have to do something about that.”

Great-Aunt Elena turned to Edward, full of acute concern. “Not hungry? What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

Edward grinned sheepishly. “No, no, I’m fine. It’s just I had something beforehand.”

Great-Aunt Elena dismissed such a feeble pretext. “So what? You’ll have something afterwards as well. At your age, one can.”

With a dismal sensation of defeat, Edward realised he was not going to get out of this unexpected extension to the evening. What was more, he didn’t like the way, for the second time now, these tough Russian women had got the better of him with quantities of food and drink. He, who was renowned among his friends as a bottomless pit; by their Slav standards, he acknowledged he was a non-starter.

Perhaps feeling slightly sorry for him, Irina added, “Great-Aunt Elena’s gone to a lot of trouble. You mustn’t disappoint her.”

Before Edward could answer, Great-Aunt Elena squeezed his hand tightly. “He won’t. Will you,
golubchik?
”

It must have been half past eleven when they sat down to table. By one o’clock in the morning, Edward’s resentment had turned to admiration; Great-Aunt Elena was, by her own admission, eighty – “Eighty-one,” Irina mouthed behind her back – but she wasn’t flagging at all.

As soon as they entered the flat, Irina had gone to telephone home. Her friend had arrived, had talked the grandmother out of setting off for the Finland Station and was happy to stay there, watching the television, until Irina came home. Edward did wonder, briefly, what the nature of this friend (after all male) was, who was willing to do Irina such enormous
favours and wait uncomplainingly until all hours for her to come home. He even wondered whether all his anxiety about Irina’s pursuit hadn’t been misplaced. Maybe that was just her manner; maybe she behaved that way, ravenously, to all men? He observed her with pity.

Her face, in the better light of Elena’s apartment, showed how tired she was; there were dark rings under her eyes and her complexion had a sallow tinge. When she returned from the telephone, having taken off her coat, her brilliant green earrings turned out to be accessories to a brilliant green top and skirt, whose lurid colour gave her, Edward found, a livid look. She plumped herself into an armchair and sighed, “Oich!”

“Hard day at the
lycée
?” Edward asked.

Irina shuddered. “Don’t mention the name. The very idea of it makes me depressed.”

“Ach, Irina, you exaggerate,” Great-Aunt Elena commented. She was busy at the side of the room putting out a daunting number of dishes onto an already densely set small table. “You have less than one week of term left and then all that Christmas holiday.”

“You don’t understand,” Irina retorted. It was obvious it was a disagreement they had had many times before.

Great-Aunt Elena appealed to Edward. “Tell me what
you
think. Don’t you think she’s lucky? She’s got a post in one of the best, the very best
lycées
in Paris. Her pupils are mostly nice girls, no trouble-makers. And yet she goes on as if it were a prison.”

“It
is
a prison,” Irina said through gritted teeth. “When are we going to eat? I’m starving.”

Great-Aunt Elena flung up her hands and then clapped them dismissively. The Russian exclamation which accompanied this sounded like someone incompletely bursting a paper bag. Then she bustled with busy dignity from the room.

Irina shut her eyes. Edward, observing her, remembered one of his friend Roland’s observations on women. Roland, who fancied himself as something of a connoisseur, had once said that a woman’s age showed most first thing in the morning. “Say you’ve had a fair bit to drink,” he had said. “And you end up in bed with someone of your own age or younger, you’ll both look about equally terrible in the morning. But say you’ve
picked up some eager older woman who might have looked perfectly acceptable under the party lighting the night before. Well, you’ll probably wake up next to some absolutely awful old bag.”

Edward was wondering experimentally whether the dictum would apply to Irina when she asked him, apparently without opening her eyes, “Why are you looking at me like that, Edouard?”

He answered flippantly, “Oh, just admiring you, I expect.”

Irina’s eyes popped open. “You didn’t have an admiring look, let me tell you. You had that look as if I were a rare specimen of furry animal. You were observing the animal’s sleeping habits.”

“Oh come,” Edward began unconvincingly.

Irina interrupted him. “Please don’t just consider me as a geographical oddity for your journalist’s notebook,” she said with a display of rigid dignity obviously inherited straight from her aunt. “Remember I am a full person too.”

Great-Aunt Elena bustled back in at this awkward juncture, bringing a dish of
quenelles
de
saumon.
Edward was glad of the excuse of his earlier dinner as the meal got under way, for it became clear that Great-Aunt Elena, in an effort to please the supposed tastes of her English guest, had prepared exclusively bland and stodgy dishes.

At first, the conversation centred on her preparations.

“I thought you would be homesick,” she explained to Edward. “I discussed with my butcher what might be appropriate and he suggested
rosbif.
But I knew it couldn’t wait during the concert so in the end I got
escalopes
de
dindon
instead. They’re quicker and I know that turkey is a traditional Christmas dish in England, isn’t that right?”

“It’s very kind of you,” Edward thanked her feebly, forking a bit of tasteless pink
quenelle
around his plate. He was marginally put off to notice that Irina was eating this unappealing dish with a hearty appetite; he had imagined that someone who was such a superlative cook would have been more discerning. But she seemed to tackle whatever was put in front of her.

“Have you been to England?” he asked Great-Aunt Elena politely.

She shook her head. “But I feel I know England intimately,”
she said. “You see, we had an English governess in Russia when we were children.”

“Oh God,” Irina groaned rudely. “Miss Macpherson. Here we go.”

Great-Aunt Elena ignored her pointedly. “Miss Macpherson. She was an admirable woman. She taught us to read and write, she taught us English, she taught us to play the piano and to sing. She was a woman of profound culture and,” she glanced defiantly at Irina, “great moral worth.”

“Macpherson is a Scottish name,” Edward said tentatively.

“Yes,” Great-Aunt Elena said, “Yes, she was Scottish. But she taught us the most beautiful pure English.” She sat a little straighter in her chair and recited:

She spoke with an impeccable BBC World Service pronunciation but a distinct burring Scottish brogue.

While she was in the kitchen frying the
escalopes
, Irina explained, “Miss Macpherson is single-handedly responsible for Great-Aunt Elena’s elevated view of the teaching profession. She thinks I’m carrying on a noble calling by dinning irregular verbs into the heads of my dear girls. Personally, I think Miss Macpherson must have been a terrible tyrant. She simply bullied them all into adoring her.” Absent-mindedly, Irina impaled another
quenelle
on her fork from the serving dish and set about chewing it. “You should see her in their
photographs; bony, as straight as a soldier on guard duty, and with an expression –” she scowled ferociously into the middle distance. “They’re all brown old photographs, of course, but Elena told me she had flaming red hair, so red that when she let it down to go to bed, they would cry out, pretending they thought there was a bonfire in their nursery.”

Over the
escalopes,
served rather disconcertingly with dumplings, the conversation moved to Edward and from Edward, by way of his flat, to Volodya.

“Maybe we ought to give Edward Volodya’s writing desk?” Great-Aunt Elena suggested to Irina. “Since he’s a journalist.”

Irina hesitated. “We could. But actually it’s not that good for writing on for long periods, you know; it tips forward if you lean on it too heavily.”

“What did he do?” Edward asked. “Was he some sort of a writer or a journalist?”

He saw a veil come down in front of Irina’s and Great-Aunt Elena’s faces. For a few seconds, both of them contemplated a past he could not share.

Irina answered, “He had several professions; he was too clever to allow himself to be limited by any one. He was in the import-export business for a long time and he was also an impresario; he put on shows with an optimistic element, you know, singing and dancing and plenty of jokes. He liked people to have a good time. And he had a lot of other interests too: stamps, perfume,
haute
couture,
gastronomy.”

Great-Aunt Elena came out from behind her veil to add, “At the time he lived in the rue Surcouf, he was planning to set up an antiques business. He wanted to conquer the new world with the treasures of the old. He went into partnership with an American woman –”

“That,” Irina interrupted, “was a fatal mistake, literally fatal. Really, I don’t know why you have to bring that up.” She turned to Edward. “Dyadya Volodya was the most kind and generous man, you understand,” she said insistently. “But frequently unlucky in matters of the heart. Certain sorts of women would take advantage of him.”

Before Great-Aunt Elena could intervene with a rival version
of events, Irina added teasingly to Edward, “You must beware the influence of his home.”

“
Enfin
, Irina,” Great-Aunt Elena protested. “Edward’s far too sensible for that kind of thing; look at him. And in any case, poor Volodya suffered from a problem of disorientated people; he couldn’t accurately place others in the category to which they belonged. He had become confused by too many migrations. He couldn’t recognise the dangerous species. That couldn’t possibly happen to Edward.”

“I don’t know,” Irina said mischievously. “Edouard’s going to travel the world for his newspaper too, you know. He’s only here in Paris for a year. He could quite easily develop the emotional problems of a disorientated person.”

“Only here for a year?” Great-Aunt Elena exclaimed. “You mean you let the flat to somebody who you know is only going to be here for a year? Whatever did you do that for?”

Simultaneously, both Irina and Edward volunteered, “It might be two.”

Great-Aunt Elena shook her head in dismay. “I thought we’d agreed –”

“Look,” Irina said, gesturing at Edward. “He seems fine, don’t you agree? So what’s the problem?”

Courteously, Great-Aunt Elena agreed that Edward did seem fine. But, embarrassingly taking Edward as a witness to Irina’s fecklessness, she rolled her eyes heavenwards.