The Steppes of Paris (19 page)

“Come off it,” Edward said.

Lyova laughed. “Not
your
YMCA,” he said. He told Edward about the press which published the works of Russian dissident writers and, wryly, he pointed out the Russian emblems around the room: the heavily gilded orthodox calendars, the photographs of wooden huts in the snow.

“You have entered the realm of retrospection,” he explained in thickly accented French. “You see these dear old people browsing? Never, incidentally, do they buy a book. They are like the statue turned to salt, forever looking backwards. They have been here in France, Edouard, for fifty or sixty years, but you should hear the way they speak French; they speak as if they arrived here yesterday. I, who
did
arrive yesterday, speak better than they do.”

“You didn’t arrive yesterday,” Irina contradicted him.

“Seven years?” objected Lyova. “Seven years
is
yesterday, especially in terms of fifty or sixty years’ residence. They make me weep, you know. They are so hopelessly nostalgic. They have no word for ‘tomorrow’ in their vocabulary; only ‘yesterday’.”

“How long have you worked here?” Edward asked.

Irina interjected, “Lyova’s an artist. He only works here sometimes.”

Lyova grimaced. “An artist,” he repeated with affected horror at the pretentiousness of the term. “And you, I understand, are a journalist?” With which he bestowed on Edward a frankly disdainful smile.

“That’s right,” Edward answered hotly. He wasn’t sure if Lyova’s disdain was directed at his profession or at the notion that someone so young and inexperienced could be a journalist. Either way, Edward’s indignation was roused.

But Lyova wouldn’t gratify him with the wherewithal to have an argument. He just nodded, smiling infuriatingly, and contemplated a highly entertaining middle distance.

Edward knew his rejoinder, “What’s funny about that?” sounded squeaky and childish. He regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth, especially when Lyova answered ironically, “Nothing funny at all, I assure you. It is a noble calling.” He stood up a little abruptly. “Please excuse me. It is time for me to close this circus.”

He went to the front of the shop, clapping his hands and calling out in Russian to his elderly customers. Gradually, over several minutes, he chivvied them, protesting and apparently querying the accuracy of Lyova’s watch, out of the shop, turned the “Open” sign over to “Closed” and switched off some of the lights.

While he was doing this, Irina again tried to take Edward’s hand, but he withdrew it bad-temperedly. What had been the point of bringing him here, just to be made fun of?

“Are we going to have a drink together?” Lyova asked when he returned.

“Why not?” Irina exclaimed brightly. “What time are you expected back?”

Lyova ran a harassed hand through his hair. “Anna’s at one of her classes tonight,” he said gloomily. “The kids are with my sister-in-law. I should pick them up before eight, I guess.”

This revelation came as a heaven-sent bounty to Edward. So Lyova, his taller, bigger, braver, better rival for Irina’s affections, Lyova who he was now quite convinced must remind Irina of Volodya, Lyova was married to someone else! Just briefly, he reproved himself for his immaturity in not having thought of this option. It did, of course, explain everything: the equivocal nature of the friendship and the way Lyova was sometimes on the scene and sometimes inexplicably not. Edward found it in himself to feel sorry for Lyova; no wonder he felt provoked to savage Edward. He must be eaten up with envy, poor bugger. For the fact was Lyova must at some stage have been Irina’s lover, but he wasn’t a free agent, shackled with a wife and puling kids to boot. He wasn’t a free agent but Edward gloriously was.

“Sure,” Edward agreed magnanimously. “Let’s have a drink.”

When Lyova had left reluctantly early, managing, Edward observed with disgust, to look vaguely dashing even in such unpromising circumstances, going off with the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the drizzle to collect his two little girls, Edward turned on Irina and asked, “What was all that in aid of?”

“What d’you mean?” she asked. “And why have you been so unpleasant this evening? Didn’t you like Lyova?”

Edward gave a sour laugh. “I’m sure he’s a fine, upstanding chap. What’s the score between you two?”

“Edouard!” Irina exclaimed indignantly. “I’ve told you before, I will not have these sporting expressions. Lyova is my best friend.”

Edward scoffed. “A likely story.”

Unexpectedly, Irina did not erupt. She shook her head glumly.

They sat in sulky silence for a while and then Irina explained, “I wanted Lyova to see what you were like. It’s hard not being able to talk about you to anybody.”

“You must let me hear his verdict,” Edward answered nastily.

Irina sighed. “It’s really not what you think, Edouard. Lyova and I are
allies
, that’s all; I complain to him about my terrible family and he complains to me about his, that’s all.”

“You’re not going to convince me that’s always been all there is to it,” Edward said.

Irina drew herself up. “I’m talking about the present, Edouard,” she told him. “Not the past.”

Lyova as old boyfriend, which was the category Edward consequently filed him under, was a lot less problematical than Lyova as an ongoing proposition. Edward relented a little while they ate a quick dinner – Irina had to be home early too – and he asked her in an offhand way, “So how often do you see each other, then? And what does his wife have to say about it?”

Irina’s reply was not at all reassuring. She snapped, “Anna has no right to reproach anybody for anything, I can assure you.”

Edward let the subject drop and called for the bill. He decided that, even if Irina offered, he would not go back with her that night to the Cité Etienne Hubert. It seemed an undesirable admission of dependency to start to spend nights with her during the working week. And he didn’t like the smug smile which his earlier display of jealousy had left on Irina’s face.

Great-Aunt Elena telephoned him the following Sunday to invite him to lunch.

“Oich!” she exclaimed, even before she had told him why it was she was ringing or gone through the elaborate Parisian hello-how-are-you formula. “It has such an effect on me, dialling Volodya’s number, you can’t imagine!”

“I’m sorry it’s only me on the other end,” Edward said a bit lamely. Straight away, he wasn’t sure if the crack was in good taste.

Great-Aunt Elena made the exclamatory noise he had previously compared to the partial bursting of a paper bag. “Ach, Edward,” she said. “I’d much rather you than some of the people we’ve had in there in the intervening years.”

He wondered whether Irina had been responsible for choosing those people too, and also, just quickly, about what naturally followed on from this question.

“You are a perfect treasure, I can assure you,” Great-Aunt Elena went on, “compared to some of the tenants we’ve had.”

“I heard about the American,” Edward volunteered.

“American!” Great-Aunt Elena said dismissively. “But I bet she hasn’t told you about the Italian or the Hungarian or the Brazilian, has she?”

“You had a Brazilian here?” Edward asked.

“Yes, we did,” Great-Aunt Elena answered. “He worked for a bank with a most suspicious name, I remember: the Banco Espirito Santo e Commercial.” She repeated the name dubiously. “And I believe he was a fundamentally unprincipled man.”

‘This flat,’ thought Edward, ‘is becoming more and more of a liability all the time.’

“The Italian was a decent person,” Great-Aunt Elena continued. “And then there’ve been a few others I never met, who were apparently perfectly all right. But the Hungarian!” She interrupted herself. “Tell your newspaper to keep you here for as long as they possibly can,” she said. “Really, you’re the most delightful tenant we’ve had since I don’t know when.”

“I’m afraid it’s out of my hands,” Edward said.

“And I know it’s not what you want anyway,” Great-Aunt Elena said hastily. “Well, that’s quite right; you should travel and see the world while you’re young.” She changed tack with the kind of French conversational manoeuvre which still always made Edward feel like clapping. “We must just make the most of you while we can. Will you come and have lunch with me next Sunday?”

The feeling that this bizarre Russian family could one day get beyond a joke had been at the back of Edward’s mind all along, of course. He welcomed Irina’s relatives as an engaging diversion which could – who knew? – turn out to be professionally useful to him. But at that moment he sighted the day when they would cease to be the free gift which came with Irina, the joke in the cracker, the oddity in the gumball, and become the one thing he would flee from anywhere in the world: merely surrogate family ties and domesticity.

He said, “Um, I’m not sure if I can make it.”

“Sunday the thirty-first,” Great-Aunt Elena said encouragingly. “A week from today. Oh please, do come; it would give me such pleasure.”

“I’ll just look in my diary, if you’ll excuse me,” Edward said, playing for time. He knew his diary gaped, utterly empty for weeks ahead, apart from the few single exclamation marks which were his jokey way of recording dates with Irina.

The telephone receiver was still chirruping into empty
space when he came back to it. Great-Aunt Elena didn’t seem to have realised he had walked away. She was holding forth with great vehemence about something or other into the blue.

Mischievously, Edward picked up the receiver and listened for a moment without saying anything.

“– worried at all because, really, she’s a wonderful girl, wonderful, it’s just her manner. People have, I am afraid, on occasion, misinterpreted her manner, but I know you won’t. You’re far too wise and intelligent to make such a primitive mistake. I was telling Vera only the other day: you have a wisdom beyond your years, I can sense it.”

“I’m sorry,” Edward said. “But I had to leave the phone for a minute to get my diary. I think I missed the last thing that you said.”

There was a confounded silence.

“Which thing?” Great-Aunt Elena ventured.

She sounded so uncharacteristically crestfallen, Edward answered hurriedly, “Oh, just that very last bit. Who was it you were talking about?”

He heard her thwarted intake of breath, and then there was what seemed a deeper silence.

At last she answered coyly, and enigmatically, so that Edward was left not knowing if his interpretation was anywhere near accurate, “I was telling you not to be afraid it would be a boring
tête-à-tête
with me. I’ve invited Irina too.”

In the end, he said he could come. It seemed counterproductive not to and, besides, the alternative was just one more bleak Sunday spent watching some mediocre film at the cinema or with his feet up on Volodya’s footstool.

Since he spent the night beforehand with Irina in the Cité Etienne Hubert, setting off for lunch with Great-Aunt Elena presented certain problems. For a start, it had been another highly energetic night and neither of them had the least inclination to get up and dressed, or to go out into the frozen greyness and put on a charade of distance. Irina had come back to bed after making Babushka her breakfast and woken him with such a frank request with her fingers that, instead of catching up on sleep, the remainder of the morning had gone the same way.

Edward showered in their antediluvian bathroom, convinced that even Babushka must guess from the raucous plumbing that Irina wouldn’t take two showers. He dried himself on the unprepossessingly pink bath towel Irina had given him and took advantage of the privacy to have a snoop through the compromising contents of the bathroom cabinets. Their rows of little mucky bottles containing medicines and cosmetics were thoroughly off-putting. He wished he could be certain that all the really stomach-turning ones belonged to Babushka – the tonic for dandruff, the horrid little khaki pills for flatulence – but, frankly, it was hard to tell whose cupboard was whose. This unnerved him. The faint stirrings of revulsion he had felt when he imagined Irina the age of Varvara Stepanovna revived. He closed the doors of the last cupboard hastily on a glimpse of something unidentifiable made of yellowed latex and told himself firmly it was, of course, his own fault for having gone snooping and, also, that last cupboard must be Babushka’s.

Leaving the flat was a ridiculous rigmarole. Irina went in to occupy Babushka while Edward sneaked out and he waited for her on the landing while she made her goodbyes and followed. But she seemed to take so long coming, and the situation struck him as so unnecessarily undignified, that he was tempted to fling the front door open – he had left it ajar so as not to make any noise closing it – and to yell in, “Come
on
, Irina!”

“I’m quite sure your grandmother’s tumbled to the fact there’s something fishy going on,” he grumbled as they travelled down in the lift. “I can’t see why you insist on carrying on with this cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“She has no idea,” Irina said haughtily. “And please make sure she doesn’t get one.”

“I don’t know what makes you so sure,” Edward said unpleasantly. “I can think of a hundred and one ways she could have found out.”

“I think,” Irina answered sarcastically, “I know her a little better than you do.”

The lift came to the ground floor with an unnerving mechanical settling and an exhausted sigh.

“Well,” Edward finished belligerently, “I still think the whole thing is ridiculous.”

Irina glared at him. “I’m not sure what
you
think is the crucial consideration, Edouard.”

They added bad temper to their other accumulated problems of lack of sleep and muzzy heads, and travelled across to Great-Aunt Elena’s in a bleary, tousled-feeling trance.

Her greeting was uncomfortably to the point.
“Mon
Dieu!”
she exclaimed. “What a pair of washed-out-looking faces! You both look in need of a good lunch.”

She had laid this on with evident forethought. “This time, you shall have
rosbif
,” she said triumphantly to Edward.

When they were seated in the living-room, with aperitif glasses at their elbows, she lifted hers and declared proudly, “Cheers!”

Irina lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes, looking rather green, Edward thought. He couldn’t tell if she was sulking or if the previous night had caught up with her. He was relieved when she picked up her glass and answered aggressively,
“Na
zdorovye.”

Great-Aunt Elena determinedly repeated, “Cheers!” and then, with a wicked giggle, “Bottoms up!”

Edward laughed. “I bet you didn’t learn that one from Miss Macpherson.”

“Indeed not,” replied Great-Aunt Elena. “I learnt that expression from a young fellow who was a business associate of our family’s in Russia. His name was Blenkinsop.”

“Oh yes,” Edward said. “Irina’s mentioned him to me before.”

Great-Aunt Elena and Irina exchanged a suspicious and a respondingly hostile glance.

“Of course,” Great-Aunt Elena said, “Irina only knew him in later life, when he was well past his prime.”

“Miss Macpherson was far too much of a prude to teach them anything fun,” Irina retaliated. “She only taught them nursery rhymes and silly songs.”

“They weren’t silly songs,” Great-Aunt Elena answered sharply. “They were charming.”

Unexpectedly she warbled:

“Ah,
ça
suffit
,” snapped Irina. She stood up rather abruptly. “I’m going to the bathroom if you’re going to start singing those maudlin melodies.”

As she stamped past Edward, he was taken aback to see her chin was trembling, as if she were on the verge of tears.

“I don’t know what gets into Irina sometimes,” Great-Aunt Elena commented. “She can be so moody and sharp. I think it must be the shortcomings of her life which distress her.”

She misread Edward’s non-committal look, with which he tried to wipe any traces of responsibility or guilt from his face, as incomprehension.

“She leads in many respects an unsatisfactory life, of course,” Great-Aunt Elena explained. “But, I keep telling her, she only makes it worse for herself, the way she behaves. People get the wrong idea about her. She’s a dear girl, a –”

“Don’t,” Irina called out, reappearing unexpectedly quickly in the doorway. “Don’t poison his mind against me. I forbid you to.” Her voice was disturbingly strained and shrill.

Great-Aunt Elena snorted. “Precisely the opposite of what I was doing,” she declared. “Precisely the opposite.”

She stood up and bustled indignantly towards the door. “I shall serve you lunch, although you, Irina, don’t deserve it.”

For a few moments, Edward and Irina stayed, not communicating with each other at all. Irina had slumped back deep into her armchair, her eyes shut and a profoundly miserable expression on her face.

“Hey, cheer up,” Edward whispered to her. “It’s not that bad, surely.”

Irina’s eyes opened and he saw they actually were glinting with tears.

“It is,” she retorted. “And worse.”

The cock-a-leekie soup and the
rosbif
seemed to restore the spirits of Irina and her great-aunt. They had rather the opposite effect on Edward. The heavy, bland food settled in his stomach like a leaden depression. He hadn’t come to Paris, he reflected, to experience this ersatz England. There was something profoundly dismal about watching these last
survivors of a dead empire dotingly mimicking another empire in its death throes. Was it, in fact, some sort of unrecognised affinity which had brought him here, to eat rice pudding and to listen to “Bobby Shaftoe”? Did he have some fatal English fondness, which he had not till now noticed, for what was old and crumbling and
passé
? Rather than enjoying a private laugh at their expense, was the joke actually on him?

Great-Aunt Elena’s little chipolata of a forefinger poked out and plucked him on the chin.

“Why so glum, Edward?”

He said hastily, “I’m not glum, am I? I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be. Probably I was just concentrating on this lovely lunch.”

He saw Irina raise one finely shaped eyebrow.

“Mais
enfin,”
Great-Aunt Elena exclaimed, “what’s got into the two of you today? You didn’t at all have the look of someone quietly enjoying his lunch, you know, Edward. You looked as if you were plunged in gloom. What’s the matter?”

“I can’t speak for Irina,” Edward said. “But I’m really not feeling down at all. Maybe eating this sort of food reminded me of England, that’s all.”

“And that made you feel sad?” Great-Aunt Elena asked. “Why? Surely you aren’t homesick?”

Irina gave a harsh laugh. “Homesick? Edouard? Haven’t you realised he’s longing to get as far away as possible from England, from Europe, from all of us? He wants to go to the jungle and find himself a girlfriend who wears flowers behind her ear.”

“And quite right and proper at his age too,” Great-Aunt Elena reproved her. She turned to Edward. “Visit the jungle while you can,” she instructed him. “At my age it’s too late.” As an after-thought, she added, “Send me postcards.”

“Postcards?” Irina scoffed. “From the jungle? You amaze me with your never-ending wanderlust, you know, Elena. One would have thought that after all the migrations you’ve been through in your time, you’d finally be quite glad to stay put in one place. You’re really no better than Babushka with her perpetual suitcases.”

Great-Aunt Elena drew a very deep and, Edward felt, menacing breath.

“Well, I think it’s tremendous,” he chipped in.

Great-Aunt Elena, far and away the shortest person at the lunch table, managed to look down on Irina with a regal glare. “I am astonished that you, Irina, of all people, should dream of comparing opposites. What do you suppose our travelling had in common with Edward’s? How can you make such a frivolous comparison between forced, joyless displacements and gadding about?” She turned graciously to Edward. “I do not wish to make light of what you do, Edward, but it is a game, isn’t it?” She rounded on Irina. “If you cannot perceive the difference between Edward, who propels himself around the world, notebook in hand, and we, who were propelled, then,
milaya
moya,
really I do not know what the last thirty years have been in aid of.”