The Steppes of Paris (24 page)

He promised Irina a present before telling her that he would, in the end, be adding a few days’ holiday to his week. As deliberate policy, he didn’t specify on which day of the next week but one he would come back, pretending dishonestly that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. He couldn’t help detecting a trace element of guilt as Irina nevertheless
swamped him in a long, thorough and highly effective goodbye embrace.

He expected to enjoy Marseilles, of course, but he was unprepared for the euphoria which came over him when, having dumped his bag at the once grand old hotel off the Canebière which Henry had recommended, he set out to discover the city on his first evening. He felt liberated. For a start, it was a good ten degrees warmer than in Paris and at six o’clock in the evening still not yet dark. The streets, busy with the home-going evening rush hour, lay unexplored ahead of him. Best of all, he was on his own. He had worked out from his map up in his hotel room which was the direction to head in, towards the Vieux Port. But he had left the map behind; if there was one thing he couldn’t bear it was to be seen consulting a map in the street, a blatant advertisement of helplessness. As he started out, he relished the sensation of casting himself adrift into the evening, peopled, he realised within the first few blocks, by a largely Arab population. He had read about this, of course; he had done his research. But the visible evidence of finding himself walking among short men in skullcaps, sunburnt men with handlebar moustaches, and hearing every few yards incomprehensible Arabic instead of French still excited him. There were little stalls like a
souk
in one of the streets he passed through and merchandise and haggling scenes and strong food smells, all of which vividly evoked North Africa, not that Edward had ever been there. He had obviously walked straight into one of the districts he had read about, where the influx of an immigrant population was being used to fuel the vicious backlash Henry wanted to write about. But instead of eyeing the scene professionally and memorising useful detail, he let himself aimlessly enjoy it and went on walking in his heady euphoria. He felt he had travelled much further than Marseilles; yes, that he was somewhere in North Africa or Arabia, and his real career had at last begun.

He stopped to have a pre-dinner drink or two on a café terrace in the vicinity of the Vieux Port. In his mood of indulgent
bonhomie,
he had bought a couple of postcards to send to people and as he sat enjoying his first drink and the new view, he decided generously to send one of them to
Irina. There she was, stuck up there in that icebound winter, and he was so free. She would still be stuck up there when he left for good and he felt sincerely sorry for her.

“Dear Irina,” he wrote. “Arrived without any problem in Marseilles. The place has elements of
1001
Nights.
But never fear; nothing to rival Parisian nights so far. Love Edward.”

Then he felt annoyed because he realised that, having written that, he would need to send the card in an envelope and he didn’t have one with him. He put the card in one of his jacket pockets and decided he would only post it if he happened coincidentally to come across an envelope.

Because he was on expenses, he had an especially good dinner and, afterwards, for all his bravado about not needing a map, no longer quite sure of his bearings, he took a taxi back to the hotel.

He dreamt that night that he was in a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, not far from the paper. It was a shop which he had always found rather depressing previously, a big dark emporium which went by the preposterous name of “Old England”. But, in his dream, he was thrilled to be in there because he was kitting himself out for the tropics. He was buying, ridiculously, a solar topee and a mosquito net, khaki shorts and bush shirts. He half-woke at this point in the dream, troubled by his overloaded digestion, but he made himself continue the dream when he got back to sleep. In this second part, he was already travelling and, dressed in his shorts and bush shirt, he was cutting a fine figure as he reported to the television news in front of a landscape of desert sands and palm trees.

Despite his reluctance to confront the shortcomings of his life there once again, and despite the drop in temperature, Edward did feel certain positive anticipations on returning to Paris. He had a fat file of material and contacts to give to Henry; diligent, intelligent, impressive. And he did look forward to springing the happy surprise of his return on Irina; telling her all his various adventures and delighting her with her present.

No one had been in his flat while he was away this time, distributing edible gifts all around the kitchen. There was a modest pile of mail untouched on the doormat, with a
particularly outrageous card from Roland uppermost. Reading it standing in the hall, still with his coat on, Edward received an unwelcome surprise. Roland wrote, cryptically, that he had been trying to reach Eddy on the phone for days but not having any luck – what the fuck was he up to? – he was resorting to a card because he wanted to let Eddy know he was coming to stay on the second. Checking the date on his watch, Edward’s annoyance was reinforced; it was Thursday and Roland was coming to stay the day after tomorrow.

His immediate reaction was to leave the rest of the mail, and his luggage, and to go and telephone Irina. If they only had two days ahead of them before Roland’s arrival, he may as well make the most of them.

Irina answered the telephone in formal mode:
“Allo
oui
?”

Deepening his voice, Edward said,
“C’est
toi,
chérie
?”

“Ah,” Irina said flatly, not entering into the spirit of the game at all. “Did you have a good time, Edouard?”

“Great,” he answered. “Great. I just got back this minute, in fact. I wondered whether – you’re not free for dinner tonight, are you?”

Her sigh was so slight, he wasn’t even sure he had heard it. He expected her to say no but instead she said, just as flatly, “Yes, I am.”

“Is anything the matter?” Edward asked cautiously. The last thing he wanted to bring him down to earth was an evening of Iskarovian histrionics.

In a sharpish tone of voice, which made him even more apprehensive, Irina replied, “No, Edouard, nothing’s the matter; everything is just marvellous.”

He liked the sound of that even less, of course, but it was too late to withdraw now.

“Let’s go to that Russian restaurant you were telling me about,” he suggested placatingly, “shall we?”

In the shower, absorbing the disappointment of Irina’s low-key reception, one of Roland’s maxims on women came back to him. It stated: “Never get involved with a woman who’s got more problems than you have.” He wondered what Roland would make of Irina, if he allowed their paths to cross. (On balance, he thought he wouldn’t.) Roland would doubtless be savagely comic about the whole thing; inform Edward what
the oddity of the relationship spelt out about him. On the other hand, had Roland ever been seen with anyone as rampantly a
femme
fatale
as Irina? And, with his eternal bloody maxims, wasn’t Roland just the sort of person who would be impressed by their age difference?

He speculated on the possible encounter as he dressed, seeking out the tie Irina had given him for good measure. There was no doubt Irina would want to meet one of his friends from England. There was no doubt either that, should Roland decide to act the buffoon and make any of his tasteless quips about him and Irina, Irina could certainly look after herself.

She greeted him, dressed in black and an assortment of angular modern jewellery which looked jarring in the Iskarovs’ antiquated front hall. His spirits rose; even if Irina were in a bad mood, she had gone to the trouble of dressing up for him.

“You look fantastic,” he whispered. The grandmother was undoubtedly within earshot. He gave her a quick minor hug and one of the angles of her jewellery prodded him in the solar plexus.

“So what d’you feel like doing?” he asked her. “Shall we go to the Datcha?”

Irina shrugged ungraciously. “If you want.” Then, as if determined to run counter to the grain of Edward’s good mood, she added, “First come and say hello to Babushka. She needs cheering up.”

“Oh Christ,” Edward whispered. “Do I have to? I’m really tired, Irina; I’ve been on the train all day.”

She chilled him with a look.

“OK,” he muttered to her back in the doorway to the grandmother’s room, “Just hello.”

As if she hadn’t budged during the fortnight since he had last seen her, Babushka sat immobile in the same armchair. When Irina showed Edward in, she responded with the merest trace of a tremor. Edward resisted a mad impulse to open the innings with a jokey reference to St Petersburg and after Irina had announced, “Edouard’s just back from Marseilles,” he added rather moronically, “Yes, I’ve been sampling
bouil
labaisse
.
”

“
Bouillabaisse
!”
Irina repeated loudly. “It’s been a long time since you ate that,
n’est-ce
pas,
Babushka?”

This time, there was no missing the impression which Edward had often thought he caught before but now unmistakably registered; Babushka impaled Irina on a long beady look. The look darted to Edward and Babushka drilled with the same silent accusation into him. Then she gave a tiny, almost inaudible, perfectly genteel sniff.

Irina bundled Edward out of the room so speedily, he wondered if it had been worth dragging him in there in the first place. The encounter was, he thought wryly, rather like paying a skimpily ritual visit to a shrine. It had not done anything for Irina’s mood either; she collected her coat and her bag and came out after him to the lift without a word.

He tried to fondle her in the lift; there was a well-established precedent. But, wearing an insultingly martyred expression, Irina merely let him and didn’t respond at all.

Edward cursed inwardly; he would have been better off in the rue Surcouf with a bottle of wine.

“Irina,” he said irately, “I don’t see what’s the point of us spending the evening together if you’re going to be like this the whole time.”

The lift reached the ground floor. In a retaliatory gesture that was frankly childish, Irina’s forefinger jabbed out and pushed the button for the fifth floor. With a long-suffering exhalation, the lift rose again.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Edward.

Irina stared stonily ahead of her. The first and second floors moved laboriously past them.

“Is this it, then?” Edward asked furiously, between the third and the fourth.

Even as he said it, he was painfully aware of how ridiculous the pair of them were, riding up and down in this cantankerous journey by lift.

The lift bumped home. Irina had the presence of mind to prop the lift door ajar with one hand to stop someone else summoning it from another floor, but she didn’t get out.

With as much dignity as someone in that position could expect to muster, she said to Edward, “If you wanted to go out with someone all sunshine and high spirits, tra-la-la,
then you shouldn’t have chosen me.” Whereupon, letting the lift door fall to, she flung herself around Edward’s neck and burst into noisy tears.

Edward prodded the door ajar again with his foot but then, fearing that either Babushka or the lady who lived behind the fish eye opposite might overhear Irina’s sobs, he let it close and reached awkwardly around Irina to push the button for the seventh, top floor.

The lift rose again, wearily.

“I’m sorry,” Irina sobbed. “I’m so sorry to be like this, Edouard. You’re quite right to get angry with me. But I can’t help it.”

“What’s the
matter
?”
Edward asked.

If they hadn’t been ridiculously yo-yoing up and down in the lift like this, he would have felt really sorry for Irina; she was shuddering against him so pitifully. But he was simply exasperated.

Irina attempted to regain control of herself. She scrabbled in her handbag for a very lacy handkerchief and dabbed only somewhat affectedly at her eyes. Rather sweetly, she appealed to Edward, “Has my mascara run?”

“No.”

“Ah good,” said Irina. With one of her disarming transitions, she added, “It’s not
meant
to. I chose it specially. A girl like me needs to wear tear-proof mascara.”

She gave a little gulping laugh, which sounded dangerously as though it might turn back into a sob. But she pressed the button decisively to take them down to the ground floor again and squaring her shoulders, which were anyway padded in a militaristic jacket, she announced, “The storm is over. The weather forecast for the rest of the evening is set fair.”

“But tell me what’s the matter,” Edward insisted as they walked up the Cité Etienne Hubert. “You can’t greet me like you greeted me tonight, burst into floods of tears, and then just carry on as though nothing had happened.”

He didn’t add, ‘And, frankly, I would rather have you all Slav and soulful than putting on this horrible pretence of synthetic happiness, which isn’t in the least convincing.’

After a worryingly lengthy pause, Irina confessed, “I’m depressed.”

“Well, I guessed that much,” Edward teased her. “But
why
?”

Irina said, “Ach, you don’t want to hear that, Edouard. Concentrate on now and have a good time and don’t worry what happens afterwards; you live the right way.”

“I
do
worry,” Edward said, largely insincerely, but it seemed the best way to salvage the evening. He squeezed Irina’s hand. “Especially where you’re concerned, believe it or not.”

Irina’s high-pitched laughter sounded almost disturbing on the empty avenue.

Edward gave her a startled sideways look. He hadn’t said anything that was so funny.

For a few moments, they walked in silence in the direction of the Boulevard des Invalides. In a last-ditch attempt to cheer her up, Edward began to do a silly walk, plunging his hands deep in his trouser pockets, squaring his shoulders, and pretending to saunter in a ludicrously debonair stroll along the avenue.

Irina made a supreme but unconvincing effort to smile.