The Steppes of Paris (26 page)

The three of them went out for a meal together on Saturday evening. Afterwards, as Edward settled down with Roland in the rue Surcouf for a long night of catching up on news and drinking, Roland volunteered the opinion that Irina knew her stuff. It was her accumulated years of experience which seemed to have made the strongest impression on Roland. He dwelt rather gratifyingly on the skills which a woman acquired with advancing years and it was obvious to Edward that, despite a rather snide reference to Irina’s weight, Roland was undoubtedly seriously impressed by the worldly sophistication of Edward’s Parisian affair. This gave Edward great pleasure. For, in the past, Roland had always had the reputation of being sexually much more adventurous than Edward.

Against all the odds, it began to feel as though it might one day be spring. Paris hardly stirred; there was no uprush of seasonal sap along the avenues. But there came a slight slackening. Unexpected curtains flapped at the open windows of the seven-storey façades and the minute lapdogs rushed at one another on their circumscribed outings, frenziedly tangling their hair-fine leashes.

Irina drew Edward’s attention to the premature flowering of skimpy, high-summer dresses in the shop windows.

“That one,” she had pointed at a lime-green slither which tied, what there was of it, in a flamboyant bow on one shoulder. “Do you think I would look nice in that?”

Edward couldn’t say he relished the prospect of Irina in revealing summer dresses. She wasn’t really made for clinging, emphasising scraps of fabric. They would, he suspected, only highlight her flaws. Already he missed her enveloped in her furs and her boots. He distrusted the enthusiasm with which she latched onto the summer clothes in the shop windows. It was shrill, over-excited, and quite artificially girlish. He hoped she was not going to be someone who ran amok at the first days of sunshine, scantily dressed and demanding immediate picnics and parties and armfuls of flowers. He imagined her, apprehensively, in outfits that were strapless,
backless, low-cut, vaunting all that she had to vaunt, and vaunting also a revamped summer personality to go with them: polka dots perhaps, teetering high heels in ridiculous rainbow colours, and outsize
fantaisie
earrings and necklaces, laden with plastic tropical fruits.

They had already had a disagreement over the very word
fantaisie.
Irina had bought Edward a shirt. He was dismayed, beyond the purchase, that Irina should have found out his correct collar size. Apart from the unsought attention, he didn’t like the idea that Irina had looked into his clothes without his knowing, or maybe even gone secretly through his cupboards on a visit to the rue Surcouf. It was potentially disastrous, of course, that she should have to have the keys to his flat. The shirt was pink, a colour he had never worn and furthermore had no intention of ever wearing. Irina described it as
fantaisie
.

He asked her, rudely, how a plain, unpatterned shirt, with no particular frills to it, could be called
fantaisie
, simply because it happened to be a particularly unprepossessing colour.

Flinching, Irina had, not for the first time, cast aspersions on the limitations of an Englishman.

“You really haven’t any idea about dressing,” she had reproved him. “I didn’t want to say anything before, but now the spring’s coming. You’ll be on your way. I want you to leave Paris looking smart, Edouard; showing, please, some signs of having known me.”

She had torn the shirt from its wrapping and in a way which was infuriating but at the same time physically difficult to resist, she had draped the
fantaisie
shirt about him and effusively embraced both him and the shirt.

Shrinking from a new display of effusiveness, Edward had scowled disparagingly at the lime-green dress in the shop window.

“Not you at all,” he had said.

And he had noted with impatience the ambulating sulk he had then had beside him for the next few blocks.

He saw more of Irina than he had probably intended because of her Easter holidays. Apart from a few days spent, reluctantly, with family friends near Nice, she didn’t go
away from Paris at all and, every day, Edward was conscious she was there in the Cité Etienne Hubert, available, expectant. It seemed excessively callous just to leave her there. He reassured himself increasingly frequently with the reminder of his departure. Only, occasionally, he would panic that there might not be a departure. He had no guarantee, after all, that, come the summer, some marvellous destination would materialise and he would be effortlessly airlifted out of this implausible situation he had got himself into. He was getting on so well with Henry Hirshfeld; maybe they would decide to keep him on in Paris for a second year. Then he would leave Irina to pine in the Cité Etienne Hubert for days on end, until she rang him, with tears in her voice, and pleaded with him to come and rescue her. He told himself that he owed her at least this consolation. For, reluctant as he was to admit it, he supposed that the main reason Irina didn’t go away from Paris was him.

One afternoon in the rue Surcouf, he realised he was ceasing to enjoy even her redeeming qualities. They were lying in bed and Edward was only half-listening as Irina, draped partly over him, was spinning one of her whimsical post-coital fantasies. Outside, the Duponts’ macaw, newly put out on the window-sill to enjoy the milder weather, was warbling a new advertising jingle and Edward was straining to work out what the product was.
“L’artichaut,”
he thought he could hear the bird proclaiming,
“Le
légume
de
l
’
été
!”
But there seemed to be no brand name. He was vaguely considering this puzzle when, beside him, Irina also started to sing, she and the macaw clamouring in a sort of insane competition for his attention, and what Irina was singing sounded at first like some cloying advertising jingle too.

She was singing:

Then she rolled giggling against Edward and started nuzzling and nibbling at him with exaggerated noises of enjoyment.

“Mm,
délicieux.”

“Oh, what are you on about?” Edward asked her wearily.

He liked to enjoy the peace and quiet at these moments. It irritated him intensely that as soon as Irina had regained her composure, she would invariably start to prattle away on the perfection of the act, the perfection of Edward, her supreme happiness at their lying there together. He had learnt to switch off when she started and this had, in fact, led to a couple of nasty squabbles when he failed to hear particularly significant compliments or confessions and Irina was forced, humiliatingly, to repeat or retract them.

She wallowed luxuriantly amid the new flowery sheets which she had recently provided.

She gurgled.

“I feel like a
dame
Tartine
,” she announced happily. “This is my beautiful butter palace. That wallpaper could easily be praline, don’t you think? And that lampshade looks incredibly like a meringue from this angle, doesn’t it?”

Edward said nastily, “I’m afraid this literary allusion is lost on me.”

Irina bravely ignored his tone of voice.

“It’s a nursery rhyme I used to love when I was little,” she explained. “Mama would sing it to me sometimes. She had a lovely voice.”

She started up again:

“OK,” Edward interrupted her irritably. “OK, I’ve got the point.”

He rolled over, turning his back on Irina but, enchanted by her fantasy, she went on, “Really, that’s exactly how I feel about being here, Edouard. It’s just like some nursery rhyme make-believe; too beautiful, too delicious to be true.”

She warbled:
“Le
palais
sucré
du
bonheur.”

Looking around the room, she enumerated, “Those curtains are of course completely the wrong colour for aniseed. What would they be?
Café
au
lait
?
Demerara sugar?”

“It’s a more appropriate analogy than you realise,” Edward murmured meanly into his pillow.

Irina heard him and paused.

“What d’you mean?”

“Well, all the edible metaphors,” Edward retorted. “We’ve virtually guzzled our way through the whole scenario, haven’t we? Nothing much left now.”

He wondered when might be a reasonable time to raise the subject with Henry. They had lunch together regularly at least once or twice a week these days, and Edward supposed that one day over lunch he would screw up his courage and ask Henry where his future lay. Not that Henry was himself in the least daunting, of course. More than once, he had made throwaway remarks which made his sympathy for Edward perfectly plain: “I’m not letting them bury you in Bonn, that’s for sure,” and on one immensely satisfying occasion he had prefaced a description of the work of a Vietnamese artist by saying to Edward, “When you’re in Saigon”. But, apart from the obvious considerations of career strategy, it seemed discourteous to remind Henry of his impatience to be off any earlier than necessary.

After all, Henry had no idea of the grotesque mess Edward had got himself into here. He probably assumed that there
was likely to be a woman; he would hardly expect a celibate twelve months. But he probably assumed as well that it would be nothing more than the kind of practical relationship which could be painlessly terminated whenever the needs of the paper dictated it. He wasn’t to know what increasingly wild scenarios Irina was threatening.

One Sunday afternoon, Edward came to the Cité Etienne Hubert to take Irina out for a walk. He had not spent the previous night with her and the walk was to be her booby prize. He tacked between such small concessions and a consistent hardline cold shoulder. As part of his campaign of emancipation, he took the stairs to the fifth floor instead of the lift. It must have been at around the fourth floor that he became aware of female voices somewhere in the building raised in dispute. The voices echoed shrilly through the stairwell, sounding particularly strident in a house that was normally silent. But it wasn’t until he reached the last flight of stairs leading up to the fifth-floor landing that he realised the furies’ voices were, in fact, coming from the Iskarovs’ flat. He stopped on the final steps. He could immediately identify Irina; a high-pitched petulant tirade of what sounded like defiance and rebellion. A second voice sounded like Great-Aunt Elena; a puttering volley of brown-paper bags being busily burst one after another. But, for some seconds, he couldn’t work out who the third voice would be; quavering, beseeching, now rising to a near wail. Then it came to him; of course, it had to be Babushka. In six months, he had hardly ever heard her speak, certainly never raise her voice or show any emotion stronger than suspicion. She would very occasionally say something in Russian to Irina in front of him, but only in response to something Irina had already said. She never started a conversation. Yet here she apparently was, virtually wailing, and certainly giving as good as she got in what sounded to Edward like an absolutely monumental row. What on earth were they arguing about?

He waited, wondering whether to interrupt the row by going ahead and knocking at the door or prudently retreating and explaining his non-appearance tactfully to Irina over the telephone later. As he hesitated, the
minuterie,
the time switch on the stairs, clicked off, leaving him in near darkness in
which the raised voices sounded somehow even louder and more anguished.

Edward felt he was eavesdropping on some larger-than-life drama: screeching, tearing of hair and beating of large, flapping breasts. A minor, despicable part of him even enjoyed it. Whatever else, what was going on behind the Iskarovs’ front door was at least meaty. In this chilly prim city, it was a hot-blooded eruption from elsewhere. He only enjoyed it for a very brief moment, though. One after the other, two unpleasant factors impinged on him: under the front door of the apartment opposite the Iskarovs’, a strip of yellow light shone out into the hall. Someone could be standing there eavesdropping too. And it occurred to him with foreboding that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Iskarovs were fighting about him.

He debated his options, the most attractive of which was undoubtedly heading back down the stairs, taking them in giant, enjoyable leaps, and saying goodbye to any idea of a walk. Alternatively, he could wait there until the row was over and then knock. But, from the sound of it, that would be a very long wait. The voices weren’t even alternating any more but frequently rising all together. He deliberated. The third option was the one which required the most nerve. But, frankly, he didn’t like the idea that he could be chased away by a trio of strident women and the prospect of a confrontation with them. It really wasn’t a flattering image of himself; pelting headlong down the stairs just to get away from three highly-strung women, two of them in their eighties. A floor or two below him, the staircase light clicked on. Even though it was probably just some other old lady coming out to summon the lift, the light galvanised him into action. Funnily enough, it was the thought that this was his chance to shut these Iskarov women up which, in the end, prompted him to cross the landing and to ring decisively at their bell.

Complete silence followed, and in the very long pause before Irina came to answer the door, Edward had ample opportunity to regret the option he had taken.

Irina looked a little flushed, and her eyes were glinting, but, otherwise, she showed no signs at all of what had been going on. She was very dressed up, presumably for their
walk, and Edward couldn’t help being slightly impressed by the stylish composure with which she posed for him in the doorway, showing off her new outfit, regardless of all she must have been through in the last ten minutes. Just as he had imagined, she had gone for something very eye-catching for the spring. He supposed it was basically a suit, but its colour scheme of crimson and mauve brushwork on a white background was so bright, it did away with any connotations of buttoned-up office efficiency. Irina waited for long enough to see the involuntary admiration in Edward’s eyes and said briskly, “Well, come on in.”