The Steppes of Paris (27 page)

“Should I?” asked Edward.

Irina exclaimed, “Why ever not?”

“Well,” Edward said, “I just heard –”

Irina gave a curt “Tchuh!” She tugged at Edward’s hand defiantly. “Come in. All you heard was idiocy.”

There was absolutely no sign or sound of Babushka and Great-Aunt Elena. Edward waited in the hall while Irina collected her bits and pieces and listened keenly for some low murmur of Russian dissent: nothing. He supposed Great-Aunt Elena must be too distraught to make an appearance. Maybe she was calming Babushka. But he was still a little put out that, considering all her repeatedly professed affection for him, she shouldn’t even stick her perfectly spherical head round whichever door she was hiding behind and say hello.

They walked up to the Quai Anatole France and across the Pont Solférino, Irina keeping up a conversation on assorted anodine topics. It wasn’t until they were strolling under the trees of the Quai des Tuileries in a leisurely, relaxed promenade that Edward eventually asked her, “What was the row about? It sounded like the beginning of the Third World War.”

To his surprise, Irina laughed. “Oh no, it wasn’t the Third yet. You know we’re always behind the times in my family; we’re still on the First and the Second.”

Then she shrugged dismissively. “It was nothing, I told you. It was ridiculous.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” Edward insisted. “You know one could hear you right the way down the stairs? I was standing out there for quite a while, because I didn’t know
whether or not I ought to interrupt. In the end, it got so bad I thought I’d better come in to rescue you.”

“Sweet,” Irina commented absent-mindedly. “You know that swimming pool I pointed out to you as we came over the bridge, the Piscine Deligny? Shall we go swimming there together in the summer, when the weather’s warmer? You know you can swim topless there?”

“OK, I’ll try another approach,” Edward said, “Twenty questions. Was it to do with: money matters, morals or men?”

Irina frowned. “Why d’you keep going on about it, Edouard? Why spoil our lovely walk too?”

“It intrigues me,” Edward answered. “And I care about it if it upset you.”

Irina stared away over the river for so long, Edward wondered if it wasn’t a strategy for hiding tears.

“I told you,” she finally said wearily, “Great-Aunt Elena and Babushka came up with this ridiculous notion. It’s not the first time. They’re always doing it, although I must admit they used to do it a lot more often than they do now. Maybe now they’re so old, their energy is running out. Or maybe they’ve just given up hope. They want to introduce me to a man.”

It was all Edward could do not to burst into astonished laughter. He concentrated on the Pont Royal coming up ahead of them.

“A man?” he repeated.

“Oh, one of these deserving cases Elena comes across on her rounds; a bald, fat, Russian widower,” she added viciously, “with diabetes.”

“And they want you to go out with him?” Edward asked.

Irina scoffed. “Go out with him? The marriage papers are as good as drawn up.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” laughed Edward.

He felt a sense of tremendous relief.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Irina went on. “Naturally, I got annoyed. And, as tempers were heating up, they started telling me what a source of deep distress my way of life is to them. Babushka made an allusion.”

But that was as far as she was prepared to go. Abruptly drawing the line, she put a finger on Edward’s lips.

“I promise you, Edouard,” she assured him, “You don’t
want
to know any more.”

They had walked as far as the Pont des Arts. Ahead of them the Ile de la Cité jutted up in its magnificence. For a while, Edward was content simply to stroll through the fine spring afternoon and enjoy the trite pleasure of walking arm in arm with a woman as glamorous, as noticeable as Irina in her spring finery.

But Irina’s new mauve shoes were starting to give trouble. Edward noticed her pace gradually slowing from a stately promenade to the tiredest of saunters. Eventually, they were on the slim bridge between the Ile de la Cité and the Ile Saint Louis, Irina gasped out, “I have to sit down. My feet are killing me.”

They found a timely bench a little way along the Quai d’Orléans and Irina flopped down and kicked off her shoes. She sat back and shut her eyes, quite obviously exhausted.

Edward reflected in the long silence before Irina felt recovered enough to speak to him, how absolutely typical of her it was to set out for a long walk in new shoes which she hadn’t yet had a chance to walk in. He looked down at the shoes, kicked beyond her blissfully wiggling toes, and grew impatient at how unsuitable they were for a walk. They were little dainty, mauve canoes, with narrow, pointed toes and on each heel a frivolous, mauve rosette. The moment summed up, Edward thought, in microcosm, the disadvantages of setting off anywhere with a woman in tow.

Irina had opened her eyes without his noticing.

“Spring isn’t my favourite season, in fact,” she announced. “I prefer autumn. In autumn, I am at my best. Everything fits: my colouring, my melancholy nature. It will be one of my lasting regrets, you know, when you are gone, that we won’t have known each other in autumn.”

Because this was one of Irina’s frankest acknowledgments yet of his likely departure, Edward said nothing, so as to let it resound and really sink in.

They were sitting in silence when Irina, who was gazing pensively past him towards the quieter eastern end of the
quai
, exclaimed, “
Tiens!
Look who’s coming!”

Edward turned round to see, not far away and vigorously
approaching, the distinctive, ill-matched shapes of Henry and Mai Hirshfeld. Rooted as he and Irina were to the bench, by their visibility as well as by Irina’s bare, swollen feet, they could hardly up and run for cover, a possibility which did pass just very briefly across Edward’s mind. In the last moments left before the Hirshfelds reached them, his concentration on contingency maneouvres was distracted by trying desperately to remember whether or not he had actually been touching Irina when the Hirshfelds came into view and by the paralysing glaze of horror which set over the whole picturesque scene.

Irina, the one who had been so keen to keep everything secret in the first place, waved and called, “Ooh-hooh!”

Mai’s arm shot up and fluttered a jerky wave in response, and she turned to Henry, who was short-sighted, obviously telling him who it was.

Henry raised an arm too and, as soon as they were close enough to speak, called expansively, “Isn’t it a marvellous day?”

In a situation so hopelessly beyond his control, Edward did what he could to retain a grip. He stood up and asked Henry, “Do you know my landlady, Mai’s colleague, Mademoiselle Iskarov?”

“No, I haven’t had the pleasure,” Henry answered, and he held out his hand to shake Irina’s warmly.

“Such a beautiful afternoon,” Mai enthused. “We usually come this way on our Sunday afternoon outing. It’s our favourite walk. But it’s especially beautiful today, isn’t it? The sunlight, the reflections.”

Her small composed face gave not the slightest sign of surprise at finding Edward and Irina together on a bench in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. But there was no need to go on quite so much, Edward thought, about the scenery.

“Ah,” Irina said playfully, “listen to the artist talking,” and all four of them laughed over-heartily.

“Yes, Mai compensates for my myopia,” Henry remarked jokily. “She’s forever pointing things out to me which have escaped my notice.”

“A perfect team!” Irina exclaimed, horribly gushingly, Edward felt. “You should go into print together: your words, illustrated by Mai’s pictures.”

Again, everyone laughed, slightly laboriously.

“Well, we should be on our way, I guess,” Henry said. “We want to take in the exhibition at the Pompidou. Nice to meet you, Mademoiselle Iskarov. ’Bye, Edward.”

Mai flashed them both a bright perfunctory smile, and the Hirshfelds continued on their way along the
quai.

Edward and Irina looked after them for a few seconds in individual states of dismay. Edward had barely begun to assess the damage when Irina, who had hastily slipped on her shoes at the approach of the Hirshfelds, sat down again abruptly and kicked them off.

She looked up at Edward, who was still standing at a loss beside the bench, and she hissed at him in a voice which actually seemed to contain hate, “Are you ashamed of me or something?”

He asked stupidly, “What?”

“You know what I mean. Why did you do that, you – you swine?”

“Irina!”

“Go on, tell me why. I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life. ‘Mademoiselle Iskarov, my landlady.’ How
could
you?”

Edward looked down at her in disbelief.

“Irina,” he said, “I thought all this was supposed to be secret. You were the one who said it had to be in the first place, remember?
I
didn’t get offended. Henry’s my
boss.
Haven’t I got the right to keep things secret from certain people too?”

Irina glared at him furiously for a moment or two. Then something within her seemed to snap and, putting her face into her hands, she collapsed into the most acutely miserable, heartbroken sobs.

Edward reproached himself that his overriding emotion at that moment was embarrassment because a crocodile of Japanese tourists was coming their way along the
quai.

For a long time afterwards, for as long as Edward thought of that period of his life, he wondered what had determined the sequence of events. Had it been simply chance which had then set things in motion, or had that meeting with the Hirshfelds actually determined his future?

He had agonised until the Monday morning over what Henry would have deduced from it. He acknowledged this was ridiculous, since Henry was far from stupid and there was only one conclusion any sensible person could have drawn from it. But a craven, completely unrealistic hope made him pretend that if he told Henry Mademoiselle Iskarov had been pestering him for so long to go out for a walk together that on that fine Sunday he had been forced reluctantly just once to agree, Henry might believe him. It was easy enough to paint Irina as a man eater. Of course, this cast him in rather a feeble light. He wondered what Henry would think of him if, as seemed a foregone conclusion, he and Mai had tumbled to the truth. He realised, gradually in the later evening, that it wasn’t inevitable that Henry would think the worse of him. It was a rather schoolboy reaction, in fact, to imagine that he automatically would; Wainwright caught by the master up to no good. Of course, Henry wasn’t the sort of man to be impressed by sexual trophies. But he was characteristically far from conventional. He would certainly have been more
disappointed in Edward if he found him on a bench with some seventeen-year-old office temp with highlights in her hair. For all Edward knew, Henry and Mai had gone on their way, metaphorically raising their hats to him; good for Edward, he didn’t miss a trick, not only had he found himself a place to live but while he was about it some high-class female company too. The Hirshfelds were, after all, Edward thought, what the French called
soixante-huitards
; the generation imbued with the ideals of 1968. With their life-long commitment to being broad-minded, they maybe even approved of a liaison which went in the face of all conventional expectations. Look, Edward thought, at their own.

He was still appalled at the thought that they knew about it. When Monday morning came, he adopted a policy which he knew to be pure cowardice, although he kidded himself lamely that it was nothing but discretion. He made no allusion at all to the weekend meeting, he didn’t say a word, and Henry, for whatever reason, did the same.

Irina wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop crying. Still crying, she had at last stumbled into the mauve shoes and set out to find a taxi. She said she didn’t care whether or not Edward came with her, but he had, because it was the only way he could retain some control over what she did next. He thought he had never seen such extravagant despair and it seemed only wise to keep tabs on it.

In the taxi, Irina said she forgave him. She understood what had motivated him to deny their association and although what he had done had hurt her deeply, for the sake of the time remaining to them, she was prepared to put it behind her. This annoyed Edward considerably for, as far as he was concerned, he had done nothing which merited such a fuss. But he restrained his annoyance, only wincing slightly when Irina started to caress his cheek despite the taxi driver’s reflected stare.

Once he had seen her safely in at the front door of Number Nine, Cité Etienne Hubert, he felt his duties were discharged, and he went back to the rue Surcouf to begin worrying in earnest about Henry’s reaction.

Nothing happened on any front for a month. Irina went
back to school and had less time to dwell on Edward. She still rang him far more often than their relations warranted, related all her little pieces of news, and pumped him avidly for his. He did his best not to be rude to her. The safest course seemed to be a stern regimen of metered meetings, no hostility which might cause her to flare up, and only when there was absolutely no way round it, the rare concession of an overnight stay in the Cité Etienne Hubert.

It was in the second week in May that the development occurred which led Edward to wonder whether the meeting beside the Seine had, in fact, been without consequences. It was in the league whose exact circumstances you remember long afterwards: the weather, your clothes. Edward remembered it was a Friday and Henry had taken him out to lunch. He was almost certain it was raining and that was why they had gone to the pricier Japanese, which was closest to the paper.

Henry had asked him, and he remembered the saké fermenting abruptly in his throat, “How quickly do you think you could learn Russian?”

Edward had blushed abominably, with the combination of saké and embarrassment, and only after a long moment’s strained scrutiny of Henry’s apparently well-disposed face, had he decided to brazen it out and replied, “What are you getting at, Henry?”

Henry grinned, as though acknowledging that Edward had decided to parry his oblique approach with oblique hedging of his own, and good-humouredly agreeing to it.

“Well, have you ever studied it, for instance?” he asked. “Have you any knowledge of it at all?”

Edward was amazed; coming from Henry, this indelicate probing was so completely out of character. Could it mark an advance in their relationship; man-to-man confidences over the lunch table? Deciding that he wanted at all costs to rise to the occasion, Edward looked Henry squarely in the eye and asked, “Is this to do with Mademoiselle Iskarov?”

Henry gaped, frankly gaped, and then broke into a grin so broad, his highly amused face looked as though it might literally disintegrate amid the resulting creases.

“No,” he had answered, nearly laughing. “No, it isn’t, I assure you. It’s to do with your next job.”

The surge of adrenalin almost drowned Edward. He had to make a supreme effort actually to hear what Henry was saying above the crescendo of his own circulation.

Obviously delighted to be the bringer of such resounding news, Henry beamed down on Edward, enjoying every moment of Edward’s flushed, taut face.

“You remember meeting Arnold Elgood at our home at New Year? Well, Arnold is moving to Moscow. He told me on the phone that he was looking for someone capable to go out there and assist him. I suggested you.”

“Gosh” was a farcically inadequate response but it was what Edward came out with.

“Did – does Arnold remember who I am?” he asked falteringly.

Henry’s grin grew unmistakably mischievous. “Vaguely,” he said. “I gave you a great write-up, though. By the time I was finished, Arnold couldn’t wait to get hold of you.” Teasingly, he added, “Poor old Arnold. He never stopped to ask himself why, if you were such a
Wunderkind,
I was so eager to get you off my hands.”

“Thank you,” Edward said formally. “Is it definite, then? I mean, are you – am I being offered the job?”

“If you want it,” Henry answered flippantly. “You can always turn Arnold down.”

“I do want it,” Edward assured him. He added hastily, “Though I shall be sorry to leave. It’s been really great working for you.”

Gravely, Henry replied, “I shall be sorry to say goodbye to you, Edward.”

He lifted their little saké jug, found it was nearly empty, and signalled to a waiter to bring them another. They toasted Edward’s destination.

“
Na
zdorovye
,” Henry pronounced, with a strong American accent. Then he gave another gleeful grin. “May I say, Edward, I was intrigued by your earlier reference to Mademoiselle Iskarov?”

Edward left the paper at the end of the afternoon and walked the whole way back to the rue Surcouf in a march of triumph through the streets of Paris which he would be leaving in less than six weeks’ time. He had a tremendous urge to tell
people his excellent news but since, apart from Irina and her family, he had made no friends in his nine months in Paris, he had no one to tell. He was naturally reluctant to tell Irina. He wondered briefly, coming over the Pont de la Concorde, whether his destination would make any difference to Irina’s reaction, which was bound to be dreadful. He couldn’t think that it would. It wasn’t South America and it wasn’t Africa but it was still a long way away and access was peculiarly difficult. He thought he remembered Irina saying once that Russian officialdom made a point of being particularly unpleasant to people like her, the offspring of Russians who had chosen to leave the Communist motherland. He suspected that, like most Iskarovian political pronouncements, this one was mistaken but, so long as it kept Irina from trying any crackpot scheme of coming to visit him there, he wouldn’t contradict her. He remembered how impotently irritated he used to get listening to the elderly Russians voicing their deep-seated distrust of Mitterrand’s socialist government. He looked down towards the Piscine Deligny as he passed it and he thought, on a wave of cruel euphoria, that he would after all be spared the sight of Irina in a bikini.

He stopped at the local Nicolas to buy a better-than-usual bottle to celebrate. But when he got back to the flat, he felt frustrated by the limitations of celebrating on his own. It was a real shame that he couldn’t tell Irina. He knew that when he did, he would open the floodgates to an all-time torrent of tears. He quailed at the thought of it. It was doubly a shame because, of course, Irina could help him get ready for Russia in these last few weeks. She could give him a crash course in Russian, her family could fill him in on all sorts of useful background information.

He rang England; he told the exciting news to Guy, who answered the telephone in his old house, and to his parents. He had the open bottle by the phone and he drank as he told them.

In the middle of the night, when he woke with the consequent thirst, he found himself first dwelling on Henry’s role. Had Henry understood straight away what was going wrong and decided to provide him with a way out? Or had it maybe been Mai, indirectly responsible for the whole grotesque,
misconceived match in the first place, who had spotted the self-evident and told Henry what to do? Or was all that, he thought in the morning, paranoia and what had happened only the better luck he deserved?

Because there was a definite limit now on the time left with Irina, he found the tendency was to be a little more generous to her than of late. She responded eagerly. They spent two successive Saturday nights at the Cité Etienne Hubert. With a premature foretaste of nostalgia, Edward enjoyed those enduring aspects of Irina. He did feel, intermittently, that he was cheating her by keeping from her that the death sentence on their time together had been pronounced. But the mere idea of her despair was enough to convince him he was doing the kinder thing. He would tell her only when he had to, at the last minute. In this new-found benevolence, he even agreed to see some more of her family on whom he had placed an absolute embargo in recent weeks. There was a useful, practical purpose to be served by seeing them now; circumspectly, he questioned them about Russia.

Considering the concession he had made in coming back to see them, yet one more to Irina’s temperamental potential, he could hardly have said that they welcomed him with open arms. Over tea, on the second of the Saturdays, Great-Aunt Elena seemed distinctly distant to him.

He put up with the rather frosty formality and what seemed to be pursed lips, making the most of things by asking what the Russian word was for all the objects on the tea trolley: cups, saucers, spoons, cake forks and
choux
à
la
crème.

Three days later, Great-Aunt Elena telephoned him, in the evening at the rue Surcouf, and invited him to come and have a drink with her. The invitation puzzled him. Naturally not particularly enthusiastic, and playing for time, he had asked what the occasion was, who else was coming, apart from, presumably, Irina?

Great-Aunt Elena’s answer was brisk: “No one else is coming, Edward. This is a
tête-à-tête
;
just you and I.”

By which stage, he had unfortunately already expressed too much interest to be able to back out. Grimly, he headed up the Boulevard de Courcelles two or three jevenings later, wondering what the old woman had in store for him. Even
the positive prospect of being able to question her freely about things Russian without any risk of alerting Irina’s suspicions didn’t compensate for what felt increasingly like trouble.

Great-Aunt Elena greeted him with apparent goodwill. She had loaded her little trolley with an array of fierce-looking liqueurs and both savoury and sweet snacks. A cynical voice within him warned Edward that there must be quite some trouble coming up. But, to begin with, all was utterly amiable; Great-Aunt Elena poured him a bilberry liqueur with the power of a paint stripper and set a plate at his elbow piled with a solid stack of goodies. They talked about Edward’s work, a feature he was preparing on the increasingly vocal ecology lobby, and then Elena announced, “I wish to talk to you about my great-niece.”

For a ridiculous moment, Edward couldn’t think who it was she meant. Then, with a sickening certainty, he understood: Irina.

Great-Aunt Elena sat very upright, her small, stoutly-shod feet crossed at the ankle and her plump hands clasped in her lap.

“Edward,” she began, “I have a very high opinion of you. I have always had a very high opinion of you. I think you are, for one so young, an exceptionally wise and serious person. But there are certain things you do not know about. For example, I know you have become extremely friendly with Irina. But there are certain things you do not know about Irina. I wish you did not need to know them. They are neither pleasant nor happy things. If matters had gone otherwise, you need never have found them out. Certainly, it gives me no pleasure to have to tell you them. But tell you I must. We hoped maybe your friendship was slackening, you see. Several weeks went by and we had the impression you and Irina were seeing less of each other. But maybe we were mistaken; maybe things had just moved underground. I am afraid Irina would be capable of just this kind of deceit. Please take note; we do not blame you for anything which has happened. This is, I am afraid, not the first time something of this kind has taken place. We hoped that when you stopped visiting though perhaps, with your exceptional perspicacity, you had sensed something was not right and you had thought better of the whole business.
But then last Saturday she brought you back, and Vera and I realised the friendship wasn’t slackening. Maybe, we worried, it was even being revived more strongly than before. So, we decided, you must be told.