Winter Garden (4 page)

The interpreter went away to tell Mr Karlovitch what had happened to his guests. As she crossed the hall she was surprised to see the Englishman in the soiled mackintosh being marched in the other direction. After an argument, during which permits and documents were passed frequently from hand to hand, she obtained Bernard’s release and led him to a vacant chair near the tea-bar. Subdued by his experience, he agreed to remain upright.

Enid stared anxiously in the direction of the arrival lounge and thought of the Secretary of the Artists’ Union pacing the red carpet, the smile of welcome fading from his eyes. She told Ashburner that she was sure his suitcase had just been mislaid in another part of the airport. Perhaps it had fallen off a wagon and been temporarily buried under a fall of snow. In no time at all it would appear on the conveyor; she would keep an eye out for it.

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ said Ashburner, ‘that I feel pretty sick. I’m not saying that I can always put my hand on everything when I need it, but I’ve never lost anything like this before. It could have the most frightful repercussions.’

‘But you didn’t lose it,’ Enid told him. ‘You can’t be blamed – and anyway, you’re not the only one.’ She indicated a fellow passenger who sat at an adjacent desk laboriously filling in forms. ‘That man who was sitting next to you on the aeroplane has lost his briefcase.’

It was of no interest to Ashburner. He knew he wouldn’t see his suitcase again, not until he returned home to Beaufort Street, where it would be standing in the hall, ransacked, its Moscow label torn from the handle to be later used in evidence against him, its contents of new pyjamas and nylon stockings and co-respondent underpants in lurid and assorted colours strewn across the doormat. God knows what his wife would make of the several bath plugs, complete with lengths of chain, wound about his waders. Would she weep or rant? Either way he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. If she chose to rave at him there’d be no nonsense about keeping her voice down for the sake of the neighbours. He would stand propped against the wardrobe like a dead twig, the sap squeezed from him, waiting for the moment when she would snap him in half. If she cried, he would drown, sunk by his own philandering. Eventually she’d take herself off to her friend Caroline’s. She would also take, after a judicious interval, his house, a third of his income and almost certainly the car.

‘If it’s any comfort to you,’ said Enid, disturbed by the expressed on his face, ‘I think you’re being very brave. I’d hate to lose all my little bits and pieces.’

When Olga Fiodorovna came back she was carrying half a dozen tulips on abnormally long stems. She presented them to Ashburner and told him that Mr Karlovitch had a deep sympathy for him and that he mustn’t worry any more. The Artists’ Union would locate his suitcase. Now they must go to the hotel, and further enquiries could be made in the morning.

‘How very kind,’ murmured Ashburner. He trailed behind her, holding the flowers awkwardly in his fist. Due to the length of their stems and the weight of their full-blown heads, forcibly grown and streaked with yellow, the tulips rolled in all directions and finally hung down, pointing at the floor. It was as though Ashburner had just eaten a particularly large banana and hadn’t yet thrown away the peel.

‘Are you all right?’ inquired Enid.

‘Resigned, perhaps,’ said Ashburner. ‘It’s out of my hands.’

‘
Que sera, sera
,’ she said.

No one could be sure what time it was. They had been so long under the artificial lights of the airport building that they had become confused.

‘Don’t you possess such a thing as a watch?’ Nina asked Ashburner.

‘Certainly I own one,’ he told her. ‘But I can’t wear it. I’m too full of electricity.’

Bernard wore a wrist-watch, but it was unreliable and he hadn’t bothered to alter it on the plane because he couldn’t remember whether they were supposed to gain hours or lose them, nor how many. Nina felt it couldn’t possibly still be daytime. She had risen at six o’clock that morning, in the dark, and when she had stepped out of the plane it had appeared to be dusk. They had probably arrived at tea-time and now it was supper-time, though she wasn’t in the least hungry. It had been altogether the sort of evening that had she been on home ground she would have terminated by winding up her alarm clock and going to bed. She bumped wearily against Ashburner as, preceded by Enid and the interpreter, they followed the luggage trolley.

Clutching his bouquet of flowers in one hand and his fishing rod in the other, Ashburner stared straight ahead. Now that he was on the move he felt less jittery. He could do nothing more about his lost suitcase; it was up to God and the Artists’ Union to find it. Above all, he resolved to abandon any notion of prudence in his dealings with Nina. Those silver moments in the air, when she had stroked his cheek, were but a prelude to the golden hours that still remained. If he was returning home to calamity and penury, the next twelve days must be lived with all the fervour of which he had once been capable.

Bernard, who was walking at Nina’s side, said something to her that Ashburner didn’t quite catch. He did hear her shout ‘Oh Christ’ in response. They were always, it seemed, having mysterious little conversations that either angered or surprised them both, though in this instance he thought they were probably being rude about his tulips.

Trotting three abreast and starting to smile apologetically, they advanced to greet Mr Karlovitch.

6

They were driven from the airport in a black limousine suitable for weddings. Though introductions had been clearly made and hands grasped in friendship, it was obvious from the beginning that the identity of Ashburner was shaky. It was a question of his name, half of which was the same as Bernard’s and the rest apparently difficult to pronounce, and of his misunderstood relationship to Nina. Mr Karlovitch, conversing mostly through Olga Fiodorovna, asked Ashburner, first of his missing suitcase contained any valuable instruments, and secondly, when they were driving through a landscape of birch trees piled with snow, what opinion he held of the engravings of Dürer. Both times, Bernard laughed aloud.

They were fortunate enough to glimpse, before the single-track road merged into a motorway with six lanes of traffic, several old dwellings built of logs, with one or two hardy old persons wrapped in rugs on chairs on the rustic verandas.

‘How healthy,’ cried Nina, and she asked Mr Karlovitch if many such houses survived. Mr Karlovitch was sitting in the front of the car, wedged between Bernard and the driver. He spoke English, haltingly, but at this first meeting wasn’t inclined to use it. Small and square, with gingerish eyebrows perpetually raised in concentration under his grey fur hat, he wore a blue knitted scarf so tightly wound about his throat that each time he swivelled in his seat to talk to the interpreter his eyes bulged in their sockets.

Olga Fiodorovna explained to Nina that, picturesque as they might seem to foreigners, Mr Karlovitch would assure them that log cabins were no longer to the liking of the people. Mr Karlovitch’s father had been born in just such an
izba
in Siberia. There had been a stove of baked clay and at night the children slept on top of it. Outside the house was a river; the temperature in winter was sometimes minus forty degrees and for eight months of the year the river was frozen to a depth of six feet. No one would wish a return to such conditions. Centrally heated accommodation in blocks of flats was available for everyone at low cost. Mr Karlovitch himself was lucky enough to rent an apartment in an area that was considered desirable. Also, it was near his wife’s place of employment.

‘How marvellous,’ enthused Nina. ‘In our country too we have blocks of flats, though they are not always heated.’

‘Except when someone sets fire to them,’ said Bernard.

Nina told Olga Fiodorovna that she was interested in the women of Soviet Russia. She would like to know whether Mr Karlovitch’s wife was a skilled worker. The interpreter leaned forward in her seat to translate into the ear of the Secretary. The car drove past an enormous billboard straddling the edge of the motorway, stamped with the portrait of a smiling and bare-headed Brezhnev; blobs of snow clung to his painted cheeks.

‘For God’s sake,’ hissed Nina, speaking out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Don’t leave it all to me. Think of a question.’

‘Has anyone seen my hat?’ asked Ashburner. He couldn’t believe he had been so careless as to drop it in the airport lounge. All through the interpreter’s rambling account of somebody’s father sleeping in an oven, he had been probing the back of the seating in search of it.

Nina called him the giddy limit. At this rate, she said, he’d end up stark naked with nothing to show but his fishing rod. They all trembled with laughter; even Mr Karlovitch, who surely hadn’t understood.

This outburst of hilarity, continuing as it did for a mile or two, served to relax the English contingent. They now became high-spirited and unrestrained, conducting themselves like deprived youngsters on an outing who, having wound down the windows and sniffed the salt air, fancied the sea was just round the corner.

Olga Fiodorovna smiled and nodded pleasantly. She had had sufficient experience of foreign visitors to appreciate the eccentricity of the English. It was they who were the most likely to be subdued in Moscow, obediently visiting the museums selected for them, and the most capricious in Leningrad, skilfully giving her the slip in both the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. They acted either with courteous reserve or wanton familiarity and could be counted on at all times to know precisely where and when such differing modes of behaviour might be found acceptable. Every one of them, unlike the French or the Dutch who had no necessity for guilt, had encouraged her to believe that when they returned to England they would write her a letter. Not one of them, not even the famous baritone who had said he was in love with her, had yet done so. Despite this, she was aware that each insincere declaration, each false promise, was dictated by politeness. She therefore allowed Ashburner to beat her about the shoulders with his wilting tulips until, having reached the suburbs of the city, the car slowed to the kerb and stopped.

Bernard peered out of the windows and was depressed to see a penitentiary made of reinforced concrete, twelve storeys high, with icicles fringing the windowsills.

‘Is this it?’ he said.

Mr Karlovitch clambered silently over Bernard’s knees and left the car. They watched him sprinting through the snow, and then the car drove on.

‘Was it anything we said?’ asked Enid worriedly.

Olga Fiodorovna explained that it was Mr Karlovitch’s day off. He had merely come to the airport out of respect. Now that they had safely arrived he could go home and eat his lunch. He would return tomorrow in his official capacity.

‘His lunch!’ cried Nina. Astonished, they learnt it was early afternoon.

With Mr Karlovitch gone from the car, Olga Fiodorovna assumed control. She indicated to the driver that he must stop smoking at once; she released the window a fraction to let out the stale air. Such was her authority that Bernard, who had just taken out his cigarettes, refrained from opening the packet.

‘Now,’ began Olga Fiodorovna, ‘you will want to know something of the history of Moscow. You will not perhaps realise that the Kremlin was built on the site of the camp of Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, grandson of Harold, your own Anglo-Saxon King who was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Here he built his citadel, which the boyars later strengthened in a vain attempt to keep away the Mongol Tartars. By the fifteenth century, when Moscow had become the heart of a centralised Russian state, the Kremlin had taken on the basic form you see today.’

‘You speak such marvellous English,’ said Nina. ‘Where did you learn it?’

‘Here, in 1812,’ continued Olga Fiodorovna, ‘Napoleon came and conquered, only to find that his victory was turned into tragedy and ignominious defeat. Here, in 1941, the armies of Hitler trundled to within thirty miles of the city and then, deflected, followed the Napoleonic road westwards.’

‘What does she mean by
here
?’ asked Ashburner. There was nothing to see outside the windows save an immensely broad street under a thin crust of snow and several nondescript department stores.

‘The name Red Square,’ declared the interpreter, ‘has no special significance. It simply means beautiful. In the naughty old days the square was a market place in which vegetables and serfs were sold. Now of course it is a place for processions.’

I’ll have half a pound of tomatoes, thought Enid, and that fellow with the big shoulders. She began to giggle quietly.

‘Are you able to hear me in the front, Mr Burns?’ demanded Olga Fiodorovna, apparently speaking to Bernard.

He ground his teeth; having done his homework before he arrived he was irritated by the history lesson. ‘What does that say?’ he asked, pointing at a row of black letters, six feet high, erected on the roof of a nearby building.

‘Labour is glorious,’ translated Olga Fiodorovna.

‘Oh, a hospital,’ said Bernard, and wondered if he was brave enough to light a cigarette.

Olga Fiodorovna told him that in this instance, labour meant work. In her country such slogans were an incentive to the workers. It spurred them on.

‘In my country,’ said Bernard thoughtfully, ‘a slogan like that would be an incentive to violence.’

At that moment the car turned a corner and he saw ahead of him a butcher’s lorry stacked with carcasses, ribs striped with frozen blood, and beyond the lorry the white curve of the Kamenny bridge that spanned first the canal and then the Moskva river. When he craned forward to look out of the windscreen, there about a hilltop was a constellation of giant stars, ruby red, wheeling across the northern sky, and beneath them a cluster of cathedrals and bell towers and palaces with golden domes. A high wall, primrose-coloured against the snow, rose above an embankment planted with fir trees.