Winter Garden (5 page)

‘Look, look, look,’ shouted Olga Fiodorovna, unnecessarily.

They drove past the Kremlin more than once. Ashburner, who had been almost on the point of sleep when she had cried out so triumphantly, feared that the driver was caught in a one-way system and that they were doomed to go round and round forever, gasping their appreciation and wonderment until the cows came home. Olga Fiodorovna held his wrist in a vice-like grip as she indicated the battlements, the graves of the Brotherhood, the onion domes tethered like balloons above the turquoise towers. She dug her pointed nails into his pulse as black crows flapped upwards through the Christmas trees.

‘Yes, it’s awfully pretty,’ he agreed, worn out by her enthusiasm as they drove up the hill yet again and circled St Basil’s cathedral for the umpteenth time.

She even went so far as to tap Bernard on the shoulder because he wasn’t gazing in the right direction. ‘Look,’ she commanded.

‘I am bloody looking,’ he bellowed, and closed his eyes directly. When he opened them again the car was drawing to a halt outside the Peking Hotel.

7

Something had gone wrong with the arrangements. Their reservations were in order, but their authorisation document couldn’t be found. Olga Fiodorovna scattered her papers in front of the booking clerk. Every quarter of an hour or so a multitude of people stampeded towards the desk and she was swallowed up, to reappear again when the hordes had receded, a solitary, argumentative figure standing on tiptoe. The English guests sat on a narrow bench in the anteroom to the lobby, and waited.

After an hour had passed the interpreter, noticeably tense, led them into the main hall and informed them that Mr Karlovitch had been telephoned but was no longer at home, and now she was trying to contact the minister for cultural affairs. The whole business might take a considerable time to sort out. It was a matter of the smallest scrap of paper imaginable.

She gestured towards the restaurant and suggested that they should have tea, but first they must remove their coats.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Enid. The massive doors leading from the snow-filled street were constantly opening and closing and she was far from warm.

Nina said she must do as she was told. No one was allowed to go anywhere in their outdoor things. Not indoors; it wasn’t permitted. She knew that from the last time she was here. The brain specialist had kicked up an almighty fuss about it, to no avail, and he was a man not often thwarted. She drew Olga Fiodorovna on one side and entreated her not to feel too badly over the delay. ‘We British,’ she assured her, ‘are used to hanging around.’

‘You are very kind,’ murmured Olga Fiodorovna. ‘It is not a good day for me. I have many problems, many things on my mind. It is not just a question of papers.’

When Bernard took off his mackintosh Ashburner was impressed by the suit he was wearing. It was made of corduroy and had a matching waistcoat. Of course the colour, being a pale and impractical shade of honey, was a bit on the arty side, but the jacket was extremely well cut. There wasn’t a speck of paint on it. Ashburner himself was wearing his third-best office suit and school tie. He hadn’t dared pack his best suit because his wife might have thought it an odd thing to fish in. If Bernard was going to strut about attired like a peacock, it was probably just as well his suitcase had gone missing. He couldn’t compete. All he had to change into apart from a fairly decent pair of flannels was his old tweed trousers. Not that Nina was in any position to throw stones. Ashburner had never known her to dress so peculiarly. She was wearing a voluminous kind of blouse, badly creased, and what he could only describe as a kilt, complete with a large safety pin attached above the knee.

The interior of the restaurant was the size of an aircraft hangar and decorated in the Chinese style with oriental screens, a lacquered ceiling of scarlet and black, and numerous pillars entwined with writhing dragons. Though it was difficult to see into the far recesses of the room – the windows were heavily draped and the Chinese lanterns unlit – it appeared to be deserted save for a score of waiters, who for some seconds stared insolently at the new arrivals before disappearing into the shadows. Bernard and the women thought the restaurant was marvellous and said so. The colours, the gloom! It was a work of art. Ashburner didn’t know whether they were joking or not. In his opinion, which he kept to himself, the place was absolutely hideous and could do with a couple of coats of whitewash.

‘Shall I go after them?’ he asked, peering in the direction of the vanished waiters. He was parched for a cup of tea.

Nina advised againt. Perhaps it wasn’t opening time yet. It would be best if they waited for Olga.

A sudden uproar was heard at the end of the room, and from behind a screen painted with butterflies thirty or forty men emerged, broad-shouldered and fierce-eyed, some wearing moustaches, all shouting and jostling against each other as they tramped noisily past the group at the table. Booting open the swing doors, they swaggered out into the hall.

‘They looked very alive,’ said Ashburner, when he had recovered. ‘Do you suppose they’re your average man in the street?’

‘Lumber men, oil men, collective farmers,’ Bernard said. ‘Ukranians, Georgians, Armenians – take your pick. They’re probably here on a convention.’ He stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Enid.

He didn’t answer her, but began to pace up and down in front of the swing doors, slapping his hip at intervals.

‘I keep thinking about my hat,’ said Ashburner. ‘I shall catch pneumonia without it. It’s below freezing out there.’

‘It was a nice hat,’ Enid said. ‘You suited it.’ She watched Bernard go into the hall and then ran after him.

Ashburner wondered whether this was an opportune moment to discuss the sleeping arrangements. He realised it was too much to hope for that the Artist’s Union might accommodate Nina and himself in the same room. Photostat copies of the inner pages of their passports had been sent off to Moscow weeks in advance, though it did seem that neither Mr Karlovitch nor the interpreter had studied them very closely. Perhaps they had been mislaid along with the authorisation papers. ‘If we’re not actually in the same room,’ he said, ‘do you want me to come to you, or would you prefer it the other way round? We ought to work out some sort of signal and synchronise watches.’

‘We haven’t got any watches,’ Nina said. ‘And we may not even be on the same floor. I’m certainly not scampering along any draughty corridors in the middle of the night. I still feel ill, you know.’

He was so filled with impatience and longing that all his movements became brusque and uncoordinated. He knocked a cruet to the carpet and held Nina’s hand so tightly that she winced. He said silly things to her, such as that he’d take care of her and make her feel better. She leant her head on his shoulder and told him she wasn’t making any promises. He was happy at the way she rested against him but alarmed at the prospect of a sleepless night spent waiting for her to summon him to her bed. He was nearly fifty years old and it had been a long day. He stared at a gilt dragon whose mouth belched lacquered flame, and stroked Nina’s hand. Please God, he thought, let my wife be sitting in the warmth, not out driving in the traffic. He didn’t imagine she’d bother to put a match to the fire he had prepared the night before. In her view, fires were dirty things, blackening the ceilings and contaminating the atmosphere. She preferred her central heating. All through his married life he had cut kindling and hauled buckets of coal. He didn’t know why it was that the sight of flames leaping up the chimney aroused such feelings of happiness within him; it wasn’t as if he were a miner’s son. In the cottage on the beach at Nevin, when the children had been put to bed, he had twisted strips of newspaper together to make firelighters. His wife had stood in the open doorway and shaken sand from the bath-towels. He had listened to the slap of waves on the shingle as the tide came in, and humming to himself had fashioned his twists of newspaper and his lumps of coal into an almost perfect pyramid in the apron of the grate. Even then, over twenty years ago, his hair had been receding; unlike the sea, it had never returned.

‘About my hat,’ he said. ‘Do you think Enid’s taken it?’

Nina sat up and looked at him.

‘She did say she liked it,’ Ashburner said. ‘Being light-fingered, I don’t expect she could help herself.’

‘You seem to have formed a very low opinion of her,’ said Nina, startled. He protested that it was she who had put the idea into his head by mentioning on the aeroplane that Enid wasn’t altogether honest.

‘She cheated at algebra, for God’s sake,’ cried Nina.

After an unhappy silence she informed him that she was going to see what Bernard was up to. She didn’t want him unsettling Olga Fiodorovna. The poor girl had enough on her plate; she was having a terrible time with her Mamotchka.

Ashburner was sitting alone in the near darkness when a waiter approached and apparently demanded to know what was required of him. Improvising, Ashburner mimed drinking a cup of tea and munching a cake. He held up five fingers for the tea order, and three for the cakes. If the interpreter was also feeling unwell, as Nina had indicated, she probably wouldn’t be hungry.

Enid returned and said that no further progress had been made: the minister for foreign cultural affairs was at his
dacha
in the country, the mongol hordes were still raiding the booking desk and Olga Fiodorovna was throwing down her documents like a grand slam at Bridge.

‘I’ve ordered afternoon tea,’ said Ashburner.

‘Good for you,’ said Enid.

He sat fidgeting in his chair, moving the cruet backwards and forwards across the white tablecloth. He thought the room was having a depressing effect upon him; he had never liked the dark. Worse, he didn’t know what he was doing here, a man in his position. But then, had he been anywhere else he would most likely have wished himself back. A man of substance could not, any more than a beggar, be in two places at once. ‘I feel ridiculously homesick,’ he confessed. ‘Isn’t that foolish?’

‘Nina’s been giving you a hard time, has she?’ asked Enid.

‘I don’t seem to know I’m here,’ said Ashburner. ‘I mean, I know we’ve flown here and I’m obviously not at home, but I don’t
feel
I’m here.’

‘You are,’ Enid said. ‘I can see you. Just about.’

Ashburner began in a rambling manner to tell her of his departure that morning, how even at the last moment he would have climbed down, cancelled his plans, if only his wife had shown any interest in him, had boiled him an egg, had bothered to look at his face. He didn’t want to sound disloyal or to make excuses for himself. His wife was a wonderful woman in every way, though it was possible she lacked depth. It hadn’t mattered in the slightest when they were young; the last thing a man wanted to come home to was a woman with depth. But she had never had any flashes of consciousness and in his ignorance – he’d had a very conventional upbringing – he had thought that a good thing. Her attitude to him had changed after her Uncle Robert had left her a considerable sum of money. Always before she’d relied on him for her clothing allowance, little treats, lunch at Harrods with her friend Caroline. Not that he’d ever grudged her a brass farthing. He would like Enid to know he wasn’t a womaniser. In her sort of game, mixing with artists and television personalities, it was all taken for granted and really he wasn’t, cross his heart, against anyone behaving in any way they thought fit. It took all sorts to make a world. His own sons were living in a very liberated fashion and he hadn’t anything against them apart from the fact that he was still forking out for their flats and clapped out cars and so forth. It was just that he was distressed at having turned out to be like everyone else. He was frankly disappointed in himself, and that made him feel negative about one or two things. There was no denying that Nina was a wonderful person. Possibly she was even more wonderful than his wife; but believe it or not, at this particular moment, sitting in this Black Hole of Calcutta, he began to doubt that he felt very much for her – not
felt
. ‘If my wife had only opened her eyes,’ he concluded. ‘If she hadn’t flipped that damned blue hand of hers as though she was warding off flies—’

‘Has she got low blood pressure?’ asked Enid.

‘She wears cotton gloves in bed,’ said Ashburner. ‘She’s very proud of her nails.’

Seeing Bernard and Nina approaching, he jumped guiltily to his feet.

‘Things are looking up,’ Bernard told him. ‘Olga’s phoning the Kremlin.’

When the waiter arrived with their order of afternoon tea it was something of a surprise. He had brought three carafes of water, eight glasses and several silver-plated dishes filled with caviar.

Enid poured herself some water and drank thirstily.

‘I ordered tea,’ said Ashburner apologetically. He could see that Bernard was disgusted.

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Enid said. ‘It’s vodka.’

Nina refused to drink. She said she was feeling pretty awful as it was. She thought Bernard and Ashburner shouldn’t drink either: they were guests of a foreign power and they oughtn’t to let the side down, not immediately. For some reason Bernard attempted to comply with her request, though he failed.

At six o’clock Olga Fiodorovna at last brought them the keys to their rooms. She had taken off her coat and headscarf and wasn’t at first recognised. Everyone except Ashburner, who merely thought her a pretty girl, was taken aback by her aristocratic nose and the width of her cheekbones. She wore her hair in an Eton crop save for one strand of hair that was pushed back behind her left ear and fell in a curve to her chin. Waving aside a carafe of vodka, she ordered a glass of iced water which, when it came, she drank languidly, holding the tumbler to her lips and sighing. She got on very well with Nina. Ashburner thought he heard her say that she and Nina had the same mother, which was patently absurd as he knew for a fact that Nina had been born at Westcliffe-on-Sea.