Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  6

  MAISlE tried to open her letter from England with a pen; she made a mess of it. Michael handed her a knife from the breakfast table and poured them both coffee. Maisie started to read to herself, biting her lip. ‘It’s from Rose.’

  Dear Mummy,

  Did you have a good Christmas with the Irishman? I thought him a little too much, you know – almost glamorous. A bit flash. I prefer ugly men.

  I am writing this from Granny’s. Daddy asked me for Christmas – if Irene had backed up the invitation perhaps I should have gone, but she doesn’t like me. I can’t say I blame her in the circumstances. But she’s a bit wet. It can’t last with Daddy. Pity about the offspring, she’s already beginning to look blurred – you know, like pregnant women do. I don’t ever want all that. No thank you.

  Anyway, it’s nice to get out of London. I bought Granny an absolutely huge bunch of mixed-up flowers – they’re all over the flat, she didn’t have enough vases, we had to use milk bottles. She said it reminded her of when she was in the theatre.

  I don’t think Granny is very well, though she never says. She takes so long to do things now, and she looks awful without her make-up. A man calls on her all the time, he was there for Christmas lunch. I hope he’s not after her money. He’s a mathematician, a professor, Hungarian and very peculiar, and probably poverty-stricken. I’m not sure Granny should be mixed up with him and I’m very worried about her. And if I may say so you are really the one who should care and keep an eye on her.

  But I expect you are too busy.

  Your loving daughter

  Rose

  P.S. Daddy thinks I ought to begin to specialise a bit – in Russian furniture, there is no one else in that field.

  ‘How’s the Glantz business going?’ Michael helped her to rye bread and apricot jam.

  ‘She doesn’t mention him … at least …’ Maisie started to read the letter again.

  ‘What lectures have you got today? Anything fascinating?’

  She looked up. ‘I’m going to stay in the room today and work on my paper. What about you?’

  ‘This morning I’m going to stay and distract you – later on I shall go to sing my songs and play my flute and carouse.’

  ‘Sergei?’

  ‘Yes. He knows someone with a recording studio – he wants to record my song.’

  ‘“I do not go” – that one?’ She had a feeling it would be, she had helped with the Russian translation.

  ‘Yes. He knows everyone in the music business, apparently.’ Michael hesitated, then said, ‘He wants me to stay on for a few days.’

  ‘Do you mean stay on after tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s not that easy to stay on. You won’t be able to.’

  ‘Sergei says he can fix all that. He knows a fixer. You’re angry.’

  ‘No. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Don’t be angry, please, Maisie. It’s only a question of a few days, it’s such an opportunity. The music scene here is interesting. I want to do it.’

  ‘Well, I have to go back.’

  ‘Yes, well …’

  ‘Where will you stay? Here? Oh, I forgot – Sergei knows a fixer. You should be careful of people like that.’

  ‘I can take care of myself, Maisie. I expect I’ll stay with Sergei – anyway, it doesn’t matter where I stay. It’s only a few days.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  In the lift he held her tight, and neither of them spoke. Back in their room, Maisie got out her notes and books.

  ‘Michael, I don’t know what you’re here for. I can’t work with you here. Why don’t you go out for a walk or something?’

  ‘I want to spend some time with you. There’s only tomorrow. Only two more nights. I’m going to miss you like hell.’

  ‘Yes, well, you can’t just pick the time that suits you. I’ve missed you quite a bit this week. Now you’re just a distraction.’

  ‘Is that what I am?’

  ‘Are you going to go and let me work?’ She felt driven to say these things, although she longed for him not to go.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘It’s the beginning of a quarrel, I think,’ he said, ‘and it’s because I’m staying on for a very short time.’

  ‘I suppose that’s it. Because you’re letting me go back alone.’

  ‘You’re a very unreasonable person, Maisie. You expect everything to revolve around you and your work. You just expect me to fit in. I’ve got work.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m a musician.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I forgot.’

  ‘You are a bitch, Maisie. I’m going out.’ And suddenly, without saying another word, he picked up his coat and left. When he had gone Maisie tried to read through what she had done of her paper. She looked up one or two things. Changed a word here and there.

  ‘Damn,’ she said aloud. ‘Damn everything. Every bloody thing.’

  She wished she had a cigarette, but she had given up a year ago. She got up and looked out of the window, holding back the stiff lace curtain. The courtyard below was deep in snow which blurred the outlines of everything. Nothing moved or stirred. It could have been an oubliette. She shivered.

  Then, damning every bloody thing again, she got to work and finished her paper.

  And then she wondered how to fill in the day. She really wasn’t in the mood for the summing-up that would take place all afternoon. But she decided to wander over to the conference centre anyway and have a glass of wine in the bar.

  When she got there the bar was crowded. She thought how insufferable intellectuals were en masse. The sort of people who would rather talk than listen; to whom it was important to have the last word, who would rather win an argument than have any real feelings about anything. She supposed that she might be like that too; she was one of them, she thought with disgust. She longed for something simpler. Longed to be simple.

  She wondered how she could bear to go back to London without her lover. She drank her white wine and hoped it might dull the feeling she had of splitting in two. The babble of voices round her felt like a physical pain; she wouldn’t be able to stand much of this.

  ‘Dr Shergold.’ It was Werner. ‘We all have to part soon,’ he said.

  There was something odd about Werner. About the way he looked at her. Either he was mentally undressing her and trying not to let it show, or he wasn’t doing that, but just trying to hide something else. Or both. She ought to thank him again for the information about the ikon she was investigating, but she didn’t. She didn’t feel much like talking. Weakly she let him buy her another drink, and then she had to listen to him going on about his life, his life history, at least his version of it. Apparently he and his wife spent a lot of time apart – they had this arrangement. Maisie gathered he was looking for someone to sleep with before the conference concluded. He had probably been looking round all week without success and now his desperation made him bold. There were only two nights to go.

  She felt slightly annoyed that Michael was not there to fend off this sort of thing: what was the use of having a lover? Werner was settling himself closer to her. Was it that men did not pick up the fact that a woman wasn’t interested, or did they not really care whether she was or not? Werner was asking if she was going to the summing-up or would she like to spend a quiet afternoon with him. She wouldn’t miss the summing-up for anything, she said, and made her escape as a delegate from the Crimea, a solemn young woman, flew into Werner’s sticky web. She decided to go back to the hotel and have a bath.

  The hotel was practically empty. It was like having a huge house all to oneself. Her footsteps echoed down the long corridors.

  The bathroom was cold, but the water gushing from the tap was boiling and hissing with steam. Soon Maisie could hardly see across the room. The combination of the cold air and warm steam as she took off her clothes was pl
easant. She turned on the cold tap and poured some carnation-scented oil into the water. Too much. The clovey scent was overpowering.

  She lay in the bath and wondered if she was a bitch.

  Perhaps she should try to sort out her feelings for Michael. She was beginning to realise that they might be in charge of her, and that she was likely to behave irrationally. For instance, she felt she could easily make a ridiculous fuss to try to get Michael to go back with her; or that she might foolishly try to stay with him, a course that would complicate her own life, even if she could manage it.

  As the warm clove-scented water lapped round her, she tried to unfold her true feelings and inspect them.

  She thought back to her first meeting with Michael. She felt the same now as she had then. That first unsought magnetic pull was as strong now as it had been then, it had not weakened its hold at all. So how did you inspect that? It was like trying to inspect an electric shock, while you were still having it.

  He had entered her life and immediately taken up the position of the only man she was interested in – although the world teemed with men. She was in love. Yes. She showed all the signs. The heart beating quickly when she heard his step. His voice and touch imbued, for her, with magical quality. The sense of loss and desolation when they quarrelled, as they had now. How when he left something died in her. It was all in the love songs that came over the radio all day. Except it felt as if she had been under the surgeon’s knife and put back together differently. Especially her stomach was in a different place.

  She splashed her feet about. She was taking a fearful emotional risk with all this. He could go at any time. Should she, could she … step back, let him go hang a bit, rearrange her feelings a little? Rearrange her feelings, care just even a small scrap less? She knew she could not. It was not in her power.

  Neither was he in her power. She could not make him do exactly what she wanted. Had she thought she would – a younger man, putty in her hands? The nasty thought appeared and left in a flash. But it had been she who had seen him first.

  Now he would not let her be the prime mover. If he had, would she have lost interest in him?

  She began washing her feet. Sometimes she looked back on her marriage with Leo and wished things had gone differently. It had not hurt like this. And Leo would always be a part of her. Their brief happy love affair had been nothing like this. It had settled quickly into a pleasant marriage, give and take, everything they said should happen for a successful marriage. Neither tried to dominate the other, both looked after the other’s interests, unselfish, putting the other first. All of that. They had liked each other immensely. But in the end the life had gone out of it.

  She didn’t know if she liked Michael or not. She did not know him in that way. Well, sometimes she liked him but that was by the way. Liking didn’t come into it. Overwhelming attraction came into it – not just sexual; she was attracted to the whole of the personality of the man, inexorably drawn to him.

  It was no good. She might be able to behave rationally, but inside she felt as if in a kind of hectic fever. It was like a sickness in some ways. Sometimes in a feverish sickness there is a heightened awareness, a fresh way of seeing things, a clarity emanating from a narrowed-down vision.

  Maisie washed her underwater limbs and belly and breasts. She thought of Irene’s expected child. What was Leo doing – fathering other women’s babies? She had been so surprised when she heard, as if in nature the thing was impossible.

  She began laughing quietly at herself.

  She had loved being pregnant. Now Irene was beginning to show. Well, that was all over for her. All she wanted was Michael. Just the two of them. What about his feelings? If she could hardly unfold and inspect her own, how much less could she fathom his? She wondered if she really wanted to know his most secret inner thoughts and feelings towards her, to have them laid bare. In their inevitable vicissitudes. It might crush her.

  One thing she would cling to in all of this. She would not let go of her work. She should have gone to the summing-up. She must siphon enough energy from this love affair still to work. It had been her raft in life before and she would not abandon it. She lay back in the water. The carnation smell in the hot water was beginning to make her feel sick. She flicked out the plug with her toe and ran cold water.

  She got out gasping with cold and rubbed herself dry. That bit about the Marxist view of art history wasn’t really right. She’d have another look at it. She worked on and off for the rest of the day.

  And that night Michael did not come back.

  A coldness began to seize her heart. She lay in bed sleepless, angry and bereft.

  She fell into a restless sleep in the early hours and woke an hour before she was to give her paper.

  She felt numb, and still angry. Coldly, quickly, she began to get ready for the day. She would wear her blue dress. It was a quiet dress, it didn’t distract. She would snatch herself something to eat – she did not want to faint in the middle of her paper.

  And she had managed not to think of Michael for several minutes. Though he was there at the back of her mind.

  There, that morning, underneath her thoughts of what she was to speak about. There, a shadow over her heart, as she took up her position on the platform. Hers was the last paper, some people had already left to travel home, so she would address a smaller audience, for which she was quite thankful.

  She looked for him along the slightly depleted rows of delegates. People tended to keep the seats they had first taken up, but he was not on the end of the second row where he and she had sat together at the beginning of the conference. If he did not come, it meant he did not care for her at all. That was it. If he did not come, it would be like a sign to her that it was over.

  Over. It was over. The seat where he should have sat was empty. She wished he would come so much that she thought she almost saw his shadow-figure taking his place, sitting there, waiting for her to begin. She must be going mad.

  She put her notes out in front of her in order, had a sip of water, and plunged in.

  ‘I want to talk this morning,’ she said, ‘specifically about Russian ikons, and I want to try to trace the Russian roots of Rublev’s vision, and the way it changed how we view ikons for ever.’

  And then she saw Michael slip into his place. She wanted to harangue him with angry words from the platform – that dark unshaven man, flopping, graceful, tired … his coat with the astrakhan collar flung on to the seat in front of him.

  ‘Where have you been through the night? How is it you dare behave with this appalling lack of consideration. Lack of love. Didn’t you think of me, didn’t you care that this morning I had to give my paper?’

  She pressed her fingernails into the sides of the wooden lectern. ‘Our knowledge of very early ikons is lamentably scant. This gap must necessarily leave much to conjecture. We cannot trace Rublev’s artistic roots to their very first source but we must endeavour to do our best.’

  If only she could sit down. But she would not look at him again. ‘I don’t want to feel this. Why must I feel it? Why am I broken down by you, Michael?’

  She felt, although this did not surface as thought, that he had let this incident happen purposely in order to keep their affair in check, a way of telling her to come no closer. A way of saying she was close enough for his liking.

  Michael watched her and her words flowed over him. ‘This ikon was perhaps used to decorate an early version of the later Russian iconostasis.’

  ‘How beautiful and clever and cool she is. She does not try to devour me. True, she had not wanted me to stay without her, but I would have felt the same. It’s not significant.’

  He knew he admired her because she seemed to have autonomy. At first he thought her vague, elusive, and it bothered him that he could not grasp her in some way. Now he saw it as a strength in her. Her central mystery was intact for him, he thought. He no longer reached out for it. But he wondered a little if she just fancied him
like hell. She knows nothing about me. But I like not to be known after all. Kate knows me through and through, what she did not know my mother has told her. Through and through to the point of claustrophobia.

  ‘The first canonised Russian ikon painter – Alipi – may well have been an inspiration. The miracle-working aspect of certain ikons must have influenced Rublev’s mind and become woven into his perceptions. I come now to his individual view of divine light.’

  ‘There are dark places in my love for you, Michael,’ she thought, ‘perhaps better kept dark.’ Michael closed his eyes.

  ‘Last night the music and the wild excitement. The fact that I was working. I feel released. I have been emptied and filled. There is a part I must never give away – that is how it is and it is for the best. Perhaps she does not realise that I am the same as her – I have my central mystery too.’

  ‘The white highlights created the effect, a marvellously ethereal effect as if the soul’s light shone through the body. It was a technique that Rublev perfected.’

  Maisie turned to the last page of her notes.

  ‘I have not, you notice, taken up the Marxist position which is so prevalent in art history today – because that has been already considered fully by others and because I think it leaves out too much of an indefinable nature, and perhaps blinkers one to the intensely spiritual nature of the ikon painter. It leaves out man’s relationship with God. At the very least it gets the balance wrong.’

  She looked up. The bloody man looked as if he was nearly asleep.

  ‘But saying that will, I am sure, call forth some comment from delegates with different views. We have a few minutes for questions.’

  Predictably, one of the Marxists asked a rhetorical question about the didactic purpose of ikons in maintaining social and economic order. Then Philomena asked a question about the nature of Rublev’s so-called divine light.

  ‘Is not this perhaps a theory that has been superimposed by later critics? Something fabricated?’

  ‘In a way that could be said to be true,’ said Maisie. ‘Rublev’s work was lit by prayer, and it shows – to call it a theory is perhaps wrong.’