Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  Maisie was interested in the questions Philomena raised, and the rest of question-time consisted of a two-way conversation between them.

  Afterwards, as Maisie was gathering up her notes and shaking hands with various people, Michael came up to her. Immediately, rudely almost, she left the little knot of people around her and went to him.

  He said casually, warmly, ‘Darling Maisie, I’m sorry I didn’t make it back last night. It was late and I thought you’d be asleep. I didn’t want to disturb you.’ So lightly he said it.

  ‘That’s all right.’ She spoke carefully, casually. ‘How did it sound?’

  ‘It was … good, Maisie, as far as I’m a judge. They were all on the edges of their seats. It was good. No one went to sleep, anyway.’

  She took his arm. Lightly. Casually flirtatious. Not feeling quite safe with him. ‘Our last night in Kiev,’ she said. ‘How shall we celebrate it?’

  ‘You choose,’ he said, kissing her cheek lightly, their quarrel still unmentioned.

  ‘We’ll go to church,’ she said, as they made their way out into the street. Michael looked a bit startled, but only said, ‘What, now?’

  ‘Well, not exactly now. We have time for a drink, something to eat.’

  ‘Am I allowed to have a shave?’

  ‘If you must. You look rather nice like that.’

  ‘I don’t feel rather nice.’

  ‘Did you enjoy your carousal?’

  ‘I did. I really am knocked out by Sergei’s lot. It’s given me so many ideas about my own music.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘Look, Maisie, I am sorry I didn’t get back.’

  ‘I think you said all that bit.’

  ‘It’s not right between us, though, is it? It won’t be, I suppose – what we ought to do this afternoon is go to bed.’

  ‘No, we’re going to church.’

  ‘But it’s a weekday.’

  ‘There are services every day at the cathedral.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I ought to go and do penance, or are we going to get married or something?’

  A wintry sun was shining. They jumped on to a tram going to the Kreshchatic. It was full and they had to stand. People stared at them as they stood, holding on in the swaying tram.

  ‘They’re thinking you’re an anarchist,’ said Maisie, thinking how very good-looking he was, even – or especially – in his tired, unshaven state.

  ‘It’s you they’re staring at,’ he said. ‘They’re wondering where you get your clothes, who cuts your hair, where you bought that beautiful shade of lipstick. They’re thinking, who’s that frightful looking old tramp she’s with?’

  ‘This is it,’ she said, and they got off. ‘Promise to leave the flowers alone.’ It was the bistro where Michael had deflowered the carnation.

  They had huge bowls of bortsch with hunks of rye bread and some splendid smoked cheese. The carnation on the table was white this time, with a little sprig of fern.

  Maisie felt happy and light-hearted. Her paper had been delivered. Michael was looking his most vulnerable and touching. She loved him. The wine had an interesting edge to it. So had life. She was enjoying the small rift between them. It distanced them as if they did not take each other for granted. Strangers again in a way, like it was at the beginning. She liked the feeling. It was light and exciting and anything could happen. Now, in a strange way, she was glad she was going back on her own.

  The cathedral was full. Michael and Maisie stood pressed about by a motley crowd of people. Everyone stood stoically, no one sat or knelt, even the ancient black-garbed women – so lost in their giving of themselves to prayer, their frail bodies forgotten. And every so often they crossed themselves, not in the way it is done in the West, but backwards – forehead, right side, left side, breast, with a quick instinctive movement as birds might ruffle their feathers; it seemed a bodily movement not connected to a thought process.

  This was essentially a drama, a ritual one watched and partook of by means of the senses. There was an overwhelming sense of the numinous. The bearded priest, his eyes yellowed with the fumes of incense, his robes richly encrusted with symbolic embroidery, wheat and grapes and flowers, the black-gowned monks, the warm glow of the tiers of candles, marigold-bright. Gold everywhere one looked. Gold set on fire by candlelight. And the rich dark colours of the ikon screen which screened the sanctuary from the nave, the sanctuary being a view of heaven on earth, shielded in its radiance from the human eye by the ikons, windows to heaven. The choir, sonorous, floating, bearing one along and aloft, the words of the service reverberating through the priest as if he was God’s sounding-board. The smell of candle-wax and incense.

  Maisie, pressed into a corner with Michael standing behind her, slightly taller than most around her, had a good view of the iconostasis. It was rich with ikons and provided Maisie with a great deal for her mind to work on throughout the long service. It told the story of Christ’s sojourn on Earth and his Resurrection. Here were ikons showing the Nativity, Baptism, the Entry into Jerusalem, Descent into Hell and Ascension. The gleaming gold Royal Door pierced the iconostasis.

  She could identify the workshops where most of these ikons had been produced, which schools of ikon painting they represented, and all the nuances they conveyed. There was one almost like the famous black Madonna, where the Virgin’s face was so darkly olive-coloured as to be nearly black. Maisie knew that, as these ikons of the Mother of God had been so revered, and so discoloured over the years with smoke and grease from the candles, it became the practice to paint the faces very dark to begin with. This Madonna was full-length frontal, ornamented and probably late thirteenth-century of the Yaroslavl School.

  Now the Procession of the Book of the Word – a jewelled, gold-bound book covered in small ikons – was being enacted by the priests. The crisis of the liturgy was approaching. The Song of the Cherubim. The richness of this Orthodox liturgy represented Heaven, this was the meeting of Heaven and Earth. Incense, the odour of Heaven.

  Now the priest was spooning sacramental food as though feeding his flock of birds, mouths open trustfully.

  Neither Maisie nor Michael received the Sacrament. Onlookers again, they saw the worshippers filing past devotional ikons on lecterns, kissing them in such natural, unaffected ways, almost as if they might be revered members of their own family.

  More than two hours had passed since they entered the cathedral and the service was drawing to a close. Michael took her hand as they emerged into the dark, foggy street.

  ‘We forgot to get married,’ he said.

  ‘I went to an Orthodox wedding once,’ said Maisie. ‘Very beautiful – the extraordinary way of elevating human life, holding things up to Heaven, as it were.’

  ‘Did you notice,’ said Michael as they walked away from the cathedral, ‘there was a point in the liturgy when the whole atmosphere changed?’

  Maisie, who had been brought up as a sceptical Anglican, if anything, was certainly not entirely without a religious sense – she needed it for her work in any case – but she kept it under control; if it raised its head too much she picked up a heavy volume – Freud or something – and banged it firmly on the head.

  ‘Where do you mean?’

  ‘Just before the Sacrament is offered – you feel the invisible world about you. Heaven watching. Time stopped.’

  ‘The Song of the Cherubim,’ said Maisie. ‘Let us now lay aside all earthly care, while we, invisibly escorted by the unseen armies of angels, receive the King of all things. Something like that. Wonderful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, you really feel the invisible world about you,’ he said.

  ‘You could almost hear the fluttering wings of angels with us there.’

  ‘You have kept your religion, Michael.’

  ‘I don’t think much about it usually,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s there in the background.’

  ‘But obviously you believe in an invisible supernatural world.’

  ‘Oh,
yes,’ he said simply. ‘Of course. Well, it’s there, isn’t it?’

  Maisie laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why are we walking so fast?’

  He slowed down. ‘We’d better find a taxi,’ he said. ‘It’s like this,’ he went on suddenly, stopping. ‘Have you ever looked down a microscope and seen the teeming world invisible to the naked eye? Well, you can’t think that is the only hidden world. It seems likely that there is another world all around us that we can’t see.’

  Maisie could see the priests at his school talking; she could just picture them, with their bony wrists and eyes as grey as an Irish sky.

  ‘Did the priests at school tell you that?’

  ‘Yes, but I knew it anyway.’

  ‘From your mother’s knee?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. She’s a good Catholic witch.’

  ‘If you believe all that, why don’t you practise your faith?’

  ‘I let all the monks locked up in monasteries do it for me. That’s their job. I’m too busy.’

  ‘Can someone do it for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Michael, signalling to a taxi. ‘Get in, lady.’

  Time was beginning to run out very fast. That night they said their farewells with their bodies and spoke very few words.

  Maisie caught the first flight to Moscow. She would be back in London by nightfall.

  Invisibly escorted by angels.

  PART THREE

  Brighton, Walsingham and London

  1

  As MAISIE paid off the taxi, she looked up and saw there was a light in Rose’s living-room. She let herself into the house quietly. The hall and stairway were dimly lit. There was a pile of post for her on the hall table.

  Leaving her luggage in the hall, she picked up the letters and made her way upstairs. There was that characteristic smell of the house – the beeswax polish Rose used on her antique furniture and the smell of soot some London houses still have, lingering from the past.

  There was a crack of light from Rose’s door, which was ajar, and Ella Fitzgerald was singing ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. Maisie felt like someone in a fifties film. It was all such a cliché. But that didn’t stop it hurting, if anything it made it worse, feeling the weight of all those who had suffered before.

  She tapped on Rose’s door and called out, ‘I’m back, Rose.’

  Rose took a long time to answer but Maisie hardly noticed. She was tired from travelling and the song had taken possession of her as she stood there in the half-dark.

  ‘Every time we say goodbye I die a little …’

  Then Rose was there. ‘Hallo, Mummy. I expected you back yesterday.’

  ‘No. Today.’ She gave Rose a kiss and wondered why it always felt like kissing someone she’d wronged. As she sat down on Rose’s huge white hessian-covered settee, Glantz appeared from the bathroom.

  ‘Mummy’s back,’ said Rose. ‘Put the kettle on, Bernard. Have you met? No, of course not. Mummy, this is Bernard Glantz of ill-repute. Bernard, my mother, just back from foreign parts.’

  ‘Kiev, actually,’ Maisie said.

  ‘Every time we say goodbye I wonder why,’ sang Ella Fitzgerald, the words clear and painful. No one attempted to turn down the volume.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ Glantz said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Oh, yes – a happy New Year to you both,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Would you bring up Mummy’s things?’ said Rose.

  ‘Please don’t bother,’ said Maisie. ‘They’ll be all right there. I’ll see to it in the morning.’ But Glantz was already on his way.

  ‘I’m putting him up temporarily,’ said Rose. ‘This is much nearer his practice than his own flat.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Maisie.

  Nothing she had heard about Glantz had prepared her for the instant liking she felt for this ugly, intelligent-looking man with the awful yellow knitted waistcoat.

  ‘I’m clearing out the swan room for him,’ said Rose. The swan room had a stained-glass window in it, of a swan on a lake surrounded by bulrushes. Usually it was full of bits of furniture.

  ‘Oh – the swan room – yes.’

  ‘How was Kiev?’

  ‘It was a good conference.’

  ‘Where is the Irishman?’

  ‘Oh, Michael – he’s staying on for a day or two on some business. Thanks for your letter.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘No thanks, darling. I’m really tired and all I want to do is get to bed. I can never sleep travelling.’

  Bernard Glantz was at the door with her bags.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Rose ordered him. Maisie wondered if she always spoke to him this way, she hoped not. ‘I’ll come now,’ she said, and led Glantz up to her room.

  ‘It’s a nice house,’ said Glantz, as they climbed the stairs.

  ‘I hear you are going to be in the swan room.’

  ‘Unless you object.’

  ‘Of course not. Here we are, and thank you.’ It felt rather nice having someone else in the house – they said goodnight and Maisie opened the door. She knew she should have probed Glantz. But Maisie had a certain reticence about such things. Somehow she never felt she had the right to go heavy-footing about in other people’s lives. She watched instead, with a loving fearfulness, and also a sense of fate.

  It was odd to be back in her own flat. She hadn’t thrown away the flowers before she’d left and there was a vase of withered, blackened stalks on the table.

  Before doing anything else, she threw them into the waste disposal. They had drunk all the water before dying – she washed out the vase.

  She put on the immersion-heater for a bath and found herself a nightdress, and then poured a glass of mineral water. She tried to work out what time it would be in Kiev and thought it might be afternoon, but she wasn’t sure, she’d never quite grasped time zones. Perhaps after a while she would begin to feel whole and the sore, grieving feeling in her solar plexus would go away. Perhaps one day she might even feel as she had before she met Michael, living so calmly in this room which she had made her own, but which now seemed to have very little to do with her. It was full of emptiness, as if emptiness could be a palpable presence.

  He wasn’t there.

  Everything in the place knew he wasn’t there. The table and chairs, the shrouded, empty bed, even the cold knives and forks in the drawer knew of his absence, and were drained of meaning. How was she to live through the days until he came back? And supposing he never came back?

  She bathed and found a book to read in bed. But she fell asleep over it with the light still on.

  She was wakened by the telephone. Wondering for a minute where she was, she picked up the receiver automatically.

  There was the click of an international call before Michael spoke.

  ‘Hallo, darling,’ he said. ‘Hallo, Maisie.’

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘Just wanted to know if you got back all right and if you’re missing me. If you still love me.’

  ‘I’ve been back, let me see, three hours. I was asleep.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m glad you rang.’ There was a pause.

  ‘Well, don’t forget me, Maisie.’

  ‘When do you do your recording?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure yet what the plan is.’

  ‘Well, I hope it goes all right.’

  ‘You’re in bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I should be with you.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was another pause, she didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Well, go back to sleep. Goodnight, Fig.’

  She held the receiver in her hand for a long time, then very slowly she replaced it and lay down again. She switched off the light and lay wide awake. She wished she had said more to him, told him how she longed for him, that she loved him.

  She wondered where Michael was going now, after he had telephoned her. Was he still at the hotel? Sergei probably had no telephone.

  Restlessly she
switched on the light and picked up her book. The words seemed strung together without meaning. She got up and went over to the window. It was the kind of neighbourhood where there was always someone awake, even in the small hours – a party, an insomniac, someone working through the night, always a light in one or two windows.

  It had been raining and the street gleamed in the lamplight as if wrapped in cellophane. A lone figure of a man wandered up the road with an aimless air about him. Somewhere a dog barked.

  Maisie wondered if her daughter and Bernard Glantz were sleeping together and supposed they were. It had to happen sometime. She wished them well, guessing Rose to be a virgin, but thought them probably unsuited. Rose was going to bully him. She imagined he had had a string of unsuccessful affairs and was probably already resigned in advance to the failure of another. But you could never tell with people. Sometimes the strangest alliances worked.

  She closed the curtains. It was no use going back to bed, she wouldn’t sleep.

  In a day or two she would have to go down to Brighton, she thought. After she had caught up with some of her other work.

  She started to look through the pile of letters on the table. A few late Christmas cards. One or two New Year’s cards from clients. Catalogues. A note from a bookseller in Cambridge to say he had found a book she wanted. Junk. A request for her to view a reliquary for a prospective buyer at auction and value it. A belated letter from the conference she had just attended, welcoming her and sending a list of events in Kiev which coincided with the conference. And a letter from Denisov. She recognised the thick hand-made paper, the large wavering writing.

  Dear Dr Shergold,

  The matter becomes pressing.

  Vladimir Dimitrivich Denisov.

  She would telephone in the morning.

  She went to bed then, and lying there in the dark, trying to remember what Michael looked like, fell asleep. And woke once more to the sound of the telephone. She had overslept but felt better for it.

  It was her mother welcoming her back.

  Maisie made a sudden decision that she would go down to Brighton that day, and told her mother she would see her soon. Then she rang Denisov and left a message that she would be there in the early afternoon.