She squeezed the juice from a couple of dried-up-looking oranges and made coffee, packed an overnight bag and telephoned for a taxi. While she waited, she made up a pile of things to go the cleaner’s and another pile for the laundry. The flat needed dusting.
When the taxi came it was late, and she was out of it into the train with no time to buy a sandwich. But she was only eating because she should, she felt she could have lived on air.
As the half-empty train rocked swiftly to Brighton, Maisie closed her eyes and took herself back to Kiev, to the dark cathedral, the orange-tongued candles licking the darkness, the seamless chanting rising and falling, and the feel of her lover’s body when she leaned back against him. She still could not remember what Michael looked like, could not recall his features in her mind’s eye, but she remembered exactly the feel of his body, and his scent was still in her nostrils, it had never left.
She imagined herself as Michael’s male companion, his comrade, on that desert island they had talked about. He was her lord and friend, she his squire and his heart’s companion. Thus she would be able to explore that part of him closed against a woman, reach him as no woman ever could. But then she wanted to be both man and woman to him, everything to him, complete. She wanted every bit of him and wondered what he and Sergei were doing.
It was still raining when she got to Brighton. She took a taxi round to her mother’s house. Someone was standing outside pressing her mother’s bell. She waited with him but there was no answer. Maisie surreptitiously scrutinised the man. He was very thin with a gaunt, interesting face, shabbily dressed; he had noticeably beautiful hands.
‘She must be out,’ said Maisie.
‘I expect she’s in the town,’ said the man. He had an accent. Central European.
‘Can I give her a message?’ asked Maisie. ‘I’m her daughter.’
‘I can see some certain likeness.’
One of her mother’s odd friends, no doubt. Foreign, slightly shabby, sophisticated. Interesting. There were her conventional Brighton friends, church and bridge friends, and then there were her occasional odd-ball friends.
‘Imre Thèk, please call me Imre.’
‘I’m Maisie,’ she said, remembering the Bonnard card on her mother’s mantelpiece. ‘I’ll come back later. If you see her, would you be kind enough to tell her I’ve gone for some lunch and will be back?’
‘I know a nice little place. Not expensive. Please let me show you – it’s newly opened.’
‘All right,’ said Maisie.
So they ended up having fried sprats and brown bread and butter together.
‘How is my mother?’ asked Maisie, remembering Rose’s reference to her health.
‘She seems very well.’
‘You met my daughter Rose at Christmas. She said you are a mathematician.’
‘I am retired. I taught mathematics and logic in London for more years than I like to think. Ever since I came from Hungary.’
‘At the time of the uprising?’
‘Yes, that’s right. I came over then.’
What else could Maisie find out about him in defence of her mother’s interests? She could feel Rose urging her on. She was interested, anyway.
‘Are you one of Ma’s bridge friends?’
‘No, I’m afraid the only game I play is chess and your mother isn’t very good at it.’
‘I thought perhaps you had met her through her bridge group.’
‘No, I met your mother in the Lanes. She was raising money for Amnesty. I gave her all the money I had with me. We got talking, we just took to each other at once. I happened to tell her I had been imprisoned as a political prisoner in Hungary. She said, “You poor man, you must be hungry, so am I. I shall buy you some poached eggs on toast.” I told her that I had not recently been released from prison. In fact already I had lived in England for many years. And I had been teaching at the University for over ten years – where the food is not too bad. But poached eggs sounded like a good idea, if she would buy it as I had put all my money in her tin.’
‘All that sounds typical of my mother. She has a streak of recklessness about her.’
‘It is that about her I most admire. She has a certain ladylike wildness – I find it very attractive.’
Maisie laughed. ‘That describes it very well.’
‘Your mother and I,’ he said, ‘we find we have much in common.’
Maisie watched him curiously as he took their coats from the coat-stand and paid the bill, carefully counting the change. These sorts of people had always drifted through her mother’s life; she had a deep interest in and sympathy with certain sorts of people, often on the fringes of the seemingly conventional life she lived. Though that conventional core to her mother was just as much a true part of her, giving the wildness a certain stable centre and saving her from eccentricity.
‘That was delicious,’ said Maisie. ‘Thank you. Tell my mother I shall be along later. I have to make a call this afternoon.’
They shook hands and went their separate ways.
2
MAISlE stopped off on her way to Denisov to buy a pot of white hyacinths for her mother and some groceries. As she rang the bell, she breathed in the flowers’ perfume, faint in the cold air.
She was not shown to the same room where she had seen Denisov before. The old man was in bed, and she was taken to his bedside.
The Steppes ikon was on the wall at the foot of his bed, and underneath it a small sanctuary lamp burned. The old man had undergone a change since Maisie last saw him. She was aware of the skull beneath the almost transparent flesh; the bony old hands waved her to come close with a strange grace, a gesture beautiful in its utter exhaustion.
But Denisov’s mind was sharp and clear.
‘You see why I have called you. I have the holy image with me now, it will accompany my last days on this earth.’
He smiled. ‘What did you discover for me?’ he whispered.
‘Only part of the story,’ said Maisie. ‘There is a crucial gap.’ And she told him what she had been able to uncover of the ikon’s past travels.
The old man listened, sharply attentive as she spoke. ‘When the time comes,’ he said, ‘we must have our facts ready. There must be no doubts. It must be clearly shown that the ikon is the original authentic Mother of the Steppes.’
Suddenly he was asleep.
Maisie kept very still, her eyes drawn to the ikon and the bright look between the Madonna and the Child, and then to the old man’s face, closed in sleep, and then inexorably back again to the ikon. There was an extraordinary aliveness in the way the Mother and Child regarded each other; the longer Maisie looked, the more alive this remarkable gaze became.
‘Where is your companion?’
Maisie was startled by Denisov’s question; he had woken as suddenly as he had slept. ‘The gentleman who came with you before. Michael Curran.’
‘He is still in Kiev,’ said Maisie, surprised that the old man had remembered his name. ‘For a few more days. He will soon be back.’
‘I trust you both,’ he said clearly, strongly.
Denisov seemed not to be worried as he had been before. He spoke deliberately, calmly, not wasting his words but making sure Maisie got his meaning. He seemed to have given himself up to his death with an almost joyful recognition of what was happening to him. He seemed to be resting in tremulous hope, halfway to Heaven – almost blithe in his very weakness. It was as though this giving up to death had given him a trust in life. He trusted Maisie.
‘I want to ask you a special thing,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘I will want you later to have care of the ikon. I want you to put it into the hands of a certain gentleman. His name and address I will give you before you go. Will you do this?’
‘Yes,’ said Maisie.
She decided to tell him, as he seemed so calm, something of the interest the ikon had stirred up in certain quarters.
He listened intently
. ‘Will you have some tea?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Maisie said, watching his expression. He seemed unruffled. He pointed to the tasselled bell-pull for her to call the old woman to bring them tea.
‘The ikon’s place is in the cathedral,’ he was saying. ‘When the time comes, it will be there … at last.’ As the old housekeeper brought in tea, he drifted off to sleep again. He looked like a fish skeleton, lying there.
Maisie sat and sipped her tea and wondered if she would ever see Michael again. Always her mind went back to that very first meeting with him. Always her heart turned over as she remembered it. If he did not come back to her, she would not be able to bear it. Her life would stop.
When the housekeeper came back to clear away the things the old woman saw that Denisov had not touched his tea. She pulled him out of his light sleep in a matter-of-fact way, propped him up with pillows and held the cup to his mouth. The tea dribbled down his chin. His body had little use now for food and drink.
‘I shall arrange for you to collect the ikon,’ the old man said to Maisie. ‘It won’t be very long now.’ He handed her a folded piece of paper. Then he smiled, a sweet ecstatic smile. ‘What a beautiful smell,’ he said. ‘Bring the flowers closer.’
‘They are for you,’ Maisie said on impulse. ‘I’ll leave them on the table for you to catch the perfume.’
‘What are they called?’ he asked.
‘Hyacinths,’ replied Maisie, and she kissed him goodbye.
Downstairs in the light of the hall as she was being shown out, she glanced at the name and address on the piece of paper before folding it and putting it in her bag. The name was Russian, the address was Walsingham.
It was dark as she made her way to her mother’s flat. The sea was rough and threw small pebbles up over the promenade. It roared and threw itself against the beach. She walked quickly, carrying her bag of shopping in front of her like a baby. There were few people about on such a wild night. Once or twice Maisie could hardly stand against the wind which came in sudden gusts.
Imre Thèk answered the door, and she followed him into the big sitting-room. The velvet curtains were drawn to shut out the winter night and Maisie’s mother and her new friend had obviously been reading peacefully beside the fire. A tranquil scene.
They both fussed round her, taking her coat, offering her a drink and a place near the fire. Maisie could see at once that her mother and Imre Thèk loved each other. As she sipped her sherry she began telling them a little about Denisov and the ikon she was investigating.
‘I thought at first I was simply authenticating an ikon,’ she said. ‘But I seem to be getting drawn into something else.’ She stopped, cautious of saying too much in front of a comparative stranger.
‘You must be careful,’ said her mother.
‘Don’t worry,’ answered Maisie.
‘You meet such a funny lot in your line of work. How was the conference? And what have you done with that young man you brought here last time?’
‘I left Michael in Kiev in the clutches of an extraordinary chap called Sergei. They are supposed to be making a record. I think Michael’s just enjoying himself with his ilk.’
‘What are his ilk?’ asked her mother.
‘Footloose musicians,’ said Maisie shortly. She turned to Thèk. ‘Do you know Kiev at all?’ she asked.
‘When it was Soviet Russia it was somewhere where one avoided going,’ said Thèk. ‘It was somewhere where if you went, you were probably never seen again. The sound of the language – everything – still fills me with fear and hatred.’
‘Imre was imprisoned for a time in Hungary as a political prisoner,’ said Mrs Sharpe.
‘Yes, I know. We got to know a bit about each other over the sprats,’ said Maisie. ‘But things are different now, things have changed since those days.’
‘Time will tell,’ said Thèk. ‘I am not hopeful.’
‘Imre was in solitary confinement for a year,’ said Evelyn Sharpe. ‘They took away his glasses.’
There was a silence.
‘Perhaps they will find another tsar,’ said Maisie in a small voice. ‘Perhaps the monarchy will return anyway to Russia itself – it had such a strong hold before the Revolution – if an heir to the throne were to be found – perhaps such a one exists.’
Thèk threw his head back and laughed.
‘It is a romantic and amusing idea,’ he said, ‘though perhaps slightly more feasible than the idea of Russia becoming Europeanised. No – she will always be enigmatic, Eastern, and confused and volcanic beneath the surface. Shambling, eccentric, wild – terrible.’
‘I think it is you who are romanticising now,’ said Maisie. ‘You speak as if Russia is a kind of Caliban – a sort of chaotic subconscious area of the world.’
Thèk shrugged and held out both hands in a characteristically Central European gesture, meaning, ‘You said it.’
‘Anyway,’ Maisie went on, ‘strictly speaking, the idea of kingship is anti-romantic. That is, if romantic ideas are about freedom, revolution, the primacy of the individual and so forth – if they are against hierarchies.’
There was another little silence.
‘Did you bring something for our dinner tonight?’ asked Mrs Sharpe.
‘Yes – and I’m going to make it,’ said Maisie.
‘Well, don’t you believe in the primacy of the individual?’ asked Thèk.
‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Maisie. ‘Romantic freedom has a hell of a lot to answer for. One small step and we’re into chaos.’
‘I’m glad you realise it,’ said Mrs Sharpe.
‘But life is worth nothing,’ said Thèk, ‘if the individual cannot be true to himself. He is not a clone, not a serf, not a number on a wall. You have to shout out your name. I am the one and only Imre Thèk.’
‘Mm,’ said Maisie. ‘I like to think I’d do the same, but suspect I might not. I might just fade into my appointed fate, without a word.’ She stood up, picking up the bag of groceries. ‘Spaghetti all right?’
‘I remember my father talking of the old Tsar,’ said Mrs Sharpe. ‘He used to sail off Cowes. My father met him on board his yacht. Spaghetti is fine – a nice change. Do you want any help?’
‘No – you two just sit there and let me do all the work. Go back to your books.’ The telephone chirped and Mrs Sharpe picked it up. There was a pause.
‘It’s for you, Maisie. It’s Michael, I think.’
‘I’ll take it in the kitchen,’ said Maisie.
Michael sounded slightly drunk.
‘How is it all going?’ she asked, a little too briskly.
‘Christ, Maisie – stop being so bloody offhand. I love you. I’ve been ringing your flat all day.’
‘I love you too,’ said Maisie.
‘Shall I come back today?’
‘Have you finished the recording?’
‘No.’
‘Well, stay and do it. I thought you were so taken up with it. You must finish things you start.’ She could hear her mother in her voice. ‘I thought it was so important.’
‘It is important. But I miss you. I’m a weak man, Maisie, you should have stayed with me.’
‘I had work to do, Michael, I just can’t go on like that – anyway, I’m glad I came back, Denisov is dying, I saw him today – he wants me to take the ikon to – to somewhere. I’ve agreed. Have you heard any more talk there of the ikon, or anything?’
‘The sort of people I mix with aren’t interested in such things. Well, Sergei’s fixer friend might be, he’s got a finger in all sorts of pies. He has got a sort of trade going in ikons – it’s illegal to trade in them, he loves anything illegal, it’s like a magnet to him. But I don’t want to talk about that, I just want to tell you how I feel. I want to be with you, Maisie.’
His words sounded sweet to her.
‘I’m making spaghetti carbonara,’ she said.
‘I love you.’
‘Ma has got a lover.’
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br /> ‘To hell with your mother, and spaghetti whatever it was. I love you, Maisie. Tell me you love me.’
‘I love you, Michael.’
‘Say it again.’
‘I love you.’
‘Goodnight, then, Fig.’
She put the telephone down and started grating parmesan, melting butter, making a sauce. She was glad he was a weak man. She smiled to herself to think he was a weak man.
She began to sing to herself, she danced around the little kitchen, the grater in her hand. She put the bread to warm, started the sauce, uncorked the wine and poured herself a small glass. She began to wonder if she had been too offhand and worried a bit that she had sounded cold.
When the food was ready, she carried it through to the other room where her mother had laid the table by the window and lit the lamp in the dining end of the room. Imre Thèk was polishing the wine glasses.
Maisie felt strongly motherly towards both the Hungarian and her mother as she brought in the plates of food, the crisp warm bread. She felt motherly to the whole world. Her mother and Thèk, Rose and Glantz – everyone with someone else. Arms encircled round each other, clinging to each other, like partners in a dance. And sometimes one danced alone, and sometimes one changed partners.
‘Parmesan?’ She offered the grated cheese to her mother.
Thèk poured the wine into his sparkling glasses. They helped each other to food and drink as they drank and ate. Maisie thought the two of them had a settled little air of suitability hovering over them.
She and Michael had no such settled little air. Michael and she, chance met, as were her mother and Thèk. But however unsettled their relationship, however unsuited they might be, she would never give up this man. She loved him and wanted him. If he did not come back soon from Kiev, she would fly out again and bring him back. If he would not come she would drug him with a secret drug and bring him back. If he stopped loving her, she would find some love potion and put it in his marmalade. Maisie’s face had a fierce look about it, but she was not far from tears either. She felt wounded by love. As she lay in bed later that night, her wounds hurt and bled.
Fig and the Flute Player Page 11