Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  It all goes round and round in my head. Could we live abroad, Maisie – the two of us? Siberia, perhaps – it’s beautiful there, Sergei told me about it. Some place where nature is huge and important and we little beings shrink to our proper size. I would return to Ireland only as an old man, when all the fires have burned out – you see, I do have to come back eventually, that is my predicament.

  Will I ever see you again, my dear, dear woman?

  Sweet Fig, I am falling to pieces.

  Michael

  She cried a little at this, but she knew that he spoke the truth, that his bonds with Kate were unbreakable. What kept him from telephoning was that he could not say the only thing that might reclaim her, that it was over with Kate for ever. Maisie suspected that he was spending most of his time in Dublin in the congenial company of his drinking and musician friends, and that he was falling to pieces only intermittently, when alone.

  Yet the image of Johnny, walking wounded, did not leave her … walking wounded. They were both that now. Then again she thought what fools women are. And then again, no, it is the same for him.

  She was too tired to read any more and fell asleep briefly, the opened letter in one hand, the unopened in the other hand. When she woke she opened the second letter.

  Dearest Maisie,

  I’m writing this and I’m not exactly sober. I’m imagining what you might be doing. I’m remembering the way you walk, you have a lovely walk, drifting along like some bloody angel, I always thought. And now more beautiful than ever being with child, my child, Maisie.

  Maisie, if I telephone, will you talk to me? If I come to London, would you see me? Coward that I am – it’s easier to send these missives.

  I love you, Maisie – don’t throw it away.

  Michael

  P.S. Did you ever read Hopkins? The Brothers were very keen on him. ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.’

  Maisie put the two letters back in their envelopes. Whenever she thought of Michael she had only one picture of him. His sick, stricken face when she had come back to the cottage in Ireland, that look that had changed everything.

  ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.’

  His letters had not made the reasons for his betrayal any clearer to her. It was to her an act beyond comprehension. His argument about Kate, his explanation of his relationship with Kate she could not follow. She could not, would not understand it. It meant nothing to her.

  She would not read Michael’s letters over again. Everything that he said she remembered. She put the letters between the leaves of random books on her shelf – she might forget about them.

  When Leo called on her the next day, he asked, ‘Do you still love him? Will you see him again?’

  ‘He appears to me in dreams,’ said Maisie. ‘Apart from that I have nothing to do with him.’

  6

  IN THE end, Rose would not go with her mother to Bath.

  She had withdrawn scornfully into herself.

  ‘What are you going for?’ she asked. ‘It’s pointless. It’s not as if you have any interest in restoring the Russian monarchy. I certainly hope not, anyway.’

  There was truth in this, thought Maisie, all her days had become pointless, and she floundered in them. She did not try to explain that her life was hard to live, and uneventful days nearly killed her. She would have liked to have been living through wars and earthquakes, catastrophes of all kinds, anything to fill the heavy hours. ‘I have something to pass on,’ she said, ‘some new information about their ikon. It’s more satisfactory to do it personally.’

  Maisie noticed that Rose’s temporary closeness had not lasted. She regretted that. But absorbed in her own life struggle, she telephoned Thèk and asked if he would accompany her. She made it into a favour so he could hardly refuse. They arranged that he would drive up to town and pick her up. Maisie told herself it would do Thèk good.

  She did not wear a crown. She felt hardly recovered from her miscarriage, but careless of her own well-being. They arrived early after an unexpectedly quick drive down the M4, listening to Mahler on tape, talking a little. Only a handful of people so far had gathered in the elegant Pump Room. They were greeted by the tall Russian Maisie had met at Walsingham. He drew her over to the window where a few early corners were drinking and watching several swimmers in the Royal Bath, their pale flesh rising and dipping in the steamy sludgy water. With a small shock of surprise, Maisie noticed they were swimming naked – it looked surreal, the wisps of steam rising from the heavy, greenish-brown water, the pink limbs of these swimming human creatures.

  She told him quietly something of what Werner had said in his letter, though she was discreet about the German professor’s personal revelations. Her host thanked her, kissing her hands, his face alive with emotion. How is it, thought Maisie, that they feel so deeply? It’s like being in love. In love with an idea, an image. ‘The last piece of the puzzle is in place,’ he said.

  He asked her then about Michael – where Michael was – how sorry he was not to see him, he had expected him. Maisie could not quite decide whether this was simply courteous interest, or a sort of checking up. He also asked about Thèk, and seemed interested in Maisie’s brief potted history: Hungarian … mathematician … her late mother’s dear friend.

  More guests were arriving. The room began rapidly filling with people. Maisie looked round at the exotic company, the epaulettes of the Tsarist uniforms which several men sported, the bright poppy splash of a woman’s dress, the flash of crystal on the long table.

  ‘I feel like a traitor here,’ said Thèk as she rejoined him. ‘Or a spy.’

  He had said it quietly, for Maisie’s ears only, but it was overheard by an old man with blue eyes, sharp as the cutting edge of a skater’s blade, who spoke in good, only slightly broken English. It was Menshikov, whom Maisie had last seen in Brighton, at Denisov’s house. She introduced him to Thèk.

  ‘My friend, you do not believe our people wish the return of a monarchy – a Tsar once more?’

  Thèk laughed incredulously, and spoke with some passion. ‘No. You Russians see reality through a mist of fables, untruths and dreams. You have no sense, no real sense of history. Or even space and time. Your view of these things is disjointed and bizarre. Dangerous. And as for a return to monarchy, you have lived too long under a system based on collectivism.’

  Maisie was beginning to wonder whether it had been wise to bring the Hungarian into this particular milieu. But Menshikov seemed unperturbed by Thèk’s outburst.

  ‘For myself,’ he said, ‘I have never lived in Russia, though I hope to end my life there. But my dear, what you say about, ah … collectivism … our position is not so far away in psychological terms; both communism and monarchism require the submergence of the individual to something higher, an ordering power. The great advantage of monarchy is that ultimately the higher power is God, the monarch only his representative. God Himself,’ he reiterated, sparks leaping from his bright old eyes.

  ‘Ah, God,’ said Thèk in despair. ‘Always God. It is history trying to fly backwards. It is not possible.’

  Angrily he waved away a waiter bearing a tray of drinks, and the waiter had to duck before offering it to Maisie and Menshikov.

  But Menshikov persisted seriously, calmly. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘the restoration of the monarchy is a culmination of history. The old order had to break up, be cut down, nearly annihilated before it could grow back, more strong, more true.’

  ‘You speak of it as a natural living organism, something that should be, in nature as it were.’ Maisie tasted the champagne, it was very fine indeed.

  ‘Yes, the monarchy is like a tree. Like a tree, it has shape and harmony.’

  ‘A gallows,’ spat Thèk violently, ‘for the free human spirit.’

  ‘You do not believe in structures?’

  ‘Not hierarchical structures,’ said Thèk, ‘they are built on fear and dread.’

  ‘My dear, hierarch
y is intrinsic to systems of order.’ Menshikov spoke lightly, but Thèk was still angry and impatient.

  ‘Life is worthless if it is not free,’ he said, ‘and also very boring. Full of ennui. Stale. The stability of your hierarchies is stifling and stagnant. Like stagnant water. Revolution will eventually always break through. Revolution is excitement – fresh, fast-flowing water – the human spirit freeing itself, purifying itself. Down with the monarchy. It shackles and chains us all.’

  ‘You speak the words of Satan himself,’ said Menshikov, but he was laughing, sure of his own faith, very slightly sozzled by the effect of vintage champagne on his old body.

  For some reason Maisie thought of Irene and her cyclical view of life, her creative wheel structure. Systems of order, patterns could be cyclical, they need not even be static. They could be ever-changing.

  ‘I used to love kaleidoscopes,’ she said, and as the two men looked uncomprehending at this irrelevance, she said, ‘You know – how the pattern is always changing with just the smallest flick of the wrist, all the pieces in the pattern rearrange themselves into another, different but equally beautiful and symmetrical pattern. The feeling is of constant movement within an ordered universe.’

  Thèk and Menshikov did not pursue this line of thought, though they looked momentarily thoughtful.

  Perhaps Irene had something in her ideas, thought Maisie, something Leo was too sure of himself to understand. He hadn’t married her for her ideas.

  Maisie was beginning to be tired standing. The champagne was making her giddy. All around her she heard the mix of languages; Russian, French, English, twining and weaving in each other. It all sounded like gibberish.

  The conversation now was about the French Revolution, how it had speeded up history, speeded up how time fled by.

  Falling in love is like that, thought Maisie. It is an overturning of things. It sings through creation. It speeds up time and simultaneously makes it stand still. It is like standing on top of the highest pinnacle on earth and being able to see a long way. Seeing everything breathtakingly laid out below, and you are breathing thin, life-giving air. But paradoxically, it blinds and narrows the view, certain things are no longer visible to you. Some things are supercharged with energy and beauty, other things fade away as if their existence no longer mattered, love being a cipher which selects differently.

  Thèk was offering her a chair. She thanked him and sat down. And she thought how often love was ultimately, like most revolutions, destructive. How it tears things apart. She thought how her careful life had been torn down – the painfully built structure – how it lay about her now like a ravaged city, and there was nothing to hold on to. She saw the time since she had met Michael, the speeded-up time, go by, flick, flick, flick like an old film.

  One of the reasons she had not wanted to come on her own, and had dragged Thèk there with her, was that she was feeling unsure of the very ground she walked on. It was as if it could open and swallow her. Outwardly she remained the same, and partook of life’s comings and goings as everyone did outside madhouses, but inwardly she could hear the weird, ghostly wind blowing across the bomb-site of her spirit, and it made her afraid. Life, in one way, seemed somehow over for her, like so much rubble. Except she still moved and talked and had her being. Sometimes she wished for Leo to be with her. In a sense he had always been more real to her than Michael, more bodily real. But Michael was the one who burned fiercely in her imagination and had cut open her heart so easily, so exactly.

  Thèk drew her over to the buffet, set out in splendour along one side of the room. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asked her, piling piroshkis on to a plate and plunging a silver spoon into an elaborate trifle, spoiling the pattern of crystallised rose petals. ‘Really, Maisie, you do not have sympathy for this crowd, do you?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I can understand very well the glamour of kingship, of a royal line. I see the advantage of being born by chance to power, rather than scrabbling for it for all sorts of possibly unworthy motives. And I suppose it is a structure which, generation after generation, can stand the strain of events.’

  ‘You can talk like that because you do not know what a tyrannical society is like. Even in this country you had to chop off a tyrant’s head.’

  ‘Charles the First? Yes, but they sewed his head back on before they buried him.’

  Thèk gave a small grim smile at this.

  ‘Yes, well – the Russians would never have done that, no half-measures with them. No compromises. It is always an extreme position. This lot will be no different in the unlikely event of them having power.’ Thèk looked at her seriously. ‘You should beware of glamour,’ he said.

  Glamour, ‘the supposed influence of charm on the eyes’. Thèk was right to warn her. Maisie remembered how Rose had described Michael, as if it was a term almost of contempt, as glamorous. It was his glamour now that she could not forget, it was why she could not let go of him, his magic, his glamour. The trouble is it moves one, it is not nothing.

  Where was Michael now? What was he doing? He should have been here with her, glamorous in this exotic place, although his sort of glamour he took with him everywhere.

  She had dreamed the night before that she could not decipher his letters. She had tried to read them but they were just marks on the page. And she had also dreamed that she was trying to telephone her mother and could not get through.

  ‘Shall we go?’ she asked Thèk. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘We will leave them to it,’ he said, abandoning his trifle.

  They left quietly as the first experimental fireworks puffed into the air and fell in pink smoke over the thick, slabby water of the baths. As they drove back to London, Maisie felt disturbed by the evening. ‘They are too sure,’ she said. ‘Their view is so narrowed. I fear for them, and I pity them. I am somehow glad that Denisov did not live to see what might happen.’

  ‘Maisie, they are a lot of deluded idiots. I don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘I should not have dragged you there,’ said Maisie.

  ‘I was glad to take you. I’m not really doing anything that matters. Well – I’ve started writing, but it’s not going very well.’

  ‘Mathematics?’

  ‘No – poetry. People always write poetry when everything else fails.’

  ‘Have you settled in the flat?’ She probed him but it was a silly question. Maisie had a picture of him seated at her mother’s desk, writing poetry, the light falling across his bent head.

  ‘I’m thinking of going back to Hungary,’ said Thèk. ‘It is possible for me now. I think I want to go back. I have a sister there.’

  ‘I shall miss you,’ said Maisie, ‘if you do.’ She was surprised by the pain it gave her; she really liked Thèk and regarded him as a friend. Everyone was going, leaving, dying.

  Thèk settled back in the driver’s seat as they turned on to the motorway. ‘Well, perhaps you will visit me. It is a beautiful country.’ He slipped the Mahler tape into the player. ‘You don’t mind hearing it again, do you?’ he asked.

  Changing into top gear, he said, ‘May I give you some advice?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You are a sensible and beautiful and clever woman. But you let strange things happen to you. Some people are like that. I think perhaps I am the same myself. You could choose otherwise.’

  ‘You mean I go about bumping into things?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps you should stop doing that. You have the possibility of so much. Perhaps you go up strange, unlikely paths.’

  ‘It used not to be like that,’ said Maisie.

  ‘Was it better before? Or now?’

  Maisie hesitated, and said slowly, ‘In spite of everything, it is better now.’ She meant that. Now her feelings were ripped bare, and she was more alive even though she was in pain.

  Thèk gave her a sweet smile and said nothing. He dropped her at the house but would not come in, and carried straight on with his journey.


  A note had been pushed under her door. It was from Rose, telling her that her telephone had kept ringing so she’d answered it, it was Michael and she had told him to go to blazes. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

  7

  THE world had suddenly gone quiet for Maisie. In spite of her underlying exhaustion, she still craved the excitement of change to ease her pain. But nothing happened. Michael did not telephone again and Maisie wondered exactly what Rose had said to him. ‘I just told him to sod off, that’s all,’ said Rose, adding darkly that Irene had instructed her that men take away all your gifts if you insist on being besotted by them. Maisie wondered if Michael had mentioned the baby. But she would not ask. A short note from him did arrive – it contained no more pleas to see her, only telling her that he was in England for a three-day university tour. That he had been home and both he and Declan sent their love.

  Well, she would be out of the country soon. She planned to take Rose, who had never been to Russia, to St Petersburg.

  The choice of that city had not been entirely at random. After all her involvement with the ikon she would not miss its restoration to an Orthodox church. It was to find its home in the Church of the Apparition of the Virgin, where the monarchists were to gather for a special service. St Petersburg, then, of all cities – it had never been Leningrad to the monarchists – was to be the venue for this event. The European press was getting interested; this Russian business had stirred up many hives. The situation looked a little dangerous and volatile, and the monarchists were treading softly, keeping their activities to themselves. But Maisie had been invited to attend the ceremony.

  Apart from her interest in seeing the ikon restored to a Russian church, Maisie was not really looking forward to her trip to St Petersburg. She had a general wish, though, to be on the move, and she felt she must go for Rose’s sake. Rose needed a complete change of scene, she thought, after this sad spring.

  They would be staying with the Abrahamovs, a pair of very old academics Maisie had known for some years. They were an extraordinary old couple, and Maisie loved them, but she would not want them to know of her sadness. They both disapproved of unhappiness. It was something indulged in by those with no inner resources. They themselves had lived through many tribulations, including the death of children. The old man was now practically blind, and his wife suffered from severe arthritis, but that did not prevent them from living full intellectual lives and travelling. Maisie had no qualms about Rose staying with such old people – they were both now in their eighties, but had far more energy and life than she. If anyone could chivvy Rose up it would be them.