by Dennis Parry
Tilda said: ‘Well, we are a bunch of fools’—and I noticed how generously she included herself—‘Next time we have a party it’s going to be gin and lime and perhaps you’ll work it off quietly by weeping in corners. Come on, if that frightful old bore Colonel Hammond has taken himself off, I’ll cook us all some eggs in the pantry.’
‘Darling,’ said Deirdre, ‘I do hope I haven’t embarrassed you too much with the guests—particularly the older contingent.’
‘The ones who noticed,’ said Tilda, ‘are the ones who’ve done that kind of thing themselves.’
‘Very good,’ said Varvara, like a teacher approving the performance of a class. She looked at me with smiling expectancy as if I were a favourite pupil who had failed to answer up.
‘I’m afraid I’m really to blame,’ I said. ‘I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of me. I think I’ll go home now.’
I had not the slightest fear of being taken at my word. It was all part of the curious game of playing at saints which had somehow been imposed on us.
We went into the kitchen where Tilda made us an omelette whilst the maid was clearing up the débris of the party. The spirit of brotherly love continued strong throughout the brief meal. The others were probably aware that some unusual force had been let loose, for Deirdre said with a giggle:
‘I hope this evening we haven’t used up our ration of goodwill for the season. It’ll be too sad if we spend Christmas biting the nose off anybody who comes near us!’
It was the first remark for a good many minutes which showed any degree of self-consciousness. I don’t know whether Varvara obscurely recognized it as a sign that her period as ring-mistress was expiring. At any rate, almost immediately afterwards she rose and said smilingly that she must go home.
‘I ought to be on my way too,’ I said.
Undoubtedly the magic was fading, for there was a moment of embarrassed silence in which one could almost hear the rasping of ulterior thoughts. Then buoyed up on the last remnants of the spell, Deirdre said:
‘You should share a taxi to Aynho Terrace. David can pick up the Underground just beyond.’
I hope I have not suggested that we went through some kind of joint mystical experience. What happened—unless it was due to chance or my imagination—approximated more closely to light hypnosis. Yet it was not without its genuine spiritual content. At its best the power which Varvara generated could transcend her own interests. She would risk looking silly or undignified, she would even eat a kind of humble-pie, in order to make other people collaborate in producing effects which she felt to be beautiful and dramatically true. She was like a medieval painter who was willing to put his own face on Judas if he thought it would help the picture.
She had, too, the inflating vision of the artist. Usually it was directed towards the magnification of feuds—which are the easiest material for histrionics. All her rows were like the harrowing of Hell. Sometimes, however, her spirit would veer sharply. Perhaps it was due to her Slavonic blood that she would suddenly become obsessed with the splendours of Christian charity. When this happened, it did so, not as a mere shading off of mood, but like the recoil of an explosion or a powerful engine thrown suddenly into reverse. The shock was transmitted to outsiders, so that for a short while they were coerced into taking their responses from her, and the atmosphere became almost Franciscan.
Alas, her potentialities for spiritual leadership were limited by the general tenor of her nature. Sooner or later she would always turn an agapemone into a brawl. But at least inconsistency was likely to prevent her from putting her considerable psychic gifts to any serious misuse.
She let me in at Aynho Terrace with her own latch-key. The hall was in darkness. As we entered, one of the lusher clocks which had broken loose from the unison of the choir began prematurely to strike eleven. Its isolated warbling sounded weird and faintly idiotic and yet significant, as if it had struck a sick note which harmonized with something in the constitution of that great plutocratic mansion.
Varvara led the way to the dining-room. She was not trying to conceal my presence in the house; still less, at that stage, can she have seen any reason for sparing me a climb to the upper floors. All the same I was glad to avoid it. Since I left Deirdre’s flat and the stimulus of the party was withdrawn the sensations of weakness had become stronger and more generally diffused throughout my body. Every molehill was a mountain now; and yet my illness was not positive enough to make any difference to the balance or clarity of my mind.
There were several decanters and wine-bottles on the sideboard.
‘One for the road,’ said Varvara in her social accents. Then suddenly, changing to tones of tragic disillusionment: ‘God knows it’s likely to be a long road!’ She locked her arms behind her head so that the loose sleeves of her frock fell back almost to her shoulders. This exhibition was immediately followed by a peal of laughter. ‘Do you know, David, I actually said that to a young man the other day!’
‘How did he react?’
‘He told me it was easy to see I had suffered and he tried to console me by putting his hand on my leg.’
‘Shocking!’
We were both laughing almost hysterically whilst Varvara postured round the room in attitudes of exaggerated despair, hauteur, and outraged chastity. I did not know before that she had any capacity for relaxation, let alone self-parody. Finally, however, she became serious again and pulling up two chairs, close together, in front of the electric fire she pushed me into one of them and sat beside me clutching my arm.
‘We will make an agreement,’ she said. ‘You will give me a free licence to show off as much as I like. But the condition will be that I shall repeat all my vanities and stupidities just as they happened, except that you alone shall be the audience. You shall keep me in order with your sneering.’
I said: ‘Don’t try too hard to escape from your own faults. You know the proverb about the baby and the bathwater?’ When I had explained it she nodded.
‘Already I have thrown away a great deal of my old self, the one of Doljuk, so as to be a figure and not a guy at nice English parties.’
‘I suppose in the end it will make for your happiness,’ I said sighing. ‘But thank God you’ve still got to flatten a few idiosyncrasies the size of Everest before you become just another Kensington rose.’
‘That is right,’ said Varvara, not without complacency. ‘I shall never entirely learn. One reason is that I shall not stay here long enough.’
‘Stay where?’
‘England.’
‘Do you mean that seriously?’
‘Of course.’
‘But where will you go?’
‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘This is not a matter of plans nor even of intention. It is something which I know about the form of my life and it will happen with or without my will.’
After a pause I asked:
‘Do you think you’ll ever go back to Doljuk?’
‘Never. Never. Never. . . . Except in my sleep.’
‘You dream about it then?’
‘Often.’ She blenched perceptibly.
I could not bring myself to believe that a few more months of Europe had so softened her that her previous brisk acceptance of the facts of Central Asian life had been replaced by shuddering horror. There must be some cause intrinsic to the dreams themselves rather than their setting. She admitted this.
‘Mostly,’ she said. ‘I see how it was when they brought back my father, dead.’
‘You never told me about that.’
‘He had bought some goods and he was anxious to collect them away from the town because of the dishonesty of the Customs—’
As I have said, Varvara’s fits of delicacy were unpredictable, but she always referred to her father’s trade with great circumspection. The fact was that he supplied persons who knew no better with the means of murdering each other, and I think she realized that as an occupation it was open to criticism.
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p; ‘—So he went out with his carters that lived in our courtyard and four little carts drawn by oxen. It was summer and very hot, and the whole sky was like a ripe plum about to burst. When he came to the meeting-place, his friends were there before him and everything was in good order. But as soon as he began to count the goods and they the money, out from behind a tall dune charged a great mob of bestials. They were of a kind which they have in America and an American has told me they are called high-knackers—’
‘Hi-jackers,’ I corrected. ‘It means people who steal contraband from other—’ I had been going to use the word crooks, but when I realized where the sentence was leading me, I left it unfinished.
‘My father and his servants lay down behind the carts and began to shoot. But presently the thieves were on them and the fighting was at hand-to-hand. Owing to God our side were about to conquer when the captain of the robbers took out an old pistol stuffed with stones and hard paper and pressed it against my father’s throat whilst he wrestled with another man. Christ save me, but it fired and the blood came out of my father’s gorge where the flesh and veins had been swept away, as if a woman had emptied a tub full of blood. Soon his body was as white as veal and he was stark dead.’
‘At least it must have been pretty quick,’ I said, fumbling. Perhaps fortunately Varvara did not seem to hear.
‘My father was economic,’ she said, ‘and he had taught his carters that whatever happened it was their first duty to lose no cargo. In the uproar that followed his wounding the thieves had escaped with one of the carts full of goods. So when he was clearly dead the chief carter took all the men except the two weakest and pursued after them. But the pair, of whom one was dumb and the other coughed blood, put my father’s body on the smallest cart with bullets below and old rifles on either side and began to push him back to Doljuk. On the way the blood-spitter was overcome by a great gush from his lungs and he lay down on a bank of stones, so that the dumb man had to go on alone.’
A slow procession of tears was running down her face, orderly and controlled, the product of a sorrow which has lost the capacity to present any new aspect. The firmness of her voice was unaffected.
‘It happened,’ she said, ‘that I had gone down to the East Gate to meet my father on his return. I had been uneasy all day, perhaps because of the heat or perhaps for another reason which you would call boasting and mystery. At any rate I sat there beside the sentry’s stairway and looked out into the desert. It was about sunset and getting dark except for one patch where the light fell in a square box with a streamer beneath it as if somebody were flying a great kite and it had caught fire. Then I saw the dumb man coming along the track heaving and straining at the cart. So I went down to meet him, knowing what I should find. My father was covered with sacking up to the chin and as I have told you he was pale white. The dumb man wept and danced about but he could not make me understand what had happened, until he seized one of the arms from the cart and held it to his own throat. It happened to be loaded and it went off in his hand and the bullet went through the corner of his mouth and out of the cheek.’
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Doljuk never gave you a straight run at your tragedies. The farce would keep butting in. Did the poor chap die?’
‘No,’ said Varvara casually. ‘He recovered in a few weeks. And after that it was found that he could speak, though not much. . . . We put my father in a brass cauldron and sealed the mouth with clay and buried it in an orchard of apricots which he owned. All the people came to the burial though they regarded him as an infidel. Even the Governor sent his chief secretary.’
Seeing that she was in the mood to talk, I meant to ask her about the weeks when she lived solitary and unprotected whilst she prepared for her journey home. But before I could do so we were interrupted by a light irregular tattoo on the closed door. Uneasily I rose and opened it.
Turpin was standing outside. Above his head and a little behind it he held a candle set in a reflector-shade. (I suppose he did not care to race Joseph Ellison’s economy device up the stairs.) The angle of the light and its surprisingly intense concentration made his face look like semi-transparent butter in which somebody had traced innumerable lines. He was very, very drunk and intoxication had ironed out his shrewd old face to a benevolence which was almost idiotic and yet significant. Further in the hinterland, dully illuminated by the backglow of the candle, stood an ornate multi-branched Victorian hat-and-coat stand. In the gloom it resembled a bit of primeval forest. As if I were recollecting something viewed in a dream, I seemed to be walking through a magic wood: I looked up and there peering down between two dusky branches was the yellow, mellow, internally radiant moon-face of . . . not a fairy . . . no . . . but a very amiable, very old elemental of the forest. . . .
‘My dear Turpin,’ I said. ‘How nice to see you again!’
But elementals do not talk English. His lips moved silently several times with the delicate precision of fish-mouths behind glass walls. No sound came at first. Then:
‘Poop, poop, poop,’ said Turpin very gently.
‘What was that?’
‘Poop,’ said Turpin.
He raised two fingers towards us in an improper gesture to which he lent the force of a pagan benediction. Then slowly he turned away.
‘Would you like me to give you a hand up the stairs?’ I said anxiously.
Turpin did not deign to answer. Already he was ascending into the darkness, with the candle throwing a saucer of fire on the wall above his head. On the first landing there was a pause and I feared lest his legs might after all have deserted him. Then soft but clear, in a perfectly produced stage whisper, came down the message of reassurance: ‘Poop!’
He was a drunken old sot who had temporarily reduced himself to incoherence: but for me his shameful state and the absolute tranquillity which accompanied it rekindled an afterglow of the universal benevolence which we had experienced earlier. I think that Varvara felt the same, for she received impressions as easily as she broadcast them. Presently we had an exchange which may have been an illustration of this truth.
I was talking about the future and in particular how we must not again run the risk of losing touch with each other.
‘Should I come round again tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow I go away for the day to meet a friend.’
I forbore to ask any impertinent questions.
‘Well, then, you’ll be back on Christmas Eve. What about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or would you rather we met somewhere outside? We could go and do some agonized last-minute shopping.’
‘Yes.’
‘I say—you do want to see some more of me? If not, it would be as well to say so now.’
Varvara sighed and leant towards me.
‘Sometimes I cannot make plans.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Not because I don’t wish to, but because I know that they will be interrupted.’
‘Nothing can interrupt us if you don’t want it to.’
She leant further over, not provocatively, but searching my face intently in the dim light. Under that scrutiny I suddenly realized what she might mean, either in reference to herself or me. Frankly I was a little annoyed at what seemed a reversion to an inferior mood and an attempt to conjure up tragedy in order to spice the possibilities of friendship.
‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘We don’t need the Gipsy Queen among your impersonations.’
Varvara took my sarcasm without resentment: her forbearance with its implications of pity caused me a momentary dismay which the dark hints themselves had failed to produce. But it was soon forgotten. For the brief additional time I remained with her she was at her best. I had the warm, humble feeling that we both knew the worst about each other and it would never be enough to deter either of us.
13
Probably there is no need to attribute Varvara’s fear of an ‘interruption’ in our relations to anything more esoteric than intelligent reading of
physical signs. I dare say that I looked pretty ill by half-past one on the morning after Deirdre’s party. Certainly my state was not improved by having to walk two miles through a drizzle before I could find a taxi.
Next morning I could scarcely get up owing to a violent pain in my back and a throbbing headache. The only thing that drove me to my feet was the certainty that remaining in bed would be put down to hangover. Even at this lapse of time I can remember the agonies of that day, in which I dragged myself round like a half-crushed worm. Only one ray comes back to me from amidst the gloom. After lunch, feeling a little less moribund, I thought I would try the effect of fresh air. As I tottered down a side street I saw a small shop displaying Christmas cards, mostly rather vulgar. One showed a scene in which three drunken lumberjacks had been sitting in a row; now only the two at the ends remained; the place of the third one had been taken by an enormous bear to which one of the men had just handed a bottle in the belief that it was his companion.
I went in and bought this monstrosity. Before I posted it to Turpin I inscribed on it the lines, several times quoted in Tchekov’s Three Sisters:
He had not time to say Alack
Before the bear was on his back.
I don’t know why, but I thought they would make a nice addition to his repertoire.
If I had not a bear on my back, I had something almost as formidable wrapped round my vitals. Next day there was no question of leaving my bed. A doctor came and went and came back with a radiographer. When the film was developed it showed that I was suffering from fairly acute T.B. For good measure I also had pneumonia. The latter nearly killed me within a week; and by the time that I had thrown it off the T.B. germs had further strengthened their hold on the ravaged area.