Summoned by Olga Fiodorovna they left the restaurant and collected their coats from the cloakroom. Ashburner was astounded to see Bernard donning a Sherlock Holmes affair in expensive check tweed with a sort of cape attached to the shoulders. He couldn’t understand how Bernard had managed to fit such a voluminous garment into a carrier bag. He was so markedly silent during the short drive to the People’s Institute that Olga Fiodorovna linked her arm in his and begged him to cheer up.
‘Tomorrow, Mr Douglas,’ she promised, ‘we shall find your suitcase. I give you my word.’
‘Lovely,’ he said and watching Bernard, who sat slumped in the front of the car, wondered if there was any significance in the dispirited droop of his head.
The lecture took place in a large room divided in half by a table and a row of metal chairs. Behind the table stood a dozen screens hung with drawings executed in very thin pencil. The audience faced the table. The English visitors sat self-consciously in front of the screens as though part of the exhibition. Throughout the lecture Olga Fiodorovna translated in an urgent whisper, loud enough to embarrass Ashburner but too low in pitch for him to hear distinctly. The phrase ‘animal-lover’ reached his ears, though he couldn’t be sure of the context. He was on tenterhooks lest Bernard should erupt into anger; apart from having twisted round in his chair so that he now sat with his back to the audience, he appeared to be calmly studying those drawings closest to him. Once there was a commotion in the corridor outside and Ashburner looked up expectantly, heart racing, hoping as the door was flung open to see Nina sailing in, a ship come safe to port. He was acutely disappointed when a powerfully built man, dressed as a factory worker in blue overalls and wearing a peaked cap like a harbour master, entered the room. In spite of his hat the fellow definitely wasn’t a sissy, but, there was something so luminous and compelling about his face that Ashburner found he was ogling him in much the same manner as he ogled Nina during those rare moments when she was nice to him. Closing the door boisterously behind him, the man sat down in the back row and tugged his cap over his eyes. Even with his face hidden he was obtrusive; arms spread wide he gripped the metal chairs on either side of him, as though otherwise he might hurtle through the body of the hall.
Now and then the lecturer addressed the English visitors directly. Enid regarded the speaker intently and with such an expression of anxiety that she gave the impression she was sitting beneath a tree that might fall on her. Every time she drew breath her taffeta frock crackled like a forest fire. Ashburner heard nothing. Listening to a foreign language, he thought, was similar to listening to classical music, which wasn’t something he did often. If the sound was tuneful enough one noticed the first and last noises made by the orchestra; all the rest was drowned in day-dreams. As a youth with a boil on his neck he had gone once to a Promenade concert. The orchestra had played a particularly thunderous piece, and when the percussionist had stood up to clash his cymbals the boil had burst. Ashburner still bore the scar. Such faded blemishes were a tell-tale sign of a nineteen-forties adolescence, which was how he knew that Bernard was a post-war baby. Of course it was more difficult to tell with women because they had all that hair hanging down. He tried and failed to remember, except that her skin was a little too dark and her eyes somewhat too blue, the face of Nina. It was funny how women differed. His wife had been enormously fond of her Uncle Robert, but she had never been back to Norwich since the funeral, not even to see the headstone, and yet Nina was quite content to rush off in a blizzard to gawp at the grave of a perfect stranger. He wasn’t sure how he should behave when he met her later in the evening. He would lose out if he attempted to be censorious or even if he capitulated and showed that he had missed her. He had missed – did miss – her dreadfully. There came to him the words of a song his wife was apt to sing, quaveringly, if the weather perked up. I’ll see you again, whenever spring breaks through again. Startled, he clutched his pocket. Olga Fiodorovna jogged his elbow. Suddenly aware of applause he let go of Nina’s scarf and clapped enthusiastically, head modestly inclined, for at that moment the lecturer was bowing to him.
Presently the audience stood and began to straggle between the chairs towards the upper end of the room. Olga Fiodorovna, sensing that Bernard was about to limp behind the screens, detained him. She laid hold of his arm and said, looking from him to the lecturer, ‘Mr Chomsky is very glad to have you here. He apologises for the uncomfortable seating.’
Mr Chomsky nodded and smiled. Bernard stood like a sullen boy reprimanded unfairly for fighting in the playground. He refused to speak.
‘Tell him,’ said Ashburner, ‘that we’re glad to be here. We haven’t yet had the opportunity to study his drawings, but we are sure they’re excellent.’
‘He is not the artist,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘He is the Director of the Committee of the People’s Institute and most interested to hear your views on English art at the present time.’
‘Ah,’ said Ashburner. He glanced nervously at Enid but she was fiddling with the belt of her frock. ‘Tell him,’ he said finally, ‘that we do not pretend to be authorities on the subject.’ He felt like Queen Victoria. Olga Fiodorovna frowned slightly and waited. She knew he was a coward.
‘Tell him to get stuffed,’ murmured Bernard.
At that instant a voice shouted ‘Douglas.’ Both Ashburner and Bernard turned in response. They were each embraced by the man in the peaked cap.
Ashburner laughed heartily as he struggled to free himself. ‘Who the devil is he?’ he asked, when he had recovered his breath. The man was now hugging Enid; it sounded as if a parcel was being unwrapped and the paper torn into shreds.
‘It’s that mate of Nina’s,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s Boris.’
‘Mr Shabelsky,’ Olga Fiodorovna said. ‘You are as tempestuous as ever.’ She added a few words of Russian.
Boris smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Follow me,’ he cried. ‘You are going to have fun, I think’, and seizing hold of Ashburner by the arm he ran him down the room.
Fearfully flustered, Ashburner collided with several chairs and, wincing, was half carried through the door.
In the street Boris invited Olga Fiodorovna to accompany them to the house of a friend. ‘For supper,’ he said. ‘You are welcome.’
Olga disputed this. ‘Besides,’ she told him, ‘I have the driver to consider. He is expecting to return Mr Douglas and the others to the hotel.’
‘It was arranged yesterday with Karlovitch,’ Boris said. ‘You are talking arse-holes.’
‘Where is Nina?’ asked Ashburner. He had peered into the interiors of both the official car and the green vehicle which obviously belonged to Shabelsky. Olga took no notice of him. He overheard her telling the driver to go home.
‘I’m hungry,’ complained Enid. ‘I’m terribly hungry.’ She stood in the gutter in her swagger coat and allowed her teeth to chatter piteously. Boris opened the door of his car and she scuttled inside.
‘Where is Nina?’ repeated Ashburner. He took hold of Bernard.
Shaking him off, Bernard clambered into the back seat beside the rustling Enid.
‘Mr Shabelsky,’ said Olga Fiodorovna. ‘The driver refuses to wait. He is going home. I am forced to ask you to run me to my apartment.’
Ashburner stayed stubbornly on the pavement. He hadn’t shaved that morning and under the light of the street lamp he looked dissolute and unkempt. He was clutching Nina’s pink scarf to his chest.
‘Will you look at him,’ shouted Boris. ‘What a brigand the man is.’ Opening the rear door he bundled Ashburner into the car.
11
Boris’s friend was a handsome woman with dyed red hair who lived with her elderly husband in the middle of a forest fifty kilometres from Moscow. Her name was Tatiana and she was a painter. Though her guests failed to arrive until after midnight she was delighted to see them. With her own hands she bathed Ashburner’s wound and applied a square of sticking plaster to his nose.
For some
of the long journey into the dark countryside Ashburner had been under the mistaken impression that they were on their way to pick up Nina from the Peking Hotel. He had thought they were taking a roundabout route because first they had delivered Olga Fiodorovna to her Mamotchka. After a further hour’s driving, realising he had been misled and in spite of the tremendous din inside the car, he had fallen into a stupor compounded of misery and exhaustion. Boris Shabelsky had sung many songs, all of them loudly, discussed art furiously with Bernard and conducted a rowdy flirtation with Enid. Forty kilometres outside Moscow, brandishing his fist in the air, he had recited most of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes for what seemed like minutes he took both hands off the wheel.
The car had finally stopped in a narrow lane banked by snow in the heart of a forest. Before the headlamps were extinguished a low building with a wooden veranda had been identified in the distance; a red lantern swung above the porch. The vicious barking of dogs blared through the trees. Boris had instructed them to get out of the car slowly and, ignoring the dogs, to walk calmly and boldly along the path to the dacha. One dog, he warned, was as big as a wolf and the other was tiny and called Betty. Of the two, Betty was the more dangerous animal. ‘If you are attacked,’ he had advised, ‘Lash out. Do not bother to be British.’
Stumbling from the car Ashburner had been given little opportunity to display either his calmness or his boldness. Almost immediately the larger dog had leapt upon him. It hadn’t bitten him, but its head struck the bridge of his nose with such force that he cried out. He had thought he’d outpaced Betty, but as he ran she overtook him. Booted by Bernard, she flew through the air and bounced squealing from a snow-covered bush. Ashburner had time to observe, before he ran headlong up the steps and into the dacha, that she appeared to have only three legs. Someone on a previous occasion, he presumed, had sensibly kicked off the fourth.
Once the slight cut on his nose had been attended to, he was led into the living room where a log fire burned in the open hearth. ‘How lovely,’ he said, and would have stared mesmerised into the flames if Boris Shabelsky hadn’t engaged him in conversation. He wanted to know Ashburner’s opinion of Russia.
‘Well,’ said Ashburner, ‘we’re mostly sitting inside cars. And then, of course, everything is covered in snow.’
‘You’ve been to Red Square,’ Boris said. ‘They always take you to Red Square.’ In spite of his factory worker’s clothing he stood in front of the fire in the swaggering attitude of a lion tamer. He hadn’t yet removed his cap. ‘You saw Lenin’s tomb, I suppose. It is very historical, don’t you agree?’
‘From the outside,’ said Ashburner. He wasn’t sure what history was, beyond a sense of place; he would remember the Square, with or without its mausoleum, because there he had witnessed Bernard over-run by the Red Army.
He was just about to ask Boris where Pasternak’s grave was situated and how Nina had managed to appreciate it in the dark, when he was directed to sit beside Tatiana’s elderly husband on a wooden bench wedged between the table and the wall. A glass vase filled with yellow tulips stood in the centre of the cloth amid a feast. Believing that the numerous dishes of caviar and quails’ eggs and pickled fish comprised the whole of the meal, the English visitors tackled everything spread before them. Five bottles of Georgian wine were opened and emptied and more bottles fetched from the kitchen.
The heat in the room was intense. Beyond the shuttered windows the dogs still bayed. Ashburner’s enjoyment of his food was marred by the ramblings of the elderly husband who spoke only Russian but, through his wife and Boris, insisted on telling him a confusing anecdote involving ikons and churches. Ashburner found it frightfully tiring listening to him; even when translated into English he didn’t understand the point of the story. He felt that he and the old man were being treated like children, thrown scraps of information merely to keep them quiet. He didn’t mind being out of the mainstream of the conversation. None of them had the faintest idea of small talk and they weren’t listening to one another. He thought Bernard was behaving like a ruffian, slopping wine all over the cloth and not caring where he put his egg shells. ‘What bugger,’ he was demanding, flushed with drink and thumping the table, ‘imagined that exhibition had anything to do with Art?’
‘I have seen shows as bad in London,’ defended Boris. ‘Some worse. You have your establishment artists. We have ours. What is the difference?’
‘He is very troubled,’ said Tatiana, speaking to Ashburner. ‘He would like your opinion on the matter. He went with a friend, a friend from England, to a church outside Moscow—’
‘You’re not allowed to paint what you want,’ cried Bernard. ‘You’ve thrown private patronage out of the window and given it all to the State. That’s the difference.’
‘But the private patrons equally told the artist what to do,’ protested Boris. He turned to Ashburner. ‘I am an old man. I like to give pleasure. My friend is keen on ikons.’
‘All those portraits,’ shouted Tatiana. ‘All those religious subjects, those narrative paintings—’
‘You’re not allowed to do what you want to do,’ said Enid. She jabbed Bernard’s arm with her fork. ‘Not really. You can do it, but it doesn’t follow anyone will give you a show. Look what happened with your rabbit etchings. All they want you for is to drop bricks on the telly.’
‘He has known this friend for many years,’ translated Tatiana. ‘They understand one another. That is why it is difficult to refuse him the ikons. I have not heard of the rabbits, only the series of girls with ducks—’
‘Geese,’ corrected Bernard. ‘And anyway they were shown—’
‘But not at Delbanco’s,’ said Enid. ‘And you didn’t sell any.’
‘They are very old, very beautiful, maybe four hundred years old,’ Tatiana said. She rose from the table and went into the kitchen. She called out: ‘Not many people come to look, and his friend is mad for them. So in the end it is arranged and his friend takes them.’ She came back into the living room carrying a dish of roasted pheasants. ‘So what would you advise?’ She looked searchingly at Ashburner.
‘Good gracious,’ exclaimed Ashburner. ‘Is there more to eat?’
‘You’re supposed to have cracked it,’ complained Bernard. ‘You get rent-free studios, subsidised tickets to the Bolshoi, dachas in the bloody country—’
‘Defect, my friend,’ shouted Boris, and he bellowed with laughter and struck Bernard repeatedly on the shoulder.
The mystery of the ikons was never satisfactorily explained. Ashburner couldn’t think why the Englishman hadn’t been arrested going through customs. He wasn’t altogether sure what an ikon was, but it sounded a rather spikey sort of object to smuggle successfully out of the country. Perhaps the Englishman had been caught and the old man was appealing to him for help.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Enid. She leaned across the table at him, holding a portion of pheasant in her fingers.
Ashburner confessed he felt a little warm. He glanced enviously at Bernard, who had removed his corduroy jacket and sat with sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
‘Has he met Boris before?’ he asked. ‘They seem very thick.’
‘No,’ said Enid. ‘Bernard’s like that with everyone, providing he likes them. He’s marvellous, isn’t he?’
‘He’s on pills, you know,’ said Ashburner. ‘I suppose they’re pain-killers, are they? For his hip?’
But Enid wasn’t listening to him. She was gazing at Bernard as though he were the Archangel Gabriel.
Ashburner wondered if Nina would be able to manage without the pills that were in his missing suitcase. It was thoughtful, if unfortunate, the way she had entrusted them to him – thoughtful but odd, because she could just as easily have slipped them into her handbag. Surely she hadn’t brought enteritis tablets to a cold country? There couldn’t be anything wrong with the water supply, though it was true everyone seemed to prefer vodka.
Several times he tried to ask Bor
is when he had last seen Nina, but he was always ignored. Bernard and he were drunkenly discussing politics and religion. Religious fervour freed man from the necessity to live each day as though it were the last. The good times lay beyond the grave. In the words of someone – Ashburner didn’t think they could be Bernard’s – ‘Was it not a sweet thing to have all covetousness satisfied, suspicion and infidelity removed, courage and joy infused?’ Purification of the heart in the religious and Catholic sense was to be obtained by constant docility in the leadings of the Holy Ghost. For the believer, Communism offered an equally angelic solution to living. All that was required was an allegiance to the Perfect State.
‘Tommy rot,’ cried Ashburner, maddened by their indifference to him. But the very words, sweet thing and infidelity removed, touched him to the core. Rendered almost unconscious by the quantities of wine he had drunk, he rested his head on the table, his cheek lying in the bloody debris of a pomegranate, and groaned aloud.
Tatiana assisted him from the bench and sat him down on the leather sofa in front of the dying fire. She hugged him. The warmth of her embrace and the sight of those glowing embers glimpsed beyond the circle of her arms brought tears to his eyes.
When eventually he could speak he apologised for his emotional behaviour. ‘You’ve been terribly hospitable,’ he said. ‘The pheasant was delicious, and I did find Mr Tatiana’s story most amusing. Normally I would have been more on the ball.’
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