‘You see,’ Arlette told him, addressing him with an informal ‘you’, as though they had known each other for a long time, ‘I cannot understand her either. I can’t understand Albertine any more. She now speaks like the rain falls, just pitter-patter.’
She pushed her bowl away. The rings under her eyes were the colour of dark indigo. Alex Carr looked at me and tried to ask again.
‘Why are you crying, Albertine? I have the right to know.’
12
The Meaning of Cowardice
It was a bewildering dream but I knew, when I woke up from it, something that I had not known before. Had Alex Carr not been so self-effacing, I might have realised it before he became my third lover. My fifth, depending on how you calculated it. Albie was not going to enumerate because he was not going to know. No one was going to know.
Had Alex Carr not been so set on playing the dependable, ordinary Englishman that he wasn’t, I might have realised it long beforehand. I might have felt a sense of relief when Albie said that he was coming with me to the party, the Easter film party, because some part of me had already known that I was not to be trusted. That in fact I could not be trusted from day one, that first evening when I kissed Alex Carr in the milky light of the approaching train. At least he did not try to pretend that he was unhappy. At least he did not fake anything.
‘I am a devoted husband,’ he said that early afternoon when we had lunch together. We were sitting side by side in a bistro in Hogarth Place, almost opposite Earl’s Court Underground station, a cold place in those rationed days, not a place you would choose for an adulterous assignation, if you had thought of it as such. If Earl’s Court was the Danzig Corridor, that corner of it genuinely felt as bleak as Danzig.
‘I am a faithful husband, Albertine, an uxorious man. You might find that distasteful. The fact that I am saying it, I mean, the fact that I need to say it just now and did not need to say it to you before.’
His spectacles were resting on the table, his long thin arms raised not towards me – I was by his side – but towards an invisible Diana who was sitting opposite and to whom just then he was, still, faithful in deed. He stooped a little, I noticed for the first time. All that desk work, I thought. His spectacles had a strange shape. The lenses were circular but the thin gold wire which framed them was straight on top. The spectacles looked as though they were made in the last century. I stared at them, on the table, because I was sitting too close to him to turn and look him in the eye.
‘They were my grandfather’s,’ he explained later.
Just then he said: ‘And I know you are too. A faithful wife. I am not sure what the female equivalent of uxorious is; a good wife, I guess.’
I tried, unsuccessfully, to think of a way to improve the adjective.
‘I am not uxorious,’ I said. ‘I am not even a good wife. I fear that I never was. There is something unanchored about me. I look at everything as though I am floating two feet above the world. And I don’t blame Albie or the war. I was like that already when I left Paris.’
If there was one single thing that led to everything that followed, it was perhaps that I had mentioned my dream to Alex Carr when he had telephoned the day before. He was intrigued, amused even, but arrived at the restaurant looking like someone who had given the conversation too much thought, who had prepared an unnecessary, redundant speech. I am responsible for it. There are things that you don’t share, and if you do, things that, when you are as old as I am, you have to take responsibility for. I was not to blame, but I am responsible. If there is, indeed, a difference between blame and responsibility in this case.
He had telephoned about his father. The usual call; we had had at least one a week since January, brief, necessary conversations, leavened by courtesy. Then, after Acton, the calls changed, became more cautious, more deliberate, but they did not stop. It was as though there were now stony, unmentionable islands around which our conversation continued to flow as before, but more tentatively, more carefully, and I noticed a change. The awareness of it made me scrutinise our exchanges, think about the things I had said, worry about the things I would say. I would have forgiven him if the calls had stopped altogether, if Diana or Mrs Jenkins had taken over the arrangements. Instead, he continued to telephone, but still, those islands …
‘We’ he said, always, but so that it often wasn’t clear whether he was speaking about himself and Diana or himself and his father. ‘We were thinking …’ ‘We were planning …’ ‘We wanted to check, if it’s OK …’
I responded in the same way. We will, of course, I would say, we knew, we saw, we were delighted. In my case, it was always clear that I meant Albie and I. I had no one else. But every now and then I had to say I. I will come. That’s all right. Albie is away. I am alone. And if I said ‘I am alone’, I could now sense that he was grappling with a meaning that had not been there before. He ceased to drop by his father’s as he had so often in those early days, knowing the timing of our sessions, five or ten minutes before the end. Not after that evening at the hospital.
Then, on a Sunday evening, he had telephoned, as usual, to talk through the coming week, to agree the times. I mentioned that I was about to complete Monsieur Carr’s biography. A memoir, I called it; I was the ghostwriter.
‘I think I am almost done. And I believe I have succeeded in catching the charm of your father’s voice,’ I said. ‘It feels, almost, as you read it, as if he had written it himself. Except, there must be a hundred mistakes. It is meant to be a surprise for your father. I would like to check all those Russian names with you. I would really love him to be the first to read the text in full, so I have prepared a list of questions, a set of cards …’
I said all this without any suggestion that I was arranging a tryst, without any premonition that a tryst was what it would become.
‘I will, of course. I’d love to. Shall we meet?’ It felt as though he had said it before he knew what he was saying.
I thought for a moment then named the place. A bistro opposite Earl’s Court, practically outside the Underground station. I had had a cup of coffee there alone once or twice before. It was run by the Free French during the war, they said, and it remained unchanged, a French provincial islet in the British sea, with smoky posters advertising events from the 1930s, the smell of garlic, butter and tarragon fighting against boiled potatoes and stale tobacco, a long bar with sticky bottles of mint liqueur no one ever ordered, and candles which had once burned in glass holders but were never lit again. They served slightly sour wine in small carafes. Monday lunchtime. It could fit into his lunch break, almost. I was not going to see Monsieur Carr until Wednesday.
‘Oh, don’t worry about my lunch break, Albertine,’ he said. ‘We can take our time to do what needs to be done. I am not proposing to rush back.’
To do what needs to be done. It was drizzly outside, and the place was almost empty, except for a couple of old men sitting under a poster for the Monaco Grand Prix, smoking and sipping coffee from tiny cups, speaking a language not unlike Russian to each other. Ukrainians perhaps? We were not going to have a secret language here, Alex Carr and I, I thought as I walked across the grimy linoleum. There were no secret languages in London any more. It did not matter; what would we need a secret language for?
He was already seated, his raincoat hanging off a hook to the left of him, his briefcase on the chair – the chair which, for the first quarter of an hour at least, was to be occupied by the ghost of his wife. The green-eyed ghost. He stood up to help with my coat, to move his bag. There was for a moment just the click-clack of metal – Blakey’s, Albie called the half-moons men had nailed beneath the toes of their shoes to make the soles last – and I worried that he was fussing too much.
‘Don’t worry, Alexei, please sit down and leave your briefcase where it is, I will sit next to you. That way we can look at my questions together. We won’t have to read anything upside down,’ I said.
Although his father – and
often Alex Carr as well – had been calling me Albertine for weeks, I had tried to persist with formality: Monsieur Carr for the father, Mr Carr for the son. Or I avoided the name altogether. I am not sure why I felt that the intimacy of the first name – and the particular closeness of its Russian version used by his father alone – was suddenly more appropriate.
The coat hooks were nailed too high, well above head height. The waiter rustled away with my raincoat. It took three attempts to hang it. Water dripped off its suspended fabric, like blood off a fresh kill, creating a dark puddle between us and the Ukrainians. I remember everything.
It was not a good idea. Sitting side by side, like couples in Impressionist paintings of absinthe addicts, we were – it turns out – intoxicated before we had the first drop of wine. We spoke as we would not have spoken had we been facing each other.
There were preliminaries: worries about Monsieur Carr, the good work I was doing, my Russian lessons. We ate the lunch – a salad of grated carrots, a bourguignon stew, dark, shiny and a little bitter.
‘English mustard,’ I said. ‘Bourguignon does not call for mustard, but – if you felt you had to add some – Dijon would have been better.’
The meat tasted like soggy paper – but most meat did in those days. With mashed potatoes and a glass of red wine, the meal was OK, even not bad at all. The French did their best with what they had.
And then the table was cleared and I opened the book, typescript pages in a spring folder. I had prepared cards with page references and names I was going to ask about, and I spread them before me like a fairground psychic casting her cards for a reading. Instead of looking at them he started reading the pages in the folder. I could not bear to remind him that I had wanted his father to be my first reader. But Albie had read most of the manuscript, I thought, Monsieur Carr would not be the first anyway.
I stared at Alex Carr, feeling so nervous about his judgement of my work that I was tempted to walk out and come back only when he had finished with it. But I stayed. I saw that his hair had much more grey in it than I had thought. I looked at his profile as he read, his sensible profile which Monsieur Carr said reminded him of his own father, and I felt a tenderness for him that was still nowhere close, not for another hour at least, to an irresistible attraction.
‘Oh dear, did my father really say that?’
‘You have done well, Albertine. You have done so well. He will love it.’
He repeated such remarks intermittently in French and English.
He paused from time to time to correct a name or explain a detail with the patience of an elementary-school teacher. I jotted things down on my cards. It took almost two hours to reach the last page. The waiter was reading a paper and smoking at the bar. My coat had dried. The Ukrainians had long gone. I collected the cards and held them together with an elastic band. I heard a soft snap as the band fell into place. I thanked Alex Carr for his help and apologised for the time it had taken. He turned to face me and, at that same moment, I turned too. I could see that his father’s story – his own story – had had a deeper effect on him than his detailed, uncomplaining explanations had suggested. He looked at me as though he was expecting, desiring even, another question. I had none.
‘I had a strange dream, about you and my sister, the other night,’ I said. I had mentioned it on the phone but now I tried to describe it. The moment I started, the details came to seem so embarrassing to me that all of a sudden I regretted having mentioned it again. There had been small steps before, small steps leading to where we were now heading, I thought, but I have now taken an irrevocable one.
He knew it. My hand was already so close to his that I could feel the warmth of his flesh. The warmth now grew to a current which could be stemmed only with a touch. He took my hand. For that, perhaps, I am to blame. It was then that he said: ‘I am a faithful husband, Albertine, an uxorious man. And I know you are a faithful wife.’
No one would know.
So the world changed and no one knew. Afterwards I locked the front door and listened to the sound of footsteps fading away with their metallic echo. I sat in the kitchen for the best part of an hour before I picked up my raincoat from the floor in the hall. It was dark outside and the rain had stopped.
I went to the cinema. The Years Between: that was the film I saw, a war story. The plot was preposterously English in its chain of resisted temptations. A colonel returned from the dead just as his wife was about to remarry. His voice could have been my husband’s. I closed my eyes, and felt so warm that I thought my body must be glowing in the dark.
When the film finished, I walked, as fast as I could, along the King’s Road, through Eaton Square and further and further east, past terraces and churches and pubs and shops, until I ceased to recognise the street names and felt only my aching feet. On the near edge of the City there was a pub not far from the Thames, like no pub I had ever seen before, a slim wedge of a building. It was all marble and alabaster inside, and a riot of reliefs: plump monks carrying water, boiling eggs, singing, making music surrounded by satyrs and gargoyles. A good thing is soon snatched up, said a motto on a banner above an empty booth. Devils played accordions on each side of it.
The place was practically empty. It was quarter of an hour before closing time, the publican said, puzzled by the sight of a woman alone, and so late; by my accent too, perhaps, and by my ignorance of what was on offer. He suggested a small dark sherry.
‘Yes, why not,’ I said.
I sat with the tiny tulip glass in the alcove until the closing bell. The only sip I took tasted warm. There was something a bit salty in the sweetness, like lovemaking and oblivion. I walked back out into the street. Cold air did little to clear my head. In the underpass by the Underground station a beggar asked for a shilling to get home. I saw through his lie but gave the coin nonetheless.
On Wednesday I went to see Monsieur Carr as usual. I had spent the whole of Tuesday typing his story again, simultaneously trying to forget the previous day and relive every detail of it. The work helped pass the time. The memoir was now in my bag, a red folder with neatly arranged pages, the names and places all corrected. But first I wanted to ask about Tonya, the question I had not dared ask before.
‘Was Tonya happy, Monsieur Carr?’
‘You see those pictures, Albertine,’ he answered, raising his hand towards the closed door and the dining room with its flower paintings behind it. ‘Do you think they were painted by a happy woman?’
‘Yes,’ I said, then quickly: ‘No.’
‘Tonya was as silent as those flowers,’ he said. ‘She was happy when we first married, happy when Alexei was born … but I don’t think, although I loved her, that I was a good husband. I am a weak man.’
‘A weak man, Monsieur Carr?’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Let me tell you something I have never told anyone before,’ he said.
‘We were in Istanbul, and Tonya went out to sell her pictures, as she often did in those months in Turkey. I stayed at home, writing letters of supplication, useless letters which got nothing but empty courtesies in reply. I spent most of my days writing begging letters. It was early evening when Tonya returned with an empty folder. The sky over the city echoed with calls to prayer and that awful cry of hungry seagulls. She put the folder on the table and said, “I’ve sold them all. We can move on now.” She took a wad of bank-notes from her pocket and put them on the table. Francs and marks and liras: rolls of paper unfolded on the bare wooden surface.
‘There was just too much of it. “How come, Tonya?” was the first thing I asked. She had never sold more than a couple of her little pictures on any one of her expeditions before, and now several dozen in a single day. Antiques shops in Pera offered a lot of Russian frippery in those days, knick-knacks by Fabergé, pocket watches, cigarette cases and medals, more medals than anything else perhaps. Tonya knocked on those shop doors, left a painting or two to sell on commission. A few days later she would knock again, usua
lly to find that nothing at all had sold. Or that a picture had gone, for not much more money than would buy lunch. She would replace it with a new one, if the dealer felt charitable. Often, they just said: no more. Even in charity they took their cut, those old Armenians and Jews whose families had been in Istanbul since Hagia Sophia was built, and who were now suffering and hungry themselves. They took their deserved cut, usually leaving so little that the sum would not get us to Edirne, let alone to Prague or Paris. And now there was this.
‘“How come, Tonya?” I asked.
‘“Hush,” she said, “hush, Sergei, my love. I was lucky today. There was someone who loved my art. I will tell you about it when I have rested.”
‘Our son walked into the room, saw the money and yelped, like a happy young puppy. He was still a teenager, and he was too old for his age in many ways, but in that split second he could have been seven or eight.
‘“Did you place a bet, Father? Did you place a bet on a winning horse?”
‘“Yes, Father did, Alexei,” Tonya responded before I could say a word. She took a box of Turkish delight out of her purse and opened it. There was the smell of rose essence, mounds of powdered sugar inside. She took one piece out, pushed the box towards us, then ate her piece slowly, her eyes wide, bewildered, looking at me as if to say I dare you to ask another question.
‘“We can leave this horrible city now,” Alexei said. “We can go back north again.”
‘Even at that age he knew better than to say go back to Russia. Although some people did. Go back. Thought it better to die in Russia than to live like dogs elsewhere.
‘That night, in our rooms off Istiklal Avenue, Tonya extinguished the lamp and drew the curtains before she undressed. She usually did one or the other. She was not shameless, my Tonya, but neither was she shy. She knew that I enjoyed looking at her body, and I don’t mean her nakedness – forgive these details, Albertine, they are important – for there were always layers of camisoles and petticoats in those cold days, layers of undergarments which revealed at best a flash of a shoulder or a breast, a hint of a calf. That evening, I was not allowed to see anything, not an inch of her skin. But I did glimpse deep bruises on her arms – four bruises like four fingerprints above her elbow, deeper on her milky skin than the darkness around us – and I did see dark stains on her underskirt. And God will never forgive me for it, I was so angry with her when I saw this that I thought if I asked her one more question I would strangle her. She was too brave, you see, Albertine, too ready to suffer alone, and in her courage, she had shown me up as the lowest of the low, the weakest of the weak.
Monsieur Ka Page 19