‘What kind of trouble?’
‘It is a long story. Some years ago, he had a brilliant idea. He set up as a middleman, a kind of travel agent. He contracted boats to take foreigners up the Volga. For cruises, you know. Vodka and culture cruises, with lectures and everything. The shipping companies had nothing to ship so this was a good deal for them too. And Russia is popular with tourists. I even got him some French ones.’ She paused.
‘It sounds good. You never told me.’
‘I have not seen you so much lately.’ She poured some more vodka.
‘And then?’
‘Well, in September his offices were burgled while he was with the last of the summer’s boats. Everything was taken. Computers, furniture. And his accountant, a young man who had been working with him for months, was shot. Wounded slightly in the arm.’
‘God!’
‘No, no, Stephan. That is only the beginning.’
‘The accountant was apparently so scared that he ran away and my brother could not track him down through mutual acquaintances or anywhere when he returned. Anyhow, then my brother started to receive threatening letters from the shipping company. They claimed they had received no payment for that summer’s boats. When my brother put his nose into the accounts, he found that not only had they not been paid, but the accountant had run off with all the income from the tourists as well.’
‘Awful!’
‘I told you it was just the beginning.’ She plied him with more food. Ate a forkful herself. ‘Then Dmitri hired a private detective.’ She laughed. ‘We have a lot of them in Russia now. Redundant KGB men. With soft shoes and big guns. So this detective went in search of the accountant. And after a while, he comes back to my brother with a bill and a mournful expression and he tells him it would be better to drop the whole thing. Much better. My brother doesn’t. He thinks he is brave. He gets an address from the detective and goes to it. He is met by three mafiosi who beat him up and tell him that if they ever so much as see him again or if he breathes a word to the police or anyone else, they will not only do more than beat him up, but they will get his sister in Paris as well.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I am very serious.’ She sighed, took their plates and piled them on the trolley. ‘Then, while I am in Russia, my brother is visited by the police. Or he thinks they were the police. By then he is a little bit crazy. They tell him that if he doesn’t pay the shipping companies quick, he will be arrested. So he tells them the story he isn’t supposed to tell. And now my brother is living in fear from all sides and is beginning to think Siberia would be better than the mafia. And he worries for me. I worry too.’
She gave him her dark gaze and shrugged. ‘I’ll bring the fruit and the cake and you think what we should do.’
Stephen paced and stopped to stare out the window which gave out onto the small back garden. It sloped darkly beneath the shadow of a spreading magnolia. That first autumn he and Ariane had planted a host of daffodil bulbs beneath it and in the spring the garden was a dazzle of yellow.
‘The daffodils were wonderful this spring.’ She had come up softly behind him and seemed to read his mind. She draped her arm round his waist and nestled into his shoulder. ‘So. What does my Stephan say?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. It all seems so improbable.’
‘But it is true. Or so my brother tells me. You have not been to my country for some time. Things are not good.’
Stephen drew her towards the sofa, took her hands. ‘The first thing is that I don’t think you need to be frightened. This is France. Nothing will happen to you here. Those little gangsters won’t extend themselves so far.’
She shivered. ‘I don’t know. I have had these strange phone calls. People hang up. I’m afraid to be alone at night. Natalya comes to stay with me - if there is no one else.’ She gave him her slow smile. ‘Tonight you will stay. You can sleep on the divan upstairs.’
He looked away. ‘We’ll see. The second thing is the shipping company needs to be paid.’
‘Ha! You don’t know the money that’s involved. Not in twenty years could my brother…’ She stood up abruptly, her back erect, a haughty look on her face. ‘No Stephan. I am not asking you for money. I do not want anything from you, except… except clarity. When I talk to you, things become clear. All my Russian friends, bah, melodrama. And the French… my colleagues, I don’t like to tell them. They will think I am mad. But you, you understand and you are cool-headed. A cool-headed Englishman.’
‘Have you spoken to Simone?’
‘You have not seen her for some months. I do not think she is very well. She doesn’t need my problems.’
‘So. Let’s think. You find out exactly how much your brother owes. You go to the bank, ask for a loan. I might be able to stand you security. Some others too, depending on the amount. Your brother clears his debts, gets a visa and leaves the country.’
Ariane laughed. ‘You make it so easy. But Stephan, I cannot be indebted to you for my whole life. It is not so easy.’
‘One step at a time. You find out first.’ Stephen leapt to his feet, paced the width and length of the room. ‘Your brother writes to the shipping company and says he is raising the money. He will pay them slowly, if needs be. In instalments. Better something than nothing as far as they’re concerned. He can say he’ll raise the price for the tourists for next summer and pay them more. At least they stay in business that way, keep their ships working. And meanwhile, with any luck, your little gangsters will kill each other off in their next escapade.’
She clapped her hands. ‘Yes. You are right. Of course. Of course. Keep the business going.’ She threw her arms round him and held him tight. ‘You help me breathe.’
Stephen looked into her eyes and stroked her hair softly. Strands had fallen round her cheeks. As she pressed herself against him, his body suddenly tingled with the memory of her. He drew away.
She laughed. ‘You know what. I have this great desire to beat you at chess. Like in the old days. A lightening game. Fifteen seconds a move. Do you still have that computer programme with the little hourglass and the dings?’
The telephone rang as he nodded.
Ariane shivered, let it ring and ring. Finally with a determined set to her shoulders, she marched over to the small desk and picked up the receiver. After a moment, her features relaxed. She broke into Russian, smiled and gestured him towards her. She covered the receiver with her hand. ‘It’s Natalya. Start the programme while I listen to her.’
Stephen switched on the machine, punched in his code, waited for the chessboard to flicker onto the screen. Ariane edged beside him and with deft fingers tapped her king pawn forward. He replied with a pawn to queen bishop three.
Moments later, she surprised him by playing a sharp reply to his Caro-Kann defence, enticing his queen into the centre of the board with the bait of a central pawn. She followed up with a series of forced exchanges which left his king exposed to a mating attack. He didn’t know whether she was giggling to Natalya or over his queen stranded out of play. In another few moves her queen and knight had bulldozed their way through the centre, trapping his king in an embarrassingly simple checkmate.
She put down the phone with an air of triumph.
‘You haven’t lost your touch. All those years trouncing your brothers have paid off.’
‘And you look so tired that I think I shall have to put you to bed and not offer you a return match.’ She grinned. ‘I have exhausted you with my problems.’
‘No, no.’ Stephen demurred.
‘I insist. You must take a nice hot bath now and I will prepare your bed. You will sleep the sleep of angels.’ She winked at him. ‘Sometimes without one’s wife, one sleeps better, eh Stephen.’
Stephen lay in the vast old tub amidst a mountain of bubbles and once more acknowledged his weariness. It had come over him again at Ariane’s mention of Tessa. Her hopeless, accusing face hovered over him and with it came
that sense of helplessness. There was an irony in having arrived at the summit of his scientific achievement and feeling that nullity at his core, as if the inevitable mid-life crisis had caught him out too soon, his organism sniffing its end, the junk DNA piling up and snuffing out any vitality. Not that he had ever been much good at sex and all that. Hated talking about it, too, particularly in the way that Tessa had latterly attempted - with a kind of tortuous banality, full of cliched magazine solutions.
He was too inhibited, he guessed. Except with Ariane who had enough desire and wit for two.
Maybe it was because he had spent too much of his life in and around schools, in the constant shadow of their discipline. A host of rules that he couldn’t even begin to rebel against since any act implicated his father, whom he loved but was afraid of. His father was a Classics master, large and stern and too dignified in the black graduate’s gown which always covered ordinary clothes. Because of his father, the other boys left him pretty much alone, apart from the occasional run of teasing.
There had been that one summer though, when he was fifteen and they had all gone off to the West Country to spend a few weeks with a cousin of his mother’s. It had been his first real taste of freedom. Of girls, too.
He could still see Jennifer with her wild tangle of hair and skimpy summer frocks leading him a mad chase across fields and fern-strewn woods. She was thirteen, but she might as well have been twenty to his studious timidity. She always made him take off his glasses before they went into the barn. There she would let him touch her. Tiny breasts, downy legs. She would touch him too, examine him all over and laugh. He could still hear that peal of a laugh. One day, towards the end of their enchanted stay, she had given him her knickers, her white slip of a bra with the daisies embroidered on it. To keep under his pillow she said and to take home with him, so that he would remember her. For weeks he had slept with them clutched in his hands, then grown more adventurous and wrapped them round his quivering penis.
Soon after they returned to the cottage which bordered the school grounds, his mother had died. Even though he knew by then it was cancer, he felt responsible. He hadn’t been kind to her that summer, had wanted to act the man for Jennifer and so had refused her attempted embraces. He was miserable after her death, guilty. She had always been so gentle with him, had always attempted to counteract his father’s distance and severity. The only soft presence in the male world of school.
The day of his mother’s funeral, he buried Jennifer’s things at the bottom of the garden. It was raining. The ground was sodden and even before he had thrown earth over them, the garments turned a muddy brown.
His father became sterner after his mother’s death, but seemed to crumble internally. Conversation was reduced to a series of Latin quotations, as if his father could now only speak through the voice of others and by repetition. Stephen hadn’t realised this Spartan, self-sufficient man depended so much on his mother. She had been the quiet one, filling her time with amateur ornithology, embroidering lavish birds on tea-cloths and cushions. Perhaps she had simply wanted to fly away.
He could still remember some of his father’s quotations. ‘Voluptatem sapiens minimi facit.’ The wise man makes little of pleasure. Or ‘ne libeat tibi quod non licet’ - let not that please you which is not lawful. Or ‘virtus plurimae exercitationis indiget’ - virtue needs very much practice.
When he had gone up to Cambridge, his father had shaken him firmly by the hand and intoned, ‘Solent diu cogitare qui magna volunt gerere’ - they are wont to reflect long who wish to do great things. And in his last letter to him, though Stephen hadn’t known at the time it was to be his last, he had once again had recourse to Cicero and written, ‘Ad bene vivendum breve tempus satis est longum’ - For living well, a short time is long enough - the very words he had uttered at his mother’s death. The stroke which killed him occurred a matter of days after Stephen had received this letter, as if his father had had a premonition of it.
It was towards the middle of his first year at Trinity. A chemistry graduate who had befriended him had offered to lend him his car, so that he could drive to the funeral, bring back what he needed. Stephen didn’t have his license yet, so they had set off together and returned with a bootload of his father’s books and his mother’s cushions.
He had lived under their aegis for the next years, only breathing freely when he was distant from them - either cocooned in the microscopic world of the lab or, yes, here, on the continent, shielded by the expanse of the Channel.
Stephen opened his eyes. Above him, hanging from a ceiling rail was a silk slip of a nightie. It glowed softly peach like Ariane’s skin. An image of Tessa padding up the Cambridge stairs in her old robe and slippers suddenly came to him and with it a tangle of emotions he didn’t want to face. He whipped them away, focussed instead on that peach garment which bore a trace of Ariane’s shape.
Ariane. He remembered the occasion of their first meeting precisely. Moscow in February of 1990. He remembered so precisely because it was the first Soviet scientific congress he had managed to get his friend Jan invited to. Remembered too, because it was only a few months after Tessa’s miscarriage and he had intended to tell her before going off about Jan and all the parts of his life he hadn’t been able to make her privy to before. But Tessa was unapproachable, inhospitable to any confidences. It wasn’t the moment to burden her with his past. Then the moment had slipped away. And after that, she seemed to have lost interest in him altogether.
It was Jan who had introduced him with a rakish wink to Ariane Mikhailova.
‘The best interpreter I’ve ever met. It’s too bad I don’t need her,’ Jan had laughed and in that laugh Stephen had heard the sound of yet another of what he supposed to be Jan’s innumerable conquests. Jan was good with women. He had confidence and an enviable charm. Waitresses, nurses, lab technicians, everyone responded. Even those hatchet-faced women who collected all tickets and monitored all exhibitions in the Eastern bloc. He could see the effects of that charm in the look Ariane thrust at his friend from beneath the thick curtain of her lashes.
She was a tall, slender young woman, a girl really, if one focussed beyond the requisite garb of sternly grey suit, white shirt and graceless shoes. Her face was a perfect oval. Her skin flawless, rendered even creamier by the contrast of dark hair and eyes. But it was her neck which captivated Stephen, its movements as languid and graceful as rushes in a breeze. Lucky Jan, he had thought to himself, happy in a vicarious game of identification.
But Jan had been effusive in his introduction of Stephen, noted him as certainly the most important scientist at the Congress and the next day Ariane had approached him during the lunch break. She had asked him if he mightn’t like a little air. It was nice down by the river. She could show him the sights perhaps.
He knew the sights well enough, but he didn’t like to say no, so they walked together in the brightness of a day which obliterated the grime of the city. On the way, she plied him with questions, about London, about Cambridge, about the West, eating his words so greedily that he wasn’t sure his supply would be adequate. He didn’t mind her hunger. He understood it. It was a hunger born of closed borders and big skies. When they were as blue as today they stretched the imagination as extensively as frontier guards patrolled the country’s limits.
‘I should so like to travel,’ she had said to him when they paused briefly on the banks of the Moskva. With a little tremor, she had squeezed his hand. Then she had taken out a compact from her purse and with a gesture he only knew from old black and white movies, held a mirror to her face and carefully applied bright lipstick. He was standing behind her and he could see his lips above hers in the glass, the quick flicker of her moistening tongue, the trace of a languid smile. The moment captured a transgressive intimacy.
Nonetheless, when he returned to the stolid grandeur of his room later that evening, he was shocked to find her stretched on his bed. He wasn’t even certain he recognized her. She ha
d exchanged the severity of her day time garb for a bohemian blackness of pencil slim trousers and roll-top sweater. But it was her hair which threw him. He hadn’t imagined its lush length, nor a face transformed in the soft lamplight into a series of mysterious planes.
She had leapt up at the sight of him and put a stilling finger dramatically to her lips. Then she had proceeded to make love to him. Stephen still flushed at the ardour of it. Even had he tried, he wouldn’t have been able to resist the silent secrecy, the risk of her lips and limbs.
The next day in the bustle of the Congress Hall she had put a note stealthily in his hands. He had kept it there until the next session, when the cover of his papers made a stealthy reading possible.
‘Take me to the West,’ the note said. ‘Invite me to a conference. Anything. Please.’
That night he had hoped he would find her again in his room. He had brought a bottle of wine back with him for the occasion. But the room had been miserably empty. Not his dreams though. She had filled them with traces of herself as luminous and vibrant as her presence.
The following morning he saw her talking to a French delegate and he wondered whether she had spent the night with another man, sowing her chances liberally. Jealousy nudged at him, but he couldn’t attribute blame. He knew enough about the ways of the east, the nature of her particular desire, to recognize that any man must for her simply be the means to an end. Before he realised he had moved, he found himself at her side. At lunchtime, they were walking together again, this time along the Arbat, with its new tourist boutiques.
He had stumbled over his words. ‘I’ll try. Though England may be difficult.’
She had looked at him, her face a bright gem above the swathe of heavy fur, like a younger Simone he had thought for a moment. She had taken his hand, fingered the wedding band gently. ‘Paris then. I would love to see Paris. Stay there for a while, if it is possible. You will be my saviour. Please.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 6