‘You must help me, Stephen. The atmosphere here is not easy. Hanka, she…’ He didn’t finish, for no sooner had they rung the bell than Eva opened the door and threw herself into her father’s arms. Hanka was standing behind her, wiping her hands regally on a dishcloth and scowling. She collected herself when she saw Stephen.
‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t expected.’
‘Neither of you were expected,’ she said with emphasis as she took Stephen’s coat. ‘Eva only told me five minutes ago her father was coming.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Stephen mumbled.
‘There is nothing to be sorry for. He is allowed to see his daughter.’
‘But not his wife of fifteen years.’ Jan shook his head in a mock sadness which had too much of the real thing in it.
‘No longer his wife. And not without an appointment.’ In her vehemence Stephen noted that Hanka looked altogether beautiful.
They broke into Czech and Stephen, not wanting to hear, took Eva aside, talked to her a little.
After a moment, Jan joined them. ‘So, Eva and I will go next door and solve these maths problems.’
Eva jumped up with a happy smile.
Hanka let out an abrupt laugh which seemed to hide tears. ‘Now that you are here you had better have a drink. Otherwise Stephen and Eva will tell me I am impolite.’ She handed Jan a glass.
He thanked her with stiff politeness and left the room with Eva at his side.
‘You should tell him not to do this, Stephen. He will listen to you.’
‘Do what?’ Stephen fidgeted in his chair.
‘Drop in whenever he pleases. As if this were still his home. Either he has to come or to go. He cannot have it two ways.’
‘How long has it been going on for?’
‘Six months.’
‘And do you want him to come back?’
‘No,’ she said it proudly, then added, ‘Not on his terms.’
Stephen had a sudden desire for the pipe he hadn’t smoked in years.
‘You don’t have to turn away. I will tell you the terms. It is not so great a thing to ask. In your country it would not be a great thing. I wish him to stop running around with his mistresses. That is all. For years, I allowed it. I said to myself, he has a hard time at work. It is always us two against the world and he needs a little relaxation. I pretend not to notice. Now I notice. I am, as you say, fed up.’
‘I see.’
‘Maybe you see. Maybe you don’t. In any case, now it is probably too late. I do not want him back. I want to travel.’ She looked at Stephen with an air of vehemence, then turned away. Her voice when it came again was light. ‘And I want new friends. Can I get you some supper, Stephen. Something quick. Some bread and ham and salad. With me. Eva has eaten and Jan is not my business.’
She seemed to want to move, so he nodded, helped her lift books and papers from the table, cover it with a cloth.
‘Did you speak to your wife about Eva?’ she asked, as she sliced a thick dark loaf.
‘Couldn’t yet,’ Stephen looked out the window and saw nothing but a puddle of grimy light. A dog barked. ‘She’s away on holiday. When she gets back. Then I’ll ring you. I’m sure it will be fine.’ He put more confidence in his voice than he felt.
‘Okay.’ She smiled at him with a touch of coyness. ‘It would be nice one day to meet your wife.’
‘Yes, you’ll have to.’ He nibbled at the food, found it suddenly indigestible. Hanka hadn’t touched hers. She looked sad. Stephen cleared his throat.
‘You know that Jan is quite brilliant, Hanka. That he is not an ordinary man.’
Her laugh sounded like a nail scraping sandpaper. ‘I know you think he is brilliant. Other people think he is brilliant. I have not asked him to give up his brain. And if it happens to live between his legs, well that is his problem.’
Stephen coloured.
‘I am sorry. I have embarrassed you. I always think that you are so much more open about these things than we are that I am allowed to speak frankly.’
‘Yes, yes.’
Eva bounded into the room and saved him the need of saying anything further. Stephen took a deep breath and nursed his beer. He heard Eva announce in great excitement that her father had said that perhaps she could go to Paris with him one day soon.
Hanka stood up with sudden rage and threw her napkin across the room. It landed at Jan’s feet. Her teeth were clenched. ‘If there is suddenly money for so many trips abroad, then by rights some of it should come to me, who has never been out of the country. Not Eva who will soon be going to England.’ She burst into tears and rushed from the room.
Jan looked shamed and very pale. He put his arm around Eva and told her that of course her mother was right. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. He was tired. She should go and tell her mother that he would pay for them both to go to Paris. Yes, he would find the money somewhere.
Eva followed obediently after her mother.
‘I am an old fool, Stephen. I think I had better leave. You stay if you wish.’ He moved toward the door then turned back. ‘No, I must say goodbye.’
He re-emerged after a moment, his face bleak. ‘Hanka says it is better if we both go. She is tired. She will phone you before you leave Prague.’
They walked slowly from the house. A pale sliver of a moon emerged from scudding clouds and threw shadows on the street. Wind gusted round corners. They both drew their coats more tightly round them. It was Jan who first broke the silence.
‘My life seems to have become much too complicated, Stephen.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The problem you see is this. Maybe you have an answer. How does one, after the passage of years, eroticize one’s wife. Tell me.’
Stephen was glad of the shadows which permitted a mere grunt in response.
‘If I could solve this, maybe it would be as important as your Chrombindin.’ He laughed with a touch of bitterness. ‘So, do they have an answer in England?’
‘Not in my bit.’
‘No.’ Jan studied his profile for a moment. ‘But come, we mustn’t be gloomy. Look. There’s our old tavern. Let’s stop for a drink. I still have a little time before meeting Simone. And I will tell you a funny story. To cheer us up. One of our Russian delegates told it to me.’
They found a small corner table at the back of the sparsely-peopled bar. The wall paper here still curled with ungainly blooms and dusty beer mugs adorned the mantle. A pot-bellied stove gave off a muggy heat. They warmed their hands over it and downed some Becherovka, while Jan told him his story.
Its setting was an unlikely one: Moscow’s first infertility clinic. A woman from the Caucasus had travelled the two thousand or so kilometres from her native mountain village to the clinic to be inseminated. How she had heard of the clinic was a mystery. What had led her there was a more profound one. She had told the doctor that she had come because her husband was dead. He had died due to her own failure of duty. A road leading down from their village was known to contain a bend so fatal that it could only be safely navigated if a lamb was sacrificed before the journey was begun. She had failed to carry out the necessary sacrifice before her husband set out and he had been killed. So now it was essential that she make good her dereliction by having a child which would bear his name. Speed was of the essence, since her fellow villagers had to believe the baby was indeed her husband’s; though her brother-in-law had given her his blessing and urged her to go ahead and have a donor baby.
It was the way the incident brought two disparate worlds crashing together which had struck Jan with the force of an epiphany, as it now struck Stephen. On the one hand, the remote village moving in its age-old patterns, maintaining hoary rituals. On the other, the high tech world of infertility clinics and frozen sperm samples. And in the midst of them, straddling the two, this woman with her desire.
‘But perhaps it isn’t so strange,’ Jan said when the second small glass had arrived. ‘After all, fertility has always been a question of magic rites and potio
ns. Dances round maypoles, leaps over bonfires, witches’ brews. Eh Stephen, maybe we only delude ourselves with the special rationality of our science?’
Stephen didn’t answer. He stared at the glass window in the pot-bellied stove, saw the leap of flame and for the first time in active memory, found himself more intent on pondering the woman with her desire than the place of science. Like Tessa, he thought to himself. Like Tessa. He struggled to change the subject.
‘You still haven’t told me what you were doing with the police this afternoon?’
Jan laughed. ‘That is almost as strange as the Caucasus story. There is this woman I met through your Dr. Knight. An interesting woman. Attractive. But she has been making me run in circles for her. An English woman. You should meet her. From Cambridge. Tessa Hughes.’
Stephen felt his stomach turn. He put down his glass too hard, so that the colourless liquid tipped over the edge and made a small puddle on the dark wood. ‘Tessa Hughes?’ He repeated inanely.
‘Yes. She is from Cambridge. But not the university. She managed to get herself into a predicament and I came to her rescue. Linguistically that is. A baby was thrust into her arms in the Orthodox church. She brought it to the police, who eventually located the mother, but were also suspicious of Miss Hughes, who feels an inordinate responsibility for the child.’ He told Stephen a complicated story at the end of which Stephen burst out.
‘But this is very odd, Jan. Tessa Hughes is my wife’s name.’
Jan stared at him. ‘Tessa, you have told me. But…’ He scrutinized Stephen’s face. ‘Your wife wears a different name? Your wife is here and you do not know?’
‘Maybe it’s a different Tessa Hughes,’ Stephen said with not quite the right amount of conviction.
‘So I see you have problems, too, Stephen. I believe she is travelling with Ted Knight.’
‘It can’t be Tessa.’
‘No. I shall introduce you.’ He chuckled. ‘You know, it is a good thing you tell me now. I was beginning to find her quite attractive. A woman with a mind that is not always stubbornly her own.’
‘You should get going,’ Stephen said with more moroseness than he intended. He rose to his feet, pushing back his chair with such vehemence that it tipped over and he had to rush to right it.
At the corner of the street, he said good-bye to Jan and headed off in the direction of his hotel.
Tessa here. Tessa with Ted Knight. He couldn’t believe it. Not Ted. Yet why not? For all the attention Stephen himself paid her, she might as well be with Ted as with anyone else. He kicked a chocolate bar wrapper into the gutter and hastened his steps.
At the corner of his street, a woman emerged from the shadow of an arch and put her hand on his shoulder, rubbed against him. He looked into a fragile, heart-shaped face, a lipstick smudged mouth. She couldn’t be much older than Eva, he thought with a pang. He put his hand into his pocket and brought out some bills, thrust them in her direction and hurried into the safety of his hotel.
‘Prosim,’ he heard her call her thanks in Russian from behind him.
He didn’t look back. He bounded up the stairs and made determinedly for the telephone. The shock of Tessa’s name on Jan’s lips was still with him. It couldn’t be the same Tessa, he told himself now as he dialled their home number. His Tessa was certainly safely back in Cambridge. But after a few rings, all he heard was a click and then her cool, clear voice soliciting a message. He looked at the receiver as if it might be deceiving him, then found himself speaking.
‘Tessa, it’s Stephen. If you’re there, if you’re back, please ring me in Prague on 29 53 28. Please.’ He wanted to say something else, but he didn’t quite know how to phrase an endearment.
For a moment he sat at the edge of the bed. But he couldn’t sit. He had to know. He grabbed his coat and rushed out. There were no taxis in sight, so he hastened towards the river, then remembered, too late, that the one way system led in the wrong direction. The wind whipped at his coat with Siberian fervour, bit fiercely at his ears. With a curse, he headed into it.
By the time he reached the hotel, his rage was as hot as his feet were cold. He felt if he bumped into Ted now, he could easily plant a fist in his smoothly handsome face, without asking any prior questions. He was certain Jan’s story was about his Tessa. The baby confirmed it.
At the desk, he huddled in his coat, tried to make himself invisible and stammered out Tessa’s name as clumsily as if it were a complex series of foreign syllables.
With a clack of pointed nails, the assistant punched out the name on a keyboard. He saw her shake her head.
Stephen felt a rope had been loosened from his neck. He took a deep unhampered breath.
The clacking at the keyboard went on. The woman turned toward him, pushed a stray strand of hair neatly behind her ear.
‘No. She and Mr Edward Knight checked out yesterday morning. I have a forwarding telephone number for Mr. Knight, if you wish.’
Stephen shook his head, couldn’t quite bring out the necessary thank-you. He wanted to ask the woman if she knew what this Tessa Hughes looked like. He gave her his back instead, then with a change of mind turned round again and asked for Ted Knight’s number. He dragged his feet towards the telephone. The receiver felt as precarious in his hand as a beaker of acid. A voice at the other end would unstop the plug. He waited, four rings, eight, then a voice announcing the Hotel Pariz. He heard himself mumbling Ted’s name, heard the ‘no answer’. With a sense of exhausted relief, he put down the receiver. His eyes glued to marble tiles, he hurried from the hotel.
By the time he had arrived back at his own street, he had half-convinced himself that Tessa would be better off with Ted. He would give her the child she so wanted, whisk her off to California.
He imagined them walking towards him side by side. Ted with his brisk, athletic strides, a beam of possession on his face; Tessa, slightly shy, uncomfortable, removing her arm from Ted’s grip. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would be cold, distant, disdainful, her life shuttered against him.
He tried to see through the shutters, but everything was slashed by their presence, fragments of figures and objects and life that wouldn’t coalesce into a whole. He picked up a snow ball that some child had packed hard and placed on a window ledge, and flung it towards a lamp-post. Its splayed fragments were white and fragile against the dark ooze of the pavement. He bent to pick them up, tried to shape them into a smooth white ball again. It was icy hard, but the grit clung. He found himself looking up at the sky wondering if fresh snow would fall. Carefully, he replaced the ball on the ledge.
What was it Jan had said to him? How did one, after the passage of years, eroticize one’s wife? The trouble was he was no longer sure he had a wife anymore. He could no longer recognise the figure he imagined on Ted’s arm. She had grown taller, her face shone with a strange glow. There was a provocative smile on her lips directed at something tantalizing and bright, beyond his shoulder. In its light, she had grown mysterious, like some complex foreign code he couldn’t crack.
He had walked past his hotel without noticing. With a scowl, he retraced his steps. In the sudden heat of the small lobby, his glasses grew misty. As he took them off to give them a wipe, a voice accosted him.
‘Hi. I hoped you wouldn’t be too late.’
A figure he didn’t recognize came towards him. He pushed his glasses back onto his nose and saw the girl with the copper hair.
‘I thought we might have a drink together. I…I wanted to thank you properly.’ She gave him a tentative smile.
Stephen looked at her in confusion, then towards the bar where he half-expected to see Antoinette.
She read his glance. ‘Antoinette met this guy at a club and…’ She waved her hand awkwardly, studied the carpet. ‘So I came to see you. But if you’re busy…’
‘No, no,’ Stephen said grappling for a little relief from thoughts of Tessa. ‘Have you eaten? Bit late by Czech standards I know, but I haven’t got round to a proper
dinner and there’s a little place near here which isn’t too bad.’
‘That would be great.’ She zipped her padded jacket up with a swish and a crackle. ‘I’m permanently hungry.’ She patted her stomach and bounded towards the door ahead of him. ‘Antoinette keeps forgetting about food.’
They sat across a chequered tablecloth in the warm, smoky restaurant and ate schnitzel and boiled potatoes dotted with parsley while everyone around them tucked into creamy desserts. Stephen tried not to ask himself what he thought he was doing here, listening to this young woman’s chatter. But he listened, desperate for the distraction, and was soon, despite himself, altogether distracted.
She provided him with meaty chunks of ready and bizarre knowledge, straight out of courses he imagined, great eclectic heaps of facts and figures that she trotted out at random intervals. None of it altogether assimilated and all of it mixed with equal bits of ignorance or innocence, but it was a heady mixture all the same, and he had to run to keep up.
As he had already sensed on the night they spent together, she had a great many decided views on a great many subjects, few of which tallied with her actions. But he found himself charmed by the un-self-consciousness of the disparities. As she dug into her schnitzel, she told him, her blue eyes altogether candid, that it was wrong to eat meat. It made one into a murderer. Animals had feelings, just like humans. At home, she was a vegetarian. Here, of course, it was impossible. She had tried for a day. No way, unless one was intent on OD-ing on potatoes. But they would learn here, too. Soon. Apart from that it was a pretty nice place.
Except for the prostitutes. There were thousands of them. Everywhere. He had seen them, hadn’t he? Lots younger than her, too. The men forced them, of course. Pimps. She had read how some even pretended to adopt orphan girls only in order to put them on the game. And hooked them on drugs. Horrible.
Her eyebrows shot up suddenly. She peered at him from beneath copper curls, her face wary. ‘You don’t go with prostitutes, do you?’
Stephen swallowed a mouthful so hard, he could feel the lump sticking in his oesophagus. He took a gulp of beer, shook his head.
The Things We Do For Love Page 28