Slowly the Lemans nodded, trying not to look deflated. They knew that for Auer to have mentioned the regular auditions meant he hadn’t been overwhelmed, but hadn’t closed the door altogether. What they didn’t know was that Auer hadn’t even said this.
Horace glanced over at Inna. She understood, too, he could see, though she was trying not to show disappointment. Quietly, he watched the dance of fleeting expressions on her face. His heart was full, feeling her imagined distress. Now an eyebrow went up a fraction; now he caught the ghost of a smile. Horace had never loved her with such breathless tenderness as in this defenceless moment.
He ignored the tall dark shape behind her. Unlike everyone else, Yasha was not even trying to take the disappointment lightly, but was frowning. Scowling, more like. Well, Horace thought irritably, the boy had never had any pretensions to finesse, had he?
‘Well!’ Madame Leman said, rather too cheerfully. ‘Let’s not let the champagne go to waste, anyway. We’ll drink to Inna’s success at the auditions when they come round, at least!’
Horace was beginning to feel he’d made a mistake by bringing in Auer, and stirring up feelings he’d have done better to leave untouched. So he was more grateful still when Lidiya Leman first handed him a fizzing glass and then, putting an arm round him and smiling very wide, began making a speech of thanks.
‘I know Inna will feel this more than the rest of us, so perhaps I’m speaking out of turn,’ she began, loudly and with far too much emphasis. Horace sensed the reproach to Inna in her words, but Inna just nodded with that vague, unsettling half-smile. ‘But we are so very grateful to you, all of us, dear Horace, for your tremendous generosity of spirit, and above all for your great kindness to Inna, for all the wonderful opportunities that, out of sheer goodness of heart, you’ve been making available to her…’
Horace, bobbing and grinning and keeping his eyes fixed on the smiling Lemans, was nevertheless horribly aware, as he might be of a throbbing toe inside a polished shoe, of Yasha looking thunderous at these words.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Yasha put an apparently casual hand forward and touch Inna’s arm, as if to cut her off from Madame Leman’s flow of thanks.
Then, to his relief, something seemed to change. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Inna move very slightly away, out of her cousin’s reach. She, at least, didn’t intend to be rude. Instead, she turned towards Horace.
‘Madame Leman’s quite right,’ she said, though her face was still empty of all but the vaguest of feeling; her voice too. ‘I have so much to thank you for, Horace. I don’t know where to begin.’
‘The jewel alone!’ Madame Leman enthused, with a level of excitement that, after Inna’s words, struck Horace as embarrassingly false. ‘Your good-luck gift – that little violin! Why, I was looking more closely at it, after you’d gone, and the quality of the workmanship – those little strings, and the bridge, and the F-holes, all so tiny, yet so perfect. It absolutely takes your breath away!’
Leman nodded. ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘It’s a very beautiful thing.’
Horace bowed his head, feeling that, even if Madame Leman was trying far too hard, this evening’s events were beginning to go at least a little his way, at last.
With exaggerated curiosity, Madame Leman added, playfully, ‘Inna, dear, can’t we take another look?’
Obediently, Inna put a finger to her neck and pulled the fine chain up from under the blouse’s high collar. She held out the tiny violin in one hand, while still holding the real violin in the other, and both parent Lemans came close and began exclaiming over the jewel.
Madame Leman began an arch question. ‘So where, Horace dear, are you planning to take Inna…?’
At the same time, Inna opened her mouth. ‘Yes,’ Inna said quietly, and she did, finally, meet Horace’s gaze now, and gave him a small but definite smile. ‘I think it’s lovely, too.’
‘… next?’ finished Madame Leman, looking flirtatiously at Horace.
Horace relaxed, but only for a moment. Because suddenly, Yasha, looking and sounding like an aggrieved child, had pushed past the Lemans and was standing in front of Inna.
‘You wore it!’ Yasha hissed.
Her eyes opened wide. She shook her head. The gesture clearly meant: Stop, stop. ‘Yasha,’ she said quietly. ‘Please.’ But she dropped the silver violin, which came to rest, winking as she breathed, against her pin-tucked chest.
Appalled, Horace watched both the Lemans’ faces turn down, their shoulders hunching defensively about their ears. He’d never seen them so embarrassed.
‘Of course I wore it,’ Inna was saying in a placating tone that was only just above a whisper. ‘Heavens, Yasha, why wouldn’t I? It’s the loveliest thing … and after all the help Horace has been so kind as to give…’
‘We’ve all been helping!’ Yasha persisted. ‘Haven’t we? Haven’t I?’ He grabbed her by the shoulders, staring straight at her, as if he were imitating a jealous lover from a comic opera. ‘But it’s all, “Horace, Horace, Horace”, tonight, all “Where are you taking her next?” What about my help?’
Horace saw Inna close her eyes. He liked the way she kept her emotions small in public – something her tempestuous relative could usefully learn, he thought – but, for a moment, she looked openly exasperated, or worse.
For a long moment, Horace saw Yasha look hungrily at her face, and observe her closed eyes and the weary anger in her expression.
Then the boy was off, flinging out of the apartment, at a run.
Motionless, they listened to the crashing and snatchings of his retreat.
Inna’s eyes remained shut.
‘Well, really!’ Madame Leman said – wholly inadequately, Horace thought – long after silence had fallen. Her embarrassment was turning to indignation. Her cheeks were pink.
‘Mmm, an absolute symphony of slamming doors,’ Leman said, raising a mocking eyebrow and beginning to grin. ‘He’s surpassed himself tonight, our Yasha. God knows where he can fling off to at this time of night, though. He’ll be back soon enough.’
Still with her eyes shut, Inna said, ‘He was going to see a man called Yermansky, I think.’
Leman shrugged that off. ‘Well,’ he added merrily, ‘all the more champagne for the rest of us, at any rate.’
But Inna shook her head. ‘Will you excuse me?’ she said, politely but distantly. ‘I’m very tired.’ In the doorway, she stopped and said, still in that small, remote voice, ‘Thank you again, Horace, so much.’ But she didn’t look up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was December before Horace took Inna out again. She was still recovering from her long bout of influenza, which had been so severe that, at one stage, it had seemed she might not recover.
He’d chosen the opera, thinking that the opulent blue-and-gold cylinder of the auditorium, the swaying ladies in their silks, the bowing cavaliers in their medals, and, in general, the ritual flavour of the solemn pleasure, would be so far from the life Inna usually led in St. Petersburg that they would cause her no pain.
The performance that night happened to be Eugene Onegin. For a while, at work, as he stared through his magnifying glass at the lid he was painting, Horace allowed himself to worry about whether Inna might miserably compare herself to its heroine, poor Tatyana, who as a helpless young provincial falls in love with the dandy Onegin, and, after an agonizing baring of her heart in the moonlight, is rejected.
It had cut Horace to the quick to realize how exactly the timing of Inna’s illness coincided with her young man making off into the night to manufacture bombs in the provinces, or wherever he’d gone; but it hadn’t surprised him, exactly. Not after that last evening, performing for Auer. Auer had been right, he knew, however hard he had tried to convince himself the maestro had misunderstood the situation. Horace could still remember the pain he’d felt, watching the way they were looking at each other as the music drew to a close, when he’d begun to realize that she was in love. But
he could also tell, without needing to be told, how humiliated Inna must then have felt that her cousin had just upped and gone, without a word. What he didn’t know was whether there was now any reason for him to think there might yet be hope.
By the time Horace had finished putting away the second to last of the Youssoupoff Oxford boxes in his desk drawer, and had cleaned up, he’d calmed himself. As he got the other little square box out of a different drawer in his desk, he told himself firmly that the end of the opera – in which, seeing that Tatyana has successfully grow into a sophisticated, married lady of the world, Onegin regrets having rejected her and tries to seduce her again, but too late, for now she rejects him – should give Inna encouragement, and him, too, perhaps. He slipped the box into his pocket.
It was Inna’s first evening out after her illness, and Leman would be bringing her, by cab, to the outside of the glorious mint-green bubble of a theatre building.
It was a windy night, and a little below freezing. Horace walked the hop, skip and jump from Fabergé’s to the Mariinsky. It was one of his favourite places in the city, that magical palace of fantasy, with its Botticelliesque nymphs dancing round a sky-blue circular ceiling, three-layered chandelier glittering with the fire of a thousand crystal pendants, and layer upon blue-and-gold layer of loggias and boxes piled gorgeously one on another. Horace wanted to feel composed when he met Inna. It had been – what? – a month since the Auer evening had gone so wrong, and so much needed to be said. The fresh air would do him good.
* * *
She was so thin that Madame Leman’s winter fur coat hung off her bones.
He kissed her hand, noticing that her wrists were so translucent and brittle that they felt snappable. She smiled, wanly. How pale she was. It wrung his heart.
Leman winked encouragingly at him as he straightened up.
Had he looked discouraged? He wondered briefly about this before nodding back.
‘Would you like to join us?’ he asked Leman politely. ‘I’m sure I could get you another ticket. And there’ve been wonderful reviews.’
But Leman just grinned and gestured down at the stained, sawdusty clothes they all knew must be covering his large body, just one layer below the big bear of a fur he was wearing. ‘Civil service gents in medals!’ he said, in a mock-piteous voice. ‘I know, I know: Chaliapin singing Gremin – marvellous, of course. But not marvellous enough to put up with an audience of stiffs. Spare me that, dear man. Spare me that.’ He roared with laughter. ‘Enjoy yourselves, my friends,’ he said, blowing them a kiss from above his black beard and turning away.
Horace was grateful for the overwhelming nature of the opera, which gave them very little time to talk about anything. They could use it to get used to each other again.
Inna’s eyes turned from one golden marvel to the next, taking it all in. When the curtain came down for the interval, she sighed. ‘Poor Tatyana.’
‘Let’s get some champagne,’ he replied nervously, fussing with opera glasses.
It was only during the interval, when, like hundreds of others, they took their glasses of champagne and went promenading along curving corridors, between fronds of tropical palms, up and down gilded staircases hung with clouds of white and swathes of pale blues, that he plucked up his courage and slipped his arm through hers.
Her arm, painfully thin under her dark clothing, was soft and unresisting.
‘How very well you look, already,’ he said, willing that to be the truth.
‘I was lucky,’ she said, and, for the first time she turned her eyes – huge, now, and shadowed, but still that arresting shade of green – directly on to Horace. ‘Both my parents died of influenza.’ She smiled a bit wider, and Horace was relieved to see the old Inna still there. ‘But here I still am,’ she added. ‘I must be made of sterner stuff.’
Cautiously, they re-established subjects they could discuss, and negotiated their way round the shadowy areas they had no words for. Of course, they both avoided mentioning the disappearance of Yasha.
The boy had never come back after he’d stormed out on that Auer evening. Obviously there was no point in going to the police; that would always be more trouble than it was worth. But Leman had subsequently told Horace how he’d discreetly asked various old journalist cronies where young Kagan might have got to, in case the boy was in trouble of some sort. Inna thought he’d been going off to see Yermansky, which, as Leman knew, was probably code for joining Yermansky’s secret socialist group. He’d discovered that Yasha had indeed been out looking for Yermansky, but he’d never actually made contact. However, the boy had recently, and separately, collected false travel papers from a revolutionary group connected with the Jewish Bundists. He’d had these papers made out for a young man of twenty-five, but in Leman’s name. He must have used them to vanish into the night, Leman said. It wasn’t just a spontaneous fit of jealousy. The fact that he had them at all suggested that he must have been planning to do a flit for some time. Horace, seeing on his friend’s face how betrayed he felt by this cavalier use of his name, and by young Kagan’s disappearance, had just nodded sadly. There was nothing more to say.
So there would be no mention of Yasha Kagan tonight. But it was fine to talk about how good Madame Leman’s nursing had been, how keen Inna was to get back to the workshop tomorrow, and how snowed under Leman was with orders in the run-up to the Christmas season. She told him how much she wanted to help, to repay the Lemans’ kindness.
Horace knew there were only a few weeks to go till the temporary papers he’d got her in the autumn ran out. But he couldn’t find the words to ask what she would do next. And she didn’t say.
One of the many conversations Horace had imagined them having, when they met again, was about whether she would like him to make another appointment with Professor Auer. He’d even pictured himself pointing out the Conservatoire, just across the square from the theatre, as an inspiration. But now he saw her here, so quiet and effortful, he couldn’t do that either. Whatever had caused her illness, it had been real enough, Leman said, with raging temperatures, sweats, the lot. She wouldn’t have touched her violin for a month. She’d need to convalesce. She’d need to practise and get back on form. And, even then, would she have the nerve to play on her own? Horace blinked and set aside the thought of the duet that had come unbidden, painfully, into his mind.
So, in the second interval, he just told her society gossip about the possible engagement of the Grand Duchess Olga, and tried to make her smile.
The Rasputin scandal was still getting worse, he continued. Every paper, every day, was full of extraordinary diatribes, as if one peasant really could be responsible for all the ills of the age. The man himself, Horace said, was desperate to get back to the quiet anonymity of his Siberian village, but the Empress wouldn’t let him go. Still, the Emperor would probably soon have to put his foot down, because there wasn’t a soul in St. Petersburg who wasn’t wondering whether Rasputin might really be the Empress’s lover. The secret police surveillance team whom the Tsar had detailed to protect the peasant had given his most faithful female followers code names – Bird, Dove, Owl and Crow – and these had been leaked to the papers.
Inna smiled at that. ‘Which follower is which?’ she asked.
Encouraged, leaning a little closer, Horace replied, ‘I don’t recall exactly, but I think Munya is Dove…’
‘I wouldn’t want a bird name,’ Inna said. ‘I wouldn’t want to be written about like that.’
Rather sadly, Horace nodded. ‘I don’t imagine Rasputin likes it much either. It’s vicious, what people are saying about him. As if his just being here, breathing the same air as them, enrages them.’
Inna nodded, looking straight at him for only the second time that evening. ‘Yes,’ she said, with more vehemence than he’d expected. ‘Father Grigory stands out too much in the city. He should go to his village, and his family: where he blends in better, and seems ordinary, and people don’t notice him, so he’s safe. Where
he can be innocent. He should go home.’
* * *
The night air was gentler when they came out, muffled in their furs. And it was snowing: the first real snow of winter, falling soft and quiet and thick.
White drifts were piling up on caryatids, wrought-iron balconies and bare branches. Drivers spurred on the vehicles and horses thronging the square. No one wanted to be caught out when their carriage’s wheels began slipping and sliding on the uncleared roads. But an almost reverent joy crept into the faces in the crowds embracing, bowing and moving away. There was hope in every tired, happy voice, a quiet faith that this snowfall would mark the natural end to the dark, gloomy, rain-lashed, miserable weeks that follow the golden-leaved autumns of Russia, and the beginning of the crisp, blue-skied, sparkling-white, crunchy-underfoot, invigorating real winter of everyone’s dreams.
Hope, and hush, everywhere: Inna took her hands out of her muff and turned her face skywards.
‘Oh, let’s not get a cab,’ she said, with sudden vivacity. She turned to him, and the animation in her face tugged painfully at Horace’s heart. ‘I’d rather walk.’
* * *
This would be the perfect moment, Horace told himself, fingering the little box in his pocket that contained the ring he’d brought out with him. He had one arm through hers, and she was leaning slightly against him. They were on Nevsky, walking past a store front gleaming with pyramids of foie-gras cans, towards the Hôtel de l’Europe. The street was teeming with other people with lit-up faces and pink cheeks, out venerating the snow. Inna looked so happy, Horace suddenly thought, that she’d become beautiful again. Snowflakes sparkled in the clouds of dark hair under her hat.
There’d never be a more romantic place or time.
He’d already asked her to a poetry reading the next night at the Stray Dog. Inna had said yes. But tomorrow there’d be a crush, with friends everywhere, and eyes, and it would be even harder to get up the courage. Whereas, if he were brave, he could just take out the ring, right here, right now, and ask her. Get it over with.
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 18