‘There,’ he said softly, touching the crucifix at his neck. ‘Now, you leave him be, and, if you would be so good, your excellency, don’t you touch that cloth I’ve wrapped round his foot with the poultice for the rest of the night. Just leave it to do its good work, and, God willing, he’ll be feeling a bit better by the time he wakes up.’ And, without waiting to acknowledge her whispered thanks, he crept to the door again.
Inna washed the dirty rags the man had removed – the last of the bandages, as Horace’s other set had finally disintegrated – and the rest of the linen they’d been wearing, and hung them up to dry near the window.
Horace carried on sweating and muttering. From time to time, she murmured something encouraging; ‘That’s better,’ or ‘Now we’re on the mend.’ But she gradually fell silent. From time to time, she wiped his face.
She drank the cold tea and put the glass outside.
And then there was nothing left but to listen to the sound of the sea, and the gulls, and the creeping outside, as she watched Horace. After what seemed hours, he subsided into what looked more like a restless, dream-filled sleep.
‘I’ll look after you,’ she whispered to him, willing this to be the turning point; willing him to wake up refreshed and himself again. ‘You’ll be well again soon. Everything is going to be all right.’ But she couldn’t sound sure. She’d staked everything on her hunch that, down here, they’d have a better chance of safety. It had never crossed her mind that journey’s end would look so empty, or that, just as she was realizing all that he meant to her, he might die.
The shadows in that dusty room thickened and the dust-flights dimmed, like hope fading. To stop herself panicking at having ended up like this, alone with her thoughts, in a hotel room in a town about to be overrun by the enemy, to stop herself wondering just how safe she might be without him, she made herself think instead of the Lemans, of how much she missed them all. She called to mind the yellow room, and Marcus proudly watching his Olympia toss back her hair and declaim her poems, and Barbarians and Agrippina’s boisterous squabbling, and Madame Leman, chatting peacefully to her dead husband’s portrait, as she sometimes did while she sat there sewing. For a moment, she even thought of Yasha, whom she’d run away from, and whose very memory she’d started to fear …
But conjuring up his face made her shrivel inside. She couldn’t help but be aware that it was her attempt to escape the dangerous overcrowding of her married life – which she alone had sought out, and for which her husband was in no way to blame – that had landed Horace and her in their predicament here.
Looking penitently down at the noble profile, the proud nose, the cleft in his chin, the line of neck and shoulder – all so familiar, yet strange too, now that Horace’s form wasn’t lit up with his usual kindly amusement but lying so still – she asked why she had been so slow to appreciate her husband, to understand.
She could never have left him. She hadn’t just chosen him for the security he’d provided until now. She loved him: the look of him, the laughter, the gentle life that no longer animated his face. She knew that now. She couldn’t imagine – couldn’t bear to think of – a world without him.
‘It’s you,’ she said aloud, touching his clammy hand. ‘It always was, really. I don’t know why I didn’t realize.’
Yet the sound of her own voice, so small and uncertain in the eerie silence, only unnerved her further. Getting up from the chair, longing for the touch of him and the reassurance of his warmth, she lay down gingerly beside him, careful not to touch his foot. She curled herself along his back and laid an arm over his shoulder, excruciatingly aware, now that it might be too late, of how naturally her body fitted to his. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go, my darling,’ she said, though perhaps the voice was only in her head, because he didn’t stir.
There was a great deal of grey in his wiry hair, she saw, trying to keep her fear at bay, but feeling it seep in anyway. There were deep lines on his cheek. ‘It will all be all right, don’t worry,’ she repeated, feeling desperate. ‘I’ll make it be.’ But what would she do when even the brilliant bars of sunlight had faded, and there was nothing between her and the silence?
* * *
Who sleeps in an empty house after dark, in a war, when anything is possible?
Back on her chair, Inna listened to sounds. Little whispery sounds, coming closer: creaks underfoot and the clangs and bangs of possible steps, or the wind, at the window. Then it got so quiet, she wondered whether the old man was still here at all, or whether he’d run away, or was whispering with men in the street. She wondered what she would hit them with if they burst in.
To keep her spirits up, she found herself humming under her breath as she padded around, checking things, fretting at the candle’s wick with her fingernail – how was it burning so slowly, when it had been dark for so long? – and wondering why the bandages wouldn’t dry.
The frisky tune on her mind was from long ago. She stopped when she realized it was the Scriabin piece. The memories it brought flooding back, of the yellow room, were too poignant now.
She could open the window and get a breeze through. That might help with the bandages and linen, she thought. But she shivered at the thought of letting the night in, and whatever was out there wandering around in it.
Inna tried to put her dulled mind to thinking what to do if the bandages weren’t fit to use by morning. There was nothing else dry.
If the rags weren’t ready, she might be reduced to finding the untouched little pile of cloths she’d put into her bag for her own use, for her monthly bleeding.
No, of course not, she thought, a moment later, almost relieved to have had that absurd, taboo idea for which she could laugh at herself. They weren’t that desperate. She was, for tonight at least, back in the land of gracious living. She’d just take one of the hotel’s pillowcases, or a towel, and rip it into strips.
And then, less certainly, she began to wonder: why were the rags untouched? She hadn’t thought, hadn’t counted; but shouldn’t she have needed those rags a good fortnight ago? Why, after all these weeks – what, three, four weeks – away?
Her breath caught.
The thought that struck her now was so utterly unexpected that she couldn’t give it a name. Oblivious, all at once, to the wind and gulls, to all the possible creeping of feet outside, and even to what sounded like banging at the front door, she bit her lip and hunched forward. She’d intended not to think of Petrograd, or what had happened in those frenzied final days, for a long while, perhaps forever. She could still avoid thinking, maybe. But she needed to count.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When Yasha walked into the room, that’s how she was: frantic-eyed, with her fingers up in a circle of candlelight, muttering numbers under her breath.
She looked up at him in the doorway – flickering and uplit from the candle he was carrying, and stubble-bearded from the train – as if he were a ghost.
He was carrying a bag, and had a violin strapped to his back.
For a long moment, she just stared. ‘Is it really you?’ she whispered, wondering if she were dreaming. ‘Yasha?’
There was nothing ghostly about his grin.
She sighed away all her fears, put a finger to her lips, got up, picked her candle up, and drew Yasha out into the corridor, away from Horace’s sickbed, with a trembling hand. Yes, she breathed to herself, he was really there. She was suffused with a golden feeling that she would once simply have called happiness, though now, with all she’d been learning on this long journey, she also thought it might just be the relief of not being alone with her imaginings any more.
There’d been moments – all right, she would admit to them – when she’d believed that never touching Yasha again would be a kind of death. She’d felt, in all the moments when her mind, skirting the edge of sleep, had escaped its inner policemen and had run away into unpatrolled, unthinkable byways, that if she ever saw him again, they’d kiss; fling themselves at each other; pul
l each other’s clothes away. She’d put her lips to his skin, and fill her nostrils with his smell. At other times she’d thought she would accuse him of things she couldn’t, for the moment, even remember; argue about things that no longer seemed important. And, just an instant ago, she’d been yearning to have him there to help her with her frantic counting. But now the sheer wonder of his reappearance outweighed everything else. She realized she didn’t want to do anything more sensual than feel the reality of his back under her hand, and his hand on her hip, and smile at him.
In the hotel corridor’s curly art-nouveau mirrors, hung between dusty potted palms, their two intersecting circles of gold were reflected from glass to foggy, speckled glass. His reflections were staring at her, none of them exactly like the Yasha she remembered, and all of them were smiling too.
She watched her many reflections lean towards his. But then she stopped watching them, and just looked into Yasha’s long eyes.
‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she whispered. ‘But you’ve come.’ She could smell him; see the creases round his eyes as he grinned. He was really here, as handsome as he’d ever been, and so warm under her hands. Yet something was missing. She was still aware of every movement, of the way his eyelashes brushed his cheeks when he closed his eyelids, but it only was the near-miraculous familiarity of that sight that moved her now. There was none of the disconcerting heat and giddiness she remembered from before.
‘I’ve been so lonely,’ she stammered, wondering at its absence. ‘So afraid, and worried, because Horace is ill, you see, terribly ill, and I think he might…’ She couldn’t finish that thought. It was too complicated, too painful, and it might let in all the contradictions her mind didn’t have room for right now. Yasha didn’t respond, anyway. She hadn’t expected him to. He only liked big, bold ideas and had always treated Horace as an unnecessary encumbrance.
She sat down, rather suddenly, on one of the ornate sofas. He sat down too, and she laughed when he winced and wriggled as the violin dug into the sofa back, rejoicing at the comfort of his being here, now, by her side. She went on uncertainly, ‘But how did you get all this way? Why are you here?’
‘You went away,’ he said. She couldn’t help the sudden lurch of her heart, the twinge of uneasy pleasure, as he added, ‘You didn’t say goodbye. I needed to see you again.’ He’d never said he loved her, never put her above all the other things he valued; but surely this action spoke louder than any words?
But when, a moment later, he continued, ‘Because you’ve got the wrong violin,’ the illusion that whatever he was about to say might, after all, sweep her away on a tide of uncontrollable feeling gave way to the scratchy, dawning disappointment of reality. He added, with satisfaction, ‘I’ve brought you down the Strad.’
She didn’t believe him, at first; she made him get his violin out of its box.
She tiptoed into the bedroom, and got out the one she’d been carrying.
It was only when she’d picked up the two golden-brown bodies, and turned them round, and compared them, that she saw he was telling the truth.
‘You see?’ he said. He looked pleased.
At first, all Inna could do was shake her head in astonishment. How could they have been carrying that box around with them for all these weeks, guarding it so carefully, when it hadn’t even had the right violin in it? How could she have just taken Barbarian’s word for it that he’d got the Strad up from the store? Had she really been so dazed, before they left, that she hadn’t checked for herself? The thought of Felix Youssoupoff accusing her of stealing his violin was making her go hot and cold with shame.
‘Thank you,’ she kept murmuring. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
She so wanted to be grateful; she so wanted Yasha to have made this heroic dash south purely to save her. But had he really, prompted a niggling voice inside her, or was this just his way of escaping the dangerous mess he’d got himself into back there? Yet it was graceless even to think that, she told herself, her head spinning, for how incredible it also seemed, how single-minded, how devoted, to have tracked her down here, right at the other end of Russia …
‘But how did you find me?’ she finally remembered to ask.
He only grinned wider. ‘Maxim said you’d gone,’ he said simply. ‘And Marcus told me where. And this is the only hotel still working in Yalta.’
So it took a while before she plucked up courage to ask the other, harder question that had been slowly forming in her mind. ‘But why did you have the Strad anyway?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, it was a mistake,’ he said carelessly. ‘I’ve never been one for detail. I put the copy and the real one in the wrong boxes, ages ago. I’d been meaning to come back and sort it out for months. I just didn’t realize you’d take off like that.’
He swung her to him, and she let him. Again she was quietly surprised that she didn’t melt into him, as she once would have been unable to prevent herself from doing. Her body seemed have unlearned how to fit his. She could feel the cautious stiffness in her limbs.
‘None of that matters, anyway,’ Yasha finished. ‘The details. What matters is that I’ve found you, and here we both are.’
He sounded so happy, as if he hadn’t noticed how strangely detached she was feeling. For his sake, she wanted, or almost wanted, to be able to share his pleasure; to lose herself in this moment, to forget Horace and tomorrow. She certainly didn’t want the prickle of unease she now felt, the knowledge that something Yasha had said was wrong – something separate, that is, from the bigger wrongness that she felt of being in his arms at all.
‘Yasha,’ she whispered, stepping back, trying to work out where this suspicion might have come from. ‘There’s something I have to ask, something I’ve been wondering. Did you send those men to beat up Horace?’
He gave her a blank stare. ‘Me?’ he asked, looking bewildered. ‘Why would I do that?’
Almost against her will, she believed him. Relieved, she squeezed his hand, mutely asking forgiveness for her question.
It took a moment more for her to realize that whether or not Yasha had tried to harm Horace no longer made any difference to what happened now. What mattered was that she’d realized the damage she’d done him. What mattered was the new, trembling, overwhelming desire she’d become aware of in these past few days to get to safety with Horace; the hazy vision beginning to emerge in her mind of how they would be happy afterwards. That was what had stopped her humming the Scriabin tune, earlier on, she suddenly saw: not just the memory of playing it to the Lemans, long ago, but the hope of playing it again in some other yellow room, in some other time, with Horace listening. That was what she wanted.
She held tenderly on to Yasha, wishing she could somehow convey all this to him without hurting him, wanting him to know how much he still meant to her, even so …
And then it came to her.
‘I remember when you last touched those violins,’ she said, suddenly. Yes, she’d put her finger on it. All the doubts she’d ever had came crowding in. ‘It was months ago, a year or more. You came round to hand in the fiddle you’d been varnishing to the workshop – your copy. You went off to the storeroom to compare it with the real Strad. And then you left. It couldn’t have been just a mistake that you left with the Strad. You weren’t supposed to leave with anything.’
‘Well,’ he said, looking cornered now. ‘Well…’
He hung his head, and then looked at her reluctantly.
‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘It wasn’t a mistake. I did mean to take it.’
She nodded, bleakly disappointed to have caught him in a theft, or at best a lie; thinking how sad the Lemans would have been if they’d heard; remembering the darker side of Yasha that she’d tried to forget on the train. He’d have some explanation, of course. He always did. That was how he’d always been, wasn’t it? Seeing everything too simply; sweeping aside what he called ‘details’ and she thought of as ‘other people’. She’d wanted
to believe it was just the revolutionary in him, and that falling out of love with the Revolution had changed him. But this was who he was.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he added, and, for a moment, she was moved by the unfamiliar note of uncertainty in his voice, the pleading. Surely that hadn’t been there before? Then, looking ashamed, and scuffing at his feet, he added: ‘I didn’t steal it. Well, I did think, for a while, that I might requisition it, and give it to the Commissariat of Enlightenment, as a Former Aristocratic Person’s belongings. But that was just … an excuse I was making to myself. Really I just took it to look at for a while. Because I didn’t think I’d see you again. And it reminded me of you, sitting in the workshop, with your hair falling down over it, concentrating…’
Inna was surprised at the tears in her eyes.
‘You must believe me,’ he whispered. ‘You do, don’t you? I was just a fool. I didn’t know how to put things right. And I put off even thinking about it, because I was nervous of going back to the Lemans’ …’
He took her back in his arms. The clear lines she’d felt she was drawing began to sway and dissolve.
For a while, neither of them said anything. They just clung together, teetering between past and future.
‘Did you know’, Yasha said, eventually, ‘that there are English ships moored in the next bay over?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said, nuzzling at her neck, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Mmm?’
‘If I go with you tomorrow, to those ships, and help you get your Englishman on board. If we make sure he’s safe among his own kind…’
She stiffened. Waited.
‘… will you stay with me?’
He made it sound so easy. He raised his head, and looked at her, as if all she had to do was to say yes.
‘And do what?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted candidly. ‘Go down the coast to Constantinople, I suppose, if we can get there, get jobs, find a ship to take …
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