Perhaps, imperceptibly, the grandmother’s face turned towards Edward, who said uncomfortably, “Bonsoir, Madame. Enchanté.”
“No, no,” Mademoiselle Iskarov hissed. “Speak English. It may stimulate her.”
“How do you do?” Edward said.
Surprisingly, Mademoiselle Iskarov nudged him fiercely. “Go on.”
Falteringly, Edward said, “I like the flat a lot, you know.”
He was convinced he caught the grandmother’s filmy blue eyes flick back and forth from him to Mademoiselle Iskarov.
Raising her voice a fraction more, Mademoiselle Iskarov repeated, “Did you hear that? Mister Wenwright is very happy in Volodya’s flat.”
Still, the grandmother did not respond.
“Bon,” Mademoiselle Iskarov concluded, a little roughly, Edward thought, “If it’s like that –” She motioned to Edward. “Let’s go and have our apéritif.”
“Nice to meet you,” Edward murmured rather helplessly as Mademoiselle Iskarov ushered him out. The grandmother watched them go impassively.
“She has times like that,” Mademoiselle Iskarov explained in the hall. “There’s no point in persisting.”
Edward felt Mademoiselle Iskarov was being rather hard and unsympathetic. But, when he thought it over, there did seem something faintly perverse in the way the grandmother had chattered uninhibitedly when there was no one there and clammed up irremediably when she had visitors.
“What can I offer you to drink?” Mademoiselle Iskarov asked brightly. “You’ve done your duty now; you deserve it.”
Edward looked at the pleasingly well-stocked drinks cabinet. It was the old-fashioned sort which lit up when you opened its rounded walnut doors. “What do you suggest?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov tilted her head to one side and said coquettishly, “Vodka?”
Only at this point did it occur to Edward to wonder whether other guests were invited too. He had somehow assumed all along that the invitation was for him only; come over for a meal, quite casual, I, Mademoiselle Iskarov, will do my welcoming bit for a forlorn young foreigner. But now everything, beginning with the dress, was out of all proportion to such an occasion: the little black and red lacquered trays of cocktail titbits set out on the low table, the promise of the elaborate dinner prepared for him. Surely, he thought, with the start of an unformulated panic, there must be other people coming too?
The bottle of vodka which Mademoiselle Iskarov took out of the drinks cabinet bore no resemblance to any vodka Edward had ever seen; it was in a thickish blue-glass bottle at the bottom of which something spidery but plant-like was suspended.
He must have looked concerned because Mademoiselle Iskarov explained, “It’s home-made, a present from some friends of ours. Have you ever drunk vodka with green herbs?”
Edward hoped he could keep the apprehension out of his voice. “No, I can’t say I have.”
Mademoiselle Iskarov gave a gleeful chuckle. “Ah, you’re about to have an unforgettable experience.”
“I suppose,” Edward said light-heartedly, “It’s going to knock me out completely?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov passed him a generous measure. She giggled and, with a very accurate imitation of flirtatiousness, she answered, “No, not completely; just the right amount.”
She matched his drink and sat down in the high-backed armchair opposite him, sinking luxuriantly against its cushions. She lifted her glass. “Well, Na zdorovye.”
“Cheers,” said Edward.
One mouthful of the vodka was enough to let him know what was what. He reached hastily for something from one of the cocktail trays, which turned out, rather unpleasantly, to be a piece of marinaded fish. He gulped it down quickly and then, rather hopelessly, took another swig at the vodka to wash the taste away.
Mademoiselle Iskarov was watching him from the depths of her armchair. She had crossed her legs and, indolently, she was drawing circles with one sharp black shoe. “Well,” she asked him, “how do you like it here in Paris?”
“Not much,” said Edward. The combined attack on his senses by the vodka and the herring had temporarily distracted him from the worrying situation in hand. Now, as Mademoiselle Iskarov bestowed a high voltage smile on him and replied, “Ah good; we have something in common,” his apprehensions returned in force.
“What don’t you like about it?” he asked absent-mindedly.
Mademoiselle Iskarov heaved a tremendous sigh. Her dress, Edward couldn’t help noticing, even though he didn’t want to, gave a tremendous follow-up. “It’s cold, it’s unfriendly. You can live here all your life but they’ll never accept you. My mother came here when she was a baby, you know, but they still called her Russian till the end of her days.”
“But I thought,” Edward said tentatively, “from what you were saying the other day that you kept it up deliberately; that you liked being Russian.”
“That’s not the same thing at all,” Mademoiselle Iskarov reproved him. “Of course I ‘like being Russian’; I’d rather be Russian than some silly chi-chi little Parisienne. But I resent being an outcast because of it. Look,” she leapt up and beckoned Edward, concerned to find that he was already not quite rock solid on his feet, over to one of the windows. Dramatically, she yanked back the curtain and gestured across the street. From the fifth-floor apartment opposite a single yellow patch of light spilled out. The rest of the building was shuttered in darkness. “They don’t always close their shutters. Neither do we. How far away do we live from one another? Fifty metres? In the summer, with the windows open, we can sometimes hear one another’s voices. And how many times, do you suppose, in all the years that we’ve lived here have we had a friendly wave or a nod from our neighbours? Parfaitement; not once.” She smacked the curtains closed again. “That’s what the Parisians are like; they live in their little hermetically sealed homes, thinking blinkered chauvinistic thoughts in their hermetically sealed minds and unless you’re one of the zenfants de la patri-uh, unless you belong, you’re a nobody. Not, of course,” she concluded erratically, “that I would wish to be part of that milieu. Are you ready for some more vodka?”
“Oh gosh, I’m not sure,” said Edward.
“You want to keep your wits about you?” Mademoiselle Iskarov asked mischievously. “Why bother?”
Edward wasn’t sure whether the slight unsteadiness from the vodka downed too fast was responsible; in a remote but accessible region of his brain a figure from a strip cartoon, with inky hair standing on end, leapt to his feet crying, “Aaargh!” and fled.
“Well, are we waiting for other people?” he asked abruptly.
Mademoiselle Iskarov’s face collapsed into an expression of immeasurable offence. “I beg your pardon?”
“Are you expecting other people for dinner?” Edward repeated brutally. “I mean, if we’re waiting, yes, sure, I’ll have some more. But otherwise I think, on the whole, maybe I’d rather not.”
In the icy silence, Mademoiselle Iskarov drew herself upright. “What am I supposed to understand by that?”
“Only what I said,” Edward persisted uncomfortably. “This vodka’s pretty strong stuff. I don’t think I really ought to have another glass without a good reason.”
“I see,” Mademoiselle Iskarov commented haughtily. “And an enjoyable dinner with just the two of us presumably isn’t a good enough reason?”
To his embarrassment, Edward felt himself about to start giggling; her dignity was so ludicrously overdone. “Oh, come off it,” he pleaded. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
Mademoiselle Iskarov considered him for a moment. She was standing with the bottle at the ready. In Edward’s strip cartoon, which continued to flicker intermittently at the back of his brain, she might at any moment swoop as a female fury brandishing a rolling-pin. But, against all the odds, she grinned.
“Are you famished?” she asked him. “I’ll go and get our first course ready.”
In the living-room doorway, she stopped and tur
ned back to him. She pulled a teasingly reproachful face, culminating in a quick display of the tip of her pointed pink tongue.
The meal was superb. Whatever Edward might hold against Mademoiselle Iskarov on grounds of excessive touchiness, her culinary skills were flawless. They began with a deep red, peppery soup on which a clod of cream floated unashamedly. In Edward’s experience, women who were lavish cooks were usually not much to look at. In England, certainly, the best-looking girls weren’t interested in eating much more than salads. Mademoiselle Iskarov was the first woman he had come across whom you wouldn’t mind walking down the street with, who also evidently enjoyed a good spread. It was true there was just a little too much of Mademoiselle Iskarov, but she carried her surplus with undeniable style. In fact, without it, the pink dress would probably not have been nearly as eye-catching.
She had reappeared in the doorway after a good five minutes, during which Edward had wandered blurrily about the living-room, looking at the family mementoes. He had also, unwisely, taken an extra nip of the vodka after all, to stoke his courage. But when Mademoiselle Iskarov came back, her indignation seemed to have subsided. She gave a little mock bow in the doorway and said, “Le dîner est servi, Monsieur.”
She led Edward into a small, very full dining-room: a large dark dining-table filled most of the room and into what was left there were squeezed a quantity of matching straight-backed dining-chairs and a sizeable serving trolley. It must have been the noise of the trolley which had made Edward giggle nervously a few minutes earlier. He had heard the steady horror-film creaking and imagined another even older and frailer relative being wheeled out of the way.
The preparations which Mademoiselle Iskarov had revealed already ought to have prepared him for the sight of the dinner-table. But he was still so taken aback by the silver candlesticks and the white cones of starched napkins that, in combination with the talents revealed by the soup, he became too overwhelmed by the dimensions of the dinner to carry on a conversation. Mademoiselle Iskarov herself seemed, uncharacteristically, to have become rather inhibited. They drank their soup almost in silence. It was only when Edward offered to help clear the plates and Mademoiselle Iskarov protested, “No, no, you’re my guest; you just sit looking elegant and useless like an English lord,” and then added, “Listen, shall we drop this silly Madame-Monsieur business? My name is Irina. May I call you Edouard?” that, on the surface at least, things relaxed a little.
The main course was an incredibly complicated combination of roast meat wrapped around minced meat and rice and mushrooms and capers. Together with the accompanying heavy sauce and volume of vegetables, it created quite a challenge. Mademoiselle Iskarov, he knew it would be some time before he could think of her as Irina, kept his glass topped up from a bottle of excellent red wine which had been breathing on the trolley, and that helped. But it was as much as anything else to give himself a respite that he worked considerably harder at keeping up the conversation.
“Do you cook on this scale quite often?” he asked her. “Or am I the lucky one?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov went through a little rigmarole of fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I don’t entertain a great deal,” she said. “It’s difficult, you see, with Babushka. When Mama was alive, we used to have parties here quite often. But since –” she shrugged.
“Well, anyway, it’s wonderful,” Edward said hurriedly.
To his embarrassment, Mademoiselle Iskarov exclaimed, “Ach, you’re sweet.” She reached across the table as if she were about to pat him gratefully on the hand but at the last moment her hand halted a few inches above his and gave a symbolic pat to the air.
“Tell me something,” she asked. “Would you say you were a typical Englishman – of your generation?”
Edward gave her an amused smile. “Why d’you ask?”
“Well, I’ve never really known any Englishmen very well, apart from once, one very old one, and I just wondered. I mean, outwardly you seem, forgive me, very typically English and I just wondered if what I’m going to discover within will also be traditionally English?”
“I see,” Edward said jokingly, although he was actually a little disconcerted to be appraised so matter-of-factly as a specimen of English manhood. “You’ve really only invited me here for research purposes, is that it?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov guffawed, as though he had said something genuinely funny. “Yes,” she agreed. “Strictly for research purposes.”
Edward chose not to pursue what it might be about her answer which made him feel obscurely uncomfortable. Muzzily, he considered the question of whether or not he was a typical Englishman of his generation. He came to the sobering conclusion that he probably was; even his longing for distant horizons followed a well-trodden tradition. He felt, uneasily, that Mademoiselle Iskarov was beginning to gain the upper hand; nobody could possibly call her a typical young Frenchwoman.
Over the cheese, he asked her some more about her family. It turned out he had already heard of almost all of them: her mother, her grandmother, her Great-Aunt Elena, Dyadya Volodya. There was no one else to speak of; they were, as Mademoiselle Iskarov put it, becoming extinct. They had been a big family once, a Forsyte Saga she said, but somehow in the upheavals of history a lot of them seemed to have got lost. Mademoiselle Iskarov was the only member of her generation.
Edward, afflicted with what he had always considered a particularly second-rate collection of siblings and cousins, considered her situation with a mixture of envy and zoological fascination. She really was a rarity; the last surviving specimen of a vanishing breed. It gave her, he concluded, a mournful but not necessarily off-putting aura.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Mademoiselle Iskarov.
Edward smiled self-consciously. “Sorry. I was just trying to imagine what it must be like to be in your position; you know, the last one left.”
“You were looking at me,” Mademoiselle Iskarov reproached him, “as though I were some unusual but not biting furry animal stuffed in a museum.” She shuddered distastefully.
Edward laughed. “I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry. But you must see it’s rather fascinating for someone like me,” he added ingratiatingly, “coming from a typical English background.”
“Oh sure,” Mademoiselle Iskarov agreed bitterly. “It’s fascinating.” She propped her chin on one hand and contemplated her own predicament with what looked like gloomy pride.
Edward couldn’t help being impressed, though, by how swiftly she seemed to shake off her bad moods. A moment later, she jumped up, saying briskly, “Time for dessert,” whereupon Edward inadvertently groaned.
“I’m so full,” he explained. “Couldn’t we wait a bit?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov beamed with contented pride. “You mean my aim is achieved; I have overpowered you with my cuisine?”
Edward grinned. “You certainly have.”
Mademoiselle Iskarov rubbed her hands naughtily. “Now I have you in my clutches. I shall put you into a trance with some very special liqueur and you won’t even be fit to walk home. Shall we forget the dessert?”
Edward had managed to keep at bay for most of the meal the possibility that there might be a strand of seriousness behind Mademoiselle Iskarov’s parody of a Parisian seductress. The later it got, the more real the risk became.
He said firmly, “I certainly wouldn’t mind some coffee.”
He asked the way to the toilet while Mademoiselle Iskarov went to the kitchen to make the coffee. As he emerged from the bathroom, he saw outlined in the light coming from her room the blurry, round shape of the grandmother, whom he had assumed to be long tucked up in bed. He had to walk past her to get back to the living-room. She was obviously unsteady on her feet for she was holding onto the door jamb with both hands and it was impossible to tell whether the vivid concern in her eyes was caused by the sight of Edward still there so late in the apartment or by her own precariousness. He gave her a cheery “Hello” as he walked past and
even though he knew it was unreasonable, he couldn’t help feeling rebuffed by her staring silence. He didn’t say anything to Mademoiselle Iskarov about having seen the grandmother; he reckoned it must be trying enough having to live with your crazed grandmother at the age of thirty-six without being reminded of her presence at inopportune moments.
He couldn’t be sure but he thought Mademoiselle Iskarov had topped up her perfume while she was preparing the coffee. He caught a great gust of it as she bent to give him his gilt-edged cup and to offer him sugar and cream. Actually, it was not unpleasant; he just wasn’t used to such decibels of femininity.
He sat deliberately upright as he drank the coffee; opposite him, Mademoiselle Iskarov reclined in her armchair, her legs lengthily crossed. Against his better judgement, Edward had also accepted a glass of the special liqueur. He told himself every few sips it would be the only one.
Mademoiselle Iskarov’s matter-of-fact conclusion caught him unawares. “Well, I’m very glad I changed my mind and didn’t let Volodya’s flat to that Norwegian woman.”
“Sorry?” said Edward.
Mademoiselle Iskarov smiled smugly. “Yes, you don’t know, do you? You very nearly didn’t get Volodya’s flat. A couple of days before you came to look at it, we had somebody else interested, a Norwegian girl, and she seemed like a good tenant. We were going to let it to her. In fact, I’d completely forgotten you were coming to see it. We were just waiting for her bank reference. Only I preferred the look of you.”
Edward’s embarrassment was matched by his irritation; he didn’t at all like the thought that he had been an unwitting pawn in Mademoiselle Iskarov’s machinations.
“Well, I I only hope you won’t be disappointed in your judgement,” he said brusquely.
“Oh,” Mademoiselle Iskarov replied archly, “I doubt it.”
As soon as he had finished his coffee, Edward announced, almost in a rush, “Well, thank you very much. It’s been a lovely evening. I really must go.”
The Steppes of Paris Page 8