How had it happened? How could she have lost everything? Her boys? Her husband? Her lifestyle? Her home? How did she get to be last in line and so utterly alone? Good questions. Unanswerable. Maybe she was too bruised by events to find answers. Curious, but too crippled to seek any answers. And what, after all, did it matter now?
Feebly Anoushka waved from the rail on A deck to the boys and Robert down below on the dock. They looked so happy, so full of life and enthusiasm. And why not? They were going home. Robert had everything he wanted. She tried to paste a happy smile on her face for the boys’ sake and thought, How cruel youth can be. How insensitive, selfish, self-centred. She kept reliving the last three days. How was it possible she was in this hell? Only a few days. It seemed a lifetime.
The boys were waving now with both arms, great arcs in front of themselves, throwing kisses as the ship was slipping its moorings and lumbering away from the dock. How she loved them. They were the only people on the dock except for the longshoremen pushing the covered gangways, working the massive hemp cables that helped launch the ship.
Her husband and sons were there because of Robert’s connections. Always Robert’s connections. Those little privileges that men of skill and renown are rewarded with were part and parcel of Robert’s life. She asked herself with some bitterness whether famous doctors’ ex-wives still got favours, whether the cachet of achievement by their ex-husbands still rubbed off on them. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes and now she too waved with both arms and pretended enthusiasm as she bid farewell to life as she knew it.
A bitter cold wind was whipping off the river. Her family were dancing, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm as the mighty Cunard liner backed into the Hudson River. The blast of her horn, a dramatic, romantic sound, echoed against the buildings on either side. Anoushka leaned out over the rail and watched Robert and her children recede: become smaller and smaller, mere dots, pin points of people against the massive landscape of the terminal and Manhattan rising majestically behind them. A gust of wind whipped under her sable-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hat and blew it from her head. She grabbed for it but in vain. Anoushka watched it tumble and turn on the currents of air before it drifted down between the side of the ship and the terminal. A longshoreman watching the English liner make its grand exit chased after it. The elegant Adolfo headgear eluded him and drifted down further to the water.
The boys broke away from Robert and ran towards the end of the dock, trying to catch it. They missed and the river made its claim on Fifth Avenue, taking possession of the hat. It bobbed along on the waves created by the churning of the massive ships propellers and then, quite suddenly, drowned, disappeared, never to be seen again. The last indignity. She had even lost her hat.
Chapter 4
‘Clearly, this is not about a hat, though it was a very pretty one.’
Anoushka turned from the rail to look at the man, tears streaming down her face. She’d not been aware of him standing next to her. His words only added to her distress.
The man opened his coat and drew a clean white handkerchief from his trouser pocket. He pressed it in her hand. Anoushka covered her eyes with it and struggled to compose herself, but it was impossible. She was sinking under the weight of too much misery. She clung to the rail of the ship for support as her knees buckled. Wiping her eyes with his handkerchief and a trembling hand, she asked barely above a whisper, ‘Help me.’
The tall broad-shouldered man looked round him for a ship’s officer, a fellow passenger, anyone, to come to her aid. But they were virtually alone in the bow of the ship, the other passengers having sought shelter from the wind and cold in the enclosed section of the deck.
She saw him looking round and grabbed on to his arm. ‘No, please, discreetly. I don’t want to make a scene.’
He placed an arm round her and that did give her the physical support, the comfort she so desperately needed. The warmth and strength of his body seemed to energise her. She pulled herself up and tried to walk. Her steps were unsure, wobbly. ‘I’m so ashamed,’ she told him through her sobs and gasps for breath. ‘Embarrassing, this is so embarrassing.’
‘Let’s just get you out of here, and to some private place where you can cry and beat your chest, if that’s what you want.’
Anoushka wrenched her arm away and glared at him. ‘You think I’m enjoying this?’
He supported her once more, his hand on her elbow, and kept her walking. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ he told her. With that he pulled open the doors to the glassed-in area and indicated to her that she should step over the threshold. Under his breath he mumbled, ‘Shit, how I hate women in distress.’
She struggled to release herself from him and told him, ‘Then just go away.’
‘What’s your stateroom number? I’ll see you there. That’s the best thing to do if you don’t want a scene. You look a mess, clearly not in control of yourself, and if I don’t help you someone else will have to.’
She told him the number of her stateroom. Then, all control lost, burst into tears again and leaned against the stranger.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
Anoushka woke up in panic. She had a tremendous headache. The room was dark. Completely disorientated, it took her several seconds and the movement of the ship to remind her she was on the QE2 crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Groping in the dark, she finally found the bedside lamp and switched it on.
The room had three portholes and was panelled with a warm honey-coloured wood. She was lying on an overly large bed. Her coat was draped over the arm of a wing chair. She swung her legs off the bed. The headache seemed to be concentrated in the back of her eyes. She covered them with her fingers and pressed gently then dropped her chin on to her chest. She sat there like that, head lowered, for some time and with the most peculiar feeling.
Emptiness, a profound sense of meaninglessness, had taken possession of her. Somewhere in the depths of sleep and despair her emotions had somehow petrified. Had they magically vanished, or were they merely deep frozen, to be resurrected at some future date? Who was to know? And what did it matter? Whatever had happened to them they were gone, and there sat the same Anoushka Usopova Rivers looking like herself but not at all the same person she had known herself to be. She had awakened as a woman with a past that no longer meant anything to her. Worse, she was aware that Robert, Alexis and Mishka were still in her life, to be dealt with more than loved. Emotional burn-out. Anoushka was aware of that but could do nothing about it. The fact of the matter was she no longer cared.
She rose from the bed. She was barefoot. She looked round the room and spotted her shoes placed neatly together on the floor next to the wing chair. The man. She flushed pink with embarrassment and touched the side of her cheek. She half expected it to be sore where he had slapped her hard. He had been escorting her to her cabin, but rather than calming, her hysteria seemed to have intensified. Her sobs had been uncontrollable, and she had been hyperventilating so badly that her body had been shaking violently.
Once he had her in his stateroom he had actually to pull her up and brace her with one hand, then slap her hard across the face, saying, ‘Sorry ’bout this.’
It had worked. He shocked her sober and she had covered her face with her hands and cried softly as he led her to his bedroom and sat her down on the bed. He left her to return with some tablets and a tumbler of whisky, and ordered, ‘Drink this down.’ She had. He then pulled her up from the bed and removed her coat, then sat her down again and swung her legs up on to the bed. That was the last thing she remembered, except that the man had muttered as she was passing out, ‘Damn it, how I hate hysterical women.’
He had loosened her clothes. She went to the mirror to adjust them and was shocked by how pale she was, how messy. Her mascara had smudged in dark circles round her eyes and rivulets of tears had streaked her cheeks. In the bathroom she washed her face and tried to make herself more presentable, at least as presentable as red and swollen eyes would a
llow. She had to get through the corridors of the ship to her own stateroom without attracting any attention. All she wanted was a hot bath and to go to sleep again.
There were signs of the man everywhere. Damp towels lying over the edge of the bath or dropped carelessly on the floor, shaving brush and razor, aftershave, scented soap, a leather sponge bag. Toothpaste with the cap off and squeezed from the top lay on the washstand. A dirty shirt in the laundry basket, a black sock draped over the basket’s edge. He had obviously bathed and changed while she had been asleep.
Anoushka rubbed her forehead, trying to remember what her good Samaritan had looked like. She couldn’t. Somehow not being able to put a face to him motivated her to hurry from the bathroom and slip into her shoes and coat. She looked for a handbag for several minutes until she realised she had left it in her stateroom when she had gone on deck with her family and friends.
Opening the stateroom door to leave, Anoushka was surprised to find that it was not the corridor she stepped into but a large beautifully appointed sitting room in creams and beiges among more polished wood panelling. A large vase of dark and fully blown long-stemmed red roses sat on a circular marble table in the centre of the room and a Persian carpet, dramatic for its subtlety of colour and pattern, was unexpected in a stateroom on what was after all a commercial ocean liner. All the lamps were turned on and cast a warm, soft glow around the room. There were stacks of books piled on a desk, a sheaf of white paper, a typewriter and laptop computer, a mug with dozens of sharp-pointed lead pencils sticking up in it.
Old habits don’t die easily, not even when you are emotionally dead. An avid reader herself, any book was of interest to Anoushka. She looked at one title and was surprised to see that it was a Japanese edition, the one directly underneath the French edition of the same book, the next a Russian title, all of which she could read. All three book titles translated differently but the author was clearly the same – Hadon Calder. A name she knew well, in common with the rest of the world. Had her Good Samaritan been Hadon Calder? The very possibility sent Anoushka fleeing from the room.
To have imposed on someone she had admired for years and not even known who he was, if indeed that had been him, only proved to her what a state she had been, was still in.
It was two in the morning and the corridors were empty, a relief for Anoushka because she got lost and had to accept a cabin steward’s help in finding her way. The moment she stepped into the room, attractively appointed and with a small private balcony, the day and its events loomed up in front of her.
Anoushka spent the next three days in her stateroom taking only breaths of air on the balcony where she stared empty-minded across the cold Atlantic waves. The events that had taken place on her arrival were completely blanked from her mind. She picked at the food served to her in her room. She neither read nor watched TV. All concentration gone, she did little but sleep and take long baths and drifted in time and space.
It wasn’t so much boredom as claustrophobia that finally, on the afternoon of the fourth day, drove Anoushka from the confines of her room. She needed the wind on her face, and space, and to walk. And walk she did, endlessly, like a lioness escaped from her cage.
A new face in first class, she was not the only one feeling the claustrophobia of a luxury ship’s crossing. Many a passenger was to lower a book or paper, thrilled to see a new face, a mystery woman. She ignored their smiles, the occasional friendly greeting.
Anoushka did not feel the adventuress she was supposed to be, more a wanderer with no place to go. In limbo. That was it. She was in a place of oblivion, and once she realised that, she came out of the living coma she had suspended herself in since the QE2 had pulled away from the dock, leaving her life behind her. Where do wanderers go? More to the point, how do they work out where they want to go? Where was she going? Southampton to dock, London, and an open ticket to the world. Daunting. But something to contemplate.
She asked the deck steward for a chair out in the fresh air and the sun, somewhere sheltered from the wind. And there she sat, tucked under a blanket, and thought not about the future but the several days she had locked herself away on the QE2, in mourning for the death of a marriage, her life as she had known it, her happiness. Lost days and nights of which she could remember nothing. Time, her lifetime, lost forever, wiped out of her share of existence. Suddenly she made the decision: Never again. No more lost days. She wanted to live every minute of every day, no matter what it was to bring.
She felt the warmth of the sun’s rays on her face. It made her skin tingle and she felt herself coming alive. A minute at a time, a day at a time, to live every aspect of life, and want nothing from it. How else would she be able to discover herself again, new, fresh, without carrying the heavy baggage of the past on her back? She sighed and felt as if a great weight had been lifted off her. The lid of her coffin? She couldn’t quite smile. Resurrection was one thing, happiness a great deal to ask for. To live again seemed quite enough. Another deep sigh, and she mumbled aloud, ‘Come on, Mr Sun, do your stuff, heal me.’
She enjoyed a cat nap, short and sweet and very comforting. And when Anoushka opened her eyes she felt if not a new then certainly a different woman, possibly one with a new sense of adventure. She could almost understand the enthusiasm her sons had felt for her voyage into the unknown.
The sun was very low in the sky when Anoushka abandoned the deck for her stateroom. The moment she opened the door she knew that it was not a happy choice. The walls seemed to close in on her. One more night. You can live with that, she told herself. She had found some strength to fight off her demons and that realisation lifted her spirits enormously. She went to the wardrobe and chose the dress she would wear for dinner. A stone coloured crêpe-de-chine full-length evening dress, strapless and pencil straight with a slit up the back, worn with a three-quarter-length silk chiffon coat of the same colour and banded in the same crêpe-de-chine. Robert had bought it for her in Paris. She had only worn it once, and until now had considered it too young and glamorous for her.
She walked across the room holding it up against her and looked in the mirror over the chest of drawers. Anoushka was shocked at what she saw. She looked drawn, drugged with despair, like someone who had suffered a tremendous shock. It was all in the eyes: shock, pain, suffering. She touched her cheek with her hand; at least the sun had given her some colour. Anoushka ran her fingers through her hair. Still a pretty woman, but how had she allowed herself to become so – well, matronly, there was no other word for it. She had of course been right about the dress, it needed a vivacious woman. The woman Robert had wanted her to be or he would never have bought such a dress.
Clearly a visit to the beauty salon was in order. A tall order for Anoushka who detested the hairdresser’s and all those beauty treatments other women were so fond of. They had never been a part of her life. Clean hair, a little mascara, lipstick, and that was it. Her good looks and Robert’s love had always been enough. Now that was gone. She fled from her stateroom to the first-class beauty salon.
She was the last to leave, but when she did she looked more glamorous than she had done for many years. That look of a well-to-do suburban matron and mother had been buffed away considerably. She received a few tips from the salon’s beautician, Denise: a touch of mocha-coloured shadow and more than a hint of dark brown mascara, a lip pencil outlining the sensuous lips coloured with the same soft shade of lipstick she favoured, a blusher of soft tawny beige, all added so much, masked to some extent the traumas she had suffered. Her shoulder-length hair looked more silvery-blonde. Layers had been cut into it by the endlessly chattering, and morale-boosting, hair stylist, Charmaine. It had more lift and body and a soft wave to it. Gone was the ten-year-old straight and sensible bob.
Walking back to her stateroom Anoushka noticed that the few people she saw were dressed for dinner – black tie or evening gowns – and all heading for the dining room. She was late, very late, and still in her wide white flannel cu
lottes and white silk Armani shirt. She passed one of the cocktail lounges and went in for a glass of champagne. It was deserted except for the staff and one couple on the far side of the room. She felt no compulsion to rush, merely asked the waiter to call the dining room and say that she would be late for dinner.
That was Anoushka’s first realisation that she could do anything she wanted to do. There was no husband, there were no children, home or commitments to consider. Just herself. A fact of her new life, too strange even to dwell on. The waiter brought some cheese straws and refilled her glass.
‘You mustn’t forget your books, Mrs Rivers,’ said the young man, placing two dictionaries, a pad of paper, a notebook and a Mont Blanc fountain pen on the small table.
She was about to protest that the books were not hers, but having been taken by surprise was too slow. The waiter was gone through the glass doors from the lounge into the corridor before she could say anything. No matter. She would merely leave them there for someone else to come and claim.
It didn’t take long before curiosity got the better of her. Clearly someone was doing a translation from Japanese into English, and badly. Without much thought she took the pen in her hand and corrected nearly two paragraphs. Lost in the work and relaxed for the first time in weeks she was not aware of the man who drew a chair up to her table and sat down. He startled her with, ‘I hate other people using my fountain pen.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry. I got carried away. It’s so badly translated. I thought I could help.’
‘You know more than sayonara, so you think you’re a translator?’
‘I said I was sorry.’ And Anoushka replaced the top on the pen and shoved the papers and books across the table. She rose from the banquette, very embarrassed and wanting to leave.
He stopped her with, ‘Oh, sit down. You seem to be continually barging into my privacy. How badly?’
Objects of Desire Page 6