Hot Siberian (13 page)

The field adjacent to the maintained grounds of the house was made up mainly of ryegrass and purple clover. A great many bees were working in it. It was also plentifully scattered with dandelions. Beautiful commoners, Vivian called them. Nikolai, to avoid the argument with himself that he was acting foolish, concentrated on not trampling dandelion heads. Thus his course was a zigzagging one all the way to an old stone wall. There was a gate a short way off to the left, but Nikolai just climbed up and over. And came down on what he knew was Archer land. The stream was a quarter mile farther on, but it was easy going over undulating, rockless meadow that had been cleared several centuries ago.

When Nikolai came within sight of the stream he checked his pace and attitude to a casual stroll. The stream at its normal level, which it was now, averaged about twenty feet wide and ran from two to seven feet deep. Its advantage for fly fishing was that much of it wound through open land, allowing uninhibited backcasts. Nikolai had numerous times overheard Vivian and Archer discussing the merits of this stream—how it offered a variety of challenges such as bends, deep holes, runs, and falls, and how it wasn't stocked, and every trout in it was native. Prince Charles had fished it a few times and been delighted, it was said.

The camaraderie of fly fishing was something Nikolai didn't try to share with Vivian and Archer. He refused even to give it a try, declined Archer's offer to show him how to go about it. They were, Nikolai reasoned, too far ahead of him in this. Together they had fished the Test and the Itchen. They had fished for salmon in Scotland along some of the most desirable private beats of the Tay, the Spey, the Dee, and the Tweed, and in Ireland along the Erriff and the Bullynahinch. The only trout fishing Nikolai had ever done was back home with Lev. They'd used worms and grasshoppers for bait, which were anathema to Vivian and Archer. So to hell with it, Nikolai concluded,
let
them have it.

Where were they?

Upstream or down?

From the grassy bank Nikolai spotted bootprints in the mud at water's edge. They were pointed downstream, so he made off in that direction. He passed by a tree which had an enameled metal sign nailed to its trunk,
POACHERS BEWARE
in discreet black and white. Archer's warning.

Around a bend he caught sight of what resembled a long single strand of golden hair against the sky, horizontally lengthening, increasing out of itself. It looped with light grace and reversed its course, rode upon the air with buoyant ease, and disappeared. It was Vivian's fly and line being cast. Nikolai walked along the edge of the bank to the spot.

“Get the hell back from the bank!” she snapped at him, hardly breaking her concentration on the swirling pool fifty feet away that was her target.

Nikolai jumped back from the edge and knelt. Now he couldn't see either her or the stream. He crawled to the edge. She was out in the stream, standing on a submerged gravel bed, the water fast around her knees. Her figure was lost in chest-high waterproofed nylon waders and a beige tackle vest over a blue chambray shirt. Her hair was entirely concealed within the crown of a black beaked cap. With the outfit she was wearing, her hair tucked out of sight and not a dab of makeup on, she looked both beautiful and handsome, Nikolai thought, like one of those sexually ambiguous young creatures who were the dears and darlings of the sophisticated milieu of London, Rome, and especially Paris.

She began another cast. Her eight-and-a-half-foot graphite rod was like a whip; it whistled as it cut the air. Her yellow-ocher line of woven silk flew close above Nikolai's head, causing him to duck. He lay on his back and watched her line with sharp barbed hook and deceitful fly on the end of its leader sail back and forth above him. Finally he felt sure enough that it wouldn't cost him an eye to peer over the bank. Vivian was reeling in her line, giving up on that pool. She sloshed across the stream to the near edge of it, she got down on her knees, and dipped her entire face in the running water for a drink. She climbed the bank and respectfully laid her rod on the grass. She let out a noisy sigh of relief as she dropped beside Nikolai. “You spooked him,” she said. “He was right there about to go for it, but you spooked him.”

Contrite silence from Nikolai.

Her forgiveness was a kiss on his cheek followed by a quick on-and-off smile.

He really needed that kiss. Actually, he needed a better one. Why should he be feeling so emotionally scuffed this morning? he wondered. Wasn't it the woman who was supposed to have that kind of hangover? The worst thing would be for him to let her know how he felt, to ask for it. “Where's Archie?” he inquired with friendly concern.

“Christ, I'm roasting,” she said. She removed her cap, only slightly disturbing her pinned-up hair. Her face was wet from the stream, but her throat and the back of her neck were beaded with perspiration and her shirt was soaked darker at the underarms.

“Catch anything?”

“Two right off. I let them go because it was so easy and promising and I didn't want to shorten the fun by making my catch too fast. However, since then, I can't get a rise. Seems the word has been spread.” Once in a trout talk with Archer she'd insisted that trout had a way of warning one another, of saying in trout talk: “Hey, watch what you eat, the enemy is around.”

“You were dead to the world this morning,” she said.

She
should have been, Nikolai thought.

“Did you have breakfast?” she asked and looked to make sure there'd be no bees beneath her when she lay back.

Nikolai decided to fib. “I had breakfast.”

“I didn't,” she complained.

He wished he'd thought to bring her something, a pear and cheese or something.

She seemed to read his mind, told him without looking at him: “
Ya tebya lyublyu
.” Then, without a pause: “That's my kind of sky. Clouds such as those shape themselves into all sorts of things if one has patience with them.”

“I love you too,” Nikolai told her. Then it became clear to him what was chafing him. Not the feeling of having been used, as he had suspected. At that moment, there in the English grass by the English stream with Vivian riding the world on her back, he was stabbed by the limitations of their love. He had over their months been pricked now and then by this practical problem, but never so deep or so sharply. Each time he'd been able to avoid confronting it with distraction and enjoyment or by placing faith in procrastination, by saying inside that the circumstances would change for the better, that Vivian could be unpredictable, that he must wait and see, wait and see. Temporizing was no longer possible, however. He had to face up to the fact that the love that was now theirs was as much as they would ever have. It was remarkable, yes, but it would not, barring some miraculous radical turn, be allowed to grow as good loves normally do. There'd be no marriage and children and all such events of fused lifetimes.

He gazed at her. Her eyes were shut, what was she thinking? His throat felt crowded. To lift the moment he said: “We ought to go see if Archer has bought the catch of some poacher.”

A genuine smile from Vivian.

They walked downstream and found Archer as he was about to descend to stream level to challenge a stretch of slower, deeper, jade-colored water. He was entirely caught up in it, his eyes a bit glazed and darty. “Some good ones along here,” he said. “Always are. In fact this is where Charlie had at it with a monster, so he said.”

Nikolai assumed Charlie to Archer was Prince Charles.

Vivian joined Archer in slipping down the bank and wading out into the stream. Before they'd gone a third of the way out, the water was up to their waists. The banks there were overhung, eaten away underneath from when the stream had been higher and rushing. Those overhung places were cool, dark sanctuaries that suited the antisocial nature of trout. They lurked in under there, and Vivian and Archer hoped to lure them out.

They did. With the help of a timely hatch of nymphs that formed a thick, playful cloud above the water's surface. First Vivian, then Archer executed perfect casts, placed hook-bearing imitations of nymphs among the hatch and fooled two trout each. They were the best eating size: large enough not to inspire unbearable pity, small enough for the skillet.

Vivian tossed one of her catches up onto the bank for Nick to see. He took in the trout's beauty, the bright specks that peppered its flanks. He held the trout high and recited Shakespeare.

“
The pleasant'st angling is to see

The fish cut with her golden oars the silver stream

And greedily devour the treacherous bait
.”

Archer threw Nikolai a congenial, approving look.

A trout shot downstream. It brushed against Vivian's leg. A trout so huge it caused a bow wake on the water and so fast it was only a brownish blur. It caused Vivian's heart rate to jump. She appealed to Archer. It was his turn to cast. However, being a British gentleman, with Etonian regard for manners and all that, surely he would defer to Vivian, allow her first chance at that huge fish.

Archer didn't think twice about it. Vivian might as well not have been there. He put his mind to his cast and, while Vivian glowered, he dropped the fly forty feet away, where he believed the trout would be. He barraged that spot with casts before giving up. “Gone,” he said. “By now he's half a mile downstream.”

“You're finished with him, then?” Vivian asked, cocking her head.

“He never stopped,” Archer contended.

Vivian put on sunglasses, the wraparound type with thick black frames and plenty of lens. They were polarized to eliminate reflections and glare from the surface of the water. She craned upstream and scanned downstream. She spotted the trout at a curved area of the right bank about thirty feet away. She pointed it out to Archer. It was where blackberry canes arched out and down, a thick, madly woven net of thorny red and green canes. Evidently the trout had chosen the spot not only because it was comfortably shady but also because it was so inaccessible. Any food that came that way would have to be authentic.

“I'll wager anything I can seduce him,” Archer said, readying his line.

Vivian grabbed at his reel. “You've had your try!” she contended adamantly.

Archer gritted and growled at her. For a moment Nikolai thought the man capable of adolescently thrashing the water and scaring the fish away for spite. “That's probably Charlie's monster,” he said petulantly, reeling in his line and biting the fly off his leader.

Vivian poor-Archered him once, then surveyed the big trout-blackberry problem. She removed a plastic fly case from one of the many pockets of her vest. It contained an assortment of dries and wets. She knew them by name: Sooty Olive Sedge, Welshman's Button, Blue Winged Hare's Ear, Little Cinnamon Ant, Female Snowbug, and a favorite with which she'd never caught anything, the White Winged Curse. After a long moment of indecision she dismissed all those engagingly named, colorfully tied buggers for one she called her Hairy Black Winker. She'd tied this fly herself on a No. 23 hook. It consisted of four pairs of dark false eyelashes, well curled, and a little tuft of silver fox fur that she'd plucked from a fat foxtail stole she'd since contributed to a benefit shop, the proceeds of which were supposed to go to London's more beset unwed mothers.

“He'll never go for that,” Archer scoffed.

His scorn didn't faze her. The only reason she didn't use the Hairy Black Winker more often, she'd always claimed, was her sense of fair play. She tied it onto the leader and was about to cast when she decided the trout was already leery from the many casts Archer had dropped and would be suspicious of anything presented to him in that manner. Wading to the bank, she found a dry twig. She broke off a three-inch section of it and discarded the rest. She stuck the mere point of the fly's hook into the bark of the twig. Just barely enough to hold. She placed the twig with fly attached on the surface of the water and let the current take it. She steered the course of the twig as best she could with her rod. It floated in under the blackberry brambles.

“No fair,” Archer whined.

“All's fair,” Vivian maintained. She waited until the twig and its passenger were in place before giving the line an ever-so-slight jerk. The Hairy Black Winker came free of the twig, was now afloat on its own.

The trout simultaneously lunged and opened its wide jaws. It must have struck at the Hairy Black Winker more out of anger than hunger. Of course, it was, no doubt, much angrier when it felt the hook that thing had hidden.

Vivian set the hook. Now if only the trout would come out and make a run for it, tire himself out crisscrossing, fighting her line and the current. But the big trout hadn't gotten so big by being stupid. He stayed in under the brambles, making use of them. He thrashed, riled the water, boiled it, came up out of it and got a swift but good look upstream at his adversary. He'd seen her kind before. They were always trouble.

The fight lasted thirty seconds.

Vivian's line went slack.

She reeled it in,
sans
her Hairy Black Winker. “The fucker got away!” she exclaimed bitterly. She sloshed out of the stream, clambered up the bank, strode past Nikolai as though he were a post. He felt radiated by her fury.

She made for home, straight and hard, the heels of her wading brogues indenting the turf of the field, stream water squishing from their insteps. A scarlet tanager flashed by for appreciation. Although it was reddest of all red birds and her favorite, Vivian didn't give it a glance.

Nikolai and Archer followed after her.

But didn't catch up.

CHAPTER

7

BY MIDAFTERNOON VIVIAN HAD ABSORBED MOST OF HER
soreheadedness over having lost the monster trout. She was working in the garden, figuring bills on the terrace, reading in the hammock. It was like her to undertake two or three things at the same time. That way she seldom had to give much to either boredom or perseverance. As might be supposed, it wasn't unusual for her not to complete any of the things she set out to do. When that happened she blamed time, accused it of having run out on her.