Midnight in St. Petersburg (13 page)

It was only when Madame Leman drew close that she realized what he was listening to. Inna was playing the violin up in the attic.

‘You're keeping a nightingale in the attic, I hear,' he said, bowing over her hand. As ever, he had impeccable white gloves on, and a fresh flower in his buttonhole: every inch the English gentleman; and everything he said, in his beautifully modulated voice, was in idiomatic if exotically accented Russian. (Unusual, this, because so often, with foreigners, you had to struggle away in bad French; but he
had
been here for ten years, after all.)

He smiled at her as he swept back up. ‘How lovely…'

Madame Leman smiled back, partly because you always did with Horace Wallick – his pleasure in life was so infectious – but partly, too, because of the voice in her head whispering, Now
this
could be the answer to all our problems.

‘It's our new guest,' she said, in as light a tone as he'd used. ‘Yes, she plays beautifully, doesn't she? If I could only persuade you to stay and eat with us – do say you will; I've made Ukrainian borshch; I know you like that – I'll introduce you. I was just about to call her down for dinner.'

*   *   *

In the end, Madame Leman didn't even need to eke out the food. Yasha, it turned out, had gone off on one of his mysterious errands, carrying a box of those Beilis campaign leaflets he'd written. So at the dinner table, Madame Leman sat Horace next to the empty seat that would be Inna's.

Carefully, if covertly, she watched his reactions as Inna came in. Inna looked fresh and pink-cheeked in a worn, but clean, dove-grey dress. She'd had the foresight to stop in the kitchen (you couldn't fault her on trying to please), and was carrying the soup tureen. She had her eyes turned modestly down, but she couldn't keep the beginning of a smile off her lips. She looked radiant; sparkling enough to make both Marcus and his father melt, at once, into protective answering smiles.

Quickly, she turned her gaze on Madame Leman. ‘Do let me help,' she said eagerly. ‘That soup smells delicious. Would you like me to serve it?'

But Madame Leman only waved her to her place, waiting for her to notice Horace Wallick, who was on his feet at her side, already half smiling, though with far more composure than either of the other men. He was looking at her as if he knew a joke he wasn't telling.

‘Inna, this is…' she began her introduction.

Inna's eyes widened as she took in the newcomer, and her lips parted slightly. To Madame Leman's secret gratification, she then blushed and dropped her eyes. But it was Madame Leman whose eyes widened next, as Inna bobbed her head in a sketchy bow, and murmured, ‘Why, Mi-ster Wall-ick…'

‘You know each other already?' she couldn't help exclaiming.

‘Why, yes,' Horace Wallick began, turning to her. ‘We ran into each other this morning, at the
oddest
…'

His eyes were sparkling. He was clearly ready to tell one of his stories. He was a great gatherer of urban eccentrics, and good at witty descriptions of the latest oddities he'd found. The Lemans leaned eagerly forward.

But Inna had screwed up her face into a rueful, charmingly self-deprecating expression that Madame Leman hadn't seen her use before, and was shaking her head, just a playful fraction. ‘Oh, please don't go on, Mis-ter Wallick,' she said prettily. ‘You weren't to know, but I've alarmed everyone here quite enough already today with my stories of visiting peasant mystics. Please, let's forget it ever happened.'

Why, Madame Leman thought, not entirely happily, the child could be surprisingly sophisticated when she wanted to be.

Horace burst out laughing. ‘Then our assignation this morning will be our secret, Miss Feldman,' he agreed with every appearance of delight. ‘And by the way, do please just call me Horace. Everyone else here does.'

‘Do sit down, everyone, or the soup will get cold,' Madame Leman called, and began to ladle out the borshch.

Horace was nothing if not a practised conversationalist. As soon as he'd unfurled his napkin, he set to amusing Inna with mocking stories about his master, Carl Fabergé, who was Swiss by birth and peppery by nature, and whose inability to suffer fools gladly made his relations with his most important client fraught with tension.

‘There's never a problem with the Emperor, who makes no claims to artistic taste,' Madame Leman overheard Horace confide, and her heart swelled gratefully as she saw him leaning towards Inna, making it seem that the jewelled, sophisticated world he was talking about was hers, too. ‘But the Empress is a different proposition. Her combination of a rudimentary notion of art and curiously middle-class stinginess often puts poor Monsieur Fabergé into the most tragicomic situations. She accompanies her orders with her own sketches, and sets the price in advance. And since it's impossible, both technically and artistically, to make whatever it is according to her sketches, all kinds of tricks have to be invented to explain the inevitable changes. Sometimes Monsieur Fabergé blames us, the masters, and says we misunderstood his instructions. And sometimes he says, as apologetically as he can, that her sketch got lost. There's no point in offending her, or charging her more than she's dictated in advance. But, oh,' and he laughed, ruefully, ‘after one of these transactions, how well advised you are to get away for the afternoon.'

Madame Leman watched Inna dissolve into sympathetic laughter.

‘Eat, eat, dear children,' she heard herself saying happily through the steam from the tureen. ‘Dear guests, eat.'

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was late when Yasha came in. He stuck his head around the door of the yellow drawing room on his way to bed, just to be sociable. The Leman parents were in there, just the two of them, playing cards. There were several empty glasses of wine about the place.

‘We missed you. We had a guest,' Leman said, following Yasha's eyes. He looked contented. So, Yasha saw with relief, did his wife. ‘And a very entertaining evening.'

‘The Englishman,' Madame Leman broke in, all smiles. ‘The painter. He was very impressed with Inna's playing. Said she should be on the stage. Far better than half the girls you see giving concerts. Far prettier, too.'

Yasha barely took in Madame Leman's words. He didn't know what Englishman she meant (the Lemans often assumed he must know all their friends). No, he was noticing something else. Madame Leman had lost that watchful look he'd noticed earlier, and was back to her usual relaxed self. Her eyes were shining, and her hair, in rivulets of ashy blond, was coming loose from the precarious arrangement of pins she could never quite get to stay in place.

‘Did
you
have a good evening, dear?' she added kindly. ‘Did your friends like your leaflet?'

He nodded, scuffing his boots as he recalled the praise they'd showered on it, feeling a bit more that all was right with the world. ‘Think so,' he grunted, and went on up the stairs.

Inna's door was closed, but she was playing again: a perky Strauss waltz this time. Yasha went into his own room and quietly shut his door.

All those things he'd been thinking about her earlier: well, he'd been a bit overwrought, hadn't he? At any rate, she wasn't marshalling any unstoppably Russian musical armies any more, just dancing in a Viennese ballroom in her mind, maybe, dreaming of the Blue Danube …

He picked up his own violin.

The wall between them was so thin that she might as well have been in here with him. He could hear everything. He could practically hear her breath.

As she went back into the waltz's refrain, Yasha joined in, first counting the three-four
dum-
dee-dee beat of the piece, then, very softly, starting to supply the playful staccato ‘dee-dee' chords of the tune's accompaniment.

Through the partition, he heard her slow down. For a phrase or two, she played with her bow just touching the strings, very quietly and questioningly, as though trying to work out what was going on, but he just kept on duetting, in time with her, and just as quietly. He couldn't help smiling at the thought of her surprise or imagining her cheeks just touched with pink.

Then he heard her violin gain courage. She speeded up into the next melody till he could barely keep up. If we were dancing together now, he thought, following her tempo, we'd be whirling off our feet. He couldn't help imagining, either, what that might be like: pastel chiffon crushed against his chest, bare arms moving against his, shining hair, wafting scent, the beat of her heart …

Eventually the dance tune moved towards its magnificent resolution, with those final, flamboyant chords. There was no place for him in it. Catching his breath, he paused to listen, applauding in his mind – she was so technically sure-fingered with all that tricky double-stopping. And, as she slowed the tempo right down, so dramatically self-assured, too.

But, while she held the last octave A notes, rich with a vibrato that carried into the night, triumphant, yet poignant too with the small sadness of the parting to come as the dancers separated, he couldn't resist lifting his own fiddle for a final, jokey, whispered, ‘dee-dee-DUM!'

As the music died away, he could almost swear he'd heard her laugh.

*   *   *

Yasha noticed that Inna kept her eyes down on her tea through breakfast, and didn't say a word to him. She practically jumped into the washing-up bowl, too. She was hard at it before Madame Leman even drew breath to ask her to help.

But once they were all in the workshop, and he started telling Leman about his outing last night, he knew she was following the conversation.

‘What islands?' she asked suddenly.

They all turned.

Yasha had just said that he'd gone to the islands by the Samson Bridge, where there were fewer gendarmes.

Why, he thought, impatiently, how green she is! Doesn't she know anything?

‘The St. Petersburg islands—' he began, but Leman interrupted before he could say ‘of course'. A moment later, with a hot rush of shame, he realized he was pleased to have been interrupted.

‘“Oh, Russian people, oh, Russian people!'” Leman intoned in a playful sing-song. ‘“Don't let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! Black and damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe! If only they could be dismantled … but no, too late!… The shadows are thronging across the bridge…'' ' His expansive belly, pressed up against the worktop, was wobbling with mirth.

Marcus was grinning too. ‘Take no notice, that's just one of his literary quotes,' he told Inna.

Seeing Inna's bewilderment, Leman laughed. ‘The islands are the suburbs here. The boggy bits of land that really were just islands, once, when Petersburg was just an estuary. They're the places over the river. Beyond Palace Embankment.'

‘Where the poor live. Where the factories are,' Yasha said impatiently. He didn't like the frivolous way Leman sometimes carried on. ‘The rich, over here, all the brutes who make their millions out of the sweat of the factory workers out there, fear all those people like fire.'

‘That's why the bridges are all drawbridges,' Leman added, twinkling at Inna over his spectacles in a proprietorial way Yasha didn't altogether like either. ‘So they can be drawn up at night. So the great unwashed don't come surging in after dark. Naturally, the islands are where Yasha meets his revolutionary friends.'

Yasha hunched down over his work, sensing he was going to be teased, prepared to retaliate if she made some mocking comment in reply.

But she just nodded, big-eyed. ‘I see,' she said, and got on with her scroll.

Yasha soon forgave Monsieur Leman because, a bit later, once he'd told them about what the lads at the meeting last night had been saying about his pamphlet, Leman turned to Inna again and said, with his admiration clearly audible now – no mocking undertones at all: ‘Because you see, dear girl, here we are in our poor Russia, a country like a boiler, with the pressure mounting, about to blow, and no safety valve. Everyone held tight by Emperor and Church; made a mockery of by bureaucrats; the prisons heaving; the poor crammed into their flea-ridden dungeons … No wonder they throw bombs. And sooner or later that boiler's going to burst – how can it not? – unless energetic young visionaries like Yasha can change everything first. Which I think he can. He's a real firebrand, you know, full of the sterling qualities we need. And they must, if we're to be saved. Because if they don't … well, only God knows what will happen.'

Yasha didn't say anything. He just planed more energetically at his fiddle back, feeling the deadwood melt away as the curves of its true shape emerged, as he brought the future into existence.

But, a little later, while Leman was inspecting the final tiny Saw-cuts – Eight and Nine – of Inna's scroll, Yasha heard him ask her, absent-mindedly, as he fiddled with a stray shaving that might otherwise have broken the purity of the line: ‘So what do you think of Horace's idea in the cold light of day?'

He noticed her quick sideways glance, too. ‘What idea?' Yasha asked quickly.

‘Our guest last night,' Inna explained in a rush – how quickly she'd learned to say ‘our,' he thought uncomfortably – ‘was very complimentary about my playing.' She looked down, blushing.

With a feeling of foreboding he didn't understand, Yasha waited. Yes, hadn't Madame L. been saying something about this last night? he thought. Now he could see the colour Inna had gone, he wished he'd paid more attention.

So Inna had brought her violin down, last night, and performed again? Was this why she'd been in such a good mood that she'd wanted to dance Strauss waltzes?

Yasha only breathed out when she went on, ‘Even though he only heard me from the bottom of the stairs, while I was practising.'