Midnight in St. Petersburg (24 page)

By the time Horace had finished putting away the second to last of the Youssoupoff Oxford boxes in his desk drawer, and had cleaned up, he'd calmed himself. As he got the other little square box out of a different drawer in his desk, he told himself firmly that the end of the opera – in which, seeing that Tatyana has successfully grow into a sophisticated, married lady of the world, Onegin regrets having rejected her and tries to seduce her again, but too late, for now she rejects him – should give Inna encouragement, and him, too, perhaps. He slipped the box into his pocket.

It was Inna's first evening out after her illness, and Leman would be bringing her, by cab, to the outside of the glorious mint-green bubble of a theatre building.

It was a windy night, and a little below freezing. Horace walked the hop, skip and jump from Fabergé's to the Mariinsky. It was one of his favourite places in the city, that magical palace of fantasy, with its Botticelliesque nymphs dancing round a sky-blue circular ceiling, three-layered chandelier glittering with the fire of a thousand crystal pendants, and layer upon blue-and-gold layer of loggias and boxes piled gorgeously one on another. Horace wanted to feel composed when he met Inna. It had been – what? – a month since the Auer evening had gone so wrong, and so much needed to be said. The fresh air would do him good.

*   *   *

She was so thin that Madame Leman's winter fur coat hung off her bones.

He kissed her hand, noticing that her wrists were so translucent and brittle that they felt snappable. She smiled, wanly. How pale she was. It wrung his heart.

Leman winked encouragingly at him as he straightened up.

Had he looked discouraged? He wondered briefly about this before nodding back.

‘Would you like to join us?' he asked Leman politely. ‘I'm sure I could get you another ticket. And there've been wonderful reviews.'

But Leman just grinned and gestured down at the stained, sawdusty clothes they all knew must be covering his large body, just one layer below the big bear of a fur he was wearing. ‘Civil service gents in medals!' he said, in a mock-piteous voice. ‘I know, I know: Chaliapin singing Gremin – marvellous, of course. But not marvellous enough to put up with an audience of stiffs. Spare me that, dear man. Spare me that.' He roared with laughter. ‘Enjoy yourselves, my friends,' he said, blowing them a kiss from above his black beard and turning away.

Horace was grateful for the overwhelming nature of the opera, which gave them very little time to talk about anything. They could use it to get used to each other again.

Inna's eyes turned from one golden marvel to the next, taking it all in. When the curtain came down for the interval, she sighed. ‘Poor Tatyana.'

‘Let's get some champagne,' he replied nervously, fussing with opera glasses.

It was only during the interval, when, like hundreds of others, they took their glasses of champagne and went promenading along curving corridors, between fronds of tropical palms, up and down gilded staircases hung with clouds of white and swathes of pale blues, that he plucked up his courage and slipped his arm through hers.

Her arm, painfully thin under her dark clothing, was soft and unresisting.

‘How very well you look, already,' he said, willing that to be the truth.

‘I was lucky,' she said, and, for the first time she turned her eyes – huge, now, and shadowed, but still that arresting shade of green – directly on to Horace. ‘Both my parents died of influenza.' She smiled a bit wider, and Horace was relieved to see the old Inna still there. ‘But here I still am,' she added. ‘I must be made of sterner stuff.'

Cautiously, they re-established subjects they could discuss, and negotiated their way round the shadowy areas they had no words for. Of course, they both avoided mentioning the disappearance of Yasha.

The boy had never come back after he'd stormed out on that Auer evening. Obviously there was no point in going to the police; that would always be more trouble than it was worth. But Leman had subsequently told Horace how he'd discreetly asked various old journalist cronies where young Kagan might have got to, in case the boy was in trouble of some sort. Inna thought he'd been going off to see Yermansky, which, as Leman knew, was probably code for joining Yermansky's secret socialist group. He'd discovered that Yasha had indeed been out looking for Yermansky, but he'd never actually made contact. However, the boy had recently, and separately, collected false travel papers from a revolutionary group connected with the Jewish Bundists. He'd had these papers made out for a young man of twenty-five, but in Leman's name. He must have used them to vanish into the night, Leman said. It wasn't just a spontaneous fit of jealousy. The fact that he had them at all suggested that he must have been planning to do a flit for some time. Horace, seeing on his friend's face how betrayed he felt by this cavalier use of his name, and by young Kagan's disappearance, had just nodded sadly. There was nothing more to say.

So there would be no mention of Yasha Kagan tonight. But it was fine to talk about how good Madame Leman's nursing had been, how keen Inna was to get back to the workshop tomorrow, and how snowed under Leman was with orders in the run-up to the Christmas season. She told him how much she wanted to help, to repay the Lemans' kindness.

Horace knew there were only a few weeks to go till the temporary papers he'd got her in the autumn ran out. But he couldn't find the words to ask what she would do next. And she didn't say.

One of the many conversations Horace had imagined them having, when they met again, was about whether she would like him to make another appointment with Professor Auer. He'd even pictured himself pointing out the Conservatoire, just across the square from the theatre, as an inspiration. But now he saw her here, so quiet and effortful, he couldn't do that either. Whatever had caused her illness, it had been real enough, Leman said, with raging temperatures, sweats, the lot. She wouldn't have touched her violin for a month. She'd need to convalesce. She'd need to practise and get back on form. And, even then, would she have the nerve to play on her own? Horace blinked and set aside the thought of the duet that had come unbidden, painfully, into his mind.

So, in the second interval, he just told her society gossip about the possible engagement of the Grand Duchess Olga, and tried to make her smile.

The Rasputin scandal was still getting worse, he continued. Every paper, every day, was full of extraordinary diatribes, as if one peasant really could be responsible for all the ills of the age. The man himself, Horace said, was desperate to get back to the quiet anonymity of his Siberian village, but the Empress wouldn't let him go. Still, the Emperor would probably soon have to put his foot down, because there wasn't a soul in St. Petersburg who wasn't wondering whether Rasputin might really be the Empress's lover. The secret police surveillance team whom the Tsar had detailed to protect the peasant had given his most faithful female followers code names – Bird, Dove, Owl and Crow – and these had been leaked to the papers.

Inna smiled at that. ‘Which follower is which?' she asked.

Encouraged, leaning a little closer, Horace replied, ‘I don't recall exactly, but I think Munya is Dove…'

‘I wouldn't want a bird name,' Inna said. ‘I wouldn't want to be written about like that.'

Rather sadly, Horace nodded. ‘I don't imagine Rasputin likes it much either. It's vicious, what people are saying about him. As if his just being here, breathing the same air as them, enrages them.'

Inna nodded, looking straight at him for only the second time that evening. ‘Yes,' she said, with more vehemence than he'd expected. ‘Father Grigory stands out too much in the city. He should go to his village, and his family: where he blends in better, and seems ordinary, and people don't notice him, so he's safe. Where he can be innocent. He should go home.'

*   *   *

The night air was gentler when they came out, muffled in their furs. And it was snowing: the first real snow of winter, falling soft and quiet and thick.

White drifts were piling up on caryatids, wrought-iron balconies and bare branches. Drivers spurred on the vehicles and horses thronging the square. No one wanted to be caught out when their carriage's wheels began slipping and sliding on the uncleared roads. But an almost reverent joy crept into the faces in the crowds embracing, bowing and moving away. There was hope in every tired, happy voice, a quiet faith that this snowfall would mark the natural end to the dark, gloomy, rain-lashed, miserable weeks that follow the golden-leaved autumns of Russia, and the beginning of the crisp, blue-skied, sparkling-white, crunchy-underfoot, invigorating real winter of everyone's dreams.

Hope, and hush, everywhere: Inna took her hands out of her muff and turned her face skywards.

‘Oh, let's not get a cab,' she said, with sudden vivacity. She turned to him, and the animation in her face tugged painfully at Horace's heart. ‘I'd rather walk.'

*   *   *

This would be the perfect moment, Horace told himself, fingering the little box in his pocket that contained the ring he'd brought out with him. He had one arm through hers, and she was leaning slightly against him. They were on Nevsky, walking past a store front gleaming with pyramids of foie-gras cans, towards the Hôtel de l'Europe. The street was teeming with other people with lit-up faces and pink cheeks, out venerating the snow. Inna looked so happy, Horace suddenly thought, that she'd become beautiful again. Snowflakes sparkled in the clouds of dark hair under her hat.

There'd never be a more romantic place or time.

He'd already asked her to a poetry reading the next night at the Stray Dog. Inna had said yes. But tomorrow there'd be a crush, with friends everywhere, and eyes, and it would be even harder to get up the courage. Whereas, if he were brave, he could just take out the ring, right here, right now, and ask her. Get it over with.

He was still fiddling with the ring-box, undecided, by the time they got to the corner of Nevsky and Garden Street, outside the Merchants' Yard covered market, where you could always find a few newspaper-vendors, puppy- and kitten-sellers and demagogues on soap-boxes.

Even tonight, there were a few political activists who were too interested in their all-enveloping vision of the future to be put off by anything as temporary as snow. One man was selling an anti-Semitic gutter paper of some sort – these were closed down, often enough, but whether they were called
Today
, or
Tomorrow
, or
Morning
, or
Evening
, you could tell straight away what they were from the big front-page cartoons of hook-nosed, grinning men sitting on moneybags. Horace pushed straight past him, hoping Inna hadn't noticed the paper, and paused instead by his rival, a man of identical scrawny build, identically muffled in an dark ankle-length coat and balding rabbit hat, who, a dozen paces on, was selling some parallel sort of fringe left-wing publication – there were so many of these, even more than there were leftist groups, whether anarchists, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats or the quarrelling sub-groups that each one spawned so regularly. This paper had a long name made up of the words Socialist and Banner and People's and Future, and the slogan ‘Proletarians of the World, Unite!' under the title.

Horace caught the man's eye. He delved deeper in his pocket for a coin.

‘Oh, don't,' he heard. He looked down in surprise at Inna, who, he saw, was suddenly ablaze with impatient indignation. ‘You're not going to buy that paper, are you?'

He paused. He was aware of the newspaper-seller, standing so close.

He'd only meant to divert her attention from the other man's paper. It hadn't crossed his mind that even this small act – more or less an act of charity – might remind her of the cousin who'd gone off to make the new world.

‘It's just some rag, spouting on about the revolution to come,' Inna said bitterly. ‘Why waste even a kopek on that pack of lies?'

Horace nodded understandingly, and the newspaper-seller moved away. Inna tightened her arm against Horace's and pulled him forward, down Garden Street, faster than before.

‘So you don't think that they're just doing what they can to build a better world, those people?' he asked, amused.

‘Oh, I hate the whole thing,' she answered robustly. ‘They're all the same, revolutionaries: fanatics and crackpots, dishonest through and through.'

‘You know, I think you're really on the mend.' Horace smiled. Tomorrow, he told himself. I'll definitely ask her tomorrow.

*   *   *

The snow had stopped by six the next evening when Inna left the workshop and, wrapping herself up in her winter hat and muff, went straight into the centre of the city. She walked quickly, surprised at how capable she suddenly was of admiring the stars between soft grey drifts of snow cloud, and at how exhilarated each cold-champagne breath she was drawing in left her, and at how full of anticipation the piles of Christmas luxuries in the Nevsky shop windows made her feel. As if the snow had magicked away more than the drizzly sleet of outside
;
as if it had brought her back to inner life too.

One of the many benefits of the strolls Horace had taken her on around smart Admiralty District, between Nevsky and the river, around the Astoria and his workplace, was that she now knew who lived in which tall townhouse mansion.

She knew exactly where the Golovin mansion was, for example. But, even if she hadn't remembered its neo-Renaissance front and the duck-egg-blue of the façade, the clutch of journalists outside would have been a clue. Father Grigory – she found it difficult to think of him as Rasputin – must be there.

Once, not long before, she would have felt intimidated by the very idea of marching up to the front door of a house like this and ringing the bell. Once, not long before, she might also have felt intimidated by pushing among these young men with old eyes, who were stubbing their butt-ends out in a patch of snow they'd already tramped into grey-brown ice.