Midnight in St. Petersburg (33 page)

Inna didn't laugh back. She could almost see those two beautiful princelings, yelling and scrambling over the backs of sofas as they carelessly whacked each other. She could just imagine those dozens of layers of slow-drying varnish, each sanded down to no more than a fine glow by some craftsman with painfully bent back and failing eyes, cracking and splintering. She shut her eyes. Hadn't Horace said that one of Youssoupoff's violins was a Stradivarius?

‘Reprehensible, of course.' She heard the prince sigh. ‘So there we are. One of them is damaged, and, naturally, as soon as I looked them over and realized how badly it needed repair, of course I thought,
at once
, of you.' He bowed, and then looked expectantly at her.

She didn't respond. She just kept her eyes turned down, staring at her own twitchy fingers knotting and reknotting themselves.

He resumed, with exquisite patience, ‘That is, to make myself perfectly plain, dear
Citoyenne
Wallick, may I offer you a commission to come to me at my home on the Moika River and put my Stradivarius in good order?'

For a moment, she was tempted. She'd never worked on a Stradivarius, never even seen one …

But then she remembered who was offering her this work.

Decisively, she shook her head. ‘I'm afraid I couldn't possibly,' she said. Her tone would have been firmer if she hadn't looked behind Youssoupoff to Horace for encouragement, and seen that, far from nodding quiet approval at this high-minded rejection, he was looking agonized, and nodding, frantically.
Say yes
, his eyes were saying.

For a moment, she couldn't understand what Horace was doing with his hand. He'd turned it over, palm up, and was rubbing his fingers urgently together.

And then it all coalesced. The ten pounds of flour they'd bought, way back when, to stave off famine, had now been reduced to a loaf or two and a few rusks. The jar of oil was half empty, and when had they last seen milk, or yellow butter, or eggs? Last autumn's mushroom pickles and cranberry jams, given them by Madame Leman, were almost used up. The shrunken sack of tea, the empty bag of sugar, the many evenings out in restaurants, and Horace's reluctance to say what the meals actually cost, and Madame Leman's face as she brought out the glass jar with her housekeeping money in, every day, and counted the diminishing piles. (Because, even if you had the time to stand in the queues all night and all day, what was the point if you didn't have enough money to buy the pitiful amounts of food on offer once you got to the front?) And when was the last time the workshop had been paid? Or Horace, come to that? They'd been rejoicing, only that morning, over the parcel from Horace's sister in England – dried blackcurrants! Raisins! Coffee! – but how long could they sustain both of them, let alone the Lemans, on Beatrice's raisins and coffee?

Doubtfully, she went on looking at Horace, wondering suddenly what other expenses he was silently paying. The Lemans' rent? The children's school fees? Wondering, too, how much he still had in savings. Yes, she could see what his gesture meant, now: they couldn't afford the luxury of principles.

But if she took this job, she'd be no less of a money-grubber than the man she'd married.

Hesitantly, she started to speak again. ‘I couldn't possibly,' she repeated. ‘Possibly…' She took a deep breath and looked Youssoupoff in the eye, firmly shutting out everything except what was necessary from her mind. ‘… do a job so delicate, except in the workshop, with all the proper tools.'

She heard Horace sigh with relief.

She squared her shoulders. ‘I'll come to you, tomorrow, and take a look at the damage,' she added. Because the palace on the Moika was only a place, after all: a geographical point, a pile of bricks and mortar. There was no point in getting the horrors about a place. Whether she went there or not wouldn't change what had happened within its walls. Nothing would.

‘I can't make any promises, mind.'

She heard another sigh, behind. She sighed too.

‘Not till I've seen it.'

*   *   *

Perhaps it was only because of her secret with Yasha – that snatched other life with her lover, experienced in minutes and whispers and kisses in that room, in the dust and dark, by lamplight, which she hardly dared call to mind here in front of her husband – that Inna could even begin to understand that, in a different way, she also, secretly yet profoundly, desired that Stradivarius of Youssoupoff's.

So while she told herself that she was helping save the Lemans by getting a well-paid job in for Marcus's workshop, putting meat and sour cream on the table, what she really wanted to see was that most beautiful and glamorous of musical instruments, a violin that in the normal run of things would have been out of her reach. I just want a glimpse, she told herself, just to prove to myself that I've really been offered it. That's not so bad, is it?

A vanity, she then admonished herself, sternly. But a powerful one, because she already half knew that, once she'd seen it, she'd be unable to resist the temptation to go further, to touch it, know it, work on it, to try to save it, to make it hers.

Hers and Yasha's, because in her mind she'd begun to move on to the next step, and was imagining them sharing the task of making that damaged beauty whole; and seeing the excitement of the work binding him closer to her.

In the last few weeks, this had become overwhelmingly important to Inna.

At first, in all the shock of rediscovering Yasha, it had been magical enough just to be alone together for a time in that familiar old room: the creak of the bed; his skin against hers, his eyes on her nakedness; the hardness of their bodies; the softness of their voices, afterwards …

Maintaining the shell of secrecy had felt attractive too: the life lived in two parallel universes, one of which no one else could see, except herself and the man she now knew she'd always loved. She'd been enjoying the kindly power, conferred on her by love, of saving others from hurt by shielding them from reality.

And this was where she'd got stuck. Horace might have faded in her mind in these past weeks, but even to think of the conversation she might begin with him, the one that would destroy everything – and annihilate him – was too agonizing. If she tried to imagine it she felt sick. She couldn't do that to him, or herself; she couldn't imagine life without Horace there in the background. So she was stuck in the tainted, muddled here and now, clinging on to both her radiant secret love, and her weary married habits. She was nostalgic sometimes for the simpler way things had been, before Yasha's return; yet all she wanted was to be with him, and she could not bear Horace hanging forlornly around, making her feel cheap and guilty.

Yasha had started to ask what she thought was happening between them. It had been an innocent enough mistake, her marrying the wrong man, Yasha kept saying; he could see how it had happened, but now they were living a deception. And he didn't like that. It was time to clear things up. She was free to leave; there were no children. Life was different now, he said; she should liberate herself from a contract made in error. He'd find a place to live. She should go and live there with him, after telling Horace frankly why she was leaving. She could go on working for the Lemans, and Yasha would work there, too, as much as Marcus could pay him for. He'd also spend a lot of time at meetings, he said, with the straightforwardness she loved in him, because this revolution was only the beginning. There was so much more to do.

Otherwise …

Well, he hadn't said what, otherwise, but she'd seen, from the play of his eyebrows, that he was thinking that he might just go. And that possibility was unbearable.

Yet she still hadn't said yes.

Maybe it was the idea of sitting alone in some shabby room, waiting for a husband who never came home from those all-night revolutionaries' meetings. Maybe it was just that she couldn't bear the prospect of hurting Horace, who so visibly loved her. Or maybe it was her fear of shocking the Lemans with her ingratitude for all that her husband had done for her. Whichever it was, Inna couldn't be sure she wanted what Yasha was suggesting. Not now, not yet.

And so she told herself that taking this violin and making it whole, with Yasha, would give her a breathing space. Because if Yasha would only wait until it was done, surely she'd know more clearly what was in her heart.

*   *   *

Reverently, Inna stroked the instruments on the marble table, fingering the glow of the wood, the old, lovely Cremonese varnish, and wondering how to heal the cracks and breaks. She'd been gazing at them for hours. As well as the Strad, there was also an Amati, and a strange jewelled and heavily inlaid violin with half its gemstones missing (but a bag in the case containing some of the loose ones), which the prince had said had been made for the French Sun King, centuries earlier, and a Strad-shaped viola that the prince didn't know was a viola, let alone whether it was a Strad, though the papers with it said it was a Vuillard copy of one. Even broken, they were all so beautiful. And, when the Strad's mangled loveliness was repaired, she could see it would sing with the voice of an angel.

Looking at them, Inna had almost forgotten why this job was ugly.

It was only the Strad that she was being asked to repair. It was the only one of the four instruments that had been really damaged by being treated as a child's weapon. Its back had a great open gash in it. (Had they whacked it down on a spike? Or stabbed it?) Its front was badly scratched. There was a rattling inside, as if the sound-post had gone, along with the vanished bridge. The scroll had a bite taken out. And a peg was missing.

The other instruments had scratches and gashes and missing strings and broken bridges, but, locked up in their cases, could safely travel abroad. And that was clearly what the prince was planning. One glance round his rooms showed that he was taking stock. He was packing. There were boxes and bags of jewels and trinkets out on tables everywhere. There were carpenters banging and sawing, too, building shelves into alcoves in every room: secret storage to hide the bigger valuables behind the walls. There were piles of movables being readied so he could stuff them in his pockets for a quick getaway, if there was any more revolution.

That was all these violins were to him, she could see: portable wealth.

Inna was glad Youssoupoff had taken himself off to read newspapers in the library, and stopped lurking around, chatting. She needed to concentrate.

She'd disliked him more than ever today: boastful and skittish, talking too fast with the pupils of his eyes turned into great black pools. He'd offered to give her a guided tour of the cellar where
it
had all happened before showing her the violins. Even when she'd refused that pleasure, the prince had told her the long, strange, gleeful story he told everyone about Rasputin, full of that Satanic strength of his, refusing to die, even after eating enough cyanide to fell an elephant, fed to him in little pink cakes (as if, Inna thought, locked into her defeated silence, any friend of Rasputin wouldn't have known he'd always hated sweet things).

Refusing to die, again and again, even after first Youssoupoff then the MP Purishkevich shot him. Rising up, again and again, roaring. ‘Like a hairy black bear,' Youssoupoff reminisced, enjoying his ghost story. ‘Or a mad bull. Terrifying.' His story ended with Rasputin refusing to die even after they'd bound him, and put him in a sack, and thrown him through a hole in the river ice. Which was what everyone said – that his arms were out of their ropes by the time they'd dredged him up, frozen solid; he'd been trying to get free, even under water.

As Youssoupoff took her upstairs to the study where the violins were, she was thinking of all the other stories, the ones Youssoupoff didn't tell. There were people who said it was his friend, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, who'd actually shot Rasputin dead, or dead-ish – since he was the only one who could shoot – and that Youssoupoff had just taken credit for the killing to shield his more royal friend from the Emperor's anger. There were people who'd said the killing was a plot by the English secret service, who'd urged Youssoupoff and Purishkevich and the others to murder so Rasputin and the Tsarina wouldn't make a separate peace with the Germans … Oh, all kinds of whispered stories. Inna had even heard that Rasputin's daughters were accusing Youssoupoff of falling, insane with rage, on their father's body, and of castrating his corpse …

Now, as she stroked the Strad that Youssoupoff had so nearly destroyed, trying to make a list of what she'd need to do to put it right, she thought, I'll never know Felix Youssoupoff's real secrets; I don't want to.

She'd take the violin, anyway. She'd bring that, at least, back to life.

*   *   *

Back at the Lemans' shop, she set it out on the worktop.

Marcus was only too ready to be enchanted.

They were both gazing softly at it, like adoring parents watching a sick child sleep, when Yasha came in. Inna's heart lurched.

‘You're joking,' Yasha said, when Marcus told him. ‘Mending
his
fiddles?' Still in his coat, with his wet hat in his hands, he grinned, ready for the laugh.

‘Just look at it,' said Marcus. ‘It's the most incredible thing. A Strad, Yash, in our workshop.'

The cheerfulness was fading from Yasha's face as he looked uncertainly at Inna and Marcus, clearly wondering why they weren't smiling.

Inna kept quiet.

‘We have to eat, Yash,' Marcus pleaded.

Yasha grinned his wolf grin. ‘You don't get much bread for thirty pieces of silver.' But he did at least step up to the battered fiddle box, which was covered in undistinguished pigskin. Inna held her breath. Because surely, once he'd looked, he'd see the magic too.

He looked inside and reached out a hand to feel the biggest of the gashes across the front, and to touch the damaged scroll. He sucked in a long breath through his teeth.