Midnight in St. Petersburg (35 page)

‘Isn't it
pretty
now?' Madame Leman called, very brightly.

‘I mean Marcus said. And I couldn't wait to see,' Inna corrected herself. Then she came round the doorway, and kissed first Madame Leman and then Horace.

Horace was aware of the other shadow moving, out on the landing, and of Yasha's door shutting.

‘I'll leave you, then, darlings,' Madame Leman said, getting up and going downstairs.

Horace could see Inna didn't know what to say to him, once they were alone together. He could see she wasn't sure if he'd noticed her lie, and thought – in a way he felt grateful for this – that she wanted him not to be hurt. But he could see, too, that she was as aware as he was of the silent third, next door.

She twisted her hands. And, for a moment, he wondered if this hot faintness he was feeling – he had the sense he was walking a few inches off the ground – might be anger?

‘I bought us a housewarming present,' he said, pulling the cloth off the top of the plate on the little table with a flamboyant gesture.

It was a pineapple. An exotic, spiny pineapple, in all its expensive glory: its top, from which the fatly luscious, spiky leaves grew, neatly decapitated; and two rings cut and peeled, ready for eating, balanced immediately underneath.

She stared at it. Yeliseyevsky food. Luxury food. How fascinated she'd been by pineapples when she came to live in Petersburg. Horace remembered how she'd gazed, and prodded, and sniffed the air of the shop to draw out the tropical scent when he'd first taken her there to see them. He'd bought one for their wedding night, and they'd eaten it with champagne, sticky with happiness. ‘The food of the gods,' he'd said. And only after that, when every trace of fear at what was to come had gone, had he laughingly drawn her to the divan, murmuring, ‘Ah, the smell of the south, so delicious…'

She turned to him now, looking pained. It wasn't the same any more, as her eyes seemed to be saying. She wasn't a child. They didn't—

They hadn't, for six months or more, Horace thought, hotter and lighter than ever. Seven.

I am a man like any other, he told himself.

Ignoring her look, and pushing her against the party wall more roughly than he'd meant to, he kissed her.

He wasn't going to ask difficult questions; he was going to stifle any confessions with his lips and his tongue. He could see how disorienting it must have been to have the man she'd once been in love with come back from nowhere, just like that; he wasn't going to blame her for letting her feelings get the better of her. He could, almost, understand, and, almost, feel sorry for her in this predicament, which she must find ugly. He just wanted her back.

For a moment, he almost believed she'd just surrender to him, and everything would go back to how it had once been.

But she didn't. He could feel her muscles tense. And there was such a startled look in her eyes when he opened his that he let her go.

She flung herself down on the bed after that, all right, and hard enough to make fountains of dust and symphonies of squeaking springs, but not in the way Horace had been hoping. She'd rushed for the far side of the bed, and now she lay there with her back to him, curled up, with her arms protectively around her shoulders, and one hand covering her eyes. She reminded him of a bird fluffed up, with its head down, against the winter wind.

Horace had known this would be difficult, but he hadn't realized until now how painful he was going to find her unhappiness at being alone with him, here, when Yasha was so close. He took a deep breath. Then, careful not to alarm her further, he sat down on the other side of the bed and stretched out a hand. ‘I didn't mean to startle you,' he whispered. But her back stiffened in rejection of even this touch.

‘Inna,' he said bleakly, and, not knowing what else to do, he lay down too, in another grind of bedsprings, leaving the hand she'd rejected stretched out towards hers across the great empty space in the middle of the bed. ‘Please.'

She didn't turn round.

But, after a few moments she did at least speak.

‘I had no idea you were thinking of this, you see,' she said, very low, but with a brittle attempt at everyday tones. ‘It's been such a surprise.'

She shifted, with another creak of bedsprings, and for a moment Horace tried to draw some sort of bleak comfort, or at least humour, from the idea that Yasha, next door, might be finding the sound agonizing. He could see a little of her face now, in the half-light. She was looking at the pineapple. Her cheeks were wet.

It was almost a relief to hear Yasha's door closing again: a quiet click.

As Inna heard Yasha go, she bit her lip.

Those footsteps outside became less disciplined as they went downstairs: two at a time, then three at a time, then four. Then a door downstairs slammed so hard Horace could feel the walls quiver all these flights up. Despite the misery inside this room, he couldn't help a quiet moment of self-congratulation.

‘It must be nearly suppertime,' Inna said in a small voice. ‘Do you think we should take the pineapple down to share with the others?'

*   *   *

The pineapple went well with bread and tea. Barbarian and Agrippina gobbled it up.

Inna looked at the empty chair, but didn't ask.

‘Where's Yasha?' Horace said.

‘He won't be back till late,' Marcus said, looking uncomfortably down.

Did they
all
know? Horace wondered. Or guess, at least?

Then, making an effort, he let go of that flash of resentment. After all, it wouldn't be hard to guess there was something wrong. Inna hadn't said a word since they'd got downstairs. She'd just put the fruit down on the table and let the younger members of the family exclaim over it. She'd accepted a slice, but left it uneaten on her plate. And then she'd sat, white and quiet, at her place, while they ate, looking at something no one else could see.

Now Horace reached out and took Inna's hand, laying it across the top of the table, under his, in full view of everyone. Then he tightened his grip on it by pushing his fingers between her unresisting ones.

Madame Leman got up. She started gathering plates.

But, before she left, she looked down at the Wallicks' interlaced hands, on the table, and gave Horace a quick, approving nod.

*   *   *

Know what you want to achieve, Horace told himself. The picture in his mind was clear: insects in the killing-jar. Alive and scuttling one minute. But shut in, deprived of air; they're dead of claustrophobia before you know what's happened.

Morning in the bedroom: fumbling footsteps from next door; the rattle of piss in the pot outside. Eyes in the crowded dark of the landing washbasin. Water splashing. Yasha, in baggy old underwear, was already lathering his chin when Horace, doing up his sleek dressing gown, followed him out.

‘Ah, Kagan,' Horace said, trying to sound as calm and even sunny as possible, as if he hadn't spent what felt like all night lying awake while Inna cried in silence. ‘Pass my bag, there's a good fellow.'

He'd gone to sleep in the end. He must have, because when he'd opened his eyes Inna had gone. She must have dressed and crept downstairs at dawn, to avoid any morning conversation. But at least Yasha didn't seem to know.

Yasha, looking surly and averting his eyes, stopped and unhooked the new bag from the towel hook.

‘Give me five minutes,' he grunted, going back to his shaving. ‘All right?'

There wasn't really room for two at the washstand.

Horace ignored him. He planted himself just beyond the path of Yasha's elbow, but still too close for comfort, checking things in his bag, pulling out the shaving brush, combing through his copious dark hair, ostentatiously waiting for Yasha to get out of the way.

And, all the while, he hummed, tunelessly but very cheerfully, hoping that Yasha was remembering whatever it was he might have thought had happened between Inna and Horace last night, and was suffering too.

‘Good evening out?' he said, after a while.

He didn't mind when Yasha slouched back inside without replying.

*   *   *

Before Horace left the apartment for Fabergé's, he dropped in at the workshop to say goodbye to his wife. However badly things were going, he knew he had to keep up appearances.

He was pleased to see that Yasha wasn't there. Even if Inna only looked vaguely about her when Horace praised their progress, Marcus looked delighted. They were doing well with Youssoupoff's violin. The scroll patch, which Marcus had carved, was in place, like a white new ear on the side of the instrument's head. Inna's back patch, also still in the white, was visible behind the clamps gluing the violin together. It didn't look, after all, as though they'd need to use the ‘spare' violin Yasha had been making. That was lying forlornly on one side, by its maker's abandoned place.

‘Now it's really just a question of the varnish,' Marcus eagerly told Horace. ‘We've settled on oil varnish: we made up a big lot of it yesterday, out in the courtyard, because it can be an explosive business. Boiled linseed oil, with pale yellow rosin and Venice Turpentine and mastic…'

They were going to take the varnishing slowly, Marcus explained, as Inna, with her head bowed, began tidying away the spare violin. It was better for the wood to darken naturally, from exposure to sunlight; the summer was doing that naturally. They were leaving both instruments by the back window, to catch the light. But tomorrow they were going to add a very light stain from a tea solution, too.

Then the ground: the first coating on the wood, a key for the varnish film, Marcus said.

‘Egg white,' Inna said, more understandably, and, even if there was nothing very romantic about those words, even if she wasn't facing him as she spoke, Horace was delighted to hear her voice at all.

The ground would be sanded down, Marcus added, very fast; then another layer of egg white; one coat of clear varnish and more sanding; another layer of varnish, this time very slightly warmed with colour extract, to help build up the desired matching rich golden-brown glow … and so on.

‘Fascinating,' Horace said, mildly. ‘Fascinating.'

Marcus added, pleadingly, as if this explained everything: ‘Luckily Yasha is a genius when it comes to varnish…'

Horace nodded. ‘I understand,' he said. He could see Inna sidling off with the violin box to put Yasha's violin away somewhere at the back. There was a store out there, he thought. He asked Marcus: ‘By the way, where is Yasha?'

‘He's gone to have another look at the room he might take,' Marcus said. ‘If he moves out. I think.'

Horace saw Inna's back stiffen and her head half turn. Then she hurried out through the back door.

He didn't think she'd known that either.

That was enough to persuade him that he was perhaps winning – at least until they didn't come up at six.

He'd put them successfully out of his mind for hours, while he first visited Fabergé's, then queued successfully for bread, then returned to the apartment to compare notes with Madame Leman, who'd queued successfully for sugar. He sat in the yellow room, alone, and read the paper. At six, in stockinged feet, he went out of the apartment, on to the staircase.

Work was over. He could hear Marcus inside in the kitchen already, talking to his mother. The others would be up any second. Horace hovered just outside the front door of the Lemans' apartment, on the landing.

He was rewarded, eventually, by overhearing the whisper at the bottom of the echoing stairwell: ‘But where can we go? There's nowhere left…' He tried, unsuccessfully, not to feel punished, just to deaden himself, when he realized those yearning words had been said by his own wife.

Should he have rushed downstairs and hit Yasha, as part of him wanted to? Or faded away, and left the lovers to whisper? He did neither. He just hovered, ingloriously, trying not to imagine them twined about each other at the bottom of the stairwell, not wanting to eavesdrop, but unable to do anything else.

‘Please, let's not even think about it till the violin's finished,' he heard a few moments later. A female whisper. Inna.

‘It practically is finished,' was the angry male answer.

At least they were just talking. But he didn't like what he was hearing. Because those words were inevitably going to lead up to what he heard next.

‘Surely it's simple,' Yasha's voice said from far away, through the blood in Horace's head. ‘Leave him.'

‘Shh,' hissed Inna. ‘It's not that simple. You must see that. How would I explain?' Her voice was stubborn, as if this conversation had happened many times.

He couldn't make out Yasha's reply. He could only hear the exasperation.

‘Because,' she capped the other voice, ‘with him living here, where would either of us work? How would we survive without jobs?'

Silence.

‘Look, come and see the place I've found, at least,' Yasha said. ‘It's far away, but it's not bad, and—'

‘I can't,' she said, and Horace heard she was crying. ‘You know I can't.'

‘If you won't come with me' – Yasha's voice was getting harsher – ‘I'm going anyway. You know that, don't you?'

‘“Because the Revolution needs me,” is that it?' came her tearful attempt at a taunt. ‘It's only your politics you're really in love with, isn't it? If it were me, you'd never even have thought of saying such a thing. You know how hard this is for me. You
know
I don't want to hurt Horace…'

How
that
hurt.

After that all he could hear was sobbing.

*   *   *

Even in retreat, Horace kept his wits about him. After going back into the flat and sticking his head back through the kitchen door to tell Madame Leman in clipped tones that he was feeling a little tired and would not have supper, he went quickly up the main staircase to the attics, alone. There were no more whispers from the bottom of the stairs. They'd gone.