Midnight in St. Petersburg (36 page)

It was only when he'd shut his own door behind him – quietly, because he wasn't a man to vent his feelings on bits of wood – that he gave way to emotion.

He stumbled over to the unmade bed. It still smelled faintly of her flower scent, and the smell made him suddenly horribly aware of what he was doing to them all. He threw himself on to the mattress, remembering the hopeless sound of her tears downstairs. Once he was lying down, he clamped a hand tight over his eyes, so tight he saw flashing lights inside his eyelids. He breathed as slowly as he could, but nothing could shake off the panicky sickness he was feeling. He was supposed to be the one with the poise, who knew how the world worked and could offer solutions. But he didn't have the least idea what to do now.

He wanted an hour of quiet, without the thoughts that were torturing him, to rest his frantic mind. He'd barely slept last night. But there was no peace.

It would demean him to look in her cupboards and see whether she'd taken any clothes out with her. It would humiliate him to look for her bag, in case it had gone. But he longed to do that because, he thought with sudden desperation, she just might have. She might never be back.

There was no sound from Yasha's room next door.

Horace took his hands away from his eyes. All you can do is wait, he told himself. So he lay, open-eyed, on the bed. Trying to keep his mind from buzzing relentlessly round the same awful possibilities, he watched the sky lose its luminosity. He saw the first faint prickle of the evening star, and the moon.

Below, he heard the people in the different flats, including the Lemans', go in and out of their apartment doors, to the courtyard dustbins or out for an after-supper walk or a smoke or a chat on the stairs. He heard Aunt Cockatoo's grating voice talking for quite a long time. There was something reassuring in its ordinariness.

It felt as though that evening went on forever.

When it was quite dark, and he started hearing the sounds of bolts being drawn and shutters being closed downstairs, he wondered whether to bother with his own shutters, or with getting undressed. He was surprised to find, as he shifted position on the bed, that his cheeks were wet.

It was later still, and silence had fallen on the building, when he heard her footsteps on the stairs. It was so late, in fact, that he couldn't be sure whether they were real or a dream. But then the door opened, and for a moment a stripe of fainter darkness from the landing became visible.

Yasha wasn't with her.

Horace shut his eyes, pretending to be asleep. She tiptoed in with her shoes in her hands. Without getting undressed, she lay down on the bed. She was as far away as ever, across the mattress, but at least she was here beside him.

*   *   *

In the blazing sunshine of the next morning, Horace went out to make the acquaintance of Maxim, Leman's old socialist friend, whom Madame Leman had suggested would be a useful contact if he did ever need to help Fabergé employees get papers to leave Russia. Horace laughed out loud when he caught his first glimpse of the man, setting out copies of his paper,
New Life
, on the newsstand on the corner of Garden Street and Nevsky where the speakers shouted about the future. Maxim was unmistakably a friend of Monsieur Leman. He had that same wry smile and the same taste in side-fastening country shirts.

The usual crowds were out, stamping around Nevsky, picking over the pamphlets and papers that were sold nowadays instead of food, talking, explaining, protesting, arguing, shouting, revelling in their new freedom of language, using all the pent-up words they'd never dared speak before – as if, as Maxim said, grinning under his droopy Slavic moustache as soon as Horace had explained who he was, someone had waved a magic wand over Petrograd and transformed it into the Latin Quarter in Paris.

Horace let the sun warm his back, feeling more optimistic than he'd done for months. There were always new chances, and new friends, and new ways forward.

He picked up one of the pile of
New Life
s that Maxim had set down at the table. It was characteristic of Maxim that he would come and talk to his readers and buyers, out here, in person, whenever he could.

‘I'm your biggest admirer, these days,' Horace said sincerely. It was a good, honest paper, after all. Maxim raised an eyebrow, but seemed pleased with the compliment.

‘Well,' Horace added easily, ‘we're all for the Revolution now. Young Kagan at Leman's workshop – he's always talking about you.'

Maxim's eyes narrowed. ‘Young Kagan, eh?' he said. His face was serious. ‘You must be worried about him.'

Horace leaned forward, suddenly interested. ‘Why?'

‘It was just like the bad old days: some Jew-bashers caught him in my courtyard at dawn with a load of papers. They started yelling at him for being a Jew and a Bolshevik, and then they whacked merry Hell out of him. He's at my place, covered in bandages. Broken arm. And look at what this lot in government's doing now – turning back the clock to the days of reaction, that's what. Mark my words, we'll soon be back in the same mess we were in before.'

Horace shook his head. ‘Ah, but who knows when the pendulum won't start swinging the other way?' He was glad Inna was safe at home if there were murderous thugs out Jew-bashing again. But he was also thinking privately that he'd never felt so grateful to a bunch of Black Hundred reactionaries as he did now to Yasha's attackers.

‘What was the boy doing at your place anyway?' he asked.

He was imagining Yasha heaving great piles of newspapers down to the delivery cart at first light. That sounded as though he'd been working off anger after a quarrel. Inna hadn't said this morning why she had come home so late, or mentioned Yasha's new place. She'd just woken up with a look of set, dazed misery, and gone quietly downstairs to the workshop. Precisely what the quarrel between the lovers had been about didn't matter, Horace told himself: whether she'd hated the idea of living in whatever room he'd found, or simply lost her nerve on the way to see it, or had realized she wanted to finish the violin, or not wanted to say goodbye to the Lemans, or … He couldn't formulate the rest of his thought. Detail was only detail. The important thing was that she was home.

Maxim shrugged. ‘Woman trouble, I think. He asked to sleep on my sofa. I don't like to ask.'

‘Well, keep him safe, eh? Couldn't you encourage him to get out of the centre of the city, if he's not safe here? Surely he could find a room out where they've moved the Soviet – near that school, Smolny? He'd be happy enough, close to the action, wouldn't he?'

Maxim nodded thoughtfully. Knowing better than to labour the point, Horace picked up a paper and set off back to the Lemans.

There was a spring in his step as he turned the corner. Maybe, just maybe, it would work out in his favour after all.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

You go on living, however much your heart aches. You go on getting out of bed, dressing in something or other, eating food that tastes of sand, and nodding when the people around you are talking, so they think you're part of their conversation. You stand in line for bread and flour and sugar, go to the woods for mushrooms and berries, join in all the pickling and preserving and jam-making you can to stave off the hunger of the winter to come. You follow everyone else's fretting about politics as the tide turns, and the Revolution, which had faded in the summer, comes back into fashion in the autumn, though its hapless current leader doesn't.
What, the Bolsheviks siding with Kerensky against the army! What, the military coup failed! What, Prime Minister Kerensky a drunken womanizer! A cocaine addict! A Jew in woman's petticoats!
You even laugh out loud, one day, when your husband comes in to tell you he's just seen a slogan on a wall, praising an obviously Jewish revolutionary just out of jail who now kept getting his name in the papers; a slogan reading, ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky! Long live Trotsky!' And, generally, you carry on with something that looks, from the outside, almost indistinguishable from your life before, only with the joy subtracted.

That, at least, was what Inna found as the summer drew to a close and the days got sharper and greyer, and her misery – which she'd explained to the Lemans and Horace as illness; a reason to stay alone on her side of the bed – shrivelled down to scepticism. It wasn't as if Yasha had gone that far away to work. Smolny was just across town, wasn't it? It wasn't as if he couldn't have come back and visited if he'd wanted to see her.

It was true that the last time they'd talked they'd had one of those excruciating discussions about whether she could leave Horace, and that she'd been reluctant even to let him persuade her out to see the room he'd half agreed to rent. They'd got as far as the embankment together. They'd hovered on a bridge, kissing and crying and arguing. But the place he wanted to go was much further off, and she found, when she looked at the grey currents rushing below, that she couldn't cross the water to look at a possible future waiting on the other side. So you won't go to the islands any more, Mrs Wallick? he'd said. It's not that, she'd stammered, wondering if he really thought her so shallow as to be frightened of the poverty over the bridge. Surely he must know that she was more afraid of the not coming back than of the going there? Cut to the quick by his easy injustice, she hadn't been altogether surprised when he'd flung off alone. She just hadn't expected him to be gone for good.

He'd never even said goodbye, just got Marcus to pack up his stuff and take it over to him, along with the still-white copy of the Youssoupoff Strad that he'd made but not yet varnished, for something to work on in the evenings. She could see that a part of him might have been scared, after being beaten up. But she couldn't altogether excuse him because of that. However many anti-Jewish mobs might have been prowling the courtyards of central Petrograd over the summer of reaction – and she didn't see many, especially as the tide turned again, and revolutionaries again displaced the Jew-hunters on the streets – all he'd have had to do would be to turn his coat collar up. If he'd really wanted to persuade her, he'd have come. He'd have tried.

No, Yasha had made his choice. She wouldn't go chasing after him: that was her choice. But that didn't mean she didn't go on agonizing about it. She couldn't be sure, even now, that if Yasha were ever to turn up saying he'd chosen her over his politics, she wouldn't choose him over the safety of life with Horace. It was just that this now seemed so unlikely. He was gone.

*   *   *

They finished the varnishing by the end of summer, Inna and Marcus. They hardly dared draw a bow across the violin's strings to hear the magic of its voice; instead they locked it away, under two other violins, behind the wood stack in the storeroom. Felix Youssoupoff would send for it when he was ready. For now the Strad filled her with such sadness that she could hardly bear to look at it.

Once it was locked up, things got a little better.

Horace's kindly presence – the way he'd say everyday things in a gentle voice, his knack of keeping life on an even keel – began to lift the fog of heartbreak that surrounded her.

One day, Inna saw Agrippina – really saw her, skulking in the shadows with a shawl clutched round her, as she always seemed to be these days. She looked dreadfully uncomfortable.

‘Oh, Agrippinochka,' she said, suddenly realizing that the girl's developing figure was crammed into a tired child's dress, with tears up the bodice seams hidden by the nasty old shawl. Of course – there was no money for new clothes. ‘You need a better dress. Let's get you something of mine.' She was surprised how pleased Agrippina's grateful, if embarrassed smile made her.

One moment of domestic insight bred others in the following days. She was aware of Marcus grinning to himself when he saw her tutoring young Barbarian in varnishing, just as Horace smiled when, one evening, she and the young Lemans started teasing Marcus about a girl. He'd taken to going out on Thursday and Friday evenings to meetings of the Union of Youth avant-garde art group, which this girl attended. Inna even laughed when Agrippina, clearly feeling more confident in her pretty, cut-down, dark-green dress joked, ‘No secrets, brother: we can guess what she looks like already. We know your type: tall, thin, black-haired?'

That night, alone together upstairs with her husband, Inna rolled over in the bed towards him.

Horace was graceful enough not even to show surprise. He just enveloped her welcomingly in his arms, and smiled a great joyful smile as she wound her legs around his. She could feel his desire.

When they surfaced from that kiss of reunion, the first in so long, and he murmured, ‘How I've missed you,' she saw from the tenderness in his eyes that it was
all right
, and everything could be as it was before. Only then he didn't, as she'd imagined, shift her on top of him, with a great groan of want.

Instead, he blinked and, obviously remembering the bucket and rags on the landing, whispered, in that practical way of his, ‘But we should wait a week, shouldn't we?' That was their agreement: how not to have a baby.

She wriggled against him, suddenly desperate to move on from the impasse in their lives and create something, someone, new: another life to face the world with the pair of them. ‘We don't have to wait, do we?' she whispered back. ‘We could
choose
…'

‘It's not the time for children,' Horace said sadly, though his hands were still moving over her skin. ‘Not yet.'

*   *   *

If Inna was disappointed, she couldn't help but see that Horace had reason on his side. She couldn't help, either, being impressed at how adroitly her husband sidestepped the growing difficulties of getting money, as the autumn turned to brutal sleet, and the Germans got closer, and the queues and demonstrations swelled. At how he handled the gentlemen from Fabergé who, as he spent less and less time at the shop, took to dropping in at the apartment instead to chat quietly in English or French. Or at the small amounts of money on top of his stipend that Horace magicked up for the communal pot. And at his practicality, repeatedly moving around the furniture on the top landing and experimenting with the placing of the bookshelves he'd made to add to the comfort of what was now almost a second apartment.