Midnight in St. Petersburg (15 page)

‘Your mute … your rosin…' he appealed. They were still on the floor.

‘I won't be needing them,' he heard before the door shut and the light vanished.

 

CHAPTER NINE

There was a woman screaming somewhere nearby.

Inna woke, full of dread, wondering where the noise was coming from, and found Yasha gazing down at her, very close.

It was nearly light, the soft grey of a winter morning. The reading lamp was still on, but its yellow was so weak that she couldn't make out his face – just the stubble on his chin, and the stare of his eyes. He was sitting on her bed.

At least the screaming had stopped.

She pulled herself up on to one elbow. ‘What…?'

She didn't understand what was happening. He seemed to have his hands on her shoulders; and now his arms, in the striped blue flannel of a nightshirt, were tightening around her, and she was clinging to his chest, with her head full of his heartbeat. ‘It's all right. It's all right,' she heard him murmur, as if she were a frightened child, though he was the one trembling. ‘It was just a dream.'

It took her another long moment to realize the screaming must have been coming from her.

‘I didn't mean to scare you,' she heard him say. ‘I never thought you wouldn't know. I've been so sorry.'

She could feel his fingers on her scalp. He was stroking her hair.

She shut her eyes. She didn't have to wake up. All she had to do was stay here, in this dreamlike state, in the warm of her bed, against his warmth, being held …

She'd avoided talking to Yasha since that night. Not that she hadn't been aware of his stricken looks in the workshop, not that she wanted to quarrel with him, even though he was wrong. Because he had been wrong; he had to have been. She had no reason not to believe what she'd always been told, no reason to mistrust Aunty Lyuba, who'd been so good to her.

And now here they were, in something blessedly wordless. She felt the heat of relief go through her that the other thing had passed. His arms tightened; she moved closer.

She hadn't played the violin for days, either, and not just because she now felt that trying to meet him halfway by playing him a Jewish tune had been a mistake. Through the thin wall, knowing he'd be listening, it had all felt too intimate. She'd shut herself in her room every evening instead and read the novel Horace had brought her.

She caught sight of it now, half covered by the quilt: a green volume, with a silver dove drawn on the front. The peasant mystic book.

The part of Inna that knew that this new thing was happening, and knew, too, that somewhere beyond the tight control of her consciousness she
had
, after all, shown the weakness of a victim –
had
, shamefully, whimpered, and cried out, and woken Yasha up – latched on to that glimpse of book jacket with joyful relief. I've had a nightmare, she thought, because of the book.

Yes, that was it … She'd stayed up late, finishing it. She must have drifted away after finishing the murder scene, whose brutal last words she still remembered now.

In the sullen light of barely breaking dawn, the yellow flame of a candle danced on the table; in the cramped room stood sullen, unmalicious people, while on the floor Pyotr's body breathed in spasms; without cruelty, with faces bared,
they
stood over the body, examining with curiosity what they had done: the deathly blueness and the trickle of blood that oozed from his lip, which, no doubt, he had bitten through in the heat of the struggle.

Yes, it was coming back: how she'd gone to sleep with her head full of the fictional young man's terror as
they
closed in. And, even more, of how
they
had been afterwards. Her eyes had closed, last night, on the disgusted thought, Was that really how people would be, after …
doing that
?

‘I shouldn't have been reading that book so late, that's all.' Her voice sounded throaty with sleep. ‘It wasn't your fault.'

But, even as she looked at Yasha's face, so close, she also knew that it hadn't only been the murder in the book that she'd been screaming about. With another part of her mind, she could still, just, recall the dissolving fragments of her dream.

No, it had been something … else. Worse. In the dream, there'd been someone lying down, she vaguely remembered, lying in the dark, but they'd had a great red wet smile, one so dreadful you couldn't look at it without your gorge rising, without screaming—

And then Yasha's lips closed on hers. And there was no room in Inna's mind for anything except right now, right here.

‘Yasha!' she heard, from far away.

His mouth left hers. He sat up.

It was Madame Leman.

‘Yaaasha!'

She was coming up the stairs from maybe one floor down. Inna could hear her slow footsteps. ‘I've got your laundry here – it's terribly heavy, too. Can you take it up the rest of the way, dear?' she called.

His eyes turned wildly to the door.

Inna could see him assessing what step Madame Leman would have reached by the time he got to the safety of his own room.

Then he bolted out on to the landing, running his hands over his head and patting at his nightshirt as he went.

Inna burrowed deep down inside the bed, under the blankets.

She could hear that Madame Leman was nearly at the top. She'd see where he'd been, there was no doubt about it …

The stair outside her door creaked. Yasha, she thought. But so did the top step. Inna screwed her eyes shut, expecting an explosion. ‘Ah, there you are, dear,' she heard instead, right outside her door. ‘Here, take this basket, do. It's breaking my back.'

She heard Yasha laugh, to her ears very uneasily, and his mumbled thanks. Then she heard him say, with new bravado, ‘You're up early.'

But Madame Leman didn't seem to hear. ‘And if you wouldn't mind, dear, since you're up too, could you get dressed quickly and come and give me a hand downstairs? I can't reach the tops of the cupboards, and I'm spring-cleaning the yellow room. I need someone tall to fetch things down.'

It was only when Madame Leman was safely back downstairs that Yasha, now hastily dressed, tucking shirt into trousers under his shrugged-on jacket, stuck his head back round Inna's door.

She was doing up her skirt hooks, hurrying too. She looked up.

‘Close,' he said, grinning conspiratorially.

Her panic receded, as the dream had before. Nothing bad had happened.

Slowly, she smiled back. Then he was gone.

 

CHAPTER TEN

Horace took off his eyeglasses and put down his tiny paintbrush on his worktable. The goggle-rings left on his cheeks and forehead chafed. Experience told him they would look red and painful if he bothered to go and check in the glass. He looked around him. The other dark-suited gents were still hard at it under the gleaming floor-to-ceiling polished mahogany shelving. Solemn and heavy as church pews, the shelves contained many, many jewelled and enamelled fripperies in the making. Horace's colleagues, straining their eyes through magnifiers at whatever precious tiny object they were working on, with whatever miniature instruments, were turning out more. There was an intent quietness in the back room: just the occasional mutter, in well-spoken English, or French, or playful Swiss-German. But the fine strokes of the latest layer of Horace's latest dreaming-spires Oxford scene needed to dry. And his eyes needed a rest.

A dozen silver cigarette boxes to finish by Christmas for Prince Youssoupoff's relatives, all with prettily idealized painted decorations of English scenes: the Radcliffe Camera dome, autumn trees, mist. Who better than Horace, who'd actually seen Oxford? Monsieur Fabergé had been pleased with the commission from the richest man in Russia. But Horace was doing them only slowly, between other orders. It's dull doing the same thing, over and over again, he said lightly; I'll spread them out. Anyway, he was also enjoying the outings he went on with the prince each time he delivered another box: a mystic one morning; a gypsy nightclub out in the sticks for the whole night, after an evening meeting. And then there was the time he'd sat for hours waiting for his client in some raffish bar off Nevsky, alone at the table, surrounded by packs of young officers drinking too hard and laughing like hyenas, watching the beautiful swaying singer, absent-mindedly admiring her pearls and décolletage as well as her husky voice and sinuous dancing, wondering what had become of Felix. It was only when the dark-haired beauty strolled past his table and dropped a rose on it – and winked – that he'd realized he'd been watching Felix all along, onstage.

‘If my mother only knew where her pearls had been,' Felix murmured, grinning impishly, ten minutes later, when he flung himself elegantly into the empty chair, dressed now in impeccable gentleman-about-town clothes. ‘Not to mention her dress! I hate to think what she'd say.'

No, he didn't want to finish this entertaining commission too fast.

Felix took the edge off the sometimes stifling respectability of his job at Fabergé in which Horace painted very small pretty things for stout generals' wives.

Unusually for an Englishman, Horace had spent his entire youth in India; his father was a military surgeon; his grandfather had been a botanist who'd run the Calcutta botanical garden. His family hadn't had the finance to treat India, as most of the English did, like a temporary posting, with the children sent Home to school and their ayahs dumped on London street corners when their usefulness ran out. Home hadn't ever quite been home to the Wallicks; his grandfather, despite his accented elegance in English, had been a Danish Jew blown into English India as a young man by a change of political wind during the Napoleonic Wars. This meant there were no convenient aunts to die and leave them an inheritance to go Home on; no cousins with ramshackle houses crumbling under sprays of honeysuckle. So when Father had retired, there hadn't really been anywhere to go in England, except rented apartments in London, where there'd been good works in the East End for his more spiritually minded, dutiful sister while he'd watched the moths eat away at his parents' marriage after Father's bankruptcy. Even more painful had been the sight of Father, embittered by the world's ingratitude for his scientific researches, scraping around trying to re-establish himself professionally as a photographer.

The childhood life before that grey, pinched, outsider scrappiness was all so long ago now that Calcutta had shrunk to no more than a saffron-coloured cloud of dust in Horace's mind: hot, energetic, multi-lingual; with water glittering between the boats and exotic Himalayan plants swaying in the gardens and red-faced white men in military uniform and fabulous native grandees in bright silks. Horace felt oddly nostalgic for those dull, noisy colonels and peacock princes. He knew how to talk to them. True, he'd never be one of them, but he felt more at home with them than with the tepid rain of Home.

So he hadn't been able to believe his luck when he'd got to Russia ten years ago now, and found this other glittering, exotic empire, this brutal place of extreme contrasts and weathers, this splendid collection of oddities just waiting for him: where he could feel apart but also at home, again … at last.

His latest client, this charming, wicked, flamboyant mass of impossible contrasts, Felix Youssoupoff, was the living, breathing shorthand symbol of the Russia Horace loved.

Like the other delightful oddities Horace gathered elsewhere in his evening life, in the avant-garde circles he preferred to frequent (when his time was his own and he could sport the kind of dandyish coloured waistcoats and twirl the silver-topped canes that would have given the generals' wives of his daytime employment a heart attack), an occasional dose of Felix reminded him he was, really, an artist with a wild side.

Still, not tonight. He didn't think tonight should be too alternative.

He opened his case and got out the newspaper he'd been looking at over breakfast, to check the various concerts he'd ringed for this evening.

There was the new young English violin sensation, Elsie Playfair. Señor José, the violin-maker who'd introduced him to Leman during a visit to Petersburg two years ago, had written last week, saying he should be sure not to miss her recital. That might be just the thing. Though, hm, Mendelssohn …

He turned the page.

He'd given tonight a good deal of thought. But he still wasn't quite decided.

He wanted to make it exactly right.

*   *   *

‘Oh!' Inna exclaimed, a few hours later. But then her voice faltered and her eyes clouded. She glanced sideways at Leman. ‘But I can't. I'm sorry…'

Still in his hat and coat, already feeling warm in the heat of the workshop, Horace breathed in sawdusty air with his disappointment. He could see she'd been expecting him, as she'd had the book ready to return. He'd imagined she'd be pleased. He glanced at Leman, hoping for clarification.

But Leman just wiped his hands on his big apron. ‘Why don't you stay to dinner instead, dear man?' he said, with, as it seemed to Horace, indecision mixed into his customary heartiness. ‘The women have promised us cheeselets. Lidiya would be delighted to see you.'

Horace wasn't especially tempted. Greasy fried cream-cheese-and-raisin patties, topped with sour cream and sugar: highly indigestible. It wasn't really an aristocratic cuisine, the Russian one. And those naughty children, making their racket … Amusing, of course, but not at all what he'd had in mind.

But when he saw how Inna's face lit up at this invitation, he smiled assent. Slipping her apron off, she stepped quickly forward to take the coat he'd started unbuttoning. She
was
pleased to see him, then. He'd find out easily enough, over dinner, what the problem was.