The Birds Fall Down (2 page)

It was only two days afterwards, for Tania was frenetic once she went into action, that Edward Rowan took his wife and his daughter and the lady’s maid, Hélène, down to Victoria and put them on the boat-train. He hardly looked at them once he had settled them in their carriage, and stared along the platform at the engine as if he were waiting for the very first detectable sign that it was getting up steam; and indeed he was waiting for that signal. When the puffing began he turned round, raised his hat, and spoke through the window. “Good-bye, Tania,” he said, “I hope you find things better than you fear. And I rely on you to come back soon. I do ask you not to stay away too long.” He spoke easily, as if he were exercising the command over his wife’s good nature which it was natural he should have, and as the train started to move he put his hat back on his head and walked quickly away.

Tania sank back in her seat, fierce as she had been on the terrace, her cheeks as hot. Laura was feeling angry with her father because he had not said good-bye to her at all. There came back to her a morning, some years before, when he had seen them off to Torquay and had whispered through the window to her that she was his plain Jane, his ugly little thing, his monster, and begged her not to come back any more hideous than she was. That would have been silly now she was grown-up, but he might have said something. She had not forgotten having overheard her mother say of her the other afternoon that she never noticed what was going on, and while she thought this opinion untrue, she supposed her mother held it because she would have liked it to be true. So, to show she had been blind to the remoteness of her father’s farewell, she said calmly, “How wonderful Papa looks. Always so much better than other men. Only he frightens me, he’s so fastidious. I was terrified in the carriage—look, I’ve one button off this glove.”

It didn’t go well. Her mother said in a cold and dreaming tone, “Yes. So fastidious. Why, he can’t endure being touched. It’s quite an ordeal for him to be fitted by his tailor or his shoemaker. It’s all very extraordinary.” Shuddering, she picked up the Times from her lap and spread out its pages with uncertain and blindish gestures.

Laura hoped her mother would not cry, for of course the other people in the carriage were taking as good a look at her as politeness permitted. They had recognized Papa, that had been obvious, and people always did; none of the younger Members of Parliament was as often photographed as he was. For another thing, Mummie was so unusual looking, with her dark gold hair, her long grey-green eyes, her high cheekbones, her honey-coloured pallor, her royal and incapable air, her splendid clothes. Laura had found that even she was stared at, because she had the same hair and eyes and skin, and of course she was nothing like as good-looking as her mother. But she need not have worried because Tania was being stared at, Tania kept her secret. Her way of emotion was as unusual as her appearance, simply she looked as if she had been roughly aroused from sleep and was not yet quite awake. She might have been just a woman who had to break her custom of sleeping on till noon.

The carriage swung about. Laura could not read, and though she usually liked looking out of a railway train, the countryside along the line always seeming of a different sort than was accessible by walking, greener and more unspoiled, it appeared that one had to have nothing to worry about to be able to enjoy that. She had a lump in her throat and a pain behind her breastbone—her father might have said good-bye to her. What was it that her father was doing that had spoiled the way he had seen them off, and everything in the house at Radnage Square? Now when she came back with her governess from her afternoon classes at tea-time the house was forbidding like barracks full of troops divided against themselves. It was not that her father and mother were quarrelling. They could not have done that, her father was not even there to be quarrelled with, for except when Parliament was in recess he was never at home on weekday afternoons, except on Friday. It was as if life had slowed down and gone muddy. The books from Mudie’s Lending Library were not changed for weeks together, and her mother often forgot to take tickets for concerts and the opera, even when she could have heard the music and musicians she most liked. Also the flowers were nothing like as good as they had been before. All other winters, it had been wonderful to go into the drawing-room and find Tania in a tea-gown by a bright fire, with mounds of bronze and gold chrysanthemums piled cunningly where they were reflected in the chinoiserie mirrors, one curtain left undrawn so that one could see the bare trees against the night sky and the yellow street-lamps shining on the farther side of the gardens, which for no reason at all shone with the aching sweetness of sad music, sad verse. But this winter, even if Tania remembered to buy flowers, she might leave them to be arranged by the parlourmaid or the governess, and many times she had had tea in her own room and did not come down till dinner, and then with swollen eyes. And her father always seemed to be thinking of something else. He did not say amusing things any more.

Laura knew that husbands could do several sorts of things which angered their wives, and though she did not care to think of them too exactly, she could not imagine her father doing any of them. Such husbands “ran away.” Her father could not have moved an inch from where he was. His friends had all sprung up round him in a crowd, at Eton, at New College, in the Commons. When he travelled he was invited to stay with people he knew; his appropriate hosts had scattered themselves everywhere. The house in Radnage Square had been built for his father, and he could walk about it in the dark without bumping into anything. Alone in a strange place, what could he do? In any way, surely such husbands “ran away” towards gaiety. But her father, though not dull, had committed himself to dullness for life and liked it; he enjoyed blue books, general elections, questions in the House, Ministerial posts.

Anyway, Tania was going to be away from whatever the trouble was for a fortnight. And she was better already. She seemed to be actually reading the
Times
as the train slid through Kent, and as it drew near Dover she emerged from her sorrow into a distress which Laura found not in the least distressing, because it was familiar and idiotic. When Tania was young in Russia she had hardly ever seen the sea, except the Baltic and the Black Sea in high summer, and the English Channel was to her a mentally deranged piece of water attended by a fellow-maniac, sea-sickness, which she saw as a separate and uncontrollable entity, capable of intruding even into harbours. She could not go down to her cabin at once because Hélène had mislaid the ticket, and she fell into a comfortable irritation, not likely to last more than ten minutes, just as she did at home when meals were late or Osmund was snobbish or Lionel got overexcited and showed off, or rather as she had done when she was still happy enough to know such minor unhappiness. This holiday would be just what she needed.

But things were not as they should have been. When they got down into the cabin and Hélène brought out the blanket and pillow from the soft red-leather hold-all and laid them on the sofa, Tania breathed with an absurd urgency, “Well, when we get to the Gare du Nord we’ll have the little Kamensky to meet us, provided he’s in Paris, and that’ll be all right.” Laura thought this tactless of her mother. Of course the little secretary man, or whatever he was, would not lose any tickets and would be much more efficient than Hélène, but her mother need not have said so. Hélène put up with a great deal; she had to spend hours in brushing Tania’s hair, and Laura’s too now, and they both had an awful lot of hair. Also Monsieur Kamensky was an educated man, he had worked for her grandfather in his Ministry, of course he would know how to do things better than Hélène. But Tania had evidently meant something different, for Hélène answered without rancour, “Yes, indeed, Monsieur Kamensky will tell us all we want to know.”

They both spoke of the little secretary (she thought he was little but could not really remember with certainty) in voices softened by trust, and she thought guiltily of an occasion on their last visit to Paris, two years before, when she had been ungrateful for his devotion to the family. Somebody had come from the Russian Embassy to question her grandfather about something that had happened when he was still a Minister, her grandmother had shut herself up in her bedroom to rage and cry, Tania had had to share this angry vigil, and Monsieur Kamensky had very kindly offered to take her for a drive. On their way home they had been going along the odd cemetery-feeling road that runs along the back-gardens of the houses on the Rue St. Honoré, including the British Embassy, on the one side, and the Champs Elysées, on the other, when she caught sight of the open-air stamp-market. There the grave men were sitting on little iron chairs with their portfolios spanning their knees or lying on the ground at their feet, and she remembered that Osmund had said that if she had a chance she might buy him some French colonials. She asked Monsieur Kamensky to stop, and he had helped her a lot, he had found the man with the brindled moustache who was the specialist in such issues; and then, when she had found just what Osmund had wanted, she had asked the man if he had any Russian stamps. She did not collect stamps, they did not interest her at all, but she would have liked to have some Russian stamps. She knew Osmund had a number of them, but she wanted some of her very own. She was proud of being half-Russian, though she loved England; it was not only that it had done a lot for her with the other girls at school, it was that she felt, while knowing it was against reason, all that Tania felt about Russia.

The man with the brindled moustache told her that he had none and that she would do best to go to two men who were sitting some distance away, nearer the street, the men with the borzoi lying at their feet. She had started to walk towards them when Monsieur Kamensky caught her by the arm and said, “Please, Miss Laura, you cannot have any dealings with those people.” She was enraged because he spoke to her as she thought that no man should speak to any woman, even if she was a schoolgirl, in command. She was also resentful of the strength of the grip of his hand on her arm. She threw back her head and tore herself away and started again towards the two men with the borzoi lying at their feet. But her arm was gripped again, more firmly than before. One would never have thought that he was so strong. She said crossly, “Why shouldn’t I buy those stamps?” Her anger had broken on the polished stone of his unchanging face. He had told her sadly that people dealing in Russian goods in Paris were often revolutionaries, even terrorists, and that dangerous consequences might follow if any of them got a clue to her identity.

“What,” Laura had asked, “is it as bad as that?” and he had answered gently, “It is as bad as it can be. Have your parents never told you why you and your brothers were never allowed to visit your grandparents while they still lived in Russia? No? With all due respect to them, I think that wrong. I will take the responsibility of telling you. Three times the terrorists attempted Count Diakonov’s life, and the wing of his country house was mined. The last time your mother’s old English governess was killed.” The honor stilled her. “I am sorry,” she said. They walked soberly to the carriage, and she stopped to ask him in a horrified voice, “But are the terrorists here? In France? In Paris?” He had answered softly, so that she could scarcely hear him, “They are everywhere.” In silence they had driven home along the Champs Elysées, towards a blood-red sunset.

They were at Calais, and Tania thanked a saint because she had not been sea-sick, though she never was. After the pushing and snapping in the French customs there was the long train-journey with its good moments; the estuary where a wide sweep of ghost-coloured dunes fell to a tidal river no more than a string of pools white in the fawn mud, a piny wilderness on the farther bank running seawards to the golden haze of the horizon; and the green and glassy outskirts of Amiens, where someone had planned waterways as a child might do it, with canals cutting across one another like open scissors, and perfectly round little ponds encircling perfectly round islands. A young man kept on walking up and down the corridor so that he could look in as he passed their carriage and stare at her. She thought men dull. Next year she would be presented, and she would have to go through the season and dance with a lot of men, and she did not know how she would bear it. She supposed she would have to get married, but she could not imagine herself getting to know a man well enough for that. She did not believe there was much in men to know.

At last there was the screaming, hurrying Gare du Nord, but no Monsieur Kamensky, only the bull-necked Pyotr, who kissed Tania’s hand and wept over it, and kissed her own and wept some more, and took them out to the carriage where the giant coachman Vissarion kissed their hands and wept again. Laura could not remember that there had been quite so much emotion when she was in Paris before. Then they drove off into the boulevards, into the whiteness which follows the sunset of a clear June day, with crowds of people hurrying along, not as if they feared to be late but as if they were eager to reach some place where they were going to enjoy themselves, past cafés where other people seemed to have reached that goal of contentment, the women smiling under huge cartwheel hats, so much larger than were worn in England, the men tilting forward bowler hats, so much smaller than were worn in England. The carriage spun on while the gas-standards came into yellow flower and the sky was pierced with stars, until they turned up the long, low hill of the Avenue des Champs Elysées, between the stout rich private houses that were nearly palaces, towards the Arc de Triomphe, proud and black against the silver ending of the sunset.

Then they turned into the sombre breadth of the Avenue Kléber, and came to a halt at the most sombre building there; and that was the end of pleasure, of Paris. They drove across the pavement through an open double gateway into a courtyard where a circle of shrubs grew round a fountain flowing from a vase held by a plaster naiad, and they were met in a dark hall by a yellow-faced concierge, who, as she remembered, was half-French and half-Japanese. The Diakonovs had made their home in this building solely because it was owned, and the lower floors occupied, by a commercial syndicate of so many and such bizarre nationalities, including a substantial Japanese participation, that they could trace no connection with Russia and therefore feared no curiosity from their landlords. Hélène stayed to look after the luggage, and Tania and Laura stepped into a lift made of iron grilles and red mahogany, which rose moaning and whistling up a pole shining like a slate pencil; and on the fourth storey they got out at an open door, and Laura saw that the place was as awful as she remembered it. There was no actual difficulty in seeing that the hall was lined with tapestries and rugs, and those gorgeously coloured, but the gloom took them to itself, the walls were dull as if they had been panelled with deal. Laura followed Tania as she hurried through one sitting-room after another, pushing aside portières of fringed and bobbled bottle-green velvet, penetrating a darkness intensified by weak shaking circles of light emanating from the lamps burning before the icons in the corners of each room. Tania paused before the last doorway and exclaimed, “They aren’t here, yet surely, surely they can’t have gone out.” But in this last room an old man was huddled at a little round table, pondering over a game of patience and looking too weak to do anything else, to rise or to speak, but who sprang to his feet, overturning the table and sending the cards spinning across the floor, and shouted, “Tania, my daughter Tania!”