The Birds Fall Down (3 page)

“He’s just what I remembered, I didn’t exaggerate,” thought Laura with admiration, with distaste. He was so huge. Her father was six foot; Nikolai Nikolaievitch must have been four inches taller, and even for that he was broad. Though his roar was loving, in his embrace Tania appeared the victim of a great beast of prey.

His head was too massive; when he bent to kiss his daughter first on one cheek and then on the other, it seemed terrible that she should have to suffer the second blow. He was not growing old in a way young people like to see; his white hair and his beard were streaked with the barbaric gold glowing as it glowed on his daughter’s head. His features were nearly classical yet were thickened as if by some blood not European, and the colour of his skin sent the mind to Asia. It made him look all the taller and stranger and yellower that he was wearing a long fawn garment cut like a monk’s robe. But it was the change in him that was so alarming. Before, he had been a wilder, stronger version of other and quite familiar kinds of people. There were Members of Parliament who came to the house for dinner and looked quite like Nikolai Nikolaievitch, allowing for a difference in size and vehemence. And when her grandfather came to London he frequented the Distinguished Strangers Galleries in the Lords and Commons, and had been to dinner at Downing Street and stayed at Hatfield and Chatsworth, and it had all gone very well. But now he could not have set foot outside the apartment without being followed by a crowd, and without gratifying their anticipations, for his movements were strange as signals to another star.

“Darling Papa, where is Mamma?” asked Tania, freeing herself from his arms.

The old man’s great amber eyes went to Laura. She was engulfed in his hugeness, smothered by the softness of his robe. It was some kind of wool, but soft as silk. He let her go, then caught her hands. “Were you anxious to see us? Did you have a good journey? Did the Channel make your mother ill?”

He wanted to know none of these things. He was testing her Russian, making sure that her mother saw to it that she spoke it as well as she spoke English. It did not matter that he and his wife often spoke French. If she spoke Russian, it would mean that his blood was somehow bound to Russia. She answered as quickly as she could get the words out, “We have been speaking of nothing else for days. The journey did not seem long at all. Mother was better than I have ever known her on the sea.”

But she thought, in English, “How I wish I was not here. I wanted to come, but now I wish I was in Radnage Square.” These walls were lined from floor to ceiling with pictures in swollen gilt frames, shallow portraits of bearded and mustachio’d generals with giant chests barred and crossed with insignia, abundant women wearing high tiaras and carrying wide feather fans, landscapes showing larches and birches and pines standing lifeless as metal among their cobalt shadows on the snow. On the chimney-piece a huge clock showed the time in gross diamond figures on a gold globe fixed to a lapis lazuli firmament, and it was flanked by lines of small objects such as a chrysoberyl bull-dog with ruby eyes and a number of gold and silver jewel-studded Easter eggs. Several small tables were covered with cloisonné jardinières and others with glass tops contained little rosebushes made of coral and jade, and many miniatures and snuff-boxes, all repellent to interest. On each side of the fireplace stood a malachite vase as high as herself. All these things were getting old, as people get old; and bad taste seemed present, as a separate entity, like dust. Yet it had been delicious to touch her grandfather’s robe. It was as different from ordinary material as something sung from something spoken. In a way she liked her grandfather. Once she had seen children crawling under a circus-tent so that they could see the elephant, and she would have done that to see her grandfather; and what she liked in him was the upside-downness of him, as this inverted luxury which gave him an everyday possession—for she supposed this robe was just a dressing-gown—which was uniquely exquisite, while the pictures and bric-à-brac round him were dull as china dogs and shell picture-frames from Margate.

But it was infuriating of him to pay no attention to Tania’s twice-repeated question, “Father, where is Mamma?” He simply went on trying out Laura’s Russian, holding her hands powerless in his, staring at her, and telling her that her accent was good, that she held herself well, that he was glad that she had inherited the family golden hair. Tania exclaimed softly, “Everything seems to go wrong at the same time,” and took off her coat and held it in her arms as if it were a baby or a little dog or her own anxiety. Laura felt frightened to see her mother suddenly becoming young and defenceless, even younger than she was herself. She pulled her hands out of her grandfather’s grasp and asked him loudly, “Where’s Grandmamma?”

Nikolai seemed to think the question odd. “Why, child,” he said kindly, “she has been pacing up and down her room all day, actually crying with eagerness for your arrival and praying that your mother should not be too sea-sick.”

“Is she there now?” asked Tania.

“How should I know?” he asked in indulgent rebuke. “She might be. In any case, they will have told her that you are here, and she’ll be coming in a minute. Sit down and rest, it’s you and not she who have been doing the travelling.”

“I must go and find her,” said Tania, going towards the door. But she halted, breathed deeply, and nerved herself to ask: “How is she? Is she well?”

“Is she well? Really I can’t say that,” said Nikolai. ‘We’re none of us in very good health. We don’t want to be here in Paris, so it doesn’t suit us. There’s an old Russian proverb—”

“Yes, yes,” said Tania, and turned to the door, but was met by Hélène, followed by the two women servants whom the Diakonovs had brought from Russia: Pyotr’s wife Katinka, the stout old cook, and Vissarion’s sister, Aglaia, the Countess’s elegant and jaundiced maid. Laura thought they looked like characters out of those boring Marivaux plays that she always had to dodge being taken to see at the Comédie française, for in the house they wore dresses belonging to another age, with full skirts and tight bodices made of thick grey cotton, with neckerchiefs of white linen and white stockings. Now they seemed more like players than ever, for they looked at Tania with great eyes before they kissed her hand, and there was an emphasized devotion in their kisses, while they cast sidelong glances at Nikolai so plainly pitying him for his ignorance of some impending calamity that he would certainly have ceased to be ignorant of it, had he not been sealed in himself. When they kissed Laura’s hand they mimed the same sort of fear, and she stiffened with fear. Was her mother perhaps going to leave her father? But she was wrong. There was some other calamity here. As Hélène took her mother’s coat from her she said in an undertone, “They say the Countess will be back in a minute and you must not worry. It appears there is a vigil service in their Church—in your Church—this evening, it’s one of your saint’s days.”

“It’s the day of Constantine and Helena, the Great Monarchs,” murmured Aglaia, an inch or two above Laura’s hand.

“Isn’t Laura Eduarevna like her mother?” Nikolai asked them.

“The image, the image,” the two servants chanted together, and Katinka murmured to Tania, “The Countess didn’t feel like going to our church in the Rue Darou, so she’s just stepped round to the chapel in the Countess von Krehmunden’s house in the Avenue de Bois—”

“Do you mean to say she’s well enough to go out alone?”

Katinka and Aglaia exchanged another dramatic glance. “Oh, there’s no question of that. Even if she’d felt like doing anything so rash, we wouldn’t have let her. But she was taken by Monsieur Kamensky.”

“Ah, that excellent little Kamensky,” sighed Tania.

“Indeed, we don’t know where we’d all be without him. It’s a pity he can’t be here all the time. But he has to follow his profession. However, he’s back now, and he’s out with her this very minute, and he’ll bring her back as soon as he can. But you know how devout she is. She’s probably forgotten the time. And if the poor lady was happy, he wouldn’t like to bring her back to a sense of what was going on.”

“Not even to remind her about you,” said Aglaia.

“Soon we will have to give a great ball for our little Laura,” said Nikolai. “Your grandmother will stand beside your mother at the head of the staircase as she stood beside your mother at her first great ball, and you will stand beside your mother.”

“Madame Tania hasn’t changed since her first ball,” Katinka said to him, in the tone nurses use to children when they are telling them to eat up something, and Aglaia spoke in the same style. “Nobody will know which is the mother and which the daughter.”

“Laura will be wasted in England,” Nikolai told Tania. “The English have next to no ceremonies. She should have been coming to us in St. Petersburg now. She might have stayed with us for a long time. She might have been a
demoiselle d’honneur
at court as you were.”

“I couldn’t do it,” said Laura, looking up into his clouded amber eyes. She felt she had to make him understand that. She knew he was disgraced and had now no influence at court, yet he had this magicianly air, she was afraid he might be able to bring about impossible things, including this. “I wouldn’t be any good at the Russian court or the English. I’ve got to be presented next year and I hate it. I’m frightened. I’ll do the wrong thing and we’ll—” She was going to say, “We’ll all be sent to the Tower,” and then checked herself. Nikolai had been sent to the Tower.

The servants, seeing that things were going better, were backing out. “You wouldn’t do the wrong thing, Laura,” said Tania. “I thought I would, but something comes and takes over. After all, the family has been doing it for so long, we’re wound up.” She went to stand by the fireplace, rested her elbow on the chimney-piece, between a chalcedony frog and an agate tortoise. Her small hat, trimmed with a bird, her close-fitting blouse, and her long skirt, cut in the slanting lines of a tacking yacht, gave her the shape of a swift force prepared to go into action. “After all, Laura,” she said in an undertone, “Grandmamma can’t be so bad if she goes out at all. And to one of our services. You have to be pretty strong for that. The Almighty always feels he can’t outstay his welcome with us.” To Nikolai she said, “The silly girl doesn’t realize one can do anything one really wants to.”

“She would have looked superb in the demoiselle’s ruby velvet dress,” said Nikolai.

“Laura doesn’t want to look superb,” said Tania. “Do remember she’s half-English, and so doesn’t care much about drama. But the English are a sentimental people. Laura prefers to love people rather than to be a person. She’s prepared to love you and Mamma though she doesn’t know you as well as I would like. She loves me,” she said, in a sudden flight of rapture, looking in the glass as if the reflection of her face confirmed what she said. “I don’t want to look as I did at my first great ball. I’d be grateful enough if I could look like myself, if I don’t just fall to pieces and be nobody, be dust. But I’m kept together because my children love me. Laura loves me quite a lot. Papa, does it mean a great deal to you that your children love you?” When he vaguely smiled and nodded, she turned round and begged him, “Hasn’t it meant a great deal to you that we love you so much, in this time, in this bad time, since all this has happened to you? Haven’t you found it true that the love of your children makes up for anything that can happen to you?”

Nikolai answered, “Yes, yes, it means a lot. A family life is one of the few real joys we’re vouchsafed here on earth. Sit down and rest. Presently they’ll bring you some tea, some Russian tea. I hope your brothers send you tea regularly, as they do to us, real tea from Russia. But they may not, they’ve never been in England and they don’t know how dreadful English tea is. Much that’s drunk there is that rubbish from India. Even that appalling stuff from Ceylon.”

“We love you so much,” Tania went on. She had turned again to the glass and was combing her hair with one of her hatpins. “I didn’t know till this last year how much I loved you. You and Mamma on the one hand, the children on the other. Nothing,” she said, her face distorted with pain, “can really hurt me, because of that love.” She spun round, crying, “Isn’t that Mamma talking out there in the corridor?”

It was frightening, when one wanted one’s mother, for her to want her mother too. But that was being a selfish beast. The door did not open at once. There was a weak twisting of the handle as if someone outside was trying to turn its massiveness with one hand, and then a call for help. Then Pyotr held the door open and her grandmother came in, leaning heavily on the arm of a small bearded man whom Laura recognized as Monsieur Kamensky, though chiefly because she remembered that he had looked very like a lot of other people, and so did this man. Whoever he was, Madame Diakonova pushed him away when she saw Tania and Laura, stretched out her hands, and took a step towards them, and then came to a halt, shaking her head and smiling shyly, as if she expected a scolding.

“Mother!” said Tania in a whisper. “Mother!” She caught her hat to her bosom and drove her hatpin through the bird which trimmed it, as if she were killing something which must not be permitted to exist for one more moment.

“Well, I warned you I wasn’t feeling healthy as a peasant,” said Sofia Andreievna, with a little laugh, and the two women stood quite still, looking at each other.

Laura hated her grandfather for what his grief had made of this apartment. It was horrible to see what breathing the poisoned air had done to her grandmother. In the past, before her grandfather had gone into exile, Sofia Andreievna had visited them often in Radnage Square. Then she had been almost as beautiful as Tania, though in a quite different way, for her hair was black and her face a smooth oval and she was not at all barbaric; and she was very grand, prodigiously so, considering that she was small and slight. She had an immense amount of jewellery, all the stones very large, and she had furs that were as weightless and warm as good weather; and she possessed only what would have been for anybody else best clothes. Even in bed, she was grand, wearing jackets frothing over with feathers between sheets she brought from Russia, sheets of linen so fine that it was dark, under bedcovers that dripped heavy Venetian lace to the floor. But within all this magnificence, and under the other weight of her years, she remained supple as a young animal. On her very last winter visit she had hunted regularly in Leicestershire, rushing back to town glittering with well-being, ready for whatever was going in the way of operas and theatres and dinner parties and balls. They said she owed her vitality to her descent on her mother’s side from a Polish family famous for strength and longevity; an ancestress of hers had ridden out at the head of an army of her serfs to do battle against an army commanded by her own great-grandson.