The Birds Fall Down (34 page)

Nikolai quavered after her, “When these two men go, give them a lot of money. Not only for what they have done but for what they are. Specially subject, like myself, to the delusion of strength.”

The salon was an odd room to find in a hotel, even this hotel with its past. It had an air of being part of a small private house, occupied by someone old and tedious and averse from change. It had been furnished in the Empire style, in the distant day, long before Laura was born, when it was not yet considered ugly. Laurel-wreaths and bees lay against the dark and light stripes of the green wall-paper, the round table was upheld by twined dolphins, a clock on the mantelpiece rested on the haunches of two metal sphinxes, there was an ormolu-encrusted desk. The laurel-wreaths and the bees should have been golden, they were dust-coloured; the dolphins had lost some wooden scales, the clock had stopped, some of the ormolu mounts were missing, but there were signs of recent occupation. On a shelf above the desk was a line of ledgers in marbled covers, the later ones quite new and unfaded, and in a corner was a man’s travelling hat-box, the brown leather crumbling to an unexpected red fundament, but labelled as if it had been taken on a journey not so long ago. But what was strange about the salon was what had struck her grandfather about the bed in the other room. When she had got up that morning she had not known this room existed, and there she was, shut in it with her fear, perhaps endangered simply by being there. “Can this be a trap?” she wondered. “Is that doctor really a doctor? He seems to be thinking something about me all the time which he never says, and he’s always making fun of something, but I don’t know what. Did Kamensky arrange for us to be brought here?”

But this room belonged to someone French, wine-drinking and sensible. People had never stayed up here all night making tea and exchanging wild guesses about salvation, as Russians would, whether they were honest or deceivers, whether they wanted to murder her and her grandfather or protect them. It could never have been stuffy in here, not really stuffy, as people like it who have been warmed since childhood in the winter months by great porcelain stoves in rooms with double windows. She had no reason to be frightened here. When the ostler and the blacksmith came out of the bedroom they were plainly not parties to a plot. They were muted by thoughts of sickness and death, and nothing else was on their minds.

Uneasily, they looked at the money she held out to them, as if they were taking it from a dead man and therefore, supposing he had not wished them to have so much, were robbing his ghost. She said to the ostler, “He wanted you to have it because you are tall like him,” and to the blacksmith, since he was a preacher, she repeated what her grandfather had said about the delusion of strength. He looked disconcerted, as if he were more accustomed to say such things than to have them said to him, and preferred it to be so. But both gave her gentle smiles and went out, shutting the door softly.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of here,” she told herself, and went to the window and cooled her forehead against the glass pane. Outside was a broken landscape of roofs, of red and orange and tawny tiles, sloping this way and that, surmounted with chimneys giving out spirals of blue wood-smoke, and below was a line of shuttered windows, and two storeys under that a wide paved street of little shops. The one directly facing her was a pork-butcher’s; long and thick and shining sausages, white and black and red, hung from hooks in the open window, and at the doorway stood the pork-butcher himself, wearing a high white cap. At his feet a mongrel dog, with a lot of pug in it, played with a bone. The pork-butcher stooped down and rubbed a forefinger along its fat neck, smoothing out the creases. That brick embankment outside the station, with the street-lamps at the top of it, this dull man stroking his dog outside his horrid shop, she would choose to spend years and years looking at them and nothing else, rather than be dead and not see anything at all. What was beauty, what was ugliness? Only existence mattered.

The doctor came out of the bedroom, closing the doors very softly. “Well, he settled in bed and he’s asleep. The examination, though it wasn’t thorough, has tired him out. For the moment he’s not too bad, you needn’t be anxious. I’ve told them to send you up some boiled water and some boiled milk, you can give it to him when he wakes. I wish I hadn’t to leave you alone with him, but I must go and get your grandfather some proper medical help. For I’m not a doctor, you know.”

He lowered his head, took a notebook out of his pocket, tore out a sheet and wrote something on it. “I’m a surgeon,” he explained, handing her the paper. “But why have you gone so white? You’re shaking. Sit down. You must be very much attached to your grandfather, but just think, he’s old, you can’t expect him to live for ever, and he isn’t suffering much pain that I can see or even discomfort. And as for the responsibility, your father should get here late tonight if he catches the early afternoon train from Victoria.” He looked at her inquisitively, disregarding her murmurs of thanks, with a tiresome smile, as if he thought she might be in genuine distress but only for a reason that was foolish, born of her youth and inexperience. There was a knock on the door and the fair stout chambermaid came in, carrying a tray. “Good girl,” he said to her, “chicken and salad and cheese, it couldn’t be better. But not the red wine. She won’t like red wine. Get her some still champagne.”

“I don’t drink any wine at all,” she said, and added, to be strictly truthful, “except at Christmas.”

“Well, there are times when the only sensible thing to do is to pretend it’s Christmas,” said the doctor. “Isn’t it so?” he asked the chambermaid, and then broke off, and scrutinized her through narrowed eyes. “Why, I know you, I’ve operated on you twice, but so long ago that if there’s any trace of the scar I ought to be ashamed of myself. Yes, I remember, your name’s Marcot, your father worked for my uncle.”

“Catherine Marcot,” she said, with a melting, hero-worshipping smile.

“Yes, Catherine Marcot, and I’ve operated on you twice. Well, well, you’ve put on weight since then, if I have to set about you for a third time there’ll be much more to cut through than there was on the first two occasions. But you’re looking well.” With a conscious exercise of charm, he asked, “You’ll keep an eye on this young lady, won’t you?”

“I’ll do what I can, but we’re very busy with that ball. It’s a shame. It’s a shame. The young lady should,” she said firmly, as if forced into taking a liberty, “have her own people with her at such a time. She’s very young, doctor.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed the doctor, “how young she is! Youth! Youth!” Catherine made a faint sound of impatience. It was evident that she and the doctor had not been talking of quite the same thing. She joined her hands as if prepared to wait till he would get past this stage of comment and say something useful. “You’re quite right,” he said hastily. “Mademoiselle, haven’t you anybody nearer than your father? Is it quite impossible to send for your mother?” She shook her head. “And there’s nobody, nobody else? What about the relatives you were on your way to stay with?”

She shook with sudden terror. If they wired to Aunt Florence she might send them Pyotr, and Pyotr had come into Chubinov’s story. She put her hands to her head and tried to recall exactly what part he was supposed to have played. Surely Kamensky had told Chubinov at some point that Pyotr was the agent who reported to him on what went on in the flat at the Avenue Kléber. But that would certainly be a lie, if Kamensky said it. Yet she could take no risks. “No. There’s absolutely nobody there either. It’s my grand-aunt we were going to, she’s quite old, and so are her servants. And she’s American, and so are the servants. They don’t speak French. They wouldn’t look after me, I’d have to look after them.”

“You’re going white again,” said the doctor, with curiosity. “That’ll be all now, Catherine. Come and see Mademoiselle the Princess again before too long.” As the door closed he put his head on one side, stroked his neat beard with his probing forefinger, and let her have the full brilliance of his grey eyes. “It seems to me that you’ve more on your mind than a sick grandfather. If you’ve a trouble which seems to you terribly secret, forget that it is a secret and confide it to me. Surgeons and doctors, you can’t astonish them, you couldn’t if you were Judas himself.”

She forced a smile. But it seemed an odd coincidence that he should speak of Judas.

“Not a very good smile,” he said. “Far from your best, far from the smile you would have given us all if your visit to Grissaint had been something quite different, and you’d come to dance at the ball in our lovely assembly room downstairs.”

As pianists run their hands over the keys when they have no notion what to play, her mind went back to what she had seen of the room, to the slender girl on the stepladder polishing the high pane with her round stretched arm, waving to her lover in the clouds, the women in their sober clothes, devoutly working on the floor, to the smell of honey in the air.

“That’s a better smile,” said the surgeon. “Have you been to your first ball?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Delicious. Well, eat your chicken and drink your champagne. That’s very important. It’ll really do you good. Don’t worry about your grandfather. I’m off to find the right doctor for him.”

But as soon as he had gone she went into the bedroom and pushed a chair up to the bedside. Nikolai’s face was luminous and yellow as if he were lying under some strong light filtering through citron-coloured stained glass or curtains. But the shutters were not fully open, the room was half-dark, and the hangings of the bed were greyish with a cornflower sprig between blue stripes. The glow on his face came from within. In awe she said, “I’m sorry you’re ill. I love you very much.”

He spoke to her in his own full voice again. His strength was evidently something apart from his health. “You are a good girl. You listen to your blood, which is my blood, that’s why you love me. I have only my blood to stand by me now. My wife loves me, my sons and daughters love me, though they have often been tiresome to the point that I have been obliged, much against my will, to chastise them, they have learned to love me for my wise severity. You love me. But that’s not enough. Like all men, I’m not content to be loved only by people of my blood, which is a kind of compulsion, leaving them no free choice. I would like comrades who simply elected to laugh when I laughed and weep when I wept, for no other reason than that they shared my opinion of what it’s right to laugh at and weep over. I thought I’d such a comrade in Kamensky. He was completely alien from me, he was low as I was high, but I laughed when he laughed and I wept when he wept, simply because I chose to, and I never doubted that he’d make the same choice. I’m not asking now why he betrayed me, I’m asking why he didn’t love me.”

“Well, he was more interested in you than in anyone else. I suppose that’s love.”

“It was not enough for me,” he said, and lay quite still, knitting his brows and mumbling from time to time. She felt some irritation, surely he might have spent a little time to worry about what Kamensky might do to her—she was, he said, of his blood. To get rid of the resentful thought she went into the other room and got the plate of chicken, reminding herself that he was ill. But when she got back he was worse. She put down the plate, her hunger gone. He was ill in a way she had thought he would not be again.

“All mysteries will be made clear quite soon. For I was right about the trumpet. It was blown by Pravdine’s daughter, the child of an insignificant official, the fifth cow, to prove that the last shall be first. She was given the privilege of announcing that all was over. She, not you, Laura. I know that must be hard for you.”

“No, I wouldn’t mind her doing it, not a bit. But, honestly, Grandfather, she didn’t blow a trumpet, and nothing’s over. It’s all just as it’s always been. When you’re well we’ll go back to Paris, and life will go on in the apartment just the same. That trumpet you heard in the station was simply the tinny thing they sound when it’s time for the train to start.”

“You’re wrong and I am right,” said Nikolai. “I will admit I was wrong over the clock. It didn’t stop. It doesn’t stop, not all at once. It goes slower and slower, minutes are like hours, like days, like weeks, like months, like years, like the whole of time. Once when I was young I made a journey from Petersburg to Persia, it was many years before we’d finished making the roads. I rode on horseback all the way from the frontier to Teheran. The ride didn’t take as long as it took me to mount the staircase up to this room between those two peasants who should have been in the army if this were not a poisoned democracy. And now go away until I call you. I won’t sleep well, sound sleep takes vigour, like riding, shooting, fencing. But in my short sleep I shall dream hundreds of dreams, as many dreams as I did in the ten years of my youth.”

He turned away from her, nuzzling into his pillow. She took the plate of chicken back to the salon, and found that while she had been in the other room a carafe of yellow wine had been left on the table. This she supposed to be the still champagne which the doctor said would do her good. As if it were medicine, she poured it into her glass, cheating a little by scanting the quantity, and drank it without hope of enjoyment. Of course it was horrid. She recalled regretfully the clusters of decanters on the sideboard at home, which she and her brothers were forbidden to touch by the pleasantest of prohibitions, for they got some credit for obedience from their elders, and all disliked the taste of wine. Reluctantly they swallowed some drops on Christmas Day, only because there was a silly tradition that when the plum-pudding had gone out and the Chinese ginger and the crystallized fruits from Nice and the Carlsbad plums and the muscatels and almonds had been set out on the table, the Rowan family drank a toast to the memory of its least distinguished member, Grand-Uncle Lionel. “Having thus concluded his army career, not a moment too soon if the sun were never to set on the Union Jack, he devoted his talents to public affairs. For twelve years he represented the Borough of Damer, Suffolk, in the House of Commons. During that period he caught the Speaker’s eye four times. But he made his mark, for on three occasions the House was counted out.” That was true. But a different aunt or uncle or cousin had to propose the toast every year, and some of them drew the long bow. That story about the tiger-hunt and the third edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
could not have happened. Though Uncle Desmond was a Bishop, he must have made that one up. But it was queer how last Christmas the toast had not been any fun. Nothing was any fun that holiday. Even Lionel, who hated Eton, had said he was glad when he had to go back.