The Birds Fall Down (35 page)

A quarter of the dose of champagne was left. She took the glass and a sliver of chicken over to the window. The wind was still blowing high over the red tiles, and blue smoke was curling out of the chimneys like ribbons blown off their spools. But the paved street below was sheltered, and the afternoon sun was shining straight down its length. The townspeople must be taking an afternoon rest. Nobody was in the bright channel except two old women, who were dawdling past the shops, pausing sometimes to turn to each other in an ecstasy of gossip, their foreheads butting the air between them, their white linen caps, gilded by the sunlight, sawing backwards and forwards in time to their recital. Then a little girl came out and hoisted herself and a big book up into a chair outside the pork-butcher’s shop. Open, the book was wider than her lap. She sucked on a finger and stared down at the page, her head turning from left to right and going back to left as she went on to the next line. Later the pork-butcher came out and bent over her and tickled her and then grew serious and pointed at something in the book. He was making her read to him, but it ended in him reading to her. When a customer came, a waddling woman with a great basket, the child was angry, and he had to free himself from her arms to go back into the shop. She wriggled on her chair, beating the air with her little fists, and almost let the book fall to the ground. But of course her father came back when he could, he hurried to her and made his peace with kisses, and pointed at the page again, and tried to make her read, but read to her himself.

Laura wished she would not have to wait so long for her father. She shut her eyes and thought how it would be when he came. He hated admitting strangers into his world, so he would thank the person who brought him into this room as if there were nothing happening of any urgency, speaking casually and smiling faintly. Then when they were alone he would strip the gloves from his fine hands, take off his overcoat, put his arms round her and kiss her quickly and coolly, pull up a chair and question her as if they were together settling some official business. “What has happened? Don’t get excited. Tell me the whole story, without hurrying, and begin at the beginning.” She would not be doing anything that called for such sharp demands for restraint, but he always made them when she or her brothers had to tell him anything, and it was all to the good, like the way that the groom who was teaching one to jump shouted, “Hands down,” long after one had learned always to keep them down, which seemed stupid but meant that one went on keeping them down even if one lost one’s head. Anyway, when he heard of her danger he would not coldly receive, he would warm, he would blaze. She was sure of that. Once at Torquay, when she was quite little, she was allowed to bathe though the sea was rough, and a big wave had knocked her down, and then when it had broken the screeching shingle had dragged her back from shore, and the surf had hissed over her blind face, and suddenly she was swung up to the light by a grasp stronger than the sea. Then she found herself standing on dry stones, while her father knelt before her, his face level with hers, and explained in his clear metallic voice, sometimes stopping and going back on a phrase and simplifying it so that she was sure to understand, how unforgivably stupid he had been in letting her bathe on such a day, and how unforgivably careless he had been in taking his eyes off her for a single moment once she was in the sea. “Why, it’s all right,” she had said, “it’s really all right,” but he had broken off, uttered a dry sound not quite like a cough and pressed his face against her bare shoulder. She would have thought that he was crying, but his eyes were dry against her skin. That was the last splendid touch, the dryness of his eyes.

If he felt like that about her when she was simply in danger, and not perhaps in any real danger (for there were boats about) of drowning, what would he feel like when he heard that someone wanted to murder her? She heard herself telling him, “Well, Kamensky might shoot me, or throw a bomb at me.” She could imagine her father’s impassioned silence. Kamensky would be wholly frustrated, Edward Rowan would not let him kill her, and instead of inflicting on her the greatest conceivable harm the traitor would give her what she most wanted. She hesitated to call that thing by name. It was not that he would give her back her father, for she had not lost him. She never had. Her mother might have, for married people sometimes tired of each other, everybody knew that, but people could not stop loving their children any more than their children could stop loving them. She frowned down at the glass of champagne, wondering if it had made her drunk, for what she saw as being restored to her was the house in Radnage Square. For the last year or two it had been as if they were living in its ghost: as if nothing remained of it but a diagram drawn in the air, as if there were no walls, only spectral uprights, enclosing transparent stairs, and floors and furniture, no solidity to make being inside it as different from being outside it as any one thing can differ from another. Smiling at the thought of how much was to be restored to her so soon, she drank the last drops of the champagne, and went back to sit beside her grandfather, feeling triumphant and powerful.

It was quite a long time before he brought his face out of the pillow and put out his hand to hers. “It is quite agreeable, being here with you. Your mother has seen to it that, like all women of our family, you know how to be a pleasant companion. But I’ll be glad to get back to Paris. Sofia Andreievna will understand how it is with me, that I’m not really ill, that I need only a night or so of rest and proper food to be able to start on my journey to Russia.”

“Yes,” said Laura. “She’ll know exactly what to do. She’s very clever.”

“No, what she has is not cleverness,” said Nikolai. “It’s a womanly quality. Ah, how troublesome it is that she’s not here. She could tell me at once something I need to know. When I was ill in Russian I always went down to the Datchina as soon as possible, and there they used to give me some strengthening soup which put me on my feet very quickly. I wonder if they could make it in this hotel. It seems quite a large place, and the French are always boasting about their food.”

“I’ll ask them,” said Laura, “if you’ll tell me what the soup was made of.”

“Nothing simpler. It was made from the carcasses of the eight most ordinary kinds of game-birds.”

“But, Grandfather, this is the summer, and I shouldn’t think they have eight kinds of game-birds in France, not common ones. But they’ll probably make you a soup which is just as good—”

He was already thinking of something else. “How I hunger for religious consolation. I am humiliated by the treachery of a friend to whom I have condescended over and over again for many years. I am humiliated by the desertion of my body, which is leaving me, rather than being left by me, for I am here as much as I have ever been, but my body will soon decline and rot and have to be buried. I ache to have the Office of Holy Unction said over me.”

“Well, perhaps there’s an Orthodox priest in Grissaint,” said Laura.

“One is not enough,” said Nikolai. “Seven priests are necessary. Absolutely necessary. Each one has to play his part.” His eyelids drooped. But they lifted, and he tried to sit up in bed. “How is it that you don’t know that it requires seven priests to perform the Office of Holy Unction? Does your mother, do her children, not receive Holy Unction when they are ill?”

“We’re never ill,” said Laura.

“Never?” asked Nikolai suspiciously.

“Never. Mummie’s as strong as a horse, like you and Grandmother. We all are. Really and truly, if any of us had needed Holy Unction, we’d have had it. I promise you. Like a shot. But Mummie couldn’t bother eight priests—”

“Seven.”

“Oh, yes, eight was for the soup. Well, Mummie couldn’t bother seven priests just because we had mumps or measles.”

“In a way what you tell me makes me happy,” said Nikolai. “I’m glad that you and your mother have inherited the wonderful health which has been one of God’s greatest gifts to me. But I’m sorry that you’ve had no opportunity to see this rite, for it’s very beautiful. As I say, seven priests are necessary. They prepare a small table, and set on it a vessel containing wheat and a lamp such as one sees before an icon, but it isn’t burning. It would not be appropriate that it should burn, for on this occasion light and heat are not being poured out by the Creator, this is an hour when He is dispensing darkness and cold.”

“What, does He ever do that?” asked Laura.

After a pause Nikolai said through his teeth, “Constantly, constantly.” He continued, less pettishly, “Round the lamp are set out a vessel containing wheat, and seven wands wrapped in fine linen are thrust into the wheat. One for each priest. Also on the table there lies the Book of the Holy Gospels—”

What was needed here was not seven priests but her father. It was not only his bravery she wanted. What she needed was his gift for stopping a fuss, as he had used it when the Welsh cook got drunk and got furious when the butler refused to believe she was a witch and threw all the pots and pans at him, even the ones that had soup and vegetables cooking in them, while the other servants hid under the kitchen table or locked themselves into the pantry. Once her father had gone down into the basement, how quickly the sounds of clanging ironmongery had died away, how quickly the cab had come to remove the cook and her luggage. There was the huge ugly black mongrel, unmuzzled in spite of Mr. Walter Long’s law, which had got into the square gardens and corralled the children and the nannies into a shivering group against the railings; her father had gone out and called it to heel and brought it straight back to the terrace where it had lain till the police came. Papa had worked the miracle easily, telling the cook over and over again in icy tones, “If you do not leave the house immediately, I shall report you to the Lord Mayor of Cardiff and the Bishop of Llandaff”; and he had gone out to the dog armed with a beef-bone snatched from the larder. The recollections were to the point. Her grandfather’s conversation with Chubinov, his long story about Gorin, was of a dark and confused and hostile state like drunkenness, and the death which was attacking her grandfather from inside, herself from outside. “Come soon,” she said aloud to her father, and leaning over her grandfather, stroked his hand in an effort to be more concerned about his death than her own.

He was going on and on about oil. Why must he talk so much about oil? It was a symbol of God, it seemed, for it can heal like His mercy and sear like His anger, and is itself colourless and cold, yet has all colour and heat within it, as God, who has no human attributes, is the source of all human attributes. Oil had had many loving names conferred on it by the Church. It is called the holy oil, the oil of gladness, the oil of sanctification, a royal robe, the seal of safety, the delight of the heart, an eternal joy, the oil of salvation.

“What sort of oil?” asked Laura. “Just olive oil?” Not the thing that came in bottles from the grocer at the corner of Queen’s Gate Terrace, the thing that went into salad dressings and mayonnaise?

“Yes. Olive oil that has been blessed according to the forms of the Church.” She did not like that. She thought of witch-doctors and Voodoo rites. But it sounded quite civilized as he went on. “We don’t produce very much olive oil in Russia, the earth is too cold. That’s why we use sunflower-seed oil so much. Which is not oil at all in the holy sense. It has not been called to serve God. How strange it is that wine and oil, two substances which have been made sacred by our religion and which make us sacred, are found chiefly in the Latin countries where they are inevitably used by schismatics for their profane purposes.

“The Latin countries, where the food of the children is given to the dogs. Latins wallow among the full plenty of the Mediterranean and defile it. We Russians stand in the South only up to our ankles down by the Black Sea. But we do well with it. There we too make wine. Leon Galitzin has great vineyards on the stony coast between Yalta and Theodosia. His cellars run far out under the sea. I have been happy in our South, and so would you be, Laura. We Russians are pulled two ways, we are a northern people, but a southern people too. Our culture comes from Byzantium, we are the real Greeks, we are pre-Greek, part of the mystery which hung over Greece since the beginning of time. Ask where that first blood that was in Mycenae came from and went back to, if not us. Their huge crimes are ours, their huge unequal contests with the gods. All vineyards should be ours too, all olive terraces. It is beautiful to look down on the sea shining blue between olive trees, their trunks dark, their branches loaded with the silver of their leaves. The Bible and the classical writers, not that one can believe a word that pagans say, tell us that once there was a race of giants. I’ve sometimes thought when I looked at the sea through olive terraces I saw it as the giants did. The leaves on the branches might be an old giant’s silver eyebrows, bristling over his eyes, the dark trunks would be like his great eyelashes. And beyond would be the blue sea. Such a giant would not smooth back his eyebrows, he would not open his eyes wide, he would want his sight shaded, because in those days the sea must have been brighter than it is today. There were few men then. Millions of men have lived since to pollute the waters with their filth. Human beings have produced nothing more persistently and in greater quantities than excrement. If only I could look once on the dazzling water the giants saw. But that is just what I am doing. The sea is before me at this moment far brighter than it is. Staring at a bright object induces sleep. That’s called hypnosis. A useless parlour trick, like reading poetry aloud, which on me has always had the same effect.”

A few minutes later he woke with a start. “Did you ever hear a story that sailors on a ship among the Greek islands heard a voice crying, ‘Pan is dead, great Pan is dead?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the first to hear it?”

“The captain, I think. Then everybody did.”

“I wonder if the man who first heard it died soon afterwards.”

“That wasn’t in the story I read.”