The Birds Fall Down (4 page)

None of that stock died before eighty, or lost their health before they died. She could not be much more than sixty, Laura calculated. She had been married at seventeen to her middle-aged bridegroom, her eldest son was a little over forty. But now she might have been an ugly and weakly old woman. Her neck had been round and white, but now the flesh had shrunk away under her chin and her neck was a narrow fluted tube, and her face was like a mask of stretched hide stuck on top of it. She did not look only ugly and old, she looked poor, like the women in the slums between Radnage Square and the Fulham Road. Her hair had lost its colour and its lustre. It might not have been washed and brushed for a long time. Her eyes, which had been heavy-lidded and almost vacuously serene, stared anxiously out of deep sockets, as if she were wondering where the rent would come from. She must be got away at once, back to Radnage Square, fed on butter and cream and allowed to rest, and given a chance to swim at the Bath Club. She would soon be all right. She was so very strong. It was all a question of getting her out of this apartment.

Her grandfather said, with mild patriarchal censure, “My dear wife, where have you been?” Having received a murmured apology, he went on, “Now look at our Tania and see how well she is, and look at our little Laura and say who she is like.”

“My darling Tania,” said Sofia Andreievna, “don’t make such a sad face. It’s not so bad really.”

“Oh, Mother, Mother,” whispered Tania. She let her hat slide out of her hands on to the floor, crossed the room and laid her arms about her mother’s wasted body, resting her golden head on the thin shoulder.

“It’s not so bad,” repeated Sofia Andreievna, “and during the last three days I am much, much better. Ask Monsieur Kamensky.”

“Oh, without a doubt the Countess has improved lately,” agreed the small bearded man, in a pleasant voice. She had forgotten his voice as she had forgotten nearly everything about him, yet it was charming, so unhurried, so good-humoured. “I’ve been away, I’ve been being an engineer instead of doing what I like and being a humble friend, and now I’m back I see a great improvement.”

“But isn’t Laura exactly like her mother, Sofia? And doesn’t that mean that she’s exactly like my mother?” cried Nikolai, exultantly. Then concern sallowed his skin, dimmed his eyes, made him petitioning and humble. He was sorry for his wife after all. But no. He thought of her for hardly a moment. “Kamensky. Alexander Gregorievitch. While you were out I thought of something. I once had some correspondence with a man named Botkin. It might have some bearing on my case. I thought of a little, little thing, which might have some significance. Could you get me out the file? Is it too much trouble? I don’t want to give you too much trouble.”

“You couldn’t do that, Excellence,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till the morning. That file was sent down to the bank with the Muraviev material. A mistake in judgment, mine more than yours. But in the meantime read what I have here for you. It’s a copy of a letter from Souvorin about the way things are going in St. Petersburg. You’ll see from the envelope who received it. As an indirect gesture of respect to you, he sent it to me yesterday, with obvious indications that it wasn’t for my eyes but for yours.” Nikolai gave a sigh of pleasure and snatched the letter from his hand and sat down in an armchair by a lamp. Monsieur Kamensky bent over Laura’s hand and said, “Good evening, Miss Laura,” and as soon as he sat down beside her said in a quick undertone, “Please, Miss Laura, look happier. Sofia Andreievna is talking to your mother now, but she might look over here, and all day long she has been saying to me, ‘I hope the little one will not be frightened when she sees what my horrible toothache has done to me.’”

“Is that all it is, toothache!” exclaimed Laura in relief. “Is it really only toothache?”

“So she would tell you,” he said, taking off his spectacles and polishing them. “Persistent toothache. On many nights it gives her no sleep at all. Before long she will have to have a number of teeth extracted. That is why she wanted your mother to come over and be with her for a little time.”

“You’ve taken a weight off my mind,” said Laura. “I can’t tell you how glad I am it’s only that. I was quite frightened. It is awful for anybody to be ill, but for my grandmother of all people, it’s far worse. Don’t you feel that?”

“I feel it very strongly,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “All your family is extraordinary. Sometimes I speculate whether your grandmother was as wonderful when she married your grandfather, for I think him one of the most marvellous people who has ever lived, and some of his genius might well have rubbed off on to her. But now I have watched her enduring this illness I know she brought her own genius with her.”

He believed in laying it on with a trowel. It was embarrassing. It seemed silly to say, “Oh, no,” but the alternative was to say, “Yes, we are wonderful, aren’t we?” But she forgot her annoyance, for a wave of scent had broken over her. It was too medicinal to be scent out of a bottle. But it made her think of gardens. It was the scent of something which grew in a big patch by the greenhouse in the house they rented every year outside Torquay, a herb called tansy. It seemed to be coming from Monsieur Kamensky’s handkerchief, and that made her want to ask him a question. But it was impertinent. She did not ask it.

Though Monsieur Kamensky had not seemed to be watching Tania and her mother, he was up on his feet as soon as they started to move towards the door and was there to open it for them. Then he sighed, looked round the room, went to the hearth-rug and picked up Tania’s hat, picked two strands of wool off it, and laid it on a table. Then he paused beside Nikolai and moved the lamp so that a stronger light fell on the sheets of paper which the old man was reading, with absorption so profound that a stranger might have thought him a peasant who had never learned to read with ease. Kamensky lingered for a second to look down on him, frowning, and he came back to Laura murmuring, “I wonder if he should have stronger spectacles. Perhaps Pyotr can remember when he last went to an oculist. Now we can sit down and make ourselves comfortable. Don’t trouble about your grandfather. That’s a very long letter he’s reading, and an interesting one. Monsieur Souvorin is the editor and the owner of the
Novoe Vremya
, our
Times
. He is not a good man, he is a liberal at heart, and liberalism is not for Russia, but he’s intelligent and what he says will keep your grandfather’s mind occupied for hours. Let me put this cushion behind your back, you’ve been travelling all day. Now you’re grown-up you’ll see that there really is some sense in the way that your elders cosset themselves. But tell me, what’s the question you thought of asking me a moment ago and then didn’t? It’s no use denying it, Miss Laura, for I saw your eyebrows go up and your lips part, and if you’d been whole-Russian the words would have been out, but your English half gagged you. See, I know everything. You must own up.”

“But it was so silly, and not the sort of thing one ought to ask people.”

“Ask me,” said Monsieur Kamensky, “I am not people. I am Alexander Gregorievitch.”

“This is all twaddle, like tea with the headmistress or the vicar calling,” thought Laura, “but he likes me. It’s nice to be liked by almost anybody.” She said aloud, with a smile, “The truth is, I smelt your handkerchief, and I remembered how you had told me last time I was here that you went straight from your home in South Russia to Moscow High School, and it was the first time you had ever felt the cold of the North, and you got such terrible chilblains and your grandmother made up a herbal ointment for them—it was you who told me that, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was me,” said Monsieur Kamensky. “And I probably told you that it was the first time she had shown me any kindness since I had broken it to her that I would rather be an engineer than a priest.”

“You didn’t, actually,” said Laura, untruthfully. “You were going to tell me, and someone came into the room. Tell me now.” He might as well tell her the story over again, it would be something to talk about.

“Well, if you are so kind as to listen to me, I’ll admit to you that the news made her really horrid to me. She gave me nothing to eat except
kasha
—I don’t suppose you know what that is.”

“Of course I do, it’s porridge.”

“And she didn’t mind if she burned it. This was terrible, because up till then she had given me very good things to eat, like the beef and cabbage stew we call
stschi
, and those little stuffed pastry turnovers called
piroki
, and all sorts of wonderful soups, and she was very good with mushrooms. And all those titbits stopped the minute I chose to be an engineer. If I may speak of such things, it was as if I had declared myself in love with some undesirable girl, when all I had done was to avow a passion for nuts and bolts, dynamos and accumulators. Then one day it all ended, as suddenly as it had begun. The weather got cold, and I started having chilblains, and they were so painful that every time I had to put on my boots or take them off, the tears ran down my cheeks, and one day it happened that she was passing through the hall when I was putting on my boots and suddenly she thrust back my head and glared down at me. ‘You’re crying,’ she said. ‘Have you at last repented on your wickedness in turning away from the service of God and breaking the heart of your grandmother who so loves you?’ I couldn’t bear it. I shouted at her, ‘Don’t talk nonsense, this is something real, I have chilblains.’ She went into the kitchen without saying a word, and I thought she would write to my parents and tell them to take me home. But when I came back in the late afternoon the house was full of the smell of tansy ointment and there was
stschi
for dinner. And she put the tansy ointment on my chilblains and gave me two platefuls of
stschi
, and we never had another cross word.” He stopped, silently chuckling.

She could not understand the story, and though she smiled back, she raised her eyebrows. He explained, “About what it is to be a priest and what it is to be an engineer she had not the faintest idea. But chilblains, they had always been in her world since her childhood, and she knew all about them and how they hurt. So her heart bled for me.” He nodded, looking Asiatic, his drooping eyelids smooth as wax in a chemist’s pot, the corners of his mouth turning up in minute folds. “That taught me a lesson I’ve always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard, they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them, they become soft.”

Absently, she thought, “How funny. He is talking as if he were someone important, like my grandfather, like my father. But perhaps he sometimes builds things that are quite big, bridges and dams, and then he might have people under him.” Aloud she asked, “What did she look like, your grandmother?”

“Like a wooden doll. With two red spots on her cheeks. I have often wondered since then whether she suffered from a skin disease, or was vain and had heard that great ladies had their own ways of keeping beautiful in their old age, and tried to imitate them and use rouge without knowing how to go about it.”

“And her house, what was that like?”

“It was a village house, because it was right on the outskirts of Moscow: wooden and built end on to the street. There were birches by the roadside, and inside the garden lilacs and a summerhouse, big enough for us to have meals there when the family came to visit her. And quite a long path laid out in pebbles, black and white arranged in circles and diamonds, made by my grandfather with his own hands so that my grandmother could walk up and down when it was wet underfoot. And at the end of the path beyond the summer-house some more birches, which he had planted specially. My grandmother loved birch trees, she was a sylvan creature inside her doll’s body. Her great delight was to go out into the forest and picnic, even when she was very old.”

“Mother always says there aren’t enough birches in England,” said Laura.

“You look as if you were dreaming when we speak of the Russia where you have never been,” said Kamensky, “and your voice grows warm.” Laura had been congratulating herself on keeping a conversation going though it bored her, just as grownups did. But that was pretence. She had liked hearing about that village house. He went on, “But you haven’t told me what it was you were going to ask, and then didn’t.”

“Why, that was nothing. Simply I thought, it’s summer-time, and why should Monsieur Kamensky have chilblains in summer-time? I wondered where you’d been.”

“You have an eye for little things,” said Kamensky. “That you don’t get from your grandfather. The little things he never notices. I could surprise you if I told you how unobservant he is. I don’t think he has ever had his watch stolen from his waistcoat, but I can’t think why. And, Miss Laura, you were right in being ashamed to ask that question, for the answer’s embarrassing. Here I am, Alexander Gregorievitch Kamensky, a grown man, and so much more than grown that my hair is getting thin and my waist is getting thick, and I’ve taken degrees at the universities of Moscow and Berlin, and I’ve built hydro-electric installations at which nobody dared to look down their nose. But I’ve no sense at all. Some things make an idiot of me still. When I pass a lake shining in the sunshine, I have to swim in it, even if the wind cuts like a knife. That’s what I did a fortnight ago, and that’s why I got chilblains in June, and reek of tansy. Now you’ll despise me for being silly.”

“I don’t,” said Laura. “I got a cold last week because I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the moon was rising over the trees in the square and I hung out of the window for hours. I just couldn’t go back to bed. That was silly, if you like. I had to go to a party two days later, and I looked awful.”

“The trouble with us,” said Kamensky, smiling, “is that we’re both of us poets, and so you get a little red nose and I get chilblains. And such beautiful emotions we had, you as you watched the moon rising, I as I watched the sun sparkling on the water. But let me tell you that what we’re engaged in isn’t trivial. The philosophers have busied themselves with it. You and I, young lady, are exemplifying the dialectic process. The great Hegel discovered it. Life advances by contradictions, so first we surrender ourselves, you and I, to a positive state of poetic rapture, and then we pass into a negative anti-poetic state, chilblains for me and a cold in the head for you; and we should pass into a third state of synthesis when we reconcile these two opposites. And so we have. We’re sitting here agreeing that swimming in the lake and watching the moon were worth while, all the same.” Suddenly his hand closed over her wrists and she frowned at him in surprise. “Your mother and your grandmother have come back into the room. I think the Countess has come back to speak to you. It would be good if you did not show her that you noticed she was not well.”