The Birds Fall Down (55 page)

“Well, it wasn’t quite like that. Grandfather told me to go into another compartment because he wanted to talk to this man, without me, and then just before we got to Grissaint this man came down the corridor looking into every compartment to find me, and—” She stopped. So often had she gone over the story that she now came near to believing it. She seemed to remember, not merely imagine, what Chubinov had looked like as he pushed back the compartment door and bent his spectacles towards her and told her that Nikolai seemed not very well, she had better come quickly. Perhaps this was how Kamensky had begun his lying. “The man told me,” she went on, “that Grandfather was ill. But I don’t know whether that wasn’t just his way of putting it because he was in a hurry. Grandfather wasn’t feeling well, and of course, he wasn’t well, but I think the real reason he wanted to get out of the train was that he felt he had to get back to Paris, because the man, whoever he was, had reminded him of something he thought might help him clear his name with the Tsar. You must remember, Mummie, that it didn’t really matter what was making Grandfather ill, he was hardly conscious of it, he was so preoccupied by the other thing, the row in Russia. And he’d got excited about something to do with that.”

“But the Professor thought he was taken quite ill in the station. Wasn’t he suffering then?”

“It wasn’t quite like that. Grandfather was sitting on a bench and waiting for the train to Paris, and then suddenly he couldn’t move.” It sounded incredibly bare. She wanted to pour out the truth, the whole truth about Chubinov and Kamensky and who Kamensky was. She grasped her mother’s hand and was about to tell her to get ready for a shock. But even her mother’s hand was wet, her tears were everywhere, and her eyes were full of grief, but not quite full, there was still room in them for a spaniel’s sad hope. If her mother heard the truth, she would use it as an excuse for running to her husband as if he were still her husband, and annulling that good-bye: “Edward, Edward! Listen to what Laura’s told me!” If that happened, her father would take ordinary measures for her protection which would be quite wrong, since the man from whom she had to be protected was extraordinary and had caught her in the mesh of an extraordinary way of life. She had been sure of this at Grissaint, she was more certain now. He lacked the love which would have made sense of the long involved story, he would produce a quiet and deadly common sense. He would tell the police, and Chubinov would be arrested, and would be in prison when Kamensky came to kill her. She went on distracting Tania’s attention from the truth. “And Grandfather was quite delirious. He kept on talking about a little girl blowing a toy trumpet.”

“One of us, perhaps? My sister Varvara, or perhaps Olga?—or perhaps,” she just dared to suggest, “me?” She averted her eyes quickly so that she need not see Laura’s embarrassed shake of the head. “Of course not. He wouldn’t speak of any of us, even at the very end. Any more than he’d speak of his fingers or his toes or his ribs. He thought of us as a part of himself. And not a very important part. Dear me, a little girl blowing a toy trumpet.”

“At a children’s party.”

“It must have been something that really mattered to him.”

“What?”

“What the man told him on the train.”

Sometimes people thought her mother was silly. They were wrong. She could have wished that they were more right.

“It must have been really very important,” Tania went on, dreamily, “to have sent his mind running all the way back from his greatness to a little girl blowing on a toy trumpet at a children’s party. That’s yet another thing I can’t say to your father. I am so terrified that if I go back to London my mind will run away from what happens to me there now. I might act so strangely that people would think I was mad or drank or took drugs. I might start gambling. It’s our Russian way of taking misfortune. There’s some sense to it. At roulette or baccara one can strip one’s luck bare, and see if it’s bad or good, and if it’s bad one can give it a chance to take pity on one and change. But I couldn’t admit to your father that what he has done has hurt me so much that I can’t stay in the world of sanity and face it, he’d think I was simply being jealous and hysterical, and that’s not what’s happened. It’s like being obliged to take up a cross and nurse the afflicted in prison, this being strange, the whole of one has to give the part of one that’s suffering a chance to live outside the world of logic, where it’s been scourged and thrown into a dungeon. But about your grandfather, you’re sure he didn’t suffer—”

“That reminds me. How’s Grandmother?”

Tania smiled triumphantly. “Ah, I’ve no need to worry about her. She’s in pain now, but she won’t be for long. It’s this treatment they are giving her. Something called radium. She didn’t like the treatment, she was frightened, that’s why, as I told Kamensky to tell you, I had such difficulty over my telephoning. But she’s bound to get better. But tell me about my father. This other Professor, not the one who telephoned to me, the one the stationmaster brought to you at the station, he took you to a hotel. What was it like?”

“Quite old. It had a beautiful ballroom in it. I looked in from the landing and they were getting it ready for a ball. Why am I telling you that?”

“When awful things are happening one’s sometimes grateful for the way the chairs and tables and carpets look. But he had a good bed, there were kind servants?”

“Oh, very kind. One nice one called Catherine. And the bed seemed comfortable enough, he lay and talked and talked. Oh, about all sorts of things. About the South. About a place where there were olive-terraces and wine-cellars running far out under the sea.”

“The Four Towers, Leon Galitzin’s estate. The Tartars built those cellars. Tartars in their white robes and their turbans. When I was little I thought they were captive jinns. Why should my father think of the Four Towers, at the very end? He was not often there.”

“Because he was talking about the Russians being a southern people as well as a northern. The descendants of the Greeks. Our great crimes. And then there was the olive-oil. The holy oil. He went on and on about that, reciting great chunks of the Office of the Holy Unction, and that other one—the Office for the Parting of the Soul from the Body.”

“Oh, dear God, dear God, and there was no priest.”

“Well, if there had been a priest about, he wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. And Grandfather didn’t really worry about that.”

“He wouldn’t. He must have known he should have got absolution for his sins, but he wasn’t much given to self-reproach. Some people aren’t, but your father’s not one of them. That means there’s another thing I can’t tell him. He’s afraid I’ll ruin his career by divorcing him. But I won’t do that. All I feel is that I can’t live with him, and divorce has nothing to do with it. A woman can’t in England or anywhere else divorce a man because he left her old father to die in a strange place, with nobody there but their daughter, a girl of eighteen. And remember, it didn’t happen but it might have, the terrorists might have been there. That’s the real reason why I can’t go on living with your father any more. Laura, I tried to help you and my father. I couldn’t leave my mother, she was frightened, being ill in a clinic was new to her, and she was too ill to take something both new and painful. Whenever I could get out of her room I rang home again and again, and told them to find your father, and they tried at the House, and rang back to tell me the Whip said he’d paired, and then I humbled myself and rang up her house. But she wasn’t there. Then I was tortured. Somebody once sent me an anonymous letter, and I read the beginning and then tore it up. I’d read enough to realize last night that if I’d finished it I could have found your father. I was punished for obeying the rules I’ve been carefully brought up on. But go on about your grandfather.”

“There’s not much to tell, not that you can really tell. He recited these services by the yard, and then said he understood everything, and that he wasn’t God but man, and had made far too much fuss about having been disgraced by the Tsar, because nothing that happened to him, or anybody who wasn’t God, was of the slightest importance.”

“That’s the sort of idea we Russians enjoy.”

“He enjoyed it immensely.”

“Possibly we enjoy it because it’s true. But after that?”

“After that, I’ve told you. He asked, ‘Must we talk in the dark like gipsies,’ and the next moment he was dead. Then they gave me some supper—the Professor who had found us at the railway-station and a nurse he had got in. They were really very nice.” She paused, and would have given anything to continue smoothly, “So nice that afterwards they helped me send a telegram to the man in the train telling him the hour at which he could most conveniently murder Monsieur Kamensky.” But her certainty came back to her: if she said that, in seconds her mother would be starting to her feet, eagerly crying, “I must tell your father at once,” and then some witless, shrewd, conventional action of her father’s would grind on its way to her death, amid a number of French policemen competently mobilized by the British Embassy. She said, “Then I went to bed, but Monsieur Kamensky arrived, and he stayed in my room for hours while I told him all about it.”

Her mother sat up straight. “Was that—all right?”

Perhaps she knew everything after all. “Do you imagine,” Laura asked, “that it couldn’t have been?”

“Was it?”

“Quite. He just sat about and nearly cried and said how much he had cared for Grandfather, and I got sleepy and then some people barged into the room, and I asked him to go—”

“But really, I don’t like his having been in your bedroom. It wasn’t proper.”

“Oh, Mummie! They’d put up a camp-bed in the salon and the nurse was sleeping in an armchair. But really, Mummie!”

“Forgive me, I’m not very clever just now. The little Kamensky couldn’t have been kinder. He telephoned me this morning, and had thought of everything, he even reminded me that the nice wife of that blind man who comes here is a qualified candlebearer, and that it would be pleasant to have her as one of the two candle-bearers who have to recite the Psalter over your grandfather’s body. You know that the Psalms have to be read as soon as he’s brought here late tonight until he’s taken to the church the day after tomorrow for the funeral. The second candlebearer I don’t know, he’s sent from the church, but the Berrs have often been here, and, of course, they’re special people. If she reads the Psalms there’ll be some reality in that dreary ceremony.”

“The Psalms do twaddle on.”

“An angry savage in a tent, sometimes calming down when there’s been a good haul of desert antelope, and there’s been enough rain for the grass. Boring God like an ill-bred guest who will chatter about his own silly little misadventures to a host who has great affairs on his shoulders. How did we come to take this cross on our back, to repeat over and over again these barbarian curses and blessings, when our hearts are full of a clear image of the one we loved?”

“Sometimes you sound like your father.”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I am moderate, rational, ordinary.”

“I wonder why it is,” Laura said, “that when people make a statement such as you’ve just made, other people say to them, ‘Tell that to the Marines.’”

“Ask your father,” said Tania, absently. Tears came into Laura’s eyes and she wondered if when Berr came into the apartment his powers would be excited and released by grief to the point of working miracles, and that time would run backwards, and then start again and keep itself undefiled. Let Kamensky’s mother never have had him. Let the old days start again, let Tania and herself at this very moment be sitting on the terrace outside the drawing-room at home, watching the tennis-players tangle their feet in their own long shadows, while the windows of the houses opposite blaze with the reflected sunset, and let them be talking of a possible visit to Russia, which should be sooner rather than later, since Nikolai was so old and was never likely to leave his own country again. Let there be no Susie Staunton, but let that be done not by the simple racing back of clock-hands, but by some involvement with pain. She shut her eyes and offered up an enraged prayer.

“Don’t, don’t,” said Tania. “Don’t pray, I mean. We Russians are so frightful, dropping in on eternity all the time, without waiting to be asked. God must get so sick of us. Give Him a rest. Come and see the little dressmaker, she has your mourning almost finished, it only needs fitting.”

In the sewing-room, in air sour with the smell of black cloth, Hélène was stitching a dress which flopped over her lap like a second grieving skirt, while a young girl and a sewing-machine were involved in a common fury which sent another dress twitching off the table towards the floor. Calm set in and the two women looked at them kindly. “This is our little Noémie, who’s come to help,” said Tania, stroking the girl’s dark curly head. It appeared she was the daughter of Hélène’s best friend, Juliette, who sometimes came over and stayed at Radnage Square. What a lot of people would miss it if that house belonged to some other family. The two of them took off Laura’s dress and till they brought her the new one she looked at herself in the cheval glass, and tried to master her annoyance at her breasts. She had to have them, it would be too odd if she did not. But they were silly things, and all the names for them—breasts, bosom, bust—were silly too, soft and credulous, as if they would believe anything they were told. They were certainly round and white and pleasantly hard, and the blue veins twisting prettily enough over the whiteness like sweet-pea tendrils. But they were tiresome additions to the useful body she had started with, and she had read somewhere if women’s breasts were bruised they might get cancer. It was absurd to be exposed to such a risk on the offchance one might some day have a baby, almost as absurd as the fatuous business of menstruation. But when the two women drew the black dress over her head she disliked it more than her body. It covered her from neck to wrist and ankles.

But her mother seemed not to be reminded of any other black dress. She said, “That’s very nicely made. Only this one dart needs alteration. It’s not as long as the one on the other side and it’s at a different angle. Hélène and Noémie are very clever at this sort of thing, we know, but what’s so wonderful is the way they’ve worked like beavers. Now the rest of it.” They draped over Laura’s shoulders a black cape bound with white and set on her head a cap of black net. “Oh, my dear,” sighed Tania, “how our hair won’t go into mourning. But otherwise it’s all perfect.”