The Birds Fall Down (7 page)

But if Tania had been a sheep-dog she would never have passed the obedience tests. Though her cousin’s fingers hovered near his hat-brim, in readiness for farewell, she kept on talking to the woman opposite her with such absorption that she let her parasol fall, and did not pretend to mind when the two men bent to pick it up, but turned and beckoned to Laura and Lionel as if to tell them to come quick before the rainbow faded.

That was not surprising. It would have been a pity to miss the really extraordinary hair which shone under the stranger’s black hat. It was golden, but not like Tania’s or her own, which was dark as the gold used by Egyptian and Roman jewellers; Susie’s was like the bloom on the petals of certain flowers, the celandine and the kingcup, yellow and yet white. Her lips too were extraordinary. It was as if an artist had painted a perfect mouth and smudged it, not from carelessness, but to get a certain effect. What effect? Just that effect, just what one saw. But what did one see? One had to look again, and never was sure. Everything about this woman was unexpected, like the flowers on the tulip tree, which were up instead of down.

Nobody had ever said that Susie Staunton had anything to do with the darkness that had fallen on Radnage Square. There was no real reason to suppose that she had. When they had got home in the hot late afternoon Papa had been drinking hock and seltzer in the curtained drawing-room, and Tania had poured out her ecstasy over this beauty she had discovered. It had turned out that Papa had met her, ten or twelve years before. She was the daughter of a North Country baronet, poor and unimportant, from whom he had once bought a horse, and had been married out of the schoolroom to the son of an equally poor and unimportant peer. Papa had been introduced to her by her father-in-law when he was giving the young couple tea on the terrace before they went off to some job in Canada. The husband, Tania supplied, was now in the Caribbean; she had had to come home because she could not stand the relaxing climate.

Tania added, “I think she’s poor. Her clothes look good, but what wouldn’t, on her.”

Papa shook his head and said he had thought nothing of the woman, wondered only why his single meeting should have stuck in his memory, and teased Tania about her enthusiasms. He had never said or done anything to suggest that he had changed his opinion of Susie: never, during all the time when she was in the house every day of the week from Monday to Friday, not just for parties, but like a relative, only more so, nor during the period which followed, when she did not come to see them any more. Odd as it was that Susie should have become a part of their lives though it was only two years since they had met, it was odder still that she still seemed so, when it must be a full year since her name had been spoken in the house.

But perhaps her mother was making a mistake about something quite innocent her father had done. Tania had changed lately. In the past, if she had had one quality more than all others, it was self-control. She never lost her temper, though sometimes she decided to do without it for a time, as she sometimes decided to wear no jewels. But now she was being absurd about her mother’s health. Though Sofia had taken fall after fall in the hunting-field and Tania had remained calm, now she was almost hysterical because the old lady had to have some teeth out. But just now it was as if everybody were moving away from the place where they had seemed rooted. Her grandfather had seemed to her in the past simply someone foreign and grand, one of the people wearing plumed hats who drove after the crowned heads in state processions, about whom she had the secret knowledge that Tania loved him, that he enjoyed giving presents and hugging silently as he gave them, and that when there were no other grownups about he could deliciously pretend to be a magician. But now he might belong to a different species, and one generally supposed to be extinct. If there had been men at the same time there were mastodons and dinosaurs, he might have been one of them. He was also like someone in the Bible. When Monsieur Kamensky had knelt at her grandfather’s feet, it was as if the older man were out of the Old Testament, the younger man out of the New.

Time passed. The white roses in a crystal vase on the table beside her shed one petal, then another, then another. Where people were unhappy the flowers were neglected. She pushed the petals together in a little pile. The old man opened his eyes, looked round him, and resumed his misery.

“I am quite well,” he said argumentatively. “I am never ill.”

“That’s what we thought,” said Kamensky. “And now we know it. If you were, such a short sleep couldn’t have refreshed you. There’s a lot of the evening left. Would you like to play a game of chess?”

“I haven’t the time,” said Nikolai. “The darkness awaits me, and there are many things of which we should talk.”

“About ideas?” said Kamensky.

“No, that is too dangerous a pleasure,” said Nikolai. “How right Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was. You have heard of him?”

“Minister of Education about 1850,” said Kamensky. “I confess I might have failed to recognize his name had I not once benefited by a prize he instituted.”

“He made a wise decision afterwards reversed. He entirely prohibited lectures on philosophy in all the universities of Russia. He saw that speculations regarding the Creator are superfluous, since the revelations we have been given on divine authority are sufficient, but he saw that researches into the wonders of Creation can never do any harm. So he encouraged the physical sciences. This must be right, because it is logical—though I have to admit that some of the students of physical sciences are among our most godless and subversive. No, I want to talk to you not about ideas, but about facts. You saw that I was afraid when I questioned you about that medicine?’”

“Yes. But, as I say, it was not unreasonable.”

“You might answer differently if I opened my heart to you. I did not tell you everything. It wasn’t only that I feared that those tablets might have been poisoned by my enemies. I had another fear. Let me tell you a story, and do not laugh at me, though it may strike you as absurd.”

“Miss Laura and I could never laugh at you.”

“It will comfort me a lot to confess what happened to me some years before my disgrace. I can’t remember the exact date, even the year. But one day I was at my office and a member of the Poliakov family, the grain dealers, came to see me. He happened to take from his pocket a letter from his son, a young lawyer who had gone to Warsaw on business. He thought it would interest me, but it didn’t. My attention was caught by one thing, however. The letter was written on bright red paper, and the envelope was bright red too. At the moment I made nothing of it except as a sign that young people like to do things in a way which is obviously incorrect.”

“How long ago,” Laura asked herself, “was this? Those young people are probably old now, and just what he approves of.”

“I should mention that I had heard some rumours that this young man had been seen with associates who could only be described as liberals. Well, a few weeks later my official duties took me to Odessa. To Odessa,” he repeated and fell silent, staring at the floor.

After a moment or two Kamensky said comfortably, “To Odessa.”

“Yes, to Odessa. But I’ve forgotten why I had to go there. It was to investigate a grave scandal, that is clear to me, something to do with the misappropriation of public funds. But beyond that I’m not now sure of anything. I really am not myself just now. Many people were suspected, some of them my own officials, some of them bank employees, two or three land speculators, and a couple of shipowners. But which of them proved innocent and which guilty has gone from my mind.”

“Don’t distress yourself, dear Count,” said Kamensky. “It can’t matter any more.”

“Not matter? To know of a group of men which were bad and which were good? That must always matter.”

“Yes, that that should be known matters more than anything else,” said Kamensky, “but it is not we who need know it.”

“True, true, Alexander Gregorievitch,” said her grandfather, “but how could the Tsar know except through his Ministers? And I was one of them.”

“But surely,” thought Laura, “Monsieur Kamensky meant God and not the Tsar. He did. He’s trying not to smile. But it serves him right. He was too smug when he said it.”

“It was my duty,” continued Nikolai, “to see and hear for my master the Tsar. I fear now that my ears and eyes were already, even then, past such service, and had let me stray into a world of folly and suspicion in which I may now be a prisoner. You see, about that bright red writing paper.”

“That bright red writing paper,” Kamensky prompted him, after a minute.

“Yes, yes. There came a night when I wished to meet a man involved in this scandal, who seemed to me guilty, or at least to have compromised his honour, and for that reason, I didn’t like to ask the Governor, with whom I was staying, to admit him to his house. So I arranged a dinner for four persons, myself and my secretary, I forget his name, he was a person of your own sort, and this man and one of his associates, at a restaurant in the town. It was attached to a hotel, and one had to go in by a mediocre sort of café, a place where the tradespeople of the town went in the evening to drink beer and eat sausages. As I passed through it my eye was caught by a girl sitting all by herself at a table.”

Again he fell into silence.

“This girl.”

“As I say, she was sitting all by herself, though she was not—” he shot a look at Laura—“not anything of that sort. And indeed it was quite a respectable place. But she was very young to be out alone, possibly under twenty, and she should not have been in such a café even with an escort, for she had an air of breeding, though she had done her best to lose it. She had thrown off her fur hat, it was lying on the table beside her. Everything about her showed that she no longer cared what people thought of her. It was very disagreeable. She had cut her hair, and her head was covered with rough curls, as if she were a boy. She was bending right over the table, writing, and smiling as she wrote, putting out her tongue, just like a child getting on well with its first copy-book. I suppose she was very pretty. But that gave me no pleasure. So far as she was concerned, there might have been nobody else in the room. A woman should not feel so. There was a pile of books lying beside her fur hat, and I tried to read the titles as I went by, for it struck me that she might be a medical student. You know I had some temporary success in closing all our schools for women doctors. Alas, that that too, like Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov’s decision concerning the teaching of philosophy, was reversed. It was then that I saw that she was writing her letter on bright red paper.”

Kamensky’s brows were knitted. “Now what would that be?” he asked softly, almost under his breath; and he shook his head.

“Ah, you too think it mysterious. That encourages me. But why? You may simply be thinking it was mysterious that I should think it mysterious. Well, I didn’t enjoy my dinner. Whoever it was my guests were, I came to the worst conclusions about them. But when

I got back to the Governor’s house and went to bed I could not sleep, and it wasn’t because of these wretched criminals, it was because of that bright red writing paper. I couldn’t imagine anybody well brought up, as that girl must have been brought up, wanting to communicate with family or friends on such horrible glaring stuff, so unlike any writing paper which it is natural and right to use. And I woke up in the middle of the night remembering that a Frenchman, a friend of my grandfather, had mentioned in his memoirs that just before the Revolution it became the fashion among French infidels to use bright red writing paper. Do you think I was foolish because, next morning, I sent my secretary to go round all the stationery shops in Odessa to find out if they sold such paper?”

“Why shouldn’t you?” replied Kamensky. “But did you find any?”

“It was being sold everywhere. And when I examined what he brought me back I found that the watermark was sinister. It was a cock. Well, the cock is Russia. But it’s France too: France, the country of anarchy and atheism, the enemy of Holy Russia, willing host to all its exiles, among whom I now, by the most horrible irony, have to count myself. And what does ‘the red cock’ mean in our native language, Laura? Tell her, Alexander Gregorievitch.”

“It is one of the most terrible phrases in our tongue. That’s what our serfs called the arson they committed in the old days when our landowners were tyrants, and still commit, in spite of all our modern reforms, when bad men incite them. It’s a terrible phrase. Innocent as the Russian peasant is, he can be seduced into burning crops, granaries, forests.”

“The terrorists would feel such evil glee in using anything inscribed with that symbol,” mourned Nikolai, “as we would feel holy glee in handling what is marked with the cross. And this writing paper would be a useful instrument in their conspiracy against their country. It would frustrate one of the most effective measures we take for the protection of our people, the perlustration of our mail, the examination of letters through the post, a measure which the innocent have no cause to fear and which is a hardship only to the guilty.”

“How so?” asked Kamensky. “How would this paper help the terrorists?”

“The organizers of the terror would have no reason to write their final instructions to their dupes. The most blameless letter, written on this red paper, might be an intimation that now was the time to commit a long-planned crime. And what clue would we have?”

“Why, you’re right,” said Kamensky. “It is really a most ingenious idea, and I can believe that those fiends might conceive it.”

“So it seems to you,” said Nikolai, “and so it seemed to me. But perhaps I am wrong, and perhaps you have allowed my influence over you to persuade you into believing what is wrong. For listen. I decided I must warn the proper authorities of this danger, and I sent some sheets and envelopes of this paper to Count Brand, who was then Minister of the Interior, pointing out the sinister significance of the colour and the watermark, telling him of the passage in the Frenchman’s memoirs, and conveying that the two people whom I knew used it were tainted by suspicion.”