The Birds Fall Down (47 page)

Kamensky came even closer to her, his spectacles aiming point-blank at her face, stretching out his hands. She stared at them revolted by the spurious bandage, and expecting him to perform some deadly conjuring trick, to bring some small murderous object down from his cuff into his palm. But he made them into a cradle. So, in the next room, her grandfather was holding the icon on his dead breast. He murmured, “I see what it is. Your nature is so sweet. I suppose your grandfather’s last seizure disfigured him, and you want to spare my feelings. Oh, Miss Laura, thank you for that thought. But death and I are not strangers—”

“I didn’t think so.”

“No, indeed. A man of my age—”

He stopped, and looked over his shoulder at the door into the corridor and turned his back on her. There were sounds of cautious movement and whispering from outside, and a scratching round the lock. Someone was trying to get in, and furtively. It could not be her father. Perhaps it was some of those idealistic young men who went on such beautiful mountain walks near Montreux, come to help Kamensky by killing her and running and leaving him appalled; everyone would believe him. But that could not be right. He meant to kill her himself and when they were alone. The joy was to be private. On the other hand, it might be Chubinov with some of his lot. It would be like him to have difficulties with a door that had opened easily enough for everyone else. She leaned back against the folding-doors, resting against her grandfather’s strength, while Kamensky took up his stance nearer the door, his knees slightly bent, his body twisted, his right hip forward, his hand deep in his trouser pocket. His gun would be there. At least he was not sure who was trying to get in; and indeed they could not be conspirators. They did not want people to hear them, but for some other cause than fear. A deep voice panted, “But it’s not locked,” and the door swung open, a woman was pushed in by the tall man behind her, who had a blacksmith’s majesty. Coming out of the lit corridor, they were blind in the half-darkness and stood breathing deeply like spent runners, without knowing they were seen.

The man’s great shoulders were a wide frame behind the woman’s head, his great arms were about hers and crushed them to her side, his great fingers went on kneading her bodice until his eyes grew accustomed to the muted light. The woman’s dress was honey-coloured, shining too gently to be satin, and a veil of the same dim brightness flowed from a wreath of pale flowers on her straw-pale hair, falling about her shoulders and her breast, where a fold of it was caught between two of the man’s fingers, one loaded with a thick sombre ring. The vacillating gaslight made her skirt and veil tremble like a settling moth, and about her neck ebbed and flowed the blue shimmer of old diamonds. Colourless and vague and shaped like a fine vase, she stood there in an attitude of resignation, as if she found what had brought her there so strange that her capacity for surprise was exhausted, and she was accepting passively the further strangeness that in this room, which she must have expected to be empty, there should be a woman sleeping in a chair, a young girl in a
peignoir
who had thrown herself back against a door, and in the middle of the room a man standing in a contorted position and speaking to her peremptorily in an unknown language. She continued to inspect them with a dazed curiosity as if they might move, and by their movement tell her what she ought to be thinking about what had happened to her.

For a time the tall man stood as she did, shocked into waxwork stillness, while through the open door there came the noise of the people in the ballroom below laughing and clapping, followed by a silence, and then more laughter and a long volley of applause. Then he came to himself and made an embarrassed and impatient gesture, which his shaking shadow made more widely across the corner of the room. The woman stirred, and a tremor ran down her long gloved arms. Slowly she moved her pale flowered head from side to side, as if drowsily throwing off drowsiness, uttered a sound of distress, pleasant in tone but not interesting, and shrank into the arms of the man behind her, who grasped her as he had done before, and drew her backwards. It was impossible to know how he felt about her from the way he touched her. He might have been moving a piece of furniture. The door banged, cutting off the first bars of the “Marseillaise,” it was softly reopened and softly closed.

Laura began to cry. Once more she was face-to-face with Kamensky, who would probably start all over again wanting to pray by her grandfather, and she could not go on and on being brave. Also an irrational grief was hurting her chest. Surely there was no reason why those two people should make her feel humiliated and deserted and passed over, why she should have had a sense of loss and guilt because she had not clearly seen the tall man’s face. In the half-light it had been only a dark mask. She would have liked to hurry along the corridor and catch them up, and lay a hand on the man’s arm, so that he would turn round and look down on her. Yet she did not think she would have liked his face. She wished she had never seen the pair, she would have liked to break them as in her childhood she had broken dolls which had seemed to her frightening. But all the same Kamensky was talking shocking nonsense about them. He had taken her hand and was calling them disgusting beasts and angrily repeating over and over again how terrible it was that they should have come in when she, she was there. But they had meant no harm. It was improbable that they had read dangerous books in which they had found a command to kill her.

“Miss Laura, you must stop crying. Forget that shameless couple. Oh, you are so free, so intelligent, so brave, so affectionate, and so innocent, above all so innocent. To think that they should breathe the same air, it’s insufferable—”

“I’m not crying because of those people. I’m crying because I want to go to sleep.”

“Oh, Miss Laura, I will leave you now. But I will not go far.”

“I’m sure you won’t.”

“No, indeed, I will take a chair and sit in the corridor outside until morning.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much. My father will find you there.”

XIII

Laura woke into a dream which was a memory. When she was quite little the whole family, her grandfather and grandmother as well, went to stay with a cousin who lived in Scotland. One day Nannie had taken her and her brothers into the dining-room where their elders sat over their dessert at a long bright luncheon-table, surmounted by a pyramid of pink and white carnations and asparagus fern. Nikolai called her to his side and held out to her a
marron glacé
, impaled on a fork. She had lifted her mouth to it, feeling as if her constant dream of being an animal had come true, and she had been changed into the tame fawn kept by the children of the house, which every morning after breakfast waited at the foot of the steps leading down from the terrace to the park and lifted its muzzle for scraps of bread and butter. It might be that if she could hold her breath for five minutes or pass some other magical test, her grandfather would speak to her in animal language and that she might understand and answer in the same tongue. He must have divined that she was telling herself a fairy-tale, for when she had swallowed the
marron glacé
he gave a long, secret-sharing gaze and put down the fork with a sorcerer’s gesture.

Her heart melted with love; and she became aware that she was being shaken, and pulled up and out of the bedclothes by the strong small hand of Madame Verrier, at whom she smiled, forgetting all that was disagreeable, the woman had such an amusing flavour, sweet and acid at the same time like raspberries.

“Your father’s here. In France. In Grissaint. In this hotel. Third floor down. In the landlord’s office.”

Laura took her hand and kissed it, she was glad she was abroad where one could do such things. She looked towards the folding-doors and said in Russian, “Grandfather, I’m safe, my father’s here,” and repeated to herself in English, “he’s here, he’s here.”

Madame Verrier said slowly, their hands still gripped. “You rely on your father a lot, don’t you? How pleasant for you.”

“I was frightened,” said Laura, and under the nurse’s clinically inquisitive gaze, she explained, “frightened at seeing my grandfather die.”

“Naturally. Now get up and dress.”

“But can’t my father come up here?”

“He didn’t want to. I mean, he couldn’t. He’s talking to somebody from the Town Hall. About the return of your poor grandfather’s body to Paris. You know what we French are. Papers, papers, papers, always papers. If you’re in a hurry to see him, jump out of bed.”

“Please wait a moment.” She was shaken by her renewed fear. “Where’s Monsieur Kamensky?”

“Ah, him. He’s gone out into the town.”

“Did he meet my father?”

“Yes, as soon as he arrived.”

“Did they talk?”

“Yes. For half an hour, I’d say.”

“And then he went into the town?”

“Yes. Why, you’re more like a judge than a young girl, asking all these questions. Do get up.”

“Did Monsieur Kamensky say where he was going?”

“Not a word. But he and I, we don’t feel any great need to communicate. When I left this room to go to the
cabinet de toilette
I found him asleep in a chair outside the door. Well, if that’s how he likes to spend his nights, I’ve no objection. But he woke up and told me about two people bursting into the room in the middle of the night, and what an affront it was to your innocence. I bit his head off. Very tiresome those two coming in like that, but it sets my teeth on edge to hear any man talking about female innocence.”

“Did he say when he would be back?”

“Not a word. But do get up. The place is upside-down after that ball, and you’ll have to wash in this basin, you can’t have a bath. All I could get is this crock of hot water, and it’s not too hot either. I’ll bring you some breakfast once you’re downstairs with your father.”

But when she said that she was ready Madame Verrier denied it. “No. Your stockings are not straight, and your hair, you haven’t brushed it properly. You may be going downstairs to see your father, but there’s nobody, but absolutely nobody, of the opposite sex before whom we can safely appear at a disadvantage.” The poor woman was always making remarks suitable for printing on a calendar designed to prove that no day in the year was worth living. Her father would never have cared that her hair was too bushy, he did not judge her as if she were a stranger; and when he heard that her life was in danger he would run his hand through her hair, as he had done when he had saved her from the sea, like a man counting the coins of his treasure.

Expectation of the rage he would feel made her tingle as they went out into the corridor, going through the alternating tunnels of darkness and the shafts of light slanting out of open bedroom doors, which had pails and brooms on the threshold or chamois-leathers hanging on the doorhandles. Out of one room there suddenly protruded a gaunt old head under a mobcap and a voice whistled through gaps left by missing teeth, addressing nobody in particular but with a personal vehemence, like a prophet crying in the wilderness, “Hurry up after four-twenty, they’ve just this moment gone down, they’ve left some of their rubbish.” A night-gown too weightless to take the air flew hesitantly out and sank on the carpet in a rosy transparent quoit. “No use to me,” the old voice cackled, and another old voice from another room cackled a comment which Laura could not understand and made Madame Verrier cry out a wordless laughing admonition. Nikolai was dead but not much else was wrong.

When they got down to the landing at the top of the great gilded staircase they had to wait. The double doors into the ballroom were ajar, and beside them stood a stout elderly woman with a moustache, her pomp and her lax black skirts suggesting the cassocked priesthood, in spite of her loaded bodice. She was holding a large bunch of keys with a ritual air, and out of the ballroom there filed, sober as nuns, all the women in blue-grey cotton gowns who had the day before been polishing the parquet floor so dutifully. Beyond them could be seen a narrow vista of the lovely room, quiet as if it had never throbbed to the clumping rhythm of the dance-band, given over again to the pure light from the high windows. Apollo and his nymphs had a simple morning look, as if they too had stripped to wash out of a basin, as she had just done; the figures in low relief on the ceiling were vague as the pattern on a damask cloth; and the chandeliers were back in their holland bags. After the last servant had passed down the stairs, the mustachio’d woman locked the door with an air of determination, and followed them with a heavy step, slower than theirs. It was the sort of thing that makes historians write, “So ended the something or other.”

That fitted well enough. She would not choose to come back to the town where her grandfather had died and she had had to sit the night through enveloped in Kamensky’s murderous sweetness. It was a pity that this meant losing this ballroom, with its air of elegant fashion and eternal peace, and a worse pity that she must also lose Madame Verrier, whose arm round her waist felt protective but not in a humiliating way, it was as if they were sharing an adventure. Had they been two women soldiers, two Maids of Saragossa, this is how the one that had not been wounded would have supported the one that was. Her heart ached as it used to at the end of the summer holidays, when she had to leave behind her at the sea-side all the people she had come to love, particularly the blacksmith’s mother and the oldest of the fishermen. It hurt worst if, at the actual hour when the dog-cart came to drive them to the station up on the moors, the tide was out, the sea a blue bar far beyond the yellow sands, withdrawn from the bastions on each side of the cove. One way or another, there was too much loss in life.

She said, “Madame Verrier, you must come to London and stay with us.”

“You’re very kind. And you’re a great charmer. But alas, my work is here.”

“But surely you take a holiday sometimes.”

They were not going all the way down the great staircase. Madame Verrier stopped in front of a panel which looked like all the rest, turned a gilt knob which might have been an ornament, and led the way into a dark passage. “Holidays,” she said in sudden dreaminess through the dusk, “I always spend them in the same place. A little village in the Dordogne. Nobody knows of it. There’s nothing there but an inn and a river, not a big river, quite a little river, running between rocks. There are pools under the rocks, and hills above, covered with woods.”