The Birds Fall Down (53 page)

“I always wanted to do what she asked,” said Saint-Gratien.

She borrowed Madame Verrier’s pencil, she was given a leaf from Saint-Gratien’s pocket-diary, she found in her bag the scrap of paper on which Chubinov had written the address of the hotel where he was hiding, and the name he would be known by there. But she could not bring herself to write the message that would kill a man. Her pencil hovering over the paper, she listened to the talk the others were carrying on in undertones.

“Yes, perhaps. But I thought he talked of her with such protective feeling about the couple that came into the little salon last night. You didn’t see them, did you? Who do you think they were?”

“From the description this Kamensky gave, the man would be de Sancy. The woman any one of a number of fools.”

“Poor de Sancy, mewed up in that run-down property, with no money to keep it up. What can he do but chase women?”

“He would chase them if he had twenty millions. But is the place in such a state?”

“Very shabby. The sort of property where all the gamekeepers look like poachers.”

Madame Verrier said suddenly, “Little one, don’t send that telegram if you don’t want to. Wait till you get to Paris, and you’ve had the chance to think it over in the train.”

But Paris was the place where Kamensky meant to murder her, in the little room where the petals had fallen from the roses. To fight this kindness which would kill her, Laura said, “But I must send it now.” Again she found a lie at the tip of her tongue. “There is trouble in my family. I want a friend to come and help my mother with his advice. My mother trusts him. But my father and Monsieur Kamensky don’t like him.”

“Well, if it’s an affair like that you’re probably right,” said Madame Verrier. “Ah, one should always mind one’s own business.”

“Yes, let’s restrict our diagnoses to our profession,” said Saint-Gratien. He searched in his pockets and found another pencil. “Now take your time over the telegram while Madame Verrier draws me another little cat on that temperature chart. All the little cats you draw remind me of someone, I can’t think who. Creatures who scratch but have their claims to be considered domestic pets, for those who care for little animals about the house. There are some.”

Laura wrote quickly, “Baraton, Hôtel de l’Indépendance, Rue des Nomades, Paris. Nikolai died yesterday, my father and I return to Paris this afternoon, please call at the apartment at four o’clock tomorrow, L.,” and handed the paper to Saint-Gratien, and then rested her elbows on the table and covered her eyes. She heard him say, “Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle,” and took no notice. But he repeated, “Mademoiselle,” and she dropped her hands and saw that he was holding the paper out to her. She had known all the time that he would not send the telegram. He did not want her to die, but something did.

He was not giving it back to her. He said, “My dear young lady, you know all about life, but you do not know that you should never use the word ‘tomorrow’ in a telegram just by itself. You must mention the day. ‘Tomorrow Thursday’ is what is needed. Look, I have written it in.”

“He’s fussy,” said Madame Verrier, her pencil going, “but he’s right about that. One comes in and finds a telegram telling one to go to a case tomorrow, the date stamp’s illegible, one takes it for granted that as it wasn’t there by noon it must have been sent that morning, and one puts one’s feet up, and then there’s a banging on the door, and they want one at once, and it turns out that the telegram’s been lying at the post office for twenty-four hours. Life’s very boring, except, of course, when it’s not.”

“I’ll send your telegram when we leave,” said Saint-Gratien. “The post offices are closed now, till three. Ah, yes, I like the way that little cat’s tail stands straight up. One has to mind one’s manners with that little cat.”

If she sat there any longer she would ask him to give her back the telegram. She must go back and look at Kamensky and refresh her hatred of him. When she got up Madame Verrier and Saint-Gratien smiled at her out of the haze of their contentment, and told her they would be there when she left, she must come and say good-bye to them, they were sorry they had met her in such sad circumstances, but age must die, and they had known many people suffer more painful deaths than her grandfather. Her heart was beating so that she felt sick, her cheeks were burning again and she knew her eyes were staring, but their kind glances slid from her face back to the temperature chart, unperturbed. As she walked slowly back along the gallery she was astonished because nothing happened to prevent her from becoming a criminal; no stranger, looking like a doctor, came out of a doorway and said, “It is all a mistake.”

She expected that she would find her father still writing his letter. That was all he was fit for, to sit in the wrecked grace of this inferior room, behind him the fine bookcase with the fine unread books tumbling off the shelves, in front of him the fine desk with its mulch of bills. But when her eyes got used to the half-light she saw that her father and Kamensky were standing face-to-face in front of the desk and at that very moment her father’s long and elegant fingers, looking foolish in the same way that faces do, were handing over the envelope to Kamensky, who gave it a little pat, a quiet, squeezing, satisfied pressure, before he slipped it into his pocket. It no longer caused her pleasure to know that he would be reading the letter within an hour or two. She wanted that letter to be burned at once, destroyed absolutely, not allowed any survival at all, even to the small degree of living in a man’s mind during the day or so he had still to live.

As she came in her father was saying something about the importance of posting this letter in the centre of London, was spelling out St. Martin’s-le-Grand. He looked shamefully ashamed when he saw her and cut himself short. “Ah, my dear. Now we’re going up to pay our last respects to your poor grandfather. Do you want to come with us? We’ll have to hurry.”

She shook her head.

“Then wait here. I got the chambermaid to bring down your hat and coat and your grandfather’s things. We won’t be long. We cannot be long.” He spoke as if it were somebody else’s fault they were short of time. “Don’t wander off, be sure to be here ready to start the moment we come back.”

Once they had gone she stood in the dimness, her eyes shut, her hands joined, begging her grandfather to forgive her for not having been able to protect his dead body from being seen by these men who were his enemies. She had to take part of that back. Her father was not Nikolai’s enemy. He had never done anything against him, that was not conceivable. Then she heard a step beside her, and she opened her eyes. Kamensky had come back and had left the door open, they both stood brilliant in a shaft of sunlight piercing the dusk. She stared at him. She was fascinated by everything about him, his sleek head, his face half hidden by spectacles and moustache and beard and very bland where it could be seen, his neat but inelegant body, because it was all about to perish. And he was staring at her, and it must be for the same reason: he was contemplating what was now bright in the sunshine, what, according to his plans, would soon be nowhere. For the first time she noticed a faint scar running from his hairline down to the middle of his left eyebrow, and she thought with the concern which springs up automatically at the sight of any injury, “An inch farther, and he’d have lost the sight of that eye,” and then thought again, in fear, “How did it happen that someone got so near to killing him and failed? How did he get away?”

Hoarsely he said, “I had to come back. You’re looking so wonderful. They say in poems that women look radiant, but you really do, you’re giving out light. But you’re agitated. I can see you’re agitated. Strangers might think you’re quite calm, but I, I understand you, I see under the surface. Your heart’s beating far too fast. Oh, be calm. Realize that there’s nothing but peace and joy in the future.”

She nodded. “Nothing but peace and joy,” she repeated. It would be true, once he was dead.

“And tomorrow I’ll be with you at four o’clock, I promise you.”

“Please, please, be there,” she said.

“And tell me, what are your favourite flowers?” She looked at him in amazement, and he added, “They should be white.”

Yes, she supposed they should. Flowers at funerals were nearly always white. It must have been Professor Barrault’s twaddle about Virgil that had made his mind run in this direction. “Not lilies,” she said, smiling at his impudence. “Lilies are pi.”

“What is pi?”

“An English word. An English slang word. It means humbugging of a special sort, to do with religion, with pretending to be good.”

“You must explain it to me some time. We have so many things to talk about. But if not lilies, what then?”

“This is difficult. I’m quite overwhelmed by being allowed to make my own choice.” She remembered the petals that had fallen on the table in the little drawing-room, while her grandfather slept. “Oh, let it be white roses. Yes, that would be fitting, white roses.”

XIV

On the railway platform at Grissaint, before the Paris train came in, Kamensky said to Edward Rowan: “Don’t thank me. To bring the dear Count back to Paris will be a great consolation. Once more, and for the last time, I will be alone with my master, my teacher, my exemplar. We will travel through the night to the same destination, the grave, though, by the great paradox, we shall arrive there at different times.” But the greater paradox was that, once again, there was what sounded like real affection in his voice. He turned to Laura and told her gently: “You who love the customs of our Church may be distressed because the Psalms are not yet being recited over the body of your poor grandfather.” He turned back to Mr. Rowan. “It is sad that no other person belonging to our Church was here with your daughter. Certain errors have been committed. The dear Count is holding his icon, whereas his hands should have been crossed on his breast, and the fingers of the right hand bent, as though in the act of making the sign of the cross. Had I only been here! But as to the recitation of the Psalms, I will discharge that duty at the first moment possible. I will get a Psalter. I have friends in the town who will find me one, and as I sit by the coffin in the guard’s van I will read the Psalms. He will not be without the services that we Russians love to render those we love at this time.”

In the train Edward Rowan hardly spoke. When they had travelled a quarter of an hour or so he explained to her, with an air of having been insufficiently praised for his self-sacrifice, how he had got to Grissaint so soon. When he had found the telegram waiting for him at Radnage Square—he paused again to wonder what had happened to the one sent to the House of Commons—he had telephoned to the Admiralty for help and the night-clerk had made arrangements. So when he took the tediously slow first morning train to Dover there was a steam-launch waiting to take him over to Calais, and there the stationmaster had been warned and was holding back the fast train to Grissaint for his arrival. At each stage of the journey on the English side, porters and dockers and sailors must have gaped, recognizing him from the newspaper photographs and cartoons, wondering why someone they had supposed fortunate through and through, for twenty-four hours a day, was out so long before decent breakfast time, on a slow train or in a little boat. They would be puzzled and admiring, for the likenesses would not have prepared them for the unlined white skin, the eyebrows drawn by a fine brush over clear eyes, the easy walk that showed he could still run. He could not have changed much since he was young, only he had developed this power of settling things which for all his lightness made him seem weightier than an ordinary man, weighty like a statue of someone famous. All these men would have trusted him to give them good advice, to tell them how they could keep the house though the landlord said they had forfeited the deposit, who was going to win the Derby, whether they had got the right pension. She saw him through those strangers’ eyes and leaned forward and said across the carriage, “Papa, about Monsieur Kamensky.”

He was looking out of the window at the skyline, at what he saw beyond the skyline. “Yes, Kamensky, Kamensky,” he answered absently, “a very decent fellow. I expect you’ve been thinking what I have, that we must do something to show our gratitude, I wonder what on earth that sort of man would like as a present. Perhaps your mother would know.”

It was no use. He had become stupid. If she told him the truth, his disbelief would change into a rage which could get Chubinov into prison: “The first thing is to find out who this fellow is.” She would be left unguarded. For distraction she turned to the magazines her father had bought her on the station, but they were of the same sort that Kamensky had bought her in Paris,
pour les jeunes filles
. She tried to lose herself in an article called “Two Fair Portrait-Painters,” comparing the art of Madame Vigée Lebrun and Madame Nelly Jacquemart-André, and in others concerning the home life and the poetry of Carmen Sylva, the Queen of Roumania, and the process by which stalactites and stalagmites are formed. What she wanted now that she had sent that telegram was a magazine not
pour les jeunes filles but pour les jeunes assassines
. But she had hardly a mind. Fear, she had found, was a sliding of the bowels, and grief an illusion that the heart was made of glass and cracked into a thousand pieces, about to fall apart; and now her guilt was a heavy stone in her stomach, and a lump in her throat she could not swallow; and diarrhoea that sent her several times along the corridor to the lavatory. Also she had a sense of being connected with her father, on the other side of the railway-carriage, and with Kamensky, who was farther away from her every moment, by twisted ropes which were her nerves. A camera behind her eyes took picture after picture of her father as he sat opposite, and compiled an unnecessary album of photographs of this man for whom she felt only indifference, faintly flavoured with hope that it was not simply that. Once she slept, but woke in a few minutes, seeing an image of Kamensky against a blood-red background, his neatness cast away, in his shirt-sleeves, more violent in gesture and expression than she had ever seen him. For the rest she watched her father, as he comfortably slept, or stared out of the window at villages and churches, grasslands and ploughed fields, woods and ponds, with that blind half-smile.