The Birds Fall Down (6 page)

“I didn’t really, not much,” said Laura, “except that I’d prefer you to be all right, you know. When do we go to Aunt Florence?”

“In two days’ time,” said Tania. But her eyes were on Laura’s like an unhappy dog’s. “But why should you suddenly have got this idea about your father losing his money? You never think of money. Osmund likes to save it and Lionel likes to spend it, but you’ve hardly heard of it. Why should you develop a theory that we were going to be poor and worry about it? Are you sure you weren’t worried about something else? Do tell me.”

“It was the two girls in my class that made me frightened,” Laura persisted calmly. She wondered at her own power of lying. “They mind being poor awfully. They’re not going to be presented at court. Does the Mûres-sur-Mer train leave in the morning or the afternoon?”

“Some time fairly early in the morning. And nothing can happen to you. Pyotr is going ahead with the heavy luggage and the bed-linen—Grandpapa and Grandmamma simply will not understand that that is unnecessary in the West. Then the little Kamensky will take you down to the Gare du Nord and put you in the train, a slow train that stops at Mûres-sur-Mer, and Pyotr will meet you on the platform. I can’t see that anything can go wrong.”

“Can’t you? You should read the litany,” said Laura. “There’s always earthquakes, for one thing.” She felt that things had eased enough for her to kiss her mother. They clung together, and Laura thought, reading the tension of the familiar body in her arms, “She’s glad to be so close to me that I can’t see her face. What can have happened?” She rubbed her own face against Tania’s shoulder as if she herself were the one that needed comfort. A tremor warned her that her mother was near to weeping. Laura released her and walked over to the window, saying, “We’re going to have another gorgeous sunset. Do you suppose it really is because of that earthquake in Martinique that we’re having all these marvellous sunsets?”

“It wasn’t an earthquake, it was a volcanic eruption,” said Tania, and Laura said, “I was practising, I was being polite to it, just as I’ve got to be to Aunt Florence,” and Tania said in a sleepy and unconcerned voice, “But it’s more polite to call an earthquake a volcanic eruption that the other way round, there’s something very dashing about a volcano, and now I must go to Mamma. She’s been too long with those people, however admirable they are. She must lie down.”

“Do your hair first, Mummie,” Laura told her, “you look very White Queen,” and kissed her once again before they went along the dark corridor. “Should I hold her hand?” Laura asked herself. “No, better not.”

But the blind man and his wife had left, and Sofia Andreievna had already gone to her room, and Tania followed her there. Laura joined her grandfather and Monsieur Kamensky, who had opened the french window and were standing on the narrow balcony, watching the street below.

“You see, Count, you needn’t have worried,” said Kamensky, “she’s got him across the street quite safely.”

“All the same, I wish that I’d had the forethought not to let Pyotr go off for the evening,” said Nikolai. “I’d have liked to send them home in the carriage, they’ve such a long way to go, and one should do such a couple honour.”

“Look at them making their way through the crowd,” said Kamensky. “The crowd are such mediocrities, and they too look mediocre. Nobody just seeing them like that could guess that here are two who could be to Paris as the one just man might have been to Sodom. Even from here we can’t easily pick them out.”

“I can’t tell which they are,” said Laura. “Are they the ones behind the two priests?”

“No, you’re out by a dozen yards,” said Kamensky. “See, stand behind me and look over my shoulder where my hand is pointing. There, you can see the glazier walking along with his pane of glass behind him. Well, they’re passing him now.”

“But I think there is something special about them,” said Laura. “But you are right about the other people, they do look alike.”

“How unjust life is,” said Kamensky, “for I, and anyone else who knows you, could pick you out of the crowd in a second, even if you were a long way farther off.”

“Why, how would you do that?” she asked to please him. It never interested her to hear anything about herself.

“Quite easily. Nobody else walking down the Avenue Kléber now, or at any other time of the day, has hair quite as golden as yours,” he said, in a gentle, educative voice, as if he were a schoolmaster demonstrating a theorem on a blackboard.

“They are hurrying along like rats rushing into the granary when a sack has been spilt,” said Nikolai, resting his arms on the balcony and leaning right over. “A people without God,” he pronounced.

“How can he tell that,” thought Laura, “by looking down on the tops of their heads? All he can fairly say is, ‘A people with lots and lots of bowler hats.’”

Kamensky said, “Ah, yes, Count, a people without God or even the hunger for God.” Again he turned to Laura like a schoolmaster and said, “Indeed, you couldn’t hide from any friend, even if he couldn’t see you. You know how it is when one comes up to this apartment by night. The lamp on the staircase comes on as soon as the concierge opens the front door, but the lift lumbers up so slowly that the lamp goes out before one gets to this storey, and one steps out on to a pitch-dark landing. Well, if we met there in the blackness, just the two of us, with no light coming from anywhere, I should know in a second that it was you.”

She could not have been less interested. She had just invented in her fancy a little Frenchman, the bald kind with a pointed beard, who was complaining to Nikolai, “I asked for bowlers and you gave me a God.” Would Mamma think that funny? One never could be sure. To be polite to Monsieur Kamensky, because he was so nice, she asked, “How would you know it was me?”

“Because, just as nobody else has hair like yours, nobody else has a voice like yours. It is rather high, but not shrill, and suddenly it cracks and it is as if a charming icicle had splintered into shining fragments.”

“Something funny happened to my voice when I had my tonsils out,” she said.

“But, of course, if I were walking down the Avenue Kléber, and your hair was hidden under a hat and you were alone and not speaking to anybody, there is another thing I would notice about you.”

Smiling as if she were eager to hear what it was, she thought, “How odd, he would notice me, I would not notice him. How unkind of me.”

“I would say to myself,” he continued, “‘How wonderful, a minute ago I would have sworn that round me there were only Frenchmen and a few English and Americans, and I was a lonely foreigner, but now I am not alone any more, for here is a Russian young lady.’”

It did not strike her at once what he had said. Then she exclaimed joyfully, “No, you can’t really mean that! Oh, I would be pleased if that were true. You actually think I look Russian?”

“Indeed I do,” said Kamensky, “and I will even be more exact. It is not only that you have a certain resemblance to the ladies in St. Petersburg and other parts of Russia who are your relatives. It is that in every Russian town there is always one young lady who makes the men of the town discontented with even the nicest of all the other young ladies—and all those special young ladies have something in common with you.”

“My head’s turning round and round,” said Nikolai, pushing himself back from the balcony railing, his great head falling back on the thick column of his throat. “I must sit down.”

They helped his rocking hugeness to his armchair. As the old man sank down among the cushions his loosely swinging arm struck Kamensky’s spectacles from his nose. “Go, Alexander Gregorievitch,” he panted, “get my medicine from my night-table. Not the white tablets, the yellow.” Kamensky said, “Yes, yes, dear Count,” and bent down to pick up his spectacles, but Nikolai cried, in a weak, howling whisper, “What are you doing? My tablets, my tablets, I must have them.” Kamensky straightened himself, sighed, and hurried from the room.

Laura picked up the spectacles and sat down with them on her lap. “Grandfather is being ridiculous,” she thought. “He brought all this on himself, hanging over the balcony, it’s quite a height. That’s all it is. He should be ashamed to make such a fuss about nothing when it’s Grandmamma who’s really ill. I wish I could tell him so. I can’t think why nobody ever stands up to him.” To pass the time she played with the objects on the occasional table beside her: a lapis lazuli paper-weight; a miniature of one of her ancestresses, young but many-chinned among ringlets and scarves; a snuff-box made of that spectral black-and-silver mixture of alloys known as
niello
, its design depicting the Cathedral of St. Sophia at Kiev; a round box made of varnished plaited straw and containing some sugar almonds rough with age. Again she had the feeling that the bric-à-brac in this apartment were getting old in the same way as its occupants, they were tedious as if they were deafish and blindish and slow. She wondered why Kamensky had not come back, and reflected that it might be hard for him to find the tablets without his spectacles, and picked them up, ready to take them to him. But probably he had not come back because he had gone to tell Tania that her father was ill. “He does everything that’s necessary, always,” she said to herself, and for lack of anything else to do she put his spectacles on her own nose.

She burst out laughing. The lenses were plain glass. Now she liked him more than ever. Her father had told her that many Japanese and Hindus with perfect sight wore spectacles simply for the sake of looking wise, and it was delightful that Monsieur Kamensky, who was so modest and kind and selfless, should have, as his only detectable fault, this innocent vanity which did not harm a soul.

“Grandfather, Grandfather,” she called, folding the gold wings over her ears, eager to let him into the joke, for she knew he was really nice, and would not laugh at Monsieur Kamensky except in a loving way.

But Nikolai stared at her icily. “Take off those spectacles at once,” he said. “Girl, I am ashamed of you. You are not a child. If you had been reared in Russia you would be a married woman by now. You should have learned long ago that you should never touch people’s personal possessions when they are out of the room.”

There was no foundation for her dream that she could defy him. “I am sorry, Grandfather,” she said, and took off the spectacles.

Kamensky was back in the room, carrying a little silver tray with the tube of tablets and a glass of water on it. “You had better take two,” he told Nikolai.

“It says one on the box,” the old man grumbled, “and medicine is not for me. Except for quinine, which I took when I was soldiering in those accursed marshes, I never tasted a pharmacist’s mess till I was over fifty. No, one tablet will be enough.”

“Ah, but the doctor said you should take two when you were seriously upset. Truly, truly, he said that. I heard him say it, and so, I think, did you. It is not a matter of being ill. There is nothing wrong with your body as yet, dear Count. But your mind is troubled and that drains away your forces. And this afternoon we had a long drive.”

Nikolai swallowed the one tablet and then said, timidly, “But there is something else which makes me not want to take this second tablet.”

“What can that be?” asked Kamensky, tenderly. He had left the tray on the table and was kneeling in front of Nikolai with the glass of water in one hand and the second tablet on the palm of the other. She wondered how he managed to look neither servile nor absurd.

“I am afraid of that little tablet,” Nikolai owned. “I think there is a conspiracy against me. If there is, perhaps these tablets are poisoned. One I have often taken, and I have lived. But two? I’m quite simply frightened.”

“Count, you’d be very foolish, considering all things, if you didn’t look warily at any tablets. But these were made up from the prescription given you in St. Petersburg by our dear Dr. Dervize and repeated by Dr. Lefebure here, and I had it made up by a chemist in the Faubourg St. Honoré who hadn’t the faintest idea who I was or for whom I was acting. I simply walked in off the street and waited till it was ready. Take this second tablet and sit for a minute with your eyes closed. Really, you’ll feel much better.”

When he turned from the old man and set the tray down on the table, Laura gave him his spectacles. In case he should guess she had tried them on and knew his secret, she said, “I was afraid you wouldn’t find my grandfather’s medicine when I saw you’d gone off without these.” And he answered, with a smile of complicity, “So was I, but I didn’t dare come back without it, so I got one of the servants to help me.”

It startled her that he lied so quickly and so well; as quickly as she had lied to Tania a little while before, and rather better. She supposed that this pretence must matter a great deal to him, and could not imagine why. But then she had no idea of what went on inside any human being except herself. What was happening inside Tania, inside Papa? She began to think of Susie Staunton, she could not imagine why. But now Susie seemed part of their lives, though it was only two years since they had first met her. Cousin Angus had taken Tania and Lionel and her to see his son play polo at one of those clubs out in the western distances of London, an old house and its gardens and parklands, which had got stranded in a crisscross of little greyish streets, down near that part of the Thames where one went to see the boat race. Between matches she and Lionel had loitered under a tulip tree, enchanted by the great white flowers which were so oddly up instead of down, while Cousin Angus and Tania did the drill, which Laura watched with half an eye, because it was pretty. Over the lawn sauntered the men with their grey top-hats and black coats and striped trousers, the women with their hats like trays of flowers and their bright fan-tailed dresses, each couple halting every now and then to greet another couple. The women did the talking, standing face to face, digging their frilly parasols into the turf a few inches in front of them and crossing their hands on the crooks of their parasols, which showed off their graceful wrists, and tilting back their heads to keep the hat-brims from nodding over their eyes, so that they all seemed to be taking a dashing, defiant conversational line. The men, standing soberly by, might have been members of another species who kept these lively multicoloured creatures as pets and were exercising them. In each male hand there might have been a leash, a collar round every female throat under the net and lace.