The Birds Fall Down Page 2

  Laura knew that husbands could do several sorts of things which angered their wives, and though she did not care to think of them too exactly, she could not imagine her father doing any of them. Such husbands “ran away.” Her father could not have moved an inch from where he was. His friends had all sprung up round him in a crowd, at Eton, at New College, in the Commons. When he travelled he was invited to stay with people he knew; his appropriate hosts had scattered themselves everywhere. The house in Radnage Square had been built for his father, and he could walk about it in the dark without bumping into anything. Alone in a strange place, what could he do? In any way, surely such husbands “ran away” towards gaiety. But her father, though not dull, had committed himself to dullness for life and liked it; he enjoyed blue books, general elections, questions in the House, Ministerial posts.

  Anyway, Tania was going to be away from whatever the trouble was for a fortnight. And she was better already. She seemed to be actually reading the Times as the train slid through Kent, and as it drew near Dover she emerged from her sorrow into a distress which Laura found not in the least distressing, because it was familiar and idiotic. When Tania was young in Russia she had hardly ever seen the sea, except the Baltic and the Black Sea in high summer, and the English Channel was to her a mentally deranged piece of water attended by a fellow-maniac, sea-sickness, which she saw as a separate and uncontrollable entity, capable of intruding even into harbours. She could not go down to her cabin at once because Hélène had mislaid the ticket, and she fell into a comfortable irritation, not likely to last more than ten minutes, just as she did at home when meals were late or Osmund was snobbish or Lionel got overexcited and showed off, or rather as she had done when she was still happy enough to know such minor unhappiness. This holiday would be just what she needed.

  But things were not as they should have been. When they got down into the cabin and Hélène brought out the blanket and pillow from the soft red-leather hold-all and laid them on the sofa, Tania breathed with an absurd urgency, “Well, when we get to the Gare du Nord we’ll have the little Kamensky to meet us, provided he’s in Paris, and that’ll be all right.” Laura thought this tactless of her mother. Of course the little secretary man, or whatever he was, would not lose any tickets and would be much more efficient than Hélène, but her mother need not have said so. Hélène put up with a great deal; she had to spend hours in brushing Tania’s hair, and Laura’s too now, and they both had an awful lot of hair. Also Monsieur Kamensky was an educated man, he had worked for her grandfather in his Ministry, of course he would know how to do things better than Hélène. But Tania had evidently meant something different, for Hélène answered without rancour, “Yes, indeed, Monsieur Kamensky will tell us all we want to know.”

  They both spoke of the little secretary (she thought he was little but could not really remember with certainty) in voices softened by trust, and she thought guiltily of an occasion on their last visit to Paris, two years before, when she had been ungrateful for his devotion to the family. Somebody had come from the Russian Embassy to question her grandfather about something that had happened when he was still a Minister, her grandmother had shut herself up in her bedroom to rage and cry, Tania had had to share this angry vigil, and Monsieur Kamensky had very kindly offered to take her for a drive. On their way home they had been going along the odd cemetery-feeling road that runs along the back-gardens of the houses on the Rue St. Honoré, including the British Embassy, on the one side, and the Champs Elysées, on the other, when she caught sight of the open-air stamp-market. There the grave men were sitting on little iron chairs with their portfolios spanning their knees or lying on the ground at their feet, and she remembered that Osmund had said that if she had a chance she might buy him some French colonials. She asked Monsieur Kamensky to stop, and he had helped her a lot, he had found the man with the brindled moustache who was the specialist in such issues; and then, when she had found just what Osmund had wanted, she had asked the man if he had any Russian stamps. She did not collect stamps, they did not interest her at all, but she would have liked to have some Russian stamps. She knew Osmund had a number of them, but she wanted some of her very own. She was proud of being half-Russian, though she loved England; it was not only that it had done a lot for her with the other girls at school, it was that she felt, while knowing it was against reason, all that Tania felt about Russia.

  The man with the brindled moustache told her that he had none and that she would do best to go to two men who were sitting some distance away, nearer the street, the men with the borzoi lying at their feet. She had started to walk towards them when Monsieur Kamensky caught her by the arm and said, “Please, Miss Laura, you cannot have any dealings with those people.” She was enraged because he spoke to her as she thought that no man should speak to any woman, even if she was a schoolgirl, in command. She was also resentful of the strength of the grip of his hand on her arm. She threw back her head and tore herself away and started again towards the two men with the borzoi lying at their feet. But her arm was gripped again, more firmly than before. One would never have thought that he was so strong. She said crossly, “Why shouldn’t I buy those stamps?” Her anger had broken on the polished stone of his unchanging face. He had told her sadly that people dealing in Russian goods in Paris were often revolutionaries, even terrorists, and that dangerous consequences might follow if any of them got a clue to her identity.

  “What,” Laura had asked, “is it as bad as that?” and he had answered gently, “It is as bad as it can be. Have your parents never told you why you and your brothers were never allowed to visit your grandparents while they still lived in Russia? No? With all due respect to them, I think that wrong. I will take the responsibility of telling you. Three times the terrorists attempted Count Diakonov’s life, and the wing of his country house was mined. The last time your mother’s old English governess was killed.” The honor stilled her. “I am sorry,” she said. They walked soberly to the carriage, and she stopped to ask him in a horrified voice, “But are the terrorists here? In France? In Paris?” He had answered softly, so that she could scarcely hear him, “They are everywhere.” In silence they had driven home along the Champs Elysées, towards a blood-red sunset.

  They were at Calais, and Tania thanked a saint because she had not been sea-sick, though she never was. After the pushing and snapping in the French customs there was the long train-journey with its good moments; the estuary where a wide sweep of ghost-coloured dunes fell to a tidal river no more than a string of pools white in the fawn mud, a piny wilderness on the farther bank running seawards to the golden haze of the horizon; and the green and glassy outskirts of Amiens, where someone had planned waterways as a child might do it, with canals cutting across one another like open scissors, and perfectly round little ponds encircling perfectly round islands. A young man kept on walking up and down the corridor so that he could look in as he passed their carriage and stare at her. She thought men dull. Next year she would be presented, and she would have to go through the season and dance with a lot of men, and she did not know how she would bear it. She supposed she would have to get married, but she could not imagine herself getting to know a man well enough for that. She did not believe there was much in men to know.

  At last there was the screaming, hurrying Gare du Nord, but no Monsieur Kamensky, only the bull-necked Pyotr, who kissed Tania’s hand and wept over it, and kissed her own and wept some more, and took them out to the carriage where the giant coachman Vissarion kissed their hands and wept again. Laura could not remember that there had been quite so much emotion when she was in Paris before. Then they drove off into the boulevards, into the whiteness which follows the sunset of a clear June day, with crowds of people hurrying along, not as if they feared to be late but as if they were eager to reach some place where they were going to enjoy themselves, past cafés where other people seemed to have reached that goal of contentment, the women smiling under huge cartwheel hats, so much larger than w
ere worn in England, the men tilting forward bowler hats, so much smaller than were worn in England. The carriage spun on while the gas-standards came into yellow flower and the sky was pierced with stars, until they turned up the long, low hill of the Avenue des Champs Elysées, between the stout rich private houses that were nearly palaces, towards the Arc de Triomphe, proud and black against the silver ending of the sunset.

  Then they turned into the sombre breadth of the Avenue Kléber, and came to a halt at the most sombre building there; and that was the end of pleasure, of Paris. They drove across the pavement through an open double gateway into a courtyard where a circle of shrubs grew round a fountain flowing from a vase held by a plaster naiad, and they were met in a dark hall by a yellow-faced concierge, who, as she remembered, was half-French and half-Japanese. The Diakonovs had made their home in this building solely because it was owned, and the lower floors occupied, by a commercial syndicate of so many and such bizarre nationalities, including a substantial Japanese participation, that they could trace no connection with Russia and therefore feared no curiosity from their landlords. Hélène stayed to look after the luggage, and Tania and Laura stepped into a lift made of iron grilles and red mahogany, which rose moaning and whistling up a pole shining like a slate pencil; and on the fourth storey they got out at an open door, and Laura saw that the place was as awful as she remembered it. There was no actual difficulty in seeing that the hall was lined with tapestries and rugs, and those gorgeously coloured, but the gloom took them to itself, the walls were dull as if they had been panelled with deal. Laura followed Tania as she hurried through one sitting-room after another, pushing aside portières of fringed and bobbled bottle-green velvet, penetrating a darkness intensified by weak shaking circles of light emanating from the lamps burning before the icons in the corners of each room. Tania paused before the last doorway and exclaimed, “They aren’t here, yet surely, surely they can’t have gone out.” But in this last room an old man was huddled at a little round table, pondering over a game of patience and looking too weak to do anything else, to rise or to speak, but who sprang to his feet, overturning the table and sending the cards spinning across the floor, and shouted, “Tania, my daughter Tania!”

  “He’s just what I remembered, I didn’t exaggerate,” thought Laura with admiration, with distaste. He was so huge. Her father was six foot; Nikolai Nikolaievitch must have been four inches taller, and even for that he was broad. Though his roar was loving, in his embrace Tania appeared the victim of a great beast of prey.

  His head was too massive; when he bent to kiss his daughter first on one cheek and then on the other, it seemed terrible that she should have to suffer the second blow. He was not growing old in a way young people like to see; his white hair and his beard were streaked with the barbaric gold glowing as it glowed on his daughter’s head. His features were nearly classical yet were thickened as if by some blood not European, and the colour of his skin sent the mind to Asia. It made him look all the taller and stranger and yellower that he was wearing a long fawn garment cut like a monk’s robe. But it was the change in him that was so alarming. Before, he had been a wilder, stronger version of other and quite familiar kinds of people. There were Members of Parliament who came to the house for dinner and looked quite like Nikolai Nikolaievitch, allowing for a difference in size and vehemence. And when her grandfather came to London he frequented the Distinguished Strangers Galleries in the Lords and Commons, and had been to dinner at Downing Street and stayed at Hatfield and Chatsworth, and it had all gone very well. But now he could not have set foot outside the apartment without being followed by a crowd, and without gratifying their anticipations, for his movements were strange as signals to another star.

  “Darling Papa, where is Mamma?” asked Tania, freeing herself from his arms.

  The old man’s great amber eyes went to Laura. She was engulfed in his hugeness, smothered by the softness of his robe. It was some kind of wool, but soft as silk. He let her go, then caught her hands. “Were you anxious to see us? Did you have a good journey? Did the Channel make your mother ill?”

  He wanted to know none of these things. He was testing her Russian, making sure that her mother saw to it that she spoke it as well as she spoke English. It did not matter that he and his wife often spoke French. If she spoke Russian, it would mean that his blood was somehow bound to Russia. She answered as quickly as she could get the words out, “We have been speaking of nothing else for days. The journey did not seem long at all. Mother was better than I have ever known her on the sea.”

  But she thought, in English, “How I wish I was not here. I wanted to come, but now I wish I was in Radnage Square.” These walls were lined from floor to ceiling with pictures in swollen gilt frames, shallow portraits of bearded and mustachio’d generals with giant chests barred and crossed with insignia, abundant women wearing high tiaras and carrying wide feather fans, landscapes showing larches and birches and pines standing lifeless as metal among their cobalt shadows on the snow. On the chimney-piece a huge clock showed the time in gross diamond figures on a gold globe fixed to a lapis lazuli firmament, and it was flanked by lines of small objects such as a chrysoberyl bull-dog with ruby eyes and a number of gold and silver jewel-studded Easter eggs. Several small tables were covered with cloisonné jardinières and others with glass tops contained little rosebushes made of coral and jade, and many miniatures and snuff-boxes, all repellent to interest. On each side of the fireplace stood a malachite vase as high as herself. All these things were getting old, as people get old; and bad taste seemed present, as a separate entity, like dust. Yet it had been delicious to touch her grandfather’s robe. It was as different from ordinary material as something sung from something spoken. In a way she liked her grandfather. Once she had seen children crawling under a circus-tent so that they could see the elephant, and she would have done that to see her grandfather; and what she liked in him was the upside-downness of him, as this inverted luxury which gave him an everyday possession—for she supposed this robe was just a dressing-gown—which was uniquely exquisite, while the pictures and bric-à-brac round him were dull as china dogs and shell picture-frames from Margate.

  But it was infuriating of him to pay no attention to Tania’s twice-repeated question, “Father, where is Mamma?” He simply went on trying out Laura’s Russian, holding her hands powerless in his, staring at her, and telling her that her accent was good, that she held herself well, that he was glad that she had inherited the family golden hair. Tania exclaimed softly, “Everything seems to go wrong at the same time,” and took off her coat and held it in her arms as if it were a baby or a little dog or her own anxiety. Laura felt frightened to see her mother suddenly becoming young and defenceless, even younger than she was herself. She pulled her hands out of her grandfather’s grasp and asked him loudly, “Where’s Grandmamma?”

  Nikolai seemed to think the question odd. “Why, child,” he said kindly, “she has been pacing up and down her room all day, actually crying with eagerness for your arrival and praying that your mother should not be too sea-sick.”

  “Is she there now?” asked Tania.

  “How should I know?” he asked in indulgent rebuke. “She might be. In any case, they will have told her that you are here, and she’ll be coming in a minute. Sit down and rest, it’s you and not she who have been doing the travelling.”

  “I must go and find her,” said Tania, going towards the door. But she halted, breathed deeply, and nerved herself to ask: “How is she? Is she well?”

  “Is she well? Really I can’t say that,” said Nikolai. ‘We’re none of us in very good health. We don’t want to be here in Paris, so it doesn’t suit us. There’s an old Russian proverb—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Tania, and turned to the door, but was met by Hélène, followed by the two women servants whom the Diakonovs had brought from Russia: Pyotr’s wife Katinka, the stout old cook, and Vissarion’s sister, Aglaia, the Countess’s elegant and jaundiced maid
. Laura thought they looked like characters out of those boring Marivaux plays that she always had to dodge being taken to see at the Comédie française, for in the house they wore dresses belonging to another age, with full skirts and tight bodices made of thick grey cotton, with neckerchiefs of white linen and white stockings. Now they seemed more like players than ever, for they looked at Tania with great eyes before they kissed her hand, and there was an emphasized devotion in their kisses, while they cast sidelong glances at Nikolai so plainly pitying him for his ignorance of some impending calamity that he would certainly have ceased to be ignorant of it, had he not been sealed in himself. When they kissed Laura’s hand they mimed the same sort of fear, and she stiffened with fear. Was her mother perhaps going to leave her father? But she was wrong. There was some other calamity here. As Hélène took her mother’s coat from her she said in an undertone, “They say the Countess will be back in a minute and you must not worry. It appears there is a vigil service in their Church—in your Church—this evening, it’s one of your saint’s days.”

  “It’s the day of Constantine and Helena, the Great Monarchs,” murmured Aglaia, an inch or two above Laura’s hand.

  “Isn’t Laura Eduarevna like her mother?” Nikolai asked them.

  “The image, the image,” the two servants chanted together, and Katinka murmured to Tania, “The Countess didn’t feel like going to our church in the Rue Darou, so she’s just stepped round to the chapel in the Countess von Krehmunden’s house in the Avenue de Bois—”

  “Do you mean to say she’s well enough to go out alone?”