3

THEY woke to a sun like solid gold, burning against a periwinkle sky. It was going to be a very hot day.

Elena and Vasily were enchanted with the idea of a picnic. Elena found a battered straw hat and tied a piece of net round it. Wearing this, she made some lemonade to take.

‘A picnic will do Vasily so much good – he is depressed today,’ she said.

‘Sergei said we are all to meet at the railway station,’ said Rose. ‘He will bring Michael and anyone else who wants to come.’

Rose put her drawing materials in a large canvas shoulder-bag. ‘I’m going to sketch,’ she said. Maisie was surprised and pleased; Rose had done little of the kind since leaving university. There was a new tone in her daughter’s voice, eager and lively. Maisie put on a white linen suit and tied a white silk scarf round her head.

When they got to the station, Sergei and Michael had just arrived with the drummer in the group (an older man, who seldom spoke) and a boy with an undernourished look and a merry smile, and Lila. They had brought a big cardboard box full of rye loaves, hard goat’s cheese and strawberries. Michael had brought his flute and flagons of wine, and looked to Maisie more attractive than she had ever seen him, he had taken to wearing his dark hair a little longer, and she liked it.

‘You look ravishing,’ he said to her, touching her face.

‘So do you,’ she said.

‘All of us are ravishing,’ said Sergei, not knowing what the word meant but liking the sound of it. He helped the old people on to the train, making a great fuss of them.

The train was a stopping country train and had wooden carriages. It pulled out with a great jerk. Michael and Maisie stayed in the corridor together, Michael holding the back of her neck with one hand, and steadying them both with the other hand on the sash of the open window. As they left St Petersburg and its suburbs and made for open countryside, the smell of grass came through the window and, in the heat, the fields of rye seemed to shimmer and move like water. There was a burst of laughter from the carriage, where everyone seemed happy and convivial.

Michael whispered in her ear. ‘I want to make love to you,’ and then, in the other ear, as if they were two separate secrets, ‘I love you.’

But in spite of her happiness, Maisie tried to name her feelings and objectify her desire for this man, in a brave, high-spirited attempt to refuse herself permission to be overcome by love, as she had been and as she knew she could be once more. Michael, knowing intuitively what was going on, tried in subtle ways to break through her fragile defences, but she remained light and hung on to her precarious gaiety. It was a tightrope she was walking. If she fell, she might never again be restored to herself. The vertiginous feeling was like being drunk. She was in some sort of ecstasy, which had some connection with grief.

The sights and sounds around her impinged on her with unusual intensity. Michael was an integral part of it all, but he was not the centre of it, not the focal point. There was no centre, no focal point, everything she saw and experienced was interrelated, everything part of everything else.

‘Are you happy?’ He probed her feelings.

‘Brilliantly happy,’ she said, smiling and kissing him. But he was perplexed by something. The first feeling he had ever had about her, that she could slip away from him, came back to him strongly. He stroked her hair, arranging the strands that escaped her scarf to his liking.

They were speeding past great rolling expanses of rye grass and buttercups. Then they stopped at a tiny wooden station with a Pepsi Cola sign on the platform as if it was the name of the place, none other being visible: A man with a long-handled axe got on.

Rose left the others and came out to join them while the train was stopped. She leaned out of the open window. ‘Isn’t it all beautiful?’ she said.

There was the feeling of the train being a temporary home. Everyone seemed to settle down quite naturally and do the sort of things they would do at home. People were playing cards and having meals, not in the way English people do, with a packet of egg and cress sandwiches, surreptitiously, but laying everything out, producing a cloth, bringing out bottles of pickles, everything. Someone was even shaving into a bowl of water held by his little boy. The boy cursed as the train started again, spilling soapy water. Rose went back into the carriage with the others.

Michael shifted Maisie in front of him and stood holding her from behind. She felt his warm breath on the back of her neck, she breathed in the sweet warm country air.

Underneath her undoubted very real passion for him, there was this insistent voice which questioned everything, reminded her of what had happened in Ireland. Yet love was not a bargain – I’ll only love you if you’ll love me only. Only me, for ever and ever. Once she had been drawn to his look of freedom, his non-attachment, she had wanted it for herself.

He wanted to reclaim her, she knew, by making love to her. From this she held back. She wanted the choice to be hers, not his. She would not be consumed by him. There was no doubt that she loved him, but she would not claim him. How often does he think of Kate? she wondered. Every day? She was surprised that the thought gave her no pain at all.

Something was different now. She had retrieved her self. Because of this, her love spilled out towards the world in a way it had not done when it had been trapped, narrowed to those things that were to do with her lover … the station where she had met him, everything he came in contact with she had loved as if it was part of him, his environment and aura. Now her love and her interest spilled over to Sergei and Rose and their friends, to the Abrahamovs in the railway carriage, laughing and making a noise. To the old couple with their pickled herrings, and the man shaving and his serious little boy holding the bowl as steady as he could in the rocking train. It spread out to the fields of rye and the buttercups reflecting the bright gold of the sun, to the very breeze which Maisie drew in with her nostrils.

Other people had been shadows to her, now they were infinitely human and real. Yet it was all precarious. Michael’s hold over her emotions was still alive, still potent. The look of loneliness in his eyes struck at her heart, but she hid that from him.

The train stopped at a halt in open country, and Sergei started to bundle them out. ‘Follow me,’ he said, leading the way across the track.

They walked single-file through the long grass threaded with poppies and many other wild flowers. It felt high above sea-level here, the air was thin and dry and hot.

Sergei led his little tribe to the shade of a clump of heavily foliaged trees. In this oasis, they sat and rested in the lovely black shade, and spread out their picnic.

‘It’s good to be out of the city,’ said Vasily, ‘where such terrible things happen.’

The drummer produced some small hard-boiled eggs like gull’s eggs from his pockets, and silently offered them round. He ate his, shell and all, to general fascination.

Rose made sketches of the old people, Elena in her hat, Vasily with his strange gaze. And she made several sketches of Sergei. She told him she would like to paint his portrait. He was very pleased.

Michael played for them on his flute for a while, obligingly playing what was asked for. Then he and Maisie wandered off. They found a small stream and sat down by it. It was very hot, and Maisie took off her scarf and soaked it in the water, and wiped her face, and Michael’s face.

‘It’s too hot to be out of the shade,’ she said.

‘I want to be alone with you,’ he answered. He kissed her, the sun scorching down on them.

‘We must go back,’ she said. ‘The sun is too hot to bear.’

‘Do you love me?’ he asked. ‘Do you still love me?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

They walked back to the shady trees and sat with the others, drinking Elena’s lemonade, watching a hawk hovering in the blue sky.

‘How cruel nature is,’ said Rose. She said it in a lively, curious way, as if it had just struck her.

‘It gives an edge to life,’ said Elena. ‘What a soft, cosy, boring world it would be without cruelty.’ She meant it.

‘Yet you are upset and depressed by things that happen in the world – by the murder in the Kirovsky Prospekt, for instance,’ said Maisie.

‘No, it is not me who is depressed by it,’ said Elena, ‘it is Vasily. He is an idealist and believes society is perfectible. Vasily believes everything should be achieved by education and dialogue. I do not share this belief.’

Vasily’s eyes were closed, but he was not asleep. ‘In my last life,’ he said, ‘I was living in classical Greece. It was preferable. I preferred it.’

Sergei was standing by one of the trees, eating strawberries, his face in profile for Rose to draw. He was pointing to the horizon. ‘Look,’ he said.

They all looked in surprise. A dark storm-cloud was rolling in. It was an incredible sight, it looked more like smoke from a great explosion or fire than anything else, but it was a dark rain-cloud unrolling like a black carpet across the sky, still in the distance.

When they got back to the halt where they would pick up their train, it had become quite dark. But it still did not rain. On the way back Maisie sat in the carriage with Michael’s arm round her.

At the next stop some gipsies got on. They sat apart, aware of their apartness but proud and swaggering, not in a boastful way – the swaggering was natural to them. One of the women had a baby dressed in rich, princely gear.

Maisie closed her eyes. Sergei began singing, and they all sang Russian songs in the gloom. Like people being taken across the Styx.