An assortment of coaches assembled on the wharf. The couriers were all beautiful ponytail blondes with polished nails, decor on wheels. They made us look shabby. I was glad I’d given my teeth a special go, to confront the fabled State Hermitage Museum of Russia. I was clean, done up in my – well, Gloria’s imaginary brother Cal’s – gear. The crew gave us bright yellow lapel stickers saying D4.
Millicent and Jim Akehurst came along, she glittering with diamonds, he as sober as any conveyancing lawyer. Billy the Kid and Ivy were with us, the former looking like a fifty-year-old cowboy in riding heels and shimmering waistcoat. It’s a wonder he didn’t have a green eyeshade, but he had the cheroot. Kevin came, pouting over some restriction imposed by Holly Sago, both so tasteful in black as to create suspicion. Amy the dancer and Les Renown sat at the front of our coach with the courier. Mangot I saw on the quayside chatting with June Milestone. He was in mufti, but wore an imposing badge and emblems on his arm.
“I am Natasha,” the guide announced in her microphone. “Can everyone hear me?”
On the drive to the city we were treated to a summary of Russia’s efforts in the Great Patriotic War and her subsequent development.
“She’ll elide over the attempted Christmas Coup of 1991,” Ivy said. She’d somehow landed next to me. I was by the window. I can’t resist looking out, especially at a place I’ve never been. Natasha was prattling on, statistics mingled with history.
“Coup?”
“Pathetic,” Ivy said. Her voice had a wistful quality, but then most women have that. It makes them worth listening to, especially when you think of my gender’s most popular representative on the cruise, Les “Chuckles” Renown.
“I didn’t know they’d had one. Don’t you mean 1905, or 1917?”
“The Winter Palace march was on Bloody Sunday in 1905, the Potyomkin business the same year. Then the siege, 1941 to 1944. Those are what foreigners remember about St Petersburg. I meant the hopeless business in 1991. It dissolved the Soviet Union within minutes.”
She spoke without bitterness but with an odd resignation I hadn’t heard before. Natasha was still rabbiting on. Ivy looked across the river at the imposing buildings, the onion-topped churches. They looked glorious.
“They’re coloured!” I exclaimed. The exteriors were beautiful with pastels, the pillars and facades down to the waterlines. It seemed utterly innocent, as if beyond harm. I said as much.
She smiled, better word. “Yes. Colour is a custom here.”
“Painting the buildings?”
“That, and the ability to convince everyone how innocent St Petersburg is.” Only, she didn’t say St Petersburg, like she hadn’t said Potemkin, the name of the famous film Battleship Potemkin. She pronounced it Sankt Pieter Burkh in a slithery guttural.
It made me look at her anew. Mousy, sure, but she had depths. And that book of the Hermitage’s prize exhibition had been well handled. Some passages had been underlined.
“You’ve been here before, Ivy?”
“Yes. It has not always been so beautiful.”
She listened to Natasha answering passenger queries. Millicent was annoying everybody with questions about money, Russian wages, price of furs, income tax, bargains, jewellery shops and other vital essentials. Holly asked about casinos, was it true Russians all knew how to rig faro in only eighteen cards. Billy was laughing with Kevin and ignoring everything else, including the superb city.
“You will know straight away which of the antiques is a forgery, Lovejoy. Am I right?”
“In the Hermitage? Probably.”
“Not for sure?”
“I never know.”
Ivy glanced at her husband and Kevin. They were immersed in their own happy chat. From what the lass was recounting, the Russians seemed to have had a hell of a lot of wars. I saw Ivy’s lips move as if in mute answer when the guide stumbled over translating a word
“The cruiser,” the lovely guide managed at last, remembering with relief, “is called Aurora. You can see her there. She fired her gun in 1917, signalling the October Revolution. She is famous. She is painted very bright colours for general admiration.”
Ivy therefore spoke Russian, and she’d been here before. If Natasha was in on our scam, as Purser Mangot had implied, was Ivy?
“Please keep together when we arrive at the Winter Palace, ladies and gentlemen. I shall carry this umbrella. Remember we are Coach D4. Please follow my umbrella at all times.”
I found myself smiling, and was caught by Ivy watching me. I went a bit red and shrugged.
“Well, she’s bonny,” I said lamely.
“That lady who left the ship at Gdynia, Lovejoy. She too was bonny, in her older way. Had you been friends long?”
“Margaret? I forget.” I sound crass.
“Forget deliberately?”
“I don’t disclose a lady’s confidences, love. Ask her. Don’t ask me. Gossip is women’s work, not mine.”
“I’m glad you think like that, Lovejoy.”
What can you say? Usually women are narked if they catch you admiring another woman, and here was one actually pleased I thought the courier gorgeous? I gave up and looked out at the passing canals, the buildings, the coloured facades of the architecture. The guide promised we’d arrive in ten minutes and warned us again about her blinking umbrella.
“I never believed there was such a thing as a divvy, until I saw your disagreement at the dinner quizzes with Mr Semper. Do you wish you weren’t?”
“Sometimes I keel over. It feels rotten.”
“Poor thing,” she said, and meant it. I thought she was joking until she touched my arm. “Tell me, Lovejoy. Aren’t you ever tempted to get it wrong deliberately? Fool people, I mean.”
Who’d said something like that, not too long ago, from his hospital bed? I muttered, “Dunno.”
“Can I go in with you?”
“We’re together anyway,” I pointed out. “A school crocodile. Only we don’t have labels on a string round our necks.”
“I mean for the pleasure of your company.”
My company, a pleasure? I stared at her. She was obviously off her trolley. Since making smiles there had been a strange distance between us. I shrugged and agreed. “If you like, but I hate people pointing things out. I get shirty. You’ll have to put up with me.”
“I’ll last out, Lovejoy,” she said quietly. “Don’t you fret.”
I wasn’t fretting at all, not that I knew. I said nothing as we arrived, last of four coaches in line within a stone’s throw of the dazzling Winter Palace. I was almost starting to shake, probably from excitement or, worse, fright, as if I could feel the dangerous vibes up ahead.
* * *
Ivy took my arm as we assembled, the whole coachload. We were alongside the river. Nervous, I glanced at Billy, but he just gave me a grin of approval and continued his waggish conversation with Kevin. I saw Lady Vee wave from her wheelchair, pushed by unsmiling Inga. Les Renown and Amy were alighting from Coach D1, Amy tapping her watch to me as a reminder about time. Holly Sago was striding angrily among some beggars, ignoring everybody. I thought, we’re a rotten species.
We trailed after the guide’s gaudy umbrella. I breathed in some strange scent. It was Ivy, puffing at me from a small spray can.
“Repellent? You’d only to say.”
“Mosquitoes, Lovejoy. You just don’t know their ferocity here.”
Whereas she, on the other hand, did? I tried not to gaze quizzically at her, just noticed how she turned to the right towards the entrance before even the courier’s umbrella swayed that way. Ivy knew St Petersburg in a way strangers never would.
“Admission fees are included, Lovejoy.” She had felt me reach for my pocket as we got to the entrance. “Russians pay less than one-twentieth what foreigners do, and have separate entrances. There’s a close security. You’re not carrying a weapon, or anything with wires and batteries, I hope?”
“Next time, maybe.”
My feeble joke made her stiffen slightly. She relaxed as we shuffled inchwise into the entrance hall. Two beefy women at tables near immense pillars began a long exchange with our courier. Natasha hadn’t even glanced at me. Fine, but if she was secretly one of Mangot’s lot, and I was as valuable as he said, shouldn’t she at least have counted us to make sure I hadn’t slipped away among the Russian families thronging the place? The noise was of a subdued pandemonium. Natasha’s conversation with the two ticket women seemed heated, became friendly, went back to anger, then full of dismissive merriment. I saw Ivy suppress smiles as the verbal brawl went on.
“Can’t we get in?” I asked her. Almost too nervous to speak, I was desperate to see the rarest collection on earth.
“Of course. It is already decided. They see each other every day. St Petersburg people can’t resist gossip.”
We were let in after more delay. No tickets seemed to be handed over despite our numbers. I asked Ivy why. She gave an enigmatic smile. Another mystery? It was quarter to eleven.
Natasha assembled us round her coloured umbrella and racked her delivery up another load of decibels to tell us of the history of the Hermitage. I switched off. Like everybody else, I already knew of Catherine the Great. That empress was a true con artist, playing off every other national leader for gain – and any gain would do. She chiselled away at Walpole to con him out of over a dozen Van Dykes, in exchange for a grotty portrait of herself. (He was our start-up prime minister, so was easily twisted.) Her famous Ten Commandments is in every schoolkid’s essays these days; I like her Seventh, Do not sigh or yawn, but hate the thought of her Eighth, Agree to join in any suggested game, without saying what the games would be. Her best was her First Commandment, Leave your rank at the door with your hat and sword.
“Why are you smiling, Lovejoy?”
“Her and Prince Potemkin. Didn’t he amble through her rooms when she was holding court with influential foreign ambassadors?”
“Yes. But of course, she wasn’t Russian. He was.”
“Dynamite, though. Got things done, eh?”
“Stay together!” cried Natasha up in front.
“I never admired him,” Ivy confided, “not as I admire Pushkin. Though all brilliant Russians have flaws. Dostoevsky had epilepsy. Prince Yusupov had been to Oxford.” Ivy smiled mischievously at her quip. I quivered as our lot edged forward en masse. “Keep calm, Lovejoy. They will still be there when we reach Rooms 143 to 146 on the second floor. Nobody could possibly remove them, could they?”
That tone again. Some private grief, from a former visit perhaps? I didn’t quiz her about it.
I’d not done so well with my attempts to sound educated in Lady Vee’s meeting, so I kept off Russian writers.
“I did my dissertation on Pushkin, Lovejoy. Hopeless.”
Natasha shrilled, “On this tour we pass the first floor! It has all manner of prehistorical Russian items, Transcaucasian and Egyptian and Greco-Roman arte-facts. We ignore these! We move to the second floor by staircases.”
“Excuse me,” said an anxious gentleman, who always looked so scholarly in the ship’s library. “I had hoped – ”
“First floor not on our D4 ticket specification! This way!”
We climbed the stairs, the man expostulating to anyone who would listen, “I’ve come all this way to see the Black Sea Greek colonies of the Seventh Century BC. I wish to draw the Siberian jasper Kolyvanskaya Vase.” His voice receded as we draw ahead in the crowd. Ivy had an enviable knack of somehow overtaking people without effort. Left to myself, I’d have been trailing the entire throng within a few paces.
“Another gambler, except he had enormously long yellow fingernails?” That exhausted my knowledge of literature.
“Please don’t criticise Aleksandr Pushkin, Lovejoy,” Ivy told me. We were still climbing, with the scholarly bloke still wittering below. “Here, it’s seen as treachery. A tiny man, given to womanising and fighting duels. His grandad was an Ethiopian slave, they say. Couldn’t keep still.”
Nice to see Ivy smile. Years fell off her as we got to the top of the narrow staircase. I began to feel queasy and thought, here we go.
“I’ve some water, Lovejoy.” She brought out a small plastic bottle and broke the seal. I took a swig, patted my forehead with a glug. “Put your arm through mine. Do I have to watch you for anything?”
“I can totter on my own, ta,” I said, gracious to the last, pulling away and returning her bottle.
“Here!” cried Natasha. “We now pause to see the Malachite Hall!” And led us into a tall green room. That is green green, so intense and swirly I almost recoiled. I closed my eyes and grabbed for Ivy’s arm. She clutched my hand and that’s how I made it out of that place, clinging. The room was so frigging green it was claustrophobic. Malachite’s a green rock, once used in making paint or green sculptures, clock pedestals and the like. It’s gone out of fashion now, thank God. I find green a problem even in emeralds and other green gemstones, and women can never match the damned colour with anything else except tan, so why the hell do we bother? As a little lad I used to be spectacularly sick seeing red and green together, a sensitivity that made me dynamite at Christmas. We edged along.
“We’re out, Lovejoy,” Ivy said quietly, and I let daylight seep back into my brain.
The crowds had thinned but people were still about in numbers. I glimpsed another mob from our ship passing across one of the grand doorways in the distance. I’d never met such space in a building before. It dwarfed anything I’d seen. And gloriously, beautifully restored.
I even recovered enough to ask a question as Natasha passed by. It was about a chandelier, and proved Natasha’s mettle.
“Excuse me, please,” I got out. “Is that papier-mache chandelier made by hand modelling or by – ?”
“No! By the compression process of machine-emulsified material,” she replied briskly. “You require the chemical composition of the glue, or the length of incorporated fibres?”
“Er, no, ta, Natasha.”
“This way, D4!” she shrieked, and we were off like another marathon start.
“She’s great,” I said. Too good, in fact. I noticed she kept acknowledging the stout ladies who invigilated in every doorway of the numbered rooms, and once I saw her slip a cell phone into her handbag. She also seemed occasionally to mutter into her umbrella’s handle, her eyes everywhere. Nobody would get lost on Natasha’s watch, that was for sure.
We emerged on a wide landing. The air stifled me. I had to go slower, Ivy hanging back to stay with me. I had another swig of water and felt no better.
“We ignore the two Leonardo paintings!” Natasha called over her shoulder, “beyond the Council Staircase. And the Michelangelo statue of Crouching Boy that is in glass-encased but repays intensive study on another visit! Quickly, please!”
No wonder I felt definitely odd. My hands were clammy, my muscle masses aching, my breath rasping. I was drenched with sweat. Ivy got worried.
“Look, Lovejoy. I think we should try to find somewhere to sit a minute.”
“No.” I knew I wouldn’t be better until I was out of the place. Another guide, this time a man in uniform, tagged along in the rear, shepherding us after Natasha. “I’ll keep going, love.” I’d my job to do.
“The Hanging Gardens of the Little Hermitage visible through the windows!” cried our beautiful guide at ramming speed. “Across is Dutch works of art, including many Rembrandts! You can photograph if you have paid for special star on special ticket, $3.60 in American moneys! Using camcorders extra!”
The windows were easy. I couldn’t help noticing how simple they were, like the old Crittal designs. I know lads in East Anglian pubs who wouldn’t even break step as they strolled in through windows like that, any height. And a canal seemed to come off the wide River Neva at exact right-angles and run underneath the Hermitage. Unless they surrounded the entire place with tanks and a battalion or two, an average robber could have the Hermitage’s contents away before dawn, given enough transport. My sense of misgiving got much, much worse, the sicker I felt.
“Is it the antiques, Lovejoy?” Ivy whispered. “You’re sure it isn’t something you ate, or maybe the flu?”
“No, love. It’s always like this.” My chest griped, my shoulders creaking like rusty machinery.
“Across is Hall of St George!” Natasha trilled, her voice a bandsaw through my brain. “Here is Hidden Treasures Revealed exhibition! Enter in order! Fifteen minutes, please!” She added darkly, “I … am … waiting!”
The rooms were frankly badly lit. I tottered in, glad to lean on Ivy. She was only slight, but kept me propped up as vibes shot through me. I could hardly see. The paintings were brilliant.
It’s hard to realise how much our own famous works of art have changed even over so short a time as a century or even less. The paint alters, as the oil vehicle in which the pigments were applied become set over time. They grow less lustrous from pollution, from changing air temperature, barometric pressures, humidity, light. Worst of all, the exhaled breath of thousands upon thousands of visitors, the faint shaking of the human voice, and the microorganisms we carry about, does damage. The average human sheds a teaspoonful of skin scales a day, not to mention threads from our clothes, our hair – we lose sixty-three hairs on average a day, some scientist slogging to earn his money claimed.
These paintings, though, simply glowed. They had remained in unchanging conditions for half a century. Okay, I would have hung them differently, had more control over the light, kept visitors down to a few every hour, but the Russians had done a superb job conserving these. They were just as they left the artists’ hands. Ten out of ten for Russia.
I gaped at the Cézannes. Who’d have thought his Mont Sainte-Victoire actually shimmered in its original condition? Every other version I’d seen looks flat from a yard away, from deterioration of the surface. Or that Vincent’s Landscape with House and Ploughman was so clamorous to the eye that its colours almost yelled? I reeled from one canvas to another, Ivy apologising to passengers as I blundered through the press.
Minutes later I was propped on the wall by the great staircase looking out at the Neva, shaking. Ivy spoke quietly to a Russian guardian lady, and I was given her chair. Ivy seemed to be explaining that I wasn’t drunk, just unwell. The woman didn’t believe her. I asked for tea, which seems understood in every language. We went downstairs, Ivy grunting and gasping a little unnecessarily I thought, but she got me into a small caff near the computer room. I got served mint tea. I hadn’t known mint tea tasted so good.
The vibes receded slightly once Ivy got me mobile and among the crowds. We seemed to be the only ones buying anything. Ivy was adept at making herself understood. Natasha’s gloomy trailing bloke followed us all the time, which I didn’t mind. He glowered when we failed to offer him some tea, so I beckoned him over and he accepted a glass of the stuff. Ivy ignored him, but he chattered a lot and seemed to be telling me about football. He was called Ilya. He looked a born killer, steady eyes, Slav chin and upturned nose, but hands that had strangled.
“The Golden Rooms, Lovejoy?” Ivy asked. She spoke to the man in Russian and notes changed hands. I tried counting the dollars in case I’d have to owe her, but gave up. Nobody absorbs notes slicker than a security man on the take.
“Ilya will let us in to the Golden Rooms, Lovejoy. Come. Can you stand? We have eleven minutes only.”
I made it, exhorted by Ivy. She proved a tower of strength. Like many women who looked puny, she had disproportionate power.
“Here. By the Secondary Entrance.” She opened her hands like a Palladium showman. “The Hermitage’s famous Special Collection!”
It cost. Ivy had to do the verbals, with Ilya along to lend baritone and subdue the stout female guardians. More dollars? I thought, God Almighty, I’d be paying this free visit off until I was ninety, the way Ivy was spending. She’d already bought me four great tomes, each an arm and a leg. Once inside, over I went and came to myself on a stool being lectured to by a security lady in uniform and three stray ladies who’d come to see the gold – pure ancient gold – artefacts but found a dizzy male stranger much more interesting. Like all females, they delightedly seized the chance of ballocking a man for being ill in the first place, sternly admonishing Ivy in various languages for not living up to her woman’s job of keeping me fit. That gave them all the opportunity of bringing up ailments they themselves had suffered, to great satisfaction, then recovered from. That dealt with, they then argued different remedies. I suppose that’s all it was.
Meanwhile the rooms ramjam packed with gold from the Crimea, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, shimmered and blinded. I apologised, pretended to recover, got no further in than my stool by the door, thanked everybody profusely, and let Ivy lead me out of Special Collection Rooms 41 et seq.
“I’m sorry, Lovejoy,” she said from a great distance. “I thought it would bring you round.”
“Okay.” We went through the security check to escape, and I got a chance of a cool breath of non-antique air at the entrance.
Within minutes Natasha’s bandsaw voice pierced the halls of the Winter Palace and we were on the move. The security man Ilya sheepdogged us to the exit and wistfully waved us off as we disgorged by the Neva. It isn’t often streets look truly glamorous, but Russia manages it. Or maybe it was just that I was relieved to be feeling better? I think it was the glamour.
My muscles stopped aching, my hands dried themselves spontaneously, and my face no longer dripped with sweat. I began to walk fairly upright like a late-order primate, getting as far as, say, Neanderthal.
“Sorry, Ivy,” I said in the cold fresh air of the waterfront. “It was stuffy in there.”
“Real, were they?”
“Well,” I began, then realised.
“I was joking, Lovejoy. Your collapse was too convincing. Is it always like that?”
“Yes. A headache will be along soon. It will be bad.”
“I’ll see to you.”
“Look, love, I’m spoiling your outing. There’s really no need.”
“I’m enjoying myself,” she said, sounding really honest. “Best morning I’ve had in years.”
“Shouldn’t we find your Billy?” I didn’t want to be accused of anything devious, him such a macho bloke.
“Don’t worry. I know exactly where he is.”
We moved to the coach the instant the driver came. A few Russian children pestered us, begging. I reached for some money. Ivy stayed my hand and bustled me away. She was cross.
“That was a bit harsh, love,” I remonstrated. “She was only eleven, and carrying an infant.”
“Lovejoy.” She was so exasperated she said my name like teachers did at school, making two enormous syllables – Love… joy – and rolling her eyes. “Didn’t you notice? Her hair was streaked and tinted. Do you know how much that costs? And she wore designer slacks and handmade London shoes. Have you no sense?”
She went on and on, how the girl had gold caps to two teeth, the infant wore two valuable jade necklets and the girl three gold bangles and a custom watch.
“Begging is an industry here,” she lectured me quietly on the coach as Natasha started up hope-you-all-enjoyed prattle. “You have to learn.”
From the coach window I watched the little girl, who nonchalantly took out a gold cigarette case. She extracted a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter, staring insolently up at the coach as we drove off.
“You aren’t really streetwise, are you?” Ivy said.
This narked me, because nobody is more streetwise. I told her so, adding, “No need to keep on, just because you can yap a few words of their lingo.”
“I was born here, Lovejoy.” She affected not to notice as Billy and Kevin looked round at us, said something to each other and roared with laughter. “I really think it’s time I took you in hand, at least for the rest of your visit. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Having a headache. You?” It was already starting, slamming down my right side and making my vision fizzle. No longer the flu feeling, just the cerebral stunner.
She smiled. “I’ll help, Lovejoy. Close your eyes and I’ll tell you about Russia.”