Marie-Thérèse couldn’t help noticing that the two muscly Russians were sitting outside at the café again when she let the doctor in at dusk. As usual, they were muttering at each other and ignoring the chessboard they were supposed to be looking at.
They’d been there every day for a month, those two men, with their cheap suits, bad skins and pudding-bowl haircuts. They looked … well, wrong, in a way she couldn’t place.
She was too preoccupied this evening, what with the doctor, Madame’s crise and the bit of whalebone that had strayed out of her corseting and was prodding into her flesh, to give her full attention to resenting these sacrés Russes in the wholehearted way she usually did – thousands of them, wherever you went, feckless vodka-swilling drunks, taking jobs from good French workers, always kicking up a stink about their papers and their tragedies, cooking cabbage, assassinating and kidnapping people, as had happened downstairs a few years back, which had meant police prying everywhere for months. There goes the neighbourhood.
From her earlier observation of this little conspiracy of Russian café visitors – and every gathering of Russians was a conspiracy, she was sure of it – she knew that, any minute now, they would be joined by their more recent friend. This more definitely lower-class man might even – she recoiled almost physically at this thought – be a market trader, if his apron stinking of crab was anything to go by. Marie-Thérèse knew from past experience that this person, wildly unsuitable for a café in the serious, respectable rue du Colisée, wouldn’t be playing chess any more than his cronies did. They’d all just sit there all evening, ignoring the game and muttering away together.
If only Madame wasn’t so taken up with Russians, she thought, and her regret was tinged with shame and anger that, as a result of her mistress’s poor social judgement, she too was, at one remove, also implicated in Russian goings-on. Not that the courteous, old-fashioned officers were bad neighbours, exactly, but those dirty artists who were always round here, staying up all night, eating Madame out of house and home, draining the wine cellar and stubbing their cigarettes out in the flower vases; not to mention the fact that a decent young Frenchman like her nephew Pierre couldn’t get work in the car factories at Billancourt these days, because he couldn’t understand what was being said around him if he didn’t speak Russian … ça alors!
She shut the door on the scene with feeling, and followed the doctor up the stairs towards Madame’s bedroom.
It didn’t take General Skoblin long to spot his wife through the clouds of murky steam that the trains were blowing back along the platform.
Plevitskaya always stood out. Ignoring tonight’s heat, she was wearing a wide-brimmed dark felt hat festooned with ostrich feathers. Her lips were a crimson pout, and she had gold hoops in her ears. In that clinging burgundy dress, walking with a slight waddle caused by new shoes he could see were too high and small for comfort, she was sweating but magnificent.
Watching her approach, amid the stares and turning heads of the other boat-train passengers, her husband quietly folded up his newspaper. In the half-hour he’d been waiting under the great glassed-in roof of the gare Saint-Lazare, no one in the crowds of porters and pigeons and passengers pushing one way or the other had spared him a second glance. But then he was an inconspicuous man in late middle age, with neat grey-black hair, a moustache and a suit of about the same colour as the dark metal stanchion he’d been standing by. He didn’t stand out. He was used to playing second fiddle.
Even though he could see her eyes searching the crowd for him now, he didn’t do any of the flamboyant things people might expect the husband of such a woman to do: run forward, sweep her up in his arms, press passionate lips to hers, or even wave. He wasn’t given to melodrama. He just stood there, thinking, and sighing a bit at the mountains of luggage bobbing along behind her equally mountainous form. He didn’t like to think of the shopping she must have done in New York, whatever she’d promised him before leaving. At least she’d travelled second class this time, so hopefully there’d be fewer new debts. Thank God, in so many ways, for the second job, and his good news.
‘Darrrling!’ she erupted with her best throaty vibrato when she finally sighted him from ten feet away. She speeded up to a curvaceous totter, rushing to his arms. He stepped dutifully forward and embraced her back. He could smell at once that she’d been replenishing her supplies of Chanel No. 5, and at American prices too. As she and the porters and observers all clearly expected, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. She curved her big mouth up into a satisfied smile, then, before he’d had a chance to say a word, opened it again and started volubly talking. ‘My golden treasure! My little sun!’ Her lips caressed each endearment, showing off for the watchers she was pretending to ignore, giving them a performance as she always did. Her great stone-studded gold cross flapped energetically up and down between her breasts. Her black-rimmed eyes widened theatrically. The train – dreadfully crowded. The ship – a tossing, turning, heaving nightmare full of God knows who; the indignity. The unworthiness of the restaurants she’d been booked to sing in in New York. And the hotel waiters – all Chinamen in pigtails …
Silently he nodded and smiled. He distributed francs among the porters (she didn’t even look – she was too busy talking). He shepherded them all along towards the waiting car. She’d shut up sooner or later. Then he’d get a chance to speak.
Her monologues never needed answers. So at least there was a kind of peace to be found in them. He used it to recall that there’d been a time – so long ago he could barely remember – when the sight and sound of her hadn’t made him sigh.
Back in the Crimea … and for a moment General Skoblin could once again smell the thyme and sea in the glittering air of his youth – and call to mind, too, the hasty packings of tents, the listing of rifles and ammunition (fewer every time) and the terrifying creepings and rustlings of the night. The last thing he’d needed, on top of his part in the fading hopes of that campaign, was a consignment of Red prisoners sent down from Kursk to deal with. Until he’d seen her among them, and heard the indrawn breaths and whistles: the Nightingale! She’d gone to the Red lines, it turned out – joined the enemy. She’d been caught singing to keep the Bolsheviks’ spirits up. That’s how she’d got herself tangled up in that impossibly churned-up war world. But before that, and even before she’d been the Tsar’s favourite musician, given jewels and asked to perform at Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace; before both her previous husbands, in some impossibly remote, lost dream-era when there still was no Revolution, and no war, he’d seen her sing at the Yar restaurant, back when she was still just a country girl who’d run away from a provincial convent choir and wore a red sarafan: a dark slip of a girl with a magical voice and a liquid-eyed way of looking at you …
And suddenly there she was, his prisoner. He’d married her two years later, in a refugee camp in Turkey. By then no one remembered she’d briefly been the Red Nightingale. By then, the Civil War had been lost, and everyone just wanted to forget.
And of course it had been a blessing, in some ways, their marriage. While most of the other White officers he’d fought and lost with had been completely down on their luck – stuck for years in those transit camps, some of them – she’d whisked him off on the new touring life she soon began, turning herself effortlessly back into the Tsar’s Nightingale and lucratively singing the sad songs of exile to any nostalgic émigré Whites who’d managed to make it as far as Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria …
They climbed into the Cadillac. (His little weakness, this; sometimes he explained it by saying he needed a grand car to drive his wife around in; sometimes, more churlishly, he told himself that surely he too was allowed a gesture of flamboyance every now and then?) Out of the corner of his eye, he watched his wife dump her handbag carelessly on the creaking pale-leather back seat. He was pleased when, apparently only now realizing it had landed on a newspaper whose front-page article was illustrated by a solemn picture of Yezhov, the new head of Soviet intelligence, she carefully moved the bag to the floor, giving him a furtive look.
He nodded grimly. She liked to show off in public. All right. But he was the man. It was right that she should respect him and his work. Alone together, they both knew who the boss was.
It was only when they were on the road out of Paris, and she’d stopped complaining about the indignity of second class, that Skoblin lit a cigarette and said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, ‘Tomorrow, to celebrate your return, we’re going to go back into town and buy’ – he paused for emphasis – ‘crab in the market.’
He preferred talking in the car. There weren’t so many cats here as in their little house in Ozoir.
‘Oh!’ she said weakly, sounding as shocked as if she’d never expected to hear the phrase.
‘Yes,’ he continued, level-voiced. ‘The crab salesman is here.’
He wasn’t displeased with the nervous way she shifted in her seat.