On the ground floor below Constance’s apartment, a stout elderly man in a suit was sitting at his desk, bathed in strong morning sun, not looking at the one letter on its vast empty surface. He wasn’t looking out of the window, either, at the crowd of peculiar-looking people in the street, all watching a coffin being loaded into a hearse. Not really. Not any more than he was really looking at the two ponies strapped to the hearse, or at the tall, attractive, well-dressed young woman in black, a stranger to him – but, he thought, with a moment’s approval, a lady, at least, unlike all those other ragamuffins – as she got into the car parked behind. Even though he wanted to look. Even though there were tears in his light eyes.
What General Miller of the Russian General Military Union – discreetly identified on this apartment’s doorplate only by his international-sounding surname and its Russian initials, ROVS, transliterated into Roman letters – was doing, instead, as Constance’s odd cortège assembled on the street, was staying very still, and trying to keep those tears from rolling down his cheeks.
He was remembering how he’d brushed Constance off at lunch three days ago, when she’d wanted him to come back to her apartment later on, and talk something over with her. Self-important fool that he was, he’d told her he was going to be too busy.
And now it was too late.
Constance had been the one taste of freedom in his life. He might not have liked all those terrible degenerate young men painting dreadful pictures whom she’d taken to cossetting. (He could half see several of them outside now.) But he’d admired her free spirit in choosing them, all the same. She wasn’t a person to let herself be tied down by other people’s expectations. She’d always done what she wanted. An extraordinary woman … To someone as defined as he was by the great struggle that had dominated his life for so long, that freedom of manoeuvre of hers had been something to appreciate. When he’d been with her, during those snatched moments together upstairs, he’d sometimes, briefly, also felt free. She’d had the knack of making it seem as though everything might, after all, be possible. She’d had hope. She’d had joy.
But now she was gone. How trapped he felt.
The door had just shut behind Jean, who’d taken one look at him while putting down a cup of breakfast-time coffee (still steaming, unnoticed, on the table by the sofa) and said, immediately, with concern in his voice, ‘Pap, you shouldn’t stay up all night working like this. Does you no good. The Soviets will wait another day to be conquered. You don’t look well. Come home with me now. Get some sleep, eh?’
Of course he hadn’t agreed. But that was nothing to do with the faint scepticism about his mission in life that he’d heard in Jean’s remark either. Jean was a good boy, whose hard work in his unworthy calling as a driver kept them all financially afloat. Jean was entitled to his opinion. He had no right to argue with Jean.
There was a good practical reason for refusing to go home. This respectable office was in an apartment that had been a legacy to ROVS from an elderly Russian émigré, who’d had the good fortune to pass away while he still had something left to leave. The apartment still had a faded dignity about it: high ceilings (though with flaking paint) and space to breathe and spread out maps. But the dingy little place in the sticks that he and Jean called home only had one bedroom, and that was for Katya, his wife, with the old nurse who lived with them in a cot at the side of the room. Where he slept, at night, was on the sofa in the other room. Jean slept on it during the day, after his nights out scouring Paris for fares. They were both big men. They couldn’t exactly share the sofa for a day’s sleep, could they?
And anyway, he wanted to be here, watching Constance’s funeral cortège set out.
What he’d really have liked, if he’d been another person with another life, would have been to go to the funeral himself. But he wasn’t allowed out by himself. He was too important to the White cause. His colleagues didn’t want any more leaders of what was left of the White Russian army – the man on whom they pinned all their hopes of a return, one day, to the lost motherland – to fall victim to any more Soviet plots. It might just have been a rumour that the strange, sudden TB that had taken off Vrangel’, his predecessor but one, had really been caused by a dose of Soviet poison. But there’d been no doubt when Kutyopov had been clubbed and chloroformed and shoved inside a car seven years ago – right here on the street, in the middle of Paris, in the middle of the morning – by men dressed as French police. The hand of the Kremlin’s secret agents was clearly visible. No one knew exactly what had become of that White military leader, but the likelihood was that poor Kutyopov had been spirited off by ship to Russia and ended up in the Lubyanka. At any rate, he’d never been seen again. So, since General Miller had taken over the job, he’d been watched, day and night, not only by Jean – who ended every night’s driving work by picking him up from home in the taxi and bringing him here, then started every new night by coming back to pick him up – but also by all those young men in the outer office: the secretaries, always buzzing around, checking on him, bringing him things … like flies.
If he tried to slip out of the building now, they’d ask questions. They’d try to come too.
And he didn’t want that. Some things were best kept private.
He didn’t even dare get up and go and stare out of the window, memorizing the details of Constance’s last departure. He was too aware of Jean’s habits not to know that, after leaving him here in the mornings – or, on this particular morning, just dropping in to check he was all right – Jean always sat out there in the driver’s seat for a few more minutes, rolling a cigarette to smoke before heading home to sleep. (A filthy habit, General Miller sometimes remonstrated; but Jean was tired by the morning, yawning and red-eyed, and would answer without anger that he needed that cigarette to get his strength up to get to his bed.) So General Miller had no intention of going near the window until he heard the chug of Jean’s motor heading away. He wouldn’t want to be seen gawping out at the many strange persons gathered out there – strays from all the old Russian empire’s subordinate nationalities – in their weird clothes, dirt and disarray.
He couldn’t stay still. He got up. But instead of going to the window he walked to the fireplace and picked up the small framed photo on it. It showed a thin young fair-haired man in military uniform, rowing a boat, with a dark-haired young woman in the mutton-chop-sleeve fashion of two generations ago smiling tremulously at him. He held it to his heart, remembering how young they’d both once been, and obscurely comforted by its still being here. Constance’s smile had always had that power over him.
Whatever he’d told her, after their last lunch, about being too busy, he’d half meant to change his mind and slip upstairs for that cocktail anyway. He really had. She was always in his thoughts. But then, by the end of the afternoon, his head had been too full of the marvellous news Skoblin had brought him – that letter from Wilhelm Canaris’s office, still lying there on the desk now, with its black, black Gothic lettering and its long German words. The letter held out the possibility of the alliance they’d been dreaming of for all these years: Germany’s military might thrown behind their increasingly futile struggle to unseat the Reds from Russia (futile because they were none of them getting any younger, and because so many of the young had, like Jean, given up hope of ever going home – but how different everything would look, if they could lean on Berlin) … He’d been so full of pride in his security chief – Skoblin, the quiet man no one had trusted, whom he’d insisted on appointing; his faith in his subordinate now triumphantly vindicated – and in the future opening up for them all that he hadn’t been able to think of anything else. He hadn’t slipped upstairs, as he’d intended, not even for a moment. He’d just let Jean take him back to his own apartment instead.
If only he’d fobbed Jean off, said he had to work late, as he sometimes did, told him to come back hours later or not at all, that he’d sleep on the office sofa, anything. If only he’d forgotten about duty and the war against the Soviets for once. If only he’d said, as a normal man might have, to hell with the cause, I want to see my lover.
He tightened his hold on the picture, as if she were somehow still in it and reachable, touchable, addressing his excuses to her. The thing was that, at that moment, on that afternoon three days ago, he hadn’t been able to think of anything but the Germans, who, as the letter said, were already on their way to Paris for that long-awaited secret meeting. In his mind, he’d been sketching out what they might look like, where the meeting would be, and what he’d say to persuade them. He couldn’t have said anything about any of that to Constance, of course, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain his elation … and (incredible as this now seemed, in the darkness enveloping him this morning) he’d so wanted to celebrate. He couldn’t, not with anyone else, because only Skoblin knew, and Skoblin had had to go back to his own little hovel in the sticks, and his wife. So, tiptoeing around so as not to disturb Katya, who was asleep in her sickroom, he’d sat out on the balcony at home and got a little happily drunk, all on his own, gazing out through the night air at the stars and allowing himself to wonder if there might, after all, be any chance that one day before he died he’d again look up at this sky – but a bigger, more luminous, old-country version of it – from that beloved shabby spreading house from the past, with its fluttering curtains, its smell of Pears soap and Dusya’s apple cake, its little river beach, and its peace, surrounded by the pine forest where, in summer, he’d once raced between trees on a bicycle …
And the next morning – could it really be only the day before yesterday? – with a muzzy head but still full of his private joy, he’d helped the nurse wheel the wordless Katya, dribbling and twitching in her invalid chair, out on to the balcony to enjoy the sunlight. He’d stood there beside the poor wreck of a woman his wife had become, not feeling sad for her for once because he was so lit up with his excitement. He’d waited for the sight of Jean’s taxi in the street below, not even listening to the traffic noise because he was lost in the peace and beauty of that other place, the estate, the blossom, the lime-tree promenade. He’d let little wisps of expectant half-thought run through his head – when would he arrange for Katya to move home, if…? And, Katya would have the care she needed, back home, if … And, more privately still, would Constance come with him to a place that would be so alien to her, if…? But all those were questions for later. He didn’t let his racing mind stop on any of them. As soon as he’d seen Jean he’d drunk his coffee in a gulp and rushed to work, eager as a child.
‘You’re in a good mood today,’ he remembered Jean saying wearily.
‘Developments,’ he’d replied, importantly, feeling the letter in his pocket with his hand. ‘Developments, dear boy.’
Now the memory of that secret pride he’d been bursting with made him want to howl and smash his fist through something. How could he not have known – after all the reverses he’d suffered in his long life – that you should never take such hubristic pleasure in the advances of a single day? They could all be wiped out the next. They usually were.
This time, his joy had been wiped out as soon as they’d reached this office building. He’d noticed people on the stairs – more to-ing and fro-ing than usual in the lobby. He hadn’t thought much of it. But perhaps he’d had a raised eyebrow, or an enquiring look on his face. At any rate, the secretary who’d answered their door had explained the fuss without even being asked, saying, with gloomy pleasure, ‘A death in the building, your excellency; the American lady upstairs.’
The silence that followed seemed to go on forever. The universe, flipping over, the stars changing their course …
Then he remembered that he’d said – snapped: ‘I don’t want to hear gossip. I have work to do. I don’t want to be disturbed today,’ and rushed into his room, leaving the secretary, and Jean, staring round-mouthed behind him.
He’d been here ever since. He’d phoned Skoblin and said he wanted to be left alone for a day or two to work out how best to approach Canaris’s men. That had got rid of him. When Jean came to pick him up, in the evening, he’d sent the boy away too. Pressure of work, he’d said. Last night, too. Now the sofa was a frowsty mess of blankets. He hadn’t changed his shirt. His hair was sticking up.
He knew they were all waiting outside, all his colleagues, expecting ideas and initiatives from him. But he hadn’t looked at the letter. Not once.
He was a man like any other. He just wanted to be left alone to mourn; to cover the mirror up decently with a cloth as the old superstition demanded; and to go to Constance’s funeral and bury his love. And he couldn’t.
Although, he suddenly thought with a wild little leap of the heart, if he were to try, just once, slipping out of the back door, the cook’s door, not just for a smoke in the courtyard, but to get to the alley at the back of it, and out past the dustbins … now, that might work … especially now, around midday, when the secretaries who worked here during the morning were all busy taking off their dignified suits and uniforms, putting on workmen’s overalls instead and heading off to the labouring jobs that they needed to keep them in bread and wine and rent money in this alien land they’d somehow fetched up in; while the others – the afternoon secretaries – were still straggling here, in ragged workers’ clothes, from their early shift in some unmentionable car-factory suburb, ready to resume their real dress, their real language, and their real, Russian way of life, only once they walked in through this front door …
For a moment, he could almost imagine himself walking, free and unaccompanied, down the street, between the roaring of traffic, with the breeze ruffling his hair.
It was what Constance would have done: paid no heed to the world, just followed her heart.
But heart-following wasn’t his destiny. He shook his head (carefully, realizing as he did that he shouldn’t have toasted Constance’s passing in vodka in the middle of last night, without so much as a zakuska to help the alcohol down; it wasn’t good for his heart). No, no, he was a man with responsibilities. He’d better look at that letter, and start making plans. He started making his way heavily towards the desk, hating the juxtaposition of mahogany slab, white paper rectangle and jacket neatly hung on the chair, dreading sitting at it again and closing down his heart.
He was still walking across the room when he heard the taxi outside pull away.
He stopped. He changed direction.
What he’d imagined he would do now was to go to the window.
But instead he went to the door, opened it – no one there – and slipped out in his shirtsleeves. They’d never know he’d gone, he told himself, opening the door at the back of the courtyard, as long as they could see his jacket on the back of his chair.