“What did your friend Simon tell you about me?”
“Nothing.”
“Why do you redden when you say that?”
“I didn’t know I reddened,” he smiled.
In fact Simon had told him that she was not a bad romp, and would give him his money’s worth, but that was not the sort of thing he felt inclined to tell her just then. With her pale face and swollen eyelids, in that poor brown dress and the black felt hat, there was nothing to remind one of the creature, in her blue Turkish trousers, with a naked body, who had had a curious, exotic attractiveness. It was another person altogether, quiet, respectable, demure, with whom Charley could as little think of going to bed as with one of the junior mistresses at Patsy’s old school. Lydia relapsed into silence. She seemed to be sunk in reverie. When at last she spoke it was as though she were continuing her train of thought rather than addressing him.
“If I cried just now in church it wasn’t for the reason that you thought. I’ve cried enough for that, heaven knows, but just then it was for something different. I felt so lonely. All those people, they have a country, and in that country, homes; to-morrow they’ll spend Christmas Day together, father and mother and children; some of them, like you, went only to hear the music, and some have no faith, but just then, all of them, they were joined together by a common feeling; that ceremony, which they’ve known all their lives, and whose meaning is in their blood, every word spoken, every action of the priests, is familiar to them, and even if they don’t believe with their minds, the awe, the mystery, is in their bones and they believe with their hearts; it is part of the recollections of their childhood, the gardens they played in, the countryside, the streets of the towns. It binds them together, it makes them one, and some deep instinct tells them that they belong to one another. But I am a stranger. I have no country, I have no home, I have no language. I belong nowhere. I am outcast.”
She gave a mournful little chuckle.
“I’m a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I’ve read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I’ve read of in books and though I try and try, I can’t see them with my mind’s eye. I know Moscow from what I’ve seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it’s no good, I know that what I see isn’t that at all. I’m a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I’m just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who’ve got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them—how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere?”
“But have you no relations at all?”
“Not one. My father was a socialist, but he was a quiet, peaceable man absorbed in his studies, and he took no active part in politics. He welcomed the revolution and thought it was the opening of a new era for Russia. He accepted the Bolsheviks. He only asked to be allowed to go on with his work at the university. But they turned him out and one day he got news that he was going to be arrested. We escaped through Finland, my father, my mother and me. I was two. We lived in England for twelve years. How, I don’t know. Sometimes my father got a little work to do, sometimes people helped us, but my father was homesick. Except when he was a student in Berlin he’d never been out of Russia before; he couldn’t accustom himself to English life, and at last he felt he had to go back. My mother implored him not to. He couldn’t help himself, he had to go, the desire was too strong for him; he got into touch with people at the Russian embassy in London, he said he was prepared to do any work the Bolsheviks gave him; he had a good reputation in Russia, his books had been widely praised, and he was an authority on his subject. They promised him everything and he sailed. When the ship docked he was taken off by the agents of the Cheka. We heard that he’d been taken to a cell on the fourth floor of the prison and thrown out of the window. They said he’d committed suicide.”
She sighed a little and lit another cigarette. She had been smoking incessantly since they finished supper.
“He was a mild gentle creature. He never did anyone harm. My mother told me that all the years they’d been married he’d never said a harsh word to her. Because he’d made his peace with the Bolsheviks the people who’d helped us before wouldn’t help us any more. My mother thought we’d be better off in Paris. She had friends there. They got her work addressing letters. I was apprenticed to a dressmaker. My mother died because there wasn’t enough to eat for both of us and she denied herself so that I shouldn’t go hungry. I found a job with a dressmaker who gave me half the usual wages because I was Russian. If those friends of my mother’s, Alexey and Evgenia, hadn’t given me a bed to sleep in I should have starved too. Alexey played the violin in an orchestra at a Russian restaurant and Evgenia ran the ladies’ cloak-room. They had three children and the six of us lived in two rooms. Alexey was a lawyer by profession, he’d been one of my father’s pupils at the university.”
“But you have them still?”
“Yes, I have them still. They’re very poor now. You see, everyone’s sick of the Russians, they’re sick of Russian restaurants and Russian orchestras. Alexey hasn’t had a job for four years. He’s grown bitter and quarrelsome and he drinks. One of the girls has been taken charge of by an aunt who lives at Nice, and another has gone into service, the son has become a gigolo and he does the night clubs at Montmartre; he’s often here, I don’t know why he isn’t here this evening, perhaps he’s clicked. His father curses him and beats him when he’s drunk, but the hundred francs he brings home when he’s found a friend helps to keep things going. I live there still.”
“Do you?” said Charley in surprise.
“I must live somewhere. I don’t go to the Sérail till night and when trade is slack I often get back by four or five. But it’s terribly far away.”
For a while they sat in silence.
“What did you mean when you said just now you hadn’t been crying for the reason I thought?” asked Charley at length.
She gave him once more a curious, suspicious look.
“Do you really mean that you don’t know who I am? I thought that was why your friend Simon sent for me.”
“He told me nothing except—except that you’d give me a good time.”
“I’m the wife of Robert Berger. That is why, although I’m a Russian, they took me at the Sérail. It gives the clients a kick.”
“I’m afraid you’ll think me very stupid, but I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She gave a short, hard laugh.
“Such is fame. A day’s journey and the name that’s on every lip means nothing. Robert Berger murdered an English bookmaker called Teddie Jordan. He was condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude. He’s at St. Laurent in French Guiana.”
She spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that Charley could hardly believe his ears. He was startled, horrified and thrilled.
“And you really didn’t know?”
“I give you my word I didn’t. Now you speak of it I remember reading about the case in the English papers. It created rather a sensation because the—the victim was English, but I’d forgotten the name of the—of your husband.”
“It created a sensation in France, too. The trial lasted three days. People fought to get to it. The papers gave it the whole of their front page. No one talked of anything else. Oh, it was a sensation all right. That was when I first saw your friend Simon, at least that’s when he first saw me, he was reporting the case for his paper and I was in court. It was an exciting trial, it gave the journalists plenty of opportunity. You must get him to tell you about it. He’s proud of the articles he wrote. They were so clever, bits of them got translated and were put in the French papers. It did him a lot of good.”
Charley did not know what to say. He was angry with Simon; he recognized his puckish humour in putting him in the situation in which he now found himself.
“It must have been awful for you,” he said lamely.
She turned a little and looked into his eyes. He, whose life had been set in pleasant places, had never before seen on a face a look of such hideous despair. It hardly looked like a human face, but like one of those Japanese masks which an artist has fashioned to portray a certain emotion. He shivered. Lydia till now, for Charley’s sake, had been talking mostly in English, breaking into French now and then when she found it too difficult to say what she wanted in the unfamiliar language, but now she went on in French. The sing-song of her Russian accent gave it a strange plaintiveness, but at the same time lent a sense of unreality to what she said. It gave you the impression of a person talking in a dream.
“I’d only been married six months. I was going to have a baby. Perhaps it was that that saved his neck. That and his youth. He was only twenty-two. The baby was born dead. I’d suffered too much. You see, I loved him. He was my first love and my last love. When he was sentenced they wanted me to divorce him, transportation is a sufficient reason in French law; they told me that the wives of convicts always divorced and they were angry with me when I wouldn’t. The lawyer who defended him was very kind to me. He said that I’d done everything I could, and that I’d had a bad time, but I’d stood by him to the end and now I ought to think of myself, I was young and must remake my life, I was making it even more difficult if I stayed tied to a convict. He was impatient with me when I said that I loved Robert and Robert was the only thing in the world that mattered to me, and that whatever he did I’d love him, and that if ever I could go out to him, and he wanted me, I’d go and gladly. At last he shrugged his shoulders and said there was nothing to be done with us Russians, but if ever I changed my mind and wanted a divorce I was to come to him and he’d help me. And Evgenia and Alexey, poor drunken, worthless Alexey, they gave me no peace. They said Robert was a scoundrel, they said he was wicked, they said it was disgraceful that I should love him. As if one could stop loving because it’s disgraceful to love! It’s so easy to call a man a scoundrel. What does it mean? He murdered and he suffered for his crime. None of them knew him as I knew him. You see, he loved me. They didn’t know how tender he was, how charming, how gay, how boyish. They said he came near killing me as he killed Teddie Jordan; they didn’t see that it only made me love him more.”
It was almost impossible for Charley, knowing nothing of the circumstances, to get anything coherent out of what she was saying.
“Why should he have killed you?” he asked.
“When he came home—after he’d killed Jordan, it was very late and I’d gone to bed, but his mother was waiting up for him. We lived with her. He was in high spirits, but when she looked at him she knew he’d done something terrible. You see, for weeks she’d been expecting it and she’d been frantic with anxiety.
“ ‘Where have you been all this time?’ she asked him.
“ ‘I? Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Round with the boys.’ He chuckled and gently patted her cheek. ‘It’s so easy to kill a man, mother,’ he said. ‘It’s quite ridiculous, it’s so easy.’
“Then she knew what he’d done and she burst out crying.
“ ‘Your poor wife,’ she said. ‘Oh, how desperately unhappy you’re going to make her.’
“He looked down and sighed.
“ ‘Perhaps it would be better if I killed her too,’ he said.
“ ‘Robert!’ she cried.
“He shook his head.
“ ‘Don’t be afraid, I shouldn’t have the courage,’ he said. ‘And yet, if I did it in her sleep, she’d know nothing.’
“ ‘My God, why did you do it?’ she cried.
“Suddenly he laughed. He had a wonderfully gay, infectious laugh. You couldn’t hear it without feeling happy.
“ ‘Don’t be so silly, mother, I was only joking,’ he said. ‘I’ve done nothing. Go to bed and to sleep.’
“She knew he was lying. But that’s all he would say. At last she went to her room. It was a tiny house, in Neuilly, but it had a bit of garden and there was a little pavilion at the end of it. When we married she gave us the house and moved in there so that she could be with her son and yet not on the top of us. Robert came up to our room and he waked me with a kiss on my lips. His eyes were shining. He had blue eyes, not so blue as yours, gray rather, but they were large and very brilliant. There was almost always a smile in them. They were wonderfully alert.”
But Lydia had gradually slowed down the pace of her speech as she came to these sentences. It was as though a thought had struck her and she was turning it over in her mind while she talked. She looked at Charley with a curious expression.
“There is something in your eyes that reminds me of him, and your face is the same shape as his. He wasn’t so tall as you and he hadn’t got your English complexion. He was very good-looking.” She was silent for a moment. “What a malicious fool that Simon of yours is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
She leant forward, with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and went on, in a rather monotonous voice, as though she were reciting under hypnosis something that was passing before her vacant eyes.
“I smiled when I woke.
“ ‘How late you are,’ I said. ‘Be quick and come to bed.’
“ ‘I can’t sleep now,’ he said. ‘I’m too excited. I’m hungry. Are there any eggs in the kitchen?’
“I was wide awake by then. You can’t think how charming he looked sitting on the side of the bed in his new gray suit. He was always well-dressed and he wore his clothes wonderfully well. His hair was very beautiful, dark brown and waving, and he wore it long, brushed back on his head.
“ ‘I’ll put on a dressing-gown and we’ll go and see,’ I said.
“We went into the kitchen and I found eggs and onions. I fried the onions and scrambled them with the eggs. I made some toast. Sometimes when we went to the theatre or had been to a concert we used to make ourselves something to eat when we got home. He loved scrambled eggs and onions, and I cooked them just in the way he liked. We used to love those modest suppers that we had by ourselves in the kitchen. He went into the cellar and brought out a bottle of champagne. I knew his mother would be cross, it was the last of half a dozen bottles that Robert had had given him by one of his racing friends, but he said he felt like champagne just then and he opened the bottle. He ate the eggs greedily and he emptied his glass at a gulp. He was in tearing spirits. When we first got into the kitchen I’d noticed that though his eyes were shining so brightly his face was pale, and if I hadn’t known that nothing was more unlikely I should have thought he’d been drinking, but now the colour came back to his cheeks. I thought he’d been just tired and hungry. He’d been out all day, tearing about, I was sure, and it might be that he hadn’t had a bite to eat. Although we’d only been parted a few hours he was almost crazy with joy at being with me again. He couldn’t stop kissing me and while I was scrambling the eggs I had to push him away because he wanted to hug me and I was afraid he’d spoil the cooking. But I couldn’t help laughing. We sat side by side at the kitchen table as close as we could get. He called me every sweet, endearing name he could think of, he couldn’t keep his hands off me, you would have thought we’d only been married a week instead of six months. When we’d finished I wanted to wash everything up so that when his mother came in for breakfast she shouldn’t find a mess, but he wouldn’t let me. He wanted to get to bed quickly.
“He was like a man possessed of a god. I never thought it was possible for a man to love a woman as he loved me that night. I never knew a woman was capable of such adoration as I was filled with. He was insatiable. It seemed impossible to slake his passion. No woman ever had such a wonderful lover as I had that night. And he was my husband. Mine! Mine! I worshipped him. If he
’d let me I would have kissed his feet. When at last he fell asleep exhausted, the dawn was already peeping through a chink in the curtains. But I couldn’t sleep. I looked at his face as the light grew stronger; it was the unlined face of a boy. He slept, holding me in his arms, and there was a tiny smile of happiness on his lips. At last I fell asleep too.
“He was still sleeping when I woke and I got out of bed very quietly so as not to disturb him. I went into the kitchen to make his coffee for him. We were very poor. Robert had worked in a broker’s office, but he’d had a quarrel with his employer and had walked out on him, and since then he hadn’t found anything regular to do. He was crazy about racing and sometimes he made a bit that way, though his mother hated it, and occasionally he earned a little money by selling secondhand cars on commission, but all we really had to depend on was his mother’s pension, she was the widow of an army doctor, and the little money she had besides. We didn’t keep a servant and my mother-in-law and I did the housework. I found her in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for lunch.
“ ‘How is Robert?’ she asked me.
“ ‘He’s still asleep. I wish you could see him. With his hair all tousled he looks as if he was sixteen.’
“The coffee was on the hob and the milk was warm. I put it on to boil and had a cup, then I crept upstairs to get Robert’s clothes. He was a dressy fellow and I’d learnt how to press them. I wanted to have them all ready for him and neatly laid out on a chair when he woke. I brought them down into the kitchen and gave them a brush and then I put an iron on to heat. When I put the trousers on the kitchen table I noticed there were stains on one of the legs.
“ ‘What on earth is that?’ I cried. ‘Robert has got his trousers in a mess.’
“Madame Berger got up from her chair so quickly that she upset the potatoes. She snatched up the trousers and looked at them. She began to tremble.
“ ‘I wonder what it is,’ I said. ‘Robert will be furious. His new suit.’
“I saw she was upset, but you know, the French are funny in some ways, they don’t take things like that as casually as we Russians do. I don’t know how many hundred francs Robert had paid for the suit, and if it was ruined she wouldn’t sleep for a week thinking of all the money that had been wasted.