Frank Baker Page 16

  “Suppose I did, Mother?” I spoke with sudden harshness.

  Then she cried, “No, no—I couldn’t bear it. I’ve nothing to live for here, alone. I didn’t mean it, son. You mustn’t go. Promise me you’ll never leave me—never, never——”

  “I won’t leave you,” I said. “I only want to take you away some­where, where we can both get back our faith in life. If we don’t go away from here soon—I don’t know, I believe something awful will happen to all of us. We’re mad if we wait for it to happen.”

  “Wherever we go,” she said, with that sudden prescience with which she was gifted—“wherever we go it might happen. Do you suppose we shall escape by running away?”

  She would not change her decision. Should I then leave her, I thought, and go alone? There was Olga. I must at least wait and see if she answered my note.

  My mother turned away from me and switched on the light. We drew the blinds. Night was come. Annie came in with cups of cocoa that she often made for us before we retired to bed. We sipped it slowly, prolonging it and stirring it unnecessarily. Because we knew that the sooner we finished the cocoa, the more difficult it would be to avoid going to bed.

  The room was stifling; the whole aspect of it cheerless and barren. Every colour was a faded colour as though an eternal autumn had settled over the place. The empty candlesticks mocked me, emphasizing this faded air. I had finished my cocoa; it was after eleven. There was nothing to do but go to bed.

  “Mother,” I said, “you must make me buy some candles for that corner. Not coloured ones, plain white. Don’t let me forget.”

  Two days passed. They were miserable, apprehensive days in which every incident passed slowly with the unreality of a hated dream that keeps recurring to a sick man. I had no sleep by night, no security by day. Every foot­step I took seemed a dangerous one. I dreaded the night because I had to shut myself into an unventilated room and suffer hours of sleeplessness; I dreaded the day because I had to go outside where there was no shelter to protect me.

  On the third day a letter in unfamiliar writing was dropped through the letter-box. I took it eagerly and read. It was a brief note and to this day I can remember every word of it.

  “I will be at a café called Samovar, in St. Martin’s Lane, to-morrow evening at 6.30, if you would like to come there.”

  There was no address, even no signature to it. I folded it in my pocket-book and took it out a hundred times during the day, trying to weigh the value of every word. 6.30 to-morrow evening. It seemed to me that I had to pass through a lifetime before then. Why not this evening, I complained, why not this evening?

  *

  I dreaded that meeting, even though I desired it so greatly. I did not know what I had to say to her. I did not even know whether upon closer acquaintance she would attract me at all. I thought it extremely probable that she would find me dull. Summing up my virtues I found them grossly overbalanced by my defects. I was a clerk amongst a thousand others; an English youth, neither original nor particularly virile. She came from a country of which I had but the vaguest understanding; a half-sinister place to my knowledge, where revolution lurked, the machine thrived, and megalomaniacs wrote exuberantly pessimistic books. She had been the friend, per­haps the lover, of a great poet; she probably moved in a circle of intellectual and artistic people. I moved in no circle, but lay stuck firm in the middle of one so vast that I was a mere speck; my few friends were very ordinary people like myself.

  If my mind was commonplace, then what of my body? I looked at my face in the mirror above my dressing-table. I thought it meretrici­ous, like a face you might meet in a magazine illustration, entirely without meaning. My body seemed flimsy and frail, my arms thin as sticks, my legs white and scraggy. As for muscles, they did not seem to exist.

  My glance fell to the books on the table, the handful of erotic classics with which I had tried to gratify my sensual thoughts. There was no erudition here, no culture. What could I talk about with authority? What particular subject had my intellect ever handled? Had I any intellect?

  She would despise me, I said, when she found that I had a maga­zine face and no mind. With this thought, I stood outside the half-curtained window of the small café where she had arranged to meet me. Inside, I could see her sitting in a basket-chair, her back to me, calmly reading an evening paper. How could she sit there, un­perturbed, like that? I asked myself, when I was in such turmoil only a few yards away from her. Didn’t she realize I was there? Didn’t she know how I felt, or could nothing move her to turn round and acknowledge me? “Come,” I said, “life is wretched enough; this can’t make it worse and it may make it better.”

  So I drove my unwilling legs towards the door, my stomach like a hollow cavity, my heart pounding.

  Clumsily I sat down beside her, nearly knocking over the small table in my agitation. She perceived at once that I was in a nervous state, for she smiled—that slow smile of her closed lips which made her eyes quiver with amusement. You remember? How often, when others were laughing, she would smile quietly like that, half to her­self, as though she alone had found the real secret of humour and would impart it to nobody.

  What were my first words? Perhaps, “Good evening, it was good of you to come.” I know, whatever I said, she took no notice, but only looked at me steadily for several seconds.

  (Do you remember her eyes? How, with all their blackness, they were so fresh and clear? When I looked at her that first evening I knew that she saw all my thoughts from the half-agitated, half-ashamed expres­sion of my face. In that long glance she made me aware of my own individuality. She would not presume to enter the solitary world which was mine. It seemed to me that for the first time I had met a person who saw exactly what I was and accepted me without question.

  She spoke. “I wondered. I thought it would be you, but I was not quite sure. That is why I didn’t sign my name. I hoped it would be you.” When she spoke, my nervousness seemed to go, I felt easy and confident with her.

  “Then you’re glad it’s me?” I said quietly.

  “Glad?” she said. “Yes—perhaps I am. You interested me on the two occasions I saw you.”

  “The last time you saw me, I’m afraid——” I began.

  She smiled and interrupted me. “Were you going to say you are afraid you were drunk?”

  I nodded. “I meant to speak to you,” I said. “I went there for that. And then—I couldn’t. It’s difficult to go over and speak to a stranger there isn’t it?”

  She half laughed. “Why, yes, I’m sure it is, when you are as tipsy as you were.”

  “But even if one was sober,” I argued, “it wouldn’t be easy in a place like that.”

  She disagreed. “I think it would be easier than in many places. You see, there are all those people laughing and talking and drink­ing. Nobody takes any notice. It would be easy to talk to anybody you liked with so much noise going on around.”

  “Do you often go there?”

  “I went there a lot with Paul Weaver,” she said. “He was an old friend.”

  For the moment I was embarrassed and murmured something unintelligibly sympathetic.

  “How did you find out my address?” she asked. I told her, and we were silent for a moment, both thinking of that first evening in the café. I wanted to ask her whether she had been the poet’s lover and many other things which could not yet be asked.

  We ordered something to eat, and while we ate she told me a little about her life and I about mine. She had come over from Russia at the time of a great revolution, when she had been a little girl. Of the dreadful hardships she had had to endure, she spoke calmly, as though they had not touched her. She had come over with an old aunt who had later died. Her parents and her brothers were all killed in the revolution, and when her aunt died she had no money. She had taken many jobs.

  “For three or four months,” sh
e said, “I wore coloured trousers and a silly sailor hat.”

  I did not understand.

  “Do you know the Plaza cinema?”

  I nodded.

  “I was one of the attendants there. It was a strange life; so closed in, so soft and scented. I didn’t dislike it in a way, though when I came out every night it was good to walk on a hard pavement after so much walking on carpets as thick as lamb’s-wool.”

  “You couldn’t endure it for long? You left there?”

  “No, I had to leave. You see, I was Russian, and your English girls—they are very nice and they were kind. Men used to take them out and give them a nice time. They wanted to take me out, and some­times I let them. But they also said, she is Russian, she will under­stand what a man takes a girl out for—do you see? They thought I was so much easier. English people are very nice, but they always think that Russian people live like animals. Then the other girls got jealous. You see? They used to talk about the Russian whore. So I went. I had to.”

  An absurd desire to exclude myself from this unpleasant category of English people, prompted me to say, “They’re not all like that. There are better people than you would meet in a cinema.”

  “Ah yes, of course,” she said, looking at me. “You mean that you are not like that?”

  I blushed very red. “Did you think I was?”

  “No, I didn’t think so. But I should so like to know why you wanted to see me.”

  I remember thinking it unreasonable of her to ask this. I had not yet attuned myself to her frankness.

  “I can’t—tell you that easily,” I stammered. “It’s—it seemed fate that I should meet you. I couldn’t stop thinking of you ever since the first evening I saw you. You were just different from anybody else I’d ever seen——”

  A waitress fussed round the table, and a number of people had gathered by now in the small room. It was unbearably hot, and I felt it was impossible to speak here.

  “Let’s go,” I said, “somewhere where it’s quieter and we can talk more easily.”

  She was agreeable to this, and we took a train up to Hampstead, where she lived. Walking up a street towards an open heath, she pointed to a little dressmaker’s shop.

  “That is where I work now,” she said, “making dresses for ladies who like to be thought rich and artistic. Do you know the sort of ladies I mean? They come in with haughty expressions and ask for a material to match this or that. They must always have everything to match. They think they are aristocratic, but they are not. No, not quite.”

  I laughed. She had summed up a certain type of English female very well, and for a time we discussed them.

  “They are very solid,” she said, “and they like to be thought un­solid. You know them best when you see their husbands, nice men always, who play golf.”

  “You’ve studied us very well,” I said.

  “Ah, when you are a foreigner in another country you see people much clearer. I dare say were you in Russia, you would see how stupid we are.”

  “How do you sum me up?” I asked.

  But she shook her head and laughed. “No, I will not tell you.”

  I begged her to speak what was in her mind.

  Then she said, “I believe you are very moral and like examining your conscience.”

  This was a shock to me; I had never thought myself moral. “I’m not,” I declared. “Not a bit moral.”

  “But you like examining your conscience?” she insisted.

  “Well, yes,” I admitted. “I suppose I do.”

  “Then you are moral,” she said, with a smile. “Since before you ever do anything you want to do, you have to ask yourself whether it is right to do it.”

  I felt mortified. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Well, this evening, you meet me and you are so frightened, you nearly knock over a table. You wonder whether I will think you a coarse man; you think it is not quite right to meet a girl like that. Why is it not quite right if you wish to? I do not mind how I meet people if I like them.”

  I explained to her that I was bound by a network of conventions which she would never understand, and that it was hard to break them. But even here she disagreed with me.

  “No, no. I know your conventions very well. My country was so conventional that only a revolution could break it. Now they are even more conventional. No, no. Some are born conventional; some are not. And you——”

  “I wasn’t born conventional,” I declared. “I swear I wasn’t.”

  “No, I think you were not,” she said. “But you have a passion for doing the correct thing according to your standards. I expect you have a tidy mind and a large, untidy heart, haven’t you?”

  We were standing by a pond on a plateau above the undulating heath, with trees and bushes in the hollow beyond us. Opposite the pond was a large tavern full of people, with many cars outside. A number of people sat on iron seats near the pond; children were sailing toy boats on the water, and dogs were barking. Yet in spite of these sounds, it seemed very quiet and still. I felt that Olga and I moved in a world of our own. In the half-light she seemed like a carved figure standing over the pond and conjuring pictures from the oily water. I felt like a child. She suddenly turned and smiled, opening her mouth. Then I knew that I loved her and that she loved me. “Olga——” I said. But she pointed to the pond and spoke.

  “What a lot of things one sees in water,” she said. “It is like being in a hot room and looking out of a cloudy window-pane to a coun­try you can never reach.”

  Her voice was sad.

  “Do you often think of your own country?” I asked.

  “I was very young,” she said, “when we came over. I was a little girl, thin and miserable-looking. I remember crying when we came over in the boat in your English Channel. ‘Look, look, Olga,’ said my aunt, who had been crying as much as I had; ‘there is England, child, where they will treat us kindly.’ I saw your white cliffs and—no, I did not want them. And though I do not think very much of Russia because it seems so long ago, I do not want this town.”

  “Neither do I,” I said.

  “No, you are unhappy,” she said. “When I looked at you for a moment that first night, I said, there is somebody unhappy in the same way that I am unhappy, because he yearns for a freer life as I do.”

  “Olga,” I said, “there are lovelier parts of England than here. I could take you to mountains and lakes where you would be free again.”

  “Perhaps,” she murmured. And for the moment she would say no more.

  I was filled with a great warmth towards life. Do you know that moment in winter when suddenly, on the bleakest day, your spirit leaps because you seem to sense a feeling of spring in the hard air? It is as though you smelt the warm sap in the bare, wind-driven trees. That is how I felt suddenly that evening.

  As though these thoughts had been snatched from some sphere which was not yet mine to enter, a dark shape veered and fluttered a few yards above my head. When I saw it my spirits sank and I felt cold again. Now it was Olga who seemed unreal and the people around who seemed real. In a second I had been forced back to that dreary world I had struggled to leave. I shivered.

  Olga knew. “Why—what is the matter?” she asked.

  Her voice was so calm, I suddenly hated it for being able to keep its tones level.

  “There’s nothing the matter,” I said; “nothing.”

  I felt desperate. How long was I to be thus tormented? An im­potent anger with fate took hold of me.

  Over the road an old woman was selling balloons in the shapes of fantastic faces with long, quivering noses and painted eyes. We heard a series of little explosions and saw the inflated faces vanish one by one, like lights suddenly pricked out. Then a small bird rose from the old woman’s tray and flew into the air. The woman screamed in fury and shook her fis
t in the air. Several people laughed.

  “What a shame he should do that to her,” said Olga.

  But my anger would allow no sympathy for the old woman.

  “She probably deserves it,” I said. “And anyhow, nobody ought to sell mockeries of the human face.”

  Olga turned and laughed in my face.

  “Oh,” she said, “so that is what you think?”

  She walked over to the old woman and I followed her. Why should she take any interest in a withered old crone who would be better dead?

  Olga was speaking to her and I stood beside, fuming inwardly, not speaking.

  “You should make balloons like birds, with long beaks,” Olga was saying. “That would make them so cross.”

  The old woman looked surprised, then she laughed. “Why yes, lady, that’s right enough.”

  She still had a number of flat balloons in her tray. “Now won’t you buy one, lady,” she said, “and blow it up and see if that dratted hen comes for you as he did for me. If he does I’ll twist his neck, that I will.”

  “Shall we buy one?” Olga asked me.

  “As you like,” I said.

  She gave the woman some money and took a balloon from the tray.

  “Now blow it up, dearie,” said the woman.

  One or two amused people had gathered round. I was less and less comfortable and wondered how Olga could behave like this; it seemed so flippant to me. Did she not understand anything about the birds?

  Quietly and calmly she placed the nozzle to her lips and began to blow, managing to invest that absurd action with a dignity which gave it an almost ceremonial quality. When it was blown up she tied the string round the nozzle and dangled a clown’s orange face in the air. It bobbed up and down in her hand, grinning with yellow-painted teeth, its long, spherical nose shaking as though it were alive; its glazed eyes reminding you it was dead.

  “There,” said Olga, “there.”

  She released it and it flew lazily away over the trees till it dis­appeared.