Winter Garden Read online

  Ashburner, searching the broadwalk ahead for a glimpse of Nina, was disconcerted to see that Bernard was dragging his left leg quite noticeably, obviously parodying his companion’s infirmity. Seen from this distance he resembled an inebriated tramp; but then Nina herself, for some extraordinary reason, was wrapped in a motheaten fur that was coming apart at the seams. Why on earth wasn’t she wearing the mink coat her husband the brain specialist had given her only last Christmas? Even as Ashburner watched, she reached up and pulled Bernard’s ear. Clutching each other at the waist they stumbled towards Gate 23. Such intimate tomfoolery accentuated the gap between Ashburner and Nina. If he had behaved in a similar manner, depend upon it, she would have shaken him from her like a louse from a blanket.

  3

  In the queue for seat allocation, Nina was pale but upright. She looked at Ashburner in his fur hat and smiled heroically.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he said.

  ‘A little,’ she conceded, and turned her back on him almost immediately.

  Ashburner was alarmed by her indifference. He feared there was worse to come. ‘I do feel’, he said, anxious to show his authority, ‘that we ought to sit in the front of the plane.’

  ‘I want to smoke,’ snapped Bernard.

  ‘I was thinking of Nina,’ explained Ashburner. ‘Besides, should anything go wrong, the back end is always the first bit to fall off.’

  ‘In that case,’ Bernard said, ‘she’ll need a fag in her hand.’

  No one bothered to ask Enid where she wanted to sit.

  Hampered by his assortment of carrier bags, Ashburner had difficulty handing over his boarding pass. When eventually he entered the aircraft and struggled up the centre aisle to the rear of the plane, Nina was already seated, positioned between Bernard and a man in horn-rimmed spectacles with a briefcase on his knee.

  ‘Ah,’ breathed Ashburner and stood there, undecided.

  ‘Do get settled,’ pleaded Nina. ‘You’re causing a blockage.’

  It took Ashburner some time to stow Bernard’s belongings satisfactorily in the overhead lockers. Pieces of charcoal and several tubes of oil paint spilled on to the lap of the man with the briefcase. Bernard stared impassively out of the starboard porthole as though it was no concern of his.

  ‘You’re in my seat,’ protested Ashburner, at last. Now that he was actually aboard, his rightful place was beside Nina.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Bernard. ‘Once down, I stay down.’ And he slapped his leg obscurely.

  Face mottled with annoyance, Ashburner joined Enid on the other side of the aisle. He had been warned about the man’s rudeness. Bernard’s first appearance on television, in a programme featuring his work, had been noteworthy. Standing in the back garden of his dark little house in Wandsworth, he had pointed graphically at an upstairs window and referred to his unseen wife as the first Mrs Rochester. He had called the interviewer a prick for confusing an etching with an engraving. He had answered every question with such evident overtones of commercial insanity, giving vent to a burst of insensitive laughter when describing the death of his cat, lost under the wheels of a corporation dust cart, that he had become an overnight celebrity. He was never off the box.

  I can’t compete, thought Ashburner. A man in my position has to mind his ps and qs. He muttered audibly enough for Enid to hear: ‘What a nerve the man has!’

  ‘He can’t help it,’ said Enid. ‘He’s had a hip replacement. He’s got a steel ball-and-socket thing.’

  Ashburner’s cheeks glowed redder than ever. He felt as though he’d been caught throwing stones at a cripple. He leaned forward in his seat to attract Nina’s attention.

  The man with the briefcase nodded at him and smiled.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ muttered Ashburner, turning to Enid, ‘but that fellow seems to know us.’

  ‘He’s probably a member of the KGB,’ Enid said, and she studied the emergency exit procedures.

  She was dismayed by the size of the aeroplane, having expected something larger. She wondered if perhaps they were being flown out on the cheap. She had travelled three times by air, twice to New York and once to Los Angeles. On each occasion she had enjoyed watching a film. Her head-phones had blocked out the noise of the engines and she had scarcely known she was flying.

  ‘I don’t like small planes,’ she told Ashburner. ‘I don’t think they’re as safe as big ones.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Ashburner reassured her, ‘they’re safer. Think of all those fellows during the war, limping home on a wing and a prayer.’

  He had just begun to tell her of the miraculous return of a Wellington bomber whose tail hung by a wire from the fuselage, a story he’d come across in Reader’s Digest while waiting for a dental examination, when the aircraft began to roll along the tarmac.

  Enid bent over her knees and stuffed her fingers in her ears.

  Nonplussed, Ashburner craned forward to look at Nina. The man in spectacles gave him a second, conspiratorial smile. Nina was talking to Bernard; sensing she was being watched she glanced over her shoulder. Ashburner was struck by the anxiety in her eyes. This woman loves me, he told himself, though many wouldn’t realise it.

  Nina fluttered her fingers at him, a gesture so reminiscent of his wife’s dismissive wave of farewell that he was further cast down. Hurtling along the runway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, he considered the probability that at this very moment his wife was unbolting the back door of their house to let the dog out to do its business. The sickening wrench he experienced when the plane left the ground and climbed into the sky made his heart pound in his breast. It wasn’t only the ground he was leaving. It came to him in one of those flashes so often described by Nina, that his wife saw him in much the same light as the dog, a creature so dependable and infirm as to be thought incapable of straying beyond the confines of the winter garden.

  Ashburner ached to confide in someone and had to wait fifteen minutes before Enid removed her fingers from her ears.

  ‘Are we up?’ she asked. She refused to look out of the porthole.

  ‘Well up,’ said Ashburner. He ferreted in his mind for the right words. ‘I haven’t known Nina very long,’ he began. ‘I expect you know her better than I.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Enid. ‘We’re not intimate.’ Now that Ashburner had taken off his fur hat she thought he looked like a troubled baby. It had something to do with the firmness of his pink cheeks, and his round, puzzled eyes.

  ‘But you’re in the same line . . . art and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Nina’s gone into lumps of metal,’ Enid said. ‘I work mainly in oils.’

  ‘But’, persisted Ashburner, ‘you do know her.’

  Enid was often underestimated. Her pleasant smile and unremarkable features made her appear neutral. She had been made a prefect at school, and the subsequent discovery that she had cheated in the maths exam had caused astonishment. ‘I’ve never been to Nina’s house for dinner,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Or to her cottage in the country, or to her studio in Holland Park. But once I had a long chat with her husband about India. He’s keen on rugs.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ashburner and fell uncomfortably silent.

  He too had never been to Nina’s house for dinner. He had, however, visited it in his lunch hour without being offered a morsel of food. Instead, Nina had encouraged him to make love to her standing up in the kitchen. ‘Just get on tip-toe,’ she had urged, ‘and lean against the door.’ It was in case her husband the brain specialist came home unexpectedly. Buttocks perilously close to the brass knob of the door, his transports of love had been tinged with theatricality. It wasn’t quite the real thing. He found it terribly difficult to keep his balance, and his knees trembled violently. He wasn’t a fit man, being overweight, and the muscles in his calves seemed to have wasted away; if he had fallen on top of her the consequences could have been fatal. Nina was quite right of course, it would have been in bad taste to cavort in the marriage bed, and it
was bad luck that the sofa in her living room was upholstered in velvet. There was a leather couch in one of the consulting rooms on the ground floor, but mostly the door was kept locked. Ashburner had suggested they line the sofa with a protective layer of newspapers, but the idea – and who could blame her? – hadn’t appealed to Nina. He was fearful, to the point of paralysis, of discovery. Nina usually stripped below the waist but insisted he retain his trousers. Such a welter of cloth and dangling braces rendered him helpless. Had Nina’s husband returned – apparently he was in the habit of rushing home quite gratuitously for a ham sandwich – Ashburner would have been hurled forward on to the scrubbed pine table, ready for carving. Nina herself pretended to require that added edge of danger. She told him a ridiculous story about D.H. Lawrence who, disguised as a character in one of his novels, actually made love to a lady called Clara on a railway line. ‘We should do it in all sorts of places,’ Nina had cried, remembering something else she had read. ‘In shop doorways and on the tops of buses.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Ashburner had replied doubtfully. He knew for a fact that Nina hadn’t used public transport for at least ten years. All he required was a decent mattress. If she had truly wanted him to give her pleasure she would have arranged things differently, he felt. He had come to this conclusion on the frantic occasion when, imagining she heard footsteps climbing the stairs, Nina had manhandled him into the lobby and thrust him inside a fitted cupboard near the door. As it happened, it had been a false alarm; but, cowering there, his bare knees pressed against the brain specialist’s summer overcoat, a faint smell of anaesthetic clinging to the fabric of the collar, Ashburner had been frightened enough to become introspective. In this sort of affair, he had realised, there was always someone who loved and someone who played the clown, and possibly they were the same person. She takes me for granted, he’d thought. It’s not a thing a man can tolerate.

  ‘When we took off,’ he observed sadly to Enid, ‘he held her hand.’ He looked sideways in the general direction of Bernard. The man with the briefcase, a miniature bottle of vodka at his elbow, raised his glass ingratiatingly.

  ‘It doesn’t mean much,’ said Enid, though she didn’t like to be told. ‘Neither of them likes flying.’ An hour ago she had cherished the illusion that it would be she who sat beside Bernard, shoulder to shoulder, as they were hauled upwards through the clouds.

  ‘His nails are filthy,’ Ashburner said. ‘Quite indescribable. He must have mended a puncture on the way.’

  ‘Inks,’ informed Enid. ‘You can’t avoid it if you’re etching.’ She would have liked to sleep, but people kept handing her trays of food and offering her drinks. It was like being in a hospital ward.

  4

  Ashburner had once been interviewed on the radio, from a prepared script, about an explosion in the North Sea and had felt throughout that his chin was welded to his chest. For the life of him he couldn’t look up. He’d been able to continue only by thinking that he would treat himself, later, to a pickled onion.

  He was in the same agonising position now, head lowered as he read the duty-free list over and over, hemmed in by Enid, who was dozing, and the man on the other side of the aisle who, during the last quarter of an hour, had added winking to his repertoire of nodding and smiling.

  When Nina had first suggested that Ashburner accompany her to Moscow, she had jokingly remarked that it might be better if he kept quiet about what he did for a living; he wouldn’t want the Russians to think he’d come to spy on their shipping fleets in the Baltic. If asked, she said, perhaps he ought to imply that he was an engineer or a banker. He hadn’t liked the idea. He wasn’t any good at lying, and besides, as he told her, the particulars of his profession were quite clearly stated on his passport. Moreover he suspected, from what he read in the newspapers, that his background had been thoroughly investigated without his knowing. He had nothing to hide from the Russians apart from the fact that he was a family man. They would surely not hold it against him; he gathered that the Communists had practically invented free love.

  The chap on his right was far more dangerous than a member of the KGB. He was one of those hearty and gregarious men who, if left alone even for a short while, behaved as though they were drowning. He would cling to Ashburner as to the proverbial straw. Given the slightest opportunity he would strike up a conversation; within two minutes he’d be babbling for an exchange of telephone numbers.

  Ashburner had just made up his mind to raise his head and, if spoken to, administer some form of snub, when the man, still clutching his briefcase, left his seat. His departure exposed a perturbed-looking Bernard and the back of Nina; she was holding on to his arm as though to restrain him. Ashburner distinctly heard Bernard exclaim ‘Bloody hell’, followed by the words, sarcastically spoken, ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Then he too rose to his feet and limped up the aisle.

  Seizing his chance, Ashburner sat beside Nina. ‘I’m just on my way to the loo,’ he said, in case he wasn’t welcome.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ mumured Nina, ‘I’m sorry not to be with you. It’s your own fault. You spent so long faffing about.’

  ‘I wasn’t faffing,’ he protested. ‘I had all those wretched bags to carry.’

  Nina called him a poor lamb, but he could tell she wasn’t concentrating. She had folded her coat across her knees and was fretfully tearing small holes in its already bedraggled lining. ‘Will I see anything of you?’ he asked. ‘I suppose you’ll be kept pretty busy looking at Art.’ He meant during the days ahead. He had such expectations of the nights that he couldn’t bring himself to speak of them.

  ‘You’ll be coming with us. You’ll have to,’ she said. ‘They won’t let you loose on your own.’

  ‘I don’t think you ought to do too much,’ Ashburner told her. ‘Not in the day. Not until you feel completely up to it. I don’t mind admitting that you looked more than a little seedy down below.’ Instantly he wondered whether he shouldn’t have chosen a different adjective to describe her appearance at the airport. She was easily offended.

  ‘Have you ever thought about illness?’ she asked. ‘Really thought. I mean, some people are ill and show it and others are ill and it’s not apparent. Not even to them. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Not altogether,’ he said.

  ‘It’s almost, Douglas, as if one only knows one is ill when told so by a doctor.’

  ‘If one was run over,’ said Ashburner, ‘one wouldn’t need to be told.’ Nina herself at the age of ten had been knocked from her bicycle by a hit-and-run driver. She had a small, star-shaped scar on her forehead to prove it. He liked talking to her about medical things; she was extremely interesting when it came to brain tumours.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about my health,’ she said. She touched his face with the tips of her fingers. ‘I nearly wept when you fetched that water for me. It was so damned thoughtful.’

  ‘Shall I order champagne?’ cried Ashburner, dazzled by her big blue eyes seen at such close range, brimming with appreciative tears. If at that moment the aircraft had gone into a downward spiral he doubted he would have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  ‘I mustn’t drink,’ said Nina quickly. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that later. The Russians are tremendous drinkers. Anyway, Bernard’s consuming enough for all of us.’

  ‘I didn’t care for his swearing at you,’ confided Ashburner. ‘Even if he has got a gammy leg. I couldn’t help overhearing.’

  ‘It’s not what it seems,’ said Nina. She enquired how he was getting on with Enid.

  He said Enid seemed awfully nice.

  ‘Don’t be taken in,’ warned Nina. ‘She’s not a hundred per cent honest.’ She didn’t pursue the subject. Instead she mentioned that Bernard thought Ashburner had a very strong head, that his bone structure was compelling. There was also something about the set of his ears and the height of his forehead. What a stone carving he would make!

  ‘Good Lord,’ smirked Ashburner, curiously pleased. He stare
d bashfully out of the porthole and saw nothing save a circle of blue sky and some wispy clouds. It was so spacious up here and so crowded below. These days it was no longer safe to cross the road. Several days before a cleaner in the office had been mown down by a bus. He realised suddenly that if in his absence a similar thing happened to his wife, there would be no means of contacting him. They would put out an SOS on the wireless, but he wouldn’t be available to hear it. At enormous cost to public expenditure country policemen in panda cars would motor the length of the Highlands. If she was injured tomorrow she could be dead and buried by the time he returned. He was so shaken at the thought that his lips trembled.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ demanded Nina. ‘Are you full of regrets?’

  ‘What a ridiculous question,’ he said evasively.

  ‘You are happy, Douglas? Really happy?’

  ‘Need you ask?’ he said. It was unlike her to bother about his state of mind, and saddening that he couldn’t match her mood. He would have given anything in the world not to feel responsible for his wife.

  He had what was intended to be a friendly word with Bernard when he met him coming out of the lavatory. ‘Look here,’ he began, ‘earlier on you must have thought I was queer—’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Bernard, and he stumbled moodily past Ashburner and went back to his seat, his head wreathed in tobacco smoke.

  Half an hour before they landed, Enid noticed something odd. The pilot announced over the tannoy that they were flying across the Soviet border; if the passengers cared to look below and a little to the left, land could be seen. Almost everyone peered out of the appropriate windows and uttered noises of astonishment – everyone, that is, except Enid, who was fearful of disturbing the balance of the plane, and the man on the other side of the aisle, who was leaning back in his seat, mouth open and eyes closed. The odd thing was that though he held his arms in a cradling position his briefcase had gone.