He looked across.
And now she turned in time to see his face attempt to express irritation and then fall blank again, though whether because the effort was too much or because he thought better of signaling enmity, she could not tell.
“But you can also be very foolish sometimes, Isabella. For all your intelligence, you continue to act on your emotions. Whenever the wind is full in your sails and you are careering forward, it’s your feelings powering you. You are wholly at their mercy. Until they subside, you have no choice but to race on. And if the wind changes direction, then you do too. You should learn to tack.”
“I didn’t come all this way to hear you talk rubbish, Dad.”
“Yes you did, I’m afraid.” He managed a smile and turned back to face the river, holding his cane in front of him, his sheepskin gloves perched together on top.
A pleasure boat was passing by.
“She was dying, Izzy, she was dying. And do you want to know something?”
“What?” Isabella raised her chin a fraction, watching the tourists sitting with their faces pressed up against the windows of the boat.
“By the end she was begging me to kill her. Day and night, she implored me to help her die.”
Isabella stiffened.
“That’s what we really talked about for those long three days—death,” Nicholas continued. “Death. That’s all we talked about. It was bloody terrible. The one thing she wanted most in the world was to die while I was still there. ‘To oversee it,’ she said. Everything, Izzy, everything—a game of chess, our trip to the Hermitage, each cup of coffee—everything was to be ‘for the last time.’ She would not do anything—she would not even lie down—unless we pronounced that it was ‘for the last time.’ And I had to go along with it. I thought… I thought if I played along, then I could take her to the Hermitage ‘for the last time,’ and that way I could get her out so that she would see life again, life outside, her favorite paintings, at least, and then maybe she would stop, come to her senses. No more death. But I was wrong. She did not stop; she carried on. ‘If you love me,’ she kept saying, ‘help me.’ She was scared. So scared. ‘If you ever really loved me, help me.’ She begged me when she was angry. She begged me when she was crying. She did not believe… She did not believe there was any point. It was beneath her dignity.” Nicholas raised his cane a millimeter or two and tapped it down after each phrase to lend his words emphasis. “But still I refused. I refused to allow her not to fight on. I arranged for her to see a specialist. I booked myself a flight back to Russia. I was determined that she should live.”
“I do not understand you,” Isabella said quietly.
“And those pills—those pills eased her pain tremendously. Those pills blocked out the suffering of her body. They allowed her to think and to talk again. When you are in serious pain, Isabella, you cannot do either. Those pills gave her back the privilege of her mind. The human privilege. No, Isabella—you do not consciously kill the ones you love. And I was then, I have always been, and I am still very much in love with Masha. She is the other half of what I am.”
“I do not understand you at all.”
“I do not ask you to.”
She turned to him and searched his face. This was it—at last, this was it: the real questions behind all the other questions.
“Why—in God’s name, why did you cheat on her so… so openly, for so long, and with such contempt? Why torture her? How do you think that made her feel?”
“I tried not—”
“And why cheat on us? We could never trust you. Do you have any idea how it feels for a child to know that her father is fucking every man and woman who comes through the front door?”
“Yes, I have a very good idea of how that feels.”
“Then all the more so—why? I knew. Gabriel knew. Dad, you had people—you had lovers to the house. You rubbed our noses in your… your… your—”
“I could not leave. I had made a deal. I had made a commitment to your father, to Ma—”
“Rubbish. You could’ve left. You could have worked it out with Grandpa—with Max. Left for good. Properly. Split up. Gone. We could have visited you at weekends or whatever. You could’ve spared Mum—you could’ve spared us all—the torture of having to know you and… and witness. You wanted an audience.”
His eyes held hers.
She did not look away.
“Isabella, I cannot explain any of this, least of all to you.” “Why not? I would say that it is specifically to me that you owe an explanation.”
“Because the answer is not rational.”
“But only a moment ago you said that I was the queen of the emotional high seas, that—”
“Because—” His voice raised, he cut her short. “Because you are who you are—my daughter, in every important way.” He looked away, then softened, speaking again to the river. “And if I even begin to attempt to explain myself to you, it will only make you… only make you dislike me all the more. No child likes to hear of her parents’ true lives.”
But she was mesmerized by the moment. And involuntarily, her hand reached sharply for his sleeve, as if to grasp hold of something within her father that she had not seen or touched before.
“For Christ’s sake, Dad, please stop. Stop shielding me. Stop acting for me. Stop trying to control everything. Let me decide. Let me know. Let me deal with whatever I have to deal with. It is not for you to worry about me—if that is what this is.”
“You sound like Gabriel’s bloody magazine.”
“Forget that I am who I am. Forget that we are who we are. Forget everything. Just try to tell me the truth, as one person to another. A stranger, if it helps.”
“Clever of you to understand that strangers help. Your mother saw that too.” Nicholas sucked his crooked teeth, then turned to face her again. “Very well.” He drew his cane toward him so that his chin was almost resting on his hands and half turned, speaking into the space between them. “All my life, for reasons that I do not know, Isabella, I have wanted—no, I have needed—the intimate company of other human beings. Dear God, believe me, I have thought that it was psychosis, I have thought that it was insecurity, I have thought it was loneliness, madness, vanity, selfishness, lust, anger, depression… And it’s all of these things, I admit it. I admit it to you—as surely as those idiots on that boat would admit that they wished they had paid the extra for the headphones instead of pretending to themselves that they can speak French. But more than any of these, much more, it’s actually to do with feeling alive. And I can say that now and really mean what I am saying.” He inhaled heavily through his nose, as if to emphasize how much he had come to value every breath. “This fact your mother understood. Intuitively. Yes, it is to do with feeling life’s only meaning close up. You know—the chaff and chatter all stripped away, the naked beauty of creation right there and present and real. Action and reaction, the body and the mind, offer and response. Where words end and even freedom itself flags, that’s where the act of love begins. And I know, of course I know, that for some people—for most people—a single other is enough, is all they want, is satisfaction. But for me—for me, not so. Again, your mother understood this. And there was shelter in her understanding. And I loved her for it. I never wanted ease or comfort or familiarity or affirmation or the certainty that bills would be paid and children fed. I did not want any of life’s kindly smothering disguises. I could not be contented like that.” His voice strengthened, and he raised his head as if to address the river itself. “No, I wanted life naked and truthful, and I wanted to gaze upon its revealed face over and over again by the changing light of a hundred different souls. I wanted to feel its brutality, its gentleness, its recklessness, its caution, its power and its weakness, its give and its take. I wanted to fix it in my arms and see it shining in every pair of eyes I lay with. I can’t play the violin or—Christ knows—paint, I really cannot paint, Isabella; I can’t write; and I have neither the hands to work the land with nor the obsequiousness required for any kind of office. I can’t teach or heal or make.” He seemed to wince against some new pain. “Forgive me, Isabella, but the act of love was—is—as close as I could get to life’s disappearing quiddity. I was born that way. Or I became that way. Born or made—who knows? You can answer that question better than I. But every nerve of mine asks me to it again and again. Even now, it is what forces me to take each one of these tortured steps. For me, it is life.”