Esmé cocked her head to one side, her blue eyes unblinking, a piece of toast halfway to her mouth. ‘Are you buying a new car? Is the airship out of trouble?’ Careless and light-minded, she had become a true Parisienne, taking nothing seriously save the exact effect on her looks of the latest mascara. While not begrudging her this happiness, I was a little irritated. Yet I could not sustain anger. I laughed. ‘The news is bad, darling. Our Company is worse than dead. The vultures close in and I’m the only meat left for them. Everyone else has run away.’ Her giggle was unexpected, like the trilling of a blackbird at a funeral. ‘They can’t harm you, Maxim. You’re invulnerable. You’ll come up with a plan.’ I had hoped for sympathy or at least concern and was disturbed rather than encouraged by this statement of confidence. ‘It’s a desperate plan, however,’ I said. ‘You must listen to me, Esmé.’
She was on her feet. I think she wished to avoid the truth, escape the disturbing facts. That was why she had behaved so strangely last night. She moved rapidly, nervously, still a dressed-up little girl, towards the door. ‘Then we must talk, of course, Maxim. I’ll be home by this afternoon. Let’s have tea somewhere at four. Shall I meet you here?’
‘I want to talk now.’
‘At four.’ She turned back, ran forward, put her arms round my neck, kissed me on the nose and smiled. ‘If it’s bad news, four o’clock’s the ideal time to hear it. If it’s good, we can celebrate tonight.’
I looked at the pile of letters I myself was too fearful to open. All were connected to the Company’s failure. I would never open them. I returned to bed, staying there until lunch time while I tried to review my situation. I was furiously incredulous that I was destitute. I lay in my huge, clean bed, looking up at the ornate ceiling while sunlight brought Parisian spring into the beautiful room. Yet my only asset, save for my Odessa luck pieces, was the Hotchkiss, which would have to be sold and the profit handed to Kolya for Esmé. Letting Esmé have her own money would be foolish. She had become habitually extravagant. She could spend anything I gave her in a day. The house would only be ours for another month and most of the furniture was gone. There was very little left to arrange. I could rely on Kolya to take care of anything else. My only fear was that my news would bring Esmé too heavily down to earth. I was afraid she would fall back into her delirium; I should not be able to leave her if she suffered another. I tried, with this in mind, rehearsing the exact tone of my revelations. But half my brain would not respond to the other. I hate to admit the truth: I was to be torn away from the girl I regarded as my own flesh. Yet I at least had become used to disappointment, disillusion, betrayal. She had known only sunshine and ease since she had met me. How much worse it might be for her, with no automatic means of anaesthetising herself.
I ate a sandwich and drank a glass of beer in the brasserie round the corner from the house, walking down St-Michel to the Seine. It was damp spring weather with a slight mist in the air and on the water. The quayside bookstalls were mostly closed up, but a few patient old men like unkempt dogs sat guarding their wares. Traffic clogging the bridge was so still, so muted, I imagined time had frozen and myself the only unaffected individual in the entire city. Sounds became increasingly muffled and faint. The people I passed took on an unreal appearance, like projections in a cinema film, though the colours were brilliant. I crossed over the bridge to Notre Dame where I stood looking up at the cathedral’s massive doors. They represented a barricade against the corruption of the world outside. In all her sensual beauty, Paris surrounded me; her trees, just budding, were isolated one from the other. She was the least compassionate of cities, the most self-involved. She rewarded success grudgingly while quickly punishing failure. In her present haughtiness it was impossible to imagine how she had been during the Revolution or the Siege, with the mob in her streets, screaming and destroying. I could understand, I thought, how she had come to be attacked by her own inhabitants; by pétroleuses with crazed, wounded eyes, trying to burn her into recognition of her own mortality. They had failed, if indeed that had ever been their ambition. She remained impassive. Poverty and distress merely disgusted her. Noise offended her. She turned away from it.
By the time I walked back it had begun to rain. Beside the little round church of St Julien Pauvre, I heard the almost mechanical click of water on her laurels, smelling the dampness of her graveyard as a curtain of drizzle moved slowly across to me. I kept to backstreets and doorways. I could not afford to be found either by Brodmann or Tsipliakov. But Paris knew I was there: she intended to purge me as if I were an alien microbe. I longed for the warm chaos of Rome, even the filth and clamouring greed of Constantinople. I could not begin to imagine New York. In other cities, in their marble and granite towers, the world’s Mapmakers were still at work. The arms dealers and the grain merchants tested the pulse of a desperate planet. Greeks were betrayed to Turks; Russians to Poles; Ukrainians to Russians and Italians to ‘Jugo-Slavs’. Ideas of virtue and probity were subtly discredited. Jazz music drowned all protest. Would America, providing so much of this distraction, be even worse than here? I countered my fear. There were Russian colonies in Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Argentina. If the United States failed me I could go South. From there it would be easy to find my way back to Europe. With this consolation I turned into the little cinema at L’Odeon and watched part of Birth of a Nation again, emerging into sunshine, my optimism restored.
I arrived back at the house by four, but Esmé did not return until six, full of pretty apologies, cursing buses and taxis and the traffic on the South Bank, kissing me all over my face, telling me about the present she had bought me. She had left it on the tram. She would get me another on Monday. It was too late to have tea, but since she seemed in such fundamentally good spirits I decided to speak.
‘Esmé, I have decided to leave France.’
‘What?’ She looked up from where she had been sorting through her purse. ‘For Rome?’
‘They’ll put me in prison if I don’t get as far away as possible. So I’m going to America.’
She was half smiling. She thought I joked. ‘But I want to go to America with you.’
‘You’ll join me there, as soon as Kolya has a passport for you. There’s a delay, because you have no proper documents. There are so many émigrés in your situation everything takes longer. It will only be a question of weeks at most. Then we’ll be together again.’
‘Where shall I live?’ She looked up frowning, putting the purse to one side. ‘The rent here is only good for another month.’
‘Kolya has offered you a room in their Paris apartment. He and Anäis are not there half the time so you’d have the place to yourself a good deal. And servants. Everything you want. Possibly Kolya and Anäis will be able to bring you to New York. They intend to go soon.’
She had grown pale and was biting her lower lip. Her eyes cast about as if she had lost something.
‘You mustn’t be afraid.’ I was gently reassuring. ‘You’ll soon be meeting Douglas Fairbanks.’
She smiled. ‘Maxim, do you love me?’
‘With all my heart.’ The question somehow disturbed me. ‘You are my wife, my sister. My daughter. My rose.’ I moved towards her.
‘Why do you love me?’
‘When I first saw you I felt something. An echo of recognition. I had always sought for you. I found you again. I’ve told you this before.’