The Conductor by Sarah Quigley Page A

agreed Elias, ‘and seemingly as unavoidable.’
    ‘In fact, I’ve got too much here for one household. You’re welcome to some, if it would help to make you a little more … punctual.’
    Elias stiffened. ‘Punctual?’ He’d heard the jokes told at his expense: how the Conservatoire staff watched from their windows, commenting on how fortunate it was that Leningrad had such a stickler for time, considering the unreliable reputation of the civic clock keepers. It was said that Ivan Sollertinsky wouldn’t start gathering up his lecture notes until Elias appeared around the corner of the press building, and that he departed for his 9 a.m. class at the precise moment Elias’s coat-tails disappeared behind the Pushkin fountain.
    But there was no gleam of humour in Nina’s brown eyes. She looked as calm as she had in the days when Yelena Konstantinovskaya had usurped her place at Shostakovich’s side, causing opera-goers to stareand housewives to gossip on their doorsteps. ‘I’ll get some extra paper from the vendor for you,’ she offered.
    ‘Thank you! But no, thank you!’ As always, Elias became flustered in the face of kindness. ‘However hungry she is, my mother won’t touch codfish. Anything dried creates mayhem with her gums. It gets —’ he stuck his finger in his mouth to demonstrate — ‘schtuck in the holsh.’
    ‘Well, one evening when there’s something a little tastier than cod on our table, you and your mother must come for supper. I’m sure my husband would like to hear more about where you studied.’
    ‘Most kind of you.’ Elias flushed. ‘In fact, I studied at the Conservatoire here in Leningrad. With your husband.’
    Nina’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Is that so? He often talks about his fellow students from that time, but I’ve never heard him mention you. Surely you didn’t study under Maximilian Steinberg?’
    ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’s son-in-law? Indeed I did. A little conservative in his methods, but a fine teacher.’
    ‘I don’t remember you being at the reunion party for Maximilian’s students. Were you there last year, in our Bolshaya Pushkarskaya apartment?’
    ‘Ah, no.’ He shuffled his feet and looked over the heads of the shoppers with a desperate nonchalance. ‘I must s-s-s- … I must confess , I didn’t have the pleasure of attending that party.’
    ‘I hope you were invited. I thought Dmitri had extended invitations to all his ex-classmates. If you were overlooked, I offer my belated but most sincere apologies.’
    ‘Overlooked?’ echoed Elias vaguely. ‘Perhaps I was. Or perhaps I received the invitation but had a particularly busy work schedule at that time. Now I come to think of it —’ He clapped his hand to his head in what he hoped was a convincing way. ‘Mother was ill. Yes, that was it. She had a mild dose of pneumonia last summer.’
    ‘The party wasn’t in the summer, it was in the autumn.’ Nina looked slightly annoyed, although certainly not at Elias. ‘Well, you must come for supper soon. I’ll invite you myself. But now I must get home to my husband. He’s in bed with a bad head-cold.’
    ‘But I’ve just —’ Elias’s mouth fell open. Don’t stand there catching flies! he heard his father shout, and he flinched, waiting for a ringing slap on the ear.
    ‘Yes?’ enquired Nina.
    ‘Are you sure he has a cold?’
    ‘Having Dmitri cooped up in the apartment is no daydream, I assure you,’ said Nina tartly. ‘He’s a nightmare when he’s ill and a nightmare when he’s working on something new, and at present we’re putting up with both. The problem is he doesn’t know how to rest. At times I think he’ll work himself to death.’
    ‘The burden of genius,’ said Elias in a low voice. ‘The world will never realise how much it owes them.’
    ‘You think Dmitri is a genius?’ Nina sighed. ‘Time will tell. In private he’s no different from anyone else, apart from being a little more short-tempered and a little less