Winter Garden by Beryl Bainbridge Page B

I know just off the Kings Road. Mickey Mouse tee shirts, pop records, outspoken badges – that sort of thing.’
    ‘My son,’ Mr Karlovitch said, ‘is very scientific, very technically minded. He is interested in computers.’
    Ashburner dropped the subject. His own sons, both over twenty-one and expensively educated, couldn’t be said to be interested in anything, certainly not in anything as advanced as computers.
    To facilitate the burgeoning of new conversations, everybody swopped places in the middle of the meal – everyone except Bernard, who wouldn’t budge on account of his leg, and Mr Karlovitch who, blatantly cheating, jumped three spaces in order to sit beside Enid. The man given to whistling now sat at the right hand side of Olga Fiodorovna and opposite Ashburner. The interpreter said little; often she consulted her wristwatch and frowned.
    Someone asked Ashburner if he was enjoying his visit. Was the Soviet Union all he had expected? Had it proved to be an eye-opener? Ashburner admitted that so far he had had very little sleep. ‘But,’ he added, ‘speaking for myself, I am enjoying it enormously.’ He was telling no more than the truth. His suitcase had been located and the mystery of Nina’s constant disappearances temporarily solved. He had stopped swimming against the tide. If the airport authorities had been in touch with his wife, then all was up with him. There was no point in rushing home to be assassinated. If they hadn’t, he might as well stay. It would require a mountain of paper and a special dispensation from the Kremlin to be sent back early to England; he had reached the point of no return. He couldn’t help noticing that Mr Karlovitch had his arm about Enid’s waist. She was on about the Polar Trek North. Ashburner wouldn’t have thought her the loose type, or Karlovitch for that matter, though these days that sort of thing was rife in every camp.
    ‘Captain Scott in his tent’, Enid was saying, ‘was far more concerned with pleasing his wife than conquering the Pole.’
    Ashburner found this incredible. He hadn’t know that Mrs Scott had gone on the expedition. When he thought of how his own wife complained of draughts in the sitting room, he felt ashamed for her. Nina, as far as he could judge, wasn’t namby-pamby about home comforts. She had once told him she had sat up for three nights on a train to Istanbul. She wasn’t the sort to witness a street accident and faint. When she had been knocked from her bicycle as a child, she swore she hadn’t cried. Boris Shabelsky was wrong in thinking that the brutal account of sudden death in Petrov’s studio had made her sick. When I telephone her tonight, he thought, I shan’t hide my true feelings. It will need courage, but there is a way of getting through to her. He would, he told himself, have liked to know more about the country he was in, the politics, the man at the top, but he already understood that this was impossible. The man at the top, rumoured in the Western press to be dying, was merely a figurehead. One could sing for ever Come out, come out, wherever you are , and no one would answer. It was an idea that governed, not a person. ‘Did you know?’ he asked Olga Fiodorovna, ‘that when Colonel Fawcett went into the jungles of Bolivia, a particularly revolting form of river parasite abounded? It burrowed into the body and laid its eggs under the skin.’
    Olga Fiodorovna raised her eyebrows; her companion whistled.
    ‘You’ve got it in one,’ shouted Ashburner. ‘Only way to catch sight of the buggers. A little whistle, out pops the grub, and Bob’s your uncle.’
    At that instant the man dressed as a stockbroker stood up. The voices died away. Bernard, swearing atrociously, was the last to become silent.
    ‘I would like,’ the stockbroker said, ‘for us to remember our absent guest. We have each of us known her. And to know her, in the words of your English poet, is to love her. Gentlemen and ladies, let