The Ice Saints Read online

  ‘You’re quite wrong, darling. In fact, entirely the opposite. They derive a tremendous kick out of the whole thing. Besides, Krystyna adores him, she can never stop talking about him and old “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.’

  Janet crossed out a word, consulted a technical dictionary on the table beside her, and wrote in another word. ‘I’m getting to be such an expert on steel-processing, you can’t imagine.’ She chewed her pencil a moment. ‘The only mistake you can make is to marry them. Then you lose caste absolutely.’

  ‘He’s married already.’

  ‘Separated.’

  ‘Catholic,’ Rose said.

  ‘I suppose so. You’ve got something stuck in your hair.’

  Rose put up her hand. ‘A pine-needle.’ She giggled. ‘He might have told me. Oh dear, it’s all so wonderful.’

  ‘Are you going to tell that to the lawyers?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘What are you going to tell them? You haven’t got so long, you know.’

  ‘I know. But I can’t think now. I must change. He’s waiting for me outside. I couldn’t bring him in in case Witek was here. By the way, does Witek know about this?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. He has no one to tell him. You would be in hot water, then.’

  ‘All these lies. But we’ve always told lies in our family, haven’t we?’

  Janet flinched: truth such as this one, certainly, had been avoided at Barnham.

  Adam was standing at the nearest tram stop. He still wore his raincoat, although the evening was fine and the wide sky over the plain was pale and translucent, with two storks flying across it.

  The rain had held off during the past week now, horses and carts came in from the country covered with dust, and the ground underfoot was beginning to turn into dust. But near the beer kiosk, all the beer that had tilted out of glasses held by contented peasants and soldiers formed into a fine sour mud, which squelched gently under their unsteady feet.

  ‘At last! What a horrible place to live!’

  ‘It isn’t so bad.’

  By now her eye had grown selective and, from the dull background of apartment buildings and terrains vagues, picked out the lame soldier summoning his tumbler pigeons out of the walnut-tree, the young couples in bright cotton sitting among the clumps of weeds. This evening the three boys who shared a motor-bicycle had taken it completely to pieces, and stood round marvelling at the pleasure of something entirely their own.

  ‘For me, it is terrible! Such people!’ Adam said. ‘They’re perfectly ordinary people.’

  ‘Perfectly ordinary! Warsaw people don’t have such faces!’

  She looked to see the joke and saw he was entirely serious.

  That evening, they wandered round the town. They had an unsuccessful meal at the railway station. After sunset, rather late, they ended up at the Students’ Cellar.

  At first there was nobody Rose recognized: of the feral young men with bad teeth and dirty sweaters, anyone might have been Mirek Sypniewski but none was. Among the girls, though, she noticed Loasby’s friend Wanda, standing alone. The girl was wearing a pink sack dress, fierce against her raw complexion. The misfortune in her appearance somehow made it certain that Derek was not far away.

  And indeed, while Adam was fetching glasses of wine, he came sidling up.

  ‘I haven’t seen Them again,’ he said. ‘But I’ve learned a lot since I saw you.’

  ‘Ought you to talk about it here?’

  He darkened – the spectral light in the cellar made his blushes grey – and lowered his voice. ‘That girl – you remember I told you?’

  ‘She’s just over there, Derek.’

  ‘I know.’

  While Derek continued talking, Rose watched the girl who leaned against the opposite wall of the cellar. Quite evidently she was in a depressed state: whenever anybody spoke to her, she did not answer but jerked away as if she had physically been bumped into.

  ‘I chucked her, you won’t be surprised to hear. I mean, it was impossible after that business of reading my letters. Funnily enough as soon as I did, people started telling me all sorts of things about her. Apparently two years ago she was trying to get to England, we wouldn’t give her a visa because she was an orphan and since then she’s been trying to get off with any foreigner who comes around. That was why she took up with me in the first place—’

  ‘This is Derek Loasby, Adam Karpinski.’

  Derek’s eyes reached conclusions, his face candidly summed it all up, he even half-nodded. He offered cigarettes, and lolled back in his chair, and ten minutes later he was still with them. Rose simmered with irritation. The thought of the English was slightly repulsive to her now, half-raw and embryonic as they were; this particular specimen, roaming at large with his self-complacency in the area of pain, gave special reason for feeling ashamed. If there was such a thing as commonness of soul, it was his.

  Derek looked from Adam back to Rose. To him she wore a completely English look, with her clear skin and petulant mouth. He believed you could not interest her except by shock.

  Abruptly he said: ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Good night, Derek.’

  ‘No, no.’ His hands tortured a cigarette pack. ‘Really leaving. I could stay on but somehow I’ve lost interest here. Everything’s got so messy, I can’t concentrate any longer. You know how there’s a time in a foreign country when you simply can’t stand anything, any aspect of the place any more?’

  Adam asked him a few civil questions about the work he was doing and the people he knew, but it was no use. Derek twisted about, exaggerated and lied. His sensibilities were scorched by the blaze of too much experience; not the experience of action, but of intention, the heavy pressure of future and past in this marginal place.

  Finally he stood up and shook hands with Adam and then Rose. Rose said: ‘I understand what you were talking about. But shouldn’t you learn to forgive people and trust them?’

  ‘How can I trust them?’ the young man asked plaintively. He disappeared into the crowd of dancers.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘So there we are,’ said Rose.

  Mark Tatham, who was walking beside her in the public garden, paced more slowly.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Since you’ve got the father’s permission to take the boy to England, isn’t it all right?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  By now they were at the statue of the poet Kochanowski, in front of the University. They could have been seen by Witek from his office window, but at this moment his head was bowed into the intricacies of his broken tape recorder: when he looked up it was only to worry out the technical terms from the German brochure. He loved machinery and would have spent his life with it, had it not been for the greater prestige involved in academic life.

  Alexandra was visiting an aged princess, an aunt of Krysia Kazimierska, who was holed up in a tiny room somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

  The sun shone on the budding trees, on the sellers of strings of pretzels, sprinkled with rock-salt, which people munched to stave off hunger. Old men basked in rows on the park benches. The inhabitants of Biala Gora looked especially unprosperous in their weekday clothes. The English people seemed extraordinarily out of place, and every now and then an incredulous stare came towards them from one of the bleak old faces on the benches. A bunch of workmen gave Rose surprised smiles, not just of sexual appreciation but of pleasure, at whatever had happened to bring so exotic a figure to this town.

  ‘There won’t be any difficulty about the visa?’

  ‘I don’t see why there should be. As long as you send him back.’

  ‘Of course.’ Now her footsteps went a little faster, pecking the asphalt among the courting pigeons; she saw, in spite of everything, some happiness ahead. ‘Thank you, Mark.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me at all. But you must be sensible, you know, Rose.’

  Rose was being belittled
by this. ‘Why?’

  ‘He is certain to find out about the money quite soon.’

  ‘Oh no. We’ve told nobody. I don’t see how he could find out. No, what we must do is wait.’

  He smiled. ‘What for, Rose?’

  ‘For – for Tadeusz to grow up. For the Cold War to – well, you know.’ Her voice trailed off, because he was still smiling and such hopes always appeared feeble, even on the sunniest mornings here.

  A cluster of students went by them on their way to lectures in the main building of the University. The pony-tailed girls, the awkward and intense young men were all talking at once; caught up in the swirling air of ideas and feelings, they sounded like a rookery in full cry. The smile faded from Mark’s face and he looked appalled. He really is pompous, Rose thought.

  ‘And this student?’ he asked.

  ‘Which student?’

  ‘Loasby. He came to see me this morning. The whole business seems rather a muddle. Does he really want to marry this girl?’

  Rose squeaked. ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘He must be stark staring. Only last night he was saying the most frightful things about her.’

  ‘Evidently there was a grand reconciliation.’ The distaste stiffened his face. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what she’s like though. She doesn’t speak English. A bit cross-looking I thought, but that may indicate banked-down fires.’

  Evidently Mark did not need this information. He did not ask for opinions or give them.

  She wondered how much Derek had told him. Derek might be involved in promises and complications which he was ashamed of and which, for various social reasons, he could never confess to anybody like Mark. He was desperate to interest people, had probably only come to Biala Gora in the first place to make himself more interesting, but it would be no use with Mark. Derek was a raw clumsy person but one did not like to think of him as irretrievably in a jam.

  Mark looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go in and have a drink. We’ve brought down some whisky.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Only be careful what you say at the hotel. Our room’s probably wired up like a telephone exchange.’

  ‘All right.’

  A warning like this brought a mixture of feelings now, no longer just the discomfort of living in a world of suspicion. It was like a comment on the physical deformity of someone dearly loved. Those she did love, Adam, Tadeusz and even Witek, could have made this comment as easily as Mark did. But then they were sufferers; since Mark was immune, he ought not to blame.

  Chapter Thirty

  The hotel was not far away. Just as they reached it a taxi drew up, and Alexandra was in it, with Adam seated beside her. It was a slight surprise to Rose because he had not mentioned he would be with Alexandra.

  In Alexandra’s presence, though, any such speculations were quickly forgotten. Her bell-voice rang out to greet Rose, whom she kissed. Adam hustled them briskly into the hotel and informed them that, since the restaurant service was so slow, there would be no time for a drink upstairs. Adam was quite altered when Alexandra was there and so was Mark. It was like having a wireless turned up: everyone had to talk a little louder, push a little harder. Or else, as Rose did now, keep silence.

  Adam proved correct, and in spite of his efforts, and perhaps because of the Western air of assurance the four of them exuded among all those drab trade delegates, their lunch was interminably delayed. For long periods their tablecloth was adorned only with clogged ash-trays, and vodka and mineral-water glasses; the carafe of crystalline spirit waited in a frost-bloomed bucket beside it. The tables were small, though so widely separated in the huge room that you were out of earshot of your neighbours. They had to sit very close together; feet and knees, not immediately recognizable, bumped under the table; above it, Alexandra was the brightest and biggest. The vodka made her eyes sparkle but in any case her tongue was already loosened. She was in fine fig and blossoming with her pregnancy. Perhaps it was the complete lack of compassion in her voice which gave what she said the feeling of wit; her sense of timing was superb and the indiscretions she let out were fairly venial ones: the boring behaviour of United States Embassy wives, the antics of a South American minister in pursuit of the younger members of the League of Socialist Youth. Mark managed to sit through this with only a slight expression of constraint and the occasional interpolation of a mild ‘Darling!’ Meanwhile Adam was echo and chorus and stimulus to everything she said. Like Krysia Kazimierska and her friends, he found any proof that people continued with their ludicrous behaviour was an assertion of life.

  Not, however, if they were Poles. When Alexandra turned on any of his compatriots, she always was wrong. ‘He may seem like that to you,’ he would tell her, ‘but he’s a brilliant fellow,’ and Alexandra always replied: ‘Of course, Adam, I’m sure he’s marvellous.’ For himself Adam permitted quite different judgements: the political set-up was composed of conspirators and swine. But even then his attack never coincided with Alexandra’s. He was out to dispraise when she praised, to commend where she chose to denigrate. It was like a game of catch in which they turned and twisted in pursuit of each other and neither managed to hold the other. Even on this minor occasion, the tension and the impassable barrier had to be there.

  Mark drank more than the rest of them, nourishing his boredom. It tugged at his sleepy eyelids and bleared his long face like the onset of a sneeze. He shifted in his chair, long-legged and uncomfortable, clutching his knees. He watched the others as though they were part of something he had been staring at for a long time, part of the longueurs of his ambition. Across him, Adam’s gaze held Alexandra’s, while she talked on and on. Alexandra dominated. She had not had much education and all the confidence of the upper class was needed for such set-to’s with men on their own level. Of course, Adam said he adored her. Rose disliked her, felt herself diminished by her.

  Mark murmured ‘Darling!’ once again at something of Alexandra’s. His gaze flickered away to Rose. Their eyes met.

  Rose was scared, and blushed. The boredom had gone from Mark’s face and instead there was a glitter of malice there. He was beckoning to her to enter a conspiracy against the other two. Because of Adam she did not want any part of it, but suddenly she began to feel a good deal more cheerful about Alexandra.

  They had finished the cups of beetroot soup. Adam grew serious. He had embarked on his usual discourse, his effort to draw his country’s boundaries in the empyrean above the shifting lines history had always provided. Even Alexandra could not pursue him as far as this region. Later, when he was portentously comparing the nation to his favourite, Sir Gawain, summoned to a mysterious destiny by a headless figure out of myth, she only muttered: ‘Bully for Sir Gawain!’ Adam smiled awkwardly and Rose was anguished because he might not know what Alexandra meant. He might be made fun of and she could not help him, though she ached to touch him and touch him again.

  She shot her hand over her glass as the waiter tried to refill it. Adam’s glass was refilled: he upended it and went on talking. Ah, couldn’t he see how boring he had become? ‘People will not want to listen when Gomulka is saying that the blanket is not big enough to cover us all. They want to see the blanket flying up there, like the flag.’

  Mark emitted a sort of plopping sound. A single word, unvoiced: ‘Balls.’

  Rose, the only one of them to hear it, felt his knee press against hers.

  His eye followed a line down Rose’s cheek and neck until he could spy out the warm corner above the collar bone, the little pit that fell between the breasts. Everything else retreated into a dim and echoing haze of alcohol, the clang of metal trays in the kitchen, the waiters’ feet padding on the red drugget, the squeal of a door opening on to sunlight brilliant enough to make you sneeze.

  When Mark emerged from this contemplation, Alexandra was watching him, fierce and nasty.

  ‘Our car will be waiting fo
r us,’ Adam said at last.

  And Mark: ‘Rose, what a pity you can’t come along with us.’

  And Alexandra: ‘Let’s go upstairs and pee, shall we, Rose?’

  *

  Released at last from the necessary constraints of the hotel dining-room, Rose began to chatter unwisely.

  She walked round the Tathams’ suite, examining, with more attention than they deserved, the prints of old Biala Gora on the walls, fingering the ungainly pottery statuettes and squares of folk-weave which are the official decoration of such places. ‘It’s not too bad, really, is it?’ She peered through the net curtains at the cobbled street below, then turned back and began to wander round the room again. ‘I must admit I’m fascinated by the micr – you know. Where do you think they hide them?’

  Alexandra did not answer.

  Rose was crushed: she had made a tactless remark, perhaps one which would be recorded, if They were listening. Less assured, she crossed over to the brass bedstead. ‘These mattresses are pretty hard, aren’t they? Why do they always make them in three bits, so you always get the gap just underneath you? And this sort of eiderdown thing, either too hot or too cold.’

  These remarks, too, were left to die out.

  Alexandra, who was seated in front of a mirror, knew how to treat another person’s effort at conversation as though it were an inevitable mechanical noise. She bent down and straightened a stocking.

  Awkward and unwelcome, Rose hung on. It had been ridiculous to expect good will of any sort from Alexandra, and rather careless to have let herself into this position at all. But somehow a worse thing was that Adam and the Tathams were now going away and leaving her forsaken and stranded in Biala Gora. It was not flattering to the Rudowskis to think this, but it seemed to be true.

  Alexandra stood up and looked out of the window.

  ‘Adam is waiting for Mark and me,’ she said. It was the only thing she said in that room, but when they were out in the corridor and she had locked the door, she went on in her usual chiming voice: ‘I’m so glad you like Adam. Mark and I are quite fond of him. It’s so nice to be spied on by somebody who’s so like one, don’t you know.’