Somehow, in the years that followed, the shadowy presences interested him as much as the famous ones, the figures who had not become known, who had failed, or who had never planned to flourish. His visitor had been married to the Prince Oblisky. The prince had a reputation for being stern and distant; the fate of Russia and his purposeful exile concerned him more than the evening’s amusement and the glamorous company who stood around. The princess was Russian too, but she had lived most of her life in France. Around her and her husband there were always hints and rumours and suggestions. It was part of the time and the place, he thought. Everyone he knew carried with them the aura of another life which was half secret and half open, to be known about but not mentioned. In those years, you searched each face for what it might unwittingly disclose and you listened carefully for nuances and clues. New York and Boston had not been like that, and in London, when he finally came to live there, people allowed themselves to believe that you had no hidden and secret self unless you emphatically declared to the contrary.
He remembered the shock when he first came to know Paris, the culture of easy duplicity, the sense he got of these men and women, watched over by the novelists, casually withholding what mattered to them most.
He had never loved the intrigue. Yet he liked knowing secrets, because not to know was to miss almost everything. He himself learned never to disclose anything, and never even to acknowledge the moment when some new information was imparted, to act as though a mere pleasantry had been exchanged. The men and women in the salons of literary Paris moved like players in a game of knowing and not knowing, pretence and disguise. He had learned everything from them.
He found the princess a seat, brought her extra cushions, and then offered her a different chair, or indeed a chaise longue which might be more comfortable.
‘At my age,’ she smiled at him, ‘nothing is comfortable.’
He stopped moving about the room and turned to look at her. He had learned that when he quietly fixed his calm grey eyes on somebody they too became calm; they realized, or so he thought, that what they said next should be serious in some way, that the time for the casual play of half-talk had come to an end.
‘I have to go back to Russia,’ she said in slow, carefully pronounced French. ‘That is what I have to do. When I say go back, I talk as though I have been there before, and yes I have, but not in any way that means anything to me. I have no desire to see Russia again, but he insists that I stay there, that I leave France for good.’
As she spoke she smiled, as she had always done, but now there was anguish and a sort of puzzlement in her face. She had brought the past into the room with her, and for him now, in these years after the death of his parents and his sister, any reminder of a time that was over brought with it a terrible and heavy melancholy. Time would not relent, and when he was young, he had never imagined the pain that loss would bring, pain that only work and sleep could keep at bay now.
Her soft voice and her easy manners made it clear that she had not changed. Her husband was known to treat her badly. He had problems with estates. She began to talk now about some remote estate to which she was going to be banished.
The January light was liquid and silky in the room. He sat and listened. He knew that the Prince Oblisky had left the son by his first marriage in Russia, and had gruffly spent his life in Paris. There was always a whiff of political intrigue about him, a sense that he counted somehow in the future of Russia, and that he was waiting for his moment.
‘My husband has said it is time for us all to go back to Russia, the homeland.’ He has become a reformer. He says that Russia will collapse if it does not reform. I told him that Russia collapsed a long time ago, but I did not remind him that he had very little interest in reform when he was not in debt. His first wife’s family have brought up the child and they want nothing to do with him.’
‘Where will you live?’ he asked her.
‘I will live in a crumbling mansion, and half-crazed peasants will have their noses up against the glass of my windows, if there is glass still in the windows. That is where I will live.’
‘And Paris?’
‘I have to give up everything, the house, the servants, my friends, my whole life. I will freeze to death or I will die of boredom. It will be a race between the two.’
‘But why?’ he asked gently.
‘He says I have wasted all his money. I have sold the house and I have spent days burning letters and crying and throwing away clothes. And now I am saying goodbye to everyone. I am leaving London tomorrow and I am going to spend one month in Venice. Then I will travel to Russia. He says that others are returning too, but they are going to St Petersburg. That is not what he has chosen for me.’
She spoke with feeling, but as he watched her he sensed that he was listening to one of his actors enjoying her own performance. Sometimes she spoke as though she were telling an amusing anecdote about somebody else.
‘I’ve seen everyone I know who’s still alive and I’ve read over all the letters of those who are dead. With some people I’ve done both. I burned Paul Joukowsky’s letters and then I saw him. I did not expect to see him. He is ageing badly. I did not expect that either.’
She caught his eye for one second and it was as though a flash of clear summer light had come into the room. Paul Joukowsky was almost fifty now, he calculated; they had not met for many years. No one had ever come like this and mentioned his name.
Henry was careful to try to speak immediately, ask a question, change the subject. Perhaps there was something in the letters, a stray sentence, or the account of a conversation or a meeting. But he did not think so. Perhaps his visitor was letting him know for nostalgia’s sake what his aura had suggested in those years, his own designed self. His attempt to be earnest, hesitant and polite had not fooled women like her who watched his full mouth and the glance of his eyes and instantly understood it all. They said, of course, nothing, just as she was saying nothing now, merely a name, an old name that rang in his ears. A name that, once, had meant everything to him.
‘But surely you will return?’
‘That is the promise he has extracted from me. That I will not return, that I will stay in Russia.’
The tone was dramatic, and he suddenly saw her on the stage, moving casually, talking as though she put no thought into it, and then throwing an arrow, a single line intended to hit home. From what she had said, he understood for the first time what had happened. She must have done something very wrong to place herself back in his power. In her circle, there would be knowledge and speculation. Some would know, and those who did not know would be able to guess. Just as she let him guess now.
These thoughts preoccupied him, and he found that he watched the princess, carefully weighing up what she had been saying, while thinking how he could use this. He must write it down as soon as she left. He hoped to hear nothing more, none of the explicit details, but as she continued speaking, it was clear that she was frightened and his sympathy was once more aroused.
‘You know, others have gone back and the reports are excellent. There is new life in St Petersburg, but as I told you, that is not where I am going. And Daudet, whom I met at a party, said the most foolish thing to me. Perhaps he thought that it might console me. He told me that I would have my memories. But my memories are of no use to me. I told him that I never had any interest in memories. I love today and tomorrow, and if I am in form I also love the day after tomorrow. Last year is gone, who cares about last year?’