A Glove Shop In Vienna

The Brides of Tula

I suppose for everybody there is a country of the heart, a place where it all comes together: devotion and delight, intensity and awareness — the feeling of being the kind of person one was meant to be.

For the lucky ones it comes with marriage and parenthood: a sunlit pleasance, well-weeded, guarded from trespassers and those we trespass against. For others it is a dark place, a night country of station waiting-rooms, hotel bedrooms and the torture of the silent telephone, Some, I suppose, never find it-Brooke’s ‘wanderers in the middle mist’ — or cannot reach it, lost in a thicket of words like ‘honour’ and ‘duty’, which no one any longer understands, but which fasten themselves, nonetheless, like barbed wire round the spirit.

But what if there are two countries? What if there is no bridge?

I was twenty when I married John and straight away I knew it was going to be all right. Oh, it was rough sometimes on the surface; he was on a research grant at a west country university, working on animal behaviour, and when Vanessa was born and then Daniel two years later we were very hard up. But all through the sex-and-money rows, the battles to adjust my manic sociability with his need for solitude, we were all right, our roots steadily twisting together down beneath it all. John was gentle and considerate, yet in no way soft. He supported me, encouraged my work (I was just starting as a freelance writer) and laughed at me. As for our children — ah, glory, there were never children like ours! We lived in a flat in a shabby terrace of Georgian houses that faced south over the city. There was a wisteria snaking from the basement to support the narrow balcony where I sat on summer afternoons telling stories to my blonde and giggly daughter, my dreamy, green-eyed son. We had friends too, real ones who allowed us to walk in and out of their lives and whose dramas and crises became our own.

A good life, you see. No excuses for what happened. No alibi.

We had been married nearly seven years when a great-uncle of mine died and left me five hundred pounds. That September John had a conference in Vienna. My widowed mother was always glad to take the children, so I went abroad by myself and I went — I never thought of any other place — to Russia.

I had signed on with an Art Lovers’ Tour and I struck lucky. They were nice, the Art Lovers: amiable, outgoing Canadians festooned with cameras, north-country schoolteachers who knew things… We flew to Moscow and in the shabby Intourist bus assigned to us were conveyed to Prince Yussupoff’s palace at Archangel, gazed reverently at Pushkin’s portrait in the Tretyakorskaya gallery, marvelled at the icons in the Novo-devichy Convent.

Then, on the third day…

We had done a sprint through the Kremlin Armoury (the turquoise and tourmaline throne of Boris Godunov, the saddle of lapis lazuli that Catherine the Great gave to Potemkin…) and were crossing Red Square, making for the row of buses parked by the Spassky Gate.

There were tourists everywhere. A party of Chinese businessmen hissed with despair as a fat German housewife walked — at the instant of camera-click — into their carefully posed group photograph; a gaggle of Swedish women gymnasts bayed for their courier and in the middle of the square, a tragic figure in a sea of cobbles — an elderly, blue-rinsed American — threw back her head and wailed: ‘Oh, gee, I’ve lost my tour!’

Pausing to comfort her, I all but lost my own. The Art Lovers had reached the row of buses and climbed aboard. And the bus was about the start.

I ran, jumped onto the steps and was pulled aboard by a man with arms of steel. Increasing speed, the bus lurched forward and I fell with a crash on to my rescuer.

It was one of my more ethnic periods. Disentangling him from my Aztec beads, my Peruvian saddle-bag, I found that my hair (long and thick and fair- my only beauty) was caught in the button of his jacket. I began simultaneously to apologise and tug.

‘Wait!’

He bent his head and began patiently to extricate the strands. High cheekbones, green eyes, brown hair already thinning a little. I noticed most his hands, which seemed to me very beautiful, and his concentration. He was doing this thing and this thing only.

‘There.’

I could look up now. The bus was full of dark-suited, serious men with a briefcase air. Not an Art Lover in sight.

‘You could, I suppose, be a hitherto undiscovered Bursting Disc Expert?’ His voice was amused and already far too tender. ‘On the other hand you could be on the wrong bus.’

They were a delegation of marine engineers on a trade mission, now on a day’s sightseeing trip to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate three hours’ drive away from Moscow.

‘Oh!’ I was enchanted. Anything to do with Tolstoy was Shangri-la to me. ‘But I must get back to the Art Lovers. They’ll be worried.’

And his voice beside me, very quiet.

‘No!’

What rubbish they talk about love at first sight. Where is it, all that ecstasy, the singing and the gold? It’s terrifying when it happens — a kind of relentless, metallurgical process, some dark thing being forged at unimaginable temperatures in some subterranean furnace of the soul.

We exchanged names: Stefan Grant, Helen Gresham.

Neither of us smiled.

It was at Tula that we first saw the brides. It’s the provincial capital of the district, the city closest to Tolstoy’s estate and the brides were queuing up outside the town hall, rows of them, waiting to get married. The men, stocky with set faces, wore their ordinary, shabby suits but the brides — all of them — were dressed in white. And each one carried a bunch of shaggy, identical flowers — the only flowers to be had, it seemed, in this vast, impoverished land.

‘Asters,’ I said. ‘Look, they’re all carrying asters.’

Stefan turned, smiled.

‘And you,’ he said, touching too briefly the gold band on my left hand. ‘What did you carry on your wedding day?’

‘Oh, roses and stephanotis, much too stiffly wired. Then someone rushed up and said it was unlucky — the red and the white, I mean, and a kind lady gave me her pink carnation and we stuck it in the back. And it was all right, I was lucky.’

‘My wife didn’t carry anything,’ he said. ‘Me, nearly. I had a dreadful hangover.’

We had exchanged marriages. Happy ones. Feeling suddenly safe, we turned to each other and began to talk.

‘Yasnaya Polyana’ means ‘Luminous Meadows’ and it’s a good name. As we spilled out of the bus and began walking up the drive, the meadows really did shimmer with light; the poplars and asters trembled. And the birches… But I’ll come again to the birches.

‘I never thought I’d see it,’ I said. ‘I used… oh, to be Natasha for years and years and years.’

Stefan was beside me. Naturally. Already what I had learnt about him on the bus was ground into my bones. An Austrian mother, a Scottish father… a childhood in a white house by a white strand in the Hebrides. Then the shock of an English boarding-school… one of those maths-and-music brains shunted into engineering. He spoke of his wife, Claire, with pride: a practical, blessedly un-neurotic girl; of his daughter, Toussia, with sensuous delight like someone describing flowers or fruit.

We walked together through the great man’s house: the bentwood chairs, the samovar, the tiny study with The Brothers Karamazov open at the page he had been reading on the day he fled his house to die.

‘A guy who asked the right questions,’ said Stefan. ‘Maybe the answers were wrong, but the questions were right.’

‘He could never bear to wake anyone from sleep,’ I said.

The narrow iron bed, the peasant smock on the coat-stand… and outside now into the grounds to visit Tolstoy’s grave.

And now we came to the birches. In Russia birches are not the slender, inconsequential things they are with us; they’re as tall as redwoods and they grow packed together in shining forests, miles upon hundreds of miles of them, and the Russians are mad about them: crazy. So Tolstoy, naturally, had asked to be buried beneath his birches. A simple grassy mound; no headstone, no inscription.

To this grave, converging from the criss-crossing paths, there came other pilgrims: groups of foreigners with Intourist guides, Russian families on an outing from Moscow, Tatars from Samarkand…

And, then, in the midst of the sightseers, there they were again, white and grave and unmistakable, the Brides of Tula — dozens of them, walking beside their newly-wedded husbands and coming forward one by one to lay their tousled asters on the great man’s grave.

It really got me: the sunlight filtering through the birches, the devout girls, the flowers which we would not, at home, have bothered to pick off a rubbish heap.

‘My mother was drowned,’ said Stefan suddenly, ‘crewing for friends in the Bahamas. I used to think a grave would have helped. I’d have burned the things on it that she loved, as the Chinese do.’

The Chinese?’

He nodded. ‘One day a year. Their New Year. They have a feast on the grave of their dead. They burn… oh, paper money for a miser… toys for a child.’

‘What would you have burned for her?’

‘A bottle of Je Reviens… the score of a Mozart concerto… a Schiaparelli scarf.’

‘And for your wife?’

He grinned. ‘A packet of seeds… a hoe… a novel with a happy ending.’

We were silent, standing too close, looking down at the quiet mound of earth beneath its tousled flowers.

‘And you?’ said Stefan. ‘What about your husband? What would you burn for him?’

It was my turn to smile. ‘A year’s subscription to Ecology; a home-brewing kit: the spare parts of a vintage Riley…’

The Engineers had drifted back to the waiting bus. The brides had gone. Then: ‘On my grave,’ said Stefan very quietly, ‘they would have to make a pyre, I think, and burn…’

He paused, trying not to say it. ^: If I had kept still; if I had only kept absolutely still. But I

moved towards him and he had to finish.

‘You,’ he said. ‘They shall burn you.’

So it began.

Moscow is an ugly city: no props for lovers — no intimate cafes, no cosy bars and at night the hotel corridors guarded by grim females sullenly handing out keys.

None of it mattered. We saw Swan Lake at the Bolshoi and the fat, middle-aged women in the audience held crumpled asters as the brides had done and threw them, at curtain call, on to the stage. We went to the circus and saw a dozen snow-white yaks dancing a saraband, and to a four-hour opera about the love life of an unidentifiable and deeply crazy czar. When Stefan had to join his delegation I waited, shivering like a kitten, in some public park and each time he walked towards me with his quick, predatory gait, I felt a happiness so violent, so idiotically pure that I could not speak but clung to his hand like someone saved from drowning.

On the fifth day after our meeting, the Art Lovers took off for Leningrad. There was no way Stefan could cut the red tape and follow me, but he followed me. It was with him that I stood breathless before the Scythian gold in the Hermitage, with him that I ran through the crazy fountains of Peter the Great’s Summer Palace, with his hand in mine that I heard the Cossacks singing at the Kirov.

Then we flew back to London. One more snatched day. We spent it mostly in the bedroom of a crummy hotel near King’s Gross, talking, talking… frantically garnering the most trivial piece of knowledge against the coming drought. (‘Did you have mumps when you were little? Do you like Dvorak? Modigliani? Gorgonzola cheese?’)

Then he took me to the station and put me on the train. There’s a sort of anaesthesia about a parting like that. One behaves well because it’s so obvious that it’s not going to happen.

Only it happened. We parted. I went home.

John was waiting, relaxed and loving. The children ran shrieking into my arms. My friends phoned and said: ‘Thank God you’re back.’ I took possession of my life, incredibly thankful that I had done no harm, that my hostages were safe. But… ‘Take it,’ said God. ‘Take it and pay for it.’

I began to pay.

We had decided not to call each other, not to write. It seemed to me that battles could be won, ships built with the force I expended on dragging myself past the telephone, on destroying the letters that I scrawled on the edges of shopping lists, the margins of newspapers, making them illegible almost on purpose so as to hide the naked words not from John but from myself. i It will pass, I said. Everyone knows that it passes. Hold on.

Grind it into the ground. You will forget.; Only I didn’t.

It’s a lonely thing, a passionate love. Boring, too. If you want to know why Isolde killed herself, I’ll tell you. She killed herself because when she woke up on the three hundred and ninety-seventh morning of her life with Tristan’s name still on her lips, she said to herself, right this one I’ve had.

The months passed, half a year, more… Then one day there was a letter. In his clear, looped, unfamiliar hand. Stefan wrote of the dearth, the greyness, the sense of a spring running dry. ‘I will do anything you wish, Helen. I have no answers. Only, can it be right to live so joylessly in a world where, perhaps, joy is a kind of duty?’

It was the letter of a man frightened, as I was, by what had been done.

It was now, driven by longing, by guilt, faced once more with a choice, that I went to see Kirsty.

Kirsty was a painter who had a studio converted from an old chapel a few miles out of town. She worked all day but about five she surfaced, drank enormous quantities of tea, went to find her marvellously independent son and (if she had one at the time) her current lover and began to assemble, like a Braque still life, the ingredients for her evening meal. It was at this witching time that I found her, preparing a gigantic Salade Nicoise to the sound of Bartok on the hi-fi, the last of the evening light streaming through the huge windows on to her russet hair and beautifully faded smock.

I took the chopping-board from her and reached for the onions. Thus covered for impending tears (Daniel and Vanessa were outside playing with Kirsty’s Shaun) I began to tell her about Stefan.

‘Oh, Helen, you poor old thing! Mind you, I’ve been expecting something like this. You’ve had that sort of look. And you’ve lost your smugness.’

‘Was I smug?’

‘Oh, well, a very little. Just a touch of “I can’t see what all the fuss is about” when other people came unstuck. Not much of the divine discontent.’

I reached for another onion. ‘Well, there’s plenty now,’ I said, dabbing at my face.

‘What’s he like?’

I said I didn’t really know any more. He had green eyes and said his ‘Rs’ in a funny way because his mother had been Viennese and when we went out to dinner he buttered my roll. Then, reaching new heights of originality I said that without him I was probably going to die.

Kirsty poured out a tumbler of wine and pushed it over. ‘It’s pretty disgusting. I was going to marinate something.’

I drank it down. A mistake. Experiencing suddenly total recall, I began to describe Stefan, gabbling like a mad nun reciting a litany.

When I had finished, Kirsty put down her knife and said; ‘If it’s like that, then you must go to him.’

I stared at her. The Bartok was finished. The children’s voices came from outside.

‘You’re mad, Kirsty. I can’t leave John. I can’t break up our marriage. And the children…’

Kirsty looked at me. ‘It’s tough, I know. But you’re living a lie, aren’t you? Lying beside one man and pining for another. It’s disgusting, that. Children make out. Husbands, too. You should have seen Chris when I left him and within six months he was having a fantastic time with Sarah. And look at Shaun — he’s all right, isn’t he? It’s lies that kill, Helen. Anyone can stand a bit of pain, but there has to be truth.’

I felt suddenly sick with terror.

“We’re all right, John and I. We’re good.’

‘If you’re all right,’ said Kirsty sternly, ‘why are you here howling into my marinade? Why have you lost half a stones since you came back from Russia? Don’t lie, Helen, not to anyone. Lying’s the end.’

I went home, my head ringing with Kirsty’s words. She was right. I had been smug. I did lack courage.

Stefan! If I was brave enough I could be with Stefan.

Four days after my visit to Kirsty, John came home with a little clump of primroses. ‘They’re the first ones. I found them on the bank at Dundry.’ He put them gently into my hand. ‘I’ll bring back a pot tonight. They’ll grow all right, you’ll see.’

I knew then that I would never leave him.

So Stefan’s letter remained unanswered and the dearth began again. I stood it for a couple of weeks and then I went to see Elaine.

Elaine was married to a businessman. She lived in a Regency house filled with Famille Rose china, potted orange trees and exotic au pairs whose emotional disasters were our staple gossip. Her taste, her flair for clothes were a byword. She also handled, with competence and warmth, three sturdy little boys and a jet-setting husband too handsome for his own good.

I usually went to see Elaine on a Sunday morning when Tony went sailing and she sat on a chaise-longue in a series of devastating kaftans, combing her snow-white Shi-Tzu, manicuring her nails and swearing to give up alcohol, dinner parties and sex.

‘Helen, how lovely! I’ll get Conception to make us some coffee.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve just had some. Elaine, I’m in such a mess, I have to talk to you.’

And I began it again, my wail, my litany. ‘I feel so empty and awful without him, as though everything had dried up inside. It seems so wrong to turn your back on something like that.’

‘Oh, I know, darling, it’s quite, quite dreadful loving someone like that, but really rather marvellous too, and in a way it’s what you need.’

I stared at her. ‘What is?’

‘An affair, of course. A bit of fun and excitement. I know you and John are very good and of course it would be madness to leave him, he adores you and he’s such a pet. But with a little spunk and intelligence…’

‘Elaine, I don’t think I could. Even now when I lie to John about something quite unimportant I feel physically sick.’

Elaine twisted the rubber band neatly round the Shi-Tzu’s topknot and set him down. ‘I’m afraid feeling sick’s part of the job, honey. Not sleeping, too. You must make sure you have plenty of sleeping pills, because they do notice if you don’t sleep and being noticed is the unforgivable thing.’

‘It sounds like an illness,’ I said.

‘I suppose it is in a way.’ She smiled. ‘But a lovely one. People are so stupid — all that about loving only one man.’

‘Can you really sort of plough it back into your marriage? The happiness you get from someone else? Like manure?’

‘Heavens, yes. I reckon some of the best times Tony and I have had have been because I felt as guilty as sin.’

‘You make it sound fun,’ I said wistfully.

‘Oh, Helen it is, I can’t tell you what fun. Only you don’t get anything for nothing. You just have to take all the beastly scheming and plotting on the chin. It’s the blabbers that are the criminals — the ones that run to their husbands and confess when the going gets tough.’

I left Elaine’s walking on air. How stupid I had been! It was so easy really. I was going to see Stefan and love him dementedly and everyone would be better for it — everyone!

In three weeks the children broke up. I would send them to my mother. Then I would tell John that I was going to stay wit my cousin, Laura, in Lancaster and spend a whole week with Stefan.

No, not Laura. Laura was coming to stay in the summer and she was terribly fond of John. I couldn’t burden her with a secret like that.

Well, then, I would tell him I needed a week to research a novel. Then I’d have to write a novel, of course, but that did not matter. I’d say it had a Scottish background and then—

And then he would offer to go with me. John had always wanted us to go to Scotland on our own.

Perhaps we’d better just take a weekend first, Stefan and I.

‘John, I thought I’d go up to London for a weekend and see that Islamic Exhibition. Could you cope with the children?’

‘Of course, lovey. Do you good to get away; you’ve been looking a bit peaked. I’ll have something in the oven for you on Sunday night. And how about getting yourself a new coat? I’ve got my examiner’s fee coming for that Ph.D.’

‘But you wanted that for some new binoculars.’

‘Oh, the old ones are all right. Honestly.’

And as he stood there, his eyes shining with delight at my coming treat, I felt my beautiful, sophisticated affair curl up and die beneath my feet.

If I sought out Trudy, the last of my special friends, it was because I knew exactly what she would say and I needed to hear her say it. She was a bit older than the rest of us, a Quaker who taught in a comprehensive school and still had time to bake her own bread, cope cheerfully with a brood of teenage children and secure for her husband the peace he needed to write his history books.

‘Helen, no one can tell another person what to do. But you know what I think. Keeping faith, being truthful, sticking to your bargain — these things weren’t meant to be easy. But without them — well, I don’t think there’s any way forward.’

‘I… must put him out of my mind?’

Trudy looked at me, a fearful pity on her face. ‘Absolutely, love. For ever. No backsliding. Because once you marry and have children you can no longer confine the paying to yourself. Others pay, always, when you grab and cheat. Oh, Helen, don’t look like that. Have a bun, love — have a big cream bun.’

I took it and ate it. A bun from Hades, from an Egyptian tomb.

That night I wrote to Stefan and said no, there was nothing for us and we must not write or meet again. At least that’s what I meant to say. My ‘no’ took five desperate pages. Like everything I did concerning him it became, somehow, an act of love. So I tore it up; did nothing.

Well, it was over now. I had stood up to be counted and the reckoning had gone against me. Kirsty’s way was no use to me, nor Elaine’s, though both were right for them. It was Trudy who spoke for me.

Or was it? One day, waiting on a windy corner for Vanessa to come from school, I remembered my old tutor at college when I went to her with some problem. She was a refugee from Hitler and what she had said was: ‘When you get to heaven, Helen, they won’t ask you if you’ve been Moses or Abraham. They’ll ask you if you have been you.’

Only who was ‘I’? It seemed I did not know.

All that summer I went into myself with a pickaxe, trying to cut out cant, hypocrisy, fear… seeking desperately for a solution which, however tentative, should be my own. Then, at the end of August, I went to a concert. It was Haydn’s The Seasons and when I came out of the concert hall I knew what I was going to do.

Oh, I know it’s a foolish, imperfect answer; I can see a hundred ways in which it might fail. But I’m going to take one day and one day only of every season of the year and spend it with Stefan. It’s my pledge (on the heads of my children, I pledge this) not to grab one hour more, not to write or phone in between or lapse into the furtive delight of an affair. But once in every summer, once in autumn, once in winter and once in spring, I’m going to be with him.

Tomorrow is our first day. A year has passed and it’s autumn once again. No Russian birches this time, no great man’s grave. But I’ll buy a bunch of asters at the station and perhaps, somehow, they’ll know, the Brides of Tula, and pray for me.