The Birds Fall Down Read Online Free Page A

by the softness of his robe. It was some kind of wool, but soft as silk. He let her go, then caught her hands. “Were you anxious to see us? Did you have a good journey? Did the Channel make your mother ill?”
    He wanted to know none of these things. He was testing her Russian, making sure that her mother saw to it that she spoke it as well as she spoke English. It did not matter that he and his wife often spoke French. If she spoke Russian, it would mean that his blood was somehow bound to Russia. She answered as quickly as she could get the words out, “We have been speaking of nothing else for days. The journey did not seem long at all. Mother was better than I have ever known her on the sea.”
    But she thought, in English, “How I wish I was not here. I wanted to come, but now I wish I was in Radnage Square.” These walls were lined from floor to ceiling with pictures in swollen gilt frames, shallow portraits of bearded and mustachio’d generals with giant chests barred and crossed with insignia, abundant women wearing high tiaras and carrying wide feather fans, landscapes showing larches and birches and pines standing lifeless as metal among their cobalt shadows on the snow. On the chimney-piece a huge clock showed the time in gross diamond figures on a gold globe fixed to a lapis lazuli firmament, and it was flanked by lines of small objects such as a chrysoberyl bull-dog with ruby eyes and a number of gold and silver jewel-studded Easter eggs. Several small tables were covered with cloisonné jardinières and others with glass tops contained little rosebushes made of coral and jade, and many miniatures and snuff-boxes, all repellent to interest. On each side of the fireplace stood a malachite vase as high as herself. All these things were getting old, as people get old; and bad taste seemed present, as a separate entity, like dust. Yet it had been delicious to touch her grandfather’s robe. It was as different from ordinary material as something sung from something spoken. In a way she liked her grandfather. Once she had seen children crawling under a circus-tent so that they could see the elephant, and she would have done that to see her grandfather; and what she liked in him was the upside-downness of him, as this inverted luxury which gave him an everyday possession—for she supposed this robe was just a dressing-gown—which was uniquely exquisite, while the pictures and bric-à-brac round him were dull as china dogs and shell picture-frames from Margate.
    But it was infuriating of him to pay no attention to Tania’s twice-repeated question, “Father, where is Mamma?” He simply went on trying out Laura’s Russian, holding her hands powerless in his, staring at her, and telling her that her accent was good, that she held herself well, that he was glad that she had inherited the family golden hair. Tania exclaimed softly, “Everything seems to go wrong at the same time,” and took off her coat and held it in her arms as if it were a baby or a little dog or her own anxiety. Laura felt frightened to see her mother suddenly becoming young and defenceless, even younger than she was herself. She pulled her hands out of her grandfather’s grasp and asked him loudly, “Where’s Grandmamma?”
    Nikolai seemed to think the question odd. “Why, child,” he said kindly, “she has been pacing up and down her room all day, actually crying with eagerness for your arrival and praying that your mother should not be too sea-sick.”
    “Is she there now?” asked Tania.
    “How should I know?” he asked in indulgent rebuke. “She might be. In any case, they will have told her that you are here, and she’ll be coming in a minute. Sit down and rest, it’s you and not she who have been doing the travelling.”
    “I must go and find her,” said Tania, going towards the door. But she halted, breathed deeply, and nerved herself to ask: “How is she? Is she well?”
    “Is she well? Really I can’t say that,”