“If people can be given numbers, like marks in school,” she said, “then children are zero.” She was enveloped in a fur cloak, out of which her hands and arms emerged as if the fur had dissolved in certain places. She was pink with wine and sun. The old man’s blue eyes were paler than hers. “Zero.” She held up thumb and forefinger in an O. “I was there with my five darling zeros while he … You are probably wondering if I was ever happy. At the beginning, in the first days, when I thought he would give me interesting books to read, books that would change all my life. Riri,” she said, shading her eyes, “the cake and the ice cream were, I am afraid, the end of things for the moment. Could I ask you to clear the table for me?”
“I don’t at home.” Nevertheless he made a wobbly pile of dishes and took them away and did not come back. They heard him, indoors, starting all over: “ ‘Go, went, gone.’ ”
“I have only half a memory for dates,” she said. “I forget my children’s birthdays until the last minute and have to send them telegrams. But I know that day.…”
“The twenty-sixth of May,” he said. “What I forget is the year.”
“I know that I felt young.”
“You were. You are young,” he said.
“Except that I was forty if a day.” She glanced at the hands and wrists emerging from her cloak as if pleased at their whiteness. “The river was so sluggish, I remember. And the willows trailed in the river.”
“Actually, there was a swift current after the spring rains.”
“But no wind. The clouds were heavy.”
“It was late in the afternoon,” he said. “We sat on the grass.”
“On a raincoat. You had thought in the morning those clouds meant rain.”
“A young man drowned,” he said. “Fell out of a boat. Funny, he didn’t try to swim. So people kept saying.”
“We saw three firemen in gleaming metal helmets. They fished for him so languidly — the whole day was like that. They had a grappling hook. None of them knew what to do with it. They kept pulling it up and taking the rope from each other.”
“They might have been after water lilies, from the look of them.”
“One of them bailed out the boat with a blue saucepan. I remember that. They’d got that saucepan from the restaurant.”
“Where we had lunch,” he said. “Trout, and a coffee cream pudding. You left yours.”
“It was soggy cake. But the trout was perfection. So was the wine. The bridge over the river filled up slowly with holiday people. The three firemen rowed to shore.”
“Yes, and one of them went off on a shaky bicycle and came back with a coil of frayed rope on his shoulders.”
“The railway station was just behind us. All those people on the bridge were waiting for a train. When the firemen’s boat slipped off down the river, they moved without speaking from one side of the bridge to the other, just to watch the boat. The silence of it.”
“Like the silence here.”
“This is planned silence,” she said.
Riri played back his own voice. A tinny, squeaky Riri said, “ ‘Go, went, gone. Eat, ate, eaten. See, saw, sen.’ ”
“ ‘Seen’!” called his grandmother from the balcony. “ ‘Seen,’ not ‘sen.’ His mother made exactly that mistake,” she said to the old man. “Oh, stop that,” she said. He was crying. “Please, please stop that. How could I have left five children?”
“Three were grown,” he gasped, wiping his eyes.
“But they didn’t know it. They didn’t know they were grown. They still don’t know it. And it made six children, counting him.”
“The secretary mothered him,” he said. “All he needed.”
“I know, but you see she wasn’t his wife, and he liked saying to strangers ‘my wife,’ ‘my wife this,’ ‘my wife that.’ What is it, Riri? Have you come to finish doing the thing I asked?”
He moved close to the table. His round glasses made him look desperate and stern. He said, “Which room is mine!” Darkness had gathered round him in spite of the sparkling sky and a row of icicles gleaming and melting in the most dazzling possible light. Outrage, a feeling that consideration had been Wanting — that was how homesickness had overtaken him. She held his hand (he did not resist — another sign of his misery) and together they explored the apartment. He saw it all — every picture and cupboard and doorway — and in the end it was he who decided that Mr. Aiken must keep the spare room and he, Riri, would be happy on the living-room couch.
The old man passed them in the hall; he was obviously about to rest on the very bed he had just been within an inch of losing. He carried a plastic bottle of Evian. “Do you like the bland taste of water?” he said.
Riri looked boldly at his grandmother and said, “Yes,” bursting into unexplained and endless-seeming laughter. He seemed to feel a relief at this substitute for impertinence. The old man laughed too, but broke off, coughing.
At half past four, when the windows were as black as the sky in the painting of tulips and began to reflect the lamps in a disturbing sort of way, they drew the curtains and had tea around the table. They pushed Riri’s books and belongings to one side and spread a cross-stitched tablecloth. Riri had hot chocolate, a croissant left from breakfast and warmed in the oven, which made it deliriously greasy and soft, a slice of lemon sponge cake, and a banana. This time he helped clear away and even remained in the kitchen, talking, while his grandmother rinsed the cups and plates and stacked them in the machine.
The old man sat on a chair in the hall struggling with snow boots. He was going out alone in the dark to post some letters and to buy a newspaper and to bring back whatever provisions he thought were required for the evening meal.
“Riri, do you want to go with Mr. Aiken? Perhaps you should have a walk.”
“At home I don’t have to.”
His grandmother looked cross; no, she looked worried. She was biting something back. The old man had finished the contention with his boots and now he put on a scarf, a fur-lined coat, a fur hat with earflaps, woollen gloves, and he took a list and a shopping bag and a different walking stick, which looked something like a ski pole. His grandmother stood still, as if dreaming, and then (addressing Riri) decided to wash all her amber necklaces. She fetched a wicker basket from her bedroom. It was lined with orange silk and filled with strings of beads. Riri followed her to the bathroom and sat on the end of the tub. She rolled up her soft sleeves and scrubbed the amber with laundry soap and a stiff brush. She scrubbed and rinsed and then began all over again.
“I am good at things like this,” she said. “Now, unless you hate to discuss it, tell me something about your school.”
At first he had nothing to say, but then he told her how stupid the younger boys were and what they were allowed to get away with.
“The younger boys would be seven, eight?” Yes, about that. “A hopeless generation?”
He wasn’t sure; he knew that his class had been better.
She reached down and fetched a bottle of something from behind the bathtub and they went back to the sitting room together. They put a lamp between them, and Irina began to polish the amber with cotton soaked in turpentine. After a time the amber began to shine. The smell made him homesick, but not unpleasantly. He carefully selected a necklace when she told him he might take one for his mother, and he rubbed it with a soft cloth. She showed him how to make the beads magnetic by rolling them in his palms.