“Of course. But please, there is no problem if you need to finish. I can wait.”
“I’m finished.” She turned back to her screen, saved her mail as a draft, and began to log out.
“How much is this café?” he asked. “How much to use the Internet?”
“Yes.”
“It’s four pounds for the first hour and then one pound for every half-hour after that.”
“It’s expensive.”
“Yes.”
“People must be millionaires in London.”
“I know.” The computer dropped offline. She swiveled in her chair and stood up. Now she noticed his coat and his backpack on the floor behind him.
He said, “How much is the subway to here?”
“The tube? It depends where you are traveling from.”
“Harrow Road.”
“There’s no station there—you have to use Warwick Avenue, or Westbourne Grove is better. Three quid, something like that. Too much.” They stood in line to pay. “How did you get here?”
“I walked.”
She had forgotten how seriously poor the vast majority of Russians were. Even those on student visas were way below Western student poor. But the real Russians, the sixty-dollars-a-month Russians, simply couldn’t survive a single day in London without immediate work. And thereafter they continued to be staggered by how much Londoners casually spent and the stuff they chose to spend it on. Isabella retuned her sensitivity. She realized too that she had suddenly developed butterflies. Too many reasons to be anxious, perhaps.
It was becoming colder—the sleet thickening, the ragged wind snatching at the door. She had not been to the Petrel for five, maybe six years, since before she moved to New York. As she remembered, the pub used to have a full-sized old-fashioned pool table and regulars talking football and what-happened-to-Frank. It had been an unpretentious, unpremeditated pub: dog, London Pride, and piano. So she was surprised, and then not surprised, as she went in, to see that it had used the intervening years to convert itself into a faux-authentic, faux-gourmet place. She realized she was torturing herself again. Or maybe it was simply because she was seeing the place through his eyes. She turned. He was standing just inside the door, tall in his coat, carrying his backpack in front of him a little awkwardly, taking the measure of the place. She felt a prickle of shame, shame that she had bought him here; and embarrassment too, that he might think she liked this sort of phoniness. As ever, she overcompensated and went back toward him too quickly, eager to cut down the distance between them.
“Christ, it’s busy,” she said. “They’ve changed everything since I was here last. Do you want to stick that over there? We can grab that little table by the window.” It occurred to her that he must be about her own age. “I’ll get them. What do you want to drink?”
He didn’t smile or soften. “Just water.”
She absorbed her first real impression of his personality—cold, distant, unyielding. She nearly asked him still or sparkling, but checked herself in time.
“Water—are you sure? Not a glass of wine or something?”
“Or tea. Tea. If there is tea here.”
“There will be… I’ll ask.”
She set off to the bar determined to procure tea, telling herself to relax. She could feel curiosity writhing in her blood alongside the overexcitement. (How did this man know her mother? What when how why who?) What was the matter with her? She told herself to calm down. Half of her childhood friends had been Russian. Even now there were twenty people she would love to see the next time she was there… An awful thought occurred to her as she eased her way past a group of men arguing about ski resorts: maybe now that her mother was dead, she wouldn’t be going back to St. Petersburg anymore; maybe there was no reason to; maybe now that her mother was dead, her connection with Russia itself was dead, severed. She had not considered this until now. She pushed forward and reached the counter. Tea. She wondered whether he was a teetotaler or merely too proud to ask for a drink when he knew he could not buy her one in return. Tea—tea would do it. How did this man know her mother? What when how why who? Something that mattered. Something that counted. In all of this.
“So how long are you in London?”
“I do not know. It depends.”
“Are you working here?”
“No.”
“Is this your first visit?” She knew already that it was.
“Yes,” he said. “Do you have your brother’s new address? I must write it down.”
“Yes, of course.”
He pulled a small exercise book from his jacket pocket. She told him the number on Grafton Terrace and watched him write it down in English. She was used to this curtness. Not with the boys in the trendy Petersburg bars, but with the men she had met with Yana in the crumbling table-football-one-beer-and-one-vodka bars away from the center, away from the tourists. Their definitiveness wasn’t rudeness; rather, they simply didn’t do small talk. There was talent, there was beauty, and there was power; either you had one of the three or you talked about one of the three or, by and large, you shut up.
She tried another line. “Where are you staying?”
He replaced his book. “I was staying at this place near Harrow Road.”
“And where now?”
“It was full of scum.”
She registered this but did not know where to take it, so she said, “Your English is way better than my Russian.” She intended genuinely to compliment him, but it sounded patronizing.
He didn’t notice, or he didn’t care. “I have a very good teacher. An Englishman. I have his letter.”
The waitress arrived with the tea and they broke off. She had ordered some bread and olives because she felt awkward ordering nothing but tea. Now she felt awkward that she had ordered something besides the tea. The carefully careless patterns of the balsamic vinegar in the olive oil were somehow ingratiating, insulting, inappropriate. Then she noticed that the waitress caught Arkady’s eye as she set the pot down. And that he met it steadily, without looking away. It was a shock to see the waitress blush.
Too hastily, she asked, “Whereabouts do you live—in Petersburg?”
“Yes.” He misunderstood.
The waitress left.
“I meant where in the city—which part?”
“I live on Vasilevsky.”
She waited for the usual “Do you know St. Petersburg, have you been there a lot?” But it didn’t come. “And do you work there?”
“I have worked. But now I am a student.”
“At the university?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
He looked at her directly. “At the conservatory.”
Finally he was volunteering something.
“Oh, yes, you said. Of course. You are a musician. You’re studying music?”
“Yes.” And then he added, “All my life.”
Simply, fatuously, disarmed by his avowal, she said, “I love music.”
“Do you play an instrument?” he asked.
“I used to play the violin. But only as an amateur.”
“Can you play… can you play a Mozart violin sonata?”
Straight to it again. “No. Yes—I used to. But I am really bad.”
“If you play a Mozart violin sonata, you are not so bad.”
“I haven’t played for years.”
His face almost softened. “There is no bad. We are all students. We find the pulse. We make the first note. We start the journey.”
She could feel the thawing that the subject had brought them. And maybe it was the tea, but her tiredness finally left her and with it the troubles of this most awful day. The rest of the pub faded away and her naturalness returned and she was concentrating again, meeting his eyes with her own.