Free Winter Garden by Beryl Bainbridge

was dead.’
    ‘Good God,’ cried Ashburner. ‘What do you take me for?’
    ‘Or in prison,’ ventured Enid. ‘At least you’d know where she was.’
    There was a second, unexplained halt when they reached the outskirts of the city. They drove into the courtyard of a block of flats. Ashburner, fancying that they had reached their destination, was manoeuvring himself to follow Olga Fiodorovna from the car when she shut the door in his face. She turned once to look back, hand held up like a traffic controller, and then, silk scarf fluttering in the wind, ran across the yard. The driver took out his cigarettes.
    ‘She’s always on the go, isn’t she?’ remarked Ashburner, irritated by the high-handed manner in which the interpreter had departed.
    ‘She’s probably visiting her Mamotchka,’ Enid said. ‘She’s having a spot of bother with her at the moment.’ Enid herself had been bothered by her own mother for many years. ‘I suppose,’ she said, looking out at the bleak vista of concrete and snow, ‘that you get on well with your Mum.’
    ‘Not too badly,’ admitted Ashburner. ‘Though she’s frightfully shy.’ He was telling Enid how his wife still went down with raging headaches on the anniversary of her mother’s birthday when the driver, who had been slumped contentedly in a cloud of smoke, sat up abruptly and stubbed out his cigarette. A car was nosing into the courtyard behind them.
    ‘After her mother’s death’, said Ashburner, ‘she perked up for a year or two. She wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. I sent a wreath of course. But then her Uncle Robert died and she became depressed again.’
    ‘The uncle with the money?’ asked Enid. The light was going from the sky. She watched as two men, one carrying a suitcase wrapped in canvas against the weather, passed the windows of the car.
    ‘I don’t understand depressions,’ said Ashburner. ‘Do you?’
    ‘Only when my work’s not going well,’ Enid said.
    Ashburner gathered she was alluding to her art; Nina often referred to her painting as work. ‘I’m afraid I’m far too active to give way to it,’ he said. ‘I’m always doing things, mending sash cords, making fires.’ But even as he spoke a peculiar feeling of lassitude stole over him. He peered out of the window of the car as though from the interior of a cave and had the greatest difficulty raising his eyes from the footprints in the darkening snow. A little church music would have reduced him to tears. He was far too worldly to imagine that his mood had anything to do with his separation from Nina. What I’m experiencing, he told himself, isn’t unhappiness but fatigue.

10
    The studio of the illustrator Andrei Petrov was housed in a five-storey building surrounded by trees and set beside a frozen lake. There was a bicycle shed in the grounds and the statue of a man bending down to admire a leaping fish.
    The short journey from car to entrance hall was sufficient to chill Ashburner to the bone. In the lift he thought he heard someone groaning but it was merely the chafing of the ancient cable.
    Olga Fiodorovna escorted them to the artist’s door and then, explaining that she had visited Mr Petrov on numerous other occasions, left them. She didn’t use the lift. They heard her running down the stone stairs.
    The room they entered was more like an English bedsitter than a studio. Though there was a couch, table and chairs, and a small kitchen half-concealed behind a curtain, it contained neither easel nor drawing board. A collection of cotton squares printed with koala bears, maps of Tasmania and kangaroos, some framed behind glass, some stretched on wooden battens, hung on the wall above the fireplace. The artist’s wife, a motherly woman in a pinny, was cutting a chocolate cake into portions. Introduced to the visitors by her husband, her hand shook noticeably and she was too bashful to look them candidly in the eye. Andrei Petrov, though more confident than his