After my experience with Katya I slept very deeply. Next morning I found that she was still there, still as tender as she had been, but anxious for me to leave because she stood to lose business. I asked when I could return. She said that I could come and see her the next day, when she had restored her routine. It might seem strange to my readers that I did not feel jealousy towards her customers. I never sought to analyse my feelings. My love for Katya, with her small, boyish body, her wealth of black hair, her humane and profoundly benign eyes, her delicate lips and fingers, was one of the purest loves I ever knew. Even when I saw her with her ‘friends’ I felt nothing but comradeship towards her. I do not think, in spite of what was to happen, that I managed to discover quite such a balanced relationship again. My life with Mrs Cornelius was altogether more complex and her role towards me, in the early days at least, more maternal.
My meeting with Mrs Cornelius came only a day or so after my first experience of sexual intercourse. My toothache had grown worse and Uncle Semya said I must have the best dental treatment. Again the dentist, Cornelius, was mentioned. Wanda must take me at once to Preobrazhenskaya (one of Odessa’s most fashionable streets) where the tooth would be pulled. My debauched life had left me pale, with bloodshot eyes. I think he believed my toothache to be worse than it was. He did not want the responsibility of telling my mother that I had, perhaps, poisoned my jaw.
In a smart Steiger, the driver a stiff silhouette on the seat in front, Wanda and I drove through foggy, autumn streets. The wheels rolled over rustling leaves which had become gold as the sea-fog turned yellow. The Odessa fog muted all the colours of the season. It muffled the sounds of the ships in the harbour and the traffic in the main boulevards. We passed the cemetery, clad in a canary shroud. Shadowy ladies in their brown autumn coats and hats, and gentlemen also in darker colours, anticipated the approach of winter.
By the time the cab turned into the long, straight avenue of Preobrazhenskaya I felt extremely lordly in my new three-piece suit, with white shirt, stiff collar and cravat, like a Count on his way to visit a Prince. My nervousness of the dentist had partly been offset by a soupçon of cocaine, taken just before we left, and partly by a sense of my own elegance. We disembarked outside an impressive building (it was in the district close to the Theatre and University) just as sunlight began to fall again upon the city. We entered a lobby and took a flight of stone, curving stairs up to a door which bore a brass plate announcing
We were expected, but there was another visitor in the well-appointed waiting-room. She seemed very much a lady of fashion, in her mutton-chop sleeves and her hat with fruit and flowers on it, with a little veil. She smelled of expensive perfume. She was, I now realise, only about Wanda’s age. But she had a romantic, foreign air to her.
She had not, it seemed, been expected. The dentist’s receptionist was saying as much when we entered. I cannot reproduce the lady’s wonderful English so will leave that to someone else. She seemed very confident as she stood in the middle of the room, holding her salmon-pink sunshade in one hand, her matching reticule in the other. She was dressed almost entirely in pink with some white decorations and, of course, the various colours of her hat. She was a picture from one of my French or English magazines. The feathers swept round, like the train of a savage monarch, as she turned to look at us. She had blonde hair (not in those days very fashionable) and a pink and white face, with a little paint on it. She smiled down on us, although she was not particularly tall, and it might have been the Tsarina herself condescending to notice me. She was speaking English, as I say, and seemed a little put out by the stupidity of the receptionist who had addressed her in German and then in French.
‘I told yer. I’ve come ter see me cuz.’
I recognised the English words, if not exactly the sense of what she said. ‘The lady is English,’ I informed the girl who, in apron and uniform, looked like a baffled sheepdog. I removed my hat. ‘Can I be of assistance, mademoiselle?”
The English girl was delighted. She seemed to relax. ‘Could you inform this stupid cow,’ she said, ‘that I am ‘ere ter visit me Cousin Haitch - Mr Cornelius. It is Miss Honoria Cornelius, who he’ll doubtless remembah as the little girl ‘e used ter dandle on ‘is knee. I ‘ave been stranded in ongfortunate circs - circumstances - and need ter see ‘im in private.’
‘You have not come to receive his professional ministrations, my lady?’
‘Do what?’ I remember her saying. This puzzled me. She added: ‘Come again?’ I gathered she had not understood me.
‘You have nothing wrong with your teeth?’
