The Rose Stone
Page 18
“Joss?” Her young voice shook forlornly.
He did not answer.
“Joss, I love you. I truly do. I always have. I’ll never love anyone but you.”
He shook his head, trapped by hatred and by love.
She caught his hand. “I do! I do! And – oh, Joss – you love me too – don’t you? You wouldn’t have – kissed me like that – if you didn’t. Would you?” The words were desperately uncertain. He tried to move away from her. She caught his hand, clutched it to her meagre breast. “Don’t go. Please – don’t go. I’ll do anything, Joss. Anything you want.” She was whispering, desperate, tears in her voice. She had rehearsed this moment, or one like it, a thousand times in her dreams. She knew, instinctively, it would not come again.
He looked at her, expressionless in the glimmering dark. Light streamed from the windows behind them. Voices were lifted in song.
She watched him, wide-eyed, frightened but stubborn. “Anything you want,” she said again.
Revenge waited, smiling. A favourite only daughter, ruined, disgraced – then another thought, more subtle, obscurely more satisfying and of a lifetime’s duration. Deliberately he reached for her, kissed her again, felt once more the unexpected wildness of her. “Anything?”
“Yes.”
“Would you marry me?”
She froze, looked up at him, mouth open.
“Well?” Already he was half-regretting it.
“You aren’t joking? Oh, Joss – you aren’t teasing me?”
“No.”
Her face lit like a lamp. “Then yes! And yes, and yes, and yes! Oh, Joss!” She clung to him, laughing and crying.
He looked over her head, into darkness.
So it was that, in the same week that his brother Boris stormed into Omdurman with his comrades behind Lord Kitchener to seal yet another victory for Empire, Josef Anatov took to wife Anna Amelia Rose, till death should them part. As they came from church on that bright September day a group of children playing nearby stopped to watch the spectacle, and then, as the last of the brightly decorated carriages bowled off down the street, took up their game again:
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
Who will be my master?
PART THREE
1898-1901
Chapter Nine
It was within a few short hours of her marriage that Anna Anatov began to suspect that her husband did not love her as she loved him; understandably, it took much longer than that for her truly to believe it. The wedding itself was a family event, with none of the grandness of occasion that had characterized the splendid marriage of Alex and Alice the year before – but Josef nevertheless was determined not to stint upon the celebration and the wedding breakfast, though a comparatively small affair, was lavish; too lavish, indeed, it seemed for the groom who quite clearly had not recovered from the prenuptial celebrations that had kept him from his bed for best part of the night and had served to dull his senses and his conscience about equally. He sat beside his wife at the head of the table, the aftermath of last night’s vodka warring grimly with the glittering, heady wine, toying with his food, monosyllabic, hardly smiling. Yet it seemed to Anna’s lovestruck eyes that he had never looked so fascinating; the set of his head, the high slant of cheekbone, the firm, straight mouth – each time she looked at him, which was often, if covertly, a small shock of excitement stirred within her. The dream that had been hers since childhood had magically come true. She had married her handsome prince and – of course – all that was left to do was to live happily ever after. In a short while they would leave her father’s house and drive to the rooms that Joss had rented for them a few miles away across the river at Kew. These rooms, Joss himself had been living in for the past few weeks and Anna, to be truthful, on the only occasion she had visited them, had not greatly cared for them. As for many a bride, however, such considerations seemed for the moment secondary; once their married life had started she would persuade Joss to find something a little larger, a little more convenient.
Their married life.
Once again that half-fearful frisson of excitement stirred. Motherless and innocent she had no idea whatsoever of what might be demanded of her by her husband: she had only her own inexperienced emotions and instincts to guide her. Since the abrupt announcement of their engagement on the day of the twins’ christening – an announcement that she was aware had come as a shock to friends and family alike, though she had confessed to no one that it had been an equal astonishment to her – Joss had, to her surprise and unspoken chagrin, not once touched her or tried to spend a moment alone with her. The decision made, he appeared simply to be intent upon implementing it as soon as possible. Remembering Matthew and poor, beautiful Tanya, Anna had sometimes wondered and worried about that – but then impatiently reassured herself, scolding herself for her doubts; whoever would expect Joss Anatov to act as others did? And always, to set against her uncertainties, she had the memory of those fiercely arousing moments that had preceded his proposal, a memory that in turn excited and half-frightened her. In the dark, quiet moments of night she would find herself feeling again the demanding pressure of his man’s body against hers, the mystifying reaction of her own body to his. More than half-shamed by the feelings such memories aroused, she had no one to confide in, nor anyone to explain. It had, of course, been out of the question for her to approach her father on such a question; kindly and devoted though he was, for such a subject to be broached between father and daughter was unthinkable. Even during their last, strangely sad evening together, as they had talked before the study fire, it had not once occurred to her to ask the questions to which she most longed to know the answers. Remembering now she glanced at Josef, sitting to her left, and a small furrow of worry appeared between her brows. Since Grace’s death her father had aged visibly; he now looked more than his age – in two years he would be sixty. She suspected that his health was not all it should be, though he stubbornly refused to see a doctor. He still worked harder than anyone she knew – the company he had built and was still building, its reputation for excellence, its firm financial establishment had become, since his wife’s death and the growing up of his children, his whole life. New workshops had been purchased adjoining the old, the shop had been extended and refurbished; new and valuable stock had been bought in; and Anna suspected that her father worried rather more than he admitted about the loans that Joss had persuaded him to take on to pay for these ventures. Also with Joss’s encouragement he had begun to speculate on the stock market, hoping to increase his capital, an activity that Anna felt to be not truly in character for her father who, unlike Joss, was no natural gambler. But it was not so much the remote spectre of possible – if unlikely – financial worries that concerned her: her fear was more nebulous than that, simply a disquieting and possibly unfounded daughterly feeling that all was not right with him, that something troubled him badly. As the years passed he, the most apparently outgoing of men, had become prey to occasional depressions, to moments of introspection in which his face assumed an expression so melancholy, so haunted, that it cut Anna to the heart to see it. Last night she had come upon him by the fireside in his darkened study, his chin sunk upon his chest, a glass and a half-filled bottle of brandy by his elbow.
“Papa?”
He stirred at her voice, lifted a hand to her. She moved swiftly to him, settled herself upon the floor by his feet, as she had come so often before and as they both knew she was unlikely to do again.
“Don’t be sad,” she said. “Please don’t be sad. I won’t be so very far away. And we’ll see each other often – almost as much as we do now.”
He half-smiled, ruefully, said nothing. Firelight flickered upon a face that looked almost a stranger’s, lined and old and far from happy. In the silence a coal tumbled and sparks flew.
“Is it – is it Mama?” Anna asked at last, timidly.
“Is it that she can’t be with us tomorrow?”
For a long, odd moment she thought that he was not going to answer at all, wondered indeed if he had even heard the words. Then he stirred. “That – and other things—” He fell to silence again.
She could not believe it. “Other things? What other things? Papa – please – what’s wrong?”
Avoiding her questioning eyes, he moved to stir the fire, then leaned back tiredly in his chair. “Wrong.” He spoke the word on a breath so quiet his daughter hardly heard it. He seemed only half-aware of her presence. He reached for his glass, sipped it, tilted his head to the back of the chair and closed his eyes, speaking softly and disjointedly into the darkness. “The things a man does,” he said, “he can never be free of them. He gives up his God – because he cannot believe in Him – and thinks perhaps that at least then he cannot be haunted.” He took a long, slow breath. “But this I know now. In time He will find you. Whoever – whatever – He is.”
Anna lifted a surprised face, questioning. The movement seemed to bring him back to the moment, to her presence. Suddenly and urgently he leaned forward and caught her hand. “Take care what you do, Anna. Take care that the things you want are worth what you may have to pay for them. What others may have to pay. And remember that the cost is not always immediately apparent.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No.” He exhaled, long and slowly, and the hurtful pressure on her hand eased. “How should you? Why should you? Take no notice, my dear – the ramblings of an old man.”
“You aren’t old.”
“Oh, yes, I’m old. But you – you’re young. Your life is before you.” With an undisguised effort he attempted to throw off his melancholy abstraction, and a false note of jocularity entered his voice. “What it is to be young, eh? Even I remember it, though it sometimes seems another life.”
She caught eagerly at his hand again, eager to change the subject. “Oh, tell me about it, Papa, please do. What was it like when you were young – in Russia?” Her voice was pleading. Her own and Joss’s Russian backgrounds about which she knew so astonishingly little had always fascinated her. It had been a source of constant disappointment to her that her father would never speak of his childhood. Joss’s bitterness she could understand and accept, but not her father – he had been a grown man before tragedy had overtaken him. There must, surely, have been some happy times?
He shook his head, the strain back in his face.
She did not notice it. “Please?” She leaned eagerly upon his knee, her chin upon her hand. “Your family – Joss’s family – what were they like? Where did they live? How did they live?”
He moved uneasily. “Questions, questions!”
“But, Papa – shouldn’t I know? Aren’t they all a part of me too? Aren’t they?”
In the dying light of the fire he bent to her, kissed her head lightly then tucked a finger beneath her chin and lifted her face from the shadows. She returned his regard gravely. The clear pain in his face struck her to the heart. Suddenly from her soul she wished she had left well alone. “I had another little girl once,” he said, very quietly. “And two little boys. Natasha, Sergei and baby—” He stopped. “God in heaven,” he said, anguished, “I have forgotten the child’s name.”
She caught her breath. “Papa – please don’t! I’m sorry – sorry I made you think of it.” Anna was appalled. Neither she, nor as far as she knew, any other member of the family had had any idea that her father had been married before. The thought did not occur until later that Joss, surely, must have known. Strange indication of the uncommunicative character of the man that he had never mentioned it, even in passing.
“The Cossacks came. And the innocents died – my wife Anna – the children. And in my own innocence I thought it must be the worst thing that could happen.”
She pressed her face into his hand, instinctively knowing that only silence would serve.
He fell silent for a long time, then sighed, a long, shaking, gathering of breath. “But that was yesterday,” he said. “A yesterday for which we can mourn, but about which we can do nothing. Tomorrow my daughter Anna marries – in an English church, dressed in English lace and with English flowers in her hair. Which is as it should be.”
Anna laughed a little. “But she isn’t marrying an Englishman.”
“Yes you are!” The words were very sharp. “Joss is a naturalized Englishman. As I am. He can never go back. He wouldn’t want to. Anna, this country has been good to us, very good. Don’t doubt it. And don’t waste your dreams on something that is part of the past, something you can never have. My own true parents I never knew.” She lifted startled eyes. This, too, she had not known. “From the start it made me rootless. I belonged nowhere. Until I came here. Until I met your mother. But you – you belong here. Your children will belong here. Be satisfied with that. Be happy with your respectable English wedding—”
She tried to distract him, disturbed by his unexpected intensity. “Will it be so different, then? From a wedding in Kiev?”
For the first time and despite himself, he laughed. “In Kiev, my dear, the whole street would be dancing.” He laughed again. “By midday the whole street would be drunk!”
She smiled, eased by his laughter. “Perhaps then we should bring some old Russian customs to Bayswater?”
He shook his head, smiling. For a moment neither of them spoke. In the silence he squeezed the hand he still held. “You’re sure you’re happy?”
She laughed up at him, relieved at the change of subject. “That must be at least the dozenth time you’ve asked! Yes, Papa, I’m happy.”
“Then that is all that counts.”
“There’s just one thing that would make tomorrow absolutely perfect—” She grinned, quickly and mischievously, like the child he remembered so well. “What a terror I am for wanting things I can’t have!”
“What? What can’t you have?”
“The diamond. The stone they call the Shuvenski. I’ve always wanted to see it. When I was little I used to dream that you might become very rich and buy it for me! Now there would be a thing – to be wed with that on my finger!” She stopped, aware of the sudden, almost violent stiffening of his body. “Papa? What is it?”
He withdrew his hand abruptly from hers, picked up his glass. “It’s nothing. Of course not. It’s just—”
“What?”
“An old man’s whim.” His voice was strangely grim. “It isn’t a good omen to have mentioned that stone.”
She stared at him astonished, more than half-inclined to laugh. “What on earth? A bad omen? Oh, Papa – are you joking? You surely can’t be serious?”
He shrugged.
“But Papa! How can you possibly believe such a thing?” Such an aberration in her usually down to earth father astounded Anna. “A diamond – that diamond – unlucky? The stone that you guarded for a thousand miles? That our business – our prosperity – our lives! – are founded upon?” She laughed. “You’re joking. Teasing me. Aren’t you?”
His hesitation was barely noticeable. “Yes, little one, of course. I’m teasing you. A father may tease his very grown-up daughter on the night before she marries, may he not?”
She came up on to her knees and threw her arms about his neck. “Of course, oh, of course.”
She remembered that conversation now, watching him beside her, wondering at the things she knew of him and the things that she did not. This man, the father whom she had always accepted, without thought, as the very soul of propriety, who dressed so soberly and worked so hard, who was so totally dedicated to his determination to become the very model of a respectable Englishman of comfortable means, who throughout her childhood had been taken for granted as a pillar of established thought and behaviour, had seen murder and worse, had in his journey from one world to another suffered privations and perils at which she could hardly guess. And – what else? What in that conversation last night had left her with the impression t
hat something – something apart from the massacre of his family and the terrible trek westwards – haunted him still, after twenty-three years? The thought disturbed her, and was followed sharply by another. Joss. Did he know? He knew so much, gave away so little. She turned to him now. His sardonic eye, surveying the company with its usual dispassion, caught hers and she thought – she hoped – softened a little in private acknowledgement. Again that unnerving lift of excitement. She loved him more than life. She always had, from that first moment she had seen him, thin-faced, shabby, defensive, walking across the lawn on her eighth birthday. Every line of his face, every movement he made, fascinated her – she surely, she thought, must be the envy of every woman in the room.
Not so. Alice Rose, née Peabody, for one, had no time for such dark and brooding affectations. She leaned to Alex, her well-bred nose wrinkled in faint distaste. “Is he always so boorish? Really – Anna may not be much to look at but I should have thought – with your father’s money – she might have done better.” Her voice was clear and piercing in the hubbub around them. She leaned back, dabbing delicately at her fine-drawn, pretty face with a scrap of lace handkerchief.