The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  It was not, however, and to her own detriment, only in the case of her father and Victoria that Anna lacked perception; she did not see – it did not remotely occur to her – that by that late summer of 1901 her daughter was not the only one who resented her absolute devotion to her son. Her husband had expected her to be as little interested in this child once it had been born as she had been in the last. He watched her now with Nicholas, his face apparently impassive but within his eyes a perilous gleam of surprising and bitter anger. It seemed that what her act of unfaithfulness had failed to do, the constant sight of her adoration of the child, the fruit of her adultery, did. The sight of her besotted love for the child offended his manhood and his pride. A just retribution had not been exacted. Anna, thinking herself safe from him since he had not touched her, in desire or in violence, since the day he had struck her, did not notice the danger signs. They shared neither bed nor bedroom. He had made no attempt to claim or enforce his conjugal rights since Nicholas’s birth. She assumed that he, like herself, found their mutual estrangement the only satisfactory way to face their unsatisfactory marriage.

  She discovered her mistake one warm August evening, when the children in bed and believing Joss to be from home, alone in her bedroom she reached into the drawer of her dressing table and, with a feeling of secret, unshared pleasure that the action never failed to produce, drew out the much-handled, dog-eared sketch pad. Standing by the open window, with the speed of familiarity she flicked through it to the page that she wanted. Beyond the window a song thrush sang its tribute to the summer’s evening. She lifted the precious picture to the light of the fading sun. She could almost smell the scent of pine and the fragrant woodsmoke. Nicolai’s face, young, unchanging, smiled up at her.

  She did not hear the door open. The first she knew of Joss’s presence was the shadow that fell across the paper she held. Frozen, she stood as he reached and tweaked it from her hand. He looked at it, head bent, in silence. In a long agony of apprehension she watched him. Nicholai’s smiling face trembled as the paper quivered almost imperceptibly in Joss’s apparently steady hands. Then, lifting his head to look at her, very precisely he tore the page from the book, the paper from one side to the other, put the pieces together and tore again. The small sound Anna made was like a gasp of physical pain. Joss lifted his head. His voice was cold, perfectly steady. “However you may have convinced yourself, Anna, you are still my wife.”

  She said nothing, her eyes riveted to the paper he still held.

  “And I think it not too extreme of me to expect you to act so. If you are ready to accept my protection for your son it seems to me that the least you might do is to try to keep your side of the dishonoured bargain of our marriage.”

  “I – I tried to thank you. For Nicholas—”

  “I don’t want your thanks.”

  “Then – what do you want?” Her voice was faint.

  “I want what any man might reasonably require of his wife.” The words were quiet. “I want what you have already given another. I want a son.”

  She stared at him struck utterly dumb. Then, “No,” she said. “Joss – please—”

  “A son,” he said implacably. “Is that not a fair price to pay, Anna? And then your life is your own.”

  * * *

  Benjamin Anatov was born on the very day in May 1902 that the stubborn, brave and bigoted commandos finally capitulated and the peace treaty was signed that brought to an end the South African war – a war that had seen a small guerilla force for a while hold at bay the might of an empire and had seen also an innovation in warfare ominous to any enemy civilian population, the concentration camp.

  From conception to birth Anna’s feelings for the child were ruled by absolute distaste: the only warmth upon seeing the tiny squalling scrap came from her heartfelt thanks that here was the boy that Joss had demanded and the loveless act that had led to the conception of this child need not be repeated. As for Joss himself, the child born and his pride appeased, he paid little attention to his new son. Indeed, to Anna’s relief he paid little attention to any of them. His interests outside the home were expanding and prospering. He had put Michael – courting now and showing some signs of settling down – in charge of the fashionable new premises in New Bond Street that had more than once been patronized by the new King in search of baubles for his doting female ‘friends’, whilst he took offices in Piccadilly from which to run independently his growing financial empire. Tea in Ceylon, railways in the United States, gold in South Africa, silk and jade from China – it seemed to Anna that her husband had a finger in every financial pie in the City. Privately, as the years passed, the open acrimony between husband and wife was slowly overlaid by the everyday commonplace exchanges of a marriage in which, by mutual consent, contact between them was minimal and governed on the whole not by the fierce intimacies of a close relationship but by the more general rules of civilized behaviour. There were times when, bitterly, Anna found herself regretting the childhood infatuation that had tied her forever to this man, times when she could convince herself that the light of her love for him had died when he had with malice ruined her father, the man who had given him everything he had. And yet it was not always so, and there were occasions when, alone and lonely in her bed, she listened for his returning footsteps, could not sleep until his presence in the house reassured her that at least in that he was constant; whatever the reason, it seemed that he would not leave her. She knew that there were other women – told herself indeed that she felt nothing but relief that they kept him from her. She supposed that in the eyes of the world she had little to complain of: she had money, position, and a creative life both interesting and fulfilling. Victoria was a pretty, amiable child, a favourite of everyone. Nicholas was growing into an extravagantly handsome boy, the light of her life – and if there were those she knew who were ready to mutter words such as over-indulged and spoiled – she assured herself that it was sheer jealousy occasioned by the child’s good looks and lively personality. As for Benjamin – who from the time he could toddle followed his older brother about like a small, devoted slave – he was a nice enough child, if quiet, and if Nanny were to be believed possessed of a reasonable brain, though for herself she could not feel the slightest warmth for the boy. Many women would, she knew, with good reason envy her. And if she yearned, she yearned in secret, loving in place of the reality that was denied her, a shadow, a memory with little substance except in her son’s brilliant eyes. Many times, especially at first, she dreamed of presenting the son to the father. Of seeing the happiness in those warm, remembered eyes. Of a future, together, somewhere away from the eyes and the problems of the world – and then she would wake and know her dream for what it was: the fantasy of a child who loved always the stories that finished “—and they lived happily ever after”. Life was not like that. Life rushed on, regardless, like a river in flood and one fought, and swam, and survived, or one allowed oneself to be overwhelmed, and drowned. So, tenderly, the pretty dreams were hidden in a treasured corner of her mind and she set about surviving the currents and pace of a world that was moving so fast that there were many to ask where it was heading in such a hurry.

  Motor taxi cabs appeared on the streets of London, and in America Henry Ford watched the first car roll off the first assembly line in the world, and a machine that was heavier than air flew – this last piece of news greeted with downright scepticism as a hoax by many. Arabella, with great enthusiasm, joined the new Women’s Social and Political Union that had been formed by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and threw herself predictably into the campaign for Votes for Women. Beth, laughing, refused to have anything to do with it, declaring herself entirely unable to tell one politician from the other, let alone vote for him. Anna, though she attended some meetings, found the feverish single-mindedness of most of the active members not to her taste and despite Arabella’s stern disappointment, kept her distance. From Russia, during the year of 1904, came the first faint but persist
ent rumours of the stirrings of a revolt. Anna, more concerned that the great Fabergé had opened a branch office in London, paid scant attention to the reports. When she thought of Nicolai and the others she thought of them always in the idyllic safety of their northern retreat beside the lake – what had they to do with politics? Elena had written twice, her letters a year apart, and Anna had answered neither, her good sense telling her it was better so, for a wound constantly aggravated would never heal. It was therefore a surprise and something of a shock to receive unexpectedly another letter in Elena’s distinctive writing in the February of 1905. She opened it with a strange feeling of trepidation. No one could have been unaware that since the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ a month before, when the wide streets and squares of St Petersburg had run with the blood of demonstrating workers cut down where they stood by the Tsar’s troops, the city had been in a terrible state of unrest. Anna had stubbornly reassured herself then, and did so again now: nothing could have happened to Nicolai. She would have known. She would.

  From the envelope as she opened it fell a piece of paper. She picked it up. Stared at it. It was the sketch that she had done of herself and Nicolai beneath the pine tree, that she had given him as a memento of the day. On the back of the picture, in Nicolai’s hand, was the single Word ‘Anna’ and the date ‘August 1900’. She stared at it for a long time before she could bring herself to open the brief, sad letter.

  “—trying to get home to his wife and baby—cut down by rioters in the Nevsky Prospekt – this sketch among his possessions—a memento of a happier day in a happier time—God rest his dear soul.”

  How long she sat, the paper clenched in icy, trembling hands Anna never knew. At last she stood. The cold shock was ebbing, the pain was making itself felt. Knife sharp. Agonizing. Blindly and with limbs stiffened as if by a stroke she climbed the stairs to the nursery.

  “Mama! Mama! See what I’ve made!” Nicholas, always the first to greet her, bounded across the room and into her arms. She clenched the surprised child to her, bending her face to his bright head, tears shining on her cheeks. Victoria, face solemn and puzzled, walked to them and stood, worried and wondering, at the sight of her mother’s distress. Ben, sitting amongst the building blocks discarded by Nicholas and already, with baby fingers, constructing a more complex contraption than his brother’s, sat blinking and did not move. Mama would not want him to touch her, the child knew that already. Phlegmatically he went back to his intricate creation.

  Outside the window the cold wind of winter, symbol of and brother to the wind of revolt that eddied and scurried in the corners of other cities than tragic St Petersburg, bent bare branches and blew tears of rain against the glass.

  * * *

  That wind of dissent – dissent against unemployment, against exploitation, against the denial of the basic right of the working man to have some say in his own destiny – blew, a year later, a Liberal Government into power in Britain, gave the newborn Labour Party its first significant electoral victories and sent a chill of foreboding through the ranks of the Establishment that had never believed such political changes possible. Unfortunately, however, for that other passionately embattled section of the population, the Suffragists, now coming universally to be known as the Suffragettes, the Liberals were no more interested in women’s votes than were their Tory counterparts and so now the battle commenced in earnest, with Arabella in the thick of it. To Anna these larger events meant little. In 1905, the year of Nicolai’s violent death, she designed for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition a casket of nephrite and rose gold. Red-gold leaves of ivy wreathed it. Hidden within that gleaming foliage a blood-red ruby, heart-shaped, nestled. The exhibit won interest and praise, but she would not sell it. The Exhibition over, the casket was placed upon a small table in her bedroom, within it the sketch that Elena had returned to her and that other picture, lovingly and skilfully repaired, that Joss had ripped. With strange delicacy Joss, who had his own sure sources of information, neither questioned nor commented on the box or its contents; but if Anna noticed this odd and gentle courtesy she was too shocked and sick at heart truly to appreciate it.

  For the next two years the Liberal Government fought against an Opposition of almost all entrenched wealth and privilege to redress the wrongs that too fast and too uncontrolled a change in British society had wrought over the past century. The Roses and the Anatovs, through it all, thanks to Joss’s acumen, prospered greatly. In 1908, with the first introduction from America of comparatively cheap Ford motor cars, the price of rubber, essential for the comfortable motoring afforded by inflatable tyres, soared. Joss, always, it seemed, uncannily aware of the needs of tomorrow, had invested heavily in the fledgling Malayan rubber industry and in one day without moving from his office made a small fortune.

  Josef, closeted within his small cottage in Essex and more at peace than he had been for years, watched them all and kept his own counsel. He felt little rancour at what Joss had done, for though it still had never been put into words he knew why it had been done, and felt that in allowing Joss his revenge his own sin had been at least in some part expiated. His every effort had been bent to minimizing the destructive effect that Joss’s actions might have had upon the two interconnecting families, for that – the destruction of those family ties that had survived so much – would have been a punishment impossible to bear and one he was sure that Tanya herself would never have exacted, whatever Joss in his blind bitterness might believe. Joss himself would certainly have been astonished to know of the concern that the man he had ruined, the man who had been foster father to him, still felt. In exacting such vengeance, Josef wondered, and in tearing in anger from a reluctant world a success from which it would in time no doubt demand exacting payment, what debts was Joss incurring? And how would he be forced to pay them? Josef pottered in his garden and pondered these things, an old man whose greatest joys were the visits of his family, especially the younger members, even that one who reminded him so vividly of past tragedy – and watched with relief the world and its troubles pass him by.

  About the same time that Joss made his killing on the rubber market, Michael married his Jane, a young lady he had pursued single-mindedly for a year until she had him – as Louisa put it – well and truly caught and nailed to the floor. Two months later, Louisa and Boris themselves came into a small bequest. Louisa’s Sergeant Major father, still in India, fell victim at last to that continent’s patient malice and succumbed to dysentery. His bequest to his only daughter – a handsome five hundred pounds – came as a surprise to both of them. Boris, to the varying degrees of exasperation of both the Anatovs and the Roses, needed little thought as to how to use this gift from heaven. Laughing still he invested it in the business he had come to know best, and Louisa found herself installed as hostess in the public house known as the Red Lion close by Plaistow Station. Of both families, only Alice Rose took any satisfaction from the move. For did it not simply confirm her long-held and unshakable opinion of the Boris Anatovs. They had found at last their proper level; and in Alice’s opinion they should be left by their betters severely alone, to enjoy it.

  PART FOUR

  1910-1918

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the sixth of May 1910, the man who had waited so long to become King died after nine short years on the throne and both Britain and an unquiet Europe lost a valuable and virtually irreplaceable worker in the cause of European peace. The following week the peace of the living accommodation above the Red Lion was also disturbed, for Sophie Anatov, inevitably as she was herself coming to believe, was in disgrace again.

  “You wrote this?” The words were barely a question. Her father lifted the piece of paper that he held, covered unmistakably in the ungainly scrawl that no effort by Sophie seemed able to discipline.

  She all but shrugged, then, taking note of the dangerous gleam in his blue eyes, thought better of it. “Yes.”

  Boris studied the paper for a moment and then read from it: “In
a so-called civilized country where half the population is female, half the work force is female and all of the mothers are female—” He paused, looked at Sophie, unsmiling, “Isn’t that just a little heavy-handed?”

  Unable to believe that he could truly stay angry with her, she grinned, swiftly and coaxingly, and then was sober again.

  “—is surely an outrage that intelligent, responsible people should be barred from the political life of their country simply because of their sex.” He lifted his eyes.

  Sophie flinched. “Miss Bantry didn’t like that word either,” she conceded, and rubbed her knuckles surreptitiously, remembering still the sharp cut of the ruler.

  Her father sighed. “Sophie, as you well know, Miss Bantry didn’t like any of it. Any more than she liked last week’s effort on the iniquities of the calling-on system down at the docks, or your lecture last month on the recognition of Trades Unions. She knows you’re simply repeating what you hear here in the bar. And – not unreasonably – it doesn’t impress her. If you’re told to write a composition on ‘A Day At The Seaside’ she doesn’t expect you to get on your ill-informed soap-box and shout about the conditions on the docks.”

  Sophie did shrug this time, her lower lip set rebelliously.

  “And this one—” he held up the offending composition “—‘My Hobbies,’” he said. “‘My hobbies’?”

  “I don’t have any hobbies,” Sophie said, perfectly and pertly truthful, “so I couldn’t write about keeping guinea pigs, or embroidering handkerchiefs, could I?”