‘No reason, child, no reason.’ Victor Valerievich’s tone was indulgent, the look he shot at Lenka was not amused. ‘Though I trust you understand that times might be a little hard to begin with. It is a great step we are taking. It will take a good deal of hard work to make the name of Shalakov as well-known in the capital as it is in Moscow.’
‘But the new shop’s on the Nevsky, isn’t it? Everyone’s bound to come! And Uncle Andrei – he’s famous already, isn’t he? He and that new student of his?’ Margarita struggled into the heavy fur-lined coat that Anna was holding for her, crammed a small fur hat onto her head.
‘Was, dear. Was famous.’ Varya’s tone was waspish. ‘Before the accident that is.’ She shrugged her own fur shuba elegantly onto her narrow shoulders, adjusted the beaver hat to exactly the right angle, reached for her muff.
‘Oh, Mama!’ Anna’s voice was scolding. ‘You always talk as if poor Uncle Andrei hurt his hand purposely to spite you! And he is still famous, you know he is! Rita, do stand still a moment, or I’ll never get you done up! Seraphima, where are the boots?’
It was a full ten minutes before they were ready. Booted, gloved and muffled to the eyes against the winter cold they stood for a moment in sudden silence. Even Margarita was still. The apartment that had been their home for so many years, left now with only the most basic of furniture, stripped of all personal possessions, all ornament, looked bleak and shabby.
Victor Valerievich cleared his throat loudly.
‘Well.’ Varya’s voice wavered a little. ‘Let us sit down for a moment, then we must go.’
Briefly and in silence they sat, the old custom made more poignant by the knowledge that this was the last time they would sit so together in this room. Then, with a last glance about her, Varya stood. Her husband offered his arm, and together they preceded the rest of the family out onto the landing.
Anna was the last to go. She turned at the door, stood for a long moment looking back into the room that had seen all of her childhood, then firmly she closed the door and followed the others down the stairs.
* * *
The women of the family had a small four-berth compartment to themselves, Dmitri and his father being next door and sharing with a couple of young officers who were on their way back to St Petersburg after leave. Seraphima and old Nanny Irisha, the only servants to accompany them to their new home, were travelling ‘hard’ in the public carriages, a fact that no argument of Anna’s had been able to change. ‘A servant is a servant, daughter,’ her father had said, ’no matter how long-serving. They have blankets, and food. They could not possibly travel with us – think of the cost.’ It was, however, not of the cost that Anna thought as she organized the stowing of their boxes and baggage and the serving of tea, but of poor Nanny Irisha’s old bones and the long night ahead.
‘Anna, where in the world is my blue shawl? I thought you said that –’
‘It’s here, Mama, here.’ Anna produced the shawl, settled it about her mother’s slender shoulders. Outside the early darkness of a northern January had fallen and ice crusted the glass as they sped through the winter night. The train moved smoothly, swaying a little, wheels clicking busily over rails that had been laid with especial and attentive care since this was a line over which the Imperial train ran often.
‘Anna – the hampers – they’re here?’
‘Yes, Mama. Under the seat.’
‘Oh, may we eat now? May we?’ Margarita’s eyes lit at the thought; she was at that stage in life when she was always hungry.
‘In a moment, when the attendant brings the tea.’ Varya Petrovna settled a cushion more comfortably behind her. ‘My book, Anna?’
‘Here, Mama.’
‘And Anna – your father and Dima – please go to make sure they’re comfortable. Remind Papa that Dima must not be made to sleep on the top berth, he’ll most certainly fall out.’
Patiently Anna stood. ‘I’ll tell him, Mama.’
Dmitri and Victor were comfortably settled in the next compartment. Their companions, two young dragoon officers, booted and dashingly uniformed, looked up as Anna slipped into the compartment, then formally if a little awkwardly against the swaying movement of the train came to their feet, smiling.
‘Oh, please – do sit down.’ Anna was flustered, feeling warm colour lift to her face. The tendency to blush poppy bright at the slightest cause, legacy of her sandy colouring and fair, freckled skin, was and always had been a source of acute embarrassment to her.
The smile on the face of one of the young men widened. He was blond and slim and looked not much older than Anna herself. She felt herself blushing even more furiously. ‘Papa, Mama wishes to know if you’re comfortable? And asked particularly that you should not let Dima sleep on the top bunk. She thinks he’ll fall out.’
Dmitri rolled his eyes and groaned theatrically. His father clicked his tongue a little impatiently. ‘It’s arranged, my dear, it’s arranged. These young gentlemen have already offered to take the top berths. Tell your mother not to worry.’ He went back to his newspaper, folding it precisely, pushing the pince-nez higher onto his nose.
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Annoushka, Mama says –’ the door behind her slid open and Margarita all but tumbled through. On meeting the amused eyes of the two strange young men she stopped, instantly aware, instantly collected, smoothing her skirts, smiling her most brilliant and beguiling smile. ‘Hello. Sorry. Did I interrupt? Mama wants to know where the chocolates are.’ Her wide and guileless blue eyes were fixed on the face of the fair young man. She laced her fingers in front of her demurely, tilted her head a little. His mouth twitched into a smile which she returned with interest.
‘They’re in the brown bag next to the hamper.’ Firmly Anna caught her sister’s hand and propelled her towards the door.
Margarita hung back. ‘You’re all right, Papa? You’re comfortable?’ Again she glanced coquettishly beneath long golden lashes at the fair young officer who was watching her in open amusement and some admiration.
‘We’re perfectly comfortable, thank you, my dear.’ Astonishingly oblivious as always to his youngest child’s precocious behaviour, Victor Valerievich bent forward to pat her hand. ‘Back you go to Mama now, there’s a good child.’
‘Yes, Papa.’ The lashes swept down against peach-smooth skin, stray golden curls escaped their pins and brushed the white, slender neck. With studiedly pretty care she leaned forward to kiss her father’s cheek. ‘Good night, Papa.’
‘Good night, child.’ Victor Valerievich nodded, pleased and proud. Margarita smiled brilliantly. Anna could have slapped her. Firmly she ushered her through the door, but not before her younger sister had bestowed yet another dazzling smile upon each of her father’s and brother’s travelling companions, and received in return from each the silent homage of interest and admiration that she knew to be her due. In the corridor she gave Anna no time to speak.
‘Annoushka, Annoushka? I need to go – you know –’
‘What, again?’ Anna eyed her suspiciously.
Margarita nodded. ‘It must be the movement of the train.’
‘But it’s only half an hour since –’
‘Please, Anna! I really must!’
‘Oh, very well. Come on then.’
They set off along the narrow corridor, bracing themselves against the movement of the train as it swung around a curve in the track. Snow billowed against the windows. Margarita shrieked histrionically and staggered a little, falling against the door of a compartment in which it so happened that four young men, two in uniform, two in the garb of students, were intent upon a game of cards. One glanced up, grinned, winked a dark, laughing eye. He was as handsome a young man as Anna had seen and his smile was pure mischief. Grimly Anna tried to propel her younger sister forward.
‘Annoushka, Annoushka, wait! My ankle – I’ve twisted it –’
Anna smiled, pleasantly. ‘Your neck will be next. You want the lavatory? Go to the lava
tory, and stop playing silly games.’
Margarita grimaced ferociously, sent a small, flirtatious glance towards the young officer who returned it in kind and then lifted interested eyes to Anna’s.
Anna caught her sister’s hand and hauled her down the corridor to the tiny room at the end. ‘In,’ she snapped. ‘Here, let me do your buttons.’
‘I’m perfectly able to do them myself, thank you.’ Margarita was on her dignity.
Anna turned her back to the door, rested her arms upon the window bar, looking into the streaming, snowy darkness. Somewhere further down the carriage a man was singing, a deep and melancholy sound that mingled with the rhythmic rush and click of the wheels. In the tiny compartment next to the toilet the attendant rattled glasses upon a tray and a samovar hissed.
Anna rubbed at the streaming window, peered into the darkness, thinking again of Moscow; of home. Of the friends who grew further away with each turn of the hurrying wheels, of the Conservatory’s teacher of music, the elderly and irascible Monsieur de Neuve to whom she knew she owed a debt it would be forever beyond her to repay, of the bustling markets and the fairy-tale domes and spires, of a certain brown-haired, blunt-faced young man, brother to a friend, whose nice eyes had smiled at her so warmly and whose attentions, slight as she had understood them to be, had nevertheless fostered the first small, private dreams of young womanhood. She blinked.
‘Anna? What’s wrong?’ Margarita stood beside her, head tilted to look up suspiciously into her tall sister’s face.
‘Nothing,’ Anna said. ‘Nothing at all. Now do come on – Mama will wonder wherever we’ve disappeared to!’
* * *
She lay, much later, fully clothed except for shoes and jacket, upon the top bunk listening to her mother’s slight and delicate snores beneath her. A few compartments along the noisy card game was still in progress. A balalaika played, and the same voice she had heard before lifted in song, deep, melancholy, vibrant with feeling; the sound, she found herself thinking, of the soul of Russia.
‘’Noushka? ’Noushka, are you asleep?’
She hesitated. Then, ‘No,’ she said.
She heard movement, dimly saw Yelena as she lifted herself upon her elbow to look across the gap between the two top berths. In the bed below, Margarita slept like a baby, a small smile upon her face. Her last words before sleep had concerned her most precious possession: ‘Anna? You’re sure my theatre is safe?’
Yelena leaned forward, speaking very softly, the words all but lost in the steady background noises of the train. ‘’Noushka, what’s it going to be like? St Petersburg, I mean?’
Anna made a small sound, affectionate and exasperated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Lenka! How am I supposed to know?’
‘I mean, it’s going to be very different, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘It seems so very strange, doesn’t it? To be leaving Moscow?’
Anna did not answer directly. ‘We’ve always known it was Papa’s plan,’ she said. ‘That’s why Uncle Andrei stayed in St Petersburg. It was only Grandfather who prevented Papa from selling the Moscow shop ages ago. Now that Grandfather’s dead –’ she hesitated a moment. Could it be true, as she suspected it was, that she was the only one of the family that truly missed that crusty, impossible old man? Miss him she did, that was certain, more than she would have believed possible; a fact that would have drawn from the old man one of his rare cackles of amusement. ‘Now that he’s dead, and Papa has the money – well, off we go, willy nilly, to St Petersburg.’
‘“Pitta,”’ Yelena said, drily.
‘Yes.’ Her sister’s voice was tart. ‘Pitta.’
‘And do you think that the new shop will be as successful as Papa hopes?’
‘Lenka, truly, I don’t know any better than you! Papa thinks so. He thinks that with the patronage that Uncle Andrei has already secured, and with a shop in the most fashionable street in the most fashionable city in Russia, the business is bound to do well. And I’m sure he must be right. Now, Lenka –’
But Yelena was not about to be quieted so quickly. ‘And Uncle Andrei – do you remember him?’
‘A little, yes. He’s dark, like Papa, but much slimmer, at least he was, I think – it’s years since I’ve seen him, I was just a little girl – it seemed to me, I remember, that he laughed a lot –’
‘Papa’s brother? What a marvel. Does he still, I wonder? How does he manage, do you think, since the accident?’
Andrei Shalakov, younger brother to their father, and even as a very young man a bow maker of immense promise and repute, had lost two fingers in the same accident that had killed his young wife and their unborn child five years before. Anna, a reserved but deeply emotional child of thirteen at the time, had had nightmares for months after news of what had happened had first reached Moscow. The horrors her mother had whispered to her friends behind her hand had appalled her. She still did not like to think of it.
‘I really don’t know. It must have been awful for him, the accident, but he still makes bows and they’re still much sought-after. Monsieur de Neuve at the Conservatory had one. Now –’ she wriggled in the narrow bunk. ‘Lenka –’
‘Oh, Anna, no!’ Yelena, sensing what she was about to say, broke in. ‘You surely can’t want to sleep? Talk to me for just a little while? Please? Just a little while?’
Anna yawned, very loudly.
Yelena snuggled into her bunk, resting her head upon her bent arm. ‘I wonder, will we finish up living in an apartment like Uncle Mischa’s and Aunt Zhenia’s?’
‘Is that what you’d like?’ Anna’s sleepy voice was faintly surprised.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose so, yes. I’ve never forgotten our visit there – so grand! So huge!’
‘We were just children. It probably isn’t so grand, nor so huge.’
‘P’raps not. I remember thinking it was like a palace! And Katya, she’ll have changed, won’t she?’
‘We’ll all have changed.’
‘But France, Switzerland! She’s been everywhere! Anna?’ Lenka’s voice dropped a little. ‘Is it true, do you suppose, that Katya was expelled from the Smolny Institute? Before she was sent abroad?’
Anna yawned another huge, jaw-cracking and not altogether convincing yawn. ‘From what I remember of Cousin Katya it’s more than possible. Certainly Mama says that’s why she has a tutor – the Smolny apparently refused to have her back. Said she was a subversive influence on the other girls, or something.’
‘I don’t suppose that bothers her one bit.’ Lenka’s one visit to her cousin Katya and her family had made a lasting impression. She rolled onto her back, looking at the smoke-stained ceiling so close above her head; sighed a little. ‘Isn’t it strange? It seems that Katya can have anything – do anything – anything at all that she wants, and we –’ She stopped. ‘Perhaps it will be different in St Petersburg?’
Anna, keeping her doubts to herself, remained silent.
The train shrieked on through the night. The singer had stopped, but the balalaika played still, softly and sadly. The card players shouted. Margarita stirred.
‘I don’t want an apartment like Katya’s.’ Yelena’s voice, breaking the long silence, was very low but no less fierce for that. ‘I don’t want her pretty clothes, nor her silly friends, nor her prospects nor her fortune. I want – I want freedom! I want to attend the courses for women at the University. I want to learn! About real things! About the world! I want to meet people who know about politics, and art, and mathematics! I want to read, and read and read! I want to know everything! Everything! Oh, ’Noushka, you aren’t laughing, are you? I mean it!’
‘I’m not laughing. I know you do.’
‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted – it’s all I’ll ever ask! ’Noushka, you will persuade Papa, won’t you? You do promise?’
‘I can’t promise, Lenka – you know that.’
‘But promise you’ll try! Papa will never listen to me. If h
e knew how much I wanted to go that would be enough in itself to make him say no.’ Yelena’s voice held nothing either of complaint or of self-pity. She stated a simple truth and they both knew it. ‘But you – he’ll listen to you.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Oh, you know he will! Anna, please! You won’t go back on your word?’
‘Of course I won’t! Of course not!’
‘So.’ Anna could hear the content in her sister’s voice. ‘We’ll share Katya’s tutor, and show him what an extremely silly pupil he’s had till now –’
‘Lenka!’
‘– and then, the University of St Petersburg. Oh, how I wish we could be proper students, living in an attic, reading by candlelight till midnight, drinking cocoa out of tin mugs –’
Anna had to laugh. ‘Idiot!’
Yelena snuggled into the thin blankets. Anna yawned again, genuinely this time, and sleepily. In the distance young men sang, with vodka-inspired cheer, of green fields and willing girls and the soft breath of summer. The silence of slumber fell. Anna’s eyelids drooped.
‘’Noushka?’ Yelena asked, suddenly and softly.
‘Mmm?’
‘Did you mind very much?’ A moment’s pause. ‘The scholarship?’
Silence. The wheels clicked and turned.
Then, ‘No.’ Anna’s voice was even, the single word closing the subject like the sharp click of a lock.
Yelena turned, burrowing into her pillow. Her voice was muffled. ‘Oh, well, as Nanny Irisha is always telling anyone who’ll listen, “Strange are the ways of God”. Who knows? It’s probably all for the best.’
‘Yes. Very probably. Now go to sleep, Lenka, for heaven’s sake. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’
The song had changed, the voices quietened. ‘Dearest, oh dear one, oh why do you deceive me?’
Anna lay very still and stared into darkness.
Strange Are the Ways Page 2