Strange Are the Ways

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by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)


  The boy, no more than nineteen or twenty, blushed with pleasure and shifted upon his stool. His empty trouser leg was tucked and pinned neatly at the knee.

  ‘What are you making?’ Anna stood beside him at the workbench.

  ‘A viola, Ma’am.’ His strong, varnish-stained fingers delicately held a chisel half the size of a box of matches. The sight of those stained fingers brought another strange and painful twist of memory; Andrei’s long finger had been stained just so as it had rested upon a sheet of music as her uncle had bent close to her, explaining a phrase, a breath of emotion in the music that she was attempting to play.

  ‘You’d like a cup of tea, Ma’am?’

  ‘Yes please, I would. If it isn’t too much trouble?’

  She stayed for longer than she had intended, though nobody seemed to mind. After that first painful rush of nostalgia it was good to be back in this atmosphere that she remembered so well. At Albert’s invitation she tested the violin he had just finished, and pronounced it a beautiful instrument.

  ‘And beautifully played, Ma’am, if I might venture such an opinion.’

  She smiled, ruefully. ‘Not as well as it might be, Albert. Nowhere near as well as it might be!’ She was truly unaware of the effect that her still-accented English had upon her listeners. They gazed at her, rapt.

  ‘I do hope I haven’t disrupted your afternoon?’ she asked as she left.

  ‘Not at all, Ma’am. We’re delighted to see you. Any time.’

  She told Guy that evening where she had been, and he smiled. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to find your way down there.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Why should I mind, my dear? And as for the shop, I think it an excellent idea that you should drop in from time to time. We can safely leave the running of the workshop to Albert, but to be honest with you I’m not so sure of Parker. It won’t do him any harm to have you call in on him every now and again.’

  Anna leaned forward to pour tea. The tea cups were pretty; bone china, patterned with roses, and the teapot, jug and sugar-bowl matched them. The room, too, was lovely, all rose and cream, the furniture light and elegant, tall windows opened to a tiny walled garden and the scents of an English spring. In six years she had grown so used to English ways that she rarely thought of the customs of her homeland. Yet now, perhaps because of the memories the afternoon had brought, she found herself thinking of a steaming samovar, the tea glasses waiting, a snow-covered world beyond the window, a skyline of golden onion domes and slender spires –

  ‘I went somewhere else, too.’ She set his tray over his legs, put the tea cup upon it.

  He was watching her, his eyes, which despite illness and age had faded only a little from their brilliant blue, calm and loving. These few years she had given him had been the most precious of a long and enjoyable life. He had thought to help her, and Andrei, and had in fact been himself presented with the most precious gift of all. He recognized her restlessness – indeed had recognized it before she had herself – and understood it. It would not be long, he knew, before it could be assuaged. A very little while more at his side, and then she would be free. ‘Oh? Where was that?’

  She took her tea cup to the window, stood, tall, lean-framed and elegant in forest-green silk, looking out into the tiny walled garden. The bright hair had been cut short and cleverly shaped. Her high-boned face, which had never been pretty but equally had never been less than interesting, was now arresting and attractive, still without coming anywhere near any ideal of conventional beauty. ‘I went to the Russian church in Welbeck Street. You know – the Embassy Chapel.’

  He sipped his tea, the effort involved in keeping his hands steady greater than he would admit, even to himself.

  ‘It was astonishing.’ Her voice was very quiet, there was a far-away look in her eyes. ‘I had forgotten how very beautiful – how very different – our Russian churches are.’

  ‘And the music,’ he said.

  She turned, smiling. ‘Ah yes. The music. Your charming, calm, civilized churches have little like it, do they?’

  ‘No. They don’t.’ He did not comment upon nor question the pronouns she had used.

  She put her cup back onto the tray. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He laid his head back upon the pillow and smiled. ‘I should like you to play for me, Anna Victorovna.’

  * * *

  It was summer when he died, and the dreadful shambles of the Somme was at its height. This was not a catastrophe that could be kept from the people. On that first terrible day, the first day of July, the stark figures had spoken for themselves and would not be silenced. Whole regiments were gone, and with them whole families, whole villages, whole networks of relationship. Men had joined together, served together and then, terribly, were massacred together. The so-called ‘Pals’ battalions had proved a disaster in this gruelling modern war in which thousands – hundreds of thousands – could die in a day. The country was in mourning.

  Guy died two weeks after the start of the campaign on the Somme. Unlike those young men who perished in France beneath the gun he died peacefully and quietly – a fate many at that time would envy him – and, predictably, his affairs were in perfect order. Anna sat, pale and utterly composed, and listened to lawyers and solicitors, accountants and advisers. Friends called with their commiserations, and she thanked them, served tea, sherry or ten-year-old Scotch, according to their needs and habits. She said very little. She even, in those first few days, thought very little. She felt oddly removed from those about her, who with the best of intentions fussed and tried to cosset her. She did not need to be cosseted, though politely she accepted the help of others when it was forced upon her. She found herself perfectly capable of organizing the funeral, of coping with the small, everyday tasks that demanded her attention, perfectly well able to understand the not-too-complicated matters of the Will, the inheritance and the business, which was now hers. What she could not do, it seemed, was to feel. Guy was gone; she had known it would happen, had, with his understanding and encouragement, prepared herself for it; perhaps with altogether too much success. Now there was nothing to do but to endure; endure the knowledge that something warm and enchanting had gone from her life and would never return. A gaping hole had been torn in the fabric of her world. She rather wished that people would simply leave her alone to adjust, to come to terms with a suddenly, shockingly, empty life.

  She did not cry at the funeral. Or perhaps she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure.

  In the weeks before Guy’s death she had taken as a matter of habit on the way back from the shop to visiting the Russian church in Welbeck Street. On occasion she herself questioned her motives in doing so; was she truly in this place to worship, or was she simply revisiting a childhood long past, long lost, yet somewhere still remembered, somehow still yearned for?

  For some time after Guy’s death, without really understanding why, she knew she was avoiding the place; but then one afternoon, after a visit to the shop, she found herself standing on the pavement in Welbeck Street. She did not remember taking any conscious decision; it was as if her feet had carried her there entirely of their own accord.

  The church was empty; unusually so. She stood very quiet and still in the womb of this sacred place, with its flickering candlelight, its icons, its overwhelming silence. The air was impregnated with incense and the smell of the candles; a smell that was like the very breath of her young life. Images flickered in her mind. Her grandfather. Her family. Andrei. The wide and sweeping countryside of her homeland, the great, slow-moving rivers, the domes and spires of the cities. And, too, suddenly she found herself remembering Guy. Not the sick man she had nursed for so many months – not even the attentive and observant English gentleman of Sythings – but Guy, as she first had known him. The Guy in the photograph that had stood upon Andrei’s sideboard. The Guy she had liked and respected from the first time she laid eyes upon him. The Guy who
had, in the apartment in St Petersburg, listened to her music with a look of wonder on his face. The Guy who had taken her to the opera. Suddenly that night gleamed in her memory, clear as if it had been yesterday. The dress – her first grown-up dress. The Italian Opera. They had performed ‘La Bohème’, and she had cried – oh, heavens, how she had cried! – and he had given her his handkerchief. Then he had taken her to the restaurant on the Islands – the name escaped her for the moment – and had told her to hold up her head as she crossed the dance floor to go to the ladies’ room. Not, in fact, the least important advice he had ever given her. She laughed suddenly at the recollection, and then at last she was crying. Not noisily, nor passionately, but simply and quietly, the tears running unchecked and uncheckable down her face, dripping into the expensive lace of her collar. Guy was gone. For ever. What would she do without him? Without his wit and his laughter, without his protection? Without his love?

  She thought it odd that, having remained dry-eyed for so long, once the tears had started she found it all but impossible to stop them. She dried her eyes before she left the little church, but found them overflowing again as she walked down the busy streets towards Portland Place. Briskly she walked, and as briskly the tears fell. No-one took the slightest notice; this was London, after all, and London in the summer of 1916, at that. It was not so very unusual to see tears upon the streets of a capital at war.

  * * *

  She did not come to her decision lightly; certainly not as arbitrarily as she knew it seemed to others that she had. Nor did she contemplate its implementation without misgiving. But the moment she made it, it became a compulsion. No objections, no obstacles would divert her.

  She wanted to go home.

  Not for ever. England had claimed her, she had a life and responsibilities here that she could not – indeed had no wish to – abrogate. But a large part of her heart, perhaps more truly her soul, still belonged to Russia, and she had been away far, far too long. Guy had recognized her homesickness before she had herself. Over the past months, compounded by very real worry for her family, from whom she had not heard for months, it had been growing. Only the need to stay with Guy had kept her from going before; now nothing held her.

  She wanted to go home.

  She made the final decision sitting at the table in the small but elegant dining room of the Portland Place house, listening to an animated young man talk about Petrograd, from which he had just returned. He had been brought to the house by an old friend from the Russian Embassy, who knew Anna had family in the city. Anna had invited them both to dine. She sat now, elbows on table, chin in hand, food all but untouched, her eyes fast upon the young man, her brain, after the years of silence, tuning in to his rapid Russian speech.

  ‘Shortages are getting worse. The queues for bread get longer each day – I saw whole streets full of queuing people. There’s much talk of profiteering. The people are angry – the war isn’t going well, our losses have been enormous, the Generals fight and squabble amongst themselves. And the Empress –’ the young man spread expressive hands ‘– she’s very unpopular.’

  ‘She always was, surely?’ Anna asked, quietly.

  He nodded. ‘That’s true. But now –’ He shrugged a little. ‘She’s truly loathed. It’s said she traffics with the enemy. That she and the Nameless One influence the Tsar to such an extent that –’

  ‘The what?’

  The young man laughed. ‘Sorry. Force of habit. People in the city are so superstitious about the man they won’t even mention his name.’

  ‘Rasputin, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Every sin is laid at his door. You’d think him the devil himself if you could hear the way they speak of him. And the Empress is being tarred with the same brush –’

  ‘– and through her the Tsar.’ Count Boris Stelyetsin rubbed his short, neat beard thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose the people have to have someone to blame?’ Anna nodded to the manservant who stood beside the wine table, indicating that he should replenish the gentlemen’s glasses. ‘If things are as bad as you say they are?’

  ‘They’re worse, Anna Victorovna, far worse, I promise you. The city is overcrowded, all but swamped with refugees, with wounded, even with deserters. And with peasants who are flocking in from the countryside, where already there’s famine. Shortages in the city are desperate, and can only get worse. Food, medicines, clothes, fuel. I dread the thought of what winter will bring. The summer has been a bad one – grey and rainy, with hardly a day’s sunshine. The people are hungry, and there’s unrest amongst the workers –’

  ‘Enough, Grigor Petrovich!’ The older man held up a hand. ‘Don’t frighten Anna Victorovna!’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ Anna said, with sober truth. ‘Tell me more, Grigor Petrovich.’

  He told her more, painting a picture of a city, of a country, in complete disarray, of a people being pushed perilously close to the edge of anarchy by hardship and by a monarch and an administration that appeared neither to care about nor to understand what was happening under their noses. He told of the agitators, of the strikes and the marches, of the riots. Of the mutinous mutterings in the food queues and in the ranks of the ill-led, ill-equipped army. He told of a vicious repression and of the people’s hatred for the Tsar’s Secret Police. He painted a vivid picture of a city in which life became more difficult, more exhausting and more uncertain every day.

  ‘And the journey, Grigor Petrovich?’ Anna asked, mildly. ‘How did you get to Petrograd and back?’

  The young man did not see his older companion’s sudden frown. ‘Via Newcastle, Anna Victorovna. To Sweden, on to Finland and then to Petrograd. The North Sea crossing is the riskiest part of course – you’ll remember Lord Kitchener was drowned just a couple of months ago when his ship hit a mine. But the Hun have been relatively quiet in that part of the world since Jutland.’

  ‘So it isn’t an impossible journey?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, no. Far from it. People do it all the –’ The young man stopped, startled by a sharp cough from the Count, who was watching Anna with growing concern upon his affable face.

  Anna faced him, calmly, smiling. ‘Dear Boris, something tells me I’ll need a friend at the Embassy if I’m to contemplate such a trip?’

  The younger man’s jaw dropped.

  In his agitation the older almost choked on his wine. ‘Absolutely not, Anna Victorovna! I utterly forbid it!’

  She shook her head, still calm, still smiling. ‘You can’t forbid it, Boris. You know it. And if you won’t help me I shall simply keep on banging on doors until I find someone who will. Guy had many contacts and much influence. I’ll find someone, I assure you. But I should prefer it to be a friend. I should prefer it to be you.’

  ‘It’s madness, Anna! Complete madness! There’s a war on!’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Petrograd is a dangerous place.’

  Her face was sober. ‘I know that, too. I know it even better after Grigor Petrovich’s graphic description. Grigor, my family are in Petrograd. I haven’t heard from any of them for months. I don’t know where they are or what’s happened to them. I intend to find out.’ Guy, had he been there, would have noted the sudden stubborn set of her sharp jaw.

  The Count was not going to give up so easily. ‘My dearest Anna – you can’t –’

  She would not allow him to continue. ‘Grigor, I can. And I will. There’s hardship and there’s want in Petrograd – what a very ugly name that is! And one thing I do know; in such circumstances money can be a very potent weapon. And I have money now, Boris. Would you expect me to stand by whilst my family starve, or worse, without my even trying to help? No. The only question to be answered, the only point to be discussed is – will you help me, or must I search out someone else? I assume one needs passes and things?’

  Grigor spluttered with sudden laughter.

  The Count surveyed her helplessly. ‘Yes, Anna. One does need
passes. And things.’

  ‘And you can get them for me?’ She was relentless.

  ‘I—’

  Composedly watching him she folded her hands and her lips and let the silence lengthen. Grigor was still grinning.

  ‘I could, yes,’ he said at last, reluctantly.

  ‘And will you?’

  He made one last try. ‘Anna, my dear, why don’t you simply send the money to your family? I promise – I swear! – I’ll make sure it reaches them.’

  She shook her head. ‘That isn’t good enough, Boris, and you surely know it. I have to go myself. I’m certain you can see that?’ The strange, empty life that a few days before had threatened to overwhelm her was receding. Here was action, here was a purpose. ‘So, please, will you help me?’

  He leaned back in his chair, his hands resting upon the table, his eyes upon hers. ‘Do I have any choice in the matter?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘No. You don’t.’

  * * *

  Only once did she regret that decision, and that was not during the long-drawn-out process of obtaining her travel documents, her tickets, the permission for this, that and the other that naturally attended such a journey in wartime and that took, incredibly, a full six months to complete. Impatience was her constant companion, and exasperation with the mills of officialdom that ground so exceedingly slow and so exceedingly small, but never doubt. Her only moment of regret came during the violent February North Sea crossing, when, in a claustrophobic cabin, clinging to her bunk and vomiting into a bucket in company with two other women and a small, miserable child, she came to the conclusion that she would not survive the journey.

  Grigor Petrovich, heading back to the Russian Office of Foreign Affairs and detailed by Count Stelyetsin to escort Anna to Petrograd – the coincidence of dates, Anna suspecting, having much to do with the slowness with which her application to travel to Russia had been serviced – had no such problems.

 

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