by Roger Bax
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered!
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
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Contents
Roger Bax
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Roger Bax
Came the Dawn
Roger Bax
Roger Bax is the pen name of Paul Winterton (1908–2001). He was born in Leicester and educated at the Hulme Grammar School, Manchester and Purley County School, Surrey, after which he took a degree in Economics at London University. He was on the staff of The Economist for four years, and then worked for fourteen years for the London News Chronicle as reporter, leader writer and foreign correspondent. He was assigned to Moscow from 1942–5, where he was also the correspondent of the BBC’s Overseas Service.
After the war he turned to full-time writing of detective and adventure novels and produced more than forty-five books. His work was serialized, televised, broadcast, filmed and translated into some twenty languages. He is noted for his varied and unusual backgrounds – which have included Russia, newspaper offices, the West Indies, ocean sailing, the Australian outback, politics, mountaineering and forestry – and for never repeating a plot.
Paul Winterton was a founder member and first joint secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association.
Chapter One
It all began at a party given by a Soviet cultural society in Moscow in March 1943. Most of the foreign colony were invited. I forget what the occasion was, but it’s of no importance, for these parties were all pretty much alike. They were usually held in vast houses once owned by Russian noblemen, with lots of gilt and mirrors and faked marble pillars in their high-ceilinged rooms. The food and drink were always staggering in quantity and variety. There were always more guests than the rooms could comfortably hold, and yet you hardly ever saw an unfamiliar face. The social life in wartime Moscow was narrow and inbred, rather like that of castaways on a desert island. Most people went to the parties because they could think of nothing better to do.
This particular gathering was no exception to the general rule. All the usual people were doing all the usual things. There wasn’t even a convoy captain down from Murmansk or an inflown American air crew to break the monotony. It was just the old gang of diplomats, members of the various Military Missions and foreign correspondents, with a careful flavouring of Russians.
There was a crescendo of voices as the vodka and wine began to flow, but in everything but volume the talk was small. The military people—Russian and foreign—were avoiding the painful topic of the war, which the Russians were convinced they were fighting singlehanded. Avoidance was easy, since few of the British and American soldiers could speak much Russian and almost none of the Red Army officers could speak English. Conversation therefore bumped along in a series of imperfectly comprehended toasts. One or two recently-arrived correspondents hovered on the edge of the uniformed groups, hoping to pick up a little copy, but the more experienced Pressmen were content to drink. The civilian Russians were behaving like the well-trained professional hosts they were, and only an initiate could detect the wariness under their mask of official cordiality. One or two sly-eyed hostesses, tough Party members in private life, flirted self-consciously with diplomats of rank. Apart from them, there was the usual sprinkling of Russian poets, artists and writers who in wartime Russia enjoyed the unwritten privilege of mixing freely with foreigners.
To judge by the noise, anyone dropping in casually would probably have said it was a swell party. But the alcoholic joviality was only a facade. Tomorrow most of the foreigners would again be frustrated, bored or angry, and most of the Russians would be aloof and unapproachable.
I helped myself to food and drink and for a time added my voice to the babble. After a while I got tired of the heat and the crush and managed to find a pillar on the edge of the crowd which I thought would at least protect my rear. I had just lighted a cigarette when a girl appeared in front of me with a tray of glasses and offered me champagne. I knew she wasn’t one of the Society’s official hostesses, and yet there was something vaguely familiar about her. I supposed she had been drafted for the occasion to help by being nice to the foreign guests, and she certainly didn’t have to make any effort. She was sweet. She had dark hair and almost violet eyes and she looked about twenty. As I took the glass of champagne I said in Russian, “Please don’t go away!” She gave me an enchanting smile but she went away just the same. I only stopped following her with my eyes when I found I was pouring champagne on to my shoe.
Several times during the next hour or so I caught her glance as she passed lightly from guest to guest, and once she smiled at me again. As soon as the crowd began to thin out I collected two glasses of champagne from a waiter, walked over to her and asked her to sit down and talk to me. She did so with a composed simplicity which was most appealing. I learned that she was a ballet dancer—no doubt that was why her face had seemed familiar, for I must have seen her at the ballet in some minor role. Her name was Marya Lamarkina. She seemed a different type from most of the young girls in the Moscow corps-de-ballet. I knew many of them by sight, and some by repute. They were a vigorous, fresh and amusing bunch who liked going about with foreigners. This girl was rather gentle and shy, with old-world manners which I found exquisite.
She asked me about myself and I told her that my name was Philip Sutherland, that I was the correspondent of a London newspaper, and that I’d been in Moscow for two years. She congratulated me on my Russian, and after a little more conversation she said she must leave. I said I hoped we should meet again, but she only smiled and said ‘Perhaps’. I could hardly bear to see her go. The slight intoxication I felt as I walked back alone to my hotel was not entirely due to alcohol. I couldn’t stop thinking of that dainty figure and that charming smile.
Next day I had to go off with a Press party to cover a big atrocity story in one of the liberated areas, and moving about among burned and tortured bodies I wasn’t in the mood to think of daintiness and charm. I was pretty used to horrors, but this was a particularly appalling business and once I’d dispatched my story I felt a reaction and was sick for a couple of days. Altogether, it was nearly a week before I could seriously get down to the problem of Marya. I was determined to renew our acquaintance, but it wasn’t at all easy to know how to begin. I was afraid that a direct approach might frighten her away for good, and yet I couldn’t see any alternative. It might be months before I ran into her again by accident, or it might be never. In the end, I sent her a short note by messenger. The forty or fifty words it contained gave me a lot more trouble than the million or so I had written for my paper since I came to Moscow, which was odd, since all I wanted to do was to ask her to accompany me to the Moscow Art Theatre on her next free day. I felt certain that she would make some excuse, but to my delight she accepted in
an old-fashioned little letter and appointed the following Sunday as the day.
I met her in the foyer of the theatre, feeling not in the least like a hard-boiled newspaper man. I had gone determined to make her feel at ease with me, but in fact I was much more nervous than she was. She was natural and friendly, and very soon we were both thoroughly enjoying ourselves. The play was The Cherry Orchard, and it was given with the traditional brilliance of the Art Theatre. Marya was enthralled. She rarely had the opportunity to see a straight play and I was touched by her rapt attention to the stage. For the first time since I came to Moscow I was grateful for what before had always seemed to me interminable entr’actes. Each time between the curtains we had half an hour or so to stroll round and round the foyer, as the Russians love to do, talking.
In the second of the intervals I learned a good deal more about Marya. As a small child she had been brought up deep in the country by parents who apparently preserved the old way of life. When she was eight she was brought back to Moscow by a ballet school which had visited her district in search of promising material. She couldn’t remember just how it had happened, but it seemed her parents had not stood in her way. A little later she had had a letter from them, written from some remote spot in Central Russia but giving no address, and that was the last she had heard of them. All her later efforts to trace them had failed. From what she could remember it was easy to imagine that they had not taken to the new regime, and that they had provided for Marya as best they could before the intolerance of the post-Revolution years had swept them away.
During the weeks that followed that first pleasant evening together at the theatre it was only rarely that I was able to be alone with Marya, but I could often see her on the stage. I became an ardent balletomane. I had always enjoyed Russian ballet on its own ground—no one who has not seen it can easily imagine the gorgeousness and glitter of its settings and costumes, to say nothing of the dancing itself. Now I had a more personal reason for liking it. Except when I was out of Moscow on some Press trip, I hardly missed a performance when Marya was dancing. At this time she was only just emerging from the chorus, but she was regarded as a dancer of exceptional promise. She had grace and vitality and technique, and a hint of passion on the rare occasions when she was given an opportunity to show it. Ballet is a serious business in Moscow, and success comes slowly, but I felt sure Marya would one day become a great dancer. Naturally I wasn’t the most objective of critics. I was dazzled by her dancing—spellbound. But it wasn’t just the glamour of the stage that was making me crazy about her. She had just the same effect on me when sometimes we walked together in the Park of Culture and Rest—a grimly formal place totally devoid of glamour.
I liked everything about Marya. I liked the impulsive way she would put her arm in mine before shyly withdrawing it. I liked the way she moved, and the ready laughter in her eyes. She was a shining person, if you know what I mean. Although she looked so demure, she had a tremendous zest for living.
She completely transformed my life in Moscow as our friendship grew. Frustration and enforced inactivity had been making me a little morose—everyone said I had been in Russia too long. But Marya’s gaiety had a magical effect. The vexations of the job no longer troubled me unduly. With Marya I could laugh at official stupidities and obstructions which a few months earlier would have started a rush of blood to the head. I told her that without her I should soon have become a sour old man. “How old are you, Philip Georgevitch?” she asked. I told her I was nearly thirty. Marya thought this over. “Old perhaps,” she said kindly, “but—not sour.”
I couldn’t see nearly as much of her as I wanted to. Almost every day she was either practising or dancing. It was I who was comparatively leisured, for with the spring thaw a lull had come on the Russian front and there was little war news to send. When we did meet, it always seemed that our relationship had ripened. Of course I was head over heels in love with her, and by now I knew that she felt for me something more than the ordinary romantic interest in a foreigner.
One day in the middle of May, when the sun was warm and all Moscow had blossomed, we took a bus out to Khimki—a bathing beach on the Moscow river—hired two tiny canoes and paddled off upstream until we had left the city far behind us. Marya delighted in any form of exercise and it was all I could do to keep abreast of her flashing paddles. She kept breaking into little snatches of song—it was that sort of day. She looked bewitching and I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Presently she suggested we should picnic on an attractive bit of grassy bank fringed with silver birches. We had come prepared to swim, but we soon found that the water was still cold from the thawed snow, and after a few minutes’ splashing and racing we climbed out to sun ourselves on the bank.
“I didn’t know you were such a good swimmer,” I said, a little breathlessly.
Marya shook her wet curls. “I’ve always liked it,” she said. “I adore the water.”
“I’ve got a sailing-boat at home,” I said. “Perhaps one day I’ll take you out in her.”
Instead of making some light reply or ignoring my remark, Marya looked at me quite seriously. I had forgotten the directness of the Russians. “I would like that,” she said.
I couldn’t stop, then. I said, “Marya, you know I’m desperately in love with you.”
“I love you, too, Philip,” she said simply.
“Then will you marry me and come to England?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “We will think about it.”
I took her in my arms. I hadn’t gone to Khimki that day with the deliberate intention of making love to her, but it happened naturally and inevitably. We were both incredibly happy.
Back in town, of course, we had to face serious problems which I suppose both of us, in different degrees, had pushed aside until now. I had been long enough in Moscow to know that about the most foolish thing a foreigner and a Russian girl could do was to fall in love, and that the most foolish thing of all was to marry. I had known it equally, of course, the day I had first set eyes on Marya. If I had been sensible, or unselfish, I should have tried to put her out of my mind after that first party. It would have saved us both a lot of heartache in the end. But people aren’t like that. I had seen many love-affairs and some tragic consequences in wartime Moscow, and in my time had given much sound advice to others, but I had never known any couple refrain from loving or marrying because of the difficulties ahead.
All the same, the difficulties were formidable. I knew that if Marya married me she would be risking official disfavour and possibly jeopardizing her career as long as she stayed in Russia. I knew, too, that there was no certainty that she would be granted an exit visa when the time came for me to leave. One or two Russian wives of foreigners had been permitted to leave, but by no means all. The attitude of the authorities to foreign marriages seemed to be hardening. It was never quite clear what their motives were, but they had a morbid fear and suspicion of the outside world and just didn’t want any mixing. Marya naturally had an inkling of all this, but she wasn’t—thank God—politically-minded and was inclined to assume that everything would be all right.
I tried to face up to the issues as honestly as anyone in love could do. Indeed, when Marya herself raised the subject of marriage at our next meeting I gave such a realistic account of the possible complications that I reduced her to tears and felt an absolute brute. She even accused me, with a rare flash of temper, of having changed my mind about her, and we got into a silly emotional tangle before everything was sorted out. One thing was plain and that was that Marya wasn’t going to be intimidated by difficulties, political or otherwise. She knew that one or two wives had got visas and saw no reason why she shouldn’t in time. She had read quite a bit about ballet abroad and seemed confident that she would be able to follow her profession in London if she were patient. I thought so, too. We went over everything. Finally she said she would sooner be married to me for two years than not married to me at all. I suppose the resul
t was a foregone conclusion all the time, because we both wanted each other and that was all there was to it. We did what so many other couples had done and grasped at happiness while we could.
When I told the British Ambassador he called me ‘a damned young fool’, warned me that he wouldn’t be able to do much to help me, and then shook me warmly by the hand and wished me luck. He married us in the Embassy in June, and afterwards we signed the necessary papers in a registry office to comply with Soviet law. In the evening we had one of the jolliest Anglo-American-Russian parties I had known in all my stay. A large part of the Moscow ballet seemed to be there, the head of the Soviet Press Department looked in and expressed his good wishes, the correspondents and diplomats were charming and cheerful and everybody was in the highest good humour. The Russians were particularly cordial and all the auspices seemed favourable.
Marya and I were marvellously happy, for we were very much in love. She went on with her ballet routine just as before, but her horizon had widened and she talked a great deal about England, which she was eager to see. Her dancing kept her away for long hours, and every now and again I would go off on a Press trip as the tide of battle surged westwards and great cities were liberated. But still we managed to be together most of the time. While the summer lasted we spent as much time as we could out of doors. We used to go off for picnics on the river or take the Metro to the outskirts of the town and walk for hours in the birch forests. Together we explored Moscow. In Marya’s company I grew to love the old city, honey-coloured in the golden autumn, rose-pink under snow in winter. When time was short we had a special ‘beat’—once round the Kremlin. On a crisp bright day in winter there isn’t a finer short walk in the world.
When the cold weather settled in, Marya insisted on teaching me to ski. Marya, like most Russians, was very competent. I, on the contrary, was very conscious of my clumsiness. We used to go off through the Sokolniki woods on the outskirts of Moscow and seek, out a quiet spot where I could practise unobserved. I remember scrambling up one day, covered with snow and indignity after failing to negotiate some nursery slope, to find a group of little Russian children watching me in silence, and their leader solemnly remarking, “From what small hills you fall!” Rather sheepishly I tried to explain that we seldom saw snow in England, and then Marya came up, brimming with laughter, to release me from further inquisition.