The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

The youngest children had made her a little book in which they had written out their favourite English story. It was the one that she had first told them, and Natalie had put it down in her best handwriting while Sasha had decorated it with little pictures. As she turned its pages, four-year-old Sasha stood beside her chair, pointing out its glories and telling her which pictures he had drawn himself and to which Natalie had contributed. Evelyn could hardly believe that they should have taken so much trouble for her and felt silly tears at the corners of her eyes. To disguise them, she hugged Sasha and laid her head on his silky black straight hair for a second. Then she looked up at the two of them, who stood hand in hand in front of her, and said:

  ‘It’s lovely. The nicest present I have ever had. Thank you very much.’

  They were pleased that she appreciated their efforts, but Natalie was a little embarrassed by the fervour of her thanks and quickly directed her attention to their parents’parcel.

  ‘See what Mama has for you, Evie,’ she said in French. ‘It is wonderful, truly.’ Evelyn laughed kindly at her and said to her mother:

  ‘You are all being much too kind to me. No one at home ever made so much fuss over my birthday.’

  But when she had opened their huge parcel she could not speak at all. They had given her a quite magnificent fur coat: thick and glossy black sable, the most luxurious and expensive fur there was in all Russia. They watched her white hands helplessly stroking it, feeling the sumptuous texture. She lifted her head at last and said:

  ‘Cousin Natasha, Cousin Andrei, I … I don’t know any words. You should not give me something like this. It’s far, far too much.’

  ‘Silly child,’ said her cousin. ‘Andrei Alexandrovitch, tell her how silly she is.’

  ‘Never that, Evelyn. But we are very grateful for what you have done for Dindin, and we knew that you needed a proper coat. Winter is coming, and it may be very bad this year,’ he added, thinking silently: and I, at least, feel guilty that we have involved you in the terrible things that have been happening in Russia. And I wish to God that I could get you home and out of the trouble that may be coming.

  ‘Try it on, Evie,’ said Dindin, excited and very envious. The tension broke into laughter, and Evelyn stood up while Dindin helped her to put the coat on. It fell in glamorous folds around her, and she turned its great collar up round her pale face, and gently caressed her cheek against its softness. A long, slow smile – almost sensuous, thought Georgii – dragged at her lips, and her eyelids lowered until the black lashes brushed the yet darker fur.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ cried Dindin. ‘Look!’ And she turned her cousin round so that she could see her reflection in the tall gold-framed glass that hung above the inlaid table.

  Piotr, coming deliberately late to small celebration and deliberately ignoring his father’s angry rebuke, could not help admiring the picture that he saw, although its reality disgusted him in a city that was supposed to have revolted against riches and privilege. She stood in front of the black and gold table, gilt wrapping paper strewn around her feet, framed in the ornate gilded carving of the pier glass, looking quite ravishing, more relaxed than he had ever seen her. Forgetting for a moment the myriad problems he had to sort out, he smiled and rather wished that Bob could have seen Evelyn like that. He might have changed his tune about her coldness if he could have seen the way she smiled then. Catching sight of his reflection in the glass, Evelyn turned from her own to hold out her hand and say, ‘Piotr, it is days since I saw you.’

  The conflict of feelings she had aroused in him made him feel a little of Bob’s often vaunted antagonism and instead of shaking her hand, he put a small, plain-wrapped packet into it.

  ‘Yes, Evie. I, too, have brought you a gift.’ He half expected a reprimand for deliberately misunderstanding her gesture of welcome, or perhaps an angry blush and a tightening of those beautiful lips, but she only smiled at him. When she had undone the white paper and revealed a cheap copy of Capital by Karl Marx, her smile even widened.

  ‘Oh, Piotr Andreivitch, you are trying to corrupt me.’

  ‘No, Evelyn, to counteract the corruption of all this.’ His thin hand swept out to embrace the richness of the room and the shameful extravagance of the fur. She slipped her shoulders out of the coat and laid it reverently on a chair.

  ‘Well, I promise to read it, but I won’t promise to believe any of it.’

  At that he, too, laughed.

  ‘If you even read one chapter you will have won my bet with Bob. You can tell him yourself tonight at the opera.’

  ‘Is he coming with us then?’ she asked, more coolly, disliking the fact that they had been betting on something to do with her, and not wanting her birthday evening to be spoiled with his sarcasm and too-obvious dislike.

  ‘Not with us, no. But he has a ticket – and he especially likes Boris Godunov, or so he tells me.’

  He smiled to himself as he remembered the conversation they had had the evening before when he and Georgii, their bitter quarrels submerged for once, had shared a frugal supper in Adamson’s flat. It had been almost like the old days before the Revolution when their differences were only academic. They deliberately avoided talking politics and the conversation was frivolous as they laughed at each other and made all the old jokes. When Bob had poured them a glass from the last bottle of brandy he asked:

  ‘So tell me – how is the Anglichanka? I haven’t seen her in weeks. Has she got over it yet?’

  ‘I think so. She seems all right, Bob,’ answered Piotr judicially. ‘I wish that it hadn’t happened, and I feel desperately sorry for her, but it has had one good result. She seems more settled now – and we get far less of what they do in Yorkshire and how a lady is supposed to behave.’

  ‘Well that’s something. I’ve sometimes thought she can’t be as stupid as she makes herself out to be, and when it mattered she was darned brave, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Do I detect a certain admiration for our English cousin?’ asked Georgii, sipping his brandy. ‘I thought you had forsworn women since your great disillusionment in Petrograd.’

  ‘But Georgii, you must have noticed: he can hardly keep his hands off her,’ said Piotr, laughing.

  Georgii looked from one to the other, noticing Piotr’s mischievous grin and Adamson’s rueful smile.

  ‘But, Bob, you can’t bear her,’ protested Georgii, who had noticed nothing of the kind. ‘Didn’t you tell me weeks ago that she is the symbol of everything you most dislike and mistrust about the idle kept women of the capitalist classes?’

  Bob’s self-mocking smile deepened and the corners of his wide mouth turned downwards.

  ‘Unfortunately a guy’s senses can play traitor to his reason. But don’t look so shocked, Georgii Andreivitch, I know too much about women to give in to my baser instincts. I can’t stand the girl.’

  ‘I can’t imagine desiring a woman I disliked,’ said Piotr meditatively, but Georgii, swirling the last of the brandy round the bottom of his glass, murmured provocatively:

  ‘Nina Rybakova?’

  ‘Actresses are different,’ said his brother more sharply, and then relaxed back into teasing their friend. ‘But, Bob, I wonder how long you’ll be able to resist that mixture of cool beauty, luxuriant glossy hair, slender bones, perfect lips, huge eyes …?’

  ‘Stop, you tormenter,’ he protested, laughing. ‘She’s a tiresome, stupid girl who happens to be packaged in a way that tickles my fancy. But unlike you two young boys, I’m too old a hand to be taken in by packaging.’

  Piotr laughed again and then said irrelevantly:

  ‘She told me the other day that her brother – the dead one, I mean – used to call her “Old Toffee-Apple Eyes” because that’s what he thought they looked like.’

  ‘That’s a bit unfair,’ said his brother. ‘They’re not the least protuberant – or sticky-looking.’

  ‘No, but I know what he meant,’ offered Bob, trying yet again to joke himself out of the unsettling emotion
s that had been aroused in him. ‘They seem huge in that elegant face, and much glossier than you’d expect.’

  ‘What is amusing you, Peterkin?’ asked Natalia Petrovna, recalling him to the present.

  ‘Nothing much, Mamenka. Just nicknames.’ Then he turned to Evelyn and rephrased his answer to the question she had just asked: ‘No, Bob is not actually coming with us, but he will be there and he said he’d come round to the box to offer his congratulations if you allow it.’

  It was partly her determination to show Mr Adamson just what she thought of his careless dress and shocking manners, and partly a desire to appear a credit to her generous cousins, whose presents had been so much more lavish than her parents’slim garnet necklace and her brother Dick’s Golden Treasury, that led Evelyn to take enormous care when she was dressing for the opera. She had pressed the dress herself, and cajoled Dindin into helping her with her hair. When she emerged from the room, with the new sables slung cloakwise from her white shoulders, she had every reason to feel satisfied with her appearance.

  She had half expected to find the theatre full of the sort of people and atmosphere she and Dindin had encountered on the tram to the Vyborg, but to her delight the vast red-and-gold foyer was filled with ladies in low-cut gowns, displaying their finest jewels, and their escorts in perfect black-and-white dress clothes, with here and there an officer in the gorgeous uniform of one of the old fashionable regiments. It was almost as though the Revolution had never happened, and it helped Evelyn to see that her two forays into the new world of the workers were nightmares: horrible enough, but unlikely ever to be repeated. She began to believe Andrei Suvarov’s view that the excesses of the last seven months were over and that even the revolutionaries themselves were anxious to get back some stability and internal peace so that they could rebuild their shattered country.

  Suddenly very much happier, Evelyn smiled at Dindin, who was standing beside her almost shaking with the excitement of her first opera and her first ‘grown-up’ evening dress. Robert Adamson, strolling towards them through the crowd, saw the smile and recognised in it a kind of complicity with Dindin that he had never seen her show before. He was just starting to wonder whether he might have been wrong about her when all his self-protective instincts rose up and reminded him of everything he knew about beautiful women. His voice was as sardonic as ever as he greeted her:

  ‘You’re looking very lovely tonight, Miss Markham.’ She heard the sarcasm and acknowledged the words with no more than a dignified inclination of her head. But Dindin answered:

  ‘Oh, yes, isn’t she? Isn’t the necklace pretty? Her father asked Papa to find it for her birthday. Doesn’t it suit her?’

  ‘You must not get so excited, Dindin. Oh, listen. There’s the bell, and your mother is beckoning. Come along. Good evening, Mr Adamson.’

  He watched them go, cursing himself mildly for his instinctive admiration of her looks, and frowning horribly at Piotr, who was laughing openly at him.

  ‘I give you six months at the most, Bob,’ the boy whispered as he passed in the wake of his family.

  ‘Never!’ he answered in mock dramatic tone, his hand on his heart, and went alone to his seat in the stalls.

  As the opera wound onwards to its dramatic end, he found himself looking up towards the Suvarovs’box and watching her face, wondering why he should find her quite so beautiful – and why he could not forget her. He had never suffered from such a violent mixture of emotions about any woman before, and he tried to tell himself that it was only because of her pretty face, oddly foreshortened now by the angle from which he looked up at her, and her exasperating attitudes. But as she sat, erect in her gilt chair, her head turned slightly away from him, looking down at the stage, he could not help looking more at her than at the singers, and wondering about what she was really like. It was hard to believe that the person she seemed to be would have risked so much for Dindin – or that Piotr could like someone as artificial and stupid as she made herself appear; and it was clear that Piotr did like her. But Bob was determined never again to allow his susceptibility to land him in the kind of mess he had tumbled into when he first came to Petrograd and fell in love with a beautiful woman who turned out to be shallow, selfish and obsessed with money. The memory of his misjudgment could still bring an unpleasant taste into his mouth whenever he thought of it, and the episode had cured him for all time of mistaking physical desire for anything else.

  For her part, Evelyn was quite unaware of him, absorbed as she was with the scenes played out on the stage. She had never been taken to the opera in England, and she found much of the posturing absurd, and often thought that the unnecessary elaboration of a simple narrative was typical of the over-rich stuffiness of the life she had discovered in Petrograd, but when Chaliapin himself was singing she was transported.

  The great voice seemed to vibrate through her body, and the power and majesty of it held her in complete subjection. When he was not singing she studied his stocky figure in the incongruously gorgeous costumes and wondered how such an ordinary-looking man could produce sounds of such magnificence, but when he sang she could only listen.

  When it was over and the astounding voice had died into silence for the last time before the elaborate swagged and fringed velvet curtains swung down and hid the stage, Evelyn felt a piercing regret. She wanted to sit quietly for a while and think about what she had just heard, but Natalia Petrovna seemed anxious to get home and hurried her out of the box. Evelyn left, looking regretfully back into the opera house.

  ‘Come,’ said Andrei Alexandrovitch offering her his arm. She took it and allowed him to lead her down the grand staircase to the foyer, where he sent Piotr for the ladies’coats and Georgii to alert the chauffeur. As soon as the car was at the door, he handed the ladies in and announced that he and the boys would be following on foot.

  Sitting comfortably in her own motor, a pleasant and conventional evening behind her and the streets around them apparently peaceful, Natalia Petrovna shared Evelyn’s satisfaction with the end of the upsets brought by the Revolution. She had had no more visits from Red Guards, and her husband had used his many contacts to ensure that her larders were as full as ever. On the few occasions when she thought about what had happened to her daughter and Evelyn in July she felt all the old horror, and so she never did think of it if she could help it. She lay back against the soft pale-grey upholstery of the motor car and watched the two girls.

  Dindin was chattering excitedly about what she had seen, and repeating all the compliments she had been paid, and so Evelyn’s silence was hardly noticeable. But at last it became apparent even to Natalia Petrovna and during a pause in her daughter’s prattle she said:

  ‘Did you dislike this evening’s performance, Evelyn?’

  The English girl smiled slowly, almost falteringly, and said:

  ‘How could I have disliked it, Cousin Natasha? It was wonderful, of course, but there was more to it than I had expected. I can’t really explain it, but listening to that voice seemed to tell me that there is much more in life than I had thought about.’

  ‘Such as?’ asked Dindin, interested enough to forget her own success for a moment.

  ‘I don’t know: it just seemed to tell me … I can’t explain. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be, Evie. It’s what Piotr used to say about you – that there were whole worlds you knew nothing about.’

  ‘Don’t be childish, Dindin, and don’t repeat things other people have said to you,’ snapped Evelyn, her elation spoiled and collapsing. ‘It was silly of me to try and tell you.’

  She felt so angry that she would have gone straight upstairs when they got home had not Natalia Petrovna said:

  ‘Ring for the samovar, would you, Evelyn? I think we all need some tea after that chilly drive.’ Always obedient, she pulled the bell and when one of the last remaining servants appeared, she gave the necessary orders. Then she walked slowly round the room as Dindin sat beside her mother and asked ques
tions about some of the notable people who had been pointed out to her in the boxes near the Suvarovs’own. Evelyn felt restless as well as angry, about she knew not what, except that she longed for someone to talk to who would have understood, or at least tried to understand what she was trying to talk about, and who would not sneer or laugh at her even when she was silly. For once she did not think of any of the young men who had been filling her mind. She had never talked to any of them in the way she wanted to talk now.

  ‘Evelyn, come and sit down and have a glass of tea. You are making me quite tired prowling around like that.’ Reluctantly she turned.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Cousin Natasha. Thank you.’ She accepted the long glass in its silver holder, and sat straight-backed on a low chair by the white-and-gold porcelain stove. She had just taken her first sip of the strong, aromatic tea when they all heard urgent voices in the hall outside. She and Natalia Petrovna exchanged surprised looks as the door was slammed back against the crimson damask wall.

  Andrei Suvarov stood there, his hat in his hand and his astrakhan coat flung open. He said, appalled and angry:

  ‘Adamson has just told us that the Prime Minister has fled and the Bolsheviki have seized power. The Bolsheviki!’

  The satisfactions of the evening were smashed beyond repair. Evelyn said without waiting for anyone else to speak:

  ‘I don’t believe it. You told me that that could never happen. All that was finished, done with. After the July Days they were stopped, exiled again. You told me yourself that it was all over.’

  ‘I thought it was. Like others, I have been misled. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dindin, don’t cry like a fool.’

  It was the first time any of them had heard him speak to his daughter in such tones and Natalia Petrovna, who had put a plump arm around her daughter’s shaking shoulders, said:

  ‘How could you be so thoughtless? Announcing such news in so brutal a way. You know Dindin hates loud voices. And after we had all had such a pleasant evening, too.’

  Her husband looked at her as though she were a complete stranger, and said: