Chapter Seven
They fell awkwardly into their new routine, and it was many days before the girls could become accustomed to rising at half-past six in the morning to see to the stoves and the lamps and begin to prepare breakfast. After breakfast Evelyn would take them and Sasha for English history and conversation, while the two men sawed up logs for the stoves and mended and made whatever was necessary in the house. Then, for two hours, Nikolai Alexandrovitch taught the children mathematics and Russian history, Evelyn joined his housekeeper in the kitchen to help prepare luncheon, and Georgii had two hours to himself.
Evelyn’s hours off did not come until the late afternoon, by which time she and the girls had washed up the dishes and pots and pans from luncheon, used the few hours of dusk-like daylight to clean the rooms, or tackle the huge pile of laundry. Dinner was usually early, about half-past six, and for an hour or two after it, struggling with sleepiness, she would sit at the big round table in the hall, cleared of its dishes and dirty cloth, and listen to the talk between Georgii and his uncle.
It was less acrimonious than the discussion she had heard in Petrograd, although its subject was often the same and, as she listened, she came more and more to admire Nikolai. From him, at last, she began to understand why a revolution had had to come to Russia, and she could almost accept that a period of privation and fear was a small price to pay for the freedom and tolerance that were to come. Sometimes she would interrupt them to ask a question or two, and always Nikolai would answer directly, with none of the implied comment she had been used to from Piotr and his American friend. Nikolai’s answers always seemed to make sense, and to be imbued with the tolerance of human inadequacy that seemed so basic a part of his character.
She trusted him. And she began to think that he might have some of the answers for which she yearned. If she had ever seen him alone, she would have spoken to him of John, who seemed to be in danger of fading from her memory. To talk to someone like Nikolai about John might help to fix him in her mind as the strong, gentle man who had first told her that he loved her, instead of the distraught, unhappy victim of their last day together.
In the early days of their romance, John had been full of a charming kind of authority, and she had believed everything he had told her. When he had said that she was beautiful she had been able to smile and believe him; when he had first said that they would love each other for ever, she had known that he was right and never suspected that one day she would have such difficulty remembering how it had felt.
She longed to tell Nikolai all of it, to describe John’s mixture of seriousness and gaiety, his thick blond hair, his superb seat on a horse, the courage that had so frighteningly deserted him at the moment when he had most needed it, and so bring them all back to her. Then she might be able to ask Nikolai about some of the other things that worried her still, and perhaps banish the unhappy memories. But the only time Nikolai appeared to sit down was after dinner, and Georgii was always there, and usually Dindin as well, even though Sasha and Natalie had been sent to bed after an early supper in the kitchen.
When Evelyn herself went to bed, she was so tired that the effort involved in collecting her can of hot water from the huge kettle in the kitchen, taking it upstairs to her room, and washing herself was almost more than she could manage. In spite of her labours in Petrograd, it was a revelation to her how tiring regular housework and cookery could be. Her muscles would sometimes ache so much that she thought she would never be able to lift another bucket. At other times it would be her hands that worried her: chapped and raw, they hurt even when she was lying in bed; plunging them into cold water was agony and using them to grip a rag and polish a table almost unbearable.
But there were curious, unlooked-for satisfactions too. Her exhausting days left her little time to think, and when she lay in bed she did not dream. Although she still hurt all over whenever she thought of her brother’s unbearable death, she came to dwell less and less on the mud and blood and bodies of the battlefields in Flanders, in France and all along the Russian front, and gradually learned to enjoy the way her world had shrunk until it was circumscribed by the grey wooden walls of the old house in Shenkursk. There was an extraordinary luxury in not having to worry about anything except whether the floor for which you were responsible was properly clean, or the sheets unmarred by wrinkles, or the food laboriously brought in by the men nicely cooked so that it could be enjoyed. The fact that she was living what was really a servant’s existence no longer worried her, and if she ever thought about the future, it was with a certain peaceful faith.
One evening Georgii, who had wrenched his back inexpertly splitting logs, had retired to bed early so that when Dindin went upstairs, Evelyn was alone with Nikolai. She said something to him about her new content and the pleasure of sleeping soundly through whole nights. Her sense of ease with him was such that she could look at him as she spoke and so she saw the reminiscent smile that spread slowly across his face as he quoted:
‘”Never sees horrid night, that child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium …”’
‘That’s right,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Who said it? “Child of hell” is just what a sleepless night becomes.’
‘Shakespeare, in Henry V. Don’t you know it?’ Evelyn blushed faintly, which amused him.
‘No. My governess did not believe in Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘I overheard my mother asking her once why she would not read the plays with me, and I remember her answer very well. She said, “Mrs Markham, William Shakespeare may be a famous dramatist, but he was a man of the utmost crudity, and his work is not suitable for a young girl.’”
‘And didn’t that make you rush to your father’s bookshelves for a copy?’ asked Nikolai with a smile.
‘No. I was such a goody-goody. It never occurred to me to break any rule or court any kind of trouble. Isn’t that stupid? What I must have missed! I think I always did what I was told.’ Her face changed and in place of the warm confiding expression came a pinched, pale look that Robert Adamson would have recognised. But Nikolai had never seen it before.
‘What is the matter, child?’ he asked.
Evelyn almost wept at the kindness in his voice as he called her ‘child’. She felt as though no one had ever called her that before, that she had never been allowed to be a child. It took a minute or two before she could control the quivering in her voice, but she said at last:
‘I would like to tell you all about it, but somehow I don’t think I can. It is just that I once did something I was asked to do, and it had the most …’ Her voice became wholly suspended and she put up one arm to cover her eyes. He put a large hand out to her across the table and took her clenched fist in it, and gently bore it down on to the table top. At first she tried to resist, but then as she allowed him to overbear her, a deep relaxation seemed to flood through her. She lifted her head at last and looked at him again. ‘Thank you, Uncle Nikki. You are very good to me. One day, perhaps, I shall be able to tell you about it. It was just something that turned out badly and might have had terrible consequences.’
‘Evelyn, out of the things I have done and those that have been done to me I have learned one thing above all others,’ he said, still holding her hand. ‘Blaming yourself for things that you have done is the most sterile exercise a human being can perform. It leads only to self-hatred, which cuts a person off from the rest of humanity. All you can do when you acknowledge that an action of yours – or words – has caused trouble or pain for someone else is to try to heal that pain and to learn how to avoid doing the same thing again.’
‘And if you cannot heal the pain, if the opportunity is taken from you?’ she asked, the tears outlining her huge, dark eyes, but not falling.
‘Then it is you who will feel the pain. But, dear Evelyn, somehow you must try to make that hurt take you closer to other people, not d
ivide you from them. That is the only way in which it will be eased.’
He thought for a moment that she might be going to tell him what it was that troubled her so, but all she said was:
‘Uncle Nikki, why do you take such trouble with me?’
‘It is not trouble, child. I am interested in you. And I like you.’
At that the welling tears fell, flooding down her face and making her eyes larger than ever. He let go her hand at last and got up off his chair to come round the table. He made her stand up and then took her in his arms. There was nothing in his embrace that reminded her of John or even of Sergei. The sensations that filled her were of comfort and safety. She leaned against him and could feel his heart beating steadily and slow. After a moment of peace, she drew back from him.
‘Thank you, Uncle Nikki. Thank you.’
He patted her head and smiled a smile of such tender amusement that something in her answered it. She brushed the last tears away with the back of her left hand and said:
‘You have done something for me tonight … I don’t quite know what … but I think you have made me very happy. I ought to go to bed now.’
‘Yes, I think you probably should. We all have an early start. I am glad we were alone tonight.’
‘I too,’ she answered and left him.
Their evening confidences were not repeated, and neither of them referred to what they had talked about, but everywhere Evelyn went, whatever she did, she heard his voice saying ‘And I like you.’ She did not believe that she had ever been truly liked before. She had been loved, perhaps, but that was different: difficult, laying burdens and responsibilities on her and carrying with it possibilities of infinite pain. Few of her so-called friends had really liked her, she now understood, just as she had liked few of them; her governess had seemed to detest her, and even her parents, who she was sure felt about her as parents should, never seemed to welcome her company or want to listen to her. She rarely saw her father except at the stilted, formal meals they had three times a day, and her mother had always been too busy telling her what she should do and how she should behave and dress to spend time talking with her.
Tony was very like a friend to her, but once he had gone away to school he seemed to have left her behind. Occasionally, when he came back from school or his one term at university they managed to retrieve the old relationship, but his life had become so different from hers that sometimes it was difficult. She had hoped that John might take his place – his old, real place – when they became engaged, but there had not been time for that.
The rest of the household did not particularly notice any change in Evelyn, but Andrei Suvarov saw it at once when he arrived from Archangel and she greeted him with a great beaming smile and a plate of hot, highly flavoured stew. He tucked into the food with the pleasure of extreme hunger, and answered the questions they all flung at him as best he could.
During the first pause in the conversation he turned to Evelyn to say:
‘I am sorry to say that I’ve no real news for you, Evelyn. Baines, my manager, could tell me nothing and so I went to see the British Consul, but he told me he has no instructions from his government about the English subjects at present in Archangel. There are fourteen hundred in Archangel town itself and no one knows how many more in the province, making their way up there. The ice won’t break up until May at the earliest, but even then it is not certain that there will be British ships to take so many people off, and the Soviet’s not likely to provide transport.’ He was surprised to see her shrug. Then she smiled and said:
‘Cousin Andrei, I seem to have been on a roundabout journey home ever since I left in 1916. I know I’ll get there in the end. And Shenkursk is not Petrograd.’
‘No,’ he agreed, looking round at their rosy, bright-eyed faces. ‘You all look very much better than on that day when I left you at Nyandoma station. You’ve done them well, Nikolasha.’
He smiled across the table at Evelyn.
‘I couldn’t have done it without our Anglichanka. She has been invaluable.’
Neither of the men noticed the scowl that crossed Georgii’s face, but Evelyn saw it, and later in the day found an opportunity to say:
‘Georgii, what made you so angry this morning?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he began and then as his resentment boiled up all over again, he burst out: ‘It’s just that no one ever notices that I do just as much work as you do.’
‘But, Georgii,’ she protested, smiling, ‘of course they do. It was only that Uncle Nikki said …’
‘I know what he said, and I know I’m being stupid, but it’s so unfair. It’s just like everything that’s ever happened. Just like them letting Piotr go off and do whatever he wanted while I had to work for Papa. No university for me, and I’m just as clever as Piotr ever was.’
Evelyn could not hide her smiles at his childishness and after a moment’s petulance, he joined in.
‘I know, I know. I’m behaving badly. It’s just that my father always makes me angry and I can’t ever show it to him without seeming foolish. And now, you see, he seems to be exempt from Uncle Nikki’s rules that anyone who doesn’t work doesn’t eat.’
‘Come on, Georgii, he’s only just arrived. You can’t really expect him to be out there in the vegetable patch already.’
‘But he won’t be tomorrow, either. He’s going to write a report for Uncle Nikki about his thirteen years’stewardship of the Suvarov Works. It’s quite absurdly unnecessary now they’ve been stolen by the Bolshevik rabble.’
Evelyn shared Georgii’s view that his father’s report was a ludicrous exercise, but at least it kept him quiet over the next few days. Whenever he was not writing it or sitting with his wife, he tried to get Nikolai to sit down with him so that he could tell his brother of the guilt and anxiety he had suffered when Nikolai had been sent to Siberia. Evelyn would never have believed that the man who had always seemed so overbearing could have become so cowed. One evening she heard him say:
‘Nikolasha, I know that what I suffered was nothing compared to what must have happened to you in Siberia.’ He paused there, as though waiting for his brother to deny it. But Nikolai just sat with his back to the stove, a pipe between his lips and his face impassive, waiting.
‘But I felt so guilty always. And I tried to do everything you would have done at the Works and then with my sons.’
At that Georgii got up and left the hall, as though he could not bear to listen to any more, and Evelyn looked speculatively at Nikolai, knowing that Georgii had already told his uncle much of what he had always called his father’s ‘tyranny’. Still Nikolai sat without apparent judgment, waiting until his brother had rid himself of the accumulated feelings of thirteen years.
‘When Piotr started to attend those meetings and bring his revolutionary friends to the house, I tried to explain to him what he was risking, what had been done to you. He wouldn’t listen, Nikolasha. He just said that Russia was worth risking everything for. And I lived in terror of what would happen. After that I did everything I could to stop him – short of reporting him to the Okhrana myself.’
At last Nikolai spoke, relieving a tension that was becoming unbearable to Evelyn at least.
‘Andrushka, you had no reason for guilt. You did not send me into exile. You were no provocateur or informer. I was arrested during a demonstration which you had refused to attend. What happened to me was not your doing.’
But his brother did not seem to want to be comforted, and Evelyn saw for the first time how self-indulgent the guilty can be, and she began to understand why Nikolai had called guilt a sterile exercise. As such conversations continued evening after evening, she wondered if Andrei Alexandrovitch were not trying to elicit from his brother a blanket absolution for the way he had bullied his two elder sons and perhaps for all the other things he might have done with which he was not satisfied. She watched him feeding off Nikolai’s strength as he tried to excuse himself for the regrets that mad
e him uncomfortable and she began to sympathise much more with the absent Piotr and with Georgii, whose slowly increasing courage to rebel seemed to grow in parallel with his father’s abasement.
One afternoon Georgii was sitting in the dark warmth of the kitchen while Evelyn was putting dried beans into a large wooden bowl of water to soak for the next day’s dinner. He had forgiven her for Nikolai’s championship; after all, as he had once told her kindly, it wasn’t her fault and she did work fantastically hard around the house. The atmosphere between them was peaceful, and the scent of stewing pork mingled with those of the drying clothes hanging on a line across one end of the big kitchen and the bread that Mischa’s wife had left to prove at the side of the big black range.
Georgii watched his English cousin and suddenly said:
‘Did you realise how weak my father was when we were all in Petrograd?’
Evelyn, concentrating on her tasks, did not at once understand what he was asking, but after he had repeated the question, she put down the spoon she had used to stir the simmering stew and said thoughtfully:
‘I don’t think it is weakness. I think he is behaving like this because for all those years he was in charge and so he blames himself for letting the timber works be stolen by the Bolsheviki. Now he is back with his brother, he sees a chance to share some of his guilt and lessen his self-hatred.’
‘You’re too charitable; but then you never suffered as I did. He never tried to bully you and choose your friends and forbid you this and that.’
Trying quite strenuously not to see a parallel between Georgii’s petulance and his father’s exculpation, or between Piotr’s rebellion and Nikolai’s strength, Evelyn decided it was time to end the conversation.
‘It must have been horrid for you, Georgii.’
As she stopped speaking, they heard a light knock on the back door. Wiping her wet hands on the voluminous white apron she wore over her peasant skirt, she went to open it. There, silhouetted against the dingy twilight, stood the figure of a dirty, unkempt, exhausted man. For a moment she did not recognise him. But then he spoke her name. She could not believe what her ears told her. Before Georgii could speak, she whispered, ‘Sergei Ivanovitch?’, holding both hands out across the threshold.
The Longest Winter Page 12