Everyone, even Nikolai and Robert Adamson, was able to share Evelyn’s joy that the four years’blood and sacrifice and waste and cruelty and stupidity were over. Joy could not be unalloyed, of course. Those years had taken her brother and hidden John from her in a waste of fear and danger. Millions had died, but the world was safe again from the scourge of Prussian militarism. Peace would return; the Bolsheviki, however cruel they might be to their own country and its people, no longer constituted an enemy of her own.
The Allies would be able to leave Russia and she, too, would be able to go home at last.
It was with a light step and a happy heart that she put Sasha and Tallie to bed that night and promised to show them her new dress before she went to the evening’s dance. She had been a little afraid that Sasha might repeat his earlier demand that she stay with him, but her happiness had spilled over into him and he showed no fear or reluctance to let her out of his sight, and when she peeped into his bedroom an hour later to show off her sea-green gown, he flung his arms around her neck as she bent over him in the half-light cast by his candle, and said:
‘Evie, you look beautiful. I wish I could come to the party with you.’
She laughed and kissed him.
‘I wish you could, too, darling, but it’s not for children. But now all this war is over, when I go home you must come for a visit and I’ll have a special party for you in Beverley.’
‘Promise?’
‘Of course. Now I must go. Sergei will be waiting, and you must sleep. Good night, happy dreams.’
She watched him snuggle down under the quilts and she felt as though her whole being was flooded with love for him. She almost floated down the stairs and smiled at Dindin, who was waiting with her cousin at the door. Sergei bent his dark head to kiss her hand and then said:
‘You are dazzling tonight, Evelyn. The perfect embodiment of England’s triumph.’
‘What a nice thing to say, Sergei Ivanovitch!’ she said and did not even hear the snort of derision from Bob Adamson, who, Cinderella-like, was staying behind.
The party that night was like a draught of the very best French champagne for Evelyn. She had no reservations this time, danced with anyone who asked her, accepted their compliments on behalf of her country, and talked happily about the possibilities of peace and of England. Near midnight Sergei came up to her as she came off the floor with Georgii and said:
‘She’s mine now. Surrender her to your senior officer.’
‘Must I? Oh, very well, but it’s cruel of you to use your military rank to monopolise the most beautiful girl in all North Russia.’
Too busy smiling in happy deprecation of her cousin’s exaggeration and in acceptance of Sergei’s masterful intervention, Evelyn did not think about the significance of all the jokes of military seniority or remember Adamson’s information. She merely looked up at Sergei in delight as he put one arm around her waist and took her hand. He swept her with him into the middle of the dance and looked down at her with an expression that was almost possessive as she put her head back and gave herself up to the music and the dance.
‘The boy’s right, you know,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘You are the most beautiful woman in all Archangel – if not Russia. When will you let go of your memories and let me love you as I ache to do?’
‘Don’t, Seriosha,’ she answered as softly. ‘I’m too happy tonight to behave as I ought and I feel as though I were in love with the whole world.’
‘Then I am jealous of the whole world, Evelyn. I mean it. I don’t think you understand how desperately I love you. You are mine, you know. You were meant to be mine, born to be mine. And on such a night as this I long to hear you admit it.’
Smiling, not taking him seriously, she moved a little closer into his embrace as they turned. She thought suddenly that all her times with Sergei seemed to involve speed and movement. Perhaps that was why being with him seemed so different from her happiest hours with Nikolai, which were all spent in still, deep peace.
Before Sergei could speak again the music stopped, and in the sudden silence before conversation swelled to take its place, Evelyn heard dull booms and crashes. Puzzled, she asked:
‘Is someone else giving a ball tonight? I thought everyone was here.’
‘Another ball? No, I am sure there isn’t. What made you ask that?’ he demanded, annoyed that she seemed hardly to have heard his carefully rehearsed words.
‘Aren’t those fireworks? Those explosions. You can’t hear them now, but when everyone was quieter just then, I heard them distinctly.’
‘Oh, that. That’s just the guns at Tulgas. You can only hear them when the wind’s blowing from the east.’
‘What do you mean “guns”? There’s an armistice.’
‘In Europe, yes. But what bearing has that on our war with the Bolsheviki?
‘But … I thought … Mr Adamson told me that the reason for our troops coming here was that there were supposed to be huge stores of war matériel that the English owned, which were lying on the docks at Archangel. And now that Germany has surrendered, none of that could be used against us, so there’s no reason for the British to be fighting anyone in this country. We’re not at war with Russia, are we?’
‘With Russia? No, of course not. But with that devil Trotsky and his master? Yes, of course, as any sane men would be. The matériel was the excuse, not the reason for the intervention.’
Her shocked expression irritated him and when he spoke he seemed to have forgotten some of his passionate devotion to her.
‘Evelyn, you are being naïve – or perhaps just silly – but no stable government of a once-allied country could sit back and watch what has been happening in Russia without trying to put things right. Surely even you must remember that what the Bolsheviki really want is revolution in all the developed nations in the western world. Your government understands that and is making a push to cut the Revolution off.’
She flushed and, assuming that she was ashamed of making him angry, he pulled her towards him and said kindly:
‘I should not have spoken so roughly. There’s no reason why you should understand such dull things as politics, my angel. Your lovely innocence is one of the reasons why I love you so much.’
Evelyn looked up at him and there was such scorn in her eyes that his arm dropped away from her waist before he could think or say anything else.
‘Really, Sergei,’ was all she said before turning away and going to make her excuses to her hostess and try to persuade Dindin and Natalia Petrovna that it was time to go home.
During the short drive, the others were surprised by Evelyn’s silence, which was in marked contrast to her excitement earlier in the evening, but she was too busy turning her thoughts over and over in her mind to notice them. She remembered shamingly that she had wanted, even expected, her country to come to the aid of the old Russia and to crush the Revolution. But since then something had happened to change her. The armistice should have ended all the fighting, she was sure. And Lenin and his confrères could no longer be seen as Prussian agents, destabilising Russia only in order to help Germany win their war with the Allies. She still hated them for what they had done to people like her cousins; the violence of the Cheka’s search of the Suvarov house in Petrograd – quite apart from what had happened to Sergei’s parents – would shock her whenever she thought of it. But somehow … She could not decide what she thought and she wanted to talk to Nikolai – or even Bob Adamson – so that she could sort it all out.
But when they reached the house, the only light to be seen was the small lamp waiting for them by the front door. Clearly the men had gone to bed. Frustrated, Evelyn went up to spend half the remaining night arguing with herself, recalling things she had said and that other people had said to her. Foremost among them was Bob Adamson’s remark – ‘They have to let Russia settle her own future; and they must let her out of the war: she has no resources or energy to go on fighting it for them.’
N
ikolai realised that something had happened to Evelyn the moment he saw her face across the breakfast table, but he waited until the meal was over and he caught her just as she was about to pick up the heavy wooden tray of dirty crockery.
‘Evelyn, wait a moment would you?’ he said softly.
‘Of course, Uncle Nikki,’ she answered, putting the tray down again. ‘Has something happened?’ He waited until everyone else was out of earshot. Then he said:
‘I think something has, but I am not sure what. You have lost all your happiness. Did something frighten you at the dance last night? Did that ass Sergei upset you?’
She shook her head, but he was pleased to see some of the eargerness come back into her dark eyes.
‘I wanted to ask you about it, but you’d gone to bed last night, and I thought I should wait until this evening when everything had been done.’
‘There’s plenty of time now,’ he said, pulling out a chair for her. She sat down gratefully, but seemed to find it difficult to begin, and so he prompted her.
‘Sergei?’
‘Only indirectly. He will go on pressing me to marry him, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve said no often enough. It’s not my fault that he doesn’t listen or believe me. No, Uncle Nikki, it was when he said that there’s still fighting at Tulgas.’ She looked up, the distress in her face impossible to ignore.
‘And at Ust-Padenga twenty miles to the south and at Plesetskaya seventy miles to the north – between us and Archangel. I assumed that you knew. I’m not surprised you are frightened, but there isn’t anything we can do.’ She shook her head vehemently.
‘It’s not that, really. Oh, I suppose I am afraid, but I can’t understand it: the war is supposed to be over. Yesterday, when we heard about the German surrender, I mean, I thought that meant the army would leave Archangel.’ Her voice dropped, ‘And that I might go with them.’
He put out a hand to touch hers and said:
‘Evelyn, there are only two things that can happen: either your soldiers will push the Red Army right back to Moscow, which looks exceedingly unlikely; or the Allies will be forced to withdraw. When that happens I will make sure that you go with them. The colonel is a decent man; he wouldn’t refuse something like that.’
‘I didn’t know you knew him,’ she began. ‘But never mind that. If he takes his troops away, what will happen to all of you – and the conscripts? I saw what the Bolsheviki did to Cousin Andrei’s house on nothing more than suspicion; what would they do to people who had actually fought against them?’
‘Probably what the Whites are doing all over Russia to the people in territories they capture from the Red Army,’ he said drily and she was afraid to ask him what that was. He might have told her anyway, if Mischa had not come into the hall, stamping the snow off his boots by the door.
‘May I have a word, Nikolai Alexandrovitch?’
‘Of course, Mischa, old friend. Come and sit down.’
Evelyn got up and picked up the big tray to carry it out to the kitchen. As she was clumsily shutting the door behind her, she heard the kindly peasant say:
‘They’ve called me up. Can I do anything about it? I don’t want to fight my own people, Nikolai Alexandrovitch.’
‘By God, I would like to thrash that man Voroshilov!’ came Nikolai’s voice, more angry than Evelyn had ever heard it. Not wanting to hear anything else, she pulled the door to and walked heavily to the kitchen. As she washed up the dishes and pans that had been used to prepare breakfast, she grew steadily angrier until, finished at last, she went up to the little room that had been set aside for lessons and said to the assembled Suvarov children:
‘I am sorry, all of you, but something has happened that means I have to go out. We can have our English conversation later, at luncheon, perhaps, but now I want you all to write me a composition – in English – on … on … oh, what you would most like to do if you were to visit England. And I will read them all when I get back. Yes, Sasha, you can try too.’
She did not wait for any answer or protest, but shut the door smartly and hurried to her room to change her boots and put on a respectable hat and coat to cover her peasant house-dress. Then she walked out of the house, down the slippery steps and into the snow-packed street. She had never walked about the town on her own before, but obviously she could not demand Mischa to drive her this time. No one seemed surprised to see a young woman walking alone, which was a relief, but she did detect some curious glances as she neared the barracks, where, she now knew, Sergei had his headquarters.
The sentry at the gate, a young man from Michigan, was much taken with her appearance and, before going to telephone from his guard hut, tried to engage her in conversation in simple Russian. She was too involved in her thoughts to catch more than the last, interrogative, ‘… baryshnia?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, at her most stiffly English. ‘My name is Miss Markham. Please do whatever it is you have to so that I can go in and speak to my cousin.’
‘You’re English?’ said the man in surprise. ‘Hey, Johnnie, there’s an English girl here.’ At the sound of that name, Evelyn’s face flushed and she moved forward towards the hut, before the impossibility occurred to her. Ashamed of herself, irritated with the young American’s obtuseness and delay, she said:
‘Oh, for goodness sake hurry up. I have no time to waste here.’
Shrugging, the man did as she wanted and after a short colloquy on the field telephone, he came out again.
‘You’re to go in. You’ll find the conscription office upstairs on the left as you get to the second floor.’
She left him without a word and walked so quickly up the stairs that she was quite out of breath as she reached the door of Sergei’s office. But for once dignity was forgotten and she went straight in without knocking and started to speak before she was even through the door.
‘Sergei Ivanovitch, how could you? Do you hate Nikolai so much that you have to take Mischa? It’s none of his business this wretched battle of yours; he doesn’t agree with you. Why couldn’t you leave us alone?’
‘Us?’ queried Sergei with something very like a sneer, ‘I never thought to hear you identify yourself with a peasant like that one. You’ll give Lieutenant Oldridge a very strange idea of yourself if you talk like that.’
Evelyn had not noticed the young English officer standing, rather embarrassed, near Sergei’s desk with a bundle of papers in his hands.
‘I beg your pardon, I had not realised that you were engaged. Forgive me, Lieutenant. But Sergei, this won’t wait. Will you release Mischa? What do I have to do to make you?’
‘My dear Evelyn, what can you mean? There is nothing you can do to alter military necessity. There have been a great many casualties in the last week or so and we need more men.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said, her eyes narrowing into angry slits and all the warmth she had ever felt for him freezing out of her. ‘I think you have done this to hurt us because of what I said last night, because I wouldn’t …’ She remembered the Englishman and stopped just in time. Regaining her self-control, she went on, ‘Please, Sergei Ivanovitch, will you do something? Mischa is much more than Nikolai Alexandrovitch’s servant; they are old friends. Please let him off.’
‘Evelyn, this is not something for discussion. Come, I shall take you back to Suvarov’s house now. You know, you really ought not to walk unchaperoned into a barracks,’ said Sergei, reverting to his old, caressing tone. But this time it sickened her, and she suddenly wondered how she had ever responded to him or thought him cast in the same mould as John and her brother. John had never seemed more lost to her; her need to believe in his survival had never been greater.
Without a word she turned to go, but she was halted at the door by the Englishman’s voice.
‘Miss Markham, he is right; a barracks is hardly a suitable place for a young lady like yourself. Won’t you allow him to escort you back to the gate at least?’ She turned back and
smiled politely at the young man.
‘You’re right, of course. Thank you, Sergei.’
Sergei got up from his desk and came round to fetch his heavy coat from a rack by the door. Lieutenant Oldridge opened the door for Evelyn and she smiled up at him, thinking how young he looked and untouched. As she moved towards the door, he said with some hesitation:
‘It’s quite a surprise to find an English lady in Shenkursk, Miss Markham. If it’s not impertinent to ask this, I wonder whether you would consider visiting some of our chaps in the hospital? They get very low, you know, so far from home and even the rest of the army. Some of them begin to wonder why on earth they’re here, and they don’t recover from the wounds as the doctors say they ought. I can’t help thinking that if, I mean …’ She saved him from more embarrassment by saying emphatically:
‘Of course I will. I had not even realised that there was a military hospital in Shenkursk. I have been wanting to do something to help ever since you all arrived, but I did not know what, or how to go about it. I shall be honoured. When …?’
‘Certainly not, Evelyn. It would not be suitable for you,’ interrupted Sergei, buttoning his coat and putting on a fur hat. ‘Oldridge, I’m surprised at you. I’ll take Miss Markham home now, and we can continue our meeting this afternoon.’
The arrogance of it took Evelyn’s breath away and she could not even look at the lieutenant for embarrassment. But when they had passed through the barrack gate, she rounded on Sergei. He listened to her furious outburst and then said coolly:
‘Of course it is my business, Evelyn, what you do and how you behave. I love you and one day you will be my wife.’
At his assumption of ownership, her slowly seething anger reached boiling point and for perhaps the first time in her life she allowed herself to say just what she was thinking.
‘You are the most selfish, arrogant man I have ever met. I have told you time and again that I shall never marry you. You are so insensitive and cruel that you continually tell me that John must be dead. You order me around. You try to insult and hurt everyone and everything you know I care for. I cannot imagine how I ever, for one single second, thought I could like you or why I have spent so much time with you. I feel quite sick that I allowed you to come so close to me.’
The Longest Winter Page 17