Miserable, discouraged and resentful, Evelyn dried her hands on a coarse huckaback towel and picked up her bag to leave. As she was standing at the tram stop, waiting in the grim, cold four o’clock twilight, she suddenly thought of Robert Adamson, alone in the Russian hospital, and knew that she could not go straight back to Baines’s house. There was no way of knowing what the hospital was like, whether Adamson was being properly treated or if he needed anything. At that moment a tram bell sounded and she looked up to see the lights of the vehicle only about two hundred yards away. Her tired, aching body screamed at her to go home, but her mind knew that she could not. Squaring her shoulders, she left the tram queue and walked down a side street towards the Russian hospital.
There was no difficulty in finding Adamson’s bed: everyone in the hospital seemed to have heard of the American civilian with the broken legs and Evelyn was escorted to him by a horde of interested ambulant patients. They stood about four yards back as she greeted Bob, too curious to disappear and too courteous to press forward to hear what was to be said.
He seemed to be asleep and she looked down at him, trying professionally to assess his condition. There was a whiteness about his mouth that suggested that he was still in severe pain and a deep crease between his thick brows that confirmed it. She was about to turn to go, not wanting to rouse him if he really was asleep, when his bruised eyelids opened. His hazel eyes focused at once and his lips twisted into a kind of smile.
‘Good of you, Eve, to visit the sick.’
‘Not at all, Robert. I had to come to make certain that you had everything you needed. Have you?’
‘No. But I’ve everything anyone in this benighted town could provide.’
There was something in his tone that discouraged her. He should have been grateful to her for coming, should have known how drained she felt and what it had cost her not to go straight back to her bed. He might have helped the conversation along. He had been so much friendlier in the last few days in Shenkursk and on the retreat. Now he sounded just as he always had, dismissive, sarcastic and bored.
‘Well, if there’s nothing I can do, I’ll leave you to sleep.’
His eyes narrowed as he looked up at her from his dingy pillow. Then he smiled a real, warm smile and even stretched a hand out from under the bedclothes.
‘I’m sorry, Eve. It just hurts damnably. I’m not much good at socialising just now.’
Very briefly she touched his outstretched hand, smiled in her crispest nursing manner and reassured him.
‘Please don’t apologise. Of course you’re not. And I only came to see that you were all right. I’ll look in again tomorrow.’
‘Thanks. Oh, have the others got here yet?’
‘No. At least not when I left this morning, but they may be at Baines’s now. I hope so. Good night. Sleep well.’
‘Night.’
Well, that didn’t do anyone any good, thought Evelyn crossly as she made her way out of the hospital and back to the tram stop. There was no one queueing there any longer and so she must have just missed the tram. It wasn’t fair; she had tried to do her best and here she was being punished for it.
By the time the next tram did appear, nearly half an hour later, she was bitterly cold as well as angry. The man who took her money returned her hard, furious stare in kind and glared at her rich furs resentfully. She shrank back and hoped that the Suvarovs might have arrived at last so that when she got herself up those steep curving stairs at Baines’s house, she would find the little flat warm and lit, perhaps with some food waiting. It would be good, too, to have some company. Dindin’s frivolous chatter would be almost as welcome as Sasha’s affectionate pleas for bedtime stories and little Tallie’s gentleness. As the smelly tram swayed down the Troitski Prospekt, Evelyn thought herself into a happier mood and was even smiling when she got carefully down from the high step on to the hard-packed snow outside Baines’s. She tilted her head back to see if there was any light coming out of the attic windows, but the projecting wooden parapet below the top floor cut off her view.
Shrugging, she let herself into the hall and, seeing the master of the house, said in some excitement:
‘Have they come, Baines? My cousins?’
‘Yes, Miss Markham. Got in about four o’clock. They’re all up there now.’
Oh, good. Thank you, Baines, and good evening.’
He nodded in surly acknowledgement and Evelyn set off up the stairs, forgetting a good part of her tiredness. Her face was eager as she pushed open the door of the biggest room and even before she had walked in she was saying:
‘Thank God you’re all here. Dindin …’
Before she could finish she took in the tableau that was presented to her. All three Suvarovs were sitting in their coats on her bed, which had been pushed into a little alcove opposite the small window. Their bags were on the floor in front of them. Otherwise the frowsty, untidy room was just as she had left it that morning.
‘I’m glad to see you managed to light the lamp at least,’ she said and the sarcasm in her voice brought tears into Tallie’s black eyes. Sasha, who was deaf to such subtleties, said gaily:
‘Oh, no, Mr Baines lit that, Evie. Aren’t you pleased to see us?’
Evelyn smiled, a small tight smile.
‘Yes, of course. But why on earth are you all sitting like this? Dindin, why haven’t you unpacked? And done something about supper?’
‘How could I?’ she asked, her eyes wide and ingenuous. ‘I don’t know where we’re supposed to sleep and there isn’t any food here. You’re horrid.’
Bitterness surged through Evelyn at the sudden realisation of what her blithe promise to Nikolai was going to entail. Of course she could not have allowed Dindin and the children to live anywhere else, but she had not bargained for Dindin being so helpless. How was she going to be able to do what had to be done at the hospital every day if she had to nursemaid them all as well? She felt her self-control snap and for the first time lost her temper with her cousin.
‘For God’s sake, Dindin, grow up. You’re not a child. You’re quite old enough to look after the others and they are your responsibility. Now that you’re on your own, you’ll have to take your mother’s place. Good heavens girl, you’re seventeen. Why didn’t you ask Baines where the shops were and go out and buy some food? I’ve been working like a slave all day in the hospital and you’ve just been sitting here doing nothing – expecting me to wait on you when I get back, I suppose.’
It was only the whiteness of Dindin’s stricken face that brought Evelyn back to her senses. She sat down at the table and put both elbows on it so that she could support her heavy head in her hands. After a moment or two, she felt a hand on her knee and looked up again.
‘Sasha.’
‘Evie, don’t be horrid. We didn’t know what to do. The girls were afraid of Mr Baines. And it’s so dark and cold.’
She let one of her hands drop on to his silky black head and ruffled his hair.
‘I’m sorry, Sashenka.’ Then she looked over his head. ‘There’s no need to cry, Dindin. Tallie, dry your eyes. I’m sorry I shouted, but it was too bad of you. Life is going to be difficult enough here in any case until we can get away, and I just won’t be able to do everything for you as well as going to the hospital every day.’
‘But you don’t have to go, do you?’
‘Well, really!’ she exploded, all her determination to be fair and kind shattering. ‘Of all the selfishness. Those men who have been wounded trying to fight the Bolsheviki for you deserve all the care they can have.’ She stopped there. What was the point? ‘Dindin, since we’ve no food at all, you’d better go down and find Baines and ask him for something.’
‘No, Evie, I couldn’t … he scares me. Don’t make me do it. Don’t make me.’
Recognising the sound of rising hysteria, Evelyn pushed herself painfully up from the hard chair and said in a voice that chilled her cousins:
‘I’ll do it then. You mig
ht at least unpack while I’m gone. Or is even that quite beyond your capabilities?’
She hated herself for that scene, as she hated herself for every snap and cross word that was forced out of her during the next few weeks. Although Dindin gradually accepted the idea that she should look after her brother and sister and prepare food for them during the day and even keep the little flat relatively clean and tidy, Evelyn could never make her think. She needed instructions for everything and if some problem arose during the day, she would wait for Evelyn to see to it and decide what had to be done. And she would ask the same questions day after day. One evening she unpacked the heavy bag of shopping Evelyn had bought on her way back from work and said:
‘These beans again – how long should I cook them for?’
Mentally turning her eyes up to heaven, Evelyn said in a voice of exaggerated patience:
‘Thirty minutes once the pot has come to the boil.’ Then, to her astonishment and fury, Dindin said petulantly:
‘You always say that and it’s never enough. They’re hardly cooked at all after half an hour.’
Evelyn found herself looking at Dindin as though she were a creature from a completely unknown species and wondering how she could communicate with it. At last she said:
‘Words fail me, Dindin. I sometimes wonder if you ever listen to what you’re saying. I know that you think I should do all the cooking and cleaning and washing in this place and that you should sit at your ease, but there is no need for you to pretend to be an idiot. If my timing for your bloody beans is wrong, then you should decide how long you want to cook them for.’
Dindin burst into tears again and Tallie came slowly towards the table to help Evelyn unpack the uninspiring contents of her shopping bag.
‘Don’t be too cross with Dindin, Evie,’ she whispered. ‘She never learned to cook.’
‘Nor did I, Tallie. We’re all learning at the same time,’ answered Evelyn, more gently.
But her language deteriorated day by day as she caught the expressions used by some of her patients, and her temper became shorter and shorter. At last Robert Adamson decided to take a hand in a situation that was clearly becoming intolerable. He waited nervously for Evelyn to arrive on her daily visit and as soon as she had sat down, sighing unconsciously as she took the weight off her feet at last, he said:
‘Dindin came to see me today.’ The unspoken undercurrent passed by Evelyn and she said only:
‘At last. She’s the most selfish girl I’ve ever met. She has almost nothing to do and she’s let you lie here alone day after day.’
‘Evelyn, don’t be too hard on her.’
‘It’s damned unfair, Robert. She has no conception of how tired I am after a day in the hospital and she’s quite capable of doing anything that is needed to keep us all alive and fed, but she won’t do anything unless I have worked it all out for her and practically written her a list of things to do and say. I wish Nikolai Alexandrovitch were here; he’d be able to show her why she just can’t go on as she does.’
‘As he once said to me about someone else, Evelyn, think: Dindin has had to leave her parents behind in Shenkursk, which we all know must have been taken by the Bolsheviki by now, and she has no idea what will have happened to them. Both her brothers are fighting – and on opposite sides. She is facing life in a foreign country, not just for year or two as you did, but probably for ever. She is lonely and afraid.’
There was a long silence. At last Bob looked at her and saw that she was blushing almost painfully, the smooth skin mottled and puckering around her mouth.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said slowly. ‘And I was too selfish to think. Oh God, what do I do now?’
Seeing the first breach in her defences, he said as gently as he could:
‘Why not leave the hospital?’
‘So that I can wait on Dindin?’ she demanded as furious as ever.
‘Why are you fixated on this business of waiting and servants?’ he asked, suddenly as angry as she. ‘There you are, every day forcing yourself to do work you hate for men you despise while your own family is living in misery that you could easily dispel. In Shenkursk there was a serious shortage of nurses, but here, with all these refugees and innumerable English women, it can’t be the same. You’re a volunteer anyway. You don’t have to go on.’
‘How did you know I hate it?’
He laughed at that and the sound was so unexpected in that gloomy hospital ward that it dragged an unwilling smile from Evelyn. Then he decided to answer more seriously:
‘Eve, listen: you come here every evening so tense it’s as though you’d been wired up. It takes a good half hour before you even begin to relax. The way you wince as a nurse takes a bedpan past here or an orderly carries out a bucket of blood tells me just how hard it must be for you to do any such things in your own hospital. You sure hate it.’
‘Yes, that’s true. I hate it more than I can say. But it’s all I can do to …’ She could not say any more.
‘To help your country?’ he suggested doubtfully.
‘Nothing so noble. No, it’s just … you see, Johnnie may be in a hospital somewhere. It’s the only way I can do anything to keep … But I suppose you’re right, it doesn’t help him at all.’
‘Eve, what would Nick say? Wouldn’t he tell you that looking after your cousins, helping them to be less afraid and a bit happier was worth more than making yourself ill and tired doing work that fills you with horror?’
Put like that, there was only one answer and she did not even have to put it into words.
‘I wish he were here,’ was all she did say and Bob answered:
‘I promised him I’d do my best to look after you for him, but stuck here like this in the dark there’s not much I can do. If you could look on me as a second-in-command and let me help …’
‘Thank you, Robert. It is good of you to try. And you have helped, truly. Now, how are the legs?’
‘Oh, getting better – slowly. I guess I’ll be out of here in about a week now, but not very mobile. I’ll find an apartment then and …’
‘You’ll do no such thing. We have a room for you at Baines’s. It’s all ready for when you’re discharged. The legs are going to hurt for a lot longer than a week and you’ll need help. Besides, Sasha keeps asking me when you’re “coming home” as he calls it And I’ll try to be more patient with Dindin, I promise.’
‘Good girl,’ he said without thinking and then watched her stiffen at what she took to be condescension. She left him then, grateful for what he had tried to do, but cross with the tone he had taken at the end. However severe Nikolai had had to be with her at times, he had never patronised her like that. Wretched man, she thought as she plodded through the everlasting dark towards the tram stop. If only there could be some daylight, she said to herself, I might manage to be cheerful and more patient.
Pushing open the door to the biggest of the three rooms when she eventually got back to Baines’s, Evelyn watched her cousins look up from their books with expressions of such anxiety that she began to understand what her fretfulness must have done to them. In that moment, she saw, too, that they were not the parasites they had seemed, feeding off her strength. If she had not had them with her in Archangel, her solitary life might have been less tiring, but it would have been yet more miserable.
‘Oh, my dears,’ she said, the contrition dissolving the rasp in her voice at last. ‘I am sorry I’ve been such a beast. But things are going to be different now, I promise you. Robert says I should leave the hospital; and if we’re all together all day and I’m not so tired with work and getting there and back every day I won’t be nearly so horrid. I’m sorry, Dindin.’
The girl smiled, with none of the self-satisfied triumph that she might have felt, and said almost humbly:
‘I’ve made a sort of stew, Evie. It’s on the stove; but it may not be very nice. The meat looked rather odd.’
‘Well, if it didn’t smell bad, it doesn’t
really matter what it looked like. Thank you, Dindin, and I’m sorry I kept snapping at you.’
‘You’ve said that three times now, Evie,’ said Sasha, coming to stand beside her and lean against her thigh. ‘Are you really going to stop going to the hospital?’
‘Yes. And we can have some English lessons again, and go for walks and things. You will have to show me all the places you have found, because you probably know the town much better than I do now.’
‘But it’s always so dark; there’s nothing to see,’ he answered. Something, not quite a whine, in his voice made Evelyn look carefully at him.
‘Sashenka, are you all right?’ For the first time she noticed how his once-cheerful face had set into an expression of endurance.
‘I just wish it would get light again. I hate it like this. The girls don’t seem to mind it, but I hate it, Evie. When will it get light?’ Evelyn, her heart twisting, hugged him and whispered:
‘I hate it too, but the spring must come soon and then it’ll get lighter and lighter until it never gets dark at all, Sasha. And it’ll be warmer and we’ll be able to bathe in the river, Baines says. Then you’ll feel better.’
The Suvarovs looked at each other, plainly wondering whether this change in their cousin would last or whether she would revert to the tense, bitter organiser she had become in Archangel. But as the weary, dingy days before Adamson’s release dragged on, they discovered that she had meant what she said.
She told the authorities at the hospital that she was too badly needed at home to continue her voluntary work and a little to her surprise they accepted the excuse and thanked her for what she had done. In fact, once the influx of wounded from Shenkursk had been discharged, there was no great crisis at the hospital and the permanent staff were adequate for the numbers they had to treat.
The Longest Winter Page 22