The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  ‘Oh, God’: the protest, or exclamation, or whatever it was, came from Adamson, and pulled Evelyn back from the uncontrollable fury that was enveloping her. Her face was suffused with deep carmine shame as she saw him standing by the door with Sasha.

  ‘I am sorry all of you. I forgot what I was saying. Look Dick, I think you had better just give me my letter and then get out of here. When I’ve recovered my temper, I’ll find you. Goodbye.’

  She held out a hand, which did not even tremble, and he was so shocked by what she had said and the way she had said it that he backed away.

  ‘Give it to her, Markham,’ said Bob from the door, and the authority in his quiet, deep voice could not be ignored. The boy handed over a crumpled, dirty envelope and left them, his face now pale with anger and distress.

  Evelyn put it in the pocket of her dress and then, in a voice of nearly unbearable self-control, said:

  ‘I beg your pardon, Dindin. Let’s settle down and have luncheon before it spoils.’

  ‘Eve,’ said Bob quietly over the heads of the children. ‘I must talk to you.’

  ‘Not now, Bob,’ she said, but her voice had taken on a little warmth. ‘I’m not fit to talk about anything that matters yet. Let’s eat and then I’ll go out and walk it off. We can talk later.’

  Appalled by the things that he had said to her, and what his presence in her flat had provoked her brother into saying, he could only acquiesce.

  The five of them hardly spoke during the austere and uncomfortable meal and as soon as it was over, Evelyn picked up her coat from the bed and went out. Without really planning where to go, she found herself walking towards the river, immobile in the thick ice that still showed no signs of breaking up.

  The sun was high and the sky for once a bright, clean blue, with hardly any of the thick, white clouds that usually hovered over the town, but Evelyn did not notice. All her thoughts were fixed on the letter she could feel in her pocket. She was afraid to open it. For so long she had lived with the thought of John and how he must have spent the days and nights after he had left her the last time, that the thought of confronting the real man again – even if it were only his words on a piece of crumpled dirty paper – frightened her. This letter was the answer to all the notes she had written and hidden in the top of her dressing-case. She was ashamed to find that she did not really want to know what the answer was.

  She walked on along the bank of the Dvina until she came to an old, disused, wooden landing stage. There was no one in sight and Evelyn sat carefully down on the sturdy bollard where someone had once tied up his barges of timber or food from the interior. Looking across the mile-wide river to the further bank and catching a distant waft of the clean smell of the pine forest there, she sat quietly and tried to prepare herself for the letter.

  At last she took it out of the pocket in her fur coat and looked down at the familiar handwriting of her name, blurred and stained as it was. She slid her fingers under the seal and ripped it open.

  My darling Evelyn, I expect that this is the last time I shall ever call you that. From the first moment I knew that I ought never to have told you I loved you: it was not fair. You were still a child and I, I was on my way to this. The things that I have seen and done here have unfitted me to be any kind of husband to you. I do not imagine that I shall survive it but even if I do, I can’t come back to you.

  We are not supposed to show any fear in case we increase the men’s reluctance to march forward together to stop bullets and bayonets with the flesh of their bodies, but I don’t know anyone, officer or private soldier, who is not afraid. There isn’t any option of course, we have to go forward, just as we have to kill the poor devils who march our guns, and do things like ordering our men to be tied, spreadeagled, to the wheels of the guns as Field Punishment Number One if they commit any of the increasingly irrelevant infringements of rules made up by men who never faced anything like this in their lives.

  We shot some Hun today in the town. They’d surrendered, but after yesterday and what they had done to our fellows, taking them prisoner didn’t seem possible and so as they turned their backs to march as we ordered, we shot them in the back.

  I’m not trying to give you a list of all the horrors of this war. I could not. There isn’t enough paper in all the trenches to write them down. But I am trying to show you why I can never come back to you, never lie in your arms again.

  Oh, Evelyn my only love, try to understand: how could I come back to you with all this blood on my hands and in my mind? What I have done to you seems worse, far worse than even this, but I can only plead that I loved you. You are still free, my darling, free of the knowledge of what man can do to man, of the terror and the hatred and the rage and the bloodlust. We can’t meet again in this world, because our worlds have been torn asunder, but I shall never forget you.

  You can never have known the man that I have discovered I really am, but for the love that you gave so generously and openly to the man you thought I was, I shall always be grateful.

  Evelyn, forgive me for loving you.

  Johnnie

  Holding the thin sheets of paper on her knee, Evelyn looked up

  again, across the mile of four-foot-thick ice to the dark forest beyond, and deliberately opened up her mind to her letter. The agony of fear and shame that must have driven him to write it had been the last thing that he would have felt before the shell burst his body and brain into fragments.

  He could never have known that whatever instinct had brought them together had been surer than he had guessed. He could never have known that the pretty empty girl he had loved had now seen the hatred, the bloodlust, the violence and the bodies, had felt the fear and the hate too. The injustice of it all and the pity of it were driven deep into her mind. They could have loved each other if they had been allowed to come back alive from their wars, and loved as whole people, not just the untouched, unaware children that they had been.

  Now, at last, she understood what he had been feeling when he took her just before he went back. She saw and acknowledged what her ignorance must have done to him and how her lack of understanding then had driven him to write his last letter. She knew now that Bob was right: her love had not killed Johnnie. But her inability to love him as he had needed had sent him to his death in misery and she did not know whether she could find a way to forgive herself for that.

  Tears, which had helped so many sorrows, could not touch this one. Every part of her body hurt with regret and the love she could have given to the man who had died. But she would not hide from it. She let it flow through her and made herself feel every bit of it.

  Robert Adamson, who had been more surprised than he could now understand by the discovery that Evelyn had made love with John, stood watching her. He was not spying on her, but he was afraid for her and wanted to make certain that if anything happened to her he would be there.

  After nearly half an hour of anxiety and trying to ignore the cold pain in his legs, he saw her stand up and stretch a little, as though sitting on the bollard had made her stiff. She carefully folded her letter and slid it back into its envelope. Then she turned towards him. He was too far away to see the expression on her face and was not sure whether to back away out of her sight or go to meet her. Dithering with indecision, he waited too long and she called out to him in surprise:

  ‘Bob! Are you waiting for me?’

  ‘Just to make sure you’re OK, Eve.’

  ‘Thank you. But I am all right – as much as I’ll ever be now.’ She stopped. There were so many things she wanted to say to him now that she did not know how to start. Then she thought that unless he knew something of the real John, whom only now was she beginning to know, he would never understand and so she took his letter out of her pocket.

  ‘Will you read it, Bob?’

  He stepped back a pace.

  ‘But it’s yours, Eve. It’s kind of intimate, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d like you to read it. Then you’ll
know what he was really like. Will you? Please?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Evelyn left Bob by the Dvina while she went to find her brother. She tracked him down eventually in a small café much patronised by the younger British officers. The air was thick with the smoke of their cigarettes and the small room seemed to echo with their loud, commanding voices and braying laughter. There was a freak moment of quiet as she entered the café and she felt as though they were all breaking off their conversations to look at her as she inched past their tables and for the first time imagined them saying to one another things like: Oh, yes, that’s Markham’s sister – living with an American. Can you imagine? Of course she’s been through a lot, but it’s not right, is it? Just shows, women are all the same given half a chance.

  Even though no one said any such thing, by the time Evelyn reached her brother’s table she was angry and humiliated and in consequence her voice sounded hard when she said:

  ‘Dick, I am so sorry I swore at you.’

  He was ready with stern words of qualified forgiveness and orders for her future conduct, but she stopped him before he was halfway through his little speech and said, with calmness but absolute determination:

  ‘No, Richard, don’t do that. I was wrong to talk to you as I did, but you were wrong too. Even if I had been living with Robert Adamson in the sense in which you accused me, that would have been none of your business – and no justification for withholding Johnnie’s letter. I know now that he would have understood that.’

  ‘Evelyn, you’re a lady, you don’t understand these things as a man does. You simply cannot sacrifice your reputation like this. I must believe, because you have said it, that you are not … not that man’s mistress, but other people may not believe it. And you will ruin all your chances. You probably don’t understand that no decent man will ever willingly take second-hand goods.’

  He was taken aback to see an indulgent smile cross his sister’s pale, elegant face, once so familiar yet now so hard to read.

  ‘Oh dear, yes, I once thought like that; to my shame it was one of the reasons why I was so desperate when I thought John might have been killed. You see, I thought of myself as you do – as a fallen woman. But it is so irrelevant to the real things.’

  She saw that he was blushing and she felt sorry for him that he still had to learn so much and go through so much before he would even be able to see what he needed to learn.

  ‘Evelyn, if – I mean if you’re going to keep that man in your lodgings, what is the position? As I said this morning, you couldn’t possibly marry him, even if he were to ask you. And that doesn’t seem very likely.’

  ‘The position, Dick? That’s easy. We are friends; nothing more. He has been a tremendous help to me in looking after our cousins, and there has never been the slightest impropriety between us. There couldn’t be – we don’t like each other like that.’ She saw his expression melt into one of mulish determination and changed the subject.

  ‘Dick, do you have a bank account? A London bank account, I mean.’

  ‘Of course I have. But what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, we are nearly starving. Until the Consul manages to get Father to pass some money through the War Office for me, I have nothing to live on.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. When we fled from Shenkursk, Andrei Alexandrovitch gave me all the gold he could get hold of in time to use to keep his children – and myself – here until we could get away to England. But there are shortages of so many things that prices are terrible, and we have spent almost all of it. Baines can’t help, because he has been ruined by the way the army has changed the currency. I will not sell the Suvarovs’jewels and furs at the sort of prices your colleagues are paying, but we have to eat. The only thing left that we could afford to pay for is vodka and that is no use to us.’

  ‘Evelyn, this … I … Why didn’t you say all that this morning?’

  ‘There was too much else to talk about. But you have a bank account. One of the officers told me that shopkeepers are accepting cheques drawn on London, and if you could let me have some money I should be very grateful. There isn’t another word for it.’

  ‘Evie, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t understand. Of course you can have a cheque. As many as you need. And I’m sure I can get some food for you. What have you been living on?’

  ‘Dried beans and potatoes mainly.’

  ‘No wonder you looked so mockingly when I told you that England is in a dangerous state now. Everyone has enough to eat there.’

  ‘Do they, Dick? Everyone?’ Her voice was drily amused.

  ‘Well everyone like us, anyway. Is there a shop near here? Why don’t we go now and get whatever you need. If he’ll take a cheque I can buy everything, Evie. Anything you want.’

  ‘Let’s go. To be able to give those children a real meal tonight would be wonderful. They are so good and they must be so frightened. Do you realise, they have left their parents, two brothers and all their family behind, perhaps to be killed? They are living here in these dreadful conditions with Bob and me, not knowing when we’ll get them out to England or what kind of life they will have when they get there.’

  ‘Evie, don’t say any more. I didn’t understand. Can I meet them properly – I promise you I won’t misbehave?’

  ‘Of course, come and share the banquet tonight.’ As they walked back towards Baines’s house, laden with packages of food, Dick suddenly said:

  ‘You know, Evelyn, you have changed.’

  ‘Yes, I do know. But the things I have seen and done and felt would have changed a dinosaur.’ He wondered how she could sound so happy when they were stuck at the ends of the earth, surrounded by filth, disease, Bolos and ice, with John dead and the quarrel that they had just had still echoing horribly in his brain.

  ‘Come on, I can’t wait to feed the children.’

  When she pushed open the door of the main room, she saw that Dindin was putting the last few beans into a pan on the small stove. Evelyn stood in the doorway, taking in the poverty and squalor of the room that had been her home for so many weeks, and began to wonder how the old Miss Markham would have coped with it. There was an odd little smile of amused acceptance on her lips. Then she said:

  ‘We don’t have to eat those things tonight, Dindin. Dickie has bought us meat, eggs, bread and butter – even sugar. We’re going to have a feast tonight.’

  Dindin looked anxiously at her cousin as though to make sure that this was not some kind of cruel joke and then flung back her head and laughed and laughed.

  ‘A feast? Truly? Oh, Evie, how wonderful! Cousin Dick, I love you.’

  Although Richard was looking suitably embarrassed at Dindin’s exclamation, Evelyn thought suddenly that he would be much more suitable for Dindin than Adamson. And if she switched her attention to Dick, she might stop her increasingly embarrassing attempts to be left alone with the American and her rather more than sisterly strokings of his arm or shoulder or knee. Oddly relieved by the prospect, Evelyn smiled at Dindin and watched Tallie rather shyly take Dick’s hand and tow him to the table.

  ‘Sit down here, Cousin Dick, and tell us about England. Sasha and I want to know all about it. Evie has told us what she knows but it isn’t enough.’

  He thought her a pretty child with her delicate, pointed chin and the black curls falling around her pale forehead, and so he smiled at her and started to tell her and her brother of the life they might find in Yorkshire, while Evelyn and Dindin set about unpacking the food. Evelyn was absorbed in her task until she felt Dindin’s hand on her wrist.

  ‘What’s the matter, Dindin?’

  ‘Here’s Bob, Evie.’

  She looked up to see him standing in the doorway with John’s letter in his hand and in his face something that made her put down the bowl and spoon she was holding. He started to speak, but then shut his mouth as he caught sight of
Richard Markham sitting at the table with an expression of frowning inquiry on his face. Evelyn walked towards Bob and he held out her letter. As she took it from him, his fingers shook slightly and she looked up at him, wondering what it was that made his hazel eyes look so dark.

  ‘I understand, Eve,’ was all he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered simply, pulling up her apron so that she could slip the letter into the pocket of her skirt. She ignored the interested looks of all her cousins and went back to her cookery.

  Throughout the meal Richard Markham kept an eye on his sister and her unlikely companion, trying to discover just what had been going on between them. By the time Dindin got up to make tea Richard was satisfied that his sister had told the truth and was as innocent as she had claimed to be. But to his eyes it was obvious that the American had designs on her, and it was his clear duty as her brother, embarrassing though it would be, to tackle the man and show him that now Evelyn was no longer unprotected, he would have to give up any improper ideas he had.

  To that end, Richard invited Mr Adamson to walk part of the way back to his billet with him. Rather surprised, and a little amused, Bob nodded casually, saying to Evelyn:

  ‘All right with you, Eve, or do you need help here?’

  ‘No, we’ll do fine. You go off for a walk – as long as you can manage it.’

  The two men left, pulling on their gloves and hats as they went slowly down the twisting staircase, but it was some time before Markham had summoned up what he felt were appropriate words. Then he began.

  ‘I say, Adamson?’

  ‘Yes?’