The Killing of Anna Karenina

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘How does it go now? “For the foam-flowers endure”’ he intoned, ‘“when the rose-blossoms wither And men that love lightly may die – but we?” Swinburne.’

  ‘Monty!’ exclaimed Mrs Emerald Stephenson.

  ‘Please, mother.’

  ‘I sure do wish,’ she said, ‘you’d give us some warning when you’re going to recite! This is the prince. How are you, prince? Better?’

  ‘Swinburne,’ Monty repeated, unabashed. ‘Delighted.’ He gave a nod towards the prince but did not offer his hand. ‘Thoughts from a forsaken garden, you know, and hardly appropriate to where we are now. Miss Julie, will you, er, permit me join you in picking these rose-blossoms even though I am, er, doomed always to be one of those men that love lightly?’

  Julie sniffed and began talking energetically to Mrs Emereald Stephenson.

  Lady Isobel quickly guided the prince away. It was rude to her guests, that was obvious, and he was so struck by her brusqueness he could not bring himself to speak until they had gone some distance along the sweep of gravel walk beside the house and were out of earshot.

  ‘Your guests, Lady Isobel…’

  She glanced back imperiously. ‘That is what I really can’t stand!’

  He asked what she meant.

  ‘I mean the guests Giles insists on inviting. Are you a Tolstoyan, prince? Somehow or other I don’t think you are. I can’t see you making your own clothes or not eating meat. I would be the first to admit that is not at the core of your great writer’s teaching. But I am sure that American lady wouldn’t dream of making her own clothes. She dresses far too fashionably for that. As for that silly son of hers… Really, I can’t think what made Giles invite them! There’ll not be much financial reward from having them here, I’m sure of that. Mr Palmer does contribute something, so Giles tells me. I will be blunt, prince. Are you going to contribute?’

  He could have been equally blunt with her. ‘I am not a Tolstoyan,’ he admitted, ‘but I admire his moral stance. As for contributing…’

  She at once confessed it had been impolite to ask. ‘No, no, it was simply that you asked about the cost. I will be quite candid. I dislike foreigners. Giles has always had to accommodate himself to their needs and spend endless sums supporting them. The long and the short of it is I find myself more and more out of sympathy with our guests and the need to influence people. We would be much better off if we weren’t involved.’

  It was a candour that surprised but it showed she had sufficient confidence to be open with him. They had reached the tower at that point in their walk and were already in its shadow. He judged it was four floors high, a large tubular structure set at the south-eastern corner of Stadleigh Court. In keeping with redbrick appearance of the rest of the house, it had a faintly Tudor look, but unlike the adjoining elevations it seemed strangely shut up. All the casement windows were closed as if it were midwinter and not a warm summer morning. It prompted him to point out what must be the sickroom.

  Lady Isobel heaved a deep sigh, swallowed and looked away. ‘I leave all that to Giles. I have grown very cynical.’

  ‘Cynical?’

  ‘Yes. I have no idea who lives there.’ She made another of her casual gestures. ‘They are your compatriots, they are Russians. Giles won’t tell me who they are.’ She turned and looked at him. He saw her eyes were brimming with tears. ‘It is too much, you know, too much for a wife to bear! To think that I have to learn about them from a stranger! Or from what Giles grudgingly tells me! In my own home! It is so unfair, dreadfully unfair!’ A lace handkerchief was drawn quickly from her sleeve and pressed to her eyes.

  The potentially difficult moment was defused by the sound of a door opening and rapid steps on the shingle. Lord Irmingham hurried towards them, his light-blue cassock flapping at his ankles.

  ‘My dear, I saw you with Prince Dmitry! I thought…’

  The sight of her husband had a startling effect. She gave a loud sob, waved the handkerchief protestingly in his direction and without a word fled past him towards the open door at the base of the tower.

  ‘Isobel dear!’

  He peered round at the prince afterwards, eyelids flickering busily in slightly accusing confusion, and asked what the matter was.

  The prince cleared his throat. ‘Your wife did not know what was going on in her own home. I was in the tower last night and I told her. One of my compatriots, a Russian, is dying. I was going to ask you, Lord Irmingham…’

  ‘Giles, please.’

  ‘Giles, I was going to ask you who they were.’

  His host gave him the benefit of a long stare and stroked his beard. He raised his eyebrows, looked down at his feet and nodded. ‘Yes, yes, yes, I owe you an explanation. Last evening you mentioned something about a black boat and a gunshot. Yes, yes, it’s all quite possible, I’m afraid. I shouldn’t have tried to deny it. It’s very worrying, of course it is, and my wife, poor thing, is quite overwrought by it.’

  Small glassy drops of perspiration stood out on his forehead as he spoke.

  7

  Consumed by a mixture of courtesy and curiosity, the prince followed Giles into Stadleigh Court through the door at the base of the tower. It was carefully locked behind them, a procedure familiar from the previous night. A flight of curved carpeted stairs, with a dado at shoulder height surmounted by glass-fronted pictures, led up to a musty-smelling first-floor landing. It seemed vaguely recognisable to the prince and confirmation came when he realised they had reached a point close to the door used last night for going up to the sickroom. Giles meanwhile showed him out through the door into the corridor no distance from his bedroom and, after carefully locking it, hurried him in another direction. He soon beckoned him into what turned out to be a study.

  ‘Caught sight of you from here,’ he announced as he directed the prince towards a leather armchair. ‘Do have a seat.’

  The manner was as brusque as Isobel Irmingham’s, but more from nervousness than a wish to command. As he sat down, the prince noted that the window from which he had presumably been seen had leaded panes and fancy pre-Raphaelite coloured glass round the edges. It was now brilliantly sunlit and its colours shed a frosty imitation of their pigments on the book-lined wall opposite. A loudly ticking clock on a carved wooden mantelpiece also drew attention to itself, although its glass face glittered so strongly in the sunlight that it was hard to see what time it told. The prince consulted his watch to find it was scarcely more than nine-thirty.

  ‘I am not, I hope, keeping you from something else?’

  The question made him replace the watch instantly and explain that he had been told the meeting was not due until ten o’clock.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I should explain about my wife, you see. There are reasons why she, and of course you, my dear Dmitry, may seem to be kept in the dark… They are delicate, very delicate.’

  Judging by his red-rimmed eyes and pale complexion, Giles Irmingham’s night had been even more interrupted than the prince’s. He seated himself in an armchair opposite, inquired whether his guest had breakfasted well, appeared reassured by the answer, ran his fingers along the arm of his chair and began speaking in a quiet, confidential voice.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘I am not sure what you mean.’

  ‘It’s about last night.’

  ‘What about last night?’

  ‘You said you had been talking to my wife Isobel about what you saw in the tower last night. Well, I know all about it.’

  The prince was uncertain: ‘You mean the doctor told you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Giles leaned forward attentively and made little quivering movements of his outstretched fingers. If they were intended to urge the prince to speak, they succeeded. He described roughly what he had told Lady Isobel. The other’s pink, unhealthily veined cheeks above the white rim of beard began to break into a smile.

  ‘So it was you who mentioned curare! Why on earth didn’t young Jamie think of that before! Lockjaw! We
ll I never!

  ‘Jamie – you call him Jamie, do you? He has a quaint habit of pretending he is Scottish.’

  ‘Yes, he does. I have no idea why. He’s only been with us three weeks or so. And of course he’s not very experienced. We had an old country doctor here until a couple of months ago. He had heart trouble and retired to the south coast. We’re lucky to have young Jamie. His experience is limited, true, but he makes up for it in conscientiousness.’

  ‘He said he had some curare,’ the prince said, ‘but who is the victim? Who is Sergius? Your wife appeared to know nothing about him.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece embarked on a loud Westminster chiming of the three-quarter-hour. It was almost as if a signal had been given for confessions to begin. Giles coloured a little with embarrassment and looked at the prince with piercing honesty as he framed the following remarks.

  Certain things had to be kept from his wife. That was what it was all about. The reason – well, they had only been married eighteen months. No excuse, of course, but maybe there would be a better understanding of things when the prince heard what he had to say. So far, though, every single thing (both hands were raised in a pleading gesture to lend further emphasis) every single thing depended on secrecy. So Lady Isobel simply could not be told everything because it would be hard to believe everything and there were also issues of, er, security and identity. As if to offer an incontrovertible justification, Giles stretched across to his desk, shuffled among papers, raised puffs of dust and ended by finding two volumes that he seemed to have laid ready. The prince took them. They were two volumes of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in Russian.

  The prince said it was Tolstoy’s final masterpiece before his ‘conversion’.

  ‘Exactly.’ Giles was evidently pleased. He then asked: ‘But would you say it was true?’

  The question seemed quite innocent and easy to answer, save for the likelihood of a trap and the prince hesitated. ‘Of course it’s not really…’

  ‘You’re doubtful whether it’s really true, aren’t you?’ The sentence was finished for him. ‘Yes, that’s the trouble. It’s a bit like what you called “a gap in nature”. Very good, that. Yes, it is like “a gap in nature”! Who is to say where fiction ends and fact begins? Or vice-versa? Now I won’t beat about the bush. You told me, didn’t you, that before you went off to fight against the Turks you were living in St Petersburg? Don’t I remember you saying you were living with your grandmother?’

  ‘In St Petersburg I always used to stay with my grandmother.’

  ‘And your grandmother had certain connections, I think?’

  ‘She had connections in high society, yes.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I thought. You see, my dear Dmitry, you’re the very person I need.’ He reached out for a paper knife and waved it idly. His hand was noticeably shaking. He raised the tip of the knife very carefully to his lips and then lowered it before saying, though not directly to the prince: ‘You are quite free of any financial embarrassments, I imagine. It is rather important that you should be.”

  ‘Well, I…’ This was carrying bluntness a shade too far for the prince’s liking. He pointed out that his affairs were his private concern unless, of course, he was being asked whether he might make a contribution to the Tolstoyan commune.

  ‘No, no, it’s not about that. I know it’s bad form to discuss such matters. Following Tolstoyan example, since you mention it, I felt I had to be sure. Because a lot of money, yes, a lot of money is involved. You see… Oh, how can I put this?’

  At this point Giles threw down the paper knife, heaved himself out of his chair, put his hands behind his back and did what the prince recalled certain Oxford dons doing. The burdensome weight of scholarship would be demonstrated by a hunching of the shoulders and a lowering of the head, followed by two heavy steps taken across the carpet, the head then raised slightly, followed by a moment or so of hesitation as a good deal of care was taken to think carefully what to say, followed then by a further two steps, at which point there would be a slow, neatly executed about-face, the back straightened, the procedure restarted and the words uttered.

  ‘My father built this place.’ Giles spoke straight ahead of him at either bookshelves or the window. ‘He caught the capitalist bug. He made his money out of the very extensive business he did with your country in the days when big profits were to be made. He married into the Stadleigh family, which is why this is called Stadleigh Court, and the Stadleigh wealth helped him move up in the world. Being an inveterate, red-blooded captain of industry, he simply couldn’t be content until he had made himself into an aristocrat and received a peerage. Call us nouveaux riches if you like. We Irminghams don’t really mind. My father married money and made the most of it. That’s all that matters.’

  He paused to study a particularly tight-packed section of books on the shelves.

  ‘I did the exact opposite. I did not marry money. My first wife had a hereditary title and not much else. So my daughter Helen has a title in her own right and not a penny to her name. My son will succeed to my title and my second wife, bless her, is county but not an heiress. I know I let the side down a bit. Still, that’s not the point.’

  He laughed and in a more jovial tone began talking about his mother. It appeared to be a rambling tale at first, but gradually it achieved coherence and relevance. His mother had been very fond of riding and whenever she accompanied his father on trips to Russia she had included among her entourage a favourite groom of hers. He was called Wilson, an expert equestrian. In addition to having a good eye for horseflesh he had a fondness for drink. Giles’s mother was persuaded to let this man Wilson stay in Russia, in good employment, but the result could probably have been foreseen. His fondness for the hard stuff and Russian conviviality turned him quickly enough into a drunkard. His wife died and he very soon sank to the bottom, leaving behind him an orphan girl called Hannah.

  ‘I can’t pretend it’s an edifying story.’ He stopped right in front of the prince. ‘It had a happy ending, at least in one sense. The girl Hannah was befriended by someone you know. Or knew. Many, many years ago.’ He folded his arms across his chest and breathed in very heavily. ‘You have the answer literally in your hands.’

  Holding the two volumes of Anna Karenina, the prince began unwillingly to realise that he was being asked to accept something quite literally beyond belief. There were degrees of plausibility he could not begin to imagine. Yet memory reinforced the plausibility rather than denied it and concerned literally what he held in his hands. Where exactly, then, does biography merge with the creative imagination to achieve a blend so real it might seem to transcend fact and make fiction a reality? How could he deny to himself the reality of what he remembered and yet simultaneously face up to the knowledge that memory itself might be a fiction?

  ***

  The sound of harness bells and carriage wheels hissing through slushy, thawing snow along the boulevards and the ice already flowing on the wide reaches of the Neva and spiders’ webs of cracks forming in the canals. I was seventeen, an officer cadet, accompanying my grandmother on a very secret journey into a part of St Petersburg I couldn’t remember save for the fact of the sun shining on my face with that incredible, heatless brilliance of early springtime. We alighted and I trailed up steps in the wake of grandmother’s thick, ankle-length fur coat and then up another of those St Petersburg staircases, not as wide, true, or as grand as grandmother’s, until the reception rooms were reached where I remembered having to wait perhaps as much as half-an-hour while grandmother was received alone. Afterwards, suddenly, double doors opened and this astonishing woman came out. She came up to me, held me for a moment at arms length, then drew me slowly towards her, to my faintly resisting embarrassment, and pressed me to her, saying quietly: ‘Seriozha! Seriozha!’ and her perfume, her femininity, her sensuality engulfed me with a quickening, enchanting sweetness.

  ***

  ‘Yes,’ he said, shaking himself out of t
he momentary daydream, ‘I remember, of course I remember.’ In fact, he remembered his second visit to Anna Karenina more vividly even than the first, but Giles was already saying: ‘Well, she befriended Hannah Wilson. Now my mother had also taken considerable trouble to keep in touch and knew about this. I don’t say she exactly approved. The lady’s reputation was, well, shall we say hardly de rigueur? The scandal surrounding her relationship with that guards officer, Count…’

  ‘You mean Count Vronskii?’

  ‘I do mean him.’ Giles ran his hand a trifle nervously over his mouth and beard and slowly retook his seat opposite. ‘That scandal had all sorts of repercussions, as you know. It even affected my father’s business interests. Her husband, Karenin, was a very influential man. My father and Karenin were friendly. I can even go so far as to say that, without my father’s initial help, it is doubtful whether Karenin would have become as rich as he has. And he has become very, very rich.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He gave an airy wave of the hand. ‘He gave up his official work, you know, and devoted himself to mining and the manufacture of steel. That’s where my father was able to help him.’

  ‘Did he marry again?’

  ‘No, no, he didn’t remarry. He threw himself into his work. He became an industrialist and a millionaire. And that’s what I want to talk about now. Because, you see, two weeks ago he died, a very old man. It was thought he died intestate, but it seems not. He died leaving all his wealth to his wife.’

  The statement was plain, matter-of-fact, unembellished and for that reason it had such a ring of reasonableness the prince did not immediately apprehend its latent meaning. A husband would naturally leave his wealth to his wife. He sat upright.

  ‘But Anna Karenina, Anna Arkadyevna is dead! She threw herself under a train!’

  Giles stared back at him for as long as half a minute, during which he began to shake his head slightly as if he had heard something palpably true but almost beyond the bounds of probability.