by Dominic Luke
The old gardener Becket, white-haired and weather-worn, pressed Dorothea’s hand between his own gnarled hands. ‘Place won’t be the same without you, Miss Dorothea. No one else takes such an interest in the gardens as you do. But by gum, you’ve had a good send-off! All this to-do puts me in mind of Christmas in the old days. We’d stand in a line just like this and old Mr Rycroft would give out presents. There’d be dancing after and a barrel of beer: we had a rum old time. It all stopped, though, when Master Frederick became master: there were no more presents, no more beer. I don’t think his missus approved on it.’
‘Oh, Becket!’ said Dorothea, crying, laughing. ‘What will I do without you and all your stories of the old days?’
There were goodbyes and goodbyes and goodbyes. At long last the family stepped forward: Roderick, then Mama, and Eliza after everyone else. She couldn’t see for the tears that were falling. She couldn’t think what to say. And already it was too late. Young Stan had the motor ready under the cedar tree. Johann handed Dorothea in, got in beside her. The door slammed. The car began to move. Its slow, heavy tyres crunched on the gravel. The crowd surged forward in the July sunshine. There was a chorus of goodbyes and good lucks. Rice was thrown, and confetti, and satin slippers. People were waving. They were crying.
Eliza in the crush found herself next to Daisy and Daisy’s elder sister: the sister who had once been Nora the nursery maid but who was now Mrs Arnold Carter of Coventry, who was rather plump and amiable and bred with none of the social graces, who was crying unabashed in her second-hand hat, waving her handkerchief like mad as the motor disappeared down the drive.
‘To think what a scarecrow she looked when she first came and nothing to wear but rags!’ sobbed Mrs Carter. ‘I had to get our Billy to fetch up an old frock of mine for something to put her in. She was never any trouble. Good as gold, she was.’
Po-faced Daisy wrinkled her nose. ‘You know the old saying, Nora: “Married in July with flowers ablaze, bittersweet memories in after days.”’
‘Oh, Daisy, really!’ cried Mrs Carter, dabbing her cheeks with her handkerchief. ‘What a thing to say at a moment like this!’
The sound of the motor had long faded. Everyone had made their way back indoors. Eliza left standing alone on the gravel felt that her heart had been torn out and that she would never get over it.
‘How very vexing!’ exclaimed Mama over lunch two days later. Mr Ordish had just brought in a telegram. She was reading it. ‘The new governess says she can’t now take the position after all.’
Since the house had emptied of guests (except Mr Antipov), Eliza had been permitted to eat downstairs. The new governess would once have been of considerable interest but nothing mattered now that Dorothea had gone.
Mama put the telegram aside, returned her attention to her red mullet. ‘I do wish people wouldn’t let one down. And to leave it to the last moment: so very inconvenient. I shall have to leave you in charge of your sister this afternoon, Roderick. I’m due at the vicarage about the church fête and it’s Turner’s half-day so there won’t be anyone in the nursery.’
‘Sorry, Mother.’ Roderick, chewing his fish, spoke out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Sorry, I can’t, not this afternoon. Miss Halsted is arriving by train. I have to be at Welby to meet her.’
‘Miss Halsted. Of course. I’d forgotten.’
‘Don’t worry, though, Mother. Antipov can keep an eye on Eliza. He was going to come to the station but there’s really no need. He can make himself useful instead.’
Mama looked rather dubious. Nor did Mr Antipov seem entirely happy. He said, however, ‘Is great pleasure, Mrs Brannan. I am glad to be of service.’
And so it was settled.
Eliza looked at her reflection in the mirror. With Daisy on her half-day, it had been necessary to dress herself. In her new embroidered skirt and with an old parasol of Dorothea’s held at a rakish angle, she looked every inch a young lady.
She was going on a walk with Mr Antipov: his own suggestion. Ordinarily she might have resented being parcelled out by Mama and Roderick but when it was Mr Antipov. . .! Her heart was beating fast. She was excited and apprehensive in equal measure.
There was one big problem. What would they talk about? The problem grew ever more acute as they made their way down the drive and emerged from the shade of the evergreens into the heat and sunshine of the Lawham Road. Mr Antipov was no help. He was strangely quiet and kept looking over his shoulder as if he would rather be back at the house. Or was it . . . could it be . . . was he thinking of Miss Halsted arriving by train at Welby station?
They went on in silence. The hedgerows were running riot. Windrows of hay were drying in the fields. The canal glinted in the bright sunlight. The long road stretched ahead, dusty and deserted. Of all the places to walk! They could have been strolling across the meadows on their way to the village; they could have been leisurely climbing Rookery Hill. What had she been thinking, coming this way? She hadn’t been thinking, that was the trouble. Oh, misery! Misery!
They came after what seemed an age to the place where the road dipped down under the railway: the branch line to Leamington. Mr Antipov halted in the shade of the brick-built bridge.
‘Perhaps we go back now, Miss Brannan? You are tired, yes?’
‘Oh no! Not yet!’ She couldn’t bear it, to go back to Clifton with the walk having come to nothing: she would feel such a failure.
In her desperation she thought of Lawham; she tried to interest him in Lawham with its shops and Market Place and the ruins of the old priory.
‘I would like to see these ruins,’ said Mr Antipov. ‘I am interested in your English history. But you are a little pale, I think. This town is too far, perhaps? The heat is too much?’
‘I’m not hot at all! I’m cool, quite cool! And Lawham’s very near! We’re almost there!’ If she could just show him the ruins she would have accomplished something, the walk would have been saved from disaster.
They went on. They toiled up the rise into Lawham. They came to Market Place. The town was quiet and somnolent in the afternoon heat. The tall, pointed spire of the church was sharply delineated against the blue of the sky.
Disappointment awaited. The ruins had vanished along with the grassy space around them. All that was left was a piece of churned-up earth and some wooden stakes hammered into the ground.
‘The old priory, miss?’ said a passing woman when appealed to. ‘Oh, that was knocked down months ago and the stones carted off. The old school is being demolished too and we’re to have a new one where the ruins used to be. A brand-new school: imagine that!’
The sense of failure was crushing. She had brought Mr Antipov all this way for nothing. She remembered last summer playing amongst the crumbling walls of the priory on a rare visit to Lawham when Roderick had been to see his tailor. Dorothea had sat on the old stump of an arch reading a letter.
The thought of Dorothea made her heart lurch. Suddenly she found she was crying – crying in front of Mr Antipov! This was appalling. The ultimate humiliation. But, oh, what did it matter? She had been fooling herself to think she could look like a lady. She hated her silly skirt, the preposterous parasol. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
‘Please! Miss Brannan! Do not cry!’ He prised her hands away. He was squatting on his haunches. His grey eyes peered anxiously up at her. ‘What is wrong? What is it that has made you so unhappy?’ He wiped her tears very gently with his fingers.
To her complete surprise and almost before she was aware, Eliza found herself telling him everything: how much she missed Dorothea, how the nursery was a lonely place now, how she was nothing but a nuisance, in the way, and nobody wanted her. She told him all about London and how it haunted her, how she couldn’t forget what she’d seen. She even told him about the kitten, the poor, dead kitten, and how she dreamt about it night after night: she’d told no one this, not even Dorothea. She was not sure quite what else she said or if it made any sense.
She was not sure that Mr Antipov understood any of it. ‘I can’t . . . I don’t . . . everything is . . . why do I feel so . . . oh, I wish, I wish. . . .’
It seemed like madness to be pouring her heart out in the middle of Market Place in Lawham. But he didn’t seem to mind. He listened, he wiped her tears, his eyes never left hers, he didn’t seem to care that people might be watching.
At length she had nothing left. She was empty. She gave one last sob, she shuddered, she fell silent.
‘Well, Miss Brannan – or may I call you Elizabeth? That is your name, yes? In Russian is Elizaveta, Leeza for short. And I am Nikolai: you say Nicholas in English. My friends call me Kolya. You must call me Kolya too.’
‘M-m-may I? May I really?’ Such privilege!
He stood up. ‘We go back now, yes? We can talk as we go. Is good, I think, to walk and talk.’
He took her hand in his. She held it shyly, a man’s hand, a Russian hand: he had long, bony fingers. They walked down the hill leaving the town behind. The sun warmed her. The countryside was green and quiet. She listened to Mr Antipov talking. She listened to his low-pitched voice, his strange accent. The meaning of his words only slowly sank in: she was always one step behind, trying to catch up. But she didn’t worry about it. Somehow she knew she was storing it all up for later.
It seemed incongruous to be walking along the familiar Lawham Road with this stranger from another land. Why was he here? She felt bold enough now to ask.
‘I have interest in England. Is most advanced country. I wanted to see for myself. Since coming here I am liking England and English people. I have become Anglophile. My father was eager for me to come and study in England. I will behave myself in England, he thinks. In Russia I get into trouble. My name is perhaps known to the secret police.’
‘Why? Are . . . are you a . . . a criminal?’
‘In Russia, is a crime to express your opinion.’
‘But you are safe in England – safe from the secret police?’
‘I do not know. Maybe the Okhrana has agents even in Oxford.’
They had reached Ingleby Wood which stretched away on their left in the angle of land between the road and the canal. Were there perhaps secret police spies lurking in the shadow of the trees, peering out at them? But even her imagination couldn’t conjure up such things in the peace of the golden afternoon.
She stumbled, weary, and Mr Antipov immediately halted. ‘We will rest a while, I think, here in the shade.’
He took his jacket off and spread it for her under the eaves of the wood. He sat down on the grass next to her, removing his cap and pulling from his pocket a ubiquitous book. Drawing up his knees, balancing the book on them, he began to read.
The dusty road here sloped gently down to the canal bridge. The opposite hedge was lush with leaves and tangled with blossom. Grass grew thickly on the verge. Above, thin, ragged clouds were now smeared across the sky. The sun glowed brightly through them in the peace of the afternoon. The peace soaked into her. A fragile calm took hold.
Yawning, she lay back looking up at the trees and the sky through the twisted branches of an old blackthorn. A spider’s web shimmered in the sunlight. Eliza picked out the spider who’d made it, sheltering in the lee of a leaf, one tiny leg poised against a silken thread. She watched the spider as it waited with infinite patience, unmoving; she watched and her eyelids grew heavy, her head grew muzzy.
Before long she was fast asleep.
An angry buzzing pervaded her dreams. The sound drew her slowly to the surface. She passed imperceptibly from sleeping to waking.
The buzzing grew more frenzied. She opened her eyes. Above her, a wasp was trapped in the web. It was struggling to free itself but only to become ever more tangled. Swift and agile, the spider now came running along the stretched-out threads. A fierce battle was joined.
The wasp was doomed, thought Eliza. Or was it? As she watched, somehow the wasp found a way to break free. The spider turned from predator to prey. Bundling it up, the wasp flexed its wings and took off, swooping up and quickly away. The sound of its buzzing faded. The web remained, torn, tattered, abandoned.
Eliza lay still. Such savagery upset her. What would become of the spider? Where was it being taken? And to think that at first she had felt sorry for the wasp, helplessly meshed in the web!
She thought of the kitten. She had felt sorry for the kitten too. And yet, earlier, Mr Antipov had said – she frowned, trying to remember – he had said that she ought also to feel sorry for the boys who’d tormented it to death. But that couldn’t be right. The kitten had not been like the wasp, had not been able to turn the tables. So what did Mr Antipov mean?
She sat up. Mr Antipov was asleep, stretched out on the grass. Dappled shade shimmered over him, over his threadbare clothes, his round, ordinary face, his tumbled, flaxen hair. Who was he? What did she really know about him?
His name was Nikolai. He came from Russia. He was twenty-two: younger than Johann, older than Roderick, not as handsome as either – and different, so very different. She’d never met anyone like him. Almost she wanted to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming, to be sure he was real. Almost she wanted to touch him, to brush back the lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead, to hold again his hand as she’d held it in walking from Lawham.
She touched instead his well-worn cap lying on the grass. She picked up his book where it had fallen from his outstretched hand. A piece of torn newspaper fell out that he used as a bookmark. There was a news story ringed in red ink, something about the Lena goldfields. It sounded so picturesque, the goldfields, but the article was all about death: 107 shot dead . . . 84 have since died . . . 210 wounded. . . .
She tucked the piece of paper back inside the book then began to turn the pages. She’d expected to see those strange Russian hieroglyphs that were impossible to decipher but she found that the book was actually in English. Mr Antipov as usual had been writing in the margins, had underlined words and passages. Slowly she began to read.
‘. . . there are those who still insist in telling us that the conquest of power in the state, by the people, will suffice to accomplish the social revolution! – that the old machine, the old organisation, slowly developed in the course of history to crush freedom, to crush the individual, to establish oppression on a legal basis, to create monopolists, to lead minds astray by accustoming them to servitude – will lend itself perfectly to its new function: that it will become the instrument, the framework for the germination of new life, to found freedom and equality on economic bases, the destruction of monopolies, the awakening of society and towards the achievement of a future freedom and equality! What a sad and tragic mistake!’
‘ “What a sad and tragic mistake”,’ she murmured. What did it all mean? Was Mr Antipov so clever he could understand it? She wished she was clever too. She wished she could understand things. But she was just a girl who nobody wanted, a girl trapped forever in the nursery at Clifton Park.
‘I do not, think, Leeza, that your mother would approve of your reading Kropotkin.’
She started and looked up. He was awake. He was lying there and watching.
Hurriedly she put the book aside almost as embarrassed as if she’d been caught touching him as she’d wanted. She could feel herself colouring up under the gaze of his intense eyes. And yet were they really so terrible? Pale grey and shining, keen and clear, there was a transparency about them that was disturbing but not alarming – as if, could you only learn how to read what was written there, you’d know him completely.
‘What is it, Leeza? Why are you frowning?’
‘I . . . I don’t understand you. What you said about those boys. They should have died, not the kitten. They were horrible – evil!’
‘No one is truly evil, Leeza.’ He sat up, took hold of the book, opened it, searching. ‘Listen: “The defeated, the incurious, the bellicose, the spiteful: these are examples of social pathology caused by prisons, slums, armies, insid
ious class distinction, want, and demeaning toil.” If you, Leeza, had lived like those boys, if you had none of your nice things around you—’
‘I could never be like them, never!’
‘Cruelty lurks in the heart of everyone, Leeza. We are all animals. We have animal instincts. Is how we rise above them that makes us different. This is battle each of us must fight alone. We must fight tyranny of our own natures before we fight the tyrannies of the world. We must learn to be heroes in our own lives.’
‘But ordinary people aren’t heroes! Heroes are people like . . . like Wellington and Nelson and General Gordon.’ These were the names that had been constantly on Roderick’s lips once upon a time.
‘Those men are not real heroes, Leeza. They are not men who have built the British Empire. Your Empire was built by coal miners, by iron smelters, by factory workers, by able seamen.’
‘Coal miners!’ She looked at him in wonder. Miners were a national disgrace, everyone knew that. They had been on strike earlier in the year, had made the trains run late. They weren’t heroes.
‘Just think, Leeza, just think: every day from the age of twelve or thirteen, every day for fifty years, miners go down into the dark. They work by candlelight. They choke on dust. They are killed in pit falls. How often do they see sun and grass? How often do they breathe fresh air and listen to birds sing? And yet without them – without the coal that they dig – factories would not work, trains and ships would not go, there would be no winter fire in your nursery. Is it not a brave and noble sacrifice that they make? Yet all the reward they get is a few shillings a week as their health is slowly destroyed. Meanwhile, mine owners live off profits and never do day’s work in their lives! Is this good? Is this right? Is this the spirit of fellowship and cooperation?’