by Dominic Luke
Eliza shrank from the idea of school, especially if it meant being sent away, but just then there were more pressing matters to attend to. ‘I’m hungry! What’s for lunch?’
‘We’ve already eaten ours.’
‘Oh, Roddy, you could have waited!’
Roderick raised his eyebrows, said loftily, ‘I suppose you could, if you wanted, have dinner with us this evening.’
Eliza jumped to her feet. ‘Oh, Roddy, yes please!’ Dinner with just her brother and Kolya! How thrilling! She wished it was evening already.
Daisy helped her dress for dinner, to put her hair up and fasten all the hooks-and-eyes on her best frock and arrange her beads around her neck. Eliza looked anxiously at her reflection.
‘Do I look all right, Daisy? Do I look nice?’
‘It’s only dinner, miss. Why all this fuss? Are you thinking of making eyes at Master Roderick’s friend?’
‘Of course not, don’t be silly, I’m not going to make eyes or whatever you call it at anyone. I’m mistress tonight. It’s my duty to look nice.’
‘If you say so.’ Daisy twisted a stray lock of Eliza’s hair and fastened it with a hairpin. ‘I suppose I’d want to look nice if I was having dinner with two young gentlemen – and Master Roderick and all.’
‘Roddy? What’s so special about Roddy?’
‘Now, don’t get me wrong, miss. I’m not one to go mooning over him like that Susie Hobson. But he is rather handsome.’
Twisting from side to side to inspect herself in the mirror, Eliza said, ‘What is it, Daisy, that makes a man handsome? Do . . . do you think Billy is handsome?’
‘Our Billy? Handsome? He’s nothing but a great ham-fisted lump! But if you were to ask me about Zack. . . .’ Daisy rolled her eyes, a great soppy smile on her face. She stepped back to admire her handiwork. ‘There. You look good enough for anyone. And now, miss, I’ll be off as you’re not having dinner upstairs. Don’t you go telling Mrs Bourne that I left early!’
Eliza watched in the mirror as Daisy hurried out of the room. Was she off to see Zack? What about the things Billy had said? But there were more important matters at hand. It was time to go downstairs.
She joined Roderick in the drawing room where they waited for Kolya.
‘He will be deciding which of his two and only jackets to wear,’ said Roderick with something of a sneer.
Eliza was offended on Kolya’s behalf. What did it matter if the Russian had only two jackets? Jackets were not the measure of a man.
It was enough to make her wish she had a different sort of brother, one who didn’t sneer or ride roughshod, one who told her how nice she looked, one who didn’t go gallivanting off to Wales.
‘Must you go, Roddy? It’s not as if you like Miss Halsted’s friends. You call them cranks.’
‘They are cranks. They eat foreign food in cheap restaurants, they go to endless meetings, they sit on the floor and read poetry – but not Victorian poetry. They disdain the Victorians. They like to be modern.’
‘So why do you want to go with them to Wales?’
‘You wouldn’t understand, a child of your age.’
‘I am not a child! I am thirteen!’
She was ready to argue the point but Kolya came in just then and almost immediately Mr Ordish announced dinner. Eliza had made up her mind as the (temporary) mistress of Clifton to sit in Mama’s place at the table but when it came to it she didn’t have the nerve. She went to her usual place. She was rather disgusted at her own timidity.
Dinner tonight was not a decorous and orderly affair as when Mama was at home. Roderick and Kolya seemed bent on quarrelling over everything, whether it was lectures at university or the war in the Balkans. Their arguments grew more heated as the courses came and went. They drank a lot of wine, their faces grew flushed, they raised their voices and pointed at each other with their knives. There was no mention of how nice it had turned out today or what a delicious sauce Cook had prepared for the fish: those were the sort of things Mama would have said.
‘Russia is a backward country!’ cried Roderick, filling up his glass, not waiting for Basford to fill it for him. ‘Russia will never amount to anything!’
Kolya shook his head. ‘Russia by her very size will be greatest power in world.’
‘But never as great as England. The Royal Navy rules the waves. Most of Russia’s navy is at the bottom of the China Sea.’
‘All empires reach their end. Rome—’
‘Rome lasted for centuries. The British Empire will, too.’
‘But world changes. Capitalist system will fail. Revolution will sweep away old order.’
‘So you keep saying. But it’s complete hogwash!’
When the food was all eaten and the wine all gone, the argument continued in the drawing room. Eliza curled up in the rocking chair. Roderick and Kolya set about the brandy.
Kolya began talking as he’d talked on the Lawham Road last summer about ordinary people being heroes and how one man could change the world. Or one woman: for women were now beginning to play their part.
Roderick scoffed. One woman? A woman like that lunatic at the Derby last month, getting herself trampled to death? What had that achieved?
Emily Davison, said Kolya, had proved her commitment to the cause, she had made the ultimate sacrifice as all good revolutionaries must be willing to do. Her heroic action had brought the emancipation of women one step closer.
‘What about you?’ Roderick asked mockingly: was Kolya ready for the ultimate sacrifice – to give up his youth, his joy and all he had to be paid back with earth and dust? But in any case, all this talk about emancipation was so much bunkum. Women did not want to be emancipated. They wanted marriage, a family, a home. It was in their nature. You couldn’t go against nature. All those troublemakers – throwing themselves under horses, chaining themselves to railings – needed to be brought to heel. They had to be shown that they couldn’t break the law and get away with it.
Laws were made by the rich to protect their ill-gotten gains, exclaimed Kolya. The rich were thieves and parasites and the rule of law under the capitalist system nothing short of despotism!
Eliza had sat silent and forgotten all this time, but Roderick got up now to pour more brandy and noticed her at last.
‘Time you were in bed!’ he growled.
She didn’t dare disobey when he was in this mood. Out in the passage, however – away from his glaring eyes and fierce frown – she changed her mind. She was not ready for bed. She did not feel the least bit sleepy. She felt instead rather stifled after the heated atmosphere in the drawing room. The back door was just to her left at the end of the passage. She turned towards it.
It was cool outside and quiet. She stood on the terrace looking out from the parapet as if from the deck of a ship. The moon, near full, hung bright and round in the black sky. A cold white light spilled across the landscape. Clouds banked on the horizon were touched with silver. All was still and silent and colourless, like an engraving.
The sound of voices brought her to herself. She turned back to the house, crept along the terrace. The French windows were ajar, there was a chink in the curtains; she could see into the drawing room where Roderick and Kolya were both on their feet. There had been a lull as she left the room but now the argument had resumed and was growing in intensity. They were talking for some reason about Miss Halsted, who they called Rosa with what Eliza thought of as a disturbing familiarity.
‘You do not own her! She is not serf! She is free!’
‘All that rot she comes out with – all that man-hating rot: she has learnt it all from you!’
‘Is you who talk the rot! She has own opinions. Are not my opinions. But you she will never agree with!’
‘Is that right? Is that so? We may not share the same outlook on life but that has not prevented us from becoming intimate. There is no one knows her as intimately as I!’
‘Rosa and man like you? Is not true!’
‘
Believe what you like. It won’t change the facts.’
They were standing in the middle of the room squaring up to each other. It was worse, far worse, than what had happened between Billy Turner and Jeff Smith. Fighting on the muddy cobbles of the stable yard was one thing, but two young gentlemen dressed for dinner in the sanctity of Mama’s drawing room? It was unthinkable!
Kolya stepped back. Eliza breathed again.
‘What?’ jeered Roderick. ‘Don’t you want to fight me? Haven’t you got the guts for it?’
‘To fight will solve nothing.’
Kolya’s words were innocuous enough. Eliza could only imagine it was something in his eyes – those intense, unnerving eyes – which made Roderick see red. It happened in an instant. Roderick swung his fist as Kolya was turning away. It connected with Kolya’s jaw; there was a sickening sound like ice cracking. Kolya was caught off balance and fell heavily across the low table. There was a noise of crunching wood and breaking glass followed by a heavy thud. Eliza watched in agony; Kolya seemed to lie unmoving for what seemed an age. Had Roderick killed him?
But no, Kolya was picking himself up, he was shaking himself down. He was rather dishevelled, his lip was bleeding, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. He looked at Roderick, reproachful, angry. Roderick’s face was stony.
At this point, Mr Ordish walked in without knocking.
‘I thought I heard a noise, sir. Is everything all right?’ His bland air of calm poured oil on troubled waters. Eliza was glad to see him: she’d never been glad of Mr Ordish before.
‘Yes, yes, everything’s perfectly all right,’ said Roderick shortly.
Mr Ordish’s eyes swivelled towards the mess on the floor. ‘Oh dear, sir. There seems to be broken glass. I’ll get it cleaned up right away.’
‘Leave it, Ordish. Just go. Go.’
There was a short pause, then Mr Ordish said, ‘Very good, sir.’
He backed out of the room but Eliza sensed that his intervention had changed things, the danger was over. Roderick and Kolya moved around, not looking at each other. When would they speak?
Just then she heard a muffled click. She ran quickly to the back door only to find it locked. Through the glass panels she could see Mr Ordish retreating along the passage. He had shut her out. She could, of course, go back in through the French windows but Roderick and Kolya were there and she couldn’t face them, she daren’t.
What did it matter, though? Nothing mattered!
She ran down the stone steps and out across the trimmed meadow known as the Park. She was seized by a wild exuberance. Leaping and skipping across the grass, she danced in the moonlight, throwing her arms out, throwing her head back, spinning round and round. She was a primeval spirit of nature; she had tangled hair and tattered skirts; she whirled across the face of the world: no one could tame her.
At last, dizzy and breathless, she tripped and fell, tumbling onto the ground, rolling over and over, coming to rest on her back. Her chest was heaving, her heart beating. She looked up with wide eyes at the moon. In the sudden hush after the havoc of her dance, she heard faintly the harsh, croaking call of a corncrake, repeated again and again. It seemed to come from every direction at once.
After a time she got slowly to her feet. In the nursery the dark always seemed thick and clinging like a veil; out here the veil was drawn back, the night had opened up around her. She had come so far, almost to the hedge that marked the periphery of the Park. The house seemed dim and distant looming like a shadow at the top of the gentle slope, lights palely gleaming in one or two windows, chimneys sticking up like spines on a dragon’s back.
She did not want to return – not yet. She went on instead. There was a gap in the hedge. The field beyond was disused and overgrown. She made her way through the tall grass and the brambles, stumbling over the uneven ground which sloped steeply down before flattening out. The call of the corncrake faded. All she could hear now was the rustle of the grass and the sound of her own breathing.
She pushed through a bed of nettles with her arms raised so that her hands didn’t get stung. The overgrown meadow came to an end. She had reached the canal. It curved towards her out of the shadows on either side, moonlight glinting on its black, glassy surface, strands of mist curling and drifting above the water. The towpath was like a pale ribbon stretched along the opposite bank. Beyond, the impenetrable dark of Ingleby Wood stood like a wall. High and remote, clouds were moving mysteriously, silently in the night sky, etched in cold, white light.
She heard a trampling behind her. Someone was coming. She turned, as smooth and calm as the canal, waiting to see who it was.
‘Leeza. I have found you at last.’ Kolya was wading through the nettles towards her. His low-pitched voice splintered the silence. ‘I saw you from the window. I saw you dancing on the grass. I followed.’ He joined her where she stood, a few feet from the brink. ‘What are you doing here? Are you not afraid?’
‘I’m not afraid at all. It doesn’t seem . . . seem real, somehow. It’s like being in a dream, or in a picture. It’s like magic.’
‘The silence of the English night.’ His voice, she thought, was tinged with melancholy. ‘I did not know that England would be like this. I thought in England the revolution would come first, before anywhere. But I look, I listen; I feel nothing ever changes here, in the English countryside. Peasants still toil in fields. Gentry still live off fat of the land. Nights are steeped in the peace of ages. England goes on. England endures. Forever and ever, amen.’
His rich accent gave to the ordinary English words a different texture as if they were new-minted. Eliza glanced at him curiously, shyly. He had no jacket, not even a waistcoat. There was blood on his shirt. The shirt ought to have been soaking in cold water with washing soda: the laundry maid had taught her this, how to remove stains.
‘Your poor face . . . your lip.’
He touched it gingerly. ‘I hit lip on table. It grows – how do you say – fat?’
‘Swollen.’
‘Swollen. Ah. Yes. Swollen.’
‘Roddy is a brute, hitting you.’
‘We got drunk. We were foolish. I am ashamed, losing my temper. But now I cool off: is that correct idiom, cool off? I cool off in canal.’
‘You are going to swim? Here? In the dark?’
He began undoing his shirt buttons. ‘Sometimes when moon was bright I used to swim in lake by our dacha.’
‘Are there lakes, then, in your city? You said you lived in a city.’
‘In Petersburg, yes. But we have also house in countryside called dacha. Is my mother’s house. We used to go there in summer: in summer long ago.’ He took off his collar, untucked his shirt tails. ‘Do not wait for me, Leeza, if you wish to go back. It is late. You must be tired. But look away now, for modesty.’ He walked towards the canal edge, shrugging free of his shirt.
She covered her face with her hands but the temptation to look was too strong. Parting her fingers she saw in the gap between them Kolya dip down as he removed his underwear. He straightened up, his back to her. He stretched, his hands reaching for the sky. He was white and naked in the moonlight like a marble statue; or like a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross, lean and slender and stainless.
She shut her eyes. She screwed them tight. It was improper to look at a naked man. It was wicked to compare him to Jesus. But who would know if she broke the rules out here in this moonlit night so far from civilization?
She opened her eyes. Kolya had gone. There was a pile of clothes on the bank. Out on the dark water she saw his head bobbing, she saw the white flicker of his arm as he swam. But he seemed a long way off now and she was alone. The night had lost its magic. It seemed merely empty now, the moonlight cold and austere. Her thoughts turned longingly to the comfort of her bed.
A breeze got up as she made her way across the Park. Clouds scudded across the moon. It grew colder, darker. She climbed up to the terrace. The French windows were wide open, the curtains billowing in the br
eeze. The electric light seemed incredibly bright, showing up the squalor of the broken table and the broken glass. The Times that had been thrown carelessly over the arm of the couch was now scattered by the gusting wind, its pages flapping round the room. There was no sign of Roderick.
She turned off the lights but left the window open for Kolya. Quietly, sleepily, she took the stairs.
Eliza woke late to a grey sky and rain. The wind was rattling the windows. Thunder rumbled. Daisy in the day room was busy covering the mirrors as she always did when there was thunder. She had disappointing news. Roderick and Kolya had been up with the lark. They had gone already.
‘They made a right mess of the drawing room last night, by all accounts: broken glass on the floor and the table leg snapped off and bits of newspaper all over.’
‘They had a fight, Daisy, I saw them.’
‘Lads! They’re all the same, nothing but trouble. Zack’s just as bad. It’s Hayton lads against Broadstone lads: that’s the latest. I’ve never heard anything so daft.’ But Eliza sensed that for all Daisy’s head-shaking and tutting, she was actually rather proud of Zack Hobson and his scrapes.
Eliza said nothing about her moonlit meeting with Kolya by the canal. It really did seem like a dream in the broad daylight of the grey morning. She wondered if she would ever see Kolya again now that he and Roderick had fallen out.
‘I wouldn’t worry, miss. They were the best of friends again this morning from what I’ve heard. There’s no accounting for boys and their bust-ups.’
Billy also said the fight was nothing to worry about when she sought him out in the stable yard. Lads often got into fights, he said, especially when they’d a drink inside them. More often than not, it was all forgiven and forgotten next day.
‘Do you fight, Billy, when you’ve a drink inside you?’ She knew he liked his ale.
‘Beer don’t act on me like that. I don’t have much of a temper. I’m an easy-going fellow, or so they say. Too easy-going if you listen to our ma. She goes on: “Ask for more wages, Bill, now you’re doing all that extra; smarten yourself up, too, it wouldn’t hurt; and get yourself a girl: you’re twenty-four, it’s about time.” I says to her, “Don’t fuss, Ma, I’m all right as I am.” But she won’t have it.’