by Ann Swinfen
'I might have a possible solution for you. I spoke to Mrs Devereux yesterday, and made a suggestion. You might care to discuss it with her. And perhaps I might call on you at your office in Hereford – at three o'clock on Tuesday.' It was a order, not a request.
It was difficult not to be bulldozed by the sheer force of this man's personality, but Nicholas took a firm grip on himself. He said, in a tone which would have made Natasha proud of him, 'I'm sorry, Tuesday afternoon is out of the question. The only time I have available next week is on Thursday. At half-past eight in the morning.'
Simon Frobisher looked amused, as if a very small dog had yapped at him. 'Very well,' he said, in a humouring voice, 'half-past eight on Thursday.'
* * *
Paul's car slithered to a halt at the front of the house in a cascade of gravel. He leapt out of it and started running. He galloped upstairs to the room he had shared with Lisa last night, and started throwing things, uncharacteristically, out of his suitcase and on to the floor. There, laid at the bottom of the suitcase under the clothes to keep them flat, were the hand-outs he had prepared for the nature trail. He hung his field glasses around his neck, stuffed his compass, some string and a handful of pencils in his pocket, and burrowed in the pocket of the suitcase for his field microscope.
Then he shot out of the door, along the landing, and jumped down the stairs two at a time. Mabel came out of William and Irina's room looking cross, with her finger to her lips. As soon as she saw that it was Paul, she pressed her hand instinctively to her mouth.
'How is Lisa?' she asked urgently.
Paul paused long enough to pat her shoulder.
'Fine, fine. They think it's just a false alarm. I'm to phone this evening and see whether they want to keep her in for observation overnight.'
'Oh, thank heaven! You scared me, leaping down the stairs like that.'
'I was getting the things I need for the nature trail. They haven't had to start without me, have they?'
'No, no, I don't think so. A few minutes ago Frances and Gregor were marshalling all the children over by the marquee. They hadn't found Nick yet. He and your mother were going to try to stand in for you, but they'll be glad you're back. They weren't at all sure what you had been planning to do with the children.'
'I'll get over there straight away, and set their minds at rest.'
Paul bounded through the drawing room and out on to the terrace. As he ran across to the tent he called out in reply to questions, 'Yes, she's fine. She's resting a little at the hospital. She's fine.'
Frances had paired the children off ready to set out on the nature trail, and Nick arrived just ahead of Paul, looking flustered.
'Yes, fine,' said Paul again. 'They're going to let her come home tonight or tomorrow.'
Frances had a cherubic boy with red curls firmly by the hand. 'Johnny Dawlish is very interested in your nature walk, Paul. I'm sure you'll let him stay with you at the front.'
Paul sized up Johnny with a glance. He knew a good deal about the species boy. 'Of course,' he said, taking him over from Frances with a swift grip. 'Right, kids, let's be off.'
Chapter 10
Natasha lay on her bed, with the curtains half drawn against the strong afternoon light, having been persuaded by Mabel to rest a little before the evening party. She had been unwilling at first, but seeing the way that the party was resolving itself into two parts – an exploration of the woods, the meadow and the brook for the children and a period of napping or basking in the sun for the adults – she agreed at last to retire to her room for an hour or so.
'I'll bring you a cup of tea at five,' Mabel promised. 'So you'll have plenty of time to beautify yourself before drinks at six. I'm going to lie down myself, like the rest of the oldies. The young ones are getting things ready for the play.'
Natasha winced at Mabel's categories, but interpreted them without difficulty.
'Which classification do Frances and Gregor fall into?'
'Oh, well –' Mabel never minded being teased. 'Neither, I suppose. Middlies?'
'And what are they doing?'
'Gregor has gone sneaking off to his studio to do some work. Says he's had enough partying to last a lifetime.' Her tone was a mixture of exasperation and affection. 'He has promised to reappear in time for drinks. I'm not sure where Frances is. She was going to chat to her father till she found he'd gone to lie down. Last time I saw her she was at the top of the lane.'
'Could you ask her to come and see me here, at about half-past five? I want to have a quiet word with her before all the evening's entertainment starts.'
'Will do. Now you lie down and have a proper rest, Natasha, and stop gadding about like a twenty-year-old.'
When Mabel had gone off to her own room, Natasha took off her blue dress and hung it carefully in the wardrobe. She thought she would dress formally for the evening, to honour the Thespians, and to round off the evening with proper solemnity. The young ones, as Mabel called them, were planning a barbecue to follow the performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but she intended to stay well away from that. From a distance a barbecue had an intriguing, nostalgic scent, recalling summers' meals cooked over open fires at the family dacha, or whole boars roasted at Papa's hunting lodge. But this modern barbecued food was poor stuff, charred on the outside and raw in the middle. The young men liked to preside at such events, wielding long-handled implements and no doubt obeying some atavistic hunting instinct, but their skill at cooking fell well short of that of the Greshlovs' lowliest kitchen boy. She would allow them to serve her one small cutlet, and eat one mouthful of it, and honour would be satisfied.
Her silk dressing gown lay across the foot of the bed. Mabel must have laid it out for her. Natasha slid her arms into its cool folds and tied it round her waist, feeling a little guilty about Mabel. She knew that she often mocked Mabel – in her mind, if not out loud – but where would St Martins have been all these years without her? She was sometimes self-important and bossy, but she held thing together on the domestic side, as Irina could never have done, and this had left Natasha free to run the trust and the creative side of the community. She was grateful to Mabel, truly she was, and she ought to show it more. When the war ended and Mabel had pretended she had been obliged to give up her job at the village school, Natasha had known the truth of the matter, but she had stayed silent, intrigued to see how Mabel would contrive to remain at St Martins. She had watched with amusement and admiration as Mabel had wound herself firmly into the community.
Irina and Mabel – she had never been kind enough to them. Her daughter had been a great disappointment to Natasha, when in her own impatient twenties and thirties. From childhood Irina had never shown a scrap of artistic talent, and she was gauche and difficult in all social situations. As the years had passed, Natasha had come to accept this, reluctantly, remembering that Edmund had said that Irina was very like his own mother, whom Natasha had met only once before her death and who had struck her as lumpish and boring.
Irina, however, had given her Hugh and Frances, who had made up to Natasha for their mother's deficiencies, and then from Frances had come a whole stream of talented descendants for her. This late enrichment of her life had wrapped her round, lapping her against the desolation of her girlhood tragedy. She felt warm and protected against the isolation she had once felt, as sole survivor of her line.
She lay on the bed, propped up with her back against the high-piled pillows in their cases trimmed with antique hand-made lace. Her feet rested on the old-fashioned honeycomb cover over proper blankets. These she insisted on, in the face of Mabel's persuasive arguments in favour of duvets filled with hollow-fibre polyester with their easy-wash poly-cotton covers. She took up the book she was reading at night – a modern novel set in Baltimore by an American woman novelist, whose she work she loved – but could not settle to it.
Instead, she reached out and lifted down from the wall above her bed the exquisite fourteenth-century icon of the Virgin, and held it lightly and
lovingly between her hands.
* * *
They have come to Budapest for two reasons, Natasha and Edmund. The first is to oversee the opening of an exhibition which Natasha is sharing with two fellow artists from Paris. It is 1925 and Natasha's career has begun to take wing. Edmund has been able to arrange a fortnight's leave from his diplomatic duties at the embassy in order to come with her. Natasha laughed at this. She who walked alone most of the distance from Petersburg to Paris, in rags, begging or stealing her food on the way – not to be able to look after herself in the distinguished capital city of Hungary! But Edmund has been firm – he cannot bear to be apart from her, and he also has some secret fears (of which he does not tell her) that there might be agents of the Bolsheviks in Budapest, who would not scruple to slip an assassin's knife into a woman now publicly known – since her fame has grown – to be distantly related to the Romanovs.
It is Edmund who has arranged everything. He has booked the tickets on the Orient Express, arranged rooms at the Gellért Hotel overlooking the Danube, and persuaded the wife of one of his colleagues to look after five-year-old Irina for a fortnight (without difficulty, because apart from an occasional tendency to whine she is a quiet, trouble-free child).
There is a second reason for this visit to Budapest, of which they have barely dared to speak to each other. Edmund has discovered, through devious diplomatic channels, that a number of Russian aristocrats have recently turned up in Budapest, coming by mysterious routes out of the heart of the closed and forbidding Soviet Union. Natasha has no hope of her immediate family, but there might be someone who has news of her great web of cousins and second cousins and third cousins. Or of friends, believed lost. Such things are still happening, even eight years after the bloody slaughter of the Revolution. It is a tiny flame of hope, and Edmund is determined to use every connection he can find through diplomatic colleagues to help in the search.
They have been over a week now in Budapest. The exhibition is ready, and the private viewing for the notables of the city will take place the next evening. Their search amongst the Russian émigrés has proved fruitless and disheartening. Those they have managed to interview have mostly been former shopkeepers or household servants, while others – known to be in the city – have simply melted away into the Hungarian countryside when it is known that they are being sought.
Edmund insists on a day's holiday, and they take a boat trip up the Danube to Margaret Island. Natasha, who has been more keyed up with anxiety than she wants to admit, relaxes with the peaceful motion of the boat and the gentle views of the passing shores. They return in the early afternoon and disembark in Pest, a little distance from the hotel and on the other side of the river, planning to stop at Café Gerbeaud in Vörösmarty Ter to drink coffee and eat cakes before returning to the hotel to dress for dinner at the British Embassy.
'Look!' says Natasha. They are walking hand in hand along a narrow lane leading to Váci Utca, Budapest's smartest shopping street. Here, in this side street, the roadway is barely wide enough for a cart to pass, and a few dark shops peek out amongst the elaborately scrolled ironwork of the doors leading to flats. They are passing a tiny shop with a window no more than two feet wide crammed with antiques and works of art. It is clear at once that these are the sad little family treasures of exiled Russians, smuggled out hidden inside shirts or corsets, and sold off one by one as a hedge against destitution.
They peer into the window, whose glass is smeared and grimy both inside and out, and Edmund feels Natasha stiffen at his side.
'The icon,' she whispers.
'It's lovely,' he says.
It portrays a very young Virgin, wide-eyed, not unlike Natasha herself, but with the great sad eyes of Byzantine art.
'It is mine,' she says flatly.
'Yours?'
'Papa gave it to me when I was born. It has been in my family for generations. It hung always above my bed.'
'Can you be sure?'
'Doushenka, each icon is unique. I prayed every night for seventeen years before my Virgin.'
The shopkeeper is shifty-eyed and pretends he has no knowledge of English or French, and very little German.
No, he does not know where the icon comes from. No, it was his assistant, not he, who bought it. He knows nothing about it. He shrugs, spits, and names the price, which is outrageous.
Edmund buys it. He would have paid any price the dirty old rogue asked. He would do anything that might help Natasha escape from the screaming nightmares that grip her still when the old terrors return.
Natasha bears the icon of the Virgin back to Paris like a living child. It has hung over her bed ever since.
* * *
Natasha held the icon between her hands, tilted slightly towards the window so that the sun falling slantwise between the curtains caught the gold leaf of the Virgin's halo, making it burn like flame. The serene eyes looked out of the face straight into the eyes of the viewer, no matter where you stood. A soft smile played about the girl's lips – secret, proud and shy. Natasha had always known that her Virgin had received the visitation of the angel, but as yet she had confided in no one. She was still pondering these things in her heart. As a child, she had felt the Virgin was her private friend, a girl not much older than herself, to whom she could confess her misdemeanours without fear of being misunderstood. The Virgin was loving and approachable, unlike the fearsome black-gowned and bearded priests, who in Natasha's childish mind were confused with a huge grey-bearded patriarch, also black-gowned, enthroned, and frowning terribly, which was her clear image of God.
When that terrible thing had happened to her, that bitter winter day in 1917, and she had fled from her defiled home in nothing but her shift, she ran through the snowy streets, crying out in her head to her Virgin of the icon: How could you betray me like this?
Finding the icon in Budapest with Edmund had been a miracle, but a small one compared with the miracle of finding Edmund, of having survived long enough to find him, of having become a new person with a new life. She had lost her faith for ever, watching her family being butchered before her eyes, little Petya last of all, holding out his arms to her. But she had rescued the icon as one might rescue a dear friend, and she looked at it now with love.
Material objects meant little to Natasha. She had learned early the bitter lesson of their impermanence. Only people mattered to her now. Although she loved to be surrounded by beautiful objects, she felt no possessiveness about them, and would as happily give them to friends as keep them. This was the only object about which she felt differently, and it was rather because it was the only link now left with her family than because of its beauty.
However, she would discuss the plan she had in mind with Frances, who was the only other member of her family to whom she had told the story of the icon.
* * *
William lay flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Irina's steady breathing from the other bed, interrupted occasionally by the small gasps caused by her asthma, told him that she was asleep. He was pleased. He knew that today was a sore trial to her, desperately shy as she was of outsiders, and it was a relief that some of it could be veiled over with sleep. Probably she had slept very little last night, although she had put on a brave face for him this morning. He felt very tender towards her, his poor Irina, so afraid all her life, so ashamed that she could not live up to her famous mother.
She never seemed to be able to realise her own gifts, and he had never succeeded in persuading her of their value. She had been a very loving mother, taking the orphaned Gregor to her heart as well as their own two children, despite her earlier doubts about the Baranowski family. Yet she did not readily show her feelings. And she had always given William such a deep, unquestioning love that it had raised his own feelings for her – which had started as pity – into a passion whose strength he rarely revealed, but which had underpinned his life. He wished that her sense of her own lack of worth had not held back her artistic gift. He was the
only person who knew that since girlhood she had painted beautiful and meticulously accurate botanical watercolours. She kept them hidden in portfolios at the back of the wardrobe, and worked on her new pieces secretively. William could appreciate their fineness, but could understand her reluctance to show them to Natasha, whose bold and innovative canvases had brought her world-wide fame before she was thirty. Natasha would probably think Irina's work paltry and old-fashioned, but William was fascinated by her understanding of the delicate mechanisms of the plant world, and her ability to give her paintings a luminous, almost spiritual quality. When she was working on one of her paintings, all her everyday complaints and anxieties would fall away, and she would be the steady, observant, rich person he alone appeared to know.
It had amused him, watching his children and grandchildren grow up, to see how many characteristics of Irina emerged in them. Hugh, the professional botanist, and Frances with her amateur love of wild flowers and her steady failure to reach her potential, were truly Irina's children. Anya suffered from her grandmother's social gaucherie, although her upbringing had helped her overcome much of it. Tony had her skill with watercolour, and her inability to make the most of his artistic talent. Lisa had married a botanist. Nick was more like himself, but had inherited Irina's tendency to worry. Katya? Well, he couldn't quite be sure about Katya yet, she was still in the making.
He shut his eyes and imagined his own and Irina's blood and genes spreading out like the delta of a great river into a network of interlaced streams, creating their descendants. He was so thankful to Frances for having a large family. He had tried whenever he could, and in the teeth of her resistance, to help with the expense of the children. He had wanted to say to her – he never had, and now might never be able to – that it was not anything as cold as responsibility or duty that moved him, but an almost overpowering sense of gratitude.