Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  ‘Was ever a proposal couched more reasonably?’ She cast one last look at Andrei. Turned back, chin up, to Guy. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you think it’s best, I’ll marry you. I suppose – you should speak to Papa?’ She could not believe her own composure. Andrei had dropped into an armchair, bowed his head into his hands.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Well talk again afterwards, I dare say.’ And, turning, and with no word for Andrei, she left them.

  She walked very straight and rather carefully up the stairs. Smiled at Seraphima as she opened the door, commiserated with her over a spoiled stew. She mouthed greetings to Varya, Dmitri, Margarita and young Natalia who was patiently painting a tiny set of clothes for one of Margarita’s more exotic actors. She waited, painfully, for a full half an hour before, with no word of a lie, complaining of a crashing headache. She allowed herself the rare luxury of being ushered to bed, cosseted, soothed and made much of.

  Then, alone, at last gave way to her tears and wept as if she would never stop.

  * * *

  Across the city Guy de Fontenay stood at his hotel window looking into the light summer’s night, pondering the wayward impulse that had led him to propose to a girl young enough, almost, to be his granddaughter. And yet – was it truly that wayward? He had always been a man of swift decision, a man who trusted his instincts. Anna Victorovna Shalakova was a rare young woman; the challenges she was likely to set him would enrich and enliven the years that were left to him. No, in honesty not such a wayward impulse after all. Nor an entirely selfless one. It would be no bad thing to see the world through those young, clear eyes. He’d take her to Salzburg. To Vienna. And to Paris. Anna would like Paris – and what’s more he’d hazard a guess that Paris would like Anna. Then there was Italy, and the blazing, lovely shores of Greece –

  He shook himself, bemused. Moon madness. The insanity of these pale white nights. He most certainly must have taken leave of his usually well-ordered senses.

  He reached for his cigar case, lit a cigar, blew smoke to the ceiling. Forced himself in a long, thoughtful moment, to honesty.

  ‘After all these years,’ he said, aloud, wryly and quietly mocking. ‘Guy de Fontenay – ensnared at last, it seems, and by something very close to love!’

  In her room across the city, curtains tight closed against the pale twilight, Anna cried quietly on.

  Chapter Eight

  The outcome of Guy de Fontenay’s interview with Anna’s father was never in doubt, clearly dumbfounded though Victor was at the older man’s approach. What father could turn down such an unexpected offer for a favourite daughter whose assets both physical and material he had always known would by many be considered to be rather less than adequate? The difference in age, though great, was by no means unusual. And there were many far more important things to set against that small disadvantage; Guy offered stability, respectability and no mean fortune. What more could a girl of Anna’s station possibly have asked? That Anna herself appeared suitably agreeable to the match, if perhaps a disappointing and surprising touch subdued in her pleasure at this undoubted triumph, made things easier still; any misgivings Victor might have had could be soothed by the knowledge that his daughter was happy. She had, he thought, typically of her, made a most sensible decision – she would be secure, well cared for, and financially independent, since she would more than probably outlive her elderly husband and be then in a very advantageous position indeed. Guy’s age was in some ways a positive advantage; too many girls in Victor’s vehemently-held opinion put too much store on a strong young body and a pretty face, and lived heartily to regret it. He had, to be honest, been harbouring thoughts about the young violin maker – the one Andrei called Volodya, who had so obviously been interested in Anna – for he had never really expected her to attract a great number of suitors, and the thought had been in his mind to bind the young man to the family at not too great a cost. But that plan he shelved with no regret. There was no doubt; Guy de Fontenay was a catch, and his Anna had caught him. He was delighted.

  If Victor was pleased, Varya was rapturous. Astonished, but rapturous. What a very clever child her elder daughter had turned out to be after all! And how devious! Anna endured her mother’s mindless and excited chatter – how envious her friends would be, how surprised the Bourlovs – for the most part in silence. The strange and devastating decision taken, she found herself drifting in an odd state of unreality, as if the world, with its intrusive comment and opinion, lived and breathed and moved without her. She supposed herself, when she could bring herself to think of it, to be in a state of shock. Neither her father’s smug pleasure nor her mother’s unnerving excitement meant anything at all to her. Margarita, on hearing the news, swung in very short order and with predictable ease from appalled disbelief that her sister could contemplate marrying a man so dreadfully old to an unflattering amazement at the mention of Paris, Rome and an estate in the country. Anna accommodated her young sister’s ensuing and undisguised envy and her young brother’s equally undisguised indifference with equal lack of effort. She simply did not care. Her main – almost her only – desire was just to get away; from the city, from her family, above all from Andrei; to get this odd business over and done, and to leave. She found it hard to look any further than that. She agreed docilely to almost every suggestion put to her; yes, she perfectly well understood that Guy would have to return to England for a couple of months to settle some affairs, yes, September would be a perfectly acceptable month in which to marry, no, she had no objection to a Paris honeymoon. Nor, Guy observed wryly, did she have any great enthusiasm for it, but sensibly he did not pursue the point. He, above all people, knew the strain she was under; he, he frankly admitted to himself, had the most to lose if she cracked and refused to go through with it. For, as he had begun to suspect on that first night, the most unlikely circumstance in the world had arisen. Guy de Fontenay – urbane, experienced, ever wary – was in love. Anna stirred him – her innocence, her unexpected passion, her quiet intelligence, her musical talent excited him as he had not been excited for longer than he cared to remember. Anna was a canvas, fresh and intriguing, waiting for the brush, clay unmoulded, a book with as yet no words. He knew the chance he took, leaving her here with Andrei; yet sensed too that if he could not trust Anna, he could most certainly trust Andrei, who had stood at the edge of the abyss and had withdrawn, trembling. He had seen – had actively encouraged – the lack of communication between them, seen Anna’s hurt at her uncle’s apparent coldness. Dispassionately he watched, and doubted that even Anna would have the reserves of strength to breach that wall now.

  Meanwhile Anna, perfectly composed and in the eyes of her female acquaintances quite ridiculously self-deprecating about her triumph in snaring the rich if elderly Englishman, drifted on in her self-preserving dream. Since thinking always seemed to take her in a swift and vicious circle from whatever point she chose to start to the memory of that night in the woodland by the Gulf and its humiliating aftermath, she tried, quite simply and on the whole fairly successfully, not to think.

  Only Lenka, with the brutality of fury at a perceived betrayal, broke through that shell.

  ‘So. This is what you’ve been up to?’ Lenka’s voice was low and bitter. ‘How could you? How could you?’ They were in the Summer Gardens, Lenka having despaired of getting her sister to herself in any more private setting. The gardens were lovely, planted by the Tsar’s own gardeners for summer greenness and beauty, dotted with statuary that spent the winter cocooned in shuttered boxes filled with straw. In the distance a band played a waltz by Strauss. The Fontanka gleamed and rippled in windblown sunlight that glinted on the windows and domes of the small stone-built Summer Palace of Peter the Great. Wearily Anna turned her head away from her furious sister. She was tired. And she was afraid. Her life had careened, out of control, like a sledge ill-driven on a river’s winter ice. She had no strength for others’ problems, not even Lenka’s.

&nb
sp; ‘You promised!’ They were sitting on one of the ornate iron benches that edged the wide path through the gardens. Elegant ladies and their escorts strolled by, families took the air, the children made bright and fractious by the summer wind. Lenka leaned forward, strands of her straight brown hair blowing across her face. She pushed them back impatiently. ‘You can’t have forgotten?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The University! You promised!’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ She had promised. She knew it. She shook her head.

  ‘You’ve sold yourself!’ There was a harrowing bitterness in her sister’s voice. ‘That’s what you’ve done! But, worse, you’ve sold me too! Have you even thought of me in these past months? Have you ever considered your promise – the plans we made?’

  Anna had not. She could not pretend that she had.

  ‘It’s this damned, damnable city!’ Lenka’s voice shook with sudden, furious tears. ‘Oh, God! How I wish we’d never left Moscow!’ She jumped up, awkwardly, walked to the nearby railings, gripped them with gloved hands as if she would wrench them from the soil.

  Anna watched her for a moment, tempted simply to stand up and to leave; to walk away from this difficult and self-centred girl. Guilt kept her. The band had broken into what seemed to her to be an entirely incongruous polka, as bright and gay as the sunshine and the wind. She came quietly to stand beside her sister. ‘Lenka –’ She could not go on. She had nothing to say.

  ‘What?’ Lenka turned, watching her fiercely. ‘What?’

  Anna shook her head.

  ‘Why are you marrying him?’ The question was granite-hard, giving nothing.

  Anna looked to the blaze of a summer flower-bed, the petalled heads dancing in the breeze. The music played on, relentlessly cheerful.

  ‘Why?’ Lenka asked, more quietly; and if Anna had had the ears to hear, it was the last appeal, the last chance to mend a wound so deeply felt, a hurt consisting of so much long-brooded misunderstanding, that its consequences could only be fatal to the love they had always and so deeply shared.

  Anna shook her head, helplessly.

  Lenka stared at her for a long moment. ‘I shall speak to Papa myself,’ she said, her voice suddenly clear and sharp. ‘And Anna, please – don’t ask me to attend you at your wedding. I shall be there, because I have to, but I won’t be an active part of this –’ she hesitated, choosing her word with unusual and cruel care ‘– this farce. You understand?’

  ‘I understand.’ She wanted to get away. She had to get away. She thought of Andrei, of the deceits, the exhausting emotions; she thought of Guy, tall, quiet, commanding, kind. ‘I’m marrying him because he is kind,’ she said. ‘And perhaps – because he is like Grandpapa – he knows so many things – he cares about so many things –’

  But Lenka had gone, striding through the gardens as if they and their summer splendour did not exist. Seething with anger and with bitterness; and with a buried fear she had shared with no-one. What had that brute meant: ‘When you are mine’? Why hadn’t she been able to share her terror with Anna, why hadn’t she been able to calm herself, as she had always done before, through a confidence with her sister?

  Because Anna had betrayed her, finally and lastingly. Not only was she incomprehensibly to marry this rich and elderly Englishman, she was to leave Russia. Apparently without a thought. Leave Lenka, alone.

  A small child cannoned into her, his nurse, flustered, apologized. Lenka scowled and strode on.

  Anna returned to the bench, sat down, watched the glimmer of the canal through the shimmering, tossing leaves. Tried, wearily, not to imagine what might happen – and what might be her own responsibility – if Lenka, in this mood, finally decided to confront their father.

  * * *

  ‘University?’ Victor, in his astonishment that this subject should be broached again when quite clearly he remembered scotching it some weeks before, all but laughed into his daughter’s earnest face; cleared his throat portentously instead. ‘No, Yelena. Of course not. There can be no question of University.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lenka stood rigid before her father’s desk, hands clasped fiercely to prevent their trembling. She had deliberately chosen the impersonal venue of his office for the interview. ‘Papa, why not?’

  Victor eyed her sharply; surely the girl did not actually expect him to take her seriously? ‘Because the very idea is ridiculous. That’s why.’ He was dismissive. He ostentatiously reached for some papers, leafed through them.

  ‘But –’

  With studied patience he tapped the papers back into order, laid them neatly before him, squaring them with the edge of the desk. Then he looked up, his face stern. ‘Yelena, even you can surely not seriously have expected me to entertain such a preposterous notion? A daughter of mine at the University? Part of that –’ he allowed himself a small grimace of distaste ‘– vulgar mob of layabouts and subversives who choose to call themselves students?’

  ‘Papa – please, if you’d only listen –’

  ‘They have the morals of a pack of alley-cats.’ Victor’s voice was quiet and even, but betrayed an edge of barely-controlled anger that Lenka recognized all too well. ‘Their politics are disgusting. They openly support murder, treason, the overthrow of our lawful government –’

  ‘Not all of them, Papa –’

  ‘Yes. All of them.’ Real anger showed now. ‘The place is a pit of subversion. And if it were not –’ He waited until she lifted her head and met his eyes; now was as good a time as any. It was time for this unloved and importunate daughter to face reality. He softened his tone a little. ‘Even if it were not there could be no question of your attending. I should never under any circumstances have allowed it. And as it happens –’ he shifted in his chair, sitting back, spreading his hands expansively ‘– I have made other plans for you. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to speak to you of them. You are a lucky child, Yelena my dear. A very lucky child. You need not look at your sister Anna with envy –’

  Lenka stared at him, willing him not to continue, suddenly knowing what he was about to say. ‘No,’ she said, flatly.

  He ignored her. ‘A lucky child, as I said. I’m delighted to tell you that my good friend and colleague Pavel Petrovich has approached me –’

  As he spoke she became very still. It was as if every vestige of life were draining from her, a dreadful haemorrhage of warmth and of feeling. The chill of it made her shiver. She shivered for what seemed like a long time, teeth clenched to prevent their chattering, whilst, as if totally unaware, her father droned on. ‘– He has connections in the very highest quarters and will very probably go far –’ It was then that, quite suddenly she began to shout. She threw back her head and screamed like a demented fishwife; she used words she did not know the meaning of, words she had heard only in whispers, read in forbidden books, the only words to express her outrage and her terror. Her father stared at her in horror. Still she howled at him, herself appalled at what she was doing, what she was saying, crying now, trying to tell him what he had done, to what viciousness he had condemned her. After a moment’s frozen immobility her father thrust back his chair, moved very fast from behind the desk and slapped her face, very hard, holding back none of his man’s strength, rocking her back on her heels. She stared at him in utter hatred. He slapped her again, back-handed. She snarled, lifted her hand. He glared at her, daring her to strike him back.

  She could not. Crying uncontrollably now, unable to control her fear and her hatred, she broke. He watched her with distaste; the heaving shoulders, the blotched and twisted face. ‘In God’s holy name, pull yourself together, girl,’ he said coldly. He pulled a clean and folded handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out fastidiously, handed it to her. Her sobs quieted a little. She blew her nose. ‘Since the unfortunate day that you were born I have had occasion to wonder,’ her father said, his voice icy, ‘if indeed you are my true child. I find nothing in your behaviour, now or ever, to convince me that you a
re not a scoundrel’s byblow. Only my faith in your mother, the need to protect her feelings and reputation, prevents me from denying you absolutely.’

  She lifted her head. In silence they stood, the gulf of misliking and misunderstanding yawning to hatred between them. Any tender conscience Victor had had about his acceptance of Donovalov’s offer was gone. Good riddance to the girl; Donovalov was welcome to her.

  In silence Yelena turned and walked to the door. She opened it. Stepped out into the corridor beyond that was edged along one side with the balcony from which Victor could watch the comings and goings in the crowded shop downstairs. She lifted her voice, still hoarse and ragged with tears, pitching it to sound above the murmur of conversation below. Faces turned upwards. She saw her father’s eyes widen, saw him move sharply towards her. She stepped back from him, repeated what she had said. ‘You hear me, Papa? I said I’d rather be a bastard than a daughter of yours!’ She had reached the head of the staircase, stood trembling, daring him to come and get her, to stop her. Victor stood like a statue in his office doorway. All movement and all noise in the shop had ceased. ‘A father from the gutter would be a better father than you are or have ever been to me! I wish I were a bastard! Then I’d be the lucky child you tell me I am!’ Battered and untidy, yet with an odd dignity she turned and marched down the stairs, ignoring the stares and the whispers. Her cheek throbbed from her father’s blow, her eyes were swollen from weeping, her nose red.

  ‘Yelena! Yelena!’ Her father’s voice cracked like a whip above her. She ignored it. What could he do to her that had not already been done? She pushed through the door and out into the street.

  * * *

  The two weddings were celebrated within a few days of one another, and the two occasions could not have been more different.

  Anna and Guy were married in the Church of the Resurrection, a pretty church with many golden domes, its walls encrusted with brilliant mosaics that glinted in fitful September sunshine. The dark interior gleamed with candlelight; the bridal candle that Anna held burning as straight and as bright as any. When the rings were exchanged her hand was cool and steady; the only tremor came after that, when the bride and groom were led by the priest, as tradition demanded, three times around the lectern, the golden crowns of marriage held above their heads by two groomsmen. It had been as impossible for Guy not to ask Andrei to be his groomsman as it would have been for Andrei to refuse. Equally, since the other groomsman was a friend of Guy’s whom Anna did not know it was logical that Andrei should carry the heavy crown above his niece’s head, carefully sidestepping the long, silken train that swept the floor behind her. It was the moment Anna had been dreading. As he took her hand Guy squeezed it, very gently, and smiled, his wise, brilliant eyes gleaming in the dancing light. And that was the moment that Anna realized, at last, that given the total impossibility of her forbidden love for Andrei she had made no mistake in agreeing to marry this man, however odd the circumstances, however disparate their ages and their backgrounds. She remembered, as she walked in stately procession beside him, behind the chanting priest and in a sweet cloud of incense, that her first impression of Guy had been of a kindly man. And she had been right. Now she was certain of it; certain too that, passion and the hot blood of youth notwithstanding, kindness could be considered no mean gift to bring to a marriage.