The Red Staircase

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ I supposed I had left black Ivan behind in St Petersburg. ‘I think you helped me to bed last night.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ She came closer to the bed to get a better look at me, studying my face with unashamed curiosity. ‘Goodness, you did look tired. We could hardly keep you awake enough to undress you.’ Over one arm she had a pile of my underclothes, miraculously all new-laundered and pressed. ‘You look more yourself this morning.’ She put my clothes on a chair. ‘Shall I bring you some chocolate? Or you can have coffee? And a rusk to eat?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I suppose I ought to get up. Where is Miss Ariadne?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about her, or Her Excellency either, for we shan’t see either of them for hours yet. I know how it is with them when they arrive. Sleep! Why, they can sleep the clock round. And if they did want anyone, why, there’s old Nanny ready for them.’

  So I lay back on my pillows and waited for my coffee to appear. It didn’t appear quickly, no one hurried at Shereshevo. But I used the time to get my bearings.,

  Here I was, then, in the country house of Dolly and her brother. I wondered exactly who owned the house and estate. Dolly spoke as if it was her property, but the Princess Irene and Peter seemed inextricably part of her life and perhaps a common ownership was at the root of it.

  The room I was in was large and well-proportioned, the walls papered in a dark blue and the paintwork gleaming with white enamel. It was sparsely furnished with, in one window, a table of some well-polished pale wood, maple possibly, and a mirror on it to make it serve as a dressing-table. In the other window stood a writing-table. A chest-of-drawers was pushed against one wall and on the opposite wall was a bookcase. My bed was large, with white muslin hangings all as fresh and crisply laundered as the linen sheets. I thought it a comfortable room but not luxurious, for the boards were bare except for a strip of carpet by the bed. An oil lamp stood on a small table near the bed. But it was a friendly room, full of light and space. From the windows I could see leaves and clouds and sky. I had the feeling of being high up under the roof, riding among the tree-tops.

  I was at the window looking down on lawns and a flower garden when Nina returned. She gave a disapproving cry and put the tray down. ‘Oh, now miss, you’ll catch your death of cold.’ She draped a wrap round my shoulders. ‘Back to bed now.’ She herself was snugly dressed in thick cotton with a little triangular white shawl over her shoulders.

  ‘But it’s warm, warm!’ I cried. ‘And the air is delicious.’

  ‘Cold air on the body is very bad,’ she said firmly. ‘And really, miss, you’re mother-naked under that gown,’ and she clicked her teeth disapprovingly. It was my first glimpse of a sort of puritanism which ran together with other strands through the Russian character. And the root of it, so I came to believe, was that what was permissible for men was forbidden for women. I often saw the young men bathing naked in the river, but the girls never went near the water. If I had taken this feminine reserve into account more, I would have had the servants more on my side, whereas I ended by shocking and alienating them. And yet I don’t know: from the beginning I had an enemy in that house, that so friendly, welcoming house.

  It seemed totally friendly to me as I ate my breakfast of coffee and a kind of rusk, with raspberry jam of a beautiful flavour but unusually runny. I needed a thorough wash afterwards, I was sticky with jam and still travel-stained. But without a request, Nina and two hefty friends came into my room with a hip-bath and stone jugs of hot water. Efficiently, but not without a giggle or two, they set out my bath. Bathrooms were intended for the St Petersburg house by Dolly Denisov, but in this house there seemed no running water at all.

  Only for me it brought Mademoiselle Laure back as if she had been living and breathing in that room with me. She might even have used this room in summers past. In fact, she probably had.

  Still, I took my bath, using a great tablet of what looked like home-milled soap, full of rough bits like oatmeal but smelling of lilac, and I found the water soft as milk. I stopped thinking about Laure Le Brun and enjoyed myself.

  Wearing one of my new dresses, I walked down a wide staircase covered in blue carpet. This led to a wide upper hall, also blue-carpeted, and from this floor opened all the main rooms of the house; the servants slept and worked on the ground floor. Great pots of flowers decorated this upper hall, and the whole impression was of lightness and space. Ahead of me a white lilac bush was growing in a porcelain tub. To my eyes, it seemed late in the year for a lilac to be blooming, but I supposed that so far north the seasons moved to a different moon than at home. I bent forward to enjoy the delicious scent, which I specially love. I had meant to have some in my wedding bouquet. The tub stood close to the wide-open doors of a large room. Flowers hid me from the occupants of the room and also masked the entrance to my view. But suddenly I heard Dolly Denisov’s voice. She sounded quite close.

  ‘Well, it is going. Not perhaps so well as you and I might wish, but it moves.’

  She sounded serious, as if the plan if that was what she meant – was something she was in earnest about. She must have got an answer, because I heard her speak again. She must have been moving away from the door because her voice was fainter, although still audible to me. ‘No, no, we must do it,’ she said urgently. ‘To give up is inconceivable. No, no, I will not consider it, neither must you.’

  I thought I had heard enough, probably more than I should have done, and I walked quickly into the room. Dolly was at the far end of it, near the windows. She turned quickly when she heard me. A look of surprise, quickly suppressed, appeared on her face. Then she came to meet me, hand held out. ‘My dear girl, good morning, and welcome to Shereshevo.’ There was no one else in the room. Whoever she had been talking to had gone. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Beautifully, thank you.’ The open windows led to a terrace, a colonnaded open room with steps which went down to the gardens. Dolly’s visitor must have gone that way.

  ‘And what do you think of Shereshevo?’

  I looked at the room. ‘What I have seen is lovely.’

  Dolly looked pleased. ‘Like an English country house or a Scottish castle?’

  ‘No, quite different. More, more – ’ I studied the room. ‘More home-like.’

  Dolly still looked pleased. ‘It is a home. You are quite right. You have caught the true essence of Shereshevo and what it means to us: it is our family home, and belongs as much to Ariadne and Peter as to me, and will belong to their children.’ Then she said in a practical tone: ‘Are English houses so different then?’ But she did not wait for an answer. She waved a hand and disappeared through the window, a much younger and more girlish figure than in St Petersburg.

  The sound of soft, shuffling feet behind me made me turn round. A stout, comfortable-looking figure stood looking at me. Her round chubby face, its plumpness accentuated by the dragged-back hair and little bun, had a cheerful look, which the sharpness of her black eyes belied. It was more an accident of her features than a real reflection of her character, I concluded later, that she looked so good-humoured and was called ‘Dear Old Nanny’ by everyone.

  She ignored me. ‘Excellency, Excellency, come back,’ she called, shuffling towards the window. ‘Excellency, you have forgotten your overshoes. You can’t go trampling in the damp grass without your overshoes, and you with a weak chest.’

  Dolly reappeared at the window. ‘Ah, Kormilitsa, dear,’ she said. ‘Take those ridiculous things away. Of course I shan’t wear them. The grass is as dry as a cinder.’

  ‘It’s old Nanny that will have to sit by you all night and lose her sleep if you have one of your chests,’ grumbled the woman, and she held out a pair of rubber galoshes.

  Dolly shook her head, but she stretched out her hand and took them and put them on in a good-humoured fashion. ‘What an old tyrant you are, Nydrushki,’ she said. ‘I shall take them off as soon as your back is turned. Rose, this is Sasha,
who was my wet-nurse.’

  But I had recognised her voice. It was she who had come to stare at me in my bed early that morning as I fell asleep, and who had muttered strange comments. I had felt dislike in her voice then, and I felt dislike now. She bobbed at me politely, and smiled, but her little black eyes observed me coldly. ‘Kormilitsa’ – wet-nurse – Dolly had called her, so she had had a husband and a child once, and perhaps she still had.

  ‘I’m glad to meet you, miss,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going,’ said Dolly from the window. ‘Nanny will look after you, Rose. Ask her for anything.’ And once again she was gone.

  ‘I thought you had already met me,’ I said deliberately to Sasha.

  ‘I don’t understand you, miss.’ Sasha’s red-cheeked face was puzzled.

  ‘Surely you came and looked at me last night? I was asleep, or almost asleep, but I remembered it in the morning.’

  ‘There were several of the girls as well as me in and out of your room, miss, to see that you were comfortable and had everything as it should be. You were tossing and turning in your sleep, miss, having a nightmare, I dare say. You’ve had bad dreams, that’s what it is.’

  ‘I heard you talking about me.’

  ‘We weren’t talking about you, miss. It’s those bad dreams I spoke about.’

  ‘I don’t remember bad dreams,’ I said sceptically.

  ‘Ah, we don’t always remember what we dream. Tossing and turning you were, and muttering. It’s a consequence of the travelling, without a doubt.’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ I said coolly, and went out on to the terrace where I nearly tripped over the pair of rubber over-boots which Dolly had deposited there. No doubt Sasha was reluctant to admit that she had stood by my bed, talking about me. I could understand it.

  I walked on the terrace for a little while, conscious that I was observed, and keeping up my dignity, and then, because I was young and happy, I gave a little skip.

  Quickly I looked round. Yes, she was watching me from the window. Then she turned round and, soft shoes pattering on the shining parquet floors, slipped away into the recesses of the house.

  ‘Well, I’m out of your sight,’ I thought, and so I was, but very soon her place was taken by another servant, a pretty young girl, who appeared from another window further down the terrace and who seemed to have no other work to do in the world but stand and observe me. It was true she carried a duster, so some task had been allotted her, but it was me she was watching. Presently an older woman appeared behind her and evidently said something sharp, for she went back into the room and very soon I saw her shaking her feather duster out of the window in a vigorous and ostentatious manner.

  I grinned to myself: I knew the mark of a lazy worker when I saw one. I strolled along the terrace towards the room where she was working. A sweet-smelling breeze blew along the terrace, which was really like a room open to the air because it had a lofty roof supported on classic stone pillars. Indeed, at one end I could see comfortable-looking basket-work chairs arranged around a low table, so it was obviously a family meeting place.

  I glanced towards the window where the pretty, lazy girl had stood: she was there again, half hiding behind a curtain and peeping at me. Then an angry hand pulled the girl back and a voice abjured her to get on with dusting the dining-room. No doubt they had few visitors here at Shereshevo, probably there had never been one from Scotland, and so I was an object of interest.

  Dolly had left some cigarettes on the table and I lit one and began to smoke it. It was only the second one I had ever tasted. Enjoyable, I thought, but hardly worth making a fuss about.

  ‘Oh, you’re smoking,’ called Ariadne, approaching along the terrace. Her hair was loose on her shoulders and she wore a plain white linen dress; for a moment she looked younger than her seventeen years, then she smiled and her face became older and more sophisticated. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but I think I need more practice.’

  ‘Oh, don’t try.’ Ariadne plumped herself down beside me and sat there swinging a foot. ‘It makes the complexion go yellow, and you have such a pretty one. Now what do you think of Shereshevo?’

  ‘I think it’s delightful.’

  ‘I’ll take you round it soon, if you like.’

  ‘I’d like that. I want to meet the peasants and try to understand what I can do for them. Understand them,’ I added.

  ‘Shereshevo is not typical. We look after our peasants – in our way, and granting that my mother is a self-indulgent woman. But they respect her. Love her, some of them. And others hate her, I dare say, and who’s to blame them. But they always have the Tsar.’

  ‘The Tsar?’ I was surprised; the Emperor seemed so remote.

  ‘I suppose your King is respected, loved too, in a way, but our peasants think of the Tsar as their special protector. “We’re lucky,” I heard one old woman say, “we have the Tsar to look after us.” So when they get angry with my mother or the steward, they feel they can call on the Tsar for help.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘They do petition him, sometimes,’ said Ariadne. ‘I don’t know if he ever sees the petitions.’

  Thus opening up a gap between hopes and their fulfilment, I thought, which might be dangerous.

  ‘Let’s go outside now,’ said Ariadne, leading the way. ‘Of course, we can’t see everything, it would take too long. But you can see the Swiss Dairy, you’d like that, I think.’ She glanced at me. ‘You’ll need a hat, the sun is very strong.’

  The Swiss Dairy was a gem of blue and white tiles stamped with swans and daisies. The tiles covered the ceiling and the walls and made up the floor. On great wooden benches stood cream bowls of blue and white porcelain. In another room was a butter-churn, and in a third cheese was making. Everything sparkled and everything was a perfection of porcelain, but why it was called the Swiss Dairy was not in the least apparent. Ariadne didn’t know, but she thought it might have been copied from one seen by her mother on her honeymoon.

  ‘Do you cycle?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I learnt some time ago.’

  ‘Well, you can always borrow a bicycle here if you want. We keep two of them so we can get about ourselves. Here.’ And she opened the door of a small building a few yards away from the, Swiss Dairy where two gleaming machines stood waiting for us.

  I wobbled for the first few minutes, then steadied and went well. Ariadne was very proficient. ‘Follow me,’ she said, bowling ahead with confidence. ‘We’ll have a look at the stables.’

  I was used to stables on the grand scale; after all, at Jordansjoy we had made our home out of the sumptuous quarters my grandfather had designed for his horses. But nothing could quite have prepared me for the elegance and fantasy of the stables at Shereshevo. Beautifully suited to their purpose, they were also toys, just like the Swiss Dairy. Impossible not to think of Marie Antoinette playing at dairymaids in the Petit Trianon. There were two stables at Shereshevo, one red and one blue; the blue stable housed the work horses and the red the carriage horses. In the red stable every piece of equipment, harness, bridle, reins and so on, was decorated in red; in the blue stable everything was in matching shades of blue. Even the horses had little plaits with coloured bows. They were splendid horses too, some of the finest I had seen, and they had the indulged, placid look of animals that are not overworked. When, later on, I visited the village, I thought some of the peasants might have envied those horses, for they were housed much worse and looked less healthy.

  It was hot in Shereshevo, but the air had a wonderful dry, spicy quality that I found exhilarating. Ariadne saw this; perhaps she wanted to please me, because she said: ‘If we cycle through the gardens, we can reach the forest and ride there.’

  ‘The forest?’ It sounded like a fairy tale: to ride in a Russian forest.

  ‘Oh, it’s only a tame little bit of forest,’ she laughed. ‘Not many miles square, but it belongs to us. There is a wood mill and a paper factory on the fur
ther side, but on our side we can ride along bridle paths and feel quite lost.’

  I pedalled after her. We travelled round the rose garden, round a shrubbery, past a formal topiary and then through an avenue of limes which led to a great bronze statue.

  ‘Ah, the monster himself,’ said Ariadne. She got off her bicycle and stood there, one foot on the pedal, holding the handlebars, and looked up.

  ‘What do you mean? Who is it?’

  ‘Peter the Great. He gave this estate to one of my ancestors. So my ancestor ran up this statue to him. Not very good, is it? I’m afraid he did not spend enough money on it. And then the birds have used it for years to perch on.’

  I looked up at the bird-stained, greening bronze. ‘And was he a monster?’

  ‘I think so, don’t you? Great and good for Russia, as she was then, but otherwise mad and terrible. Did you have anyone like him in your country?’

  Beyond the statue the forest started, and although Ariadne had called it tiny and not many miles wide, yet it gave an impression of immensity. Great pines stretched in every direction. The ground sloped gently. ‘There is a river down there,’ said Ariadne. ‘A great, broad, gentle river. Our boundaries end at the river.’

  There was a narrow path, and leaving our bicycles propped against a tree, we followed this track down to the river. Ariadne was humming softly; she was not a girl with much of an ear for music, but her little song reminded me of a familiar tune, although I couldn’t place it – like seeing a face you know in a distorting mirror.

  ‘What’s that you’re humming?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said idly. ‘Just something. Look, there’s the river.’

  It ran in a great loop with low banks on both sides. We stood among the pines looking at a flat meadow on the other side where cattle grazed.

  ‘Not our cattle,’ said Ariadne. ‘The Brusiloffs own that land. Nice people, but the house is miles away by road because you cannot cross the river.’

  In the distance I could see the roof of a long, low building. I pointed. ‘What’s that? A school? Or a village hall?’ I knew they had no hospital or I might have thought it that.