The Red Staircase

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘We must hurry,’ said Ariadne, and she touched the pony with the whip so that it began to trot.

  We were just out of the dusty yard, with a wave to our old acquaintance at the gate, and on the road to Vyksa, when a bird flew up from a ditch straight in front of us with a harsh flutter of its wings. Ariadne said: ‘They say a bird flies up when a soul leaves the body.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was remembering the branded prisoner. Perhaps it was his death. ‘Do you think, perhaps – ’ I began.

  ‘How can we know?’ said Ariadne, and flicked the whip on the pony’s back.

  We were almost out of Vyksa before I spoke again. ‘Did you hear the tune that was being played on the piano?’

  ‘No.’ Ariadne sounded surprised.

  ‘I wish you had. I would like to have asked you what you thought it was called.’

  ‘I hardly ever know the names of tunes,’ Ariadne reminded me meekly. ‘What did you think it was?’

  ‘I thought it was a song of Robert Burns,’ I said. ‘ “My love is like a red, red rose”.’

  There was a long moment of silence, then Ariadne said: ‘You keep hearing that, don’t you?’

  Ariadne drove us through Vyksa, but just outside the town I said: ‘Stop, Ariadne, and change places with me. Here, give me the whip. I’ll drive. You look tired.’

  She yawned. ‘I believe I am.’

  For a little we drove in silence. Then I said: ‘I’ve just remembered that I heard you hum that tune once, Ariadne, rather badly, so that it was not easy to recognize. But I’m sure of it now. So therefore it was also you whistling it in the house.’ I didn’t accuse her of lying or of evasions. Probably she had been quite unaware of what she was doing.

  Falteringly she said: ‘If you say so, I suppose it could have been. Yes, it must have been me. Without realizing it, of course. How strange.’

  I didn’t answer at once, but concentrated on my driving. The first time I had heard Ariadne attempt that tune we had only just arrived at Shereshevo. It looked as though Ariadne had made another and earlier visit to Vyksa that no one knew of. She was capable of it.

  Ariadne closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat. ‘Just let the pony have her head,’ she said sleepily. ‘She knows the way.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ I said ironically.

  The heat of the day was cooling as the sun went down. ‘Ariadne,’ I said, although I guessed she was already asleep and I was talking to myself, ‘I think I know why I could not help that wretched prisoner. He was demented, mad. I could not reach his mind!’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Ariadne sleepily.

  ‘Nothing.’ With the baby, in spite of his infancy, there had been a level on which our minds could meet. Only unreason and reason could find no common ground.

  ‘Is it that tune again?’ she murmured. ‘Don’t worry. Perhaps you imagined it all.’

  I didn’t answer, but let her relapse into sleep, so much did I want time and silence in which to think about that tune, which was Patrick’s tune and my tune too. The little tune was so loved by Patrick, and so often hummed or whistled, that it was woven in and out of our love affair through good moments and bad, like a silver thread. I could never forget it; to me it almost was Patrick.

  As I drove, shapes of thoughts only half identified were moving at the back of my mind; I was thinking as a dreamer does, with thoughts forming and bursting, effervescent as bubbles. Corvus, the crow; his other name is grey-bird. Grey-bird – Graham. The thoughts ran through my mind.

  Suddenly I pulled on the reins and turned the horse’s head round.

  ‘What are you doing?’ cried Ariadne, roused from her doze.

  ‘Going back. Back to Vyksa. I must.’ I lashed the horse mercilessly hard.

  ‘We can’t. We shall be back home too late.’

  ‘I tell you I must.’

  We tore through Vyksa. The gateway was still open and I clattered through, ignoring a shout from the gate-man. The door to the Lazarev house stood ajar. Throwing the reins to the protesting girl by my side, I ran in. Incredibly, the piano was still being played; this time a halting, limpid melody. I followed the sound. It led up the stairs and to a room overlooking the yard. The door was open and I saw one of the little Lazarev girls labouring away at her Chopin. She had her back to me. By her side sat a man.

  He stood up when he saw me and bowed, stiffly and rather shyly. I saw a bespectacled middle-aged man. No one I had ever seen before in my life.

  ‘Monsieur Corvus?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry I interrupted you like this. My apologies. And to you, Alicia.’ For the little girl looked frightened.

  ‘He understands no English,’ said Marisia, coming up behind me. ‘Not a word.’

  I stood there, bewildered and discomfited, utterly at a loss. ‘I thought perhaps he was someone I knew.’

  The man smiled and bowed again.

  ‘He doesn’t know you.’

  ‘No. I see that clearly.’

  Ariadne said crossly: ‘We must get home. Rose, are you mad?’

  At Shereshevo we were met at the stable-yard by Peter Alexandrov, who had obviously been waiting for us. As we hurried upstairs to change for dinner he called after me: ‘There are some letters for you in your room. I myself told the servant to put them there.’ He smiled up at me. ‘Letters should be enjoyed in private, should they not?’

  Gratefully reaching the peace of my bedroom, I found my little maid standing beside a ewer of hot water with fresh towels over her arm. I dismissed her and picked up my letters. The first one, as I saw at once, was from my ancient correspondent in ‘Piter’. It was brief but rhapsodic, so much so that I wondered in passing if dementia had set in.

  ‘I am so well, so well. Today I went out for the first time in nineteen years. And my luck at cards! Incroyable. Will the power to love return also? Merci, merci. Continue to think of me.’

  My second letter was from Tibby and was much welcomed as offering more news of Grizel and Archie. Grizel had met him at the Bowes-Lyons’s dance. ‘He is barrister in Chambers at Gray’s Inn, and has parliamentary aspirations, so they will live in London, which will suit Grizel. There is a baronetcy in the family and ten thousand a year, but unluckily there is an elder brother. He is in the army, but so safe is the modern army that (barring a general conflagration, which heaven forbid) there is no hope there!’ She ended with the comment: ‘He is not a bit good-looking, but is very clever and can manage Grizel if anyone can.’

  I put the letter away, glad to have it but feeling remote from Grizel and her love affairs. I think you could say I was winded by the episode at Vyksa and needed time to get my breath back. I did not quite get it.

  A little preliminary unveiling of her plans from Dolly the next day. She had heard again from her old friend Madame Titov, it seemed.

  ‘On Thursday next we go to visit Madame Titov at her own house. Such a beautiful place. Very quiet, of course.’ She means dull, I thought, knowing enough of Dolly by now. ‘We shall stay overnight, it seems, so get the maid to pack what is necessary. A small toilette, nothing grand, she rarely entertains and I suppose we shall be her only guests.’ I did wonder why the brilliant, worldly Dolly Denisov and her wayward daughter and the daughter’s Scottish companion were to be welcomed by this recluse. Then Dolly went on: ‘And you won’t mind if Madame Titov asks you a few questions of a personal nature?’

  My eyebrows went up. ‘I won’t mind,’ I said coolly. ‘But perhaps I may not answer them.’

  She looked doubtful at this. ‘Everyone always answers Madame Titov.’

  ‘I shall be a surprise to her, then.’

  Dolly smoked a cigarette and then looked across to her brother. We were in the great bare room they called the summer ball-room. There was no evidence that anyone had ever danced in it, but there were many potted plants around, and it was cool and fragrant. It was evening.

  ‘Peter, what shall we do with her?’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ he said shortly. ‘If she does
n’t want to answer the old girl’s questions, why should she?’

  But when we were next alone, Dolly explained herself a little more clearly. ‘You see,’ she said, almost shyly, ‘it is possible that we might be going to see the Tsar. Madame Titov might be able to arrange a visit. She thinks that you would interest the family.’

  To be in Russia, and to see the Tsar! My eyes flew open wide at that: I felt like the heroine of an opera or a romantic poem. I was going to see the Tsar. But I did not forget that he was also the Tsar of Vyksa, and that was not so romantic.

  Characteristically, Dolly had begun with a bang and now proceeded to a diminuendo. ‘That is, we shall very likely see the Tsar, and be seen by him. But it is the Tsarina we are to visit. Not to stay in the house at Spala, of course. But Madame Titov lives in a lodge attached to Spala when they are there, and we shall stay with her. While we are there, we shall be in the Tsarina’s company.’

  Just her company, I thought; that doesn’t sound very lively.

  ‘So now you see why Madame Titov might ask you some questions. She really has to vet all the people who, through her, might speak to the Tsarina. Of course, she may never say a word to you, but if she does, you must answer.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to answer any questions Madame Titov may wish to put.’

  ‘Bravo,’ said Dolly. ‘I knew you would. You are a reasonable little creature.’

  Oh no, Dolly, I thought. You don’t know what a feast of unreason I am growing inside me.

  ‘Well, let’s go and find the others now that I’ve said what I want. It was better to talk on our own. I sent the others into the garden on purpose to be alone with you. By the way, Ariadne will not be coming with us on this occasion after all. She knows; I’ve told her.’

  Curiouser and curiouser, I thought.

  I found the others sitting in the dark under a tree, not talking to each other but apparently waiting for me to call them; they knew as well as Dolly did that they had been banished. But only I really knew why. It was to give Dolly and me a secret – not to keep Ariadne and Peter from knowing about the visit to the Tsar, which I am sure they knew already. Dolly was binding me to her with gossamer strands, like a pleasant little spider. For some reason she wanted me close to her. It must be to do with that healing skill of mine in which she took an increasingly obsessive interest. I knew it must be so, because it was the only thing that marked me out from other girls.

  ‘Are you ready to come in?’

  ‘Oh, we’re coming,’ said Ariadne, jumping up. ‘I’m being bitten by a particularly nasty sort of little fly, I shall be all blotches tomorrow. We know we were only sent out so that you and Mother could talk.’

  ‘We didn’t say much.’

  ‘No, you weren’t long. Oh, she loves her little mysteries. She’s like Tante Irene. Don’t you think she’s like Tante Irene?’

  ‘Why are you talking about her?’ called Dolly from inside. ‘I can hear every word you are saying out there.’ She appeared at the door. ‘I hear extraordinary things about Aunt Irene. People keep writing to me to say they have seen her about the town. Actually seen her walking and talking. Princess Kudashev says she’s even got a lover. Well, it’ll kill her, that’s all.’

  We passed up the stairs and went back into the sitting-room.

  ‘I shouldn’t believe a word of it,’ said Peter, sitting down in a chair and picking up a book. ‘Least of all the Kudashev.’

  ‘I believe the stories going about the town,’ said Dolly, in a definite manner, ‘but not those of a lover. But where will it all end?’

  ‘In a bed,’ said Peter. ‘Like most of her activities.’

  ‘Peter!’

  ‘I meant it most respectably,’ he assured her with a straight face. ‘I meant she will die in her bed. Come along now, Dolly, don’t pull such a long face. Her bed has been her place of residence for a long time past.’

  Usually, out of politeness to me when I was present, Dolly spoke English, but now she lapsed into Russian, which, however, I understood easily, although I still spoke it clumsily.

  ‘How I wish she would die. Isn’t it sinful of me? But I wish she was dead. I feel her influence on me all the time. I’m frightened of her.’

  ‘Everyone is.’

  ‘Not you, Peter.’

  He shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t let her worry you so much. Why do you?’

  Dolly said: ‘She brought my mother up, she brought me up, and she tried her hand with Ariadne. Three generations of us. How can I not be influenced?’

  ‘Poor Dolly.’

  ‘I ought rather to ask how you are free.’

  ‘Ah, you have the Corps des Pages to thank for that. Five years in that establishment is enough to free any man from the influence of women.’

  ‘Did you hate it so much, Peter?’

  ‘Hated, loathed, despised, resented it,’ he said. I had never heard him speak in a tone like that before. ‘Ridiculous discipline, archaic severity, stupidity rampant and raised to the level of a deity. The whole of my life since has been a reaction to it.’

  ‘One must have discipline. And service to the Tsar in the Corps is a responsibility of the nobility which one must respect,’ said Dolly nervously. ‘Discipline one must have, especially in this country, we are so wild otherwise.’

  ‘Wild? Why, we are a population of sheep,’ said Peter. ‘Look at the peasants – any other people but ours would have risen long ago.’

  ‘Gradually things will be bettered,’ said Dolly. ‘Patience is needed.’

  ‘The mujiks have risen,’ observed Edward Lacey. So he was listening avidly too. ‘Then there was the Land and Freedom movement. Remember what Herzen said in The Bell.’

  ‘Oh, that name,’ said Peter. ‘So powerful and yet so powerless. People like Herzen have ruined us, I think.’

  As I listened, I remembered the scene in the village on the way to Vyksa; I put my hand up to feel my cheek. To myself I thought that though there might not be much open anger, there was a deep, smouldering, sullen resentment. But possibly that was what Peter meant by ‘sheep’. Perhaps that was the only way sheep had of showing anger.

  I think they’d forgotten I was there. It was time to remind them. ‘Who was Herzen?’ I asked.

  They remembered me then, and expressions changed, slightly but unmistakably, veering towards reserve.

  ‘Alexander Herzen,’ said Peter. ‘A famous revolutionary. In thought, anyway. As far as I know he never lit a bomb. He was exiled.’

  ‘Oh, where to?’ I was interested.

  Edward Lacey answered: ‘England. Then France. He’s long dead, and largely discredited by now, but I imagine he still has his disciples. He has a daughter, I know.’

  ‘Oh, but they lived in such a messy way,’ said Dolly distastefully, and in English. ‘Wives and mistresses all muddled up together.’

  Edward Lacey laughed, and Ariadne said: ‘I thought Tante Irene once had an affair with her husband’s aide-decamp. That must have been under one roof.’

  ‘Oh, that woman,’ said Dolly. ‘Shall I never be free of her!’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll come to Shereshevo now she is so much stronger,’ suggested Ariadne. Out of malice, I thought.

  ‘What? Never. She hasn’t been here for twenty years.’ Dolly looked at me, and it was obvious what she was thinking. ‘No, she would never come without due warning.’

  ‘But there was a letter for you from her,’ said Ariadne. ‘And you wouldn’t bother to read it.’

  Dolly gave a shriek and ran out of the room. Presently she was back, the letter pressed in her hand. ‘No, it’s all right. She just talks about how astonishingly well she is. No pains, great feeling of vitality, she does go on a lot about that, calls it a miracle. As indeed it is, a black miracle.’

  Later that evening, on the way up the stairs to bed, Dolly took the opportunity to say to me: ‘Oh, by the way, I shouldn’t do too much driving around with my brother. The servants hate machinery anyway, they
think it is the invention of the devil, and they are beginning to look at you. Of course, I know that in one way one takes no notice of them, but in another way – ’ And she shrugged. ‘They know how to be bad enemies.’

  ‘I don’t want to alienate them, although I think already they don’t like me, but how can it matter if they are my enemies?’ There spoke the free, self-confident, misguided Rose Gowrie.

  ‘Ah, my dear, how can you possibly know what your destiny is?’

  The next day Dolly and I did what Ariadne, who seemed to be rejoicing in her own escape, called ‘the Titov drill’. What it amounted to was a thorough survey of any clothes, parasols and handbags which might be used on the visit, to see if they met some unimaginable standard of propriety. Clothes were ruthlessly weeded out for any hint of frivolity. Too much lace eliminated a good petticoat, although I protested it would never be seen, and an embroidered butterfly ruled out my best frock. Dolly’s handbag and vanity-case were emptied of all cigarettes, and her parasol all but fumigated in case it should smell of smoke. ‘Madame Titov is totally opposed to smoking,’ Dolly said.

  The next stage was the quick study of various little books and pamphlets of a pious and devotional nature which, it seemed, Madame Titov was in the habit of sending out to friends and enemies alike, and which, naturally, Dolly had never looked at until now. Then there was a solemn discussion of them, conducted by Dolly and inflicted on Ariadne.

  ‘And don’t wear mauve, dear,’ she said to me, ‘or violet.’

  ‘I never do,’ I said in surprise. ‘But why?’

  ‘It is the Empress’s favourite colour and left for her wear.’

  In all these preparations Dolly’s old wet-nurse, Sasha, played a prominent part, bustling here and there, full of self-importance. She particularly harried my little maid, even boxing her ears when she dropped some linen she was carrying.

  ‘Why do you let her bully you?’ I said, trying to soothe the crying girl. ‘Answer her back.’

  ‘Oh, I’d never dare, we’re all frightened of her. And so should you be, miss.’ And she rubbed her ear. ‘No, there’s nothing to be done but put up with her.’