The Longest Winter
Page 6
‘Dindin! Help me, please.’ The girl stopped at last, about a hundred feet away, and turned in consternation. Just then a man, perhaps the one who had shouted, came running out of a narrow cavernous passage between two vast buildings, and grabbed at Dindin’s purse. She pulled it back, saying haughtily, quite unaware of any danger:
‘What do you think you are doing? Let go at once.’
Evelyn, trying to stand and get to her cousin, watched powerless as he put one large hand on her cousin’s shoulder and the other on her wrist and jerked one of her arms high up behind her back. The agonised screams forced Evelyn to get to her feet and limp towards the man, who was now pushing Dindin against the grimy brick wall and grabbing at her pearl necklace. Evelyn was terrified of what he might do to Dindin and shouted loudly as she limped towards them, trying to ignore the pain that seemed to scream up from her ankle through her spine to her head every time she put her left foot to the ground. As she got closer, she saw that the hairy, dirty man had both his hands at her cousin’s neck, fumbling among the lace trimmings of her bodice. A nightmare mixture of disgust and terror forced her on. As she reached him she grabbed at the greasy collar of his coat and pulled for all she was worth, screaming out:
‘You beast, you beast! Leave her alone. You horrible man. Dindin run, run!’
She did not see him turn, but she felt a tremendous blow across the side of her face and she slipped back into the mud. A sharp pain exploded in her side as his heavy boot crunched into her ribs and she screamed. There was nothing she could do to stop him, but she hardly had time to feel the fear as she saw his hands coming to her throat. Just before she lost consciousness she thought he was killing her. In the split second of terror, she saw John’s face, and she thought that he smiled at her in welcome.
When she came back to consciousness the first thing she saw was Dindin’s white face hanging over her. The memory of what had happened returned in a rash. She tried to get up and said faintly:
‘Dindin, are you all right?’ A tear fell on her face and her cousin tried to wipe it away.
‘Oh Evie, you shouldn’t worry about me. You saved me. Papa is here.’
‘Thank God,’ she said and shut her eyes again. She heard his voice capably directing some men he had with him and soon felt herself lifted into his motor car. When she heard the door banged shut, she opened her eyes. To her astonishment he smiled down at her and his voice had lost its rasping edge.
‘We shall get you home, Evelyn.’
That reminded her of her errand and she said:
‘Natalia Petrovna … She sent us because she needed you.’
He patted her hand.
‘Yes I know. Dindin told me when she came running to fetch me.’
‘Fetched you?’ repeated Evelyn, puzzled and wincing from the pain in her ribs as she drew in her breath too deeply.
‘Yes, you let her escape from that pig and she came for me.’
‘What happened to him?’ Evelyn asked, shuddering.
‘He ran off as we came round the corner. We couldn’t catch him. One of those damned anarchists I imagine. He got your purses and Dindin’s pearls. But none of that matters compared to your …’ Uncharacteristically he stopped, and her imagination had to supply the rest of the sentence.
By the time they reached the Suvarov house the shock of what had happened began to reach Evelyn, and she started to shake. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and held on to her skirt with both hands to try to control herself, but the reaction was too strong, and she felt as though every muscle in her body was locked into a separate spasm. Andrei Alexandrovitch understood and called the chauffeur to come and carry her into the house. Then he followed, his arm round his chastened, tear-stained daughter.
Natalia Petrovna met them almost before they were through the front door, bursting with indignation that they had taken so long and raging at what she saw as the rape of her larders. But the hot fury in her husband’s blue eyes, let alone the sight of Evelyn’s terribly bruised face, silenced her almost as soon as she had begun her tirade. When both girls had been put to bed and the doctor had administered sedatives, Andrei turned his attention to his wife.
Much of the horror she had felt had been overtaken by what she had learned of the ordeal to which she had subjected her daughter – and Evelyn. But she had to reconstruct it to justify herself to her wrathful husband. She told him how the Red Guards had come to their house only half an hour after the girls had left, and how the leader was a young man of birth and education. In fact that had been almost the worst of it: he had called her Madame Suvarova in the old courteous way, and he might almost have been a friend of one of her sons coming to call if it had not been for the ugly, violent-looking men with him.
She had tried to explain to the young leader who was stealing her food that none of it was hoarded; the stores were no different from any she had kept before the Revolution; that any self-respecting mistress of any house would have cupboards full of dried, bottled, smoked or pickled meat, eggs, vegetables and fruit. But the raider, charming though he looked, had said:
‘That is why we made the Revolution, Madame Suvarova. While you had your cupboards full of expensive delicacies, outside your warm, rich house, people were starving. Now you must just scavenge like the rest of us.’
‘And how am I expected to feed my family and my servants? I have nearly twenty people in the house, my good man, and someone must provide for them.’
‘They are hardly “yours”, Madame, and they must take their chance with the rest of the city,’ he said, the courtesy seeming only to underline the brutalities of the world into which she had been plunged. She had had to stand beside him, wondering desperately when Evelyn would bring Andrei home, as the rough workmen carried past her all the smoked hams and reindeer tongues, pressed caviare, bottled vegetables, sacks of flour and sugar and coffee. Whole cheeses were trundled out in their wooden cradles through the hall and down the front steps, and Natalia Petrovna had only just enough control not to order the men to use the tradesmen’s entrance and not risk damaging the marble floor of her gracious hall.
When it was all done, the young man had smiled as though he had enjoyed the whole episode and bowed to her, thanking her for her contribution to the Revolution. Hating him for the sarcasm and for his treachery to their class, she had said nothing; but the instant he had left after his men, she had called imperiously for one of the servants to shut the door and when she thought she detected a reflection of the young man’s smile on his face she rounded on him and berated him for his insolence.
He, in turn, had betrayed her by saying as angrily:
‘I do not have to listen to this any more, Comrade. I am leaving.’ And he had gone, just like that, taking his few miserable possessions with him and leaving her even more short-handed than ever. Having told her story to her husband, Natalia Petrovna finished up pathetically:
‘And you left me here alone to face that, to watch those brutal men stealing all our children’s food.’
He felt rage, hot and dangerous, surging up through him and he wanted to force into her stupidity some realisation of what was really happening outside her house and to what she had condemned the two girls, children almost, because of her absurd obsession with her larders and her servants. But he had long ago recognised that she had neither the will nor the capacity to tackle anything unpleasant and that his own life was slightly easier if he kept her serene, and so, ignoring the riots, the sounds of guns in the streets nearby, and what had happened to his daughter, all he said was:
‘Did you not say they had guns, my love? There is little I could have done except die in defence of your larder.’
‘Don’t mock me, Andrei Alexandrovitch. You did not have to suffer as I did, and you do not have to worry about the feeding of all these people. And the servants are leaving, more every day. You don’t understand how difficult it is without a housekeeper. I have never had to worry about this kind of thing before and it is too
difficult.’
‘Well at least the servants’leaving means that there will be fewer mouths to feed. No, Natasha, I am not laughing at you. But you must face the fact that until order is restored, there is nothing we can do. Most of Petrograd is close to starving. You will just have to do what you can. Be thankful they have not requisitioned the house – yet. And that we at least can afford to buy what food there is.’
She closed her eyes at the thought of losing her house and of all the other things that might happen and said from the bottom of her heart:
‘I wish to God that the Germans would arrive. They would soon stop all this nonsense.’ She turned away from him and was distressed to see Evelyn standing in the doorway about five feet away. Her dark eyes were appalled and stared out of a face that was the colour of unbaked clay, disfigured by the huge bruise, already yellowing at the edges, and the cut lips, which were swollen and deep red. Natalia Petrovna hurried forward.
‘Evelyn, my dear, you ought to be in bed. Come along, I’ll take you back up and tell them to bring you some hot milk with sugar in it. Come.’
‘Evelyn resisted the kindly pressure of Natalia Petrovna’s plump arm and said:
‘Did you mean what you just said? You cannot have meant it.’
‘Never mind about it now. Come back to bed.’ As Evelyn still resisted, her cousin tried to explain: ‘Evelyn, at least the Germans would know how to keep order. There would be proper arrangements for distributing the food and the streets would be safe enough even for young girls. I hate what happened to you and Dindin. I shall never be able to let you go out alone again – you will be ill if you never take walks. But come along now. We won’t talk about it until you’re better.’
Evelyn gave up and went with her, to lie in bed pretending to sleep. Natalia Petrovna sat beside her until she was certain that the pretence had become reality and then went downstairs in search of her husband.
‘Andrei Alexandrovitch, why can’t we go away this year? If we could at least get out of Petrograd … I know we can’t go to Finland any more, but even Archangel would be better than this. You know how I hate that house, but we can’t stay here.’
‘And how much of this house do you think we should find when we got back? This situation cannot possibly continue. Either the Provisional Government will pull itself together, discipline the Kronstadt sailors and institute some kind of order, or someone else will take over, and we shall be able to get back to normal.’
Natalia Petrovna shuddered to think what the revolutionaries might do to her house if it were left undefended. After all, they had walked in and seized all her food and no one had been able to stop them. She thought of her paintings and the ikons she had brought with her when she married, and the furniture she had selected so carefully over the years, and pictured them all splintered and desecrated.
‘But what if it’s worse? I mean, what if these people of Peterkin’s, these Bolsheviki take over?’ Her husband was able to laugh sardonically at that ludicrous possibility.
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him by that ridiculous name. You’re not at all English, and even there it’s never used outside the nursery. But you needn’t worry about your son’s irresponsible friends; they’re the least powerful opposition faction in the Duma, despite their destructive influence on the factory workers and deserting troops. They could not possibly form any kind of government. As far as I can gather they can’t agree about anything among themselves. Trotsky is said to be all for the war and the other one wants anything, defeat even, that will stop it. They’re never going to be able to organise each other, let alone anyone else.’
Chapter Four
It was weeks before Evelyn could forget what had happened to her in the Vyborg, and the prospect of leaving the house filled her with such dread that she could no longer take Natalie and Sasha out for their afternoon walks. What had happened to her was trivial in comparison with what her brother must have suffered and she despised herself for not being able to shake off her fears. Her dreams were filled with men who came at her with strong grabbing hands and cruel faces, and sleep no longer seemed to promise peace. She read for hours after she went to bed and wrote letter after letter, anything to put off the moment when she would have to turn out the lamp and remember everything that had happened and think about the things that might have happened if Dindin had not brought her father in time.
The cracked ribs had healed and the bruises on her face faded long before she had learned how to come to terms with her memories. But gradually the increasing affection the Suvarovs showed her had an effect and she learned to ignore what had been done to her in the Vyborg.
Her whole relationship with her cousins began to change. Andrei Alexandrovitch no longer seemed to her to be like some wild beast ready to spring, perhaps because the respect and gratitude he had felt for her when he realised what she had done for his daughter, and at what risk to herself, deepened during the summer into something approaching real affection; and the twins, to whom he confided the full story of what had happened, became much more open with their English cousin. They no longer treated her as a kind of second-class sister, to be mocked when she said things they disliked or patronisingly admitted into their confidence when she behaved herself. Instead it was as though she had become a person to them. As for Dindin, her hero-worship and her resentment alike dissolved into trust.
By the week of Evelyn’s twentieth birthday in early November she had almost overcome the whole Vyborg incident, and when Andrei Alexandrovitch told her that her birthday would be a celebration for them all she even felt a kind of anticipation. He did not tell her that it had been with the greatest difficulty that he had wrung from Piotr a promise to join the rest of the family. Andrei Alexandrovitch did not know what his second son was up to, but there was some trouble brewing, he felt sure. Still he was determined that his family should be united in their observance of Evelyn’s birthday. Without her his daughter might have been killed – or worse – and so he had demanded Piotr’s presence.
When Andrei Alexandrovitch and his wife asked Evelyn whether she would prefer to hear Chaliapin sing or see Karsarvina dance, she chose the opera and decided to wear the garnet silk she had had made for the previous Christmas. She had not worn it since then and so the evening before her birthday she rang the bell in her bedroom in order to give Anna, her maid, the necessary orders to hang the dress out and press it. To her dismay the girl to whom she had always tried to be kind looked insolently at her.
‘No, baryshnia, I will not press out your gown, nor come to your room to dress you tomorrow.’
‘Annoushka, you must not talk like that …’ Evelyn was beginning, but the maid interrupted: ‘Why not? We have Liberty now. No one can make me do anything now that I don’t want.’
A feeling that was very like hate rushed through Evelyn in a hot tide. So, Anna had now joined the hordes of resentful, ungrateful people who had spawned the man who had beaten her and Dindin.
‘You will do as you are told or I shall speak to Madame Suvarova at once,’ she said.
‘So what?’ demanded the maid. ‘She can’t make me slave for you any more and she won’t either, Miss Markham, because she knows that she will find no one else to wait in queues for her or cook her food or clean her house. Now that there are only four of us left, she knows how much she needs us.’
Remembering her dignity just in time to prevent her from slapping the girl’s taunting face or shouting at her, Evelyn said quietly:
‘I think you will regret what you have just said.’ She then left the room without waiting for any response, and went straight to her cousin, whose reaction was just as Anna had foretold.
‘Evelyn, please don’t make me dismiss the girl. It is impossible to get any servants and if she goes too, the others will join her and I don’t know what we should do. See what you can do to smooth things out, please.’
‘You sound almost as though you want me to apologise to her,’ said Evelyn, shocked and hurt.
‘Apologise to a servant! For asking her to do what she is paid to do? What can you be thinking of, Cousin Natasha? If the servants get out of hand, you know, nothing will ever be straight again.’
‘But, Evelyn, be reasonable: we have had a revolution. Nothing is ever going to be the same again; and it will be so much worse if you – any of us – offend even the few women who are still prepared to work for us.’
‘Cousin Andrei says that everything is simmering down well. He told me yesterday that everyone seems to agree that the Revolution has gone on long enough and it is time to start reorganising normal life. I was only trying to do my part.’
Her cousin looked doubtful, secured an undertaking that Evelyn would do nothing more to upset the remaining servants and went reluctantly down to the kitchens herself to listen to Anna’s imprecations against the Anglichanka, and calm her down.
Evelyn left the room in such a rage that she could hardly think at all, and almost despised her good-naturedly selfish, indolent cousin. She slept very little and awoke the next morning feeling that something momentous and terrible was about to happen. As she sat brushing her own hair before the glass, she traced the sensation to the previous evening’s quarrel and squashed it down as far as she could, determined to enjoy her birthday, and not to think at all about the servants or the Revolution.
It turned out to be not so difficult after all. Her cousins had been kidnapping all the letters and parcels that had arrived for her over the previous week, and, with their own presents, had made a great pile for her on one of the Boulle tables in the salon. She opened theirs first, although she longed for news of her real family, because it seemed only polite to show them that she was grateful for the trouble they were taking over her.