Madame Avinkova came to greet them as soon as she caught sight of them and took Natalia Petrovna off to introduce her to the other Shenkursk ladies, leaving the girls to Sergei, who appeared in front of them, as attentive and polite as he had always been. He quickly introduced Dindin to another young man and swept Evelyn off into the middle of the dance floor. The music was irresistibly light-hearted and almost in spite of herself she leaned towards him and allowed him to lead her into the seductive steps of the waltz. They did not speak, but she felt as though his smiles were telling her that he had understood and accepted what she had said to him and would never again press her to forswear her love for John. That certainty allowed her to give herself up to the pleasure of dancing with him, feeling the strength of his arms as they held her and looking up into his handsome face.
Sergei looked down into her happy, ingenuous eyes as he danced and thought that it would not be long before he could persuade her to forget the lover who had quite certainly died in the trenches. He relinquished her with regret at the end of the waltz to an importunate young man who had obviously been struck by her luminous beauty, and went off to talk to his host, who understood exactly what he had been sent to do in Shenkursk and wanted to help.
Evelyn went from one partner to the next, never suffering the indignity of having to retreat to Natalia Petrovna’s side, although there were fewer men than girls at the party, and only slowly began to wonder why she was not enjoying herself more. She had not expected the old, unthinking delight that she had always felt dancing with Johnnie at the Yorkshire hunt balls before the war. That innocent happiness was gone for ever. But to think, in the middle of a waltz, that she would actually prefer to be darning sheets and talking to Nikolai, or even reading stories to Sasha and Tallie was a surprise.
The music was charming, she was back in the old life, complimented, sought after, danced with, and yet something was missing. Her partners talked of places they had visited ‘in the past’, although none was crass enough to say ‘before the Revolution’, and of people they knew, the ballet, the Moscow Arts Theatre, the weather, the new arrivals in Shenkursk and the talents of the small orchestra that was playing in an alcove at one end of the elegant room. It was all just as it ought to have been and yet it seemed hollow. Evelyn wanted to forget what she had seen and suffered in Petrograd just as much as anyone there, but to pretend that none of it had happened began to seem absurd.
One of her partners took her into dinner and asked her about the differences between life in England and Russia and she so far forgot herself as to mention her last months in Petrograd. His shocked expression reminded her of her social duty and she toned down the rest of her answer to make sure that nothing unpleasant could be read into it. In her turn, once she had run out of things to tell him, she asked about his home, and he described to her the glories of his family’s estates in the Crimea, which she assumed must have been broken up and distributed among the peasants like all the others there. But she said nothing to hint at this and nor did he.
He danced with her again after dinner and paid her extravagant compliments while she tried to find him amusing, delightful, charming, but by the end of the party she found herself wondering how they could all be so blinkered. It was absurd to carry on like that once the whole world had changed.
When Sergei Ivanovitch said goodnight to her as he saw her and Dindin and his aunt to their carriage and asked her if she had enjoyed herself, she smiled as well as she could and said:
‘Oh, yes, it was good to spend time frivolously once again.’ Then she thought even that was not enough to satisfy him and so she turned to her cousin. ‘Wasn’t it, Dindin?’
Dindin, snuggling into the fur collar of her evening cloak, looked up towards the black, starry sky and said voluptuously:
‘It was the most wonderful evening I have ever spent. I felt alive again.’
Sergei appeared to be satisfied and assured Dindin as he kissed her that he would see that she was invited to every party that was planned in the town. They all thanked him and he watched as they drove away, congratulating himself on bringing Evelyn out into the world again, certain that she would not be able to resist him for long.
The three women hardly spoke on the drive back, but as they drew up outside the pillared portico of the Suvarov house, Evelyn said in a tone of surprise:
‘Who can be up still? It is after one and there are still lights in the hall.’
‘Well of course there are, Evelyn,’ said Natalia Petrovna, ‘they will have been left on for us.’
‘Not so many, surely. One lamp and our candles would have been enough. Uncle Nikki is never extravagant with the lamps.’
‘What are you worrying about?’ asked Dindin, laughing at her and still floating in her state of delight.
‘I am not sure, but we must go in and see what has happened.’
She almost ran up the shallow steps and pushed angrily at the door when it refused to yield. After another try she managed to open it and almost burst into the hall to see Nikolai and his brother standing by the empty stove talking to another man who had his back to her.
Natalia Petrovna and Dina were not interested in anything except the splendid time they had just spent and went upstairs to bed, calling ‘Goodnight’to the men as they went, but Evelyn walked curiously to the other side of the hall. Nikolai Alexandrovitch had turned to smile at his niece, and as the other men moved aside, Evelyn was amazed to recognise Robert Adamson.
He looked even more untidy than he had in the old Petrograd days, and very tired. As he felt in his breast pocket for his eccentric spectacles, Evelyn noticed some other change in him, but she could not define it. He seemed somehow softer and, without thinking, she went in at once to attack him.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’
He laughed ruefully and answered unhelpfully:
‘That’s a poor welcome for an old friend after the kind of journey I’ve had from Moscow. Piotr sends his regards, by the way.’
Evelyn stepped back at that, and her lips thinned and her nostrils flared in a parody of disgust.
‘I never want to hear anything of him again. Don’t you know what his Bolsheviki are doing to Russia?’ As he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender, she said furiously: ‘It’s not funny. Do you know what they did to Sergei Ivanovitch’s parents and poor Ekaterina Nikolaievna?’
His big, bony face sobered at once and the lips that had twisted into the familiar half-mocking smile straightened again.
‘Yes, Georgii told me right after I got here. Look here, Miss Markham, I am as disgusted as you must be and as Piotr would be if he knew. We both hate brutality. But you can’t judge all the Bolsheviki by the actions of the criminal element – just as I don’t judge all the “Whites” by the atrocities some of them have committed.’
Evelyn was about to challenge him when she felt Nikolai’s hand on her wrist and heard his familiar, deep voice.
‘Child, don’t. Mr Adamson is our guest here. His paper has sent him up to the North to write articles about what is happening here and I have invited him to stay with us for a while.’
She turned away, disappointed in Nikolai for the first time.
‘I’m sorry, Uncle Nikki. I just can’t bear to think about the Bolsheviki he admires so much and the things they do. Andrei Alexandrovitch, can you allow this man who took Piotr away from you to live here?’
Her tone brought a small flush into her cousin’s pale cheeks and a harsh glitter to his eyes. He looked at her so angrily that she expected him to speak in his old manner.
‘Andrushka.’ There was no sound of command in Nikolai’s voice, but his brother shrugged. Then he turned back to Evelyn.
‘I have told you before that I do not wish to hear that name spoken,’ he said with uncharacteristic calm, and then he walked away.
‘Evelyn, you’re tired,’ said Nikolai quickly, seeing that she was about to protest. ‘Come, up to bed. We can talk about all this in the mornin
g.’ He walked with her up the stairs, as though to make certain that she did not join battle with Adamson again, asking questions about the party.
‘It was all right. Sergei sent his respects. What did Georgii think about Mr Adamson’s arrival?’
‘Much the same as you, my dear, and I am afraid he flung out of the house to join Voroshilov. He’ll come back, though.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. He’s been restless and angry for ages, and when Sergei told him he ought to be fighting, he said he’d do anything to get out of here.’ She looked sideways and then in a rush of compunction said: ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Nikki. I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘He’s a fool, but I can’t stop him if that’s what he wants to do. Now, forget all about this, dream of your dancing partners and sleep well.’
She tried to smile for him and left him at the door of her bedroom. But it was some time before she slept as she worked over what she would like to have said to Adamson if she had been allowed to speak her mind, and what she would have done to Piotr if he had appeared, and how very much she wanted to be out of Russia and back in England where people behaved as they should and were polite and honest and straightforward.
During the days that followed, she often looked up to see Nikolai watching her with his eyebrows raised as she rushed into angry quarrels with Bob Adamson, but he annoyed her so much that she could not accept Nikolai’s unspoken rebukes.
Almost everything Adamson said jarred on her and she could not understand why Nikolai allowed him in the house and – worse – seemed to like him. With Sergei and Georgii both gone, Evelyn had looked forward to a few evenings alone with Nikolai, but now, whenever she had finished clearing away the dinner and tried to talk to him, there would be the American talking, playing chess, monopolising Nikolai. It was too bad; Evelyn felt an unaccustomed and distasteful jealousy that made it still harder for her to behave to Adamson with even the barest civility.
It was only the recognition of his usefulness that eventually made her accept his presence. He turned out to be enormously capable and seemed to have set himself to outwork his host, digging up vegetables, feeding the pigs and chickens, splitting logs for the stoves, climbing ladders to mend roofs that had been discovered to be damaged once the thaw sent streams of water through every crack and gap in the shingles.
Evelyn watched him. Much as she admired his industry and apparent talent for the work, she decided that he must have been bred to it, and had perhaps fought his way up in his career. In a way, that excused his peculiar manners and the sarcasm she had come to expect from him, and it made it easier for her to ignore him at all but the most superficial level. They spoke to each other at meals, or when he brought a bucket of potatoes into the kitchen when she was working there, but that was all.
Adamson was annoyed to find how much he minded her attitude. He had thought about her often in his increasingly bleak months in Petrograd and later in Moscow as the chaos of the Revolution made life more and more difficult – and as the growing realities of power bit into the Bolshevik leaders. He had welcomed his editor’s demand that he find out what was happening in North Russia not least because it would get him away from witnessing the undeniable changes in the men who had transformed the Revolution. Even Piotr had seemed to harden as the painful months dragged on. They quarrelled often about what could or could not be justified in the name of preserving the Revolution, and once kept apart for nearly a month because they had hurt each so badly. Then, when Bob got his editor’s orders, he went to see Piotr to try to rescue their friendship before it was too late.
Piotr greeted him stiffly, obviously still smarting and angry, but Bob made himself hold out his hand and say:
‘Piotr Andreivitch, I guess that many things I have said have offended you very much, but now that I have to leave Moscow, won’t you forgive me?’
Piotr’s thin, tired face broke into something like his old smile and he used the Russian diminutive he had once bestowed on his friend:
‘Romochka, we have been like two children. You’re right to try to put things together again.’ He took Bob’s hand in both of his and held it in a warm clasp for a moment. Then he asked where Bob was going and, on hearing that he had been sent North, insisted there and then on writing to his uncle. As he handed the single sheet to Bob, he said:
‘Do go to Nikolai Alexandrovitch. He’s a good man. You’ll see Evelyn when you get there: will you tell her I often think of her?’
Taken aback that at this emotional moment of reconciliation Piotr should be worrying about his tiresome English cousin, Bob said coldly:
‘If you like.’
Piotr stood up from the rickety table where he wrote his letters and gripped Bob firmly by the shoulders.
‘Don’t be misled by her ridiculous attitudes and conversation, Romochka …’ Then he took his hands away and there was a hint of exasperation in his tone: ‘Why do you insist on seeing only the political opinions of the people you know? There’s much more to them than the way they believe the world should be organised.’
After that he had talked of other things, leaving Adamson surprised to have been so taken to task by a boy ten years his junior. After he had left the shabby room, Piotr’s letter to his uncle in his pocket, Bob allowed himself a minute or two to examine the charge, but he had no difficulty in dismissing it. Anyone who could show Evelyn’s cold disregard for all people who did not fit into the classes and nations she admired, had to be dismissed: intolerant, insensitive, selfish, arrogant – she could never be trusted, any more than his own family could be trusted.
Even so, there was the unfortunate fact that he could never quite banish the thought of her from his mind, and during the tedious and difficult journey up to Shenkursk he had toyed with the thought of what it would be like if he found her changed: as beautiful and alluring as ever, but with her mind and character transformed.
And then her greeting had hit him like a blow in the face. During the first days in Shenkursk he came to detest the accusation in her fine eyes as much as the superiority of her manner. He was surprised to see how much she obviously liked Nikolai Alexandrovitch and how easily she talked to him, but she was not the woman he had imagined he might one day discover. He tried to laugh at himself for his fantasies and for his inevitable disillusion, but somehow he could not.
One evening in June, when she and Dindin had gone to yet another party, he and Nikolai were playing chess, and he was trying to stop thinking about her. He had no idea of the time, and the light streaming in through the windows made him feel that it must still be early. Both men were dressed in loose peasant blouses and thin breeches, for the weather was sultry, and they looked almost like brothers: tall, rangy men with determined faces and clear eyes. Nikolai’s full beard and greater bulk singled him out as much as his twenty years’seniority, but there was something akin about them.
Bob had just escaped checkmate by the skin of his teeth for the third time in their fifth game, when he said out of the blue:
‘Why does she carry on like that, Nick?’
The elder man picked up his queen and sat turning it slowly round and round in his big, calloused hands. Although they had not spoken of Evelyn all evening, he knew just what Bob meant. There had been an unpleasant scene as Evelyn, already dressed for her party, brought in the dinner for those who were not going out and Bob had tried to compliment her on her appearance.
‘She is unhappy, Bob; deeply unhappy. You must make allowances.’
‘But she makes none.’
‘How can she? Think, my boy: her lover was probably killed at Loos and she doesn’t know any longer what she really feels about him. She is homesick; she is stuck here, in danger and anxiety and – for her – privation, in a revolution that has nothing to do with her. She does not know when or if she will get home; she has done her best for the family and she gets little enough in return except from Sasha. Do you wonder that she is edgy?’
‘I give you all that, Nick.
But it’s not just the circumstances. She is better – just – than she used to be, but that darned condescension of hers – how can you bear it?’
‘I say it again, Bob: think! What defence does she have against this world she’s been catapulted into? She was getting better here, with plenty of work to do and no outside interference, when that damned nephew of Natalia Petrovna’s must ruin everything by whisking her into this ridiculous “season” in the town. She hates going to their parties, have you noticed? But she can’t not do it. It’s the only thing she’s been educated for, and she thinks that it is the real world. When you or I seem to mock it, of course she condescends.’
‘I suppose so. You’re a tolerant man, though.’
Nikolai put his queen down again on the chequered board, said, ‘Checkmate,’ and then after a small pause, ‘But I am not in love with her.’
Bob looked at the carved limewood chessmen and then up at his friendly adversary. He took off his spectacles and rubbed both lean hands across his wide, high forehead.
‘Can you seriously believe that I …?’
Nikolai did not try to hide his smile of amusement as he started to pack away the chessmen in their long box, and Bob Adamson saw it, but before he could speak, Nikolai said:
‘Every time you look at her, or are standing near her, it shows. The anger is only hiding it from you. When you take a plate or a glass from her your hands move towards her as though you want to touch her; when you’re talking and she stands beside you, you lose the thread of what you’re saying as your mind locks into wanting her; you …’
‘All right, all right, I surrender,’ said Bob, putting up both hands and laughing.
‘Yes, but, perhaps I ought not to say this …’
‘Come on, Uncle Nikki,’ answered his friend, using the children’s name for him, ‘out with it.’
‘I was just going to say that you must be careful with her. She has no energy to spare at the moment; I don’t think she could bear to have to deal with your feelings now – or her own.’
The Longest Winter Page 15
