Feeling suddenly free and happier than at any time since she had left Nikolai’s protection, Evelyn hardly noticed the hateful daytime darkness as she went away to visit Bob Adamson. His expression as he welcomed her told her that the change in her was visible as well, and for once she did not mind his knowing smile.
‘So, they’ve let you go,’ he said as she sat down beside him.
‘Yes, and though I knew I hated it, I didn’t know quite how much. It feels wonderful. And they didn’t seem to be angry either.’
‘Good. And to be set free, too.’
‘I’m glad! When?’
‘Tomorrow if all goes well. They took the weights off yesterday and I got to practise walking this morning.’
‘How did it go?’
‘It was – rough,’ he admitted. ‘And I can’t hobble far, but I can at least stand and … Never mind. The plaster can’t come off for another few weeks, but if you’ll really have me at Baines’s, I can leave.’ Evelyn wondered vaguely what it was he had not been able to say, but something inside her resisted the idea of finding out more about him and so she just said:
‘Nikolai Alexandrovitch would never forgive me if I let you go anywhere else in that condition. And the children will be so glad to have you close. You’ll be able to help me with Sasha. He seems very depressed by the darkness and I just don’t know what to do to help him. I know he’ll be happier once you’re there to cheer him up.’
‘And you, Eve?’ he asked. She looked down at him, quick to suspect that he was getting at her in some way, but his hazel eyes were clear and his whole expression free of mockery for once. Even so, her voice was stiff and formal.
‘Of course, Robert. But I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to get you back there.’
‘No, don’t worry about that. They’ve offered me the services of the ambulance.’
‘Excellent. We shall come and collect you tomorrow then. Goodbye, Robert.’
‘You don’t have to do that …’ he was beginning, but a new quality in her expression stopped his protests and when she left him he wondered whether he was beginning to break through her apparently impenetrable armour to the woman he was increasingly sure lay there hidden from predators.
When she came back the following morning with little Sasha, Bob was relieved to see that although the child looked drawn and pale, he happily held Evelyn’s hand and chattered confidingly to her as he had always done. From Dindin’s description of the way her cousin had ordered them all around and shouted at them, Bob had pictured the younger children as cowed and terrorised. Obviously the old love of drama had not deserted Dindin. Bob started to think he had been too hard on Evelyn. He searched her face for signs of resentment, but she looked untroubled. She was brisk too and very efficient as she called for a nurse to get him out of bed and dressed. Then she helped the nurse to arrange screens around his bed and patiently waited until he was ready.
Dressing with both legs in plaster was a difficult business and required all his concentration, which stopped him worrying about whether he had jeopardised the slowly flowering friendship by taking Dindin’s complaints too literally. When he was ready there were all the farewells to make to his nurses and fellow patients. At last the little procession, led by Sasha, turning all the time to talk to Bob, made its way down the long ward and out into the street. Although there was no light, the air felt clean and fresh on his face and he turned it up towards the deep indigo-coloured sky, taking deep breaths as he stood there on the top step.
‘What a superb smell,’ he said.
‘But Uncle Bob, it doesn’t smell of anything,’ protested Sasha. ‘It’s just beastly dark as usual.’
‘I know, little one. That’s what I mean. If you’d spent all those weeks breathing in ether, formaldehyde, antiseptic and the other patients, smelling nothing would smell to you all the perfumes of Arabia.’
‘You are funny. Evie, isn’t he funny?’
‘Yes, Sashenka, but I know what he means. Bob, I hope you’re not going to be suffocated in the flat. There are certain difficulties about keeping things as clean as they should be in this town.’
‘Don’t apologise. I know. The nurses have all told me, there’s hardly any water.’
‘Isn’t it weird? The last thing I’d have thought about the Arctic Circle. With all this frozen water about. It’s so frustrating.’
‘It’s like that poem, isn’t it? We could add a new line, so that it would go:
Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink,
Water, water everywhere,
But all the people stink.’
He laughed and to his amazement, Evelyn managed to smile with him.
Chapter Fifteen
Evelyn sometimes thought that if light had not started to come back to the town a few days after they had brought Bob Adamson to the flat she might not have been able to carry on. In some ways his presence made life easier: he was much better company than Dindin, and in the evenings after Sasha and Tallie had been sent to bed, Evelyn could talk to Bob instead of having to listen to Dindin’s complaints about the unfairness of life and the way she would have been spending the spring in Petrograd if it had not been for the Revolution. But there were constraints, too, and he needed a lot of looking after. Even after his plaster had been taken off and he could take care of himself again, he was still weak and could not walk far. She longed for the day when he would be strong and mobile enough to be of real help to her.
He, too, longed for it, not least because he had been afraid during the long solitary days in hospital that he would never be able to walk again. Although that terror had been to a certain extent dispelled by his first tentative attempts at walking on crutches, and later, once the plaster had been removed, with two sticks and after a couple of weeks with only one, he was still afraid that he would not regain his full fitness. To someone as active as he had always been that was a torturing thought. There were many times during their increasingly peaceful evening talks when he almost told Evelyn about his fears, but much as he wanted her understanding, he could not bear the thought of her pity. And since she had never evinced the slightest desire to know anything about him or his life before she had met him, he could not force his confidences on her.
The mixture of feelings she had always aroused in him seemed intensified by the closeness in which they had to live and there were many times when it drove him into something approaching his old sarcastic mockery. Always, as soon as the words had been spoken, he would regret them as he saw Evelyn flinch and touch something she wore just under her collar. But he could not stop himself.
Whenever it happened, Evelyn would remind herself that despite the occasional warmth Adamson had shown to her, he must dislike her thoroughly. Then she would retreat into formality and envy Dindin, who chattered and flirted as she always had. She obviously enjoyed having masculine company and once confided to Evelyn that since there were no eligible Russian men left for her to marry, she rather thought Bob Adamson might do. Evelyn, who thought he treated Dindin with commendable patience, said, carefully controlling her irritation:
‘He is a little old for you, I think, Dindin, and not at all suitable. And as soon as we get out of Archangel there will be plenty of eligible men for you to meet. You really ought not to be thinking of such things – it is rather unsuitable, you know.’
‘Oh, stop being like a governess! If I’m old enough to cook and clean and look after the children, I’m old enough to think of men as possible husbands. You’re so prissy, Evelyn, just like any other spinster. I deserve some fun.’
Evelyn, smarting from the insult, which had landed inexorably on some of her deepest-hidden fears, suppressed the ‘why?’ that rose to her lips and turned the subject. But she could not talk to Dindin about the one that worried her most, or to Adamson. For some time, it had been becoming clear that the money that Andrei Alexandrovitch had given her to keep them all until they could get to England was not going to l
ast until the ice melted. Food was so scarce in Archangel that it had become terribly expensive, and with five people to feed, she had been spending much too much, in spite of being as economical as she could have been. As she counted the few miserable coins and Intervention rouble notes in her purse, she had an impulse to tell Adamson and wait for him to do something about the problem. But she knew she could not. It was she who was responsible for them all, she to whom Nikolai had given the charge. And, besides, there was nothing Adamson could do that she could not.
He was often in pain, she knew, and still virtually immobile. There did not seem to be any way in which his paper could get any salary to him, and she was certain that he had no money of his own, even if he had somehow been able to draw on it in Archangel. There could be no help from him. This, too, was a burden she must carry alone. She had heard that other refugees were selling their furs and jewels to raise enough money to feed themselves and their children, but they were in such desperate straits that they had to sell for tiny fractions of what the stones and furs were worth. It had disgusted Evelyn when she found out that even officers, British officers, were taking advantage of the plight of the desperate Russians and buying up sables and gold and diamonds for no more than the price of a few meals or even with tins of cigarettes. She was determined not to allow that to happen to the Suvarovs’last resources and even if her life depended on it, she did not think she could have brought herself to sell the locket Nikolai had given her. It was all she had left of him, and the affection it symbolised was the only source of strength left to her in her dreary, enervating life.
Her first thought of a source of financial help was Baines, but it soon became clear that he was in almost as bad a way as the Suvarovs, and Evelyn was forced to recognise that she would have to beg from the British army. Hateful though that thought was, she knew that she had no choice, and the following morning when she had seen that Dindin was cleaning up the kitchen area of the living-room and Bob was giving lessons to the other two, she put on her gloves and a shawl and said:
‘I have to go out now. I’ll fetch the water on my way back, Dindin.’
‘Sure, Evie,’ said Dindin, having picked up the word from Bob Adamson. ‘See you later. Oh, aren’t you taking a coat? Won’t you freeze to death?’
‘No, the sun’s shining. I’ll be all right in a shawl,’ she answered, not wanting to explain that if one was going to beg for money to buy food it would be ridiculous to do so clad in the thickest, most luxurious sables anyone could have imagined.
As she walked out into the snowy street, the sight of the sun, pale and shrouded in piled clouds though it was, lifted her spirits a little and made her forget for a blessed moment what she had to do. She could feel its slight warmth on her face and thought that the thaw could not be much longer in coming and that as soon as the sea ice broke up it might be possible at last to get away from Russia. A group of soldiers, other ranks she noticed as she looked at their sleeves, passed her and stopped a few feet further on.
Evelyn hardly looked at them as she caught up with them, but one of the men said:
‘Speak English, baryshnia?’
Thinking that perhaps they were lost or something, she stopped and turned to smile politely at them.
‘Yes, what can I do for you?’
A raucous laugh greeted that, and the man who had first spoken said:
‘Well, we’ll’ave to talk about that won’t we, but in private don’t you think?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, as stiffly as she had ever spoken. Her accent did not appear to have registered on the men, who seemed from their rollicking voices to be drunk.
‘Ow much, then, baryshnia? I’ad a countess last week – at least she said she were a countess – and she was only three roubles the go.’
Feeling quite sick, Evelyn at last understood what the man was talking about. The foulness of it was underlined by the fact that she needed money, probably as desperately as the unfortunate countess they had mocked – and probably for the same reason.
‘You disgust me,’ she said in cold anger. ‘And the fact that you are English makes me ashamed of my country and the army that fought and died in France and Flanders. I am on my way to General Ironside’s headquarters now, and you should be grateful that I am not asking your names and numbers to report you to him.’
Long before she had reached the end of her speech, it had dawned on the men that this was not some Russian bint with a remarkably good knowledge of English. The man who had accosted her tried to shrink to the back of the little group. One of his mates, braver than the rest, said:
‘We didn’t know as’ow you was English, Miss. We’re awfully sorry. Chalky’ere, ’e wouldn’t have said that if’e’d known. Honest, Miss. We’re sorry.’
Evelyn thought she recognised genuine distress in the man, but she couldn’t bear to speak to any of them, and turned sharply round to walk as quickly as possible away from them. She was half-afraid that they would follow, but that was the last thing they had in mind and even backed away from her retreating figure.
The unpleasant little episode did not make her any more eager to do what she had to do, but at least the anger it had given her carried her through the preliminaries. Then, faced with a young officer, she tried to bury every feeling that she had and forced herself to beg from him. She could not look at him as she said the words.
‘There is no money left. My cousin’s manager, in whose house we are lodging, would have helped us, I am sure, but all his money was in Tsarist roubles and he has been ruined by the Intervention. We have to eat, and I need money.’
The young man was quite as embarrassed as Evelyn, but his duty was perfectly clear.
‘Miss Markham, please do not distress yourself. If you are in such desperate straits, you must go to the Acting Consul; he has a certain amount of discretion in such cases. You are a British subject, and I expect that there are funds that can be drawn on to help. But I am sorry to say that I don’t think they can be used to help three Russians and an American. I regret this very much, but there is nothing any of us can do to help. Do you know how many refugees there are in Archangel now?’
‘No, but it doesn’t matter. I understand.’ Then the whole idea of dutiful resignation stuck in her throat and she said for once what she really felt.
‘Some men, British men, stopped me on my way here and offered me money to … to …’ She found that she could not use any of the words she had learned in Archangel, but she saw from the poppy-coloured blush on the young man’s downy cheeks that he understood. ‘Perhaps I ought to have accepted in order to feed those children.’
‘My dear Miss Markham, please,’ he protested. ‘Please go to the Consul. He will be able to help.’ A thought seemed to occur to him and he looked more directly at her. ‘Unless perhaps you have a bank account. Many of the shopkeepers here will take cheques drawn on London.’
‘A bank account? Of course I haven’t got a bank account.’
‘No, no I suppose ladies don’t. Well, there it is. Nothing I can do. Try the Consul. He’ll help. Or the Americans, perhaps.’
Burning with humiliation she made her way to the Consul, who proved to be more helpful. He handed her a small sum in Intervention roubles for her own immediate needs, and suggested that he try to contact her father by telegraph so that he could arrange with the War Office to get some funds to her through the army. He was touched at the way her face lit up, and he warned her that it might take some time to arrange.
She did not realise that she was muttering to herself as she walked back along the Troitski Prospekt until a loud American voice called out to her:
‘Hey, Lady, you can talk to me if you need to talk.’
Her face on fire with embarrassment all over again, Evelyn shook her head and kept her eyes firmly directed at the road in front of her. There were so many things that she wanted to say angrily to so many people that she must have been mouthing them furiously as they formed in her mind. Now she
kept her lips tightly together and tried not even to think what she would have liked to explain to the officer, to the party of English other ranks, and everyone else with whom she had come into contact in Archangel.
When another male voice broke into her thoughts, she did not even look round, not wanting to know who had hailed her or what this one wanted. She thought that she knew. Then the voice came again:
‘Evelyn? For God’s sake, Evelyn! Come back. It’s Dick. Evelyn!’
Eventually the sense of the shouting reached her and she stopped suddenly, her booted feet sliding on the hard snow. Turning to look at the running man behind her, she recognised her young brother and felt weak with astonishment:
‘It can’t be! Dick? What are you doing here? It is too absurd: people keep popping up in the most extraordinary way. How did you get to Archangel?’
He caught up with her at last and, panting, kissed her cheek. She stood back a little to look at him. When she had left England he had been a thin, rather sickly schoolboy; now here he was, planted in Archangel in his khaki uniform, looking taller and broader than she would have believed possible. As she inspected him approvingly from the top of his glossily polished brown boots to his sleekly brushed short dark hair, she became aware that he was looking at her, too, but with quite different feelings nakedly displayed on his face.
‘Evelyn, what on earth has happened to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, but … your hair, and those awful clothes. You … I mean, oh hang it; you look frightful. What happened?’
Belatedly understanding one of the reasons why Adamson had been so angry with her in the old days, Evelyn said drily:
‘A revolution and a civil war, actually, Dick. It’s rather hard, don’t you know, to keep up appearances under such conditions.’
The Longest Winter Page 23
