The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  Her tone, if not the words she had used, brought blood into her brother’s fresh face. He took both her hands in his.

  ‘Evie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what that sounded like. It was just the shock. Thank God I’ve found you. I’ll do what I can for you now. You don’t have to worry any longer. I’m here now, Evie.’

  ‘But what do you mean, Dickie? Found me. Didn’t Mother get my letters? You must have known that I was in Archangel.’ She looked at him more searchingly, and then said: ‘But you’re in uniform. What about the asthma, Dick? Come on, don’t just stand there. Tell me.’

  ‘I will as soon as you stop talking.’

  ‘Sorry, Dick,’ she said, laughing a little at his pompousness. ‘I’ll be quiet.’

  ‘Where are you going? Can I come with you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m just going back to the flat, to out cousins. I’ve three of them here with me, Dindin, Natalie and poor little Sasha. But you must tell me why you are here.’

  ‘All right. You know that I couldn’t get a commission because of the asthma.’ He waited for her to nod, which she duly did. ‘Right, then. After Tony died and when we heard what was happening in Russia and that you were stuck here, I couldn’t bear it that I was sitting safe at home …’ He stopped and Evelyn was touched at the humble way he looked at her.

  ‘I was never in any real danger, Dickie; just frustrated not to be able to get home, and very sad for our cousins as we watched everything they had lived for smashed up and thrown away.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ he said, clearly not very interested in the Suvarovs. ‘So when I discovered that they were recruiting for an expedition to North Russia, and that it didn’t matter if one was physically not in the pink, I had to come. We’ve been stuck in Murmansk all winter, but if I’d known that you were actually in this town I’d have wangled a job here sooner.’

  ‘But how did you hear in the end? I assume this isn’t just coincidence.’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. But you got a letter to Mother from this place Shenkursk and so she wrote to me as soon as she got it and told me to get to Shenkursk and find you. But, of course, by then Shenkursk had fallen to the Bolos. I made what enquiries I could and discovered that Cousin Andrew Suvarov had stayed. I was pretty desperate when I thought that you might have stayed with them and came straight over here as soon as I could join a relief unit. And here I am.’

  Evelyn stopped once again and put both hands on his shoulders and took a huge, deep breath.

  ‘And, oh, Dickie. It is wonderful that you are. I have missed … But there’s no sense in talking about it. I am so glad that you’ve come. Have you got any letters for me from home? I had one little note from Mother that got through to Shenkursk ages ago, but nothing since. If you get letters from her, why don’t I?’

  ‘Well she knew where I was and anyway our letters come through the War Office. I think it’s different with civilians. I mean, after all we’re at war with Russia now.’

  ‘Are we?’ she asked in a tone he had never heard from her in his life. ‘There’s been no declaration of war.’

  ‘But of course we are,’ he said as though to a rather backward child or a foreigner, wondering whether the Revolution had affected her mind as well as her quite dreadful appearance. He noticed in disgust that her skirt was actually dirty and her boots cracked where the upper joined the sole. ‘Don’t you realise what might happen if revolution got to England? It’s bad enough already. I know that you won’t spread this around the town, but some of those wicked trades unions are striking in protest at what we’re trying to do to their Russian comrades. The miners, you know. And some of the dockers refused to load any more ships headed for Murmansk, trying to force the government to pull out of Russia. You don’t know what it’s like in England now. The lower classes are in a dreadfully dangerous state, Father says. It’s absolutely vital that we nip all that sort of thing in the bud.’

  Evelyn found herself laughing at his portentousness and again recognising some of her old self in the way he was carrying on. No wonder Piotr had laughed at her; no wonder Robert Adamson had been so sarcastic. Not until she had been presented with the young brother she had cherished in her mind all this time had she realised how much she had changed. Here he was fresh from England lecturing her, someone who had lived through the Revolution, on its significance, with all the ignorance and prejudice of their class.

  ‘Dear Dickie, I’m sorry to laugh. But it is too absurd. Do you really think that a few units of highly reluctant Allied troops can really smother something like the Bolshevik Revolution in a country this size?’

  ‘It’s not just us, you know,’ he said, lowering his voice even though there was no one anywhere near them. ‘There are forces making their way up through the Ukraine, and others from Siberia. We’re all going to meet in the middle and restore proper government here.’

  ‘Look, we were only as far south as Shenkursk and had to retreat. That was only two hundred miles from here. Don’t delude yourself, Dick. Now, to a more realistic subject. Did you bring any letters for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said and then stopped, his pink face now the very picture of guilt and distress.

  ‘What’s the matter, Dick? Nothing’s happened to Mother – or Father – has it?’ Then when he still did not speak, she understood and with her face beginning to freeze, she said: ‘It’s Johnnie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Evelyn; it seems that he was killed. At Loos.’ He was profoundly embarrassed to see that tears were oozing out of her eyes in a public street and said hastily:

  ‘I’d better get you home. Where are you staying?’

  ‘Number two hundred and twenty, but we’re nearly there. What happened, Dick? Tell me.’

  ‘We don’t know very much, Evelyn, but they think it happened during the attack on Hill 70. It seems that a lot of bodies were never found or identified, but one of his friends who was dreadfully wounded there was beside him when it happened. He, the friend, I mean, was invalided out of the army and spent two years in hospitals of one sort or another – he took some shrapnel in the spine, you see.’

  ‘But couldn’t he at least have got word to us about Johnnie? It’s been three years. All those years when I thought he could be still alive,’ she protested through the tears that she could not stop, however often she brushed her big, dark eyes.

  ‘He didn’t know, until he got out of hospital and came to Beverley, that no one knew what had happened.’

  Listening carefully to his voice, Evelyn understood that there was something more to this story than simply the truth she had dreaded since the telegram had arrived.

  ‘Now Dick, stop here in the street and tell me the whole thing. Why did this friend come to Beverley? What is it that you are hiding?’

  He was appalled.

  ‘Evelyn, I’m not hiding anything. I am trying to tell you so that you understand. He brought a letter for you. Johnnie gave it to him at dawn before they attacked and asked him to get it to you if he could. That’s why he came. And it was a tremendous effort: he’s paralysed, you see – in a wheelchair.’

  His sister was clinging to his arm now, and he could feel her whole body shaking with the sobs that were forcing themselves out of her.

  ‘Well give it to me. For the love of God, Dickie, give it to me.’

  ‘Evelyn, try to keep calm. I came to give it to you, but it’s in my kit. I haven’t got it with me. I was going to the Consul to try to find out your address so that I could find you and give it to you. It was chance I met you out here in the street.’

  ‘Never mind any of that now. Go straight back and get it, Richard, and bring it at once to the flat. Number 220. Come as quickly as you can. It’s right at the top of the stairs. The front door’s never locked in the daytime. Hurry. I must know what he wrote.’

  ‘All right, all right, Evelyn. Try to keep calm. I understand. Don’t think I don’t, but you must be calm. I’ll come back as quickly as I can.’

  Chapter
Sixteen

  Evelyn tried hard to remove the traces of tears from her face as she hauled herself up the steep stairs to Baines’s attic, but she saw from the expressions on the faces of all three of her cousins that she had not succeeded. Dindin, with the tact she was just beginning to learn after the long weeks of enforced intimacy, turned back to her cooking, but nine-year-old Natalie said:

  ‘What’s the matter, Evie? Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly all right, Tallie. Have you finished your lesson?’ answered Evelyn in a dreary voice that worried Bob Adamson even more than the stains of grief on her pale face. He intervened.

  ‘I expect Evelyn’s tired, children. Lunch in half an hour, didn’t you say, Dindin?’

  ‘That’s right, Bob. What there is of it.’

  He laughed, and then said:

  ‘OK. You three stay here and get everything ready, while Evelyn has a little rest on one of your beds. Come on, Eve.’

  He knew that she would never agree to sit with him in his little bedroom and so he led her to the room where all three Suvarovs slept. Then he made her sit beside him on Dindin’s bed and said:

  ‘What has happened, Eve?’

  She turned her head sideways so that he could not see her face and said with no pretence of dignity:

  ‘Johnnie’s dead. He’s been dead for three years – ever since the telegram. He was blown up in the attack on Hill 70 at Loos.’

  He wanted to hold her close to him and tell her everything that he felt for her and kiss her until she could smile again, but since he could not, he had to think of some words that might comfort her. All he could find to say was:

  ‘Evelyn, I am so sorry. How did you hear?’

  She turned her head a little. ‘My brother’s here with the army. I met him just now, and he told me. But, Bob, you knew John was dead, didn’t you? Like Sergei. But you didn’t say.’

  ‘I thought he must be.’

  ‘But you never said.’

  ‘There seemed to be no point. If my silence has made the hurt worse, then I’m sorry for it. But I didn’t see how it would help to tell you what I thought.’

  At that she pulled herself together.

  ‘Bob, I didn’t mean that. I am grateful that you never said anything. If that sounds mad, I’m sorry. But Sergei used to tell me that he must be dead every time he tried to make me say I’d marry him. He was using my love for Johnnie … And he’s dead. I suppose I knew it too, but I made myself hope. I’d promised him that I’d wait for him: I thought that if I never admitted that he might be dead, if I really believed I would see him again, it would somehow keep him alive. Stupid, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, not stupid. Very natural. Look at me. Eve.’

  She obeyed, but with such an expression of horror in her face that he quite forgot what he had been going to say.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘That name. No wonder you call me that. It was all supposed to be her fault, wasn’t it?’ He heard the beginning of hysteria in her voice and spoke sharply to her.

  ‘Evelyn, stop it. Now. And tell me, quietly, what I have done. What name?’

  ‘You call me Eve. No one else ever does.’

  He forebore to say that was why he had chosen it. It had been the only way he had been able to find to single himself out in connection with her. It had seemed important to call her by a name that was used by him alone. He waited for more. She sat up straight again and took a ragged, greyish handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe away the tears.

  Then, apparently quite composed, she told him of the horrible conviction that must have been at the root of her self-enforced loneliness for years but that she had only articulated to herself when she had heard the confirmation of John’s death:

  ‘I must have done it, you see. You do understand that, don’t you? It’s like Tony. Something terrible happens to everybody that I love, and I think it must be my fault.’

  Adamson dropped his head into his clasped hands. He didn’t feel capable of dealing with the neurosis she had revealed. His legs hurt abominably that day; he had faced a crisis of conscience that seemed to have made all the work of his adult life a mockery; he was unable to work any longer; he was tormented by what might be happening to his friends both White and Red all over Russia; he was in love with the woman beside him and living in almost unmanageable frustration so close to her yet unable to touch her. Now she had revealed a torment that had to be assuaged, and he did not know how. He wanted to seize her and make love to her, and show her that love had nothing whatever to do with death, that it was the only true manifestation of the reality of living. And he knew he could not. His only hope of reaching her was with words, and words, the one thing that had never failed him until Shenkursk, were now more difficult to manage than anything else. He was too tired. But he had to try.

  ‘Evelyn, listen.’

  ‘I’m listening, Bob,’ she said as she watched him prop his elbows on his knees and move his big, muscular hands over his face. Then he sat up straight and looked full at her.

  ‘Evelyn, I don’t know what first put that thought into your head, but it is ridiculous. No,’ he protested, grabbing hold of both her hands as she recoiled from him. ‘You will listen to this. Do you know how many men were killed on the Western Front? I don’t, but I can make some kind of guess. I know that 70,000 men died in the defence of Ypres in 1915, Loos cost 60,000, on the Somme 30,000 men fell dead or wounded in the first half-hour alone – that is one thousand every minute.’

  Evelyn flinched at each statistic, as though they were bullets he was firing at her. But he could not – and would not if he could – hide the facts from her, and his voice was cold and sounded angry as he said:

  ‘And those died in just three battles on the Western Front in the first two years. What about the rest? In Russia, in Turkey, on every front for four whole years thousands died. And every one was probably loved by a woman. Can you really think that it was the love of all those women that pushed wave after wave of inadequately armed men in front of superior weapons to die for stupidity and ignorance and vanity? What makes you so special that your two died for you and not for that? For Christ’s sake, Evelyn, with the whole world torn and bloody around you, you have built yourself a nice little shelter, haven’t you, a dug-out with all home comforts to keep you from understanding the truth. What if it is a little painful? A peck of painful guilt is a small price to pay for a sack of protection from the truth.’

  He dropped her hands and went out of the room, cursing himself for his clumsiness, recognising that he had probably lost for ever any chance he might once have had of getting close enough to love her. He walked slowly straight past the door of the main room to his own curtained-off cupboard and lay face down on his bed, feeling the ache in his legs increase with the weight he was putting on them, but hardly caring. This was the end. The one thing he thought he might have salvaged for himself from the wreckage of his life had been thrown away. He lay there, trying to keep out of his mind everything he had ever said to her, but nearly every word came rushing back: all the sarcasm, the sneers, the clumsy attempts at compliments and, later, comfort. How could he ever have expected her to love him when he had never shown her anything but dislike or ridiculously inept gestures of friendship? As he came to that conclusion, another truth dawned on him: he had dug his own protective trench, too.

  Piotr had been right about him. If Evelyn had stopped herself from seeing the true horror that the world had unleashed on itself by concentrating on her own imagined guilt, then he had protected himself from feeling ordinary human emotions by the anger he had built up and his insistence on seeing every person as a symbol of the political belief they espoused.

  Adamson turned over and lay staring up at the boarded roof over his head, and began to listen to the sounds that had only vaguely reached him before. Angry voices, getting louder and louder, someone banging a fist on a table, a girl crying. He was just levering himself painfully up off his bed to go to
find out what was happening when Sasha pat his head round the edge of the curtain and said:

  ‘Uncle Bob, Uncle Bob, please come! Evie’s brother is here and he’s saying dreadful things to her and making her terribly cross. Tallie’s crying and Dindin’s nearly fainting and I can’t make them stop.’

  ‘I’m coming, Sasha, give me a hand.’

  The child came over to the bed and helped Adamson push himself up off the bed. Then he swung his still-stiff legs round and put them gingerly to the floor.

  ‘There. We’ll get there now. Don’t worry, Sasha We’ll sort it out together.’

  They walked into the main room together just as Evelyn was saying through clenched teeth:

  ‘You are filthy, Richard. How could you say such things? And what damned business is it of yours anyway? Give me my letter.’

  The boy in khaki had his hands behind his back; his determined chin was thrown forward, and his eyes, large and dark as his sister’s, were as full of rage and disgust as hers.

  ‘The fact that you can swear like that shows just how far you have been degraded by the life you are living. What do you think it feels like to be greeted with the information from a brother officer that my sister – my own sister – is the mistress of some nameless American scribbler? No wonder you look so frightful now. How could you? What will our parents say? And it’s not as though he’s the sort of man you could possibly marry. God knows what will be done with you. You’ll have to live abroad or something …’

  ‘Will you be quiet?’ said Evelyn, clearly entirely oblivious to her surroundings and the fact that the Suvarov children were listening. Never had Bob seen her lose her temper, but now he could see that she was almost drunk on her rage.

  ‘You might have bothered to ask me before charging in here accusing me of being a prostitute. Yes, brother, dear, I know the words now. I have learned them because of what I have seen in your glorious army. As it happens, I have not had sexual intercourse with the American and – unlike some of your men – he has never suggested it. And why the fact that I am living under the same roof as he should make me – what did you call it? – unfit to read the sacred last letter of one of the fallen … You make me quite sick. Your sainted soldier hero is the one who seduced me. Yes, dear brother, I am not a virgin. Does the fact that John deflowered me make me too impure to read his last words to me?’