The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  ‘I suppose so, although I can’t help thinking of that phrase of Marshal Bosquet’s. But then none of this is quite war, is it?’

  ‘Not exactly, but I’ve a feeling it’ll become more like it before your boys get to go home. All the more reason why I want you all out of here before it happens. Come on, let’s by-pass this lot and get to Petrovitch’s.’

  Evelyn did not answer, suddenly realising that if there were to be a battle, Dick might have to fight. With all these new, fit relief troops, his C3 health status might save him, but if it did not then she would be back with all the old fears. She shivered.

  ‘Eve, are you all right? You can’t be cold on a boiling day like this.’

  ‘No, I’m not cold.’

  ‘Come on; come on,’ said Tallie, getting even more excited as they reached the sea.

  They turned into the boatyard, which was full of decaying boats, piles of timber, and old tarry ropes. The smell of the place was oddly exciting, compounded as it was of freshly sawn pine planks, varnishes, oils and tar, all overlain with the salty tang of the sea. The sight of Bob’s yacht, high above the landing-stage in its wooden cradle, made the idea of escape seem much more credible and Evelyn began to believe that they might actually get away. But the size of the boat bothered her.

  ‘Bob, you mustn’t rely too much on me. Tony’s dinghy was titchy compared with this, but I truly don’t understand how you think we can cross the Barents Sea and the North Atlantic in it.’

  ‘Eve, I’m not planning to. Look,’ he said, taking an old map out of his pocket and spreading it out on the top of a damp, odorous fish box. ‘We’ll get out of the White Sea and then in reasonably easy stages creep round the coast to Norway. See: then we’ll hop from Hammerfest to Tromsö, on to Narvik, Mosjöen and Trondheim. Then round to Bergen. I think we could then cross the Atlantic and get to the Shetlands, but it’s probably wiser to sell the boat in Bergen and get an ordinary commercial steamer down to Newcastle.’

  ‘But it’ll take weeks,’ she protested as she took in the scale of the map and the immense length of the Norwegian coastline.

  ‘Probably about three. Perhaps four,’ he agreed, apparently unworried. ‘But it’ll be far better than rotting for all that time in Archangel. And this is just the right time of year – the ice is at its least now, and we’ll be able to sail for as long as one or other of us can keep awake since there’ll be no real night to stop us.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Evelyn at last, but her face showed how daunted she was.

  ‘Don’t worry, Eve. You’re right that it’ll take time, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t make it. I’ve sailed bigger boats than this and I promise I’ll take you out to practise before we set off for Bergen.’

  The old boatman appeared just then, a smoking pipe between his teeth. He patted the rough planks of the yacht’s side and said in a heavy accent:

  ‘Good ship, yes? She’ll take you safe to Norway.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Petrovitch,’ said Evelyn formally. ‘But how long will it take for you to get the repairs and the new rigging finished?’

  ‘Two weeks, perhaps three. Who knows? Is better when I get materials, yes?’

  Adamson spoke sternly to him in Russian and they moved off together to Petrovitch’s cluttered office, leaving Tallie to scamper around the legs of the cradle and Evelyn to think about getting home at last. There was comfort in the idea, but not as much as she had expected. True, she told herself, trying to stamp out the sudden doubts, it would be wonderful to get away from Archangel. But for the first time she began to think of what England held out for her apart from safety from the Revolution.

  Could she go back to the old life? In the past she would never have so described it, but now it seemed to have been one of deadening boredom, punctuated by the dim pleasures of rainy tennis parties, dreary dances and patronising, enervating good works. How could she slot back into the tramlines that seemed to have been laid down for her at birth? She should find a suitable man to marry, from a family known to her parents, learn to run a small house and its servants in the way her mother had done so that she would be suitably qualified to take over her husband’s parents’house in due course. Then would come children, increasingly matronly responsibilities in some village, opening vicarage fêtes and giving talks to the assembled women; and above all seeing that her children too were properly trained to take their place on the same dull tramlines. There must be more to life than that.

  Of course she would have Sasha with her, and by now he seemed more than ever like her own child, and there would be Dindin for a time and Natalie. They would add something. But what of Bob? She had been afraid that he might go back to the States and leave her in Archangel and thought it was the prospect of living there without him that was so upsetting. Now, at last, she understood that being anywhere without him would be to live in a loneliness from which she would never emerge.

  Until Sasha’s terrifying illness had smashed into her self-absorption, she had not even noticed how much she relied on the big, shabbily dressed, untidy American. His unsuitability and his occasional mockery had seemed so important that she had not seen beyond them to what he was really like – or how much he meant to her. His sarcastic dismissal of all the shibboleths with which she had been inculcated had once hurt her, but now she understood that it was that very dismissal that had allowed her to see how unsatisfying her life had been. Like Nikolai Alexandrovitch, Bob knew what was important, and it had nothing to do with conventional manners or correct dress.

  Bob had broken through the battlements that had surrounded her, and through the gaps he had made she had been able to see a world in which she would be able to live as herself, not just as a counter in some meaningless, convention-ridden game. To go back to the emptiness of her old existence, having caught a glimpse of what life could be, would be tormenting.

  At that moment he came out of Petrovitch’s office and stood blinking in the bright light and rolling the torn sleeves of his cream-coloured peasant shirt up over his muscular, tanned forearms. As she watched the sun glinting almost like gold on his thick fair hair, Evelyn felt that she had never seen him properly before – it was as if cataracts had been miraculously removed from her eyes. At last she could look at him without the fog of misunderstanding and misdirected emotions that had made it impossible to see the man he really was. The tremendous masculinity that had once seemed so threatening now promised to be a rock to which she would be able to cling through storm and tempest.

  He walked towards her, unaware of the immense, almost volcanic, changes that were taking place within her. She was being forced to feel every sensation she had denied – and to see the last few months from his point of view instead of her own. She had thought him another burden she had to carry, furious with him for trying to turn their growing friendship into something else, for trying to take advantage of her in the cramped, forced intimacy of their situation. Evelyn actually flushed as that thought swam up into her mind. Looked at through his eyes, the picture was rather different, and she recognised belatedly that it was she who had been exploiting him, relaxing against the friendship he offered and refusing to see that it could never have been just friendship. She had been as blind and selfish over Bob’s feelings as she had once been over Johnnie’s.

  As he came up to her she smiled at him and tried to tell him with her eyes that she understood and was sorry, that she would be to him whatever he wanted. He looked down at her, not understanding what she wanted, and raised one of his thick fair eyebrows. When she did not explain, he said once again:

  ‘What’s the trouble, Eve?’

  Trouble! How could she answer that? Perhaps he no longer wanted her; she had probably killed all the feelings he had for her by her idiocy. Quite unable to speak, she just shook her head and turned aside to find Tallie. Bob looked after her, puzzled, then up at the yacht. Perhaps she was worried that in so confined a space he might try again to make love to her and that she would not be a
ble to control him. He sighed in exasperation; why did she think that men were ravening beasts? Couldn’t she understand that he had got the message, that it just wasn’t in him to force himself on a reluctant woman, however much he might have wanted her – even if he could spare the time from navigating a yacht that size through some of the most treacherous seas in the northern hemisphere? The thought of such a scene suddenly made him laugh and broke the tensions of the moment.

  He collected her and Tallie and, calling farewells to old Petrovitch, they walked slowly to the tram stop and so home. When they climbed the twisting stairs, they found Dindin entertaining Dick and another British officer to tea. Both men leaped to their feet as Evelyn walked in and she said almost impatiently:

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Don’t bother to get up. Sit down and have your tea.’

  But they waited, cups in hand, until she had taken off her light shawl and sat down by Sasha’s bed. He was asleep again, breathing heavily in a way that bothered her. She put her fingers to his thin wrist and felt his pulse: it was irregular and oddly faint. Evelyn looked up towards Dindin to ask how long Sasha had been like that.

  Dindin was edging her chair very close to Dick’s and gazing meltingly up at him through her eyelashes. Just so, thought Evelyn annoyed, had she looked at Andrei Alexandrovitch in the old days. Hadn’t the realities they had all lived through done anything to teach Dindin dignity, or concern for anyone except herself? Did she really feel nothing for her brother? Then Evelyn took herself to task and acknowledged that even in the middle of her anxiety for Sasha she was envious. If Dindin had been in the absurd situation in which Evelyn now found herself, she would have simply stroked Bob’s arm and said straight out, I am sorry I stopped you from kissing me that day at the river. There is nothing I should like better now than for you to seize me as you did then. I have discovered that I love you. But, being herself, she could not. If he did not want her any more, she could not lay herself open to the possibility of agonising rejection. It might serve her right for her insensitivities in the past, but it would not be bearable. In any case, there were more important things to worry about. She pushed it all away and said:

  ‘Dindin, how long has Sasha been asleep like this?’

  ‘Oh, most of the afternoon. Why? Samenev said sleep is a great healer.’

  ‘Did he come while we were out?’

  ‘No. Come on, Eve. What are you making such a fuss about?’

  ‘Do you want him, Eve?’ asked Bob, quietly coming over to stand beside her. She looked up at him, grateful for his calmness and his sensitivity.

  ‘Please. I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t want to do anything that might …’

  ‘Hush now, Eve. I’ll go right now.’

  The two young men followed him out of the room about ten minutes later, leaving Dindin to take her cousin to task for driving them away. Evelyn was too tired and worried to answer and just waited for the doctor, never taking her eyes off Sasha’s face. His skin seemed to her to be more transparent even than during the worst of his fevers.

  When Samenev came he banished Natalie and Dindin from the main room before he examined Sasha, and then he made Evelyn sit down.

  ‘What is it, Doctor? What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Now, now. There’s no need for hysteria.’

  ‘No, I know. But please tell me.’

  ‘It’s not the malaria. The quinine has dealt with that. But he seems very much weaker than he should be. There’s no real cause for alarm, but he’ll need careful nursing to get his strength back. His heart seems to have been weakened by the strains of the illness – and … And he is struggling.’

  ‘You told me there was no risk.’

  ‘There is no risk from malaria nowadays. His constitution has been much weakened; we must just keep him quiet and cool and hope that he regains enough strength.’

  Evelyn dropped her face into her hands. She felt two strong hands on her shoulders and knew that Bob was there, supporting her as he had done for so long, ready to do whatever she needed. She leaned back and looked up into his face, not caring that there were tears in her eyes.

  Chapter Twenty

  Evelyn scarcely slept that night, getting up again and again to check Sasha’s pulse, bathe his forehead, comfort him when he woke and was fretful, and by morning she was exhausted. She was up and dressed by the time that Natalie and Dindin came in to help with breakfast and neither of them noticed anything, but as soon as Bob appeared he said at once:

  ‘Is he no better?’

  ‘I’m not sure; but he’s no stronger. Oh, Bob …’ Just in time she remembered the presence of Sasha’s sisters and stopped herself from expressing her worst fears, but she could tell from the direct sympathy in his eyes that he knew what they were.

  ‘Have some coffee, Eve. It’ll give you strength. I don’t suppose you got much sleep.’ She smiled waveringly and sat down at the table.

  The coffee was strong and hot and as she obediently drank it, it did seem to put some life back in her. She had just put the big cup back on to its saucer when the door opened and her brother stood there, his normally pink face a little pale, and his determined chin jutting forwards. Dindin bounced up from the table at once and went running to him.

  ‘What is it, Dick? You look different. What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re off this evening – down the Dvina.’

  ‘Not to fight? Oh, dearest Dick, no,’ Dindin wailed. Evelyn heard the protest and wondered in curious detachment how Dindin could be so concerned about one healthy young man when her own brother, defenceless and very ill, lay almost at her feet.

  ‘There’s no need to take it so hard, Dindin,’ he said, putting on a patronising voice that Evelyn recognised. ‘There’s just going to be a bit of a putsch against the Bolos to drive them back so that we can arrange the official evacuation. No need to fret.’

  Dindin showed no signs of regaining calm. Her face was the dirty white of the ice that had covered the river all through the winter and her dark eyes looked almost like holes cut in the whiteness. Evelyn got stiffly up from the table, looked back over her shoulder to check that Sasha was all right, and then went to her brother.

  ‘Good luck, Dick. You’ll forgive me, I know, if I don’t come to the river to see you off. I can’t leave Sasha.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. Poor little chap. How is he?’

  ‘Very weak still.’

  ‘Well, goodbye, Evie.’

  ‘Goodbye, Dick, and the best of good luck.’ She leaned forward as though to kiss him but he stuck out his hand. She took it and he shook hers firmly, before turning back to Dindin. Evelyn thought suddenly how poverty-stricken their privileged, comfortable, Yorkshire life had been in that they had never been able to touch each other or express any real feelings. She looked for Bob, who was standing close behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and said over her dark head:

  ‘Good luck, Markham.’ The boy turned from Dindin and his face stiffened as he saw how his sister was standing.

  ‘Thanks, Adamson. I know I can trust you to look after the girls while I’m gone.’

  ‘Of course, you can rely on me. Presumably you have no idea how long you’ll be away.’

  ‘None. But Dindin tells me that you’re trying to get some boat or other ready to take them all out of here.’

  ‘Yes. It doesn’t look as though the formal evacuation will come before the fall and Eve needs to get home, don’t you?’

  Dick said nothing, but was obviously struggling to put some feeling into words. Bob helped him out. ‘I take it you don’t disapprove, Markham?’

  ‘Indeed not. But, I say, Adamson …’ He broke off, looked across at his sister and their cousin and then said: ‘Could I have a word outside, old boy?’

  Bob could feel Eve tense under his hands and he leaned towards her to whisper:

  ‘Don’t worry, Eve, I’ll see to it. You wait here.’ He followed her brother out into the corridor and waited, a lit
tle amused, as the boy blushed and obviously searched for a way to broach what was clearly a delicate matter. In the end he threw out his rounded chin and his chest in the way Bob had seen before and said in a clipped tone that reminded the American of Evelyn in Petrograd, though with more hesitation than she had ever shown:

  ‘I have accepted my sister’s assurance and of course yours that there is nothing – er – untoward between you two but your living here under the same roof as Evelyn is, well, to say the least of it, irregular. And, I don’t like to have to say this …’

  ‘Come on Markham, spit it out,’ suggested Bob, who was leaning against the tatty wooden wall with his arms crossed and an expression of half-amused superiority on his face.

  ‘I rely on you to take her straight to my father’s house in Beverley when you reach England, and well, not to be alone with her. I mean without the Suvarovs, between landing and getting to Yorkshire. Please don’t think that I don’t understand how in your flight from Shenkursk it happened that you all had to share this flat, and I’m damned grateful, believe me, that you’re taking her home, but in England it will naturally be different. I assume that you will speak to my father then.’

  ‘Markham,’ said Bob kindly enough, ‘my relations with your sister are her affair and no one else’s. I hope you haven’t talked like this to her again.’ When the boy shook his head, Bob carried on: ‘Good. She’s been through too much to have to listen to arguments of propriety and convention, still less with whether or not she wishes to marry me. I guess that’s what your last cryptic sentence meant.’

  Richard Markham decided that he had never been so embarrassed in his life and was furious with Evelyn for landing him in this dreadful situation. His voice sounded almost strangled as he said: ‘Well, yes, that was rather what I meant.’

  ‘Look, you can’t compel feelings just to suit some crazy British idea of what is decent …’ Bob stopped there, recognising that Richard Markham was trying to do his best for Eve and so he tried to explain: ‘In the years we have known each other we’ve gotten to be friends, but that’s been in the middle of this whole mess. There is no knowing what will happen once we’re back in normal life. But if you’re still afraid that I’ll seduce her deliberately to ruin her reputation, I can swear that nothing is further from my thoughts.’