Nikolai Mikhailovich shot his son’s friend a startled glance from the box where he sat.
‘I could not imagine a single way in which this place could be improved,’ Pavel said. He was overflowing with happiness, and nothing could intrude on his joy. ‘In any case, you do see the beauty of it – you see what I see, or you guess at it.’
Vitkevich grunted, as if this were merely quibbling.
3.
Presently, the vehicle drew up in front of the house, and, without waiting for it to stop, Pavel leapt out. From the shady entrance, Masha stepped forward, her clean round ruddy face filled with excitement. Pavel embraced her warmly, and then stepped back to look at her.
‘How well you look, dear Masha!’ he said. ‘How often have I thought of you in Petersburg!’
‘Pavel Nikolaievich!’ she said, gazing at the splendid officer she had known all his life. It seemed as if the transformation from the youngster with dirty knees, demanding sweetmeats from the kitchen stores, to the fine young officer with his superb whiskers, was too much for her to understand, as if it had happened in a moment. ‘Pavel Nikolaievich!’ she said again, too burdened with happiness to express herself, and then, all at once, burst into tears of joy.
Pavel embraced her again, laughing, and then turned round. ‘How badly you treat my dear Masha, papa!’ he cried. ‘See what few pleasures you permit her, that a single kiss from her little nuisance can make her cry so!’
Nikolai Mikhailovich stood back, delighted. Nothing could please him more than that Pavel would resume his old friendship with the cook, whatever changes had occurred in Masha’s life and position in the last years.
‘Little nuisance,’ Masha sniffed. ‘Yes, my own little nuisance. I promise never to call so fine an officer such a thing, ever again.’
‘If you promise to call me nothing else,’ Pavel said, kissing her tears away, ‘I promise that I will never be unhappy again. Dear Masha! Vitkevich, Vitkevich, what are you doing? Come and kiss my dear old Masha, of whom you have heard so much!’
Vitkevich was peevishly sniffing, and extracting himself cautiously from the vehicle.
‘How terrible the roads are, here,’ he said. ‘My poor body is black and blue with bruises. Truly, I have never known the like, and you know I am not one to complain at physical discomfort.’
Pavel laughed and laughed, as if he had never heard anything so funny. ‘Never mind that now, you ass,’ he said. ‘Get down and come and let Masha kiss you. Don’t mind him, Masha, that’s just his way. You will grow to love him as much as I do, I promise. Come here, you old bear.’
‘Ass, bear – my dear fellow, I can hardly be both. I am most heartily pleased to meet you, madam,’ he said, bowing deeply and offering a languid hand in her direction as Pavel released her. Masha seemed to doubt that she would grow to love so very queer a fish, but she took his hand, and bobbed at the top of his brilliantly shining coiffure. Nikolai came up, and gave a single, quick, proprietorial kiss on the top of her forehead before leading the way into the house.
Over dinner that night, Nikolai thought, he would put the proposal he had determined on to his son Pavel, to go shooting the next day.
Masha had laboured hard over the dinner. For some days, Nikolai had been aware, from her steady troubled expression as much as from the rows of game, fruit and fish hanging in the cold-larder, that her mind was made up in one respect at least. She, and the household, would welcome Pavel home with a dinner of which anyone in the empire could be proud.
Nikolai had made no specific instruction regarding the food. However, he was pleased that Masha had made the decision herself to kill the fatted calf, as it were, on his returning son’s behalf. The dinner might not be able to rival the elegant culinary dissemblances and contrivances of the St Petersburg soirees Pavel was used to. Nikolai felt, however, with a strength of emotion not usual for him, that his estate and Masha’s best efforts could, at any rate, provide a dinner which would not be surpassed in the quality of culinary virtue and honesty.
Pavel, accustomed and, perhaps, fatigued by dishes which attempted to disguise the origins and substance of their constituent parts, might prefer this honest cooking to a cuisine which aimed mainly to deceive the palate. He might even find true novelty and delight in a dinner where the food was not perpetually entombed, en gelée, en croute, à la mode, but abundantly itself.
So powerfully had Nikolai Mikhailovich felt the charm of the unadorned productions of his own stretch of earth that, for some days past, he had found himself involuntarily turning into the cold-larder where the game and hams hung. Here, too, the soft cheese swayed in its muslin bag, dripping peacefully into a bowl. Looking at the limp partridge and heavy, glossy hare, noting from the single twisted-off claw that two of the pheasants had been shot three days ago by Vanya, and the last of them on Friday last, Nikolai felt his pleasure to be complete.
As he stood in the cold-larder, walled against the heat and farm-noise of the day, feeling the sweet warm smell of animal, earth, blood, fruit, he was convinced that the ends of simplicity were served best by the larder, and not by the dinner table. It was then, in the quiet tense days before Pavel’s arrival, that he decided to take Pavel shooting. After Masha’s splendid, prodigal dinner, Pavel Nikolaievich would welcome the proposal. It would be a treat for his son (in his mind, muddled a little by the good raw smell of the dinner to come, he thought for a moment of his soldier son as still a small boy, playing war, only, in the fields). But it would also be an education; a re-education; a reminder.
His son and the curious guest retreated to their rooms, and slept. As Masha tiptoed upstairs, she heard the comforting sound of Pavel snoring in his room. No one had slept in that room since Pavel left, and she smiled, still tearfully, at the comforting feeling that the house was full again. With no one there but Nikolai Mikhailovich, it was not the same. She still counted herself among the servants, as no one, and although everyone knew that her place in the house was not as it had been when the mistress was alive, she was not someone who would ever have wanted to be treated as the mistress of the house. In former times, she would have said that she knew her place, but the truth was that now, she did not.
She stood at the top of the stairs, listening to the comforting sound of Pavel’s snoring. How tired he must have been! In a moment a pair of arms embraced her from behind. She had not heard the master tiptoeing up the stairs.
‘Nikolai Mikhailovich!’ she whispered.
‘Still crying, my little bird?’ Nikolai said. ‘Is it so sad that Pavel Nikolaievich has returned to his father’s home?’
‘No, I am not crying for that,’ she said seriously. ‘I don’t know why I am crying—’
‘You are crying because you are a very good girl,’ Nikolai said, kissing her tears away. ‘And because—’
‘Please,’ Masha began. ‘Do not tell him – do not tell him about – he would not like it. His mamma …’
‘He loves you as much as he ever did, and you have always been a second mother to him,’ Nikolai said. ‘Do not fret.’
‘But you will not—’
‘No,’ Nikolai said, holding her to him. ‘I will not tell him, if that is what you wish. Now, there is so much to be made ready, is there not?’
‘Yes, Nikolai Mikhailovich,’ Masha said, and, wiping her face on her apron, went downstairs to the kitchen to prepare the great feast. Nikolai watched her go, and then went into his study to polish his guns, which were kept there.
4.
The family reassembled shortly before dinner in the salon. When Nikolai came in, wearing a new stock and a clean white shirt, in his son’s honour, he found Vitkevich bending awkwardly over the card table and inspecting the titles of the books. He was still sniffing furiously. Layevsky stood there in the doorway for a moment, then saw that there was no reason for him to feel shy in his own house, and walked in, coughing slightly. Vitkevich straightened and threw him a quick hostile glance before bowing with ceremonious coldness.
‘I
hope you are quite comfortable, sir,’ Nikolai said.
‘Quite so, quite so,’ Vitkevich said. ‘I slept but little, but I had an adequate rest. I find it difficult to sleep in the afternoons, sir, however tired I feel. Thank you for your kind solicitude.’
‘We so rarely have guests, sir, you must forgive any rustic neglect,’ Layevsky said. ‘I do hope you will be patient and treat us as you would any simple peasant. Tell me, how is Petersburg changed in the last twenty years?’
‘I hardly know, sir, so recent has my acquaintance with the city been,’ Vitkevich said. ‘I believe it to be much as it was, however; still filled with duchesses and subalterns, and the constant pursuit of merriment. So tiring for one of my fragile disposition.’
‘I am sorry to hear you suffer from poor health,’ Layevsky said. ‘It is nothing too serious, I hope.’
‘Wretched,’ Vitkevich said. ‘There is nothing more fragile than – well, you do not wish, I am sure, to hear of my poor troubles.’
Nikolai bowed, having no response to this. ‘No, do tell me,’ and ‘Yes, it would be rather dull,’ were equally impossible. Vitkevich turned and walked to the end of the dark wood room, and stood there with his back to his host, gazing out of the window. Pavel came into the room, looking refreshed and pink from the bath.
‘Mr Vitkevich was telling me he suffers from poor health,’ Nikolai said. ‘I presume, sir, you are confined to Petersburg in your army duties.’
‘No, papa, not one bit of it,’ Pavel said. ‘Vitkevich, you must learn to complain less. Some day, someone will believe what you say. Poor health? Papa, the man is a lion; he goes for days living off the land, and drinking water from puddles which the beasts of the field would turn their noses up at. Complaining, I admit, complaining without cease, but he is strong as an ox. Vitkevich, admit the fact; your poor health is a fiction. It is your favourite occupation, to guard it and complain of its tenderness, but living as you do, travelling through uncharted wastes, fighting and brawling, there is no question that you have anything but the most robust constitution. I heartily wish I was as strong as you.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ Vitkevich protested, and turned back to the view. It seemed as if this were a familiar exchange between the two of them. He picked up a book from the set on the walnut card table. ‘Do you care for Balzac, sir?’ he said to Nikolai. Nikolai made a slight bow, not immediately understanding what Vitkevich was referring to. ‘I adore Balzac,’ he went on, putting the book down again.
‘I heartily wish I had the strength,’ Pavel went on, ignoring all this, ‘to lay siege to all those belles. That, Vitkevich, is a more impressive witness of your physical hardiness than any number of campaigns.’
‘Some day, Layevsky, you will go too far,’ Vitkevich said. ‘And I believe your cook has come to summon us to dine.’
Masha was standing in the doorway, nervously smiling. She had removed her apron, and her skirt and blouse were clean; her face had been scrubbed and her hair pinned up. And perhaps she thought, standing there, that the family would not mind too much if … Nikolai gave a deep nod to her, and smiled in an embarrassed way, not looking quite at her, and led the way towards the dining room. He walked past her, not taking her arm or bringing her with them, as if it were quite normal that the cook of the house should come to the salon to summon the family to table. She followed them, a few steps behind, then, at the door of the dining room, seemed to lose her nerve, and went back to the kitchen. She did not know why she had believed for a moment that Nikolai Mikhailovich would ask her to sit down with his son and their guest.
5.
The change in Masha’s position in the household had come about quite suddenly, and without her quite understanding it. She had always lived on the Layevsky estate, and all her life had never ventured more than forty versts from Boguslavo. The world began just there, at the end of the road, and was all the same; a strange distant fairy tale, peopled with monsters and wars. In her mind, at the end of the road were tartars, the Tsar Napoleon, and men whose heads grew below their shoulders. What she knew was Boguslavo, and the family within it, and that was good enough for her. Masha’s father had been an estate carpenter, and when she was twelve, the mistress felt she was willing, clever and agreeable enough to be taken into the kitchen. Over the years, the family grew to depend on her sensible abilities, and to love her. She learnt to read and write without any fuss, and for years she quietly ran the house, grateful for everything. She always knew where the best mushrooms could be found, never pilfered, never complained, had half a dozen clever ways with any game bird, and was neat and honest with the household accounts.
The influenza of 1829 roamed through the estate like a savage hungry bear. Beginning with a slight ache and a rough throat, within days it required its victims to take to their beds with a cough which racked their bones and echoed through the still winter night. The first to die was Masha’s brother, who, like his father, was a carpenter, and she sincerely grieved for him. At first it only took hold of the peasants, but one night at dinner, Mme Layev-skaya began to complain of a slight ache and tiredness, and retired early. Masha, serving the men of the family with a dish of potatoes, did not meet their expression; she did not want them to see any fear in her eyes.
The mistress had always been kind to Masha, and over the next weeks she nursed a steady decline with easy dishes. At first, with simple dishes of plain vegetables; then, after a day when she had watched Mme Layevskaya trying to spear a single slippery mushroom on her little fork, and growing tearful at her weak failure, Masha supplied only beef tea and unsleeping kindness. Whenever Nikolai Mikhailovich came into the sickroom, looking as frightened as if death had already laid his hand on the mistress, Masha was always there, wiping her mistress’s delirious brow as if there were no possibility that she would not mend.
A day before she died, Mme Layevskaya seemed to improve a great deal, and even sat up in bed for a time. The household and the family began, prematurely, to rejoice, but Masha said nothing. She had seen the look in the mistress’s eyes, and knew what it meant. She only felt sorry for the master, and, besides, by this time, she herself was beginning to feel ill.
She took to her bed a day after the mistress died, and remained there for two weeks. In her, the influenza stood no chance; she was too young and strong, and certain that she, too, must not die, for the sake of the family. And yet, when she returned to the kitchen, pale and thin and tired, she felt guilty above all; guilty that the mistress, who had been so good, had been taken and she spared. For a long time she could not look at Nikolai Mikhailo-vich’s despairing eyes, and concentrated only on running the affairs of the kitchen and the house as well as she could, certain in her conviction that, if she had anything to do with it, the gentry would have no more troubles than they were already afflicted with. The bestial hungry influenza had done its worst, and gone elsewhere; where, Masha could not think.
The spring had always been Masha’s favourite time. It began so suddenly, like a bough breaking, a still bird taking flight. One day there was nothing but chill and damp in the air, and the next there was a warm wind, bearing the scents of pine and meadow-grass into the house. On these days, she could never resist leaving the kitchen for an hour, and walking through the clean damp grass, for the sheer pleasure of it. If challenged, she would have had a ready kitchen excuse, but in truth it was her one idle hour of the year.
It was the spring after the mistress died, and she was walking through the woods when all at once Nikolai Mikhailovich appeared, as if he had been hiding behind a birch tree. She blushed, immediately, and dropped a curtsy.
‘Masha,’ he said, as if there were no time to lose. ‘I am so lonely.’
She curtsied again, not knowing what to say to this. She had never heard any of the gentry say anything about their feelings; she had no doubt that they had them, just as she had no doubt about the emotions of animals. She herself had said, many times, ‘Poor Nikolai Mikhailovich!’ after the mistress had died, but
somehow their feelings were not like hers; their grief was the gentry’s grief, and something more solemn and unspeakable than the practical, intense worry she had had when her brother or father had died. That the master would stand before her and say briefly that he was lonely was something nothing had prepared her for.
‘So lonely,’ he said again, and when she looked, his eyes were filling with tears.
‘Poor Nikolai Mikhailovich,’ she said, astonished at her own daring and almost speechless. She did not understand loneliness, and all at once she found herself wondering whether she herself had ever been lonely. It seemed absurd; there had always been the family, and Boguslavo, and the kitchen to keep her occupied, and the hundreds of serfs she had known all her life. She wondered, all at once, if she had ever been lonely, and then it seemed to her that she had always been lonely, and not understood it because she had known nothing else to compare it with. She was thirty-five, and Nikolai Mikhailovich had said simply that he was lonely, and for the first time she was considering her life, and not his. So strange.
‘Dear Masha,’ Layevsky said, simply, and with a single movement he lowered his tear-filled face to hers, and she found that he was kissing her. Her arms spread wide, and, not knowing how to embrace, her hands fluttered at the air, but she did not move. Nothing came to her mind but a single sentence – Nikolai Mikhailovich is kissing me – as if she had to speak what was happening to understand it. There, the scent of birch, the damp good earth underneath her thin boots, the clean fresh air, the taste of tobacco on Nikolai Mikhailovich’s soft mouth and beard all fused into one sensation, and, without knowing how or why, her arms curved around him in a long embrace. And since that day, she had, it seemed, become the mistress in the house, and he was so good to her, so very good.
6.
‘Vitkevich is a great linguist, you must know, sir,’ Pavel said, once the three of them were settled at the table. He was tearing off a strip of pheasant and stuffing it in his mouth. ‘He is a true wonder, a marvel – I know not how many languages he speaks now, or how many he will end by mastering. Vitkevich, how many is it now?’
The Mulberry Empire Page 31
