The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘What happened?’ Frank asked. ‘Who’s looking after you? Did you get lost on the way?’

  A dark woman in an overall came in, not the stationmaster’s wife, if indeed there was such a person, but, as she explained, a kitchen-mother, called in to help as required.

  ‘She only gets eighty kopeks a day,’ said Dolly. ‘It’s not much for all this responsibility.’ She put her arm round the woman’s waist and said in caressing Russian, ‘You don’t earn enough, do you, little mother?’

  ‘I’ll settle up with everybody,’ said Frank ‘and then straight home to Lipka Street. We shall have to wake up Annie, I’m afraid.’

  The children’s outdoor clothes were airing above the stove, along with the stationmaster’s second uniform, and a heap of railway blankets. Hauling down the birchwood clothes frame was like a manoeuvre under sail. Annushka woke up while she was being crammed into her fur jacket, and asked whether she was still in Moscow. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Frank.

  ‘Then I want to go to Muirka’s.’

  Muir and Merrilees was the department store, where Annushka scarcely ever went without being given some little extra by the astute floor manager.

  ‘Not now,’ said Dolly.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for Annushka,’ said Ben, ‘I think Mother might have taken us on with her. I can’t be sure, but I think she might.’

  The whole house began to shake, not gradually, but all at once, from blows on the outer door. The kitchen-mother crossed herself. It was the sledge-driver. ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were strong enough to knock like that,’ Frank told him.

  ‘How long? How long?’

  At the same time the stationmaster, perhaps taking the opportunity to find out what was going on in his house, came in through the front. Probably he was the only person who ever did so. This meant that the whole lot of them – Frank, the children, the kitchen-mother, the stationmaster – had to sit down together for another half-hour. Annie’s coat had to be taken off again. She fell asleep again instantly. Tea, cherry jam from the cupboard which could be opened now that the stationmaster had brought his keys. The kitchen-mother suddenly declared that she couldn’t bear to be parted from her Dolly, her Daryasha, who resembled so much what she had been like herself as a child. The stationmaster, still wearing his official red cap, lamented his difficulties at the Alexandrovna, where he was besieged by foreign travellers. His clocks all kept strict St Petersburg time, 61 minutes in advance of Central European time and two hours one minute in advance of Greenwich. What was their difficulty?

  ‘You might ask to be transferred to the Donetz Basin,’ suggested Ben.

  ‘How old is your boy?’

  ‘Nine,’ said Frank.

  ‘Tell him that the Alexandervokzal is the top appointment. There is nothing higher. The state railways have nothing higher to offer me. But it’s not his fault, he’s young, and besides that, he’s motherless.’

  ‘Where’s your wife, for that matter?’ Frank asked. It turned out that, trusting no-one in Moscow, she had gone back to her village to recruit more waitresses for the spring season. They prepared to go, the sleigh-driver pointing out, for the first time, that the horse was old.

  ‘How old is he exactly?’ asked Ben. ‘There are regulations, you know, about how old they’re allowed to be.’ The sleigh-driver said he was a young devil.

  ‘They’re all young devils,’ said Frank. ‘Now I want to get them home to Lipka Street.’

  They might have been away several years. The whole household, the house itself, seemed to be laughing and crying. From the carnival – that was what it felt like – only Dunyasha was absent. Almost at once she came to Frank for her internal passport, which was necessary if you were going to make a journey of more than fifteen miles, and had to be handed over to the employer. She wanted to leave, she was no longer happy in the house, where criticisms were being made of her. Frank took it out of the drawer in his study where he kept such things locked away. He felt like a man with a half-healed wound who would do better to leave it alone, for fear of making bad worse. Nellie had sent no message to him by the children, not a word, and he saw it would be best not to think about this, or he might not be able to stand it. His father had always held that the human mind is indefinitely elastic, and that by the very nature of things we were never called upon to undertake more than we could bear. Frank had always felt doubtful about this. During the past winter one of the machine men from the Press had gone by night to a spot a little way out of the Windau station, and lain down on the tracks. This was because his wife had brought her lover to live in their house. But the height of the train’s wheelbase meant that it passed right over him, leaving him unhurt, like a drunken peasant. After four trains had passed he got up and took the tram back to his home, and had worked regularly ever since. This left the question of endurance open.

  While the rejoicing went on and spread to the yard and, apparently to the yard dog and to the hens, locked up for the winter, Dolly came in wearing her brown uniform from the Ekaterynskaya Gymnasium, and asked him to help her with her homework, since after all, she had to be at school by nine o’clock. She spread out her atlas, ruler, and geography exercise book.

  ‘We’re doing the British Isles. We have to mark in the industrial areas and the districts largely given over to keeping sheep.’

  ‘Did you take those with you on the train?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Yes. I thought they might come in useful, even if I didn’t ever get back to the Ekaterynskaya.’

  ‘It was lonely in the house while you were away, somewhat lonely, anyway.’

  ‘We weren’t away for very long.’

  ‘Long enough for me to see what it was going to be like.’

  Dolly asked: ‘Didn’t you know what mother was doing?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Dolly, no, I didn’t.’

  ‘I thought not,’ she added rapidly. ‘It was hard on her. After all, she’d never had to look after us before, Dunyasha did everything. Annushka wouldn’t sit still. Mother asked the attendant for some valerian drops, to calm her down, but he hadn’t any. We should have brought some with us, of course, but I didn’t do the packing. You shouldn’t have expected her to manage by herself. She had to send us back, we weren’t a comfort to her. I think you asked too much of her.’

  ‘I don’t agree, Dolly. I know my own mind, but so does your mother.’

  3

  Frank’s father, Albert Reid, had looked ahead – not quite far enough, perhaps, but to see too clearly in Russia is a mistake, leading to loss of confidence. He was aware that the time was coming when British investors, ironmasters, mill-owners, boiler-makers, engineers, race-horse trainers and governesses would no longer be welcome. Either the Russians would take everything into their own hands or the Germans would, but he thought that the good times would last a while yet. All that had really been needed, when he started out in the 1870s, was a certificate to say that the articles of association of your company were in accordance with British law and another form in St Petersburg to say that your enterprise was advantageous to the interests of the Russian Empire. Besides that, though, you had to have a good digestion, a good head for drink, particularly spirits, a good circulation and an instinct for how much in the way of bribes would be appropriate for the uniformed and for the political police, the clerks from the Ministry of Direct Import, Commerce and Industry, and the technical and sanitary inspectors, to get anything at all. These bribes, too, must be called gifts, and with that word you began your study of the Russian language. All the other formalities – sending the balance sheets, for example, to the central government and the local Court of Exchequer – were just paperwork, which he’d done himself, with his wife’s help, by lamplight, in the old wooden house on the works site in the Rogoznkaya. Like the Russian nobility and the Russian merchants, foreign businesses were given ranks, according to their capital and the amount of fuel (soft coal, birch-bark, anthracite, oil) that their factory consumed. Reid’s (Prin
ting Machinery) was of moderate rank. Frank’s father and mother were the only partners. Both of them had come from long families, that was why Bert had been sent out in the first place to make a living in Russia, but they only had the one son. Frank was sent over to England once or twice as a boy, to stay with his relatives in Salford. He enjoyed himself in Salford because, given half a chance, he enjoyed himself anywhere. When he was eighteen he went back for much longer, to train in mechanical engineering and printing, first at Loughborough Polytechnic, then for his apprenticeship with Croppers of Nottingham.

  It was while he was at Croppers, doing quite reasonably well, and playing football for the first time in his life, that his father wrote to him to say that, as a kind of subsidiary to the business, he was going to start his own printing press, quite near the centre of Moscow, in Seraphim Street. There was nothing legal at the moment against foreigners buying property, as long as it wasn’t in Turkestan or the Caucasus or anywhere where they were likely to strike oil, and he thought the place could be got fairly cheap. He’d start with hand presses only, jobbing machines, and see how they went along. It was an old warehouse, this place, and there was room to expand. Even though the deal wasn’t concluded yet, the men were already calling it Reidka’s – dear little Reids.

  There was a photograph enclosed of Seraphim Street, looking like most of Moscow’s side-streets, almost past repair, blank, narrow, patched and peeling, with children crowded around a horse and cart selling something unidentifiable. Above was a white sky with vast, even whiter clouds. The shop-signs made Frank feel homesick. Perlov’s tea-bricks, Kapral cigarettes 20 for 5 kopeks, and a kabak with a name that looked like Markel’s Bar.

  His father usually gave the date Russian style, thirteen days earlier than the date in Nottingham, so that there was some adjustment to be done, but it must have been in March that year that there was mention of Selwyn Crane, who’d been taken on, not at the works, but to do the accounting at Reidka’s. A few weeks later it seemed that Crane was becoming very religious. ‘I’ve no objection to that, though on the whole I think religion is of more use to a woman than a man, as it leads to content with one’s lot.’ In the next letter, Bert doubted whether ‘religious’ was quite the right word. ‘Spiritual’ would be better. ‘Crane has now proclaimed himself a vegetarian, which I do not think is enjoined anywhere in the Bible, and he tells me he’s several times been in quite lengthy conversations with Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy is a very great man, Frank,’ he continued. ‘Fortunately, though, one doesn’t have to judge of great men by the oddities of their disciples. The truth is, though, that Crane has a knack with figures and has been up to now a pretty fair man of business – he came to me from the Anglo-Russian Bank. I asked him whether it was not rather surprising that he should have saved a reasonable sum of money, as I fancy he has done – he is not a married man – and continues to live off the said sum and the salary I pay him, while giving it out as his opinion that buying or selling of any kind or description is a sin against mankind. It’s rather, he said, that wealth shouldn’t be used for the benefit of individuals. Then, you consider me a wrong doer, Crane, I said, determined to treat the whole matter in a spirit of joke, the next thing will be that you’ll refuse to shake me, your employer, by the hand. I thought I’d caught him there, but what he did was to kiss me, first on one cheek and then on the other – a Russ habit, as you well know, but this was on the shop floor, Frank, not even in the counting house.’

  His father, however, had no hesitation about the chief compositor he’d engaged, a capital fellow, a very steady worker, it would take a revolution to dislodge Yacob Tvyordov. Frank thought, when the time comes, I’ll see whether I want these people or not. I’ll make up my own mind when it comes to it.

  In 1900 he transferred himself to Hoe’s of Norbury to get experience with more up-to-date machines. It was in Norbury that he met Nellie Cooper. She lived with her brother Charles, who was a solicitor’s clerk, and his wife Grace, at 62 Longfellow Road. It was a nice, substantial house, two entrance doors, the inner one with a stained glass panel, good new glass in art shades from Lowndes and Drury, representing the Delectable Mountains from the Pilgrim’s Progress, dining room and kitchen downstairs in the basement, sitting room opening on to a flight of green-painted iron steps which led into the garden, a bit of fencing to screen off the vegetables, three bedrooms on the first floor, one of them spare as Charles and Grace didn’t have any children. Frank had a room in a boarding house where, the landlady, probably unintentionally, as it seemed to him, was gradually starving him to death. He joined (as he had done in Manchester and Nottingham) the local choral society. At refreshment time (they were rehearsing, perhaps overrehearsing, Hiawatha) he had to excuse himself to Nellie, who was helping to serve out, for taking more than one fish paste roll. Nellie asked him what his job was, whether he had to heave things about in the open air and couldn’t help getting up an appetite. Then, without listening very attentively to his answer, she said she had been teaching for four years and was due to take her qualifying exam for the certificate.

  ‘I’m twenty-six,’ she added, as though it might as well be said now as later.

  ‘Do you like teaching?’

  ‘Not all that much.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to go on with it then. You oughtn’t to try for the certificate. You ought to train to do what you want to do, even if it’s sweeping the streets.’

  Nellie laughed. ‘I’d like to see my brother’s face.’

  ‘Does he worry about you?’

  ‘He’s doing all right, anyway. I suppose there’s no real need for me to work at all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you do it, then.’

  ‘It gets me out of the house, so I’m not under my sister-in-law’s feet and she doesn’t have to see me all day.’

  ‘Did she say that to you, Miss Cooper?’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t say anything like that. She’s a sufferer.’

  Frank was struck by her way of looking at things. There was a tartness about it, a sharp flavour, not of ill-nature, but of disapproval of life’s compromises, including her own. The introduction meant that he was entitled to see her home from the draughty Jubilee Hall where the rehearsals had been called. Nellie had to help put away the Choral Society’s crockery. Then she came back in her coat, with her shoes in a water-proof bag. Frank, to establish his claim, took the bag from her. He always did everything quickly and neatly, without making a business of it.

  ‘If we were in Moscow now it would still be all frozen up,’ he said, going down the steps beside her.

  ‘I know,’ said Nellie. ‘But when you do things at school in geography you know them, but you don’t believe them.’

  ‘No, you have to see them for yourself. It makes you want to do that.’

  ‘Were you at school in Russia, then?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you’d read about Norbury while you were there, tell me honestly, would you have wanted to come and see it?’

  ‘I would,’ Frank answered, ‘if I had known I was going to be in such good company.’

  She ignored this, but Frank felt satisfied. He asked her what she thought of Hiawatha. She told him that the composer lived in Croydon, not so far away, and this was supposed to be his favourite among all his pieces. ‘He christened his son Hiawatha, you know.’

  ‘But what’s your opinion of the music, Miss Cooper?’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t care so very much for music. I can hold a part all right, but only as long as I’m with a lot of others. I don’t know how I got through my sight-singing test when I came to join the society. I’ve often wondered about that. Dr Alden, that was the old choirmaster, didn’t hardly seem to listen. Perhaps he’d been drinking.’

  ‘Well, but there you are again. Why do you come to rehearsals, if you don’t care about them?’

  It was the same reason – to get out of the house, to get out of the way of her sister-in-law, who, when Frank met her
, seemed harmless enough, but harmlessness, as he knew, could be a very hard thing to bear. When he went to Longfellow Road to call for Nellie, Grace Cooper would fuss over him and ask him whether his landlady was treating him right. She told him to leave his shaving mirror in the bed during the day and if by the evening it was clouded over that meant that the bed was damp, and he had a right to complain about it at the Town Hall. Better take the mirror along with him, to show to the authorities. Frank got the notion that Grace always talked about damp.

  Several times he was asked to stay to supper, and they sang hymns afterwards at the piano. Frank realized then that Nellie had told the truth about her voice, and he admired her for telling the truth.

  The trouble was that he was still only training. His lodgings and laundry cost him twelve shillings and five-pence a week, and by Saturday he was hard up. ‘I know how you’re placed,’ said Nellie, ‘I’ll pay my share.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could agree to that,’ Frank said.

  ‘You’re afraid I’ll take out my purse and lay it on the table and rattle it about, getting out the money. Don’t get that idea into your head. Just as we go out, before we ever get out of the house, I’ll give you something for my half. That way there can’t be any awkwardness. It’s called Dutch treat, you know. What’s that in Russian?’

  There was no Russian word for it. ‘Students, perhaps,’ said Frank, ‘I’ve seen them empty out their pockets at the beginning of the evening and put all the money they’ve got in the middle of the table.’

  ‘That’s not Dutch treat,’ said Nellie.

  Once he had his training certificates, he had reasonably good prospects to lay before her. He felt that he could assume that she wouldn’t be too distressed at leaving her family and friends, still less at getting out of Norbury. If he wanted to go ahead with it, he ought to speak to Charlie, explaining in more detail about the firm and his prospects. He did want to go ahead with it, and after fixing things up with Nellie, he did speak to Charlie. No worry about a ring, because he had brought with him a ring belonging to his mother which his father had bought for her at Ovchinikof’s in Moscow. It was a Russian triple knot, in three different colours of gold, made so that the three circlets were separate but could never be taken apart. They slid and shone together on Nellie’s capable finger. At the choral society it was thought pretty, but foreign-looking. ‘When your mother gave it you, she must have expected you to find someone,’ said Nellie. ‘Was she ill?’