The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by “unfortunately” in this connexion,’ said Frank, but Volodya rushed on. ‘You took Lisa Ivanovna into your house. That was why I tried to kill you.’

  ‘So you’re not connected with any political group?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘And you didn’t want to print anything?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Not even a few pages on universal pity?’

  ‘What is universal pity?’ asked Volodya doubtfully.

  ‘But you feel responsible for some reason for Lisa Ivanovna, and you wanted to get rid of me. Why didn’t you come round to the house and take a shot at me there?’

  ‘That would have caused scandal. For Lisa to be living in the house of a foreign merchant when he was shot might have made things very difficult for her.’

  ‘Lisa works in my house, just as she did at Muir and Merrilees. You never went round there and fired at the manager. Do you seriously think she’ll come to any harm with me?’

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps not, it makes no difference, I feel like shouting aloud that it’s too much for me to bear. Listen, please, I should prefer you to understand. It isn’t bearable that she should be approached, spoken to, breathed upon, quite possibly touched by a man such as yourself, Frank Albertovich.’

  Volodya was, in fact, shouting aloud, as though addressing one of the forbidden students’ meetings. ‘Have you ever spoken to her yourself?’ Frank asked. Yes, it appeared that Volodya had spoken to her several times, but always in public. He had met her on three separate occasions in the Prechistenskaya public library. He went there because the University libraries were closed during the periods of student unrest, which had become longer and longer. Lisa, after her day behind the counter, went there to read the magazines and newspapers. Speaking in low tones wasn’t forbidden in the library, although presumably, Frank reflected, the rules made breathing upon and touching very difficult.

  Volodya’s eyes were full of unshed tears, which gathered brightly and increased, as Annushka’s sometimes did, without a sound. Without warning, dropping the willows and what was left of the bread, he threw his arms round Frank’s neck.

  ‘Did you believe what I said? Did you?’

  Frank felt outnumbered.

  ‘I didn’t want to kill you. When I said that, I wasn’t telling the truth. My intention was only to frighten you.’

  ‘What made you think I’d be frightened?’

  ‘I thought you were a coward,’ said Volodya, ‘but wrongly, wrongly.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘Because you ran away from the English governess.’

  Frank unhitched Volodya’s long clinging arms. He had seen Lisa, Dolly, Ben and Annushka, walking away from him, with their backs to him, past the Inverskaya chapel. Pigeons were threading their way through the press of bodies and legs to retrieve Volodya’s fallen bread. Frank hurried across the square, against the human current, towards Lisa. When he caught up with them, (which was not so difficult, after all, since the pavement outside the Inverskaya was laid out in pink and grey granite setts, and Annushka would walk only on the pink ones) the children, with their arms full of willow branches, besieged him. He must agree to their going to the dacha with Lisa for the school holiday, from Easter Tuesday until the Tsaritsa’s name day. Frank pointed out that the snow would still be on the ground in the woods, while in Moscow even the windows hadn’t been opened yet, and he himself would be wanted at Reidka’s, which would not be on holiday. He asked what he was supposed to do without them. Dolly said that she was sure Mrs Graham would ask him round pretty frequently to the Chaplaincy.

  ‘Swear by the health of His Imperial Majesty that you’ll let us go,’ shouted Ben.

  ‘But your mother might come back while you’re away.’

  ‘Are you expecting her?’ Dolly asked.

  ‘No.’

  Annushka said she wanted him to carry her. Lisa said nothing. They would, after all, only be away for a few days. However wet and cold they got, it would be unkind not to let them go.

  24

  The sky was of a blue so pale that it could hardly be distinguished from white. On Good Friday the churches stood dark and silent. On Easter Saturday, cheesecakes were brought out in their tens of thousands in every parish, to be blessed. On Monday the house-cleaning began. Every blanket had to be taken outside and beaten, the rugs must come up, the curtains down, fur-lined coats had to be stowed away, the mattresses had to be ripped open and remade, feather by feather. Frank was consulted by Toma as to whether the windows should not be opened. I leave it to you, he said. And the poultry let out? I leave it to you. No post was delivered on Easter Monday, so he went across to fetch it himself from the General Post Office on the west side of the Miasnitskaya. There was nothing from England except an Easter card from Charlie, with a hand-coloured photograph of chickens, lambs and young children, and a printed quotation:

  ‘The world would be a dreary place Were there no little people in it.’

  There was also a letter from Volodya, correctly stamped, which read:

  Honoured Frank Albertovich

  In my haste on Palm Sunday I am afraid I may not have made myself clear on one point. I may have suggested to you that there was in fact, as well as in possibility, a sexual relationship existing between you and Lisa Ivanovna. Let me say now that having thought more deeply on the subject, and on your reputation in the foreign business community here in Moscow, and particularly on your age, I realize that my suspicions must be groundless. I wish therefore to withdraw them. On every other point in discussion between us my opinions remain the same. Indeed, they are unalterable.

  With sincere respects,

  Vladimir Semyonich Grigoriev

  Although it was not his habit, Frank read the letter through twice. The handwriting, for a student, was wretched.

  At 22 Lipka Street packing had already begun for the few days’ visit to the dacha. None of the servants were going, though they would have liked to, and to indicate this they had thrown themselves into unnecessary activities, sewing up the children’s clothes in rolls of sacking and loading the china into crates of straw. ‘We shan’t want all these,’ said Dolly. It was quite unlike the long summer holiday, when everyone came, and they stocked up as though for a siege. ‘There’ll be no one there except Egor and Matryona.’ She meant the old couple from the nearest village who were supposed to act as caretakers. Toma agreed that there was no point in taking cups and saucers for those who were not able to appreciate them. Those two were born ignorant, he said, and if you boiled them in a kettle for seven years, you wouldn’t boil that out of them. ‘That’s not what I meant at all, Toma, and you know it,’ said Dolly. The china remained in the hall, half unpacked again, when night fell.

  Frank asked Lisa not to go to bed. ‘There’s something I want to ask you, and if you’re going away for five days I’d better ask you now.’

  She stood by the door, untroubled.

  ‘Lisa, do you know a man, a young man, that is, called Volodya Semyonich Grigoriev?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Is he in trouble?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘He’s a student,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders a little.

  Frank wanted to ask her where she had met Volodya, to see if she would tell the same story, but felt this would be base and undignified.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’ Lisa asked.

  Taken aback, Frank shifted his ground. ‘You’re quite right, he has been in trouble. I should be ready to help him, though, if he’s a friend of yours.’

  Lisa seemed puzzled.

  ‘Would you, Frank Albertovich?’

  ‘No, to be quite honest, I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I can’t tell what he’s been saying about me. What did he say?’

  ‘He told me that he’d only met you three times.’

  ‘Perhaps you could count it as three times, I’m not sure. He used to come into Muir and Merrilees
, to the counter, and hang about the department. The students couldn’t afford to buy anything. But it was warm in there, and it was also warm in the Prechistenskaya.’

  Volodya had written a note, she went on, and put it in the magazine she was reading, then waited while she turned the pages until she got to it. ‘That’s not such a strange thing in a public library. But you have to write in pencil. When I opened it, it said: “You’re alive. I too am alive.”’

  ‘I didn’t ask you what it said.’

  ‘What kind of trouble is it? I think he’s only twenty.’

  ‘And I’m not. That, too, he’s pointed out to me.’

  Lisa looked at him with polite concern. She seemed, however, as always, to be listening only enough to grasp what was said and to respond to it correctly and efficiently, while compelled to hear, by some inner secret conspiracy, another voice.

  ‘Listen to me, Lisa,’ Frank said, gripping her by the forearms, ‘since we’re telling each other what was in our private correspondence, let me go a bit farther. This Grigoriev told me it wasn’t bearable that you should be breathed on, touched, gone near to, spoken to, no, spoken to, breathed on, gone near to, touched, that’s it, by a man like me. What do you say to that, Lisa? You’re alive. Is it bearable? Is it?’

  For the first time he had all her attention, or, if he was deceiving himself there, and I daresay I am, he thought, at least more than he had ever had before. It was the first time, too, that he’d ever made love to a woman with short hair. What an advantage, none of that endless business with the hairpins. And with all the blood in his body he knew that she was not taken by surprise.

  ‘Don’t regret this, Frank. If you’re sure, if you know beyond any doubt that what you’re doing is helpful, then go on, go on with a stout heart.’

  It was Selwyn, who must have made his way through the straw and clutter of the front hall. As Frank turned to confront him, Lisa disengaged herself quietly and was out of the room.

  ‘You’re angry with me, Frank. But, my old friend, the fathers of the Russian church saw anger itself as “black grace”. It helps to remember that. All strong emotions, Frank, may be worthy of grace.’

  ‘Selwyn.’

  ‘Frank, yes.’

  ‘Selwyn, get out of here, if you don’t want your teeth down your throat.’

  Presumably Selwyn had had some reason for calling, but he had no chance, at that particular moment, to say what it was, while he retreated rapidly towards the front door, Frank went up the dark stairs in to the back of the house and knocked at the door of Lisa’s room. He had not expected it to be locked, and it was not locked, but he waited until he heard her bare feet cross the wooden floor to open it.

  In the very early morning, they left for Shirokaya. The children said goodbye to him affectionately, but absentmindedly, the leavers commiserating with the left behind. They had March fever. They were going out of the still sealed-up, glassed up house into the fresh, watery, early spring.

  Toma kept repeating that the two taxis which were to take everyone and everything to the station were outside; the drivers had been waiting in the semi-darkness, arguing, for more than an hour. Lisa Ivanovna and the children, Toma said, must sit down for a minute, in the old way, the Russian way, before starting on their journey, to ensure that they’d return safely home. No-one took any notice of him. Blashl, who was never allowed into the house, had floundered into the hall and in her terror was wailing, rather than barking, and wagging her tail insanely. Told to leave, she lost her way and could be heard upturning heavy objects in the kitchen. Lisa appeared in her waterproof.

  ‘What are you going to say to me?’ Frank asked her, at the foot of the stairs.

  Lisa appeared to think a little and then said, ‘Until next Saturday, Frank Albertovich.’

  ‘For God’s sake stay with me, Lisa,’ said Frank. There was no way of telling whether she had heard him. The doorman and the cook were in the hall to say their goodbyes and Blashl, unrestrained, had trundled once again out of the kitchen quarters, sweeping her tail in wide arcs. Annushka, as disturbed as Blashl by the scent of departures, howled and clung. Lisa restored tranquillity, and in five minutes they were gone. He was almost sure that she could not have heard what he had said to her.

  25

  The dacha was not convenient, and not in good repair. The passionate affection which Dolly and Ben felt for it suggested that, after all, children and adults were hardly of the same species. It was true, though, that Nellie, too, had been unwilling to part with it. And Selwyn, who had no dacha of his own, had often come down for Saturday and Sunday. Oddly enough, when he was there, he behaved much more like an ordinary management accountant than he did in Moscow.

  Although there was a large industrial town three miles away, with workers’ suburbs and dormitories, Shirokaya could only be reached by a woodcutters’ branch-line along the edge of the forest. The nearest village, Ostanovka, got its name from the railway halt. From there the quickest way was on foot through the woods, while the luggage went round by carrier’s horse and cart. The carrier also came round twice a week to fill the water-barrels. The rye-bread, heavy as a tombstone, was bought in the village. The tea they brought with them from Moscow.

  Tea was drunk with pickled lemons, which stayed in the dacha from one year’s end to another in large barrels in the store-room, along with the salted melons, the pears in vinegar, the soused apples, the pickled cabbage, the pickled onions and plums, the pickled mushrooms. The mushrooms, strung from the ceiling, were sorted into the slimy buttery ones, the fleshy rusty ones, the white ones, which were in fact brown, the huge pine-tree ones, the red-capped Aspen ones, the Birch Tree ones, gathered from the north side of the trees, which never dry out. What would have been thought of in Norbury as ordinary mushrooms were despised. They were Unworthy Ones, only strung up and preserved on Frank’s account, as he was supposed to like them. The store-room itself was as damp as if it had been beneath the sea. The barrels were made of oak, but they were covered in grey lichen which had never been seen growing on an oak. In Moscow, it was an insult to say of someone that he looked as if he had been scraped off the bath house wall, but moulds and mildews, thicker than in any bath house, spread and flourished among the dacha’s stores. Only the strength of the vinegar and vodka, Russia’s potent protectors against universal death from poisoning, safeguarded the unseen fruit and fungus as it brewed through the winter months.

  There was a bath house, however, half of the lavatory shed. It worked very simply. Underneath a lid of perforated zinc there was a layer of stones from the brook, which could be heated by lighting a brushwood fire. When the fire had died down you went in, shut the door and pulled back the grating in the roof until Egor’s face squinted down at you, ready to pour down a bucket of cold water that raised a suffocating cloud of steam from the blistering heat of the stones. The bath house, Frank knew, ought to be raised a good two feet above the ground, but then, so should the whole place. The damaged planks would have to be cut back until you got to a sound edge, and replaced with sound wood. The sight of the derelict, unkempt dacha, half gone back to moss and earth and almost fermenting with its load of preserves and alcohol would be enough to bring a keen English Saturday carpenter – Charlie, for instance – to the verge of tears.

  In front of the dacha, running across its whole length, was a veranda of shaky wooden planks, with a roof supported by fretwork columns. There the day, in summer, when it was hot, could be drowsed away. Courage, though not strength, was needed to raise the loose boards of the flooring. Underneath there was much animal and vegetable life. You could hear a scuttling and rustling, and if you bent down and looked closer you could catch the glint of metal. Some previous tenant, (the whole estate, the forest, the village and the dacha, was owned by a Prince Demidov who preferred to live in Le Touquet) had left his knives and forks there for safety during the winter, and had forgotten them, or perhaps had never returned. And there was part of a croquet set, although who could ever
have tried to play croquet at Shirokaya? But thirty years or so ago a croquet set had been the right thing to take down to the country, and perhaps the dacha then had had its own piece of grass.

  The forest – as the Prince’s German agent had explained to Frank when he first took the lease – had been cleared occasionally, but never cut. The trees grew so close to the dacha that they threw shadows, with the first light, through every window. Only a few yards away from the veranda the forest began. The fringes were of hazel and aspen, with green grass in the clearings as soon as the snow melted, and a wealth of cloudberries, bilberries and wild raspberries. The birches were the true forest. They had created for themselves a deep ground of fallen leaves and seeds, dropped twigs, and rotting bark, decomposing into one of the earth’s richest coverings.

  As the young birches grew taller the skin at the base of the trunks fragmented and shivered into dark and light patches. The branches showed white against black, black against white. The young twigs were fine and whiplike, dark brown with a purple gloss. As soon as the shining leaf-buds split open the young leaves breathed out an aromatic scent, not so thick as the poplar but wilder and more memorable, the true scent of wild and lonely places. The male catkins appeared in pairs, the pale female catkins followed. The leaves, turning from bright olive to a darker green were agitated and astir even when the wind dropped. They were never strong enough to block out the light completely. The birch forest, unlike the pine forest, always gives a chance of life to whatever grows beneath it.

  The spring rain, however welcome, made a complication. The drops ran down the branches as far as the heaviest twig, then hung there perilously, brilliant silver above, dark below. They were tenacious, apparently intending to stay on at all costs. If small birds landed on the branch at the same time, sometimes with the intention of getting at the drops of water, the whole system seemed in jeopardy. Twigs and boughs bent beneath the invasion, sighing, swaying back and forth with a circular motion, crossing and recrossing to settle back into their myriad delicate patterns. And yet quite large birds, starlings and even jackdaws and wood-pigeons, risked the higher branches in the early morning.