A Glove Shop In Vienna (30 page)

It was impossible, my grandmother said, to blame Nikolai in any way. He didn’t even
kiss
the girl, just put his arm round her to steady her and murmured something, not in his polite and easy French but in low and throbbing Russian. Even so, as my grandmother came up to them and saw the expression on both their faces, she realised that all was now well and truly lost.

Though she knew she was failing in her duty, my grandmother didn’t read Tata’s diary the day after the picnic. It was all she could do to bear the pain in Tata’s eyes, while the young tutor’s cheekbones looked as though they would tear through his face and Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha had to be carried to bed each night, so violent were the games he played with them.

For time was running out and Prince Kublinsky was growing impatient. He detested the country and was anxious, as the summer drew towards its close, to get his affairs settled and return to Moscow. His visits became more frequent, his moist hands moved ever further up Tata’s trembling arm. And at the party given to mark Tata’s name day, he asked formally for the Countess Tatiana’s hand in marriage and was granted it. After which happy event, the Sartov family plunged into total and utter gloom.

‘I cannot like Kublinsky,’ wrote Petya, ‘but what does it matter? We are all victims, all born to sacrifice…’

And: ‘Give me strength to endure it,’ wrote Tata, smudging the page with her tears. ‘God give me strength.’

It was August now and the days were shortening. While still weighed down by their own particular sorrows, the Sartovs began to share in a new and general despair.

‘Soon now we must return to Moscow,’ sighed the Countess.

‘We are always so sad when we leave the country,’ mourned Tata.

‘Only here is there air to breathe,’ agreed the Count.

They began to pay long sad farewell visits to their favourite haunts.

‘This is the last time we shall ride along this lane,’ Petya would sigh, or, ‘Let us pick our last blackberries,’ the Countess would suggest mournfully. Even Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha were liable to burst into howls of despair as they punted ‘for the last time’ across the lake or picked a final crop of mushrooms. And wherever they went, through birch woods, along the banks of the river, Tata and Nikolai walked as far apart from each other as they could and, if they were forced by the narrowness of the path into proximity, they flinched as if someone had struck them.

Even so, said my grandmother, she would have behaved beautifully right to the end if she had only ever been able to get any
sleep
. But even when at last she was allowed to go to bed (and the idea always caused deep distress) she still couldn’t sleep because her room was above the veranda and it was often three or four in the morning before the last of the visitors dispersed.

On the night she finally broke, she had just dozed off when she was woken by a scene of passionate farewell between a neighbouring landowner and the Count.

‘Good night, my little pigeon,’ said the landowner moistly. ‘We meet too rarely, Vassily Vassilovitch,’ replied the Count. After which, overcome by vodka and emotion, they began to sing sad songs taught to them by their wet-nurses from Nizhny Novgorad.

It was during the refrain of one of these, which went 7
love your dreary, vast expanses, Oh, Holy Russia Mother Dear
,’ that something in my grandmother quite simply snapped.

She became suddenly and violently homesick. She also became extremely cross. The homesickness took the form of a craving for scrambled eggs, a longing for her quiet, icon-less bedroom on Richmond Hill and a desire to look again on Mr Fairburn’s calm and well-remembered moustache.

The crossness took a different form. My grandmother rose and from her bureau drawer she took out the large black fountain pen which had been a farewell present from Mr Fairburn. Then she put on her dressing-gown and crept downstairs.

The Countess Sartov’s diary was the one she came across first.

‘What a sad day!’ the Countess’s latest entry read. ‘I had a pain in my chest and worried about Tata who looks so pale. Even so, all would be endurable if we could remain here in the peace of the countryside. But soon, now — Ah, God, how soon -we must return to Moscow!’

My grandmother unscrewed her fountain pen. For a moment she hesitated. Then, after the Countess’s last entry, she wrote in large, clear letters and in English a single word. After which she moved on into the library.

Petya’s diary was among a jumble of books on the birchwood table: ‘The leaves have begun to fall from the lime tree along the drive. Each day brings my doom closer. But what help is there? All must be as it must be. I must become a soldier.’

Once again my grandmother unscrewed her fountain pen and once again she wrote the same single word against Petya’s last entry. Then she went out on to the veranda.

Tata’s diary was under a cushion on her favourite wicker chair.

‘How shall I bear it?’ poor Tata had written. ‘How shall I bear the endless, empty years without Nikolai? Yet there can be no hope for me. I
must
marry the Prince.’

And once more my grandmother wrote the same single word against Tata’s last entry and closed the book.

She was on the way upstairs when an unfamiliar notebook caught her eye. Opening it she saw with a sinking heart that it was the diary of Nikolai Alexandrovitch. Staunch Slavophil that he was, the young tutor had written his diary in Russian which she could not read. Still, from the wildness of the scrawl and the frequent repetition of the Countess Tata’s Christian name, she felt perfectly justified in adding the same, single word to the end of his diary also.

After which she went upstairs, packed her portmanteau, laid out her travelling clothes and got into bed.

Petya was the first to burst into her room at dawn. ‘You have written in my diary!’ he announced, wild-eyed.

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother, sitting up in bed.

‘Where I have said I must be a soldier you have written “WHY?”.’

‘Yes,’ agreed my grandmother.

‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ stormed Petya. ‘You know it was the dying wish of my grandfather that I become a soldier.’

My grandmother settled herself against the pillows. ‘Was he a good man, your grandfather? A man to respect and—’

‘You have written in my diary!’ declared a shrill and agitated voice as the Countess Sartov, grey plaits flying, entered the room. ‘Here, where I have written that we must return to Moscow, you have written “WHY?”.’

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother.

‘Why?’ shrieked the Countess. ‘Why have you written “WHY”?’

‘Well,’ said my grandmother, ‘I wondered why you must return to Moscow when you all like it so much better here.’

The Countess stopped pacing. ‘But we always return to Moscow, isn’t it so, Petya?’ She ran back into the corridor. ‘Sergei,’ she yelled to her husband, ‘come and explain to Miss Petch why we must return to Moscow.’

‘We always return to Moscow,’ said the Count, entering with a heavy tread. (Old Bull had still not done his stuff.)

‘Father, was my grandfather a good man?’ interrupted Petya.

‘A good man? Your grandfather!’ yelled the Count. ‘He was a louse. A swine! When I was six he locked me in a cupboard for two days. Once he killed a serf with his bare—’

‘Then I can see no reason why you need be bound by your promise to him,’ said my grandmother briskly. ‘As for returning to Moscow, I suppose that’s because the house is not habitable in winter?’

‘Not habitable in winter?’ roared the Count, turning to his wife. ‘Did you hear that, Annushka? Why, the stoves in this house would heat the Kremlin. They would heat the Kremlin without the slightest—’

‘You have written in my diary!’ came a deep and passionate voice from the doorway. ‘Here, where I have written I may never hold the Countess Tata in my arms, you have written “WHY?”.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed my grandmother patiently.

‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ demanded the young tutor,’ when you know that it can never be?’

‘I suppose your father was an illiterate serf and so on?
¹
enquired my grandmother.

Nikolai looked surprised and said no, his father had been — and actually still was – headmaster of a Boys’ Academy in Minsk.

‘Well then, I take it that you are penniless and futureless?’ prompted my grandmother.

Nikolai turned his marvellous eyes on her and said that as it happened he had been left a little money by an aunt and was going in the autumn to take up a lectureship in Russian language at the University of Basle, in Switzerland. He had, he said, hopes of a Professorship fairly soon.

‘Well then,’ said my grandmother.

The Countess, who had been in feverish conversation with her husband, now turned round sharply. ‘What are you saying, Miss Petch? Tata is engaged to Prince Kublinsky.’

‘Madame, you must forgive me for speaking plainly but I am a doctor’s daughter,’ said my grandmother. ‘And in my opinion,’ she went on steadily, ‘you would be advised to look… very carefully… into Prince Kublinsky’s health.’

The Countess blanched. ‘No! Oh, my God, it is not possible. Yet I have heard rumours… His early dissipations… Oh, my poor Tata!’ She paused, then rallied. ‘Even so,’ she said, ‘it is out of the question that Tata should marry Nikolai Alexandro—’

‘You have written in my diary!’ announced the Countess Tata, arriving in the doorway bare-footed, tangle-haired and devastating.

‘Tata, Grandfather was a louse,’ yelled Petya, ‘so I need not be a soldier!’

‘We’re staying in the country, we’re staying in the country,’ sang Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha who had appeared from God-knows-where, and began turning ecstatic somersaults.

But it was at Nikolai, standing perfectly still in the centre of the room, that Tata looked.

‘Come here,’ said Nikolai. ‘Come here, Tata.’

He didn’t use her title, nor did he go to her but waited, his head up, until she came to him.

‘We’re going to be together,
doushenka
,’ he said, taking her face between his hands. ‘I promise you this. We’re going to be together always.’

In spite of all entreaties, my grandmother insisted on leaving as soon as transport could be arranged. Her homesickness persisted and she felt she had done what she could.

When she reached London, Mr Fairburn was at the station to meet her.

‘How kind of you, Mr Fairburn,’ she said, allowing him to help her from the train.

‘I wish,’ said Mr Fairburn earnestly, ‘that you would call me Alfred.’

My grandmother realised that this was probably the most passionate speech that she would ever hear from him.

‘Weren’t you disappointed?’ I asked, remembering the mighty Volga,
troikas
and a little Countess hopelessly in love. ‘Didn’t it all seem rather tame?’

My grandmother said, no. One should know one’s limitations, she said. And call him Alfred she did.

Jeremy was seven when he first went to boarding school, his expensive new grey shorts enveloping his skinny knees, a roll of comics for the journey smudging in his tight-clasped, bird-boned little hand. Even Matron, jovial by profession, felt a pang as she unpacked the belongings of this patently unfledged fledgling and wondered whether another year in the nest would have done any harm.

Except that in Jeremy’s case there wasn’t really any nest. His father, one of the finest climbers of the decade, had died trying to help an injured companion on a distant, still unnamed Himalayan peak. Jeremy’s mother, gay and accomplished, had married again within two years — this time, for solid worth and safety. Jeremy’s stepfather was a mining engineer, kind, decent and magnificently unimaginative. When his firm sent him out to the Copper Belt in Central Africa, it seemed obvious to him that what Jeremy needed was to be left behind in a good English prep school.

And Jeremy’s school
was
good. When he wrote his weekly letter to his mother out in Africa, his pen digging holes in the thin blue air-mail paper, it was pointed out to him that to describe one’s homesickness was a bit
selfish
, didn’t he think? So he wrote instead, in his huge, sloping script, of cricket matches and other suitable topics suggested on the blackboard. After a while, too, he stopped crying under his pillow at night because, as Jenkins minor said, he was simply disgracing their dorm. And gradually, as the weeks crept by, he began to forget. He ‘settled’. Really he had no choice.

Fortunately there was no problem about where Jeremy should spend his holidays because he had grandmothers – a full set. There was his mother’s mother, Mrs Tate-Oxenham whose husband, Jeremy’s grandfather, sat on the Board of not fewer than seven major business enterprises. Mrs Tate-Oxenham lived in the centre of the most fashionable part of London in a tall house filled with valuable antiques and had a housekeeper, a chauffeur and a cook. Jeremy called her ‘Grandmother’ in full because abbreviations, she said, were slipshod: one was never
that
short of time.

Then there was his dead father’s mother Mrs Drayton; she was a widow and managed on her pension. She lived in London too: in a single room, in a shabby peeling house on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. Jeremy called her ‘Nana’ but not when Mrs Tate-Oxenham was around because it made her frown.

It was to ‘Grandmother’, that Jeremy went first when his school broke up for the summer. He had never actually stayed with Mrs Tate-Oxenham before, so that at first he took the uniformed chaffeur who had been sent to meet him at the station for some kind of admiral or chief of police.

‘Mind you sit still!’ said this lordly being, settling Jeremy into the huge black car with its silver fittings and the rug made of a whole dead zebra lying on the seat. ‘We don’t want anything kicked, do we?’

Jeremy wouldn’t have dreamt of kicking anything. Indeed, after a while the mere effort of sitting up straight was all that he could manage, for the great car was almost hermetically sealed against draughts and long before they drew up at the tall house in the hushed street, Jeremy was feeling agonisingly, almost uncontrollably car-sick.