The Longest Winter Page 3

  When the servants had cleared the last of the plates, Sergei said to his aunt:

  ‘Don’t you think Evelyn ought to hear the gypsies playing just once? She tells me she’s never heard them.’

  ‘Oh Seriosha, how can she? She cannot go to a public restaurant. Don’t worry about it; one of our friends is bound to have them at a private party before long.’

  ‘She could if you would come too, all of you.’ He looked round the table, a tantalising smile playing around his lips. Dindin drew in a deep breath and, without waiting for either of her parents to speak, said excitedly:

  ‘All of us? Oh Mamenka, please do let us. Papa, you would like to come, wouldn’t you? I’ve never been to a restaurant, please, please, Papa. And one can never hear too much gypsy music, can one, Seriosha?’

  Evelyn watched an indulgent expression creep into Andrei Suvarov’s ice-blue eyes as he smiled at his pretty, impulsive daughter. Before Natalia Petrovna could say any more, he had given his permission, adding only:

  ‘But if you will forgive me, Sergei Ivanovitch, I shall not come with you. I have some papers to deal with. You will take care of them, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Well, Aunt?’

  ‘Very well, Seriosha. We shall come. Evelyn, Dindin, come on upstairs and fetch your cloaks.’

  As they came down the broad red-carpeted staircase, Evelyn whispered to Dina:

  ‘But what is so special about the gypsies, Dindin?’

  ‘Wait till you hear them – it’s the most exciting music in the world, Seriosha told me.’

  ‘So, you haven’t heard them either?’

  ‘Well, no actually. It’s usually only men who go to those places, and … well, you know the sort of women I mean. And I haven’t been to the private dances where they have the gypsies yet. But I will next year, when I’m seventeen.’

  With that introduction, Evelyn hardly knew what to expect when they arrived at the restaurant. She half suspected that the room would be filled with scantily clad satyrs and street walkers, and was agreeably surprised to be taken into a luxuriously decorated hall, with perfectly respectable-looking men and women in evening dress sitting at white-clothed tables. There were no signs of impropriety and indeed nothing to shock her at all. She relinquished her cloak to a waiter and followed Natalia Petrovna to a large table quite near the small orchestra.

  At first she thought that the whole expedition must have been a hoax for there were no obvious gypsies, only ordinary musicians going through the usual repertoire of fashionable waltzes. But just as the second bottle of champagne had been opened, the orchestra put down their instruments and made way for a gaily dressed troop.

  ‘Now!’ said Sergei, leaning back in his chair and turning to smile at Evelyn. ‘Now you will hear them.’

  ‘Don’t expect too much, Evie,’ said Piotr sardonically. ‘You won’t understand the words and the music is an acquired taste,’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, chérie,’ said Natalia Petrovna, smiling.

  But at first, it was Piotr who was proved right. Evelyn listened puzzled to the plaintive, wailing music and the incomprehensible words sung by a gaunt-eyed, swarthy woman with a red silk scarf bound about her dark hair. As the song ended, clapping broke out at all the tables around them, and Evelyn politely joined in. Then Sergei called something to the leading gypsy, who nodded and swayed forward as he drew his bow across the strings of his violin.

  ‘What did you say?’ Evelyn whispered to Sergei.

  ‘I just asked for my favourite song. Listen, it is about a beautiful girl who is in love with an enemy of her father’s. She will not admit to her feelings, even though he begs and pleads with her. Then her brothers, who object to him bothering her, go and kill him, and then she understands how she loved him. It is very sad. Listen.’

  Obedintly Evelyn leaned back in her chair and let the wild, passionately sad music wash over her. This time she did not even try to understand the words; she just listened and began to feel the music. As the song unwound itself in her mind, she became very conscious of Sergei sitting so close to her and his hand resting very near hers on the white table cloth. She knew she should move her hand, but a peculiar languor seemed to have invaded her and she allowed it to remain. Then, when the song was over and he looked into her eyes, she dropped her lashes and blushed.

  He tried to catch her alone the next day before he had to leave for the railway station, but she was inaccessible in the schoolroom with Dindin and her little sister, Natalie, and he had to say goodbye to Evelyn at the same time as all the others. He kissed them all in the usual way and as he reached her said caressingly:

  ‘Since you are nearly a cousin, Evelyn, will you let me kiss you too?’

  She was too embarrassed to know how to answer that, and as he took her in his arms she looked up at his face a little worried. He bent his head and kissed her full on her beautiful lips and she was shocked to find herself responding to him and wanting to press herself closer. She knew that she was blushing again as he drew back, but she forced herself to say:

  ‘Sergei Ivanovitch, goodbye – and good luck. I shall be thinking of you.’

  ‘Petite Evelyn,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘It will help to remember that at night in the trenches.’ He might have said more, but Dindin threw herself at him just then, crying and kissing him. Evelyn turned away, frighteningly reminded of the day John had left Beverley after that last leave. A kind of resentment seeped into the regret she was feeling. It seemed so unfair that these men should make her care for them so much and leave her to such terrible fear. She left the hall and walked wearily up to her room to re-read some of the letters she had written to John and to try to dismiss thoughts of what had happened during his last leave, or of the trenches and the bodies and the blood and the wire.

  She was interrupted an hour later by Natalia Petrovna, who had come in search of some distraction from her own sadness. Her excuse was that it was nearly time for her baby, little Alexander, to leave his nursery and have some simple lessons with his two sisters. After all, Sasha was four years old now and it would be a pity to miss the opportunity for him to learn English.

  Evelyn dragged her thoughts back from Flanders and tried to talk intelligently about how she would set about teaching so young a child and how to fit him into the lessons she gave his elder sisters. His mother was soon bored with the topic and tried to change it.

  ‘Were you writing home, my dear?’

  Evelyn almost scowled in her embarrassment and told the first deliberate lie of her life as she hastily pushed the letters back into the morocco blotting book.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. To Dick, my young brother. He wants to know all I can tell him of life here. I was just trying to describe the gypsies to him. And then I was going on to explain why the twins get so angry with each other when they talk politics together; I mean, explain about Georgii’s Cadet Party and why Piotr thinks it is so worthless and approves of those Bolsheviki and why they think that only the workmen should form the government. But it is hard, since I still can’t really understand them.’ Evelyn knew that she was saying too much and almost at random, but having no experience in lying, she felt she had to add colour to her first bald statement.

  ‘It’s so tiresome,’ was Natalia Petrovna’s comment. ‘Andrei Alexandrovitch gets so angry with them when they talk all their revolutionary nonsense; but I tell him that all young men think like that. And not only young men nowadays. Everywhere I go people are talking about how to increase the powers of the Duma and what is to be done about the war. I think it’s since that dreadful Rasputin was killed. It seems less dangerous to speak out now.’ Then her voice changed as she was forced to think of the dangers her beloved Piotr still faced. ‘But I wish Peterkin would be more careful. These books he brings to the house; I know they’re forbidden. The Okhrana are everywhere even now.’

  ‘Okhrana?’

  ‘The police – secret police. If he were caught … Well, it’s no good talking abo
ut it. Promise you won’t tell anyone what I said?’

  ‘Of course,’ answered Evelyn, not quite sure whether to take any of it seriously, or whether Natalia Petrovna shared her elder daughter’s undoubted enjoyment of melodrama.

  Not very long after that conversation Evelyn discovered how much substance there had been to her cousin’s fears. Towards the middle of February there were riots in the city which grew daily worse and more widespread instead of petering out as usual. The government was frightened enough to have machine guns set up on top of strategically positioned buildings in the city centre and one morning they opened fire on the crowd.

  In the schoolroom, Evelyn and the three children heard a sharp ratt-tatt-tatt bursting through the still air. At first Evelyn tried to tell herself and her pupils that it was thunder, or a motor backfiring. When the sound persisted, she ran to the window and tried to open it. But like all the others in the house it had been sealed for the winter and she was frustrated. Absurdly, she felt as though she had never been allowed to breathe properly since she had arrived in Petrograd. Her longstanding anger at the unhealthy custom of sealing the windows nearly boiled over and her long fingers scraped and picked at the gluey material that kept out every trickle of fresh air.

  ‘You mustn’t open it, Evie,’ called Dindin, shocked at what she saw. ‘You will make us all ill.’

  ‘Fresh air never hurt anyone, Dindin,’ answered Evelyn. ‘In fact a little cool air in this hothouse would benefit everyone.’ But then she remembered the necessity of backing up their mother’s rules and turned away from the window, saying: ‘You’re right, of course, Dindin, I keep forgetting how much colder it is out there than at home in England. Now I think we should forget the riots and turn back to the last paragraph. Natalie, will you read it out?’

  The child, who was always gentle and obedint, started to read, but the sound of gunfire came again, unmistakable now, and she paled and put down the book.

  ‘Evie, what is happening? Can’t we find out?’

  ‘I shall go downstairs and ask. You may read to yourselves, and I shall tell you whatever I can discover.’

  Despite their protests, she left them and ran lightly down the stairs to the morning room, where to her surprise she found not only the twins but also Robert Adamson. None of them stood up as she came in or spoke to her but for once she did not notice the discourtesy.

  ‘Is it guns? What is happening? Do you know?’ It was Georgii who answered her.

  ‘Yes, machine guns, being fired on the people.’

  ‘They have no bread,’ burst out Piotr. ‘And Bloody Nikolai is shooting them for asking for just that.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ countered his brother. ‘There’s plenty of bread in the city. Our people have checked it out.’

  ‘Oh, you Cadets are hardly better than the Tsar’s ministers. You believe all the lies they tell you.’

  ‘I heard that it all started when a workman started to beat his wife when he discovered she had no bread for his meal,’ said Adamson, perhaps trying to defuse the twins’arguments. ‘Their neighbours started to beat him for beating her and so it went on.’

  ‘What does it matter how it started?’ demanded Evelyn. ‘All that matters is that people are being killed out there.’

  Piotr looked at her with rare approval and said:

  ‘I know. What kind of a government can do that to the starving? They used to call him “The Little Father” you know. It is sickening that he can be so cruel.’

  ‘What will happen, Piotr Andreivitch?’ she asked, her voice softened by her recognition of his real distress.

  ‘I don’t know, Evie. But I expect the people will disperse in the end; the Okhrana will hand out savage sentences to the men they grab; and it will all happen again and again.’ His voice sounded hopeless.

  The riots grew worse and the anxiously waiting citizens of Petrograd told each other that the Cossacks would soon be sent out against the demonstrators. Even outsiders like Evelyn knew that the Cossack regiments had always been notorious for the cruelty with which they carried out the Tsar’s orders, and they all waited for news of a massacre.

  As the strikes and riots infected more and more of the city, the Suvarov Timber Works, in common with many of the metal foundries and factories, had to be shut down. Andrei Alexandrovitch could do nothing to prevent it and was forced to wait out the strike at home. Acerbic and impatient, he increased the tensions in the house tenfold, and Evelyn wished that he would be summoned to the family’s forests and estates in the northern province of Archangel, or even be ill so that he would be confined to his room. She knew it was ill-natured of her to entertain any such thoughts, but she thought it was just too much to have to face his anger indoors while such a storm was raging outside.

  His unaccustomed presence at the breakfast table was really only a trivial matter, but it turned a once-pleasant meal into an ordeal for her, particularly before Dina arrived downstairs to draw his fire with her flirtatious smiles and chatter. They were sitting alone together in silence, sipping coffee, on the morning of the 27th when Piotr and Georgii came rushing into the room.

  Evelyn, whose nerves had made her jumpy as she spent the last few days incarcerated in the house, almost dropped her half-empty cup. Piotr stopped dead just inside the door as he saw his father and then said:

  ‘It’s started. Bob just telephoned. It is the Revolution.’

  Andrei Alexandrovitch touched his thin lips with a damask napkin.

  ‘Must you burst in here as though this were some convocation of students? Sit down and behave in a civilised manner for once. Evelyn, would you pour me some more coffee?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said automatically, and rose to take his cup to the coffee pots on the sideboard. Then, in spite of the older man’s obvious dislike of the subject, she could not help saying to Piotr:

  ‘But what about the Cossacks? My maid told me yesterday that they were being positioned across all the main roads to stop the marching people. What happened, Piotr Andreivitch?’

  His face seemed to blaze and she saw that he was happy as well as excited.

  ‘They joined the rioters. Can you believe it? The Cossacks actually drew their horses aside and let the march go past, and some of them even joined in.’

  ‘Yes,’ added Georgii, for once in a voice that carried no hint of complaint, ‘and today the Volhinya regiment were ordered out into the streets and they mutinied. At last it’s happened. Russia is free today!’

  The triumph in the twins’faces and their friendliness were such that Evelyn found herself smiling back at them and, as she gave their father his refilled white and gold cup, she said:

  ‘Andrei Alexandrovitch, isn’t that wonderful? That Russia should be free, I mean?’

  ‘If you believe that, you’re as childish as my sons,’ he said, flattening her instantly. But the boys looked at each other as though nothing on earth could dim their excitement.

  ‘Everyone’s going to the Taurida Palace to hear what the Duma has to say,’ said Piotr. ‘Are you coming, Evelyn? You’re not due in the schoolroom until this afternoon. Do come. It’s a historic day.’

  ‘Oh may I go, Andrei Alexandrovitch?’ asked Evelyn, suddenly longing to be out of the house for once.

  ‘It is a matter of complete indifference to me,’ he answered. ‘If you have no duties in the house this morning, you may do as you wish. But all the istvochiks are on strike and I cannot allow any of our horses out on the streets today. You will have to walk.’

  ‘Oh, what does that matter?’ said Piotr. ‘Come on, Evelyn.’

  ‘Georgii, I trust you are not thinking of joining your brother.’

  All three of them stopped at the door of the breakfast room and Evelyn sympathised with the expression of despairing resentment that distorted the elder twin’s face. He turned back to his father and said in his old, familiar voice:

  ‘But, Papa, the Works are shut today. What could I do? Why can’t I go?’

  ‘Stand
up to him, for once in your life,’ Piotr hissed at him.

  ‘There is plenty of paper work in the study. I shall expect you in half an hour.’

  Georgii took a deep breath.

  ‘No. Today Liberty has been brought to Russia. I won’t come.’ And then as though to fend off his father’s anger, his voice sounded pleading as he went on: ‘Papa, truly, if there are papers to be dealt with, I could do them this evening.’

  Piotr sighed, but his father said coldly:

  ‘See that you do. And look after your cousin.’

  They escaped and as soon as the door was closed behind them, Georgii burst out:

  ‘Why is it always me? Why didn’t he even try to stop you, Piotr? It’s not fair.’

  ‘It’s only because you allow him to coerce you like that. But don’t let’s quarrel now. Evelyn, if you’re coming, go and get your coat, and you’d better wear a shawl instead of a hat. You don’t want to look too conspicuous this morning.’

  Evelyn did not wait for anything else, but ran upstairs to change. The governess, Ekaterina Nikolaievna, was in charge of the children until luncheon, and so Evelyn would have plenty of time to go with the twins to find out what was happening. As she was searching through her bottom drawer for an old woollen shawl to wear, Dindin looked round the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.

  ‘To the Duma with the twins. The riots are over, but something terribly important is happening.’

  ‘Take me with you, please, Evie. The Kat is horrid today and she’s told me to write out “I must not chatter during lessons” three hundred times.’

  ‘Poor Dindin – but I don’t think I can take you.’