A Glove Shop In Vienna (29 page)

I don’t want anything for myself. No, really… But there is something that’s needed for the school. Badly needed.’

And very carefully, giving precise instructions – for I too had read the catalogues – I told him.

Then I put down the receiver.

‘Good-bye, Mr Hunter’ I said, stretching out my shaking hand. Mr Hunter ignored it; evidently my incredible nobility had completely stunned him and no wonder. How many men, after all, receive two dozen, low-level pedal-flush toilets at the hands of a girl they have wronged, humiliated and dismissed?

‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, still ignoring my outstretched hand, ‘how Jimmy MacAlpine got the baby into school?’

‘Russel Taylor’s brother’s box-cart,’ I said absently. I had found it abandoned in a corner of the yard. Then I stared at Mr Hunter.

‘You mean, you
knew
?’ I shrieked. ‘You knew all the time and yet you just stood there and let me
resign
?’

‘Caroline,’ said Mr Hunter – and my hitherto detested Christian name rang in my ears like a celestial glockenspiel. ‘You have no idea what a strain it has been having you on my staff.’ He rose and took down his coat. ‘I’ll clear up the business, of course. I just didn’t want Jimmy to get pounced on before I’d had a word with the child care people.’

‘There were extenuating circumstances,’ I said — and explained about ‘Our Les’.

Mr Hunter smiled, then he put on his coat and steered me gently out of the door. Glorifying the huddled town, the shadowy chimneys, the Evening Star rose trembling in the Christmas sky.

‘I was wondering,’ said Mr Hunter, whose marvellous cool, austere and Christian name was Charles, ‘whether one might ultimately interest you in a more… orthodox way of getting hold of babies?’

I turned and looked at him. ‘I am only interested,’ I said primly, ‘in one particular kind of baby. The kind with horn-rims and parallel lines across its forehead.’

Mr Hunter took my arm and drew it tenderly through his. •Curiously enough,’ he said, ‘that’s precisely the kind I had in mind.’

It was just eleven months later, at the beginning of November that Alexander Dominic was born. Though lacking at birth the spectacles I’d craved, he came, otherwise, up to my wildest dreams. But when I offered him, beaming with pride, to the girl who had taken over my class, she turned him down flat. She wasn’t doing a Nativity Play, she said. She had been on this course. ‘Drama’, she said, ‘Should Come Spontaneously from Within…’

In the early years of this century my grandmother (whose name was Laura Petch) became engaged to a Mr Alfred Fairburn. A month later she set off for Russia to be a governess. ‘Oh,’ I said, anguished, when first I heard the story, ‘wasn’t it awful for you both, being separated so soon afterwards?’ My grandmother, who was very old by then, gave me a look. In those days, my dear,’ she said, ‘people knew how to wait.’ What with her brave sister Gwendolyn more or less permanently chained to the railings in Hyde Park because of women’s rights and her father a doctor in the London slums, my grandmother felt she wanted to achieve something before she settled down – and achieve something, in a sense, she did. ‘So, aged twenty-two, she travelled alone to Moscow and on still further in a slow and stuffy train through endless birch nests and shimmering plains, and even then her journey was not finished, for she took an old wooden boat down the Volga ‘Yes, my dear, the Volga,’ said my grandmother as I sighed) had at last reached the little village of Yaslova on the estate of her employers the Count and Countess Sartov. And there, on the landing stage, was the whole family to meet her.

The Count, ruddy-faced and smiling, standing beside his Countess, a pale, plump woman who peered anxiously across the sun-dappled water. Their three little boys, Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha, wearing identical sailor-suits and far more interested in the arrival of the boat than of the governess. Petya, the eldest son, all but grown-up, standing aloof; self-absorbed and dreaming.

But it was at the figure of the only girl that my grandmother looked hardest, as she walked down the gangway beneath her parasol. At the Countess Tatiana, aged sixteen, in her white dress and pink sash, for the little Countess was to be her special care.

Grey, gentle eyes; long, dark gold hair; a wide mouth Typically Russian features, and as she stepped forward to shake hands and greet her governess in the perfect French the family all spoke among themselves, she could have been any-well-brought-up Russian girl.

‘I’m Tatiana,’ said the little Countess, ‘but everyone calls me Tata,’ and she smiled. At which my grandmother stepped back a pace instinctively. For it occurred to her that it might be difficult not to love the Countess Tata, and to love anyone in this wild, vast country was not what she had intended.

Though she missed her parents, her brave sister Gwendolyn and of course kind and patient Mr Fairburn, my grandmother settled in quite easily to life at Yaslova. In the morning she taught Tata English and supervised her other lessons. In the afternoons she took her for walks, or they went rowing on the lake, or they played croquet. Often they were joined by Petya the literary and dreamy eldest son, or by Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha whose tutor – an aged and decrepit scholar – usually fell asleep over a volume of Pushkin after lunch.

It was only in the evenings that my grandmother began to feel the strain. For just when she began to think of a light supper and an early night after the day’s work, everyone at Yaslova woke up. The Count came in from the stables. The Countess, a devout and dedicated hypochondriac, left her bed. Petya abandoned his books, neighbours arrived by
troika
or by horseback and the samovar was carried out on to the veranda which ran the length of the house.

And there, drinking interminable glasses of tea with rasp berry jam and being bitten by mosquitos, everybody, said my grandmother sadly, just sat and sat and sat. Sometimes they talked of the hopelessness of Russia’s destiny; sometimes they discussed the total uselessness of their beloved ‘Little Father the Tsar. Occasionally the old tutor would read aloud from Pushkin and everybody would explain to my grandmother (in the French they all spoke, even to say their prayers) how much more beautiful, inflected and sensitive the Russian language was than any other language in the world. And no one, said my grandmother, sighing,
ever
went to bed.

Because she had been careful to read the works of Chekhov,

Dostoyevsky and the rest before she came, my grandmother was not really surprised to find that beneath the pleasant routine of a country summer everyone at Yaslova boiled darkly and deeply with hopelessness, yearning and despair.

Darkly and deeply they might boil, but not in secret – and this was because of the diaries. Except for Vashka, Mishka and

Andrusha who were mercifully too young, everyone at Yaslova kept a diary. Count Sartov kept a diary. His Countess kept a diary. Petya, their literary and dreamy eldest son, kept a diary.

As for the little Countess Tata’s diary, it was currently running at volume twelve. And in spite of the beauty, inflectedness etc.

of the Russian language, all their diaries were in French.

Though very young, my grandmother — then as now – was a model of rectitude and although everyone left their diaries lying about, she would have died rather than read a single word.

After a few weeks, however, she found that this was giving the most bewildered offence.

‘But did you not read in my diary my views on Lermontov’s poetry?’ enquired Petya during an evening session on the

Veranda.

‘Surely I mentioned my symptoms in my diary?’ said the

Countess, surprised, when my grandmother enquired about the progress of an ailment.

‘But, Miss Petch, I wrote it in my
diary
,’ wailed Tata when set to composition on the countryside. ‘Such a beautiful description of the Zarestry woods!’

The discovery that she was supposed to read all their diaries in addition to her other work depressed my grandmother, but she stuck to her task assiduously. And it soon became clear to her that the Sartov family were in a fairly bad way.

‘I live only for poetry! I long only to dedicate my whole being to expressing the truth in words. And yet I am doomed to kill and to teach others to kill,’ wrote Petya.

‘Why are you doomed to kill?’ enquired my grandmother, who had dutifully read this passage on her way to bed.

‘Petya is to go into the army next year,’ explained Tata. ‘He will join the Cadet Corps and be a dashing soldier.’

‘It was my grandfather’s dying wish,’ said Petya and his eyes grew dark.

The Countess Sartov’s diary expressed a more physiological turbulence. ‘My head ached all day. A throbbing seemed to go through from my temples to my ear-lobes and it was as though a leaden weight pressed on my stomach’, would be a typical entry in the diary of Tata’s mother.

The Count’s diary my grandmother was always inclined to skip a little. Not that the Count, too, didn’t have his troubles.

‘For the fifth day we brought Old Bull out to the cow, and again – nothing! Oh, the cursed inaction of all male animals!’ was the kind of thing my grandmother had to contend with from the Count.

But of course it was Tata’s diary which distressed my grandmother most. For she had been right about Tata; it
was
impossible not to love her. Generous and passionate, open and selfless, Tata in her diary burnt the pages with intimations of a great and dedicated love.

‘Oh, to find someone to whom I could belong totally, someone in whose depths I could lose myself!’ wrote the little Countess.

And my grandmother would shake her head and sigh, for Tata, it seemed, was destined to be the wife of Prince Kublinsky. And in Prince Kublinsky it would have been hard to discern depths enough to float a tea-leaf.

He was a plump, lardy young man with enough physical signs of dissolute living greatly to disturb my grandmother, who was a doctor’s daughter. But his family was old and immensely aristocratic; his father had owned the souls of three thousand serfs and his attentions to Tata, now that he had decided it was time to carry on his line, were considered by all the Sartovs to be a great honour.

And this was the state of things when, about six weeks after my grandmother’s arrival at Yaslova, the old scholar who was tutor to Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha quite suddenly died.

He died, it was generally agreed, an enviable and truly Russian death, falling asleep on the stove they lit for him even in summer and failing to wake. But admirable though it was, his death created problems, not the least of which were Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha running wild and driving everybody mad.

So a new tutor was engaged from Moscow. And on a hot grey day in early July, my grandmother went with the rest of the family to the landing stage to meet him.

The boat landed. Nikolai Alexandrovitch leapt lightly on to the wooden jetty and my grandmother’s heart plummeted right down to her neat kid boots and stayed there.

The new tutor was young. He was tall and lightly built and slender. He had large, dark, unutterably expressive eyes, a passionate mouth and leaf-brown hair with copper glints in it.

‘Oh dear,’ thought my grandmother, watching him bend gracefully over Tata’s outstretched hand. ‘Oh dear, oh
dear
?

And as was so often the case with my formidable grandmother, she was perfectly right.

Any lingering hopes she might have had about the new tutor were shattered on the first night when he came and joined them on the veranda. Nikolai was polite but not servile, shy but not tongue-tied and when requested to read aloud from Pushkin did so in a voice of such beauty and depth that even my grandmother (who still understood very little Russian and was getting a bit of a thing about Pushkin) found herself carried away by the sheer beauty of the sound.

Very soon, all her worst fears were realised. Not that Tata’s family, deep in its own despairs, seemed to notice anything. The Countess Sartov’s diary continued to reflect the state of her liver; Petya mourned yet again his coming incarceration in the army; the Count remained obsessed by the inadequacies of Old Bull. It was thus left to my grandmother to note that Tata was quietly, deeply and heartbreakingly falling into the shattering glory of first love.

‘Today I spoke with Nikolai Alexandrovitch about Pushkin. We think so much alike, it is amazing!’ wrote Tata. Or: ‘Is it not extraordinary? Nikolai Alexandrovitch, too, likes nothing better than to walk in the rain!’

Like the most formidable duenna in fiction, my grandmother watched the young tutor for signs of licence or disrespect. There were none. Nikolai behaved perfectly. Only his pallor, a barely perceptible change in his voice when he spoke to Tata betrayed him. Soon it became impossible for him to remain on the veranda when Prince Kublinsky called and ran his slug hands absent-mindedly up and down Tata’s arm. Even so Tata’s innocence, Nikolai’s integrity might still have saved them had it not been for the picnic in the Zarestry woods.

To my grandmother, accustomed to striding briskly over the Downs with a cheese sandwich in her pocket, the Sartov picnics were a nightmare. There never seemed to be less than three
troikas
and two neighbouring families with whom no one, by the end of the day, was on speaking terms.

And there was the picnic samovar. Even fifty years later, when she described it to me, my grandmother’s voice trembled with hatred for the picnic samovar: a huge brass, convoluted beast which lived in a special shed, took hours to light and then sent terrifying sparks over the tinder-dry forest.

It was because of her struggles with this fiend that my grandmother was careless enough to allow Tata to stroll off alone. An hour later, when everyone assembled in the clearing, there was no sign of her.

The forests of Central Russia are not Hyde Park. The Count roared, the Countess blanched; search parties were assembled. And my grandmother, half-demented with guilt, found herself struggling through the undergrowth with Nikolai Alexandrovitch.

Try as she would, she could not in her long skirts keep up with him. So that it was Nikolai, striding between slanting rays of sunlight towards her, that Tata – lost and lonely and bewildered, with wild cornflowers in her hair – saw first, and she ran forward and threw herself into his arms.