The Man from St. Petersburg (3 page)

Charlotte sat beside her and looked across the carpet of turf to the long south front of Walden Hall. The tall Gothic windows glinted in the afternoon sun. From here the house looked as if it might be rationally and regularly planned, but behind that facade it was really an enchanting muddle. She said: “What’s silly is being made to wait so long. I’m not in a hurry to go to balls and leave cards on people in the afternoon and meet young men—I shouldn’t mind if I never did those things—but it makes me so angry to be treated like a child still. I hate having supper with Marya; she’s quite ignorant, or pretends to be. At least in the dining room you get some conversation. Papa talks about interesting things. When I get bored Marya suggests we play cards. I don’t want to
play
anything; I’ve been playing all my life.” She sighed. Talking about it had made her angrier. She looked at Belinda’s calm, freckled face with its halo of red curls. Charlotte’s own face was oval, with a rather distinctive straight nose and a strong chin, and her hair was thick and dark. Happy-go-lucky Belinda, she thought; these things really don’t bother her;
she
never gets intense about anything.

Charlotte touched Belinda’s arm. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to carry on so.”

“It’s all right.” Belinda smiled indulgently. “You always get cross about things you can’t possibly change. Do you remember that time you decided you wanted to go to Eton?”

“Never!”

“You most certainly did. You made a terrible fuss. Papa had gone to school at Eton, you said, so why shouldn’t you?”

Charlotte had no memory of that, but she could not deny that it sounded just like her at ten years old. She said: “But do you really think these things can’t possibly be different? Coming out, and going to London for the season, and getting engaged, and then marriage …”

“You could have a scandal and be forced to emigrate to Rhodesia.”

“I’m not quite sure how one goes about having a scandal.”

“Nor am I.”

They were silent for a while. Sometimes Charlotte wished she were passive like Belinda. Life would be simpler—but then again, it would be awfully dull. She said: “I asked Marya what I’m supposed to
do
after I get married. Do you know what she said?” She imitated her governess’s throaty Russian accent. “Do? Why, my child, you will do
nothing
.”

“Oh, that’s silly,” Belinda said.

“Is it? What do my mother and yours do?”

“They’re Good Society. They have parties and stay about at country houses and go to the opera and …”

“That’s what I mean. Nothing.”

“They have babies—”

“Now that’s another thing. They make such a
secret
about having babies.”

“That’s because it’s … vulgar.”

“Why? What’s vulgar about it?” Charlotte saw herself becoming
enthusiastic
again. Marya was always telling her not to be
enthusiastic.
She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “You and I have got to have these babies. Don’t you think they might tell us something about how it happens? They’re very keen for us to know all about Mozart and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci.”

Belinda looked uncomfortable but very interested. She feels the same way about it as I do, Charlotte thought; I wonder how much she knows?

Charlotte said: “Do you realize they grow inside you?”

Belinda nodded, then blurted out: “But how does it start?”

“Oh, it just happens, I think, when you get to about twenty-one. That’s really why you have to be a debutante and come out—to make sure you get a husband before you start having babies.” Charlotte hesitated. “I think,” she added.

Belinda said: “Then how do they get out?”

“I don’t know. How big are they?”

Belinda held her hands about two feet apart. “The twins were this big when they were a day old.” She thought again, and narrowed the distance. “Well, perhaps this big.”

Charlotte said: “When a hen lays an egg, it comes out … behind.” She avoided Belinda’s eyes. She had never had such an intimate conversation with anyone, ever. “The egg seems too big, but it does come out.”

Belinda leaned closer and spoke quietly. “I saw Daisy drop a calf once. She’s the Jersey cow on the Home Farm. The men didn’t know I was watching. That’s what they call it, ‘dropping’ a calf.”

Charlotte was fascinated. “What happened?”

“It was horrible. It looked as if her tummy opened up, and there was a lot of blood and things.” She shuddered.

“It makes me scared,” Charlotte said. “I’m afraid it will happen to me before I find out all about it. Why won’t they
tell
us?”

“We shouldn’t be talking about such things.”

“We’ve damn well got a right to talk about them!”

Belinda gasped. “Swearing makes it worse!”

“I don’t care.” It maddened Charlotte that there was no way to find out these things, no one to ask, no book to consult … She was struck by an idea. “There’s a locked cupboard in the library—I bet there are books about all this sort of thing in there. Let’s look!”

“But if it’s locked …”

“Oh, I know where the key is. I’ve known for years.”

“We’ll be in terrible trouble if we’re caught.”

“They’re all changing for dinner now. This is our chance.” Charlotte stood up.

Belinda hesitated. “There’ll be a row.”

“I don’t care if there is. Anyway, I’m going to look in the cupboard, and you can come if you want.” Charlotte turned and walked toward the house. After a moment Belinda ran up beside her, as Charlotte had known she would.

They went through the pillared portico and into the cool, lofty great hall. Turning left, they passed the morning room and the Octagon, then entered the library. Charlotte told herself she was a woman and entitled to know, but all the same she felt like a naughty little girl.

The library was her favorite room. Being on a corner of the house it was very bright, lit by three big windows. The leather-upholstered chairs were old and surprisingly comfortable. In winter there was a fire all day, and there were games and jigsaw puzzles as well as two or three thousand books. Some of the books were ancient, having been here since the house was built, but many were new, for Mama read novels and Papa was interested in lots of different things—chemistry, agriculture, travel, astronomy and history. Charlotte liked particularly to come here on Marya’s day off, when the governess was not able to snatch away
Far from the Madding Crowd
and replace it with
The Water Babies.
Sometimes Papa would be here with her, sitting at the Victorian pedestal desk and reading a catalogue of agricultural machinery or the balance sheet of an American railroad, but he never interfered with her choice of books.

The room was empty now. Charlotte went straight to the desk, opened a small, square drawer in one of the pedestals and took out a key.

There were three cupboards against the wall beside the desk. One contained games in boxes and another had cartons of writing paper and envelopes embossed with the Walden crest. The third was locked. Charlotte opened it with the key.

Inside were twenty or thirty books and a pile of old magazines. Charlotte glanced at one of the magazines. It was called
The Pearl.
It did not seem promising. Hastily, she picked out two books at random, without looking at the titles. She closed and locked the cupboard and replaced the key in the desk drawer.

“There!” she said triumphantly.

“Where can we go to look at them?” Belinda hissed.

“Remember the hideaway?”

“Oh! Yes!”

“Why are we whispering?”

They both giggled.

Charlotte went to the door. Suddenly she heard a voice in the hall, calling: “Lady Charlotte … Lady Charlotte …”

“It’s Annie; she’s looking for us,” Charlotte said. “She’s nice, but so dim-witted. We’ll go out the other way, quickly.” She crossed the library and went through the far door into the billiard room, which led in turn to the gun room; but there was someone in the gun room. She listened for a moment.

“It’s my papa,” Belinda whispered, looking scared. “He’s been out with the dogs.”

Fortunately there was a pair of French doors from the billiard room on the west terrace. Charlotte and Belinda crept out and closed the doors quietly behind them. The sun was low and red, casting long shadows across the lawns.

“Now how do we get back in?” Belinda said.

“Over the roofs. Follow me!”

Charlotte ran around the back of the house and through the kitchen garden to the stables. She stuffed the two books into the bodice of her dress and tightened her belt so they should not fall out.

From a corner of the stable yard she could climb, by a series of easy steps, to the roof over the servants’ quarters. First she stood on the lid of a low iron bunker which was used to store logs. From there she hauled herself onto the corrugated tin roof of a lean-to shed where tools were kept. The shed leaned against the washhouse. She stood upright on the corrugated tin and lifted herself onto the slate roof of the washhouse. She turned to look behind: Belinda was following.

Lying facedown on the sloping slates, Charlotte edged along crabwise, holding on with the palms of her hands and the sides of her shoes, until the roof ended up against a wall. Then she crawled up the roof and straddled the ridge.

Belinda caught up with her and said: “Isn’t this dangerous?”

“I’ve been doing it since I was nine years old.”

Above them was the window of an attic bedroom shared by two parlormaids. The window was high in the gable, its top corners almost reaching the roof, which sloped down on either side. Charlotte stood upright and peeped into the room. No one was there. She pulled herself onto the window ledge and stood up.

She leaned to the left, got an arm and a leg over the edge of the roof and hauled herself onto the slates. She turned back and helped Belinda up.

They lay there for a moment, catching their breath. Charlotte remembered being told that Walden Hall had four acres of roof. It was hard to believe until you came up here and realized you could get lost among the ridges and valleys. From this point it was possible to reach any part of the roofs by using the footways, ladders and tunnels provided for the maintenance men who came every spring to clean gutters, paint drainpipes and replace broken tiles.

Charlotte got up. “Come on, the rest is easy,” she said.

There was a ladder to the next roof, then a board footway, then a short flight of wooden steps leading to a small, square door set in a wall. Charlotte unlatched the door and crawled through, and she was in the hideaway.

It was a low, windowless room with a sloping ceiling and a plank floor which would give you splinters if you were not careful. She imagined it had once been used as a storeroom: anyway, it was now quite forgotten. A door at one end led into a closet off the nursery, which had not been used for many years. Charlotte had discovered the hideaway when she was eight or nine and had used it occasionally in the game—which she seemed to have been playing all her life—of escaping from supervision. There were cushions on the floor, candles in jars and a box of matches. On one of the cushions lay a battered and floppy toy dog, which had been hidden there eight years ago after Marya, the governess, had threatened to throw him away. A tiny occasional table bore a cracked vase full of colored pencils and a red leather writing case. Walden Hall was inventoried every few years, and Charlotte could recall Mrs. Braithwaite, the housekeeper, saying that the oddest things went missing.

Belinda crawled in, and Charlotte lit the candles. She took the two books from her bodice and looked at the titles. One was called
Household Medicine
and the other
The Romance of Lust.
The medical book seemed more promising. She sat on a cushion and opened it. Belinda sat beside her, looking guilty. Charlotte felt as if she were about to discover the secret of life.

She leafed through the pages. The book seemed explicit and detailed on rheumatism, broken bones and measles, but when it arrived at childbirth it suddenly became impenetrably vague. There was some mysterious stuff about cramps, waters breaking, and a cord which had to be tied in two places, then cut with scissors which had been dipped in boiling water. This chapter was evidently written for people who already knew a lot about the subject. There was a drawing of a naked woman. Charlotte noticed, but was too embarrassed to tell Belinda, that the woman in the drawing had no hair in a certain place where Charlotte had a great deal. Then there was a diagram of a baby inside a woman’s tummy, but no indication of a passage by which the baby might emerge.

Belinda said: “It must be that the doctor cuts you open.”

“Then what did they do in history, before there were doctors?” Charlotte said. “Anyway, this book’s no good.” She opened the other at random and read aloud the first sentence that came to her eye. “She lowered herself with lascivious slowness until she was completely impaled upon my rigid shaft. Whereupon she commenced her delicious rocking movements to and fro.” Charlotte frowned, and looked at Belinda.

“I wonder what it means?” said Belinda.

Feliks Kschessinsky sat in a railway carriage waiting for the train to pull out of Dover Station. The carriage was cold. He was quite still. It was dark outside, and he could see his own reflection in the window: a tall man with a neat mustache, wearing a black coat and a bowler hat. There was a small suitcase on the rack above his head. He might have been the traveling representative of a Swiss watch manufacturer, except that anyone who looked closely would have seen that the coat was cheap, the suitcase was cardboard and the face was not the face of a man who sold watches.

He was thinking about England. He could remember when, in his youth, he had upheld England’s constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government. The thought amused him, and the flat white face reflected in the window gave him the ghost of a smile. He had since changed his mind about the ideal form of government.

The train moved off, and a few minutes later Feliks was watching the sun rise over the orchards and hop fields of Kent. He never ceased to be astonished at how
pretty
Europe was. When he first saw it he had suffered a profound shock, for like any Russian peasant he had been incapable of imagining that the world could look this way. He had been on a train then, he recalled. He had crossed hundreds of miles of Russia’s thinly populated northwestern provinces, with their stunted trees, their miserable villages buried in snow and their winding mud roads; then, one morning, he had woken up to find himself in Germany. Looking at the neat green fields, the paved roads, the dainty houses in the clean villages and the flower beds on the sunny station platform, he had thought he was in Paradise. Later, in Switzerland, he had sat on the veranda of a small hotel, warmed by the sun yet within sight of snow-covered mountains, drinking coffee and eating a fresh, crusty roll, and he had thought: People here must be so happy.