The Beginning of Spring
Penelope Fitzgerald
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican chaplain’s wife? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his chief book-keeper? How do people live together, and what happens when, sometimes, they don’t?
The Beginning of Spring
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
Contents
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Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor (#u77e26c77-f31d-5aee-bf02-16f68a6fb8da)
Introduction (#u216cdf35-8f79-5445-ba62-61d3ba735226)
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Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor (#ulink_8d9bf74d-d5d4-5edc-a004-7d391f819f44)
When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.
Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.
She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short-listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.
After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.
Introduction (#ulink_512097af-4ad8-5f33-adea-a5e3a6aa0a46)
For a long time I had a picture of Penelope Fitzgerald pinned above my desk, something I’d cut out of the book pages of a newspaper and that always looked a little crumpled and fragile. It was the photograph that is used everywhere, a head-and-shoulders shot in which she looks out of the frame with a slight and slightly tired smile. The photographer (or so I imagine it) has encouraged her to put a hand against the side of her head in a way that is thought to enliven this sort of picture. She is, I suppose, in her late sixties, it’s hard to tell. She’s wearing a striped blouse buttoned to the neck, a black cardigan, puffy in the sleeves, and there’s a glimpse of something worn under the blouse, something warm, as if the picture was taken in a cold house on a cold day. Did she enjoy having her picture taken? Probably not; I don’t know many writers who do. But something comes over, carried in the tension between the coolly assessing gaze and that half-smile, the lips closed but not tightly. A mouth ready to speak, perhaps to laugh out-loud.
It is foolish, of course, to read things into a picture of someone you do not know, though I did meet her once, an evening in autumn 1995 when she came to Waterstones in Bath to read from her latest (and as it turned out her last) novel, The Blue Flower. I was in my early thirties and most of the way through writing my first novel. I was also, other than the bearded bookseller overseeing the wine, the only male at the event. There were not many of us there. I sat at the end of a row near the back. Penelope Fitzgerald I mistook at first for one of the audience. Then she was suddenly alone on the one chair facing our direction and she smiled, spoke quietly but clearly and seemed interested in us. Was there, she asked, anyone in the audience who was writing their own book? I don’t know if she really expected a hand to go up but for a few seconds I was aware of her gaze moving quickly among us and for the briefest moment she paused as she came to me – a pause that, almost certainly, had no cause other than my gender and relative youthfulness – but I felt seen, and immediately took the moment as evidence of my possessing a secret writerly soul, hidden from most but not from her.
Though grateful to her, and glad to have been there, I did not run home that night with an armful of her books – all signed – and bury myself in them. More than a year passed before I started to read her seriously and have that rush of excitement that comes all too rarely in a reading lifetime. I started with the late novels – Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower – and these, in truth, remain my favourites. I couldn’t think why I had not properly known about her before, had not known how extraordinarily good she is. Why wasn’t everyone talking about her? Why had that reading in Bath not been standing room only?
On the back of my edition of The Beginning of Spring – an edition now looking as loved books do, as though it has been through the spin cycle of the washing machine – there’s a line from a review by Jan Morris that begins simply, ‘How is it done?’ How indeed. The novel shares with the others in that late quartet some quality of the uncanny, an elusiveness, a sense of things being hidden in plain view. The plot, such as it is, could be summarised in a sentence or two; the plot is not the point (it rarely is in the books I like). Things happen, people come and go, shots are fired (just one, in fact) but what’s going on, what it’s all about other than Life itself, life as it slides past mysteriously like scenes on a riverbank, I cannot really say.
The novel takes place in Russia the year before the onset of the Great War and a question likely to rise in the mind of any reader is how on earth can someone living in England in the second half of the 20th century know so much about the minutiae of day to day life in Moscow in 1913? And it’s not simply the knowing, it’s how this knowledge is set down – the when and the where of it. Research of course – what else can it be? Witchcraft? – but research so fantastically thorough, so deeply absorbed, it appears on the page as a seamless continuation of the narrative. Never a moment when we hear the noise of scenery being dragged on stage, never a moment when we doubt her.
In the busy opening pages of the book, Frank Reid, the novel’s hero, having just received the news that his wife has left him, gazes distractedly into the courtyard of his house, ‘where the winter’s stack of firewood was down by now to its last quarter. The neighbours’ oil lamps shone out here and there beyond the back fence. By arrangement with the Moscow Electrical company, Frank had installed his own twenty-five watt lighting.’
It’s just a glance, a pause in the flow of the action about the length of a breath, but it brings with it the image and idea of an entire world, and makes a slim book – under two hundred and fifty pages – feel like a big book, a book perhaps like the classic Russian novels Fitzgerald must have known well. And typing out those few lines I’m reminded of how matter-of-fact her sentences are. Restrained, clipped, unambiguous. There’s no high style in Fitzgerald, no ornamentation. Get in, say it and get out. Don’t stand there asking to be loved. A way of writing perfectly suited to the short story, the novella, the short novel. Plain water in a plain glass – or that’s what it seems until your head starts to spin.
It’s worth saying at this point what should perhaps have been said earlier: Penelope Fitzgerald is often a very funny writer and The Beginning of Spring is often a very funny book. Frank Reid is the straight man around whom the Moscow carnival spins. He is not a highly imaginative man, and though he has grown up in Moscow and speaks the language and has a deep empathetic understanding of the people, a love of them, his manner is that of a sober Edwardian gentleman, intelligent but slightly narrow, a man intent on doing the right thing while frequently being unsure what that might require of him. It is, if you like, the comedic inversion of a Marx Brothers film (that’s Duck Soup rather than Das Kapital). Instead of three crazies causing blissful mayhem in an apparently orderly world, we have an apparently orderly man surrounded by mayhem he will not, ultimately, be able to constrain. But with Fitzgerald, comedy rarely comes without some suggestion of its reverse. In one of the novel’s most brilliantly achieved scenes, Frank looks for someone to help him take care of his three young children (Fitzgerald’s children always have the power to unnerve adults and have in her books no obvious sentimental appeal). He turns to his friend and fellow businessman, Arkady Kuraitin. ‘Arkady had children – how many Frank couldn’t say, because extra ones, perhaps nephews and nieces, perhaps waifs, or even hostages, seemed to come and go.’
Unluckily for Frank, the first occasion his children go to the Kuraitin household coincides with the arrival there of a bear cub sent as a present by one of Kuraitin’s business contacts. When it arrives, his children, in the hope of pleasing their guests, or out of sheer devilment, try to make the animal dance but it won’t. Baulked, they settle on a new game. The bear is fed saucers of vodka and is soon hopelessly drunk:
Losing its perilous balance it held out its paws like small hands and reeled onto the carpet where its claws gave it a better hold, while a gush of urine sprayed across the pattern of red and blue. For some reason one of its ears had turned inside out, showing the lining of paler skin. It rolled over several times while the dark patch spread, then sidled at great speed out of the door. All the children laughed, Dasha and Ben as well, they were all laughing and disgusted together … the bear … lumbered from end to end of the table making havoc among glass and silver, dragging at the bottle of vodka that stood in each place, upending them like ninepins and licking desperately at what was spilled. The service door flew open and the doorman, Sergei, came in, crossed himself, and without a moment’s hesitation snatched up a shovel, opened the doors of the white porcelain stove and scooped out a heap of red hot charcoal which he scattered over the bear. The tablecloth, soaked in spirits, sent up a sheet of flame. The bear screamed, its screams like those of a human child.
There is so much to notice in this scene – its deft choreography (at least five children to manoeuvre), its slide from farce into horror – but we fly through it, longing to see where Fitzgerald will take us next, and it is only when we return for a second go that we can relish a detail such as the bear’s ear having a ‘lining of paler skin’. Earlier in the same scene she writes that the bear’s fur ‘grew at all angles, except along the spine which was neatly parted …’ This is not really ‘research’ any more. It’s being someone who pays close attention to the world, someone on whom nothing is lost.
The Beginning of Spring is a well organised book and I assume Fitzgerald was a well-organised writer, or a writer able to give that impression through relentless redrafting. She said once – and we should always treat with vast caution what writers say about their methods – that before starting a novel she needed to know the first paragraph, the last paragraph, and the title, nothing else. In this instance I’m tempted to take her at her word. The first paragraph, with a kind of theatrical bluntness, sets the action in motion, while the last is a sort of faux-resolution, a moment that seems to offer the possibility of a return to good order, but which in fact promises the exact opposite. As for the title, it has its own poetry and serves, with rich irony – an irony that extends, of course, far beyond the lives of the inhabitants of 22 Lipka Street – as the book’s destination.
‘Life’, a cab driver says to Frank Reid near the opening of this novel, ‘makes its own corrections’. It’s a beautifully enigmatic line (if only cabbies really did come out with such stuff) and one that might stand as the book’s epigraph. For Frank, for his clear-eyed children, for the lovable but not quite harmless Selwyn Crane, for Moscow, for Mother Russia, life will indeed make its own corrections. Fresh confusions will replace the old, men and women will continue to mistake themselves, and in the midst of it there will be the casual glory of a world that doesn’t much care what we do.
Andrew Miller
2013
1 (#ulink_d1cf7f3f-f9c5-5b2b-8ff1-9401c0d7ed61)
In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days. In the March of 1913 Frank Reid’s wife Nellie started out on this journey from 22 Lipka Street in the Khamovniki district, taking the three children with her – that is Dolly, Ben and Annushka. Annushka (or Annie) was two and three-quarters and likely to be an even greater nuisance than the others. However Dunyasha, the nurse who looked after the children at 22 Lipka Street, did not go with them.
Dunyasha must have been in the know, but Frank Reid was not. The first he heard about it, when he came back from the Press to his house, was from a letter. This letter, he was told by the servant Toma, had been brought by a messenger.
‘Where is he now?’ asked Frank, taking the letter in his hand. It was in Nellie’s writing.
‘He’s gone about his business. He belongs to the Guild of Messengers, he’s not allowed to take a rest anywhere.’
Frank walked straight through to the back right hand quarter of the house and into the kitchen, where he found the messenger with his red cap on the table in front of him, drinking tea with the cook and her assistant.
‘Where did you get this letter?’
‘I was called to this house,’ said the messenger, getting to his feet, ‘and given the letter.’
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘Your wife, Elena Karlovna Reid.’
‘This is my house and I live here. Why did she need a messenger?’
The shoe-cleaning boy, known as the Little Cossack, the washerwoman, who was on her regular weekly call, the maid, and Toma had, by now, all come into the kitchen. ‘He was told to deliver it to your office,’ Toma said, ‘but you have come home earlier than usual and anticipated him.’ Frank had been born and brought up in Moscow, and though he was quiet by nature and undemonstrative, he knew that there were times when his life had to be acted out, as though on a stage. He sat down by the window, although at four o’clock it was already dark, and opened the letter in front of them all. In all his married life he couldn’t remember having had more than two or three letters from Nellie. It hadn’t been necessary – they were hardly ever apart, and in any case she talked a good deal. Not so much recently, perhaps.
He read as slowly as he could, but there were a few lines only, to tell him that she was off. Coming back to Moscow was not mentioned, and he concluded that she hadn’t wanted to tell him what was really wrong, particularly as she had written at the bottom of the page that she wasn’t saying this in any way bitterly, and she wanted him to take it in the same spirit. There was also something about keeping well.
They all stood watching him in silence. Not wishing to disappoint them, Frank folded up the page carefully and put it back in the envelope. He looked out into the shadowy courtyard, where the winter’s stack of firewood was down by now, to its last quarter. The neighbours’ oil lamps shone out here and there beyond the back fence. By arrangement with the Moscow Electrical company, Frank had installed his own twenty-five watt lighting.
‘Elena Karlovna has gone away,’ he said, ‘and she has taken the three children with her, how long for I don’t know. She hasn’t told me when she will come back.’
The women began to cry. They must have helped Nellie to pack, and been the recipients of the winter clothes which wouldn’t go into the trunks, but these were real tears, true grief.
The messenger was still standing with his red cap in his hand. ‘Have you been paid?’ Frank asked him. The man said he had not. The guild were paid on a fixed scale, from twenty to forty kopeks, but the question was whether he had earned anything at all. The yardman now came into the kitchen, bringing with him a gust of oil and sawdust and the unmistakable smell of cold. Everything had to be explained to him all over again, although it must have been his business earlier on to help with Nellie’s luggage.
‘Bring some tea to the living room,’ said Frank. He gave the messenger thirty kopeks. ‘I’ll have dinner at six, as usual.’ The thought that the children weren’t there, that Dolly and Ben would not return from school and that there was no Annushka in the house, suffocated him. This morning he had had three children, now he had none. How much he would miss Nellie, and how much he did miss her, he couldn’t tell at the moment. He put that aside, to judge the effect later. They had been considering a visit to England, and with that in mind Frank had cleared the family’s external passports with the local police station and the central police department. Possibly when Nellie signed her passport it had put ideas in her head. But when had Nellie ever allowed ideas to be put into her head?
Reids, when Frank’s father had set up the firm in Moscow in the 1870s, had imported and assembled printing machinery. As a sideline he had acquired a smallish printing business. That business was pretty well all Frank had left. You couldn’t do anything with the assembly plant now, the German and direct import competition was too strong. But Reid’s Press did well enough and he had a reasonably satisfactory sort of man to do the management accounting. Perhaps, though, ‘reasonable’ wasn’t, in connection with Selwyn, quite the right word. He had no wife and appeared to have no grievances, was a follower of Tolstoy, still more so since Tolstoy died, and he wrote poetry in Russian. Frank expected Russian poetry to be about birch trees and snow, and in fact in the last verses Selwyn had read to him birch trees and snow were both mentioned pretty frequently.
Frank went now to the telephone, wound the handle twice and asked for the Reid’s Press number, repeating it several times. Meanwhile Toma appeared with a samovar, the small one, presumably suitable for the master of the house now that he was left on his own. It was just coming to the boil and gave out a faint chatter of expectation.
‘What are we to do with the children’s rooms, sir?’ Toma asked in a low tone.
‘Shut the doors of their rooms and keep them as they are. Where’s Dunyasha?’
Frank knew she must be about the house somewhere but was lying low, like a partridge in a furrow, to avoid blame.
‘Dunyasha wants to speak to you. Now that the children are gone, what is to be her employment?’
‘Tell her to set her mind at rest.’ Frank felt he sounded like a capricious owner of serfs. Surely he’d never given them much reason to worry about their jobs?
The call came through, and Selwyn’s light-toned, musing voice answered in Russian: ‘I hear you.’
‘Look, I didn’t mean to interrupt you this afternoon, but something’s happened which I didn’t quite expect.’
‘You don’t sound altogether yourself, Frank. Tell me, which has come to you, joy or sorrow?’
‘I should call it a bit of a shock. Sorrow, if it’s got to be one of them.’
Toma came out into the hall for a moment, saying something about changes to be made, and then retired to the kitchen. Frank went on: ‘Selwyn, it’s about Nellie. She’s gone back to England, I suppose, and taken the children with her.’
‘All three?’
‘Yes.’
‘But mayn’t it be she wants to see …’ Selwyn hesitated, as though it was hard for him to find words for ordinary human relationships, ‘… might one not want to see one’s mother?’
‘She didn’t say so much as a word. In any case her mother died before I met her.’
‘Her father?’
‘She’s only got her brother left. He lives where he’s always lived, in Norbury.’
‘In Norbury, Frank and an orphan!’
‘Well, I’m an orphan, for that matter, and so are you.’
‘Ah, but I’m fifty-two.’
Selwyn had a reserve of good sense, which appeared when he was at work, and unexpectedly at other times when it might almost have been despaired of. He said, ‘I shan’t take much longer. I’m checking the wage-bill against what the pay clerks are actually handing out. You said you wanted that done more often.’
‘I do want it done more often.’
‘When we’ve finished, why don’t you dine with me, Frank? I don’t like to think of you sitting and staring, it may be, at an empty chair. At my place, and very simply, not in the heartless surroundings of a restaurant.’
‘Thank you, but I won’t do that. I’ll be in tomorrow, though, at the usual time, about eight.’
He put the mouthpiece back on its solid brass hook and began to patrol the house, silent except for the distant rising and falling of voices from the kitchen which, in spite of what sounded like a burst of sobs, had the familiar sound of a successful party. Ramshackle, by Frank’s standards, and roomy, the house consisted of a stone storey and on top of that a wooden one. The vast stove, glazed with white tiles from the Presnya, kept the whole ground floor warm. Outside, towards the bend in the Moscow river, a curious streak of bright lemon-yellow ran across the slate-coloured sky.
Someone was at the front door, and Toma brought in Selwyn Crane. Although Frank saw him almost every day at the Press, he often forgot, until he saw him in a different setting, how unusual, for an English business man, he looked. He was tall and thin – so, for that matter, was Frank, but Selwyn, ascetic, kindly smiling, earnestly questing, not quite sane-looking, seemed to have let himself waste away, from other-worldliness, almost to transparency. With a kind of black frock-coat he wore a pair of English tweed trousers, made up by a Moscow tailor who had cut them rather too short, and a high-necked Russian peasant’s blouse, a tribute to the memory of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. In the warm room, with no ladies present, he threw off the frock-coat and let the coarse material of the blouse sink down in folds around his lean ribs.
‘My dear fellow, here I am. After such news, I couldn’t leave you by yourself.’
‘That’s what I would have preferred, though,’ said Frank. ‘You won’t mind if I speak out. I’d rather have been by myself.’
‘I came on the twenty-four tram,’ said Selwyn. ‘I was fortunate enough to catch one almost at once. Rest assured that I shan’t stay long. I was at my desk when a thought came to me which I knew immediately might be of comfort. I got up immediately and went out to the tram stop. The telephone, Frank, isn’t the right way to convey such things.’
Frank, sitting opposite, put his head in his hands. He felt he could bear anything rather than determined unselfishness. Selwyn, however, seemed to be encouraged.
‘That’s the attitude of a penitent, Frank. No need for that. We are all of us sinners. The thought that came to me didn’t concern guilt, but loss, supposing we think of loss as a form of poverty. Now poverty, or what the world calls poverty, isn’t a matter for regret, but for rejoicing.’
‘No, Selwyn, it’s not,’ said Frank.
‘Lev Nikolaevich tried to give away all his possessions.’
‘That was to make the peasants richer, not to make himself poorer.’ Tolstoy’s Moscow estate was only a mile or so away from Lipka Street. In his will it had been bequeathed to the peasants, who, ever since, had been cutting down the trees to make ready money. They worked even at night, felling the trees by the light of paraffin flares.
Selwyn leant forward, his large hazel eyes intensely focused, alight with tender curiosity and goodwill.
‘Frank, when summer comes, let us go on the tramp together. I know you well, but in the clear air, in the plains and forests, I should surely come to know you better. You have courage, Frank, but I think you have no imagination.’
‘Selwyn, I don’t want my soul read this evening. To be honest, I don’t feel up to it.’
In the hall Toma appeared again to help Selwyn into his sleeveless overcoat of rank sheepskin. Frank repeated that he’d be at the Press at his usual time. As soon as the outer door was shut Toma began to lament that Selwyn Osipych hadn’t taken any tea, or even a glass of seltzer water.
‘He only called in for a moment.’
‘He’s a good man, sir, always on his way from one place to another, searching out want and despair.’
‘Well he didn’t find either of them here,’ said Frank.
‘Perhaps he brought you some news, sir, of your wife.’
‘He might have done if he worked at the railway station, but he doesn’t. She took the Berlin train and that’s all there is to it.’
‘God is not without mercy,’ said Toma vaguely.
‘Toma, when you first came here three years ago, the year Annushka was born, you told me you were an unbeliever.’
Toma’s face relaxed into the creases of leathery goodwill which were a preparation for hours of aimless discussion.
‘Not an unbeliever, sir, a free-thinker. Perhaps you’ve never thought about the difference. As a free-thinker I can believe what I like, when I like. I can commit you, in your sad situation, to the protection of God this evening, even though tomorrow morning I shan’t believe he exists. As an unbeliever I should be obliged not to believe, and that’s an unwarrantable restriction on my thoughts.’
Presently it was discovered that Selwyn’s brief case, really a music case, crammed with papers, and stiffened by the rain of many seasons at many tram-stops, had been left behind on the bench below the coat rack, where the felt boots stood in rows. This had happened a number of times before, and the familiarity of it was a kind of consolation.
‘I’ll take it in with me tomorrow morning,’ said Frank. ‘Don’t let me forget.’
2 (#ulink_12c0a92d-8c0c-55b6-a7e6-124a84163b85)
Up till a few years ago the first sound in the morning in Moscow had been the cows coming out of the side-streets, where they were kept in stalls and backyards, and making their own way among the horse-trams to their meeting-point at the edge of the Khamovniki, where they were taken by the municipal cowman to their pasture, or, in winter, through the darkness, to the suburban stores of hay. Since the tram-lines were electrified, the cows had disappeared. The trams themselves, from five o’clock in the morning onwards, were the first sound, except for the church bells. In February, both were inaudible behind the inner and outer windows, tightly sealed since last October, rendering the house warm and deaf.
Frank got up ready to do what he might have done the evening before, but still hoped wouldn’t be necessary, to send off telegrams. Then, at some point, he had better go to the English chaplaincy, where he could see Cecil Graham, the chaplain, and count on his saying, out of embarrassment, very little. But it would also mean an explanation to Mrs Graham, who in fact, did both the seeing and the saying. Perhaps he might wait a day or so before going to the chaplaincy.
At a quarter to seven the telephone rang, jangling the two copper bells fixed above a small writing desk. It was the stationmaster from the Alexandervokzal. Frank knew him pretty well.
‘Frank Albertovich, there has been an error. You must come to collect at once, or send a responsible and reliable person.’
‘Collect what?’
The stationmaster explained that the three children were deposited at his station, having come back from Mozhaisk, where they had joined the midnight train from Berlin.
‘They have a clothes-basket with them.’
‘But are they alone?’
‘Yes, they’re alone. My wife, however, is looking after them in the refreshment room.’
Frank had his coat on already. He walked some way down Lipka Street to find a sledge with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night’s work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye – with just a dear little touch of drunkenness. He also wanted a patient-looking horse. On the corner he stopped a driver with a small piece of resigned, mottled face showing in the lamplight above his turned-up collar.
‘The Alexander station.’
‘The Brest station,’ said the driver, who evidently refused to give up the old name. On the whole, this was reassuring.
‘When we’re there, you’ll have to wait, but I’m not sure for how long.’
‘Will there be luggage?’
‘Three children and a clothes-basket. I don’t know how much more.’
The horse moved gently through the snow and grit up the Novinskaya and then turned without any guidance down the Presnya. It was accustomed to this route because the hill was steep and so a higher fare could be charged both down and up, but it was not the quickest way to the station.
‘Turn round, brother,’ said Frank, ‘go the other way.’
The driver showed no surprise, but made the turn in the middle of the street, scraping the frozen snow into grey ridges. The horse, disconcerted, braced itself, crossing its legs and moving with the awkwardness of a creature disturbed in its habits. Its guts rumbled and it coughed repeatedly, sounding not like a horse, but a piece of faulty machinery. As they settled into a trot down the Tverskaya, Frank asked the driver whether he had any children himself. His wife and family, the driver said, weren’t with him, but had been left behind in Rovyk, his village, while he did the earning. Yes, but how many children? Two, but that they had both died in Rovyk when the cholera came. His wife hadn’t had the money, or the wits, to buy a certificate to say that they’d died of something else, so they’d had to be buried in the pest cemetery, and no one knew where that was. At this point he laughed inappropriately.
‘Why don’t you send for your wife to keep you company?’
The driver replied that women were only company for each other. They were created for each other, and talked to each other all day. At night they were too tired to be of any use.
‘But we weren’t meant to live alone,’ said Frank.
‘Life makes its own corrections.’
They would have to pull up at the back of the station, in the goods yards. The driver wasn’t one of the smart ones, he hadn’t a permission to wait at the entrance.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ Frank said, giving him his tea money. The words meant nothing except general encouragement, and were taken in that spirit. Snow was lightly falling. The driver began to drag a large square of green oilcloth over the horse, whose head drooped towards the ground, dozing, dreaming, of summer.
The yard was served from the Okruzhnaya Railway which made a circle round the entire city, shuttling the freight from one depot to another. The sleigh had arrived at the same time as a load of small metal holy crosses from one of the factories on the east side. Two men were painstakingly checking off the woven straw boxes of a hundred and a thousand.
Frank walked past the coal tips and the lock-up depositories through the cavernous back entrance of the station. Inside the domes of glass a gray light filtered from a great height. Not many people here, and some of them quite clearly the lost souls who haunt stations and hospitals in the hope of acquiring some purpose of their own in the presence of so much urgent business, other people’s partings, reunions, sickness and death. A few of them were sitting in the corners of the station restaurant watching, without curiosity or resentment, those who could afford to order something at the gleaming rail or the buffet.
The stationmaster was not there. ‘The nachalnik is in his office. This is the refreshment room,’ said the barman. ‘Quite so,’ said Frank ‘but didn’t his wife come in here earlier, with three children?’ – ‘His wife is never here, this is not her place, she is at his house.’ The waitress, tall and strong, elbowed him aside as she lifted the flap of the bar and came out. ‘Three little English, a girl with brown hair and blue eyes, a boy with brown hair and blue eyes, a little girl who was asleep, her eyes were shut.’ – ‘Did they have a clothes-basket?’ ‘Yes, when the little one sat down she put her feet on it, her legs were still too short to reach the ground?’
‘Where are the children now?’
‘They were taken away.’
The waitress folded her arms across her bosom and seemed to be challenging Frank, or accusing him. Her accent was Georgian, and it was folly, he knew, to think of Georgia as a land of roses and sunshine only. But Georgians pride themselves on their rapid changes of mood. Frank said, ‘In any case, you are not to be held responsible. In no sense was it part of your work to keep a check on everyone in the refreshment room.’ Immediately she yielded, becoming anxious to please.
‘They’re not your children, I can tell that. You wouldn’t let them arrive like this in the city without anyone to take charge of them.’ Frank asked where the stationmaster lived. His house was in the Presnya, between the cemetery and the Vlasov tile works.
He recrossed the swept and wheel-crushed snow of the coal yards. The horse was standing, entirely motionless, in the white distance, the driver was coming out of the urinal. He agreed to wait while Frank walked the short distance to the Presnya.
Along a side-road patched with clinker, carriage springs, scrap iron punchings and strips of yellow glazed tin which once advertised Botkin’s Tea and Jeyes’ Fluid, wooden houses stood at intervals. They were raised by two wooden steps above the ground and Frank saw that the entrance, as in the villages, would be at the back. At No. 15, to which he’d been directed, the back door, in fact, was not locked. He shut it behind him, and was faced with two doors.
‘Who is at home?’ he called out.
The right-hand door opened and his daughter Dolly appeared. ‘You should have come earlier,’ she said. ‘Really, we have no business to be here.’
Inside, the table, covered with oilcloth, had been shoved into the right hand corner so that no-one could sit with their back to the ikons and their glimmering lamps. Annushka was asleep on the clothes-basket, Ben was at the table looking at a newspaper, the Gazeta-Kopeika, which dealt entirely with rapes and murders. He looked up, however, and said, ‘When you’re on a main line, the distance between posts is a twentieth of a verst, so if the train does that in two seconds you’re going at ninety versts an hour.’
‘What happened?’ Frank asked. ‘Who’s looking after you? Did you get lost on the way?’
A dark woman in an overall came in, not the stationmaster’s wife, if indeed there was such a person, but, as she explained, a kitchen-mother, called in to help as required.
‘She only gets eighty kopeks a day,’ said Dolly. ‘It’s not much for all this responsibility.’ She put her arm round the woman’s waist and said in caressing Russian, ‘You don’t earn enough, do you, little mother?’
‘I’ll settle up with everybody,’ said Frank ‘and then straight home to Lipka Street. We shall have to wake up Annie, I’m afraid.’
The children’s outdoor clothes were airing above the stove, along with the stationmaster’s second uniform, and a heap of railway blankets. Hauling down the birchwood clothes frame was like a manoeuvre under sail. Annushka woke up while she was being crammed into her fur jacket, and asked whether she was still in Moscow. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Frank.
‘Then I want to go to Muirka’s.’
Muir and Merrilees was the department store, where Annushka scarcely ever went without being given some little extra by the astute floor manager.
‘Not now,’ said Dolly.
‘If it hadn’t been for Annushka,’ said Ben, ‘I think Mother might have taken us on with her. I can’t be sure, but I think she might.’
The whole house began to shake, not gradually, but all at once, from blows on the outer door. The kitchen-mother crossed herself. It was the sledge-driver. ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were strong enough to knock like that,’ Frank told him.
‘How long? How long?’
At the same time the stationmaster, perhaps taking the opportunity to find out what was going on in his house, came in through the front. Probably he was the only person who ever did so. This meant that the whole lot of them – Frank, the children, the kitchen-mother, the stationmaster – had to sit down together for another half-hour. Annie’s coat had to be taken off again. She fell asleep again instantly. Tea, cherry jam from the cupboard which could be opened now that the stationmaster had brought his keys. The kitchen-mother suddenly declared that she couldn’t bear to be parted from her Dolly, her Daryasha, who resembled so much what she had been like herself as a child. The stationmaster, still wearing his official red cap, lamented his difficulties at the Alexandrovna, where he was besieged by foreign travellers. His clocks all kept strict St Petersburg time, 61 minutes in advance of Central European time and two hours one minute in advance of Greenwich. What was their difficulty?
‘You might ask to be transferred to the Donetz Basin,’ suggested Ben.
‘How old is your boy?’
‘Nine,’ said Frank.
‘Tell him that the Alexandervokzal is the top appointment. There is nothing higher. The state railways have nothing higher to offer me. But it’s not his fault, he’s young, and besides that, he’s motherless.’
‘Where’s your wife, for that matter?’ Frank asked. It turned out that, trusting no-one in Moscow, she had gone back to her village to recruit more waitresses for the spring season. They prepared to go, the sleigh-driver pointing out, for the first time, that the horse was old.
‘How old is he exactly?’ asked Ben. ‘There are regulations, you know, about how old they’re allowed to be.’ The sleigh-driver said he was a young devil.
‘They’re all young devils,’ said Frank. ‘Now I want to get them home to Lipka Street.’
They might have been away several years. The whole household, the house itself, seemed to be laughing and crying. From the carnival – that was what it felt like – only Dunyasha was absent. Almost at once she came to Frank for her internal passport, which was necessary if you were going to make a journey of more than fifteen miles, and had to be handed over to the employer. She wanted to leave, she was no longer happy in the house, where criticisms were being made of her. Frank took it out of the drawer in his study where he kept such things locked away. He felt like a man with a half-healed wound who would do better to leave it alone, for fear of making bad worse. Nellie had sent no message to him by the children, not a word, and he saw it would be best not to think about this, or he might not be able to stand it. His father had always held that the human mind is indefinitely elastic, and that by the very nature of things we were never called upon to undertake more than we could bear. Frank had always felt doubtful about this. During the past winter one of the machine men from the Press had gone by night to a spot a little way out of the Windau station, and lain down on the tracks. This was because his wife had brought her lover to live in their house. But the height of the train’s wheelbase meant that it passed right over him, leaving him unhurt, like a drunken peasant. After four trains had passed he got up and took the tram back to his home, and had worked regularly ever since. This left the question of endurance open.
While the rejoicing went on and spread to the yard and, apparently to the yard dog and to the hens, locked up for the winter, Dolly came in wearing her brown uniform from the Ekaterynskaya Gymnasium, and asked him to help her with her homework, since after all, she had to be at school by nine o’clock. She spread out her atlas, ruler, and geography exercise book.
‘We’re doing the British Isles. We have to mark in the industrial areas and the districts largely given over to keeping sheep.’
‘Did you take those with you on the train?’ asked Frank.
‘Yes. I thought they might come in useful, even if I didn’t ever get back to the Ekaterynskaya.’
‘It was lonely in the house while you were away, somewhat lonely, anyway.’
‘We weren’t away for very long.’
‘Long enough for me to see what it was going to be like.’
Dolly asked: ‘Didn’t you know what mother was doing?’
‘To tell you the truth, Dolly, no, I didn’t.’
‘I thought not,’ she added rapidly. ‘It was hard on her. After all, she’d never had to look after us before, Dunyasha did everything. Annushka wouldn’t sit still. Mother asked the attendant for some valerian drops, to calm her down, but he hadn’t any. We should have brought some with us, of course, but I didn’t do the packing. You shouldn’t have expected her to manage by herself. She had to send us back, we weren’t a comfort to her. I think you asked too much of her.’
‘I don’t agree, Dolly. I know my own mind, but so does your mother.’
3 (#ulink_787ce651-178e-5772-aaac-27a256732e13)
Frank’s father, Albert Reid, had looked ahead – not quite far enough, perhaps, but to see too clearly in Russia is a mistake, leading to loss of confidence. He was aware that the time was coming when British investors, ironmasters, mill-owners, boiler-makers, engineers, race-horse trainers and governesses would no longer be welcome. Either the Russians would take everything into their own hands or the Germans would, but he thought that the good times would last a while yet. All that had really been needed, when he started out in the 1870s, was a certificate to say that the articles of association of your company were in accordance with British law and another form in St Petersburg to say that your enterprise was advantageous to the interests of the Russian Empire. Besides that, though, you had to have a good digestion, a good head for drink, particularly spirits, a good circulation and an instinct for how much in the way of bribes would be appropriate for the uniformed and for the political police, the clerks from the Ministry of Direct Import, Commerce and Industry, and the technical and sanitary inspectors, to get anything at all. These bribes, too, must be called gifts, and with that word you began your study of the Russian language. All the other formalities – sending the balance sheets, for example, to the central government and the local Court of Exchequer – were just paperwork, which he’d done himself, with his wife’s help, by lamplight, in the old wooden house on the works site in the Rogoznkaya. Like the Russian nobility and the Russian merchants, foreign businesses were given ranks, according to their capital and the amount of fuel (soft coal, birch-bark, anthracite, oil) that their factory consumed. Reid’s (Printing Machinery) was of moderate rank. Frank’s father and mother were the only partners. Both of them had come from long families, that was why Bert had been sent out in the first place to make a living in Russia, but they only had the one son. Frank was sent over to England once or twice as a boy, to stay with his relatives in Salford. He enjoyed himself in Salford because, given half a chance, he enjoyed himself anywhere. When he was eighteen he went back for much longer, to train in mechanical engineering and printing, first at Loughborough Polytechnic, then for his apprenticeship with Croppers of Nottingham.
It was while he was at Croppers, doing quite reasonably well, and playing football for the first time in his life, that his father wrote to him to say that, as a kind of subsidiary to the business, he was going to start his own printing press, quite near the centre of Moscow, in Seraphim Street. There was nothing legal at the moment against foreigners buying property, as long as it wasn’t in Turkestan or the Caucasus or anywhere where they were likely to strike oil, and he thought the place could be got fairly cheap. He’d start with hand presses only, jobbing machines, and see how they went along. It was an old warehouse, this place, and there was room to expand. Even though the deal wasn’t concluded yet, the men were already calling it Reidka’s – dear little Reids.
There was a photograph enclosed of Seraphim Street, looking like most of Moscow’s side-streets, almost past repair, blank, narrow, patched and peeling, with children crowded around a horse and cart selling something unidentifiable. Above was a white sky with vast, even whiter clouds. The shop-signs made Frank feel homesick. Perlov’s tea-bricks, Kapral cigarettes 20 for 5 kopeks, and a kabak with a name that looked like Markel’s Bar.
His father usually gave the date Russian style, thirteen days earlier than the date in Nottingham, so that there was some adjustment to be done, but it must have been in March that year that there was mention of Selwyn Crane, who’d been taken on, not at the works, but to do the accounting at Reidka’s. A few weeks later it seemed that Crane was becoming very religious. ‘I’ve no objection to that, though on the whole I think religion is of more use to a woman than a man, as it leads to content with one’s lot.’ In the next letter, Bert doubted whether ‘religious’ was quite the right word. ‘Spiritual’ would be better. ‘Crane has now proclaimed himself a vegetarian, which I do not think is enjoined anywhere in the Bible, and he tells me he’s several times been in quite lengthy conversations with Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy is a very great man, Frank,’ he continued. ‘Fortunately, though, one doesn’t have to judge of great men by the oddities of their disciples. The truth is, though, that Crane has a knack with figures and has been up to now a pretty fair man of business – he came to me from the Anglo-Russian Bank. I asked him whether it was not rather surprising that he should have saved a reasonable sum of money, as I fancy he has done – he is not a married man – and continues to live off the said sum and the salary I pay him, while giving it out as his opinion that buying or selling of any kind or description is a sin against mankind. It’s rather, he said, that wealth shouldn’t be used for the benefit of individuals. Then, you consider me a wrong doer, Crane, I said, determined to treat the whole matter in a spirit of joke, the next thing will be that you’ll refuse to shake me, your employer, by the hand. I thought I’d caught him there, but what he did was to kiss me, first on one cheek and then on the other – a Russ habit, as you well know, but this was on the shop floor, Frank, not even in the counting house.’
His father, however, had no hesitation about the chief compositor he’d engaged, a capital fellow, a very steady worker, it would take a revolution to dislodge Yacob Tvyordov. Frank thought, when the time comes, I’ll see whether I want these people or not. I’ll make up my own mind when it comes to it.
In 1900 he transferred himself to Hoe’s of Norbury to get experience with more up-to-date machines. It was in Norbury that he met Nellie Cooper. She lived with her brother Charles, who was a solicitor’s clerk, and his wife Grace, at 62 Longfellow Road. It was a nice, substantial house, two entrance doors, the inner one with a stained glass panel, good new glass in art shades from Lowndes and Drury, representing the Delectable Mountains from the Pilgrim’s Progress, dining room and kitchen downstairs in the basement, sitting room opening on to a flight of green-painted iron steps which led into the garden, a bit of fencing to screen off the vegetables, three bedrooms on the first floor, one of them spare as Charles and Grace didn’t have any children. Frank had a room in a boarding house where, the landlady, probably unintentionally, as it seemed to him, was gradually starving him to death. He joined (as he had done in Manchester and Nottingham) the local choral society. At refreshment time (they were rehearsing, perhaps overrehearsing, Hiawatha) he had to excuse himself to Nellie, who was helping to serve out, for taking more than one fish paste roll. Nellie asked him what his job was, whether he had to heave things about in the open air and couldn’t help getting up an appetite. Then, without listening very attentively to his answer, she said she had been teaching for four years and was due to take her qualifying exam for the certificate.
‘I’m twenty-six,’ she added, as though it might as well be said now as later.
‘Do you like teaching?’
‘Not all that much.’
‘You oughtn’t to go on with it then. You oughtn’t to try for the certificate. You ought to train to do what you want to do, even if it’s sweeping the streets.’
Nellie laughed. ‘I’d like to see my brother’s face.’
‘Does he worry about you?’
‘He’s doing all right, anyway. I suppose there’s no real need for me to work at all.’
‘I don’t know why you do it, then.’
‘It gets me out of the house, so I’m not under my sister-in-law’s feet and she doesn’t have to see me all day.’
‘Did she say that to you, Miss Cooper?’
‘No, she wouldn’t say anything like that. She’s a sufferer.’
Frank was struck by her way of looking at things. There was a tartness about it, a sharp flavour, not of ill-nature, but of disapproval of life’s compromises, including her own. The introduction meant that he was entitled to see her home from the draughty Jubilee Hall where the rehearsals had been called. Nellie had to help put away the Choral Society’s crockery. Then she came back in her coat, with her shoes in a water-proof bag. Frank, to establish his claim, took the bag from her. He always did everything quickly and neatly, without making a business of it.
‘If we were in Moscow now it would still be all frozen up,’ he said, going down the steps beside her.
‘I know,’ said Nellie. ‘But when you do things at school in geography you know them, but you don’t believe them.’
‘No, you have to see them for yourself. It makes you want to do that.’
‘Were you at school in Russia, then?’
‘Yes, I was,’ he said.
‘Well, if you’d read about Norbury while you were there, tell me honestly, would you have wanted to come and see it?’
‘I would,’ Frank answered, ‘if I had known I was going to be in such good company.’
She ignored this, but Frank felt satisfied. He asked her what she thought of Hiawatha. She told him that the composer lived in Croydon, not so far away, and this was supposed to be his favourite among all his pieces. ‘He christened his son Hiawatha, you know.’
‘But what’s your opinion of the music, Miss Cooper?’
‘To be honest, I don’t care so very much for music. I can hold a part all right, but only as long as I’m with a lot of others. I don’t know how I got through my sight-singing test when I came to join the society. I’ve often wondered about that. Dr Alden, that was the old choirmaster, didn’t hardly seem to listen. Perhaps he’d been drinking.’
‘Well, but there you are again. Why do you come to rehearsals, if you don’t care about them?’
It was the same reason – to get out of the house, to get out of the way of her sister-in-law, who, when Frank met her, seemed harmless enough, but harmlessness, as he knew, could be a very hard thing to bear. When he went to Longfellow Road to call for Nellie, Grace Cooper would fuss over him and ask him whether his landlady was treating him right. She told him to leave his shaving mirror in the bed during the day and if by the evening it was clouded over that meant that the bed was damp, and he had a right to complain about it at the Town Hall. Better take the mirror along with him, to show to the authorities. Frank got the notion that Grace always talked about damp.
Several times he was asked to stay to supper, and they sang hymns afterwards at the piano. Frank realized then that Nellie had told the truth about her voice, and he admired her for telling the truth.
The trouble was that he was still only training. His lodgings and laundry cost him twelve shillings and five-pence a week, and by Saturday he was hard up. ‘I know how you’re placed,’ said Nellie, ‘I’ll pay my share.’
‘I’m not sure I could agree to that,’ Frank said.
‘You’re afraid I’ll take out my purse and lay it on the table and rattle it about, getting out the money. Don’t get that idea into your head. Just as we go out, before we ever get out of the house, I’ll give you something for my half. That way there can’t be any awkwardness. It’s called Dutch treat, you know. What’s that in Russian?’
There was no Russian word for it. ‘Students, perhaps,’ said Frank, ‘I’ve seen them empty out their pockets at the beginning of the evening and put all the money they’ve got in the middle of the table.’
‘That’s not Dutch treat,’ said Nellie.
Once he had his training certificates, he had reasonably good prospects to lay before her. He felt that he could assume that she wouldn’t be too distressed at leaving her family and friends, still less at getting out of Norbury. If he wanted to go ahead with it, he ought to speak to Charlie, explaining in more detail about the firm and his prospects. He did want to go ahead with it, and after fixing things up with Nellie, he did speak to Charlie. No worry about a ring, because he had brought with him a ring belonging to his mother which his father had bought for her at Ovchinikof’s in Moscow. It was a Russian triple knot, in three different colours of gold, made so that the three circlets were separate but could never be taken apart. They slid and shone together on Nellie’s capable finger. At the choral society it was thought pretty, but foreign-looking. ‘When your mother gave it you, she must have expected you to find someone,’ said Nellie. ‘Was she ill?’
‘I don’t think so, she certainly didn’t say so?’
‘What were the girls like in Nottingham?’
‘I can’t remember. Very moderate, I think.’
‘I daresay they fancied you because you were tall?’
‘They might have done.’
‘Did you fall in love with any of them when you were in Manchester, or when you were in Nottingham, and offer them this ring, and get turned down?’
‘No Nellie, I didn’t.’ They were walking in Norbury Park. The air and the trodden earth and grass breathed out moisture. Grace had warned them that they would find it very damp.
‘You might have had to take the ring back to Moscow, then, and tell your mother it was no go.’ They sat down on a bench, from which an elderly man tactfully got up as they approached.
‘Look here Frank, do you know a lot about women?’ He was undaunted.
‘I think you’ll find I know quite enough for the purpose, Nellie.’
There was no need to wait a long time for the wedding. Frank’s parents had to arrange to come from Moscow, and it was never easy for them to leave the business, but all his relatives from Salford were singlemindedly devoted to attendance at weddings and funerals, and would let nothing stand in their way. The preparations made Frank resolve never, until he came to be buried, to let himself become an object of attention at any kind of religious ceremony again. He knew, however, that he ought not to grumble. Both Charlie and Grace, who were going, after all, to considerable expense, told him that it would be Nellie’s day. He felt deeply tender towards her because of this and because of her practical good sense and the number of lists she was making and the letters which were answered and crossed off yet another list. He was startled when she said: ‘I’m doing all this as it should be done, because I owe it to both of us. But I’m not going to be got the better of by Norbury.’
‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Frank said. ‘Which of them would?’
‘You don’t think I’m marrying you, Frank Reid, just to get out of Norbury?’
‘I don’t put myself as low as that,’ he said, ‘or you either.’
‘I don’t just mean the people here,’ she went on earnestly, ‘I mean all the people we’ve invited, those cousins of yours from Salford, and those aunts.’
‘They’re not so bad.’
‘People always say that about their aunts,’ said Nellie. ‘The wedding will bring out the worst in them, you’ll see. I’m not a dreamer. I have to look at things quite squarely, as they really are. That’s one of the things you like about me. I know it is.’
She had no doubts. Even her curling hair seemed to spring up from her forehead with determination. Frank kissed her, but not in such a way as to interrupt her. She asked him whether he’d given any thought as to what the wedding would be like.
‘It’s best to take things as they come,’ he said.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what it’s going to be like. I’m not talking about the church service. I mean afterwards, when we’re back here. We’re going to have ham and tongue, cucumber sandwiches, vanilla shape and honeycomb mould, nuts, port wine and Madeira. The port wine will be a bit much for Charlie and after a bit it’ll be too much for the lot of them, and they’ll all take some, because teetotallers always say that port doesn’t count, and the older ones, they’ll draw together a bit and lower their voices and say to each other, she doesn’t know what she’s in for. She’s twenty-six and he’s the first boy she’s ever been out with seriously. He’s a decent sort, you can see that, so they won’t have been up to anything yet, and she hasn’t any idea what she’s in for.’
‘I was hoping they’d have confidence in me,’ said Frank, ‘they’ve no reason not to.’
‘Oh, they won’t have anything against you personally. But they have to make out that it’s a tremendous thing – the only thing that ever happens to a woman, really, bar having children, and change of life, and dying. That’s how they see things in Norbury. There’s a certain expression they have, I’ve noticed it so often. They’ll say that if they’d known what it was going to be like nothing would have dragged them to the altar.’
Frank felt rather at a loss. He kissed her again and said, ‘Don’t be discouraged.’ She remained rigid.
‘What does it matter what all these people think, Nellie? If you’re really right, we ought to pity them.’
Nellie shook her head like a terrier.
‘I’m not going to be got the better of. They may not know it, they won’t know it, but I’m not going to.’
It was a brilliant day, a moment when a Norbury’s dampness justified itself in bright green grass, clipped green hedges, alert sparrows, stained glass washed to the brilliance of jewels, barometers waiting to be tapped. They were alone in the house. Nellie said: ‘Would you like to see my things? I mean the things I’m going to wear for the wedding. Not the dress, they’ll bring that later. It’s not lucky to have it in the house for too long.’
‘Yes, of course I would, if you feel like showing them to me.’
‘Do you believe in luck?’
‘You’ve asked me that before, Nellie. I told you, I used to believe it was for other people.’
They went up past the half-landing and into a bedroom almost entirely filled by the wardrobe and various pieces of furniture which looked as though they’d come to rest there from other rooms in the house. The morning sunlight, streaming through the one window caught the wardrobe’s bright bevelled glass. On the white bed some white draper’s goods were laid out, turning out to be a petticoat, a chemise, drawers and corsets. These last Nellie picked up and threw on the ground.
‘I’m not wearing these. I’ve given up wearing them. From now on I’m going to go unbraced, like Arts and Crafts women.’
‘Well, it’s always beaten me how women can stand them,’ said Frank.
‘Don’t think I’m going to pay for them, though. They can go back to Gage’s.’
‘Why not?’
‘They make ridges on your flesh, you know, even with a patent fastener. You’ll find I don’t have any ridges.’
She began to undress. ‘I’m twenty-six.’
‘You keep telling me that, Nellie.’
‘All the same, even at my age, when I’ve got these things off I’m not sure what to do next.’
It was a moment’s loss of confidence, which Frank knew he mustn’t allow. Under his hands her solid partly naked body was damp with effort. She was recklessly dragging off something or other whose fastenings seemed to defy her. Her voice was muffled. ‘Go on Frank. I’m not going to let them stand about knowing more than I do. I won’t be got the better of.’
4 (#ulink_84230919-d99e-538c-99e5-8a0408f48356)
The young Reids did not go straight to Moscow. One of the things that Frank’s father had told him at the Norbury wedding was that he’d better have a look at what they were doing in Germany, and so for three years he worked with Hirschfeld’s printing machinery in Frankfurt. Dolly was born there, and so was Ben. Then came the miscarriage. It was summertime, the hot, landlocked German summer. They were living in the suburbs, and in those days there were still barrel organs playing in the streets. From the pavement below their room an organ repeated the same tune Schön wie ein engel. Again and again it tore into the sentimental music with steel teeth. Nellie lay flat on her back, losing blood, hoping to save the baby. She told Frank to throw some money out of the window to the organ-man to bring them luck, but they had no luck that day.
In the winter of 1905 Bert Reid died in Moscow – not in the uprisings, although that was a year of strikes and violence, almost a revolution against the Russian war with Japan. The German and English papers showed pictures of the streets barricaded with wrecked trams. The electricity had been cut off and the snowy, tomb-like barricades were lit by kerosene flares. Five batteries of artillery arrived to shell the factories in the Presnya and the Rogoznkaya where the men held out. Then they pumped in water through the gaps with equipment borrowed from Moscow’s fire services. The water turned to ice on impact. When the strikers came out to try to escape back to their villages, the soldiers overturned their sledges and scattered their possessions in the snow. The assembly plant was taken over and the Reids moved to the nearest hotel, Sovastyanov’s. There, after a week during which he had no occupation, since the army wouldn’t let him on to his own site, Bert complained of heart pains. These pains were the symptoms of bacterial endocarditis. Pieces of inflamed tissue were making their way from the walls of the heart into the bloodstream. The Greek doctor who was called in – their usual doctor, a German, had left for Berlin when the light and water in his surgery was cut off – had nothing to prescribe except rest and valerian drops and warm water. He told Mrs Reid that in his opinion her husband’s heart had given way from grief at the sad happenings in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Dr Weiss, if he had been there, though he might have diagnosed more accurately, would not have been able to save Bert.
Mrs Reid, perhaps, really did die of grief. She collapsed in the study of the Anglican chaplaincy, where she had gone to see about the funeral arrangements. Summoned by cables, Frank arrived at the Alexander station with Nellie and the two children, who wanted to start playing immediately in the deep snow. He remembered – though she had left no will and indeed had nothing of her own – that she had expressed a wish to be buried in Salford. All that had to be put in hand, and he had to find somewhere to live. The wooden family house on the site had been half burned down and then swamped with water. Without much difficulty he took a lease on 22 Lipka Street. Some of the men got together to help him rescue what furniture they could. The piano, oddly enough, his mother’s Bechstein, came out undamaged from the ordeal by fire and ice. Everything else he got from Muir and Merrilees, which had remained open during what the manager called the disturbances, its dark blue flag with the golden M&M flying frozen above the shop’s façade.
It wasn’t a time for risk-taking, because Frank was determined that Nellie shouldn’t have to worry about money. A look through the books showed that the import and assembly business would have to be wound down, or better still, sold as it stood. That was a pity, because Reid’s main suppliers, Hoe’s of the Borough Road in south east London, were as reliable as the day and the night. The trouble seemed to have been two things which Frank hadn’t known anything about. In the first place, although his father had got his letters, giving him some idea of the German competition, he hadn’t acted on the advice, or had acted on it eccentrically. He’d set his heart on expansion, and, worst still, become fascinated by the idea of the Mammoth Press which Hoe’s were putting into production for Lloyds Weekly News at a cost of eighteen thousand pounds. Another Mammoth, not for any definite customer, but most unwisely ordered on spec, had been delivered to the site, and was lying prone under tarpaulin, colossal, unassembled, unpaid for, looking, as it lay under many inches of snow against the pale green sky, like an ominous relic of the past rather than the machinery of the future. By Bert Reid’s bedside when he died, among the letters he was drafting to the Ministry of Interior to plead for those of his people, his ‘hands’, who had been arrested, was an illustrated booklet from Hoe’s describing, in heroic terms, the Mammoth. Now, with the sheds, the plant and the site itself, it must find, even in its dismembered state, a purchaser, probably one of the merchants of the second grade, with whose sons Frank had gone to school. Once it was gone, he could strike a balance, and concentrate on Reidka’s.
Frank’s affection for Moscow came over him at odd and inappropriate times and in undistinguished places. Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore-houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarists straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers’ dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage-patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village.
Nellie, too, very much preferred Moscow to Germany. She enjoyed putting 22 Lipka Street in order. The village habits of the great manufacturing city didn’t disconcert her at all. She was at home there, it seemed to Frank. This threw a new light on her hostility to Norbury, which had been neither town nor country.
5 (#ulink_56df6910-9135-5e5c-8972-d26dcec4f398)
They had had to move to Moscow in the dead of winter, and as they came out of the Alexander station the whole Tverskaya seemed to be drifting with smoke and steam, everyone, men and women alike, rolling and smoking their own cigarettes, their breath condensing heavily in the frost, like cattle in a pen. Selwyn had met them, anxious for their welfare and unmistakeably grieving, to be forgiven everything for his sincerity. What had to be forgiven was his inability to help in any way with the children, the porters and the luggage, not so much through incompetence as inability to grasp the kind of thing that might be needed. Frank had met him before on short trips to see his parents in Moscow, Nellie not at all. ‘How do you do, Mr Crane. This is Dolly, our eldest. This is Ben.’ Selwyn bent down towards them, wrapped as they were like bundles against the cold.
‘Both of them bereaved!’
‘They’ve never met their grandparents, so they’re hardly likely to miss them,’ said Nellie. ‘Perhaps you’d help Frank to check the items.’
At that first meeting, she told Frank, she’d thought that Mr Crane was only elevenpence in the shilling. But Selwyn, though he would probably have been at a loss in Frankfurt, managed well enough in Moscow. He didn’t oppose his will to the powerful slow-moving muddle around him. What he did not like, or could not change, he guilelessly avoided. The current of history carried him gently with it.
Before his first visit to Reidka’s Frank asked Selwyn to sit down with him and give him an accurate idea of what he’d find when he got there. Selwyn began, as his nature was, with reassurance. ‘Of course, your chief compositor will be there, Yacob Tvyordov will be there, as always.’
‘What happened to him last year? Wasn’t he out on strike with the others?’
‘He is the Union Treasurer, and he was out for six days. I believe those are the only six days he’s ever missed.’
‘Where did my father find him?’
‘He came from the Flying Swan Press when it closed down. They only did hand-printing, of course.’
‘And Tvyordov?’
‘Only hand-printing.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve got his particulars, I suppose. Some people are ageless, Frank.’
‘What about the overseer?’
Selwyn never liked to speak ill of another human being. He hesitated.
‘Korobyev. Well, it’s his business, of course, to collect the fines for mistakes, spoiled work, laziness, drunkenness, absence and so on. An unenviable task, Frank! But there it is, the Printer’s Union agreed to the scale of fines, and we keep to the agreed scales. But since your father died, I fear Korobyev may have instituted a collection of his own whenever he feels the need for ready money.’
‘Who does he collect from?’
‘Well, perhaps from anyone who is not quite strong enough to object. Perhaps from Agafya, our tea-woman, perhaps from Anyuta, our cleaning-woman. Perhaps a few kopeks from the errand boys.’
‘Have you spoken to him about it?’
‘Your father may have told you that I don’t believe in direct resistance to evil. The only way is to put it to shame, to put it to flight, by good example.’
Frank thanked him, went to the press, shook hands with the entire staff, and called a general meeting to discuss the conduct of the overseer. This meant the three hand-compositors and their two apprentices, the pressmen, the readers, the three machine-men, the putting-on and taking-off boys, the gatherers, the folders, the deliverers, the storekeeper, the warehouseman who also entered the work in the account books and checked deliveries, the paper-wetting boys, the errand-boys, the doorman and Agafya and her assistant Anyuta. There was only one place where there was room to address them all at the same time and that was the shed which served both as the paper warehouse and the tea-kitchen. Once they were assembled the men complained that the boys, some of whom were only just fourteen, were incompetent to judge the question, and they were sent home. This cleared a good deal of space. Meantime Korobyev had not arrived, he had not been in at all that day, and was feeling faint.
‘Well, we’ll proceed without him,’ said Frank, taking up his stand on the tea-counter. ‘I’m speaking to you, not as a stranger, because as you know, I’m a child of Moscow, but as a stranger to this press which was my father’s last enterprise.’ Some crossed themselves. ‘Because he died, I have come back to you. I think I may say that during my time in England and Germany I’ve learnt the business pretty thoroughly. Tonight we have to decide between ourselves what is meant at Reid’s Press by fair dealing.’
It was the shortest meeting that Frank had ever attended. It appeared that there was no one in the room who did not want to get rid of their overseer. Korobyev did not insist on working out his time, or accept Frank’s invitation to explain himself. All he asked for was his internal passport, which allowed him to travel more than fifteen miles from his place of birth, and which an employer, if he thought fit, could refuse to give back. Frank gave it back. As Korobyev left the building, the compositors hammered him out by knocking their sticks against their cases. The battering sound seemed to excite itself and to work itself into a metallic frenzy, splintering the ears. The din stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and outside, at the tram-stop, Korobyev could be heard shouting: ‘Listen to me! Let everyone hear what has been done to the father of a family!’
Suddenly Agafya, her head covered with a white handkerchief, went down on her knees before Frank and implored him to have mercy on Korobyev.
‘That’s all rubbish, Agafya. He was taking forty-seven kopeks a week off your wages.’
‘I’m on my knees to you, Frank Albertovich, sir.’
‘Yes, I see you.’
‘You heard him say he’s the father of a family.’
‘It’s a disgrace if he is,’ said Frank. ‘He’s not married.’
Agafya, satisfied with the dramatic effect she had made, returned, like an old sentry to his post, to her samovars and to her campaign, in which no settlement seemed possible, with the storekeeper, over the issue of tea. The tea came, not in leaf form, but in tablets. These were charged as Consumables, but Frank thought they might just as well go down under Maintenance Materials. Forbidden to smoke, everyone at the Press was impelled to drink black tea not only at the stated hours, but if they could, all day.
From that morning Frank took on the job of overseer himself, or you might say there was no overseer at Reidka’s, only a manager who worked rather harder than most. Even so, the change would not have been possible without Tvyordov.
This man was the only compositor to be employed year in year out, on a weekly wage. The other three were on piece work. He had a broad, placid face, and the back of his head, covered with short greying stubble, gave the same reassuring impression as the front. Work started at Reidka’s at seven, and at one minute to seven he was in the composing room. It took him a minute exactly to get his setting rule, bodkin, composing-stick and galley out of the locked cupboard where they were kept. These were his own, and he lent them to no one. Tvyordov did not take any tea at this time. He put on a clean white apron which hung from a hook by the side of his frame, and a pair of slippers which he brought with him in a leather bag. Then he stepped into his frame and put his German silver watch on the lower bar of the upper case into a clip of his own construction, which fitted it exactly. The watch had a second hand, or sweep. Tvyordov spent no time in distributing the type from the reserves of the thirty-five letters and fifteen punctuation marks, that had always been done the night before, but started straight away on his copy, memorized the first few phrases, filled his composing stick, adjusted the spaces and took a sounding from his watch to see how long this had taken and to set his standard for the day. This was not an absolute measure. It depended on the weather, the copy, the proportion of foreign words, but never on Tvyordov himself. If at any point later on in the day he found that he had pushed down his last space a few seconds too early he would wait, motionless and untroubled, then shift his setting rule down at the watch’s precise tick. When the stick was lifted into the galley he grasped the letters lightly as though they were a solid piece of metal. This was difficult, the apprentices trying it were often reduced to tears, but during the past four hundred years no easier way had apparently been discovered of doing it. In this way he could set one thousand five hundred letters and spaces in an hour.
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