A Glove Shop In Vienna

The Little Countess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veranda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ agreed my grandmother.

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well then,’ said my grandmother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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