It was a perilous instant, lasting only a breath of time, leaving her heart racing too fast, as Yelena broke the bubble by demanding, ‘Why did you call her that, Papa? Why did you call her Anna Petrovna?’
The Count turned his head away, and Anne felt as though his gaze had had to be ripped away from her. ‘That’s what Miss Peters’ name is in Russian, galubchik. You can work that out for yourself.’
‘But she isn’t Russian,’ Yelena objected with the passionate logic of the child. ‘So why do you call her a Russian name?’
He moved from Anne’s side, and she felt her skin grow cold with his absence. ‘If she is going to live in Russia from now on, she will become a Russian, or nearly so. Why, have you some objection?’
‘I think it’s silly,’ Yelena said firmly.
‘Do you, indeed?’ the Count demanded, reaching out hands to tickle her, and she shrieked and dodged away from him. A lively chase ensued in and out of the bushes which decorated the cliff top. Anne stood where she was, listening to Yelena’s shrieks of excited laughter, and looking down thoughtfully at the lawn below, where the Countess, in rose-pink muslin with a white, Chinese silk shawl embroidered with almond-blossom and butterflies, was sitting on a rug with Natasha beside her. Both seemed to be quite immobile, occupied with nothing more than gazing serenely before them, complete in themselves, needing nothing and no one.
A little later the three climbers went back down the path, the Count going first with Yelena riding him pick-a-back, and turning at each steep place to hold his hand up to Anne. The strong, dry palm and long fingers folded round hers each time with an appalling feeling of familiarity, and their linked hands seemed a channel through which some vital force flowed. Him, and me, and Yelena, her bemused brain murmured to her: man, woman and child. What would it be like to be here with them as of right, to be in reality what she now only appeared to be, the third person of that trinity?
‘I hope you’re hungry, Anna Petrovna,’ the Count said as they regained level ground. ‘Kerim’s picnics are unsurpassable. I hope that exercise will have whet your appetite sufficiently.’
‘That’s not her name, Papa,’ Yelena objected sternly, wriggling to get down. ‘It’s Mademoiselle Peters.’
‘Is it indeed, little piker?’ he said in English. ‘I’ll race you back to Mama. One, two, three!’
How much did he feel? Anne brooded on the question all day, as she watched the children splashing naked in the pool. They all sat around together eating the superb food that Kerim had packed into the baskets: cold roast fowl, and meat pies, and pâtés, and spiced sausage, and cake, and fruit. Did I imagine the whole thing? she asked herself as she sketched the scene, the pool and the waterfall, and the semi-somnolent people: Fräulein Hoffnung, in a thick, woollen shawl, reading; Nyanka knitting with her eyes shut; the Countess twirling her parasol on her shoulder, very slowly, first this way, then that; Natasha sitting on her supine father’s up-bent knees, balancing above him with her hands on his and laughing silently at him.
What must I do about it? she asked herself unhappily as she walked with Yelena in the fringes of the wood, hoping to improve the hour by telling her the English names of flowers and trees, and learning from her, where she knew them, the Russian. The sunny day seemed endless, and the longer it went on, the more bemused she grew, like a sun-dazzled bee on a hot window sill, with no answers for anything, and a growing sense of unreality, so that she began to think she had dreamed everything and was dreaming still.
The servants had got the samovar going at a little distance, and tea was preparing. To eat with it there were little cakes and soft biscuits with raisins in them, and a box of the marmelad they had made yesterday.
‘We had better be going back soon,’ the Countess said eventually, the sun gilding her eyelashes and the soft curls on her forehead. ‘The children will be very tired. It’s so easy to forget the hour at this time of the year.’
‘I was thinking, doushenka,’ the Count said, sipping his tea, ‘that it might be a good opportunity to show Miss Peters the peasant village. She ought to see it once, as part of her education.’
‘It’s much too far, Nikolasha,’ the Countess said unemphatically. ‘All the way back to the house, and then another seven or eight versts.’
‘I don’t mean that one,’ he said. ‘I mean the one here, on the other side of this wood. If I take her in the caliche, we can drive by the short-cut through the wood, and it’s hardly any distance at all. We won’t stay long, and if Limonchik puts his feet down smartly, we’ll be back almost as soon as you.’
‘Just as you please,’ the Countess said indifferently. ‘But who is to drive the barouche?’
‘Morkin, of course, and Stefan can drive the kibitka. Would you like to see a peasant village, Miss Peters?’
‘Very much, sir,’ Anne said, striving to keep her voice even. ‘If it will not inconvenience anyone.’
‘Of course not. Nyanka and Fräulein Hoffnung can take charge of the children, and we’ll be back in time for supper.’
Anne determinedly closed her mind to speculation as she took her place beside the Count in the caliche. It was a tight fit, and he chuckled, ‘What a child’s plaything of a carriage this is! It’s a good job you are so slender. Have you room enough there? Are you able to breathe?’
The sun was much lower, and the air was beginning to cool, and Limonchik, revived after his long sleep in the shade of a tree, trotted briskly with his chocolate-coloured ears pricked, the harness jumping and slapping against his round yellow rump as it bobbed along in front of them. They turned off the track which led home, somewhat to Limonchik’s surprise, and on to a narrow path into the wood, and after driving for about ten minutes between the dark trees, they came out at the other side quite suddenly into the slanting afternoon sunshine. The track widened out, leading gently downhill, and at the foot of the slope was the village. The Count halted the caliche half way down, so that Anne could see it all spread out before her.
It was built in linear fashion along either side of the wide earth track, a series of large, stout-looking log houses, with very steep roofs and long, overhanging eaves. Some had dovecotes built into the roof, and pigeons, gilded by the afternoon light, preened and strutted along the roof-tree, cut out against the sky like fantastic decorations. Some of the huts were built with the living quarters raised up and a low beast-shed taking up the ground floor, while others had separate barns and hen-houses attached.
‘The huts are called izby in Russian,’ the Count said. ‘They may be a little rough, but they are snug and dry, and when one thinks of the way peasants live in some parts of Europe… The two big buildings at the end are the kabak, which you know about, and the bath-house – the bania. Everyone goes there on a Saturday afternoon to bathe and put on clean linen, so that they are all clean and decent for the Sabbath. For the rest of the week, I’m afraid, they do very little washing.’
Each izba had a shade tree or two in front of it, a fuel stack neatly built to shed the rain, and a vegetable patch behind where Anne could see cabbages and what looked like cucumbers growing in neat rows. There were hens scratching about, and small children playing in the dust, a dog or two lying in the sun, and a long-horned, red-and-white cow tethered to a tree outside one house. Half-way down the street was a well with a surrounding wall built of logs, and a wooden crane for raising the water. Most of the activity in the village seemed centred on it, for the women going to and from it with pairs of buckets on long poles across their shoulders were the only adults in view.