‘Will you not enjoy them? Dinners and balls are pleasant things,’ Anne said.
‘I hope only to survive. But you will enjoy them, I hope.’
‘When is she coming?’ Anne asked.
‘Next week, she and Sergei – and the Danilovs the day after, to stay until we leave for Petersburg. No more quiet rides alone,’ said the Countess sadly. ‘We shall have the house full for the rest of the summer. Oh, how I dislike to have lots of people around me. I hate company and crowds.’
How differently we feel, Anne thought. And how could the Count, that conversable, sociable man, have chosen such a retiring woman for his mate? Despite the kindness and the confidences, she still could not feel she liked the Countess, although she could not refuse the intimacy offered.
‘The rain seems to have stopped,’ she said, cocking a head to listen. ‘I think perhaps we might be on our way.’ She stood up, feeling the now lukewarm water rushing down to the toes of her boots, and her heavy skirts clutching damply at her legs. But at least their jackets were almost dry. They put them on, and thanked the peasant family for their hospitality, and received shy smiles from the woman, though the old man looked to Anne as though he would have liked a more tangible sort of gratitude.
‘When we get home,’ Anne added, following her mistress to the door, ‘perhaps we can make a list of the things that have to be done. I shall be very glad to help you in any way I can.’ The Countess gave her a glance of burning gratitude. If I cannot love her, Anne thought, I can at least be kind to her: I must do no less. But how much I would have preferred it if she had never existed, poor creature.
Chapter Nine
If Anne thought the Countess was exaggerating about the amount of work involved in preparing for a visit by the Countess Dowager, she soon learned her mistake. Her experience so far of Russian servants was that they were an easy-going tribe, who liked to move about their tasks in a leisurely fashion, and were more often than not to be found lounging against something and chatting, much preferring to discuss work than actually to do it.
The very mention of Vera Borisovna changed all that, and sent them scurrying in all directions, bumping into each other, dropping things, and exploding into vehement arguments about who was impeding whom, and whose fault it would be if things weren’t ready. It seemed that the whole house had to be scoured and polished from top to bottom before the Dowager stepped over the threshold. Carpets were beaten, floors waxed, windows cleaned inside and out, every piece of china and porcelain washed and dried by two senior servants who set Anne’s teeth on edge by their inability to converse while they worked without waving their hands.
Every lustre in the great rooms had to be dismantled, and the individual crystal drops washed in vinegar and polished with soft cloths before being put together again and supplied with fresh candles. Silver, which had languished unnoticed and dull since the last formal dinner, was polished to midday brightness, and Grigorovitch justified Anne’s first assumption about his job by appearing with ladder and pots to touch up the paintwork inside the house wherever it was damaged, finger-marked or dingy.
The great dining-room was opened up, and the largest of the state bedchambers, which Vera Borisovna would expect to use, and more modest bedrooms were prepared for the other guests. Gardeners came and went, followed by cursing housemaids with brooms, bringing pots of flowering plants and shrubs to decorate the formal rooms, orange trees in lead troughs to place along the terrace, and cut flowers for the Dowager’s chamber. The estate musicians were brought together and given their instructions, and the sound of their rehearsal issued at all hours from one of the rooms in the white tower; while down in the kitchens, such pandemonium reigned that the anthill activity upstairs paled into insignificance beside it.
The Countess went about with her face creased in a worried frown, the list she and Anne had made between them clutched like a talisman in her fingers and growing more and more dog-eared and difficult to read. Fräulein Hoffnung took charge of the children, to release Anne to help the Countess, and Nyanka to oversee the linen cupboard, which was her special province; but Lolya grew more ungovernable by the hour, and with Natasha at her heels, continually escaped Fräulein Hoffnung’s restraint to tear up and down corridors, toboggan down the newly polished stairs, and play hide-and-seek among the dust sheets.
The Count stepped serenely over and around the commotion with a smile of inward amusement, and, sitting down to the picnic meals which appeared at irregular intervals, told his wife that he couldn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss. ‘The servants ought to know their jobs by now. It’s only a matter of cleaning everything and setting it all to rights. Let them get on with it, Irina – don’t trouble yourself with it. Go out for a walk, or go and read a book somewhere.’
Irina forbore to point out that there was nowhere in the house where one could sit down with a book without being dusted, and ate her cold meat and stale bread with a meekness Anne would not have emulated. The Count’s attitude certainly made her want to wring his neck – it was not he who would be blamed if everything were not perfect – but on the other hand, the Countess was ineffectual and inefficient, often increasing muddles by her attempts to direct the servants’ labours and by her inability to make decisions and stick to them. Anne tried as far as possible to direct matters herself and to persuade the servants, without appearing disloyal, to come to her for instructions. Her Russian improved by bounds during the week before Vera Borisovna’s visit.
Then the dreaded day arrived, and all the servants were assembled in the great hall in clean dresses and aprons, best livery and white gloves, because the Dowager liked to be received in formal manner by the whole household. It was difficult to keep them all together, for individuals kept remembering something they hadn’t done, and slipping off to turn off a tap or retrieve a duster left in a prominent place. Vasky went along the line inspecting everyone’s fingernails, while Yakob, in a last-minute fit of panic, suddenly took it into his head to climb on to one of the hall chairs and check that the tops of all the doors had been dusted.
The children, washed to smarting-point and dressed in their best, were confined with Fräulein Hoffnung in one of the parlours off the great hall, ready to be brought out when the moment arrived. Anne and Nyanka were checking for a last time that everything was ready in the bedchambers, and that Lolya hadn’t done anything in her excitement like putting a frog in Vera Borisovna’s bed. Outside in the entrance courtyard the orchestra was tuning up for the moment when the carriages would come into sight, and the grooms were lined up round the walls to run to the horses’ heads. Anne thought that if the Prince of Wales had taken it into his head to go and stay with the Murrays for a week or two, there would not have been more fuss and work and worry than had been expended over the impending visit of the Dowager Countess Kirova.
When she arrived, however, she did it in grand style, in a large and gleaming black coach picked out with crimson and gilding, drawn by four milk-white horses. Behind it came two more carriages and a cart, bringing her servants and luggage, for where Vera Borisovna went, a nucleus household went too. She brought with her her waiting woman and her dresser, a chambermaid to take care of her linen, and a chamberlain who took charge of her china and silver, and who also looked after her jewels; a secretary-courier, for she could neither read nor write; her own coachman and footman, two grooms, a cook, two housemaids, and a lamp boy. In her youth, she had been lady-in-waiting to the great Empress Catherine, and she had never forgotten what that lady had taught her about the importance of ceremony. She also had her generation’s fear of the hazards of travelling, and was convinced that anywhere outside Moscow and Petersburg she would meet with nothing but insolent servants, damp sheets, bad food and cracked china.