The Count stood up, and held up his hands. Both protagonists lapsed into silence, their eyes fixed on him in mute and burning appeal, and he surveyed them a moment with his most infuriating faint smile. The Countess looked from one face to another apprehensively, knowing that that particular smile boded no good.
‘Mother dear, consider! I can’t turn Anna off in a strange land, when it was I who brought her here. I have a responsibility towards her. I owe it to her father, my friend, to take care of her.’
‘Koko, you cannot mean–!’
‘Sir, you must know–’
‘Anna dear,’ the Count said soothingly, turning to her as he left the table, ‘don’t make such a fuss. There’s plenty of time to teach Lolya everything she needs to know. She’s only nine years old. Let her enjoy herself.’
With that he strolled out of the room, having resolved nothing, leaving the Dowager baffled and Anne annoyed but resigned. Irina got up hastily and made her escape, and for an instant Anne felt a sympathy with her mistress. The Count was many delightful things, but he was not perfect, and his enjoyment of teasing people could be very tiresome. But just as Lolya’s imperfections of face made her the more truly beautiful, his imperfections of character only made him more attractive to Anne.
One day when she was accompanying the Countess and the children in the carriage, Anne saw the Emperor Alexander from a short distance away. He was tall, well made, and handsome, with high-coloured cheeks, blue eyes, and dark auburn hair, looking very elegant on horseback in one of his many brightly coloured uniforms. She thought he looked pleasant and kindly, but very young, younger even than his twenty-six years. It was hard to reconcile his appearance with the fact that he was the absolute ruler of the largest country in the world. He was not just the sovereign, he was the owner of every man, woman and child, every acre of land, every cow, sheep, tree and ear of wheat in all of Russia, and he could do with them exactly as he wished.
Of course, Anne knew that only outsiders like her found it remarkable. To the native Russians it was as natural a state of affairs as that it should be cold in winter. And how cold! Anne had been told about the cold, had expected it, but no exercise of the intellect could prepare her for temperatures that passed freezing point and went on falling to the stark and astonishing regions of -21C.
It was a cold past comprehension, a cold like death, and yet there was a curious exhilaration in it, a feeling of the city gradually waking up. First the river skimmed over with ice, frost fingers making long patterns like ferns on the surface; and boys idling along the quays threw stones at it, breaking the thin sheets with a sharp noise like window panes. The temperature fell, and the ice thickened, and then the day came when the flung stones skittered across the surface, and the first daring soul took a tentative step on to it and found it bore his weight. The next instant, it seemed, there were skaters in coats of sheepskin dyed scarlet and deep blue and green, whirling and darting like bizarre winter dragonflies; and high, narrow horse-drawn sleighs, laden with goods or with fur-swathed passengers, flying along the river as on a road, the drivers ringing their bells and cracking their whips for clear passage.
The snow came, falling feathery and soft, melted at first by the wheels of the carriages, and piled into ridges down the broad thoroughfares. And it grew colder, and the snow settled, and fell all night in a silent wilderness out of the black sky, and the next day the carriages were put away and the sledges and troikas were brought out, and travel in the city became like something in a dream: unbelievably swift and almost soundless over a glittering carpet of crushed diamond. It grew colder still, and the surface of the snow froze, and more snow fell on the roads and on the river and the canals, obliterating them, so that the city seemed to grow larger as the boundaries disappeared, and movement seemed freer – no difference now between the elements of earth and water, bound together in a single plane beneath the enveloping icy air.
The days grew shorter and the nights longer. Anne saw the other side of the coin from the white nights now, in those long nights beginning in mid-afternoon and lasting until mid-morning. Yet the nights didn’t seem so dark after all, filled as they were with movement and laughter and torchlight and the hissing of the snow under the runners of a thousand sleighs, their swinging coach-lamps spilling yellow light like honey into the shadows as they hurtled round corners on their way to some urgent pleasure.
All the families were back from their summer retreats, ready for the almost frantic sociability of the Petersburg winter Season. The circle in which the Kirovs moved included the families Anne already knew – the Fralovskys, Tiranovs, Tchaikovskys and Kovanins – together with dozens more she had never met. Uncle Petya Bazarov, Vera Borisovna’s brother, was an early caller – a huge man with a beard, dressed in Cossack tunic and trousers – who lived a strange and eremitical life in a house on the Vassilevsky Island. He drank hugely, though he never appeared to be drunk, and spoke Russian instead of French, but he was a great favourite with everyone, even the fashionable set, and Anne was once again impressed with the generosity of the Russian mind, which enjoyed people as they were, without applying restrictive social rules to them.
Every day now had its engagements. There were dinners and balls and routs and card-parties and supper-parties; there was the theatre and the ballet, Court receptions, military reviews and parades; there were troika races and skating-parties and masquerades. Anne’s wardrobe could not have stood the strain had not a great deal of her newly free time been devoted to buying materials and making up new gowns.
As for her outdoor clothes, as soon as the first frost came, Irina had given Anne a shooba: a heavy coat of felted wool, with a thick, quilted lining stuffed with kapok. When the snows began, the Count made her a present of a fur-lined cloak and a fur hat with long lappets, and the Countess gave her a fur muff. Anne was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the gifts, but her employers made nothing of it. It was obvious, they said, that she must have the right clothes for the Russian winter, and who should provide them but themselves? Anne bought herself a pair of sheepskin gauntlets and a pair of the white felt boots called valenki she had so admired in the shops. With the memory of English snow and slush, Anne had some doubts as to the wisdom of the colour; but she soon learned that the Russian snow was so cold that it remained powdery and quite dry, so the boots never got dirty or discoloured.
Wrapped in all these, and further protected by a huge bearskin rug, Anne would sit beside her master and mistress in the large, three-horse sleigh, its eight bells ringing in harmony like a strange kind of frozen music, and be sped along through the torch-lit streets to yet another party. Parties often began late and went on until the early hours of the morning, and Petersburg never seemed to go to sleep.
Anne met Basil Tchaikovsky at Princess Kovanina’s soirée, and despite her poor opinion of his intellect, could not help feeling a little flattered by the haste with which he came to bow over her hand.
‘Anna Petrovna! How delightful to see you again so soon!’
‘Basil Andreyevitch!’ she replied in kind. ‘What a surprise! I thought you lived in Moscow and found Petersburg insipid?’
‘Why, who told you so?’ he said indignantly.
‘You did yourself, at the ball at Grubetskaya.’
‘Oh, one cannot be bound by what one says at balls,’ he said airily, waving one of the white hands of which he was so proud. An emerald ring caught the light so attractively that he was pleased with the gesture, and repeated it. ‘The conversation at balls obeys different rules from conversation anywhere else.’