‘Being completely ignorant of the facts, General, I would not like to make any comment at all,’ said Powerscourt, beginning to sweat slightly.
‘I forgive you,’ said Derzhenov, smiling at his visitor. ‘There is one piece of information you have, I believe, which you are not telling me about, but I know it already. Fear not. I respect you for not telling me. Now then. Miss Bobrinsky, how shall I put this? You could tell her friends to expect her back in St Petersburg this afternoon.’
And with that a beaming Derzhenov led them down the stairs and out into the fresh air. He shook them all warmly by the hand. For once there were no noxious smells or sounds of horror coming from the basement.
‘What on earth,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald when they were a good hundred yards clear of the building, ‘was that last bit about?’
‘The bit about I know what you’re not telling me but I don’t mind? He means, I think, that he knows about the haemophilia. Quite how he knows, I can’t imagine. I just hope his organization is quite secure or the whole bloody Russian Empire will know about it before the end of the year.’
16
Lord Francis Powerscourt was sitting next to Rupert de Chassiron in the back row of the seats in the University of St Petersburg’s theatre at four o’clock the same afternoon, waiting for a play to begin. Natasha Bobrinsky had indeed been released from captivity and had gone home to recover from her ordeal. She and Mikhail and Powerscourt were to meet for dinner at a hotel on the Nevskii Prospekt where they had dancing in the evenings. Johnny and Ricky Crabbe had disappeared on an outing to some distant place where the local birds could be seen to best advantage, way out near the tip of Vasilevsky Island. Afterwards, Powerscourt had learned to his horror, Ricky was going to take his new friend back to his own quarters and introduce him to a range of different vodkas. De Chassiron was slightly apologetic about the play.
‘Don’t expect anything fancy like you would see in the West End, Powerscourt. Don’t expect anything very much at all. The students are all on strike – the English Department only got permission to put this on because it is not part of the course. The English professor is very keen on drama and he has translated this play himself. He put on another one by the same author last year and I came to see it. This one’s called The Cherry Orchard and it had its first performance last year in Moscow.’
‘Should I have heard of this author, if the professor is so keen on his work? Is he famous?’
‘He’s not famous, not yet anyway,’ said de Chassiron, ‘he’s dead now, poor man. He was a doctor called Chekhov, Anton Chekhov. He was still quite young when he died.’
If they had been back in London such an amateur production would probably have irritated both Powerscourt and de Chassiron. The professor’s translation appeared to be more than competent, but some of the student actors seemed to have been spending more time on revolutionary activities than they had on learning their lines. When you added the fact that the prompter appeared only to have a copy of the play in Russian rather than English, the difficulties, for Powerscourt at least, were compounded. And some of the cast had a less than perfect grasp of the English language so that much of the dialogue passed him by.
Nonetheless he thought he had the hang of the main points of the story. The Cherry Orchard belonged to a Mrs Ranevskaya who is returning home from Paris at the beginning of the play. The estate and the Cherry Orchard will have to be sold to pay off the family debts unless she agrees to cut all the trees down and build villas for the new middle class on the site of the orchard and live off the rental income. A local merchant, risen from the ranks of the former peasants, offers to help her do this, but she refuses. There are two of her daughters, one adopted, and her brother in the cast, all going to be affected by the sale. There is an aged servant called Firs who regrets the passing of the old days of the serfs when everybody knew their place. There is a perpetual student called Trofimov who boasts of not being thirty yet. All of these characters, Powerscourt felt, were out of place. They didn’t seem to belong to their own time, to their own space. They were displaced persons in what had become, for them, almost a foreign country. They floated precariously between the old world of the Ranevskaya estate and the different world they would inhabit when it was gone. Very near the end the stage was empty, with the sound of all the doors being locked with their keys, and all the carriages leaving. The silence was broken by the striking of a solitary axe against a tree, a rather melancholy sound. The old servant appears. He has been forgotten, left behind. Suddenly Powerscourt felt very strongly that the Cherry Orchard, for Chekhov, was Russia. The old order of long ago, of masters and serfs, has long gone. Nobody is sure what is going to replace it. Russia is being sold off to the new capitalist class, who will cut down the cherry orchards and build the villas while the previous owners complete their abdication of responsibility by going back to their lovers in Paris.
‘Life has gone by as if I hadn’t lived,’ says the eighty-seven-year-old Firs at the very end, ‘you’ve got no strength left, nothing, nothing.’ There is the distant sound of a string breaking, as if in the sky, a dying melancholy noise. Silence falls and the only thing to be heard is a tree being struck again with an axe far off in the orchard. The final curtain falls. The old order is being cut down. Powerscourt wondered what Dr Chekhov would have made of Bloody Sunday and the current paralysis in his country. Would he have any prescriptions? Or would he be content to describe the symptoms?
‘Can you tell me one thing, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha Bobrinsky and her young man Mikhail and Lord Francis Powerscourt were waiting for coffee at the end of their dinner in the Alexander Hotel halfway along the Nevskii Prospekt. Their table was hidden away at the end of the dining hall, decorated like a London club, a rather expensive club with valuable paintings all over the walls. To their right a small orchestra could be heard tuning up for the dancing which was due to commence in fifteen minutes. Two servants were lighting enormous candles on the walls of the ballroom.
‘Of course, Natasha, whatever you like,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Well,’ said the girl, leaning forward to address Powerscourt more closely, speaking in her near perfect French, ‘I think I understand most of what has been going on when I’ve not been there. Mikhail told me all about the wicked Major and what happened to him and what happened to Mr Martin and I think you were all very brave about that. I know about the little boy.’ She paused briefly to look at a couple of violinists making their way towards the stage, tugging vaguely at their instruments. Powerscourt was impressed that she had chosen not to name the disease.
‘But there are two things I don’t understand.’ Her long fingers began tapping out some unknown musical beat on the white linen tablecloth. Waltz? wondered Powerscourt. Foxtrot? Mazurka? He suddenly remembered Natasha’s grandmother in that great bed, humming her way through the dances of her youth, trying to salvage Martin’s name from the depths of her memory. ‘Why didn’t Mr Martin tell Tamara Kerenkova he was coming? He’d always told her before.’
‘I’m not absolutely sure about that,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘but remember, the previous times he came he wasn’t working, if you see what I mean. He wasn’t representing Great Britain or the Foreign Office, just himself. This time he was on business, very important business, and the Prime Minister must have told him he couldn’t even tell the church mouse a thing about it. I think Kerenkov knew Martin was coming because the Okhrana read the telegrams from the Foreign Office giving the date of his arrival and told Kerenkov about it in some ploy of their own.’