This annoyed Florence, who said she didn’t see why she shouldn’t learn something. Julian was going to. She would do so. She fell over her words, and fell silent. She couldn’t imagine what she might try to learn.
That left Griselda. Basil and Katharina were clear about her future. She would be Presented at court, become a debutante, and make an advantageous match. Katharina said she hoped Griselda would be as happily married as her parents.
Griselda twisted a puce bow rhythmically round and round. Her mother tapped her fingers. Griselda had been shocked—deeply shocked—when Dorothy said she wanted to be a doctor. She had not thought of wanting anything beyond release from puce bows. She had an intense secret life, which consisted of reading novels about women reduced to silent attentiveness, full of inner rebellion, or of the effort of resignation. Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Maggie Tulliver. But all these had really wanted love and marriage. None had wanted anything so—so destructive—as to be a doctor. Why had Dorothy never said anything of this intention? Griselda loved Dorothy as Dorothy loved Griselda. She loved Todefright with a passion she dared not admit to, even in Todefright. She came to stay there, and was immediately released from her good clothes and set loose to run wild in the woods. There were books everywhere. She had it in her pale head that she and Dorothy might live in the country together, and never bother with stays and hatpins and button-hooks. That was all she had thought of. And now suddenly Dorothy’s world was black bags, and blood, and sickbeds, and grief and drama, and Griselda was nowhere. Dorothy had a secret. Griselda, her face white, said
“I mean to study. Like Florence. I learn German and French. I mean to study languages.”
Katharina said that Griselda had the best possible teachers, and her progress was exemplary.
Basil remarked to the surrounding bushes that women’s education simply made them dissatisfied. He did not say with what.
Griselda twisted another bow, and her mother tapped her hand. Humphry Wellwood picked up Florian.
“And what do you want to be, Florian?”
“A fox,” said Florian, with total certainty. “A fox, in a foxhole, in a wood.”
5
Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and the belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded. It rested on the charm of her presence, and where she was, her parties were lively. She liked to be at the centre. She liked to charm, and to charm those she was excited to entertain—in this case leaders of culture, Prosper Cain and August Steyning, both of whom stood, champagne glasses in their hands, laughing at her self-deprecating jokes. She relied on others to do what was needful—introduce people, feed people, change the structure of groups. To a certain extent Violet could do this—she saw to bodily comforts, but was uneasy with bright talk. And Humphry could normally be relied on to amuse both men and women, but he had become ominously locked in argument with his brother. Children flickered and flitted along the flowerbeds and in and out of the shrubbery as the light thickened.
Vasily Tartarinov was performing his party piece to the Skinners and the young, Tom, Julian, Philip, Geraint, Florence and Charles. His party piece, which also formed part of his London lectures, was the story of a horse. The English cared about horses. It was the way to hook their attention. This horse, a noble black beast, Varvar the barbarian, had played an essential part in a series of daring escapes from Russian prisons and police surveillance, including Tartarinov’s own. Varvar had been waiting when Prince Kropotkin flung off his immensely heavy green dressing-gown, in a movement practised for weeks, and simply ran out of the prison hospital courtyard and into a waiting carriage, where one conspirator was waiting, whilst another distracted the guards by showing them how to see parasites under a microscope. Varvar had galloped out of sight with Sergey Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, known universally as Stepniak, and now a much-loved member of English socialist and anarchist groups, advising on the translation of the Russian classics, looking like a great, amiable bear in his thick beard. Tartarinov, in his turn, had been on his way down from his apartment, with a small bundle of essentials, to rush away behind Varvar, when he met the secret police coming up.
“I dissembled,” he told them, in his high-pitched voice. “I said to them, we are too late, I am on the same errand, the bird is m-m-m-flown. The trail is cold, that is how I put it. We all descended together, and I got into the carriage, and we walked sedately to the corner, and then away flew the great Varvar, like the wind. He took me back to Cherkasov’s estate, where he lived, and I disguised myself as a seaman, and worked my way, via Sweden and Holland, to my refuge here. Others were less fortunate.” He touched a handkerchief to his eye.
The English socialists were embarrassed to ask certain questions. Three years ago an anonymous article in the New Review had described the cold-blooded killing of a certain General Mesentsev. He had been stabbed with a blade, a kitchen knife wrapped in a newspaper, exactly the method subsequently used to assassinate the French president, Carnot, only last year. The article had implied that Stepniak was the killer. His English friends were deeply moved by his writings on the torture, imprisonment, and execution of Russian nihilists and objectors. But they were troubled to imagine the laughing man they took tea with waiting on the pavement, with the knife and the newspaper. They had become increasingly nervous about random acts of violence. Last year, an unknown man had mysteriously blown himself to bits outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The grown-ups remembered the spate of attacks ten years ago—on government offices, The Times newspaper, underground stations, railway stations, Scotland Yard, Nelson’s Column, London Bridge, the House of Commons, the Tower itself. They understood that suffering caused rebellion. They tried to understand covert, isolated attacks on ordinary people. They tried to inhabit the minds of bombers. It was hard.
“Tell me, Mr. Tartarinov,” said Etta Skinner, who was a Quaker and a pacifist, “would you resort to blowing things—and people—up, to help your cause? You yourself, would you do such a thing?”
“We have to be prepared. There is certainly nothing we will not blow up, if it stands in our way. We must look steadily to the end and choose the appropriate means. Without flinching.”
Etta pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders.
“And you yourself? Could you kill someone in cold blood?”
“I do not know. I have never been faced with the necessity. None of us know of what we may be capable, when we are called.”
The group was joined by August Steyning, who wanted to introduce Anselm Stern, who brought greetings from socialists in Germany, several of whom were, as German socialists often were, given the Kaiser’s loathing of them, in prison for lèse-majesté.
The boys asked themselves, naturally, if they could kill someone. Geraint had been brought up on tales of knights-at-arms and Icelandic warriors, but he did not imagine blood. Charles had disappointed his father by taking no pleasure in foxhunting or shooting. He rather thought he could not. Philip was not really listening to the conversation. He was looking at the juxtaposition of textures in the grass, the flowers, and the silks, and the very rapid colour changes that were taking place as the sky darkened. Browning and vanishing of red, efflorescence and deepening of blues. Tom imagined the thud and suck of a bomb, the flying stone and mortar, and could not quite imagine the crushing or burning of flesh. He thought of his own skull and his own ribs. Bone under skin and tendons. No one was safe.