The Summer Day is Done (6 page)

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she said crossly. He thought she was perhaps liverish. It would not be surprising. ‘Heavens, it’s not a crime to be interested in the movements of one’s friends, is it? You aren’t going because you’re bored here, are you?’

His smile was an immediate denial.

‘I haven’t been bored at all and I’m certainly not now. Have you been painted in oils lately, Princess? Stay like that and I’ll ask Andrei to come in and put you on canvas while I’m in Yalta.’

Long lashes lifted. She looked challenging, as if daring him to exercise impropriety, to lower his gaze. Then she said, ‘Karita is to take a carriage in thirty minutes, she has a free day and is going to see her parents. You can ride with her and then take the carriage on to Yalta. But you’re not to forget to return. Ivan, if I thought you really were bored—’

‘I’ll be back later,’ he said. He took her hand and kissed it. Aleka made a little face, but was not displeased.

The carriage did not arrive promptly but it was there in the end. Karita, in bright blouse,
flowing skirt and linen bonnet, said she would sit up with the groom. Kirby said he would prefer her company himself as the groom had the horses to talk to.

‘Monsieur, it’s not proper for me to sit with you,’ she said. She looked remarkably attractive.

‘Well, let’s be improper for once, no one will notice,’ said Kirby.

Her smile came, brightening her golden face. She sat up with him, her back very straight, her attitude as proper as it could be under the circumstances. He talked to her, asked her about her parents. She said her father farmed the land and her mother was very wise. She always went to see them when she had a free day.

She alighted when they had gone three miles. She thanked Kirby, said goodbye to the groom, and Kirby watched her turn off the road into a narrow lane, flanked on both sides by rolling carpets of colour. He saw the white rooftops of the village of Karka in the distance, where Karita’s parents lived. She turned and waved. She looked as colourful as the landscape.

Yalta was balmy with autumnal warmth. Holiday Russians were strolling and shopping. Kirby stepped out and asked the groom to return with the carriage in a couple of hours. He sauntered in the sunshine, the town brown and mellow. The atmosphere was one of peace, although in St Petersburg there was another minor crisis and there had been unrest in the Urals. He had coffee, black and strong and sweet. He felt a sense of freedom. Princess Aleka did not make friends, she possessed them. In his
meandering abstraction, he almost collided with a rather dumpy woman as she emerged from a shop. She, stepping hastily back, dropped her folded parasol. He picked it up and offered it to her with apologies for his clumsiness. As he did so a slender woman, accompanied by a girl in summery white, also emerged from the shop. She looked at Kirby, at the woman he had brushed, and said in enquiry, ‘Anna?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ The woman Anna, pleasant-faced, smiled away any suggestion of importunity on the part of Kirby.

‘Only that I was clumsy,’ he said in his faultless Russian. ‘I am terribly sorry, madam.’

‘Really, it was nothing,’ she said again, taking the parasol and shaking it out.

He felt a peculiar consciousness of the familiar. He turned his head and looked into blue eyes regarding him in curiosity. Immediately her shyness rushed into pink, startled recognition. Her chestnut-gold hair was a profusion beneath her white, ribboned bonnet, her youth an almost absurd enchantment to him. Their glances touched, held and were broken. She dropped her eyes at his ghost of a smile and went on her way with the slender woman and the dumpy one, parasols opening, swirling and perching. The girl seemed to float, her white dress a whispering caress.

He went on his own way and took with him a new image of a girl as sweet as dawn itself. He entered a building and found the offices he wanted. He went in. A clerk looked up. He asked for Mr Anstruther, a consular representative of
His Britannic Majesty. Mr Anstruther came out. He was middle-aged and fatherly.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, seeing Kirby, ‘come through, will you?’

His office was brown. Brown leather chairs, ancient brown desk and mahogany paintwork. The curtains were of brown velvet and wooden filing cabinets stained brown. And Anstruther himself was brown.

‘I was expecting you two days ago,’ he said, indicating a chair. Kirby sat down. ‘I hope nothing cropped up.’

‘It was only that I came under the ownership of Aleka Petrovna, the Princess Karinshka,’ said Kirby.

‘Oh?’ said Anstruther, looking interested.

‘It took a few days to free myself. To have come before would have looked impolite.’

‘To whom?’ Anstruther was slightly sarcastic.

‘I understand your impatience.’

‘Not impatience, Mr Kirby,’ said Anstruther mildly, ‘we can always wait as long as we’re put in the picture. Worry is the word when we aren’t. However, you’re here. Have you got what you promised?’

‘Yes,’ said Kirby. He brought out the wafer-thin rice papers that had lain within the cavity of his hairbrush and laid them on the table. ‘The information covers location of plants, factories, depots and so on. There are calculated yearly outputs, estimated stocks, types of armament, factors of obsolescence and everything else I could get. My estimation is that they’re short of every essential, particularly ammunition. They
could fight a war on manpower alone, but how the devil they could successfully take on a major power I don’t know. By the way, it cost me a dickens of a lot to get certain of the information. That’s been included in the report and perhaps you’ll have it credited to my account at Coutts.’

Carefully Anstruther studied the papers. Figures were construable but all else was in code. He looked up, his expression cautiously agreeable.

‘Major power? Mmmm,’ he said, ‘you must have sensed the situation is changing. Rapidly. We don’t anticipate being in dispute with Russia in the foreseeable future. Russia in the foreseeable future is more likely to be an ally. Either way, however, these figures should be invaluable. How reliable are they?’

‘Only as much as I am. How reliable is that in the minds of our masters?’

‘I hope you’re being facetious,’ said Anstruther. He put the papers into an envelope, slid the envelope into a drawer and locked it. ‘You know, with the way things are going at the moment, if there is a war it could only be with Germany.’

‘Is that reliable?’ asked Kirby.

‘We think so.’

‘Russia,’ said Kirby, ‘is opposed in all things to Germany. It’s traditional and it’s incurable.’

‘Is it?’ Anstruther stroked his chin. ‘There is the Tsarina to be reckoned with. An extremely good and religious woman, I believe, but German and with her own ways of influencing the Tsar. However, much as the Kaiser seeks to foster a closer personal relationship with the Tsar,
Nicholas will never forgive him the fiasco of the Bjorko treaty. The Kaiser browbeat Nicholas into it and made them both look fools. It ran counter to the Russian alliance with France.’

‘And Willy and Nicholas have since cooled off?’

‘Considerably. The Kaiser still tries but Nicholas manages to stand aloof when they meet. He does it most agreeably.’ Anstruther got up and walked about. ‘But things are changing every day. You know, everything that can be done to make your figures look vastly better than you suggest would almost certainly coincide with the official line now.’

‘Well, will you add a few noughts or shall I?’

‘I mean,’ said Anstruther testily, ‘we’d approve an increased Russian output.’

‘You’d better talk to the Tsar about that,’ said Kirby. ‘I’d like a holiday myself. I’ve poked my nose into so many places these last three years that all I want for the next three is to mind my own business.’

Anstruther permitted himself a brown, fatherly smile. He looked at Kirby, comfortably at ease in his chair. That was the man’s forte, his ability to be at ease, to make friends and invite confidences. He was a better observer of a country than the finest official ambassador. He was invaluable in Russia.

‘Well, your time is your own for the moment. We might get you back to England for a vacation if you like.’

Kirby mused on that, then said, ‘Thanks all the same but no, not yet.’

‘You mentioned – let me see, who was it now? Princess Karinshka? Mmmm, I think we’ve got a file on her.’

‘On Princess Karinshka?’

‘Let me see.’ Anstruther unlocked a cabinet, extracted a file, returned to his desk. He opened the file, perused a few entries. He looked up. ‘Did you know she’s a socialist?’

‘She says she is. She doesn’t live like one.’

‘That’s not uncommon. Convert her,’ said Anstruther briskly, ‘a revolution in Russia would be no help to any of us at the moment.’

‘Except to the people. Well, except to some of the people.’

Anstruther brushed that aside.

‘One revolutionary aristocrat is worth ten thousand conventional revolutionaries in a country like this. It might only mean containing her particular pocket of trouble, but I’m sure you’ll do your best. We’ll leave it to you.’

‘Princess Karinshka could eat me,’ said Kirby, ‘so I’ll leave it to you. I’m going to take that holiday. If you want me for anything really important, I’m staying at the Karinshka Palace. I don’t know for how long. She’s not a woman who can put up with the same faces indefinitely.’ He got to his feet.

‘I’ll get your report sent,’ said Anstruther, ‘and let you know sometime what they think of it.’

‘If they want to show enormous gratitude,’ said Kirby, ‘tell them to make me a lord. It will please a friend of mine and make me look more proper to her.’

He got back to Karinshka quite late. He
wandered with the groom around Crimean villages, intensely interested in the Tartar people and all the bargains they had to offer him. He accepted a great deal of hospitality, drinking their black coffee and their Tartar liqueurs. The groom, a Tartar himself, drove the carriage in lazy happiness, stopping whenever Kirby wished and joining the bargaining, the drinking and the establishing of friendship. He did not drink much coffee, however, he opted for something more infectiously convivial. He was singing when they arrived at Karinshka. Old Amarov kicked him all the way to the stables for being drunk.

The sky was purple, the descending sun slashing the colour over the horizon. Karita appeared when Kirby reached the door of his suite and followed him in.

‘It’s not my place to say so, monsieur,’ she said, ‘but her Highness is dreadfully put out.’

How quaint she was. He was warm with bonhomie.

‘Is she?’ he said. ‘What has Andrei Mikhailovich done now?’

‘It isn’t Count Purishkin, monsieur,’ said Karita, her brown eyes slightly reproving. ‘Who could be put out by so inoffensive a gentleman as he is?’

‘Her Highness, perhaps?’

‘Indeed no, monsieur, never. Well, almost never. It is you. You have been gone all day. You see, she is so sensitive. She thinks you must be bored here. Monsieur, are you?’ She seemed touchingly anxious to hear that he wasn’t.

‘Never, little one.’

‘I am so glad. Monsieur, you must be ready by nine or she will not permit you to dine with her.’

‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind. You can bring me something up on a tray. If her Highness is having her usual visitors she won’t miss me.’

‘Monsieur!’ Karita was aghast. ‘She would kill us both.’

‘I must save you from that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get ready, then. Did you enjoy seeing your parents?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She looked pleased at his interest. ‘I spoke to my mother of you. It was because you’re English and I wanted to tell her you didn’t go around fighting everyone.’

‘I didn’t realize she suffered such anxieties about us,’ he said. ‘I hope she believed you.’

‘Monsieur,’ said Karita, ‘you tease me dreadfully. But see, my mother has given me an ikon for you.’ She slipped a hand into the pocket of her dress beneath her white front and brought out a tiny bas-relief of polished wood. ‘She said it would bring you closer to God.’

‘Oh, she thought I was a heathen too, did she?’

‘She didn’t say so, only that she would like you to have it. Of course, if you don’t wish it—’

‘I wish it very much,’ he said. He studied the ikon, carved to delineate the head of the Virgin Mary. ‘I will value it very much. Thank your mother for me. And thank you, Karita.’

He bent and kissed her. Karita felt the momentary pressure of warm, firm lips and then an intensely disconcerting confusion. She
looked up at him, her face hot. She saw laughter but kindness too, and affection.

‘Oh, goodness,’ she said, then the door opened to a knock and Princess Aleka swept in. She was gowned in deep green, her auburn hair brilliant, her jewels a radiance.

‘Ivan, you utterly deplorable man,’ she cried, ‘where have you been? Andrei and I have been off our heads about you.’

‘I’m sorry I’m so late—’

‘Yes, old Amarov told me how drunk the groom was. You aren’t drunk too, I hope. No. How nice to have a friend who can drink in a hundred villages and still remain sober. But we thought we had lost you. Andrei said you had probably gone walking from Yalta to Kerch, it’s only a hundred and fifty miles.’ She was apparently not a bit put out, she was in her most vivacious mood. He glanced at Karita, edging her way towards the bedroom, intent on running his bath. Karita gave a very expressive shrug. It clearly said that she could not understand her Highness any more than he could. ‘Ivan,’ Aleka went on, ‘I’m sorry but it will be quiet tonight. There will be none of our friends to dinner, I have had to put them all off. It is Andrei’s fault. Can you imagine it, he said I am turning Karinshka into a zoo and that if I didn’t give him a rest from the monkey house tonight he would hang himself! Oh yes, you can smile, but Andrei is like that. You simply could not trust him not to hang himself if he could find someone to knot the rope. So I have invited no one to dine with us. I hope you will be able to bear the awful silence. How nice that you’re back
in time to join Andrei and me. You and I must talk him into realizing that a monkey house is far more entertaining than a cemetery. Do you know, he said he would always prefer a cemetery as long as there were dancing girls around and their embonpoint was sufficiently diverting. Yes, that is the ridiculous kind of man he is.’