The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald
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Название: The Beginning of Spring
Автор: Penelope Fitzgerald
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007370092
isbn:
It wasn’t a time for risk-taking, because Frank was determined that Nellie shouldn’t have to worry about money. A look through the books showed that the import and assembly business would have to be wound down, or better still, sold as it stood. That was a pity, because Reid’s main suppliers, Hoe’s of the Borough Road in south east London, were as reliable as the day and the night. The trouble seemed to have been two things which Frank hadn’t known anything about. In the first place, although his father had got his letters, giving him some idea of the German competition, he hadn’t acted on the advice, or had acted on it eccentrically. He’d set his heart on expansion, and, worst still, become fascinated by the idea of the Mammoth Press which Hoe’s were putting into production for Lloyds Weekly News at a cost of eighteen thousand pounds. Another Mammoth, not for any definite customer, but most unwisely ordered on spec, had been delivered to the site, and was lying prone under tarpaulin, colossal, unassembled, unpaid for, looking, as it lay under many inches of snow against the pale green sky, like an ominous relic of the past rather than the machinery of the future. By Bert Reid’s bedside when he died, among the letters he was drafting to the Ministry of Interior to plead for those of his people, his ‘hands’, who had been arrested, was an illustrated booklet from Hoe’s describing, in heroic terms, the Mammoth. Now, with the sheds, the plant and the site itself, it must find, even in its dismembered state, a purchaser, probably one of the merchants of the second grade, with whose sons Frank had gone to school. Once it was gone, he could strike a balance, and concentrate on Reidka’s.
Frank’s affection for Moscow came over him at odd and inappropriate times and in undistinguished places. Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore-houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarists straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers’ dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage-patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village.
Nellie, too, very much preferred Moscow to Germany. She enjoyed putting 22 Lipka Street in order. The village habits of the great manufacturing city didn’t disconcert her at all. She was at home there, it seemed to Frank. This threw a new light on her hostility to Norbury, which had been neither town nor country.
They had had to move to Moscow in the dead of winter, and as they came out of the Alexander station the whole Tverskaya seemed to be drifting with smoke and steam, everyone, men and women alike, rolling and smoking their own cigarettes, their breath condensing heavily in the frost, like cattle in a pen. Selwyn had met them, anxious for their welfare and unmistakeably grieving, to be forgiven everything for his sincerity. What had to be forgiven was his inability to help in any way with the children, the porters and the luggage, not so much through incompetence as inability to grasp the kind of thing that might be needed. Frank had met him before on short trips to see his parents in Moscow, Nellie not at all. ‘How do you do, Mr Crane. This is Dolly, our eldest. This is Ben.’ Selwyn bent down towards them, wrapped as they were like bundles against the cold.
‘Both of them bereaved!’
‘They’ve never met their grandparents, so they’re hardly likely to miss them,’ said Nellie. ‘Perhaps you’d help Frank to check the items.’
At that first meeting, she told Frank, she’d thought that Mr Crane was only elevenpence in the shilling. But Selwyn, though he would probably have been at a loss in Frankfurt, managed well enough in Moscow. He didn’t oppose his will to the powerful slow-moving muddle around him. What he did not like, or could not change, he guilelessly avoided. The current of history carried him gently with it.
Before his first visit to Reidka’s Frank asked Selwyn to sit down with him and give him an accurate idea of what he’d find when he got there. Selwyn began, as his nature was, with reassurance. ‘Of course, your chief compositor will be there, Yacob Tvyordov will be there, as always.’
‘What happened to him last year? Wasn’t he out on strike with the others?’
‘He is the Union Treasurer, and he was out for six days. I believe those are the only six days he’s ever missed.’
‘Where did my father find him?’
‘He came from the Flying Swan Press when it closed down. They only did hand-printing, of course.’
‘And Tvyordov?’
‘Only hand-printing.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve got his particulars, I suppose. Some people are ageless, Frank.’
‘What about the overseer?’
Selwyn never liked to speak ill of another human being. He hesitated.
‘Korobyev. Well, it’s his business, of course, to collect the fines for mistakes, spoiled work, laziness, drunkenness, absence and so on. An unenviable task, Frank! But there it is, the Printer’s Union agreed to the scale of fines, and we keep to the agreed scales. But since your father died, I fear Korobyev may have instituted a collection of his own whenever he feels the need for ready money.’
‘Who does he collect from?’
‘Well, perhaps from anyone who is not quite strong enough to object. Perhaps from Agafya, our tea-woman, perhaps from Anyuta, our cleaning-woman. Perhaps a few kopeks from the errand boys.’
‘Have you spoken to him about it?’
‘Your father may have told you that I don’t believe in direct resistance to evil. The only way is to put it to shame, to put it to flight, by good example.’
Frank thanked him, went to the press, shook hands with the entire staff, and called a general meeting to discuss the conduct of the overseer. This meant the three hand-compositors and their two apprentices, the pressmen, the readers, the three machine-men, the putting-on and taking-off boys, the gatherers, the folders, the deliverers, the storekeeper, the warehouseman who also entered the work in the account books and checked deliveries, the paper-wetting boys, the errand-boys, the doorman and Agafya and her assistant Anyuta. There was only one place where there was room to address them all at the same time and that was the shed which served both as the paper warehouse and the tea-kitchen. Once they were assembled the men complained that the boys, some of whom were only just fourteen, were incompetent to judge the question, and СКАЧАТЬ