The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

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      ‘Where are the children now?’

      ‘They were taken away.’

      The waitress folded her arms across her bosom and seemed to be challenging Frank, or accusing him. Her accent was Georgian, and it was folly, he knew, to think of Georgia as a land of roses and sunshine only. But Georgians pride themselves on their rapid changes of mood. Frank said, ‘In any case, you are not to be held responsible. In no sense was it part of your work to keep a check on everyone in the refreshment room.’ Immediately she yielded, becoming anxious to please.

      ‘They’re not your children, I can tell that. You wouldn’t let them arrive like this in the city without anyone to take charge of them.’ Frank asked where the stationmaster lived. His house was in the Presnya, between the cemetery and the Vlasov tile works.

      He recrossed the swept and wheel-crushed snow of the coal yards. The horse was standing, entirely motionless, in the white distance, the driver was coming out of the urinal. He agreed to wait while Frank walked the short distance to the Presnya.

      Along a side-road patched with clinker, carriage springs, scrap iron punchings and strips of yellow glazed tin which once advertised Botkin’s Tea and Jeyes’ Fluid, wooden houses stood at intervals. They were raised by two wooden steps above the ground and Frank saw that the entrance, as in the villages, would be at the back. At No. 15, to which he’d been directed, the back door, in fact, was not locked. He shut it behind him, and was faced with two doors.

      ‘Who is at home?’ he called out.

      The right-hand door opened and his daughter Dolly appeared. ‘You should have come earlier,’ she said. ‘Really, we have no business to be here.’

      Inside, the table, covered with oilcloth, had been shoved into the right hand corner so that no-one could sit with their back to the ikons and their glimmering lamps. Annushka was asleep on the clothes-basket, Ben was at the table looking at a newspaper, the Gazeta-Kopeika, which dealt entirely with rapes and murders. He looked up, however, and said, ‘When you’re on a main line, the distance between posts is a twentieth of a verst, so if the train does that in two seconds you’re going at ninety versts an hour.’

      ‘What happened?’ Frank asked. ‘Who’s looking after you? Did you get lost on the way?’

      A dark woman in an overall came in, not the stationmaster’s wife, if indeed there was such a person, but, as she explained, a kitchen-mother, called in to help as required.

      ‘She only gets eighty kopeks a day,’ said Dolly. ‘It’s not much for all this responsibility.’ She put her arm round the woman’s waist and said in caressing Russian, ‘You don’t earn enough, do you, little mother?’

      ‘I’ll settle up with everybody,’ said Frank ‘and then straight home to Lipka Street. We shall have to wake up Annie, I’m afraid.’

      The children’s outdoor clothes were airing above the stove, along with the stationmaster’s second uniform, and a heap of railway blankets. Hauling down the birchwood clothes frame was like a manoeuvre under sail. Annushka woke up while she was being crammed into her fur jacket, and asked whether she was still in Moscow. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Frank.

      ‘Then I want to go to Muirka’s.’

      Muir and Merrilees was the department store, where Annushka scarcely ever went without being given some little extra by the astute floor manager.

      ‘Not now,’ said Dolly.

      ‘If it hadn’t been for Annushka,’ said Ben, ‘I think Mother might have taken us on with her. I can’t be sure, but I think she might.’

      The whole house began to shake, not gradually, but all at once, from blows on the outer door. The kitchen-mother crossed herself. It was the sledge-driver. ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were strong enough to knock like that,’ Frank told him.

      ‘How long? How long?’

      At the same time the stationmaster, perhaps taking the opportunity to find out what was going on in his house, came in through the front. Probably he was the only person who ever did so. This meant that the whole lot of them – Frank, the children, the kitchen-mother, the stationmaster – had to sit down together for another half-hour. Annie’s coat had to be taken off again. She fell asleep again instantly. Tea, cherry jam from the cupboard which could be opened now that the stationmaster had brought his keys. The kitchen-mother suddenly declared that she couldn’t bear to be parted from her Dolly, her Daryasha, who resembled so much what she had been like herself as a child. The stationmaster, still wearing his official red cap, lamented his difficulties at the Alexandrovna, where he was besieged by foreign travellers. His clocks all kept strict St Petersburg time, 61 minutes in advance of Central European time and two hours one minute in advance of Greenwich. What was their difficulty?

      ‘You might ask to be transferred to the Donetz Basin,’ suggested Ben.

      ‘How old is your boy?’

      ‘Nine,’ said Frank.

      ‘Tell him that the Alexandervokzal is the top appointment. There is nothing higher. The state railways have nothing higher to offer me. But it’s not his fault, he’s young, and besides that, he’s motherless.’

      ‘Where’s your wife, for that matter?’ Frank asked. It turned out that, trusting no-one in Moscow, she had gone back to her village to recruit more waitresses for the spring season. They prepared to go, the sleigh-driver pointing out, for the first time, that the horse was old.

      ‘How old is he exactly?’ asked Ben. ‘There are regulations, you know, about how old they’re allowed to be.’ The sleigh-driver said he was a young devil.

      ‘They’re all young devils,’ said Frank. ‘Now I want to get them home to Lipka Street.’

      They might have been away several years. The whole household, the house itself, seemed to be laughing and crying. From the carnival – that was what it felt like – only Dunyasha was absent. Almost at once she came to Frank for her internal passport, which was necessary if you were going to make a journey of more than fifteen miles, and had to be handed over to the employer. She wanted to leave, she was no longer happy in the house, where criticisms were being made of her. Frank took it out of the drawer in his study where he kept such things locked away. He felt like a man with a half-healed wound who would do better to leave it alone, for fear of making bad worse. Nellie had sent no message to him by the children, not a word, and he saw it would be best not to think about this, or he might not be able to stand it. His father had always held that the human mind is indefinitely elastic, and that by the very nature of things we were never called upon to undertake more than we could bear. Frank had always felt doubtful about this. During the past winter one of the machine men from the Press had gone by night to a spot a little way out of the Windau station, and lain down on the tracks. This was because his wife had brought her lover to live in their house. But the height of the train’s wheelbase meant that it passed right over him, leaving him unhurt, like a drunken peasant. After four trains had passed he got up and took the tram back to his home, and had worked regularly ever since. This left the question of endurance open.

      While the rejoicing went on and spread to the yard and, apparently to the yard dog and to the hens, locked up for the winter, Dolly came in wearing her brown uniform from the Ekaterynskaya Gymnasium, and asked him to help her with her homework, since after all, she had to be at school by nine o’clock. She spread out her atlas, ruler, and geography СКАЧАТЬ