Dostoyevsky and the rest before she came, my grandmother was not really surprised to find that beneath the pleasant routine of a country summer everyone at Yaslova boiled darkly and deeply with hopelessness, yearning and despair.
Darkly and deeply they might boil, but not in secret — and this was because of the diaries. Except for Vashka, Mishka and
Andrusha who were mercifully too young, everyone at Yaslova kept a diary. Count Sartov kept a diary. His Countess kept a diary. Petya, their literary and dreamy eldest son, kept a diary.
As for the little Countess Tata’s diary, it was currently running at volume twelve. And in spite of the beauty, inflectedness etc.
of the Russian language, all their diaries were in French.
Though very young, my grandmother — then as now — was a model of rectitude and although everyone left their diaries lying about, she would have died rather than read a single word.
After a few weeks, however, she found that this was giving the most bewildered offence.
‘But did you not read in my diary my views on Lermontov’s poetry?’ enquired Petya during an evening session on the
Veranda.
‘Surely I mentioned my symptoms in my diary?’ said the
Countess, surprised, when my grandmother enquired about the progress of an ailment.
‘But, Miss Petch, I wrote it in my diary,’ wailed Tata when set to composition on the countryside. ‘Such a beautiful description of the Zarestry woods!’
The discovery that she was supposed to read all their diaries in addition to her other work depressed my grandmother, but she stuck to her task assiduously. And it soon became clear to her that the Sartov family were in a fairly bad way.
‘I live only for poetry! I long only to dedicate my whole being to expressing the truth in words. And yet I am doomed to kill and to teach others to kill,’ wrote Petya.
‘Why are you doomed to kill?’ enquired my grandmother, who had dutifully read this passage on her way to bed.
‘Petya is to go into the army next year,’ explained Tata. ‘He will join the Cadet Corps and be a dashing soldier.’
‘It was my grandfather’s dying wish,’ said Petya and his eyes grew dark.
The Countess Sartov’s diary expressed a more physiological turbulence. ‘My head ached all day. A throbbing seemed to go through from my temples to my ear-lobes and it was as though a leaden weight pressed on my stomach’, would be a typical entry in the diary of Tata’s mother.
The Count’s diary my grandmother was always inclined to skip a little. Not that the Count, too, didn’t have his troubles.
‘For the fifth day we brought Old Bull out to the cow, and again — nothing! Oh, the cursed inaction of all male animals!’ was the kind of thing my grandmother had to contend with from the Count.
But of course it was Tata’s diary which distressed my grandmother most. For she had been right about Tata; it was impossible not to love her. Generous and passionate, open and selfless, Tata in her diary burnt the pages with intimations of a great and dedicated love.
‘Oh, to find someone to whom I could belong totally, someone in whose depths I could lose myself!’ wrote the little Countess.
And my grandmother would shake her head and sigh, for Tata, it seemed, was destined to be the wife of Prince Kublinsky. And in Prince Kublinsky it would have been hard to discern depths enough to float a tea-leaf.
He was a plump, lardy young man with enough physical signs of dissolute living greatly to disturb my grandmother, who was a doctor’s daughter. But his family was old and immensely aristocratic; his father had owned the souls of three thousand serfs and his attentions to Tata, now that he had decided it was time to carry on his line, were considered by all the Sartovs to be a great honour.
And this was the state of things when, about six weeks after my grandmother’s arrival at Yaslova, the old scholar who was tutor to Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha quite suddenly died.
He died, it was generally agreed, an enviable and truly Russian death, falling asleep on the stove they lit for him even in summer and failing to wake. But admirable though it was, his death created problems, not the least of which were Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha running wild and driving everybody mad.
So a new tutor was engaged from Moscow. And on a hot grey day in early July, my grandmother went with the rest of the family to the landing stage to meet him.
The boat landed. Nikolai Alexandrovitch leapt lightly on to the wooden jetty and my grandmother’s heart plummeted right down to her neat kid boots and stayed there.
The new tutor was young. He was tall and lightly built and slender. He had large, dark, unutterably expressive eyes, a passionate mouth and leaf-brown hair with copper glints in it.
‘Oh dear,’ thought my grandmother, watching him bend gracefully over Tata’s outstretched hand. ‘Oh dear, oh dear?
And as was so often the case with my formidable grandmother, she was perfectly right.
Any lingering hopes she might have had about the new tutor were shattered on the first night when he came and joined them on the veranda. Nikolai was polite but not servile, shy but not tongue-tied and when requested to read aloud from Pushkin did so in a voice of such beauty and depth that even my grandmother (who still understood very little Russian and was getting a bit of a thing about Pushkin) found herself carried away by the sheer beauty of the sound.
Very soon, all her worst fears were realised. Not that Tata’s family, deep in its own despairs, seemed to notice anything. The Countess Sartov’s diary continued to reflect the state of her liver; Petya mourned yet again his coming incarceration in the army; the Count remained obsessed by the inadequacies of Old Bull. It was thus left to my grandmother to note that Tata was quietly, deeply and heartbreakingly falling into the shattering glory of first love.
‘Today I spoke with Nikolai Alexandrovitch about Pushkin. We think so much alike, it is amazing!’ wrote Tata. Or: ‘Is it not extraordinary? Nikolai Alexandrovitch, too, likes nothing better than to walk in the rain!’
Like the most formidable duenna in fiction, my grandmother watched the young tutor for signs of licence or disrespect. There were none. Nikolai behaved perfectly. Only his pallor, a barely perceptible change in his voice when he spoke to Tata betrayed him. Soon it became impossible for him to remain on the veranda when Prince Kublinsky called and ran his slug hands absent-mindedly up and down Tata’s arm. Even so Tata’s innocence, Nikolai’s integrity might still have saved them had it not been for the picnic in the Zarestry woods.
To my grandmother, accustomed to striding briskly over the Downs with a cheese sandwich in her pocket, the Sartov picnics were a nightmare. There never seemed to be less than three troikas and two neighbouring families with whom no one, by the end of the day, was on speaking terms.
And there was the picnic samovar. Even fifty years later, when she described it to me, my grandmother’s voice trembled with hatred for the picnic samovar: a huge brass, convoluted beast which lived in a special shed, took hours to light and then sent terrifying sparks over the tinder-dry forest.
It was because of her struggles with this fiend that my grandmother was careless enough to allow Tata to stroll off alone. An hour later, when everyone assembled in the clearing, there was no sign of her.
The forests of Central Russia are not Hyde Park. The Count roared, the Countess blanched; search parties were assembled. And my grandmother, half-demented with guilt, found herself struggling through the undergrowth with Nikolai Alexandrovitch.
Try as she would, she could not in her long skirts keep up with him. So that it was Nikolai, striding between slanting rays of sunlight towards her, that Tata — lost and lonely and bewildered, with wild cornflowers in her hair — saw first, and she ran forward and threw herself into his arms.