‘The house at the eleventh verst,’ said Virginsky redundantly. Porfiry screwed his face up into an expression of reproof.
The train stopped at a station on the Ligovsky Canal. The lunatic asylum remained in view, as if to provoke them. Porfiry fidgeted in annoyance. Virginsky felt somehow embarrassed. It was a relief to them both it seemed when the train pulled out.
From Ligovo, the short next stop, the railway climbed and ran through woodland. A green translucent fire blazed around them. As they emerged they scanned the horizon hopefully for a glimpse of the sea. Now the tracks ran parallel with the Petergof Road a couple of versts away to the north, its chain of magnificent dachas spread out along the coast. Beyond it, the edge of the land crumbled into the bay.
The summer residence of Count Akhmatov was a grand, neoclassical palace looking out over the Gulf of Finland. To reach it, they took a drozhki from New Petergof station one and a half versts back along the Petergof Road. The salted air and the flicker of light through the beech trees rekindled the holiday mood in Virginsky. There was a breeze from the sea; the morning hovered on the edge of coolness. But he felt the sun on his face and that counted for a lot.
Porfiry sat with the basket of food on his lap. There was something fussy and comical about the figure he cut. It would be easy to underestimate him, thought Virginsky, looking at the placid, almost animal, expression on his superior’s face. Porfiry had his eyes closed, those hyperactive lashes of his still for the moment, as he smiled, basking in the sun. Virginsky remembered the fear and, yes, hatred he had once felt towards this man. But he realised that even when these feelings had been at their most intense, there had been room for others. Porfiry Petrovich had always fascinated him. There had been times when he had even liked the man, and wanted to be liked by him in return. Certainly, he had never made the mistake of not respecting him. Now, in retrospect, the sympathy he had at the time entertained towards his persecutor seemed inexplicable. He wondered whether he would ever entirely trust him.
As the drozhki turned into the canopied lane that led winding up to the house, Porfiry opened his eyes and saw Virginsky looking at him. Porfiry’s smile was questioning. Virginsky met it with an ironic, slightly mocking face. ‘You are quite comfortable?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ answered Porfiry, bemused.
‘I was merely thinking of something you said to Dr Meyer. About sitting down. For long periods. I wondered. .’
‘It comes and goes,’ said Porfiry carelessly, looking away.
‘I rather imagined it was just something you said. Off the top of your head, as it were. An invention.’
‘How could you suspect me of such a thing, Pavel Pavlovich?’
Virginsky shrugged. ‘I thought it was part of your technique.’
‘Do you really believe me capable of such deviousness?’ Porfiry’s tone was hurt. ‘Besides, I am more superstitious than you allow. To lay claim to a malady one does not have seems almost to invite it. I am not so rash as to wish the complaint in question upon myself.’
‘What malady?’
‘Haemorrhoids.’ Porfiry’s expression sealed off any further discussion.
Catching sight of the gardens, formally landscaped in the ‘French’ style, with symmetrical lawns and statue-lined avenues, Virginsky was stirred first to delight and then to anger. Really, these aristocrats! he thought, they believe that even nature must do their bidding. He looked back to Porfiry and saw now that it was he who was being watched with interest. Porfiry smiled and nodded for Virginsky to look at something: a fountain sprayed out from a statue of Neptune, within an arc of columns.
‘He has made his own little Petergof,’ said Porfiry.
Virginsky allowed himself a collusive smile.
The path curved round and brought them to the front of the house. A gleaming facade of columns faced the sea, as if demanding obeisance of it.
Virginsky, however, was determined not to be cowed, though he was curiously discomfited by Porfiry’s basket, which was handed to him to hold as the senior investigating magistrate climbed down after him from the cab. He made sure to give it back to Porfiry at the soonest opportunity.
The doors were opened to them by a gaunt-faced butler who affected a superior attitude, despite the fact that he was the one done up in livery. When Porfiry explained who they were and why they were there, the butler turned a contemptuous eye on the basket before admitting them.
They followed his satin-clad back across a marble-floored reception hall towards the muted sounds of an orchestra playing. The hall was dominated by a huge painting of an Arcadian scene. Howtypical! thought Virginsky, hotly. He imagined the declaration he would make when he was brought into the count’s presence. You celebrate the rural idyll, adorn your walls with idealised images of shepherds and shepherdesses, yet the wealth that makes it possible was borne out of the ownership of human souls. The count will probably protest that he no longer owns any souls. Perhaps he will even claim to be a liberal, saying that he gave his serfs their freedom in advance of the reforms of ’61. But Virginsky would not spare him. You refuse to renounce the crimes of your forefathers! Your life of luxury and idleness is tainted by its source. You are the child of theft and oppression!
With an unpleasant jolt of awareness, Virginsky recognised the face his imagination had supplied for the count in this self-soothing fantasy: it was his father’s.
The flunky opened a door and released a blast of music that was both lush and somehow also ragged. The room they were shown into was a circular hall with a domed ceiling painted with clouds. The walls were lined with paper in which gold leaf predominated. In the middle of the hall, stretched out on a sofa, was a man of around forty, a Chinese dressing gown draped around his considerable bulk. He wore his hair long and unkempt and had his eyes closed, though he did not seem to be asleep. His expression was somewhere between the pained and the ecstatic. The musicians, who were dressed in the same pale-blue livery as the butler, were seated on a platform in front of their solitary audience. They were about twenty in number, and by the sounds of it, of varying degrees of musicianship. The string section produced a passable, even rich, sound, but one or two of the woodwind were out of tune, as well as out of time. Virginsky couldn’t see the face of the conductor, who was bringing them more or less to the end of a limping rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but his shoulders were rounded and the movements of his arms seemed rather constrained and lacking in conviction.
When the music finished, he turned a face in which fear and hopefulness were combined to pathetic effect towards the lounging aristocrat, who did not deign to open his eyes or acknowledge the end of the piece in any way. Virginsky also discerned in the conductor’s meek and suppliant expression a stifled hatred that were it ever to be released would result in an explosion of violent passion.
‘Well, Yakov Ilyich,’ began Count Akhmatov at last, for it was surely he reclining on the sofa. ‘The noise your rabble produces reminds me of the female pudenda, heavenly bliss in close proximity to utter filth and degradation.’
There was a titter of amusement from the players.
‘Thank you, Your Excellency.’ Yakov Ilyich smiled uneasily.
Count Akhmatov kept his eyes closed, but his arms swept magisterially about him, trailing the loose sleeves of his dressing gown. ‘Don’t thank me, you fool. I’m insulting you! Don’t you even have the wit to know when you are insulted?’
Yakov Ilyich shrugged and mugged for the orchestra. By such small acts of insubordination, he asserted his freedom from the tormentor on the sofa.