Then there were the parties themselves: she and Basil had invitations every day to dinners, masks, routs, balls, card evenings, musical soirées, theatre parties, picnics, water picnics and rides; and when they took their turn at entertaining, the work involved was almost inconceivable. Over the years she had built up an efficient staff of free, and therefore mostly foreign, labour, on whom she could rely, but there was still all the planning and deciding and supervision to do.
It ought, she reflected, to have left her no time in which to be unhappy; and she arranged her routines in order to leave herself no dangerous idle moments when reflection might ambush her. She was woken in the morning by Pauline, her maid, who brought her bread and fruit and coffee on a tray, together with the newspapers, letters and the day’s crop of invitations to sift. When she had eaten, she had her bath, and then various members of her staff were admitted while Pauline dressed her hair.
Her secretary, Miss Penkridge, who came from the same part of Yorkshire as her carriage-horses, would arrive first with her diary to remind her of her engagements, and to take instructions over which invitations to accept, and how to reply to the various other letters which had arrived that day. It was also Miss Penkridge’s duty to be aware of what plays, concerts, military reviews, exhibitions and other public entertainments were going on, and to acquire tickets when necessary; and to know what new books had been published, and to buy copies on her mistress’s behalf.
After the all-important Miss Penkridge the butler, housekeeper, cook and mantuamaker all had their consultation, and then Pauline would dress her for her morning engagements. If Basil was at home, he would usually call on her at that time in his dressing-gown, yawning and gum-eyed after the previous night’s all-male dissipation, and discuss the day’s programme and the new invitations. If he was not at home, or had been unusually late to bed and was not yet awake, she would not normally see him until they met for the evening’s engagement. They spent most evenings together – or at least, under the same roof, be it their own or someone else’s – but when the evening engagement was over, Basil usually went off to some club or mess to drink vodka and play cards until the early hours of the morning. Within Byeloskoye he had his own suite of apartments, and Anne hers.
A busy life, certainly; but, she was aware, lacking some essential ingredient. It absorbed, but did not satisfy her. She and Basil had not slept together for over a year, she reflected. It was not that she missed his physical advances, or had relished them when she had them; but it was the most obvious symptom of the fact that their marriage was not what it seemed She had married him as a means of escape, and to acquire security for herself, and if they were not good reasons, they were at least the reasons for which a great many women married. Basil had loved her – so he said, and so she believed. Theirs might have been a contented, if not a passionate, partnership.
But the love, if it ever existed, did not last long. Anne went a virgin to her wedding bed, knowing nothing of the facts, and little of the feelings beyond the undefined yearnings she had felt in Kirov’s arms. She found it deeply, distressingly embarrassing to get into the same bed with Basil Andreyevitch, both of them in their nightgowns and caps; and what happened after the candles were snuffed and the bed curtains drawn was astonishing, painful and repellant.
She could not believe that he had got it right. Surely no all-knowing, all-forgiving Deity could have designed it that way? And yet Basil Andreyevitch had something of a reputation as a gallant – ought he not to know? Perhaps, she pondered, his reputation for gallantry had been like his reputation for wit – going a long way before the truth. Certainly he seemed to find almost as little gratification in what he did to her unwilling body as she did.
To her relief, his attempts on her grew less frequent after the first few weeks, and she rewarded his restraint by being more pleasant and attentive towards him on the mornings after nights when they had simply gone to sleep. When the thing had been done, she found it hard to meet his eye in the morning, and her embarrassment made her cool and distant with him. Sometimes she felt guilty about that, for if he really did love her, and his love drove him to want to do that extraordinary thing, ought she not to be more accommodating?
But it transpired at last that he must have been doing something right, for she became pregnant. As soon as her condition was confirmed, Basil moved out of her bed to his own apartments, with what seemed like relief on both sides; and they had never slept together since. Eleven months after their wedding, Anne had given birth to his child.
Marya Vassilievna had arrived on the 8th of September with very little difficulty, a tiny, pink and white and gold baby, who had almost from the moment of her birth been nicknamed simply Rose. It was then that Anne discovered that all was not dead inside her. She would never have believed that she could feel so much for such a tiny scrap of humanity, but when her baby was first placed in her arms, and she gazed down on the soft, unused face, the perfect miniature fingers, the fragile skull with its delicate fronds of hair – her child, born out of her own flesh! – she knew a love as powerful as it was complete and perfect.
Basil adored Rose on first sight, and the baby should have brought Anne and Basil together, a shared concern to make a bond between them; but two things prevented that from happening. Firstly, there was her sex. Basil’s parents had been deeply upset over his choice of Anne as a wife. They had liked her well enough as Kirov’s governess, but it was mortifying to have their only son marry her. Had Basil not taken the precaution of marrying her first and telling them afterwards, they would probably never have accepted her. As it was, there was nothing they could do about it but put on a good face in public, though in private they remained cool towards her.
In this they had the support, and more, of Olga, who could never forgive Anne for usurping her place at Basil’s side, and for outshining her in intellectual society. Olga would have given anything to destroy Anne. As it was, she was quick to make profit out of it, when Anne destroyed herself by producing a female child. It was she who pointed out to her parents that Anna Petrovna had failed in her primary duty; who induced her mother to believe that Anna was probably incapable of bearing a son; and when her mother died only a week after Rose’s christening, convinced her father that she had died of a broken heart, consequent upon the reflection that Basil was tied irrevocably to a barren woman
Having chosen Anne knowing she would not meet with his parents’ approval, Basil ought to have stood by her and forced them to accept her. But he had been single, and their darling, for too long. He and Olga had preserved for each other the illusion of childhood, and with it went a dependency on their parents’ opinion and a need for their approval. His loyalty to Anne was too new and uncertain to outweigh the old; he was his parents’ child first, and Anne’s husband only second. He equivocated, attempted to please both sides and ended by pleasing neither; and Anne, disappointed and angry that he did not protect her from his parents’ disapprobation, felt the first shadow of contempt for him.