The truth was that she didn’t like the little actor, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. His friendship with Basil had grown apace since their first meeting in Moscow, so much so that Anne had a suspicion that Basil’s eagerness to spend the Season in St Petersburg had a lot to do with the fact that Jean-Luc had been invited there to play with the French company before the Emperor.
De Berthier ran tame about the Tchaikovskys’ town house, and was present – and extremely visible – at every entertainment they gave. He and Basil were inseparable: Basil went to his every performance, held court in his dressing-room, entertained the entire theatre company to expensive suppers at the English Club, and talked French Drama as an expert at dinner tables all over St Petersburg.
He and Jean-Luc were seen everywhere together, and more often than not drunk. The actor seemed to have had a deplorable effect on Basil, who behaved in his company more like a twenty-year-old cadet than the forty-year-old head of his family. Basil had taken to wearing very odd clothes, and indulging in strangely youthful horseplay, which was getting him talked about, and not always with indulgence. Olga had even broken her self-imposed rule of never stepping over Anne’s threshold unless absolutely forced to by calling on her voluntarily to beg her to stop Basil making a spectacle of himself, and consequently of all of them.
She had not enjoyed Anne’s assurance that she had no influence over her husband, which would once have given her great pleasure.
‘If you had behaved as a wife should,’ she said hotly, ‘you would now have sufficient credit with my brother to stop him destroying himself. But I suppose you don’t care about that. You always were a cold, hard, selfish woman, and I suppose it’s too much to expect you to change now, now that you have the spending of Basil’s fortune, which is evidently what you married him for.’
Anne did not care a jot for Olga’s good opinion, but it was rather too much to be insulted in her own house, so she invited Olga to leave, and they had not spoken to each other since. In fact, Anne did not care any more than Olga to know that her husband was making a fool of himself. What Basil did inevitably reflected on her; but it was not only that. She was fond of Basil, and did not like to see him come under a bad influence. There was something sinister about Jean-Luc; something not quite right. She didn’t like him and she didn’t trust him, and if there had been any way she could have detached Basil from his new friend, she would have done it.
But the thing which troubled her most about Jean-Luc was his devotion to Rose; and the undeniable fact that Rose loved him and responded to him more than to anyone else. Since he had been visiting her regularly, she had improved by leaps and bounds. She would turn her head and smile the moment she heard his voice; she would endure the massages Grubernik recommended without a whimper if Jean-Luc held her hand; for him she would do her exercises and attempt things that no one else could persuade her to try. By association, she had come to love Basil too, and the two of them frequently spent a whole afternoon playing with her, crawling about the floor to move the pieces of her toy farmyard at her command, dressing-up and play-acting, clowning to make her laugh.
Jean-Luc took Rose’s condition very seriously, and often used their games to induce her to increase the range of her abilities. He taught her spillikins to improve her manual dexterity, for instance, and invented a picture game with icons to exercise her eyes and to try to straighten the crooked one. He played wounded soldiers with her, to persuade her to try to walk in the leg braces she so hated; and it was he who first got her, in the course of a farmyard game, to lie down on the floor with him and Basil, and to crawl by pulling herself along by her elbows, with her poor weak legs trailing behind.
All this, Anne knew, ought to make her like him – at the very least, to be grateful to him. Yet she could not help feeling that all was not as it seemed, that he was using Rose to gain a foothold in the family. Because she always tried to be honest with herself, she had also wondered whether she was merely suffering from plain jealousy, because her daughter seemed to prefer the Frenchman’s company to hers. Was it jealousy that made her feel Jean-Luc was trying to steal Rose from her, to shut her out from the nursery? When that idea had first occurred to her, she tried very hard to fight it and to like Jean-Luc for Rose’s sake.
Then came the day when she had gone to the nursery, and standing at the door had seen Jean-Luc, on one leg with his arms above his head and his face painted in primary colours, pretending to be a flower, while Basil, in a gold-and-brown striped shawl taken from Anne’s wardrobe, buzzed around him as the bee. Rose, watching from her wheeled chair, was evidently some kind of fairy queen or woodland goddess, for she was draped in the green nursery table-cloth, with a crown of ivy round her soft, barley-brown hair and a wand clutched in her hand.
The flower’s antics as it tried to prevent the bee from pollenating it, and its expression when the bee finally succeeded, were so funny that Rose was almost choking with laughter, her face brighter and more alive than Anne had ever seen it. The bee and the flower ended up in a heap on the floor, laughing and panting, while Rose clapped her hands and cried ‘Again! Again!’
At that moment they all three caught sight of Anne at the door. The laughter died away, and five eyes regarded her, not precisely with hostility, but cautiously, and certainly without welcome.
‘Carry on,’ Anne had invited them. ‘Don’t let me stop the fun.’
But Rose’s smiles had disappeared like the sun going behind a cloud. Jean-Luc got up politely and engaged her in small talk, but they were evidently waiting for her to go. Turning at the door, Anne had caught Jean-Luc’s eyes on her with a bright, hard, speculative look. It was instantly veiled – so instantly, that afterwards she could tell herself she must have imagined it. But before she reached the bottom of the first flight of stairs, she heard Rose’s infectious giggle floating out from the nursery behind her. It hurt her to be so excluded from her daughter’s court – and from no fault of her own, but by another’s design.
It was all made worse by the fact that she was sure Basil recognised her feelings and enjoyed watching her struggle with them. She did her best to behave always with courtesy towards Jean-Luc; but she sometimes caught Basil watching her with a strange gleam in his eye.
Lolya had removed the absurd and melodramatic veil from her hat, was sitting very upright beside Anne in the winter caliche, her hands thrust deep into her muff, looking about her with enormous pleasure and hoping for someone to recognise and admire her. It had been a particularly severe winter, and there had been a great many snowfalls lately: the thaw would be late, by the look of things. Today was fine and bright, freezing hard, but with a blue sky and a thin sunshine like watered gold making deep, luminous blue shadows across the snow.
Anne’s white horses trotted out well, and while their feet made no sound, the bells on their harness rang a thin, sweet carillon, and the runners of the caliche hissed against the packed snow and threw out a fine spray of diamonds.
‘I always think, every winter,’ Anne said, ‘that travelling in the snow makes the best sound in the world. One could never be unhappy riding in a sleigh, don’t you think?’
Lolya looked round with a relieved smile. ‘Oh, you are happy! I’m so glad. You seemed so quiet before, I thought you were angry with me for interrupting you.’
‘No, love. I had something on my mind, that’s all.’
‘Oh good! Because there is one other thing I wanted to ask you. Could we drive down the Nevsky Prospekt, do you think? There’s something I want you to see.’
Anne looked at her suspiciously. ‘This is another of your wheedles, isn’t it?’