As a result of these campaigns, Feodor, Galina and Zina got together, and decided that the summer house at Pyatigorsk should be opened after all. None of the younger brothers wanted to leave Chastnaya, but Dmitri insisted they could manage very well without Feodor, and that he ought to have a break from his cares, which seemed of late to be bowing his shoulders and greying his hair. So it was decided that he and Galina should go, and chaperone their own Masha, a plump merry sixteen-year-old, and Zinochka; and that Katya and Irushka should go along for the baths.
‘What about Anna?’ Zina said. ‘She is looking pale, too. Perhaps a change of scene would do her good.’
Anne, when asked, thanked them, but declined. She had no desire for the bright lights and music of a fashionable resort. She would prefer to stay quietly at Chastnaya teaching Sashka, from whom, now she had got him back from Nyanka, she was rarely parted. And she had begun in the evenings to have regular talks with Father Gregory, the priest from the estate church, who was helping her to come to terms with her guilt over Natasha’s death. He was also, she knew, trying to convert her to the Old Faith, but she didn’t mind that. She was beginning to feel that the English prejudice against idolatry was not so age-old and deep-seated, nor even necessarily so absolutely reasonable as it had once seemed to her; that God could not be entirely averse from a little magic, since He had put so much of it into His world in the making. Little by little, she was coming closer to her adopted country; but where the realisation would once have alarmed, now it pleased her.
However, when it came to it, Irina refused to go to Pyatigorsk without her. She was indeed looking very ill, and the cough which had troubled her last winter had returned. She was listless, unable to be interested in anything, sleeping a great deal, and when she was awake, lying on her bed or on a sofa staring at nothing. Anne tried to involve her with Sashka, feeling that if the boy could draw his mother back from the darkness, it would be worth losing him to her; but Irina didn’t seem able to care about him. She tried, politely, but she looked at him like a stranger, and Sashka’s lip began to tremble ominously. She had nothing to give her son. Nasha had been everything to her; she could care for nothing else, not now.
So when Zina and Feodor insisted she went to Pyatigorsk, she made little resistance, and sat and watched Marie packing for her with dull but resigned eyes. When she understood that Anne meant to stay, she suddenly roused herself and issued an ultimatum. She would go if Anna went, or stay if Anna stayed. They might take their choice.
So when the party set off from Chastnaya to travel back along the Cossack line, westwards along the River Terek, and then north-west to Pyatigorsk of the Five Hills, Anne went with them, leaving Sashka behind in Nyanka’s charge. He waved goodbye to her bravely from the verandah as the carriage pulled away, and Anne leaned out of the window and waved back as long as his small figure was in sight.
The Kiriakovs’ summer house was a pretty, modern building of white-painted wood and pink shingles, sitting in an extensive and rather overgrown pleasure ground just outside the town, on the road which led from Pyatigorsk to Karras and Mount Besh Tau. It had a large verandah – an essential feature of any house in those parts – over which clambered a riot of white and palest pink roses and white summer jasmine, whose scent filled the air all day and through the long pale twilight.
The area around Pyatigorsk had always been famous for horses, and there were well-marked bridle paths to all the best viewpoints, interesting ruins and ‘safe’ villages. Expeditions on horseback to tribal villages to see displays of horsemanship and charming Tartar customs, to buy native souvenirs, and to witness the strange ceremonies of the Moslem feasts, were an integral part of the Pyatigorsk ‘Season’. Anne felt she had seen as much of these things as she wanted. Fortunately, after Feodor’s curt refusal of the first such invitation, the story was quickly passed around as to the circumstances of Natasha’s death, and the Russian community tactfully refrained from asking again.
But there were still picnic rides, and expeditions to other places of interest, such as the famous stud farm in the foothills of Mount Mashuk, and to the great St Eusignius’ Day Fair at Karras. And then, of course, there was the life of the town itself. It was evidently in a state of rapid expansion, new houses and public buildings going up along the main street, and the dachas of the rich being built at the edges of the town in their own pleasure gardens. The houses were mostly of wood, but painted bright, cheerful colours – blue and raspberry and rust-red and woodland green – and they had breath-taking views of the blue-green foothills rising up to darker mountain peaks, and in the far distance the misty silver chain of the Caucasus.
As well as the sulphur baths, on which, of course, a great deal of the town’s activities centred, and the chalybeate springs, there were newly laid out public gardens for walking in, and an open-air theatre; and the main street was in a state of improvement, with new shops opening every month, and a raised footpath along which had been planted an avenue of spindly saplings which would one day be scented limes. There were numerous public and private balls, for the Season was now at its height; and routs, picnics, masks, dinner parties, card evenings and every other sort of occasion that the fashionable people could invent for dressing-up and getting together to gossip and flirt.
Besides the invalids and the pleasure-seekers, Pyatigorsk always had a large and fluctuating population of military personnel, for it was strategically placed on the route between Stavropol, and Tiflis in Georgia and Petrovsk on the Caspian shore. It was a cheerful town, and Anne could not help her spirits being raised, though she had anticipated little pleasure from the visit. Masha and Zinochka, after a brief struggle with sadness, flung themselves whole-heartedly into the gaiety which inevitably surrounds a large number of handsome young officers on leave, and only occasionally looked guilty when they discovered they were enjoying themselves. Feodor encouraged them. They had loved little Nashka as much as anyone could in the short time they had known her; but they were young, and life must go on.
Katya soon found a circle of matrons who were just to her taste, and when she was not subjecting herself to the malodorous baths, she was usually to be found sipping coffee or soda water with two or three women of her own age and status, and chatting luxuriously about ailments, confinements, the delightfulness of one’s own children, the wickedness of servants and the expense of everything in particular.
Irina, however, did not revive. She went dutifully to the baths every day, accompanied by one or other of the women, drank her glass of the stinking water, and immersed herself in the communal pool. Thereafter she sat on the verandah, just as she did at Chastnaya, her eyes fixed on some invisible distance, rocking and rocking herself, as if the movement were putting distance between herself and her pain. She seemed to Anne somehow to be fading, becoming transparent, as though the stuff of her were wearing thin, and time were beginning to show through here and there. She rocked and rocked, travelling every day further from them, her blue-shadowed eyes focused elsewhere, on what alone now could brighten them.
Anne tried to talk to her, to make her discuss what she felt and thought, but it was a hopeless task. Sometimes she would talk about things that had happened in her childhood – some incident which had intrigued or pleased or frightened her – but nothing more recent seemed to interest her; and even then she would sometimes stop in the middle of what she was saying, as though she simply could not care enough to go on.