By the time Paul had been old enough to be aware of the world around him, the Rostovs were part of that tiny percentage of the Russian population that had its collective boot firmly on the neck of the remainder. With such a background it was only to be expected that they knew which side of reaction their bread was buttered, that they were staunch tsarists, and prayed — Orthodoxly, naturally — that that was how matters would continue.
Paul’s father, it turned out, had been an exception. He had embraced the liberal politics of the day, much to the disgust of the rest of his family. Paul had learned this from his mother as soon as he was old enough to understand the ramifications, even if she had been a little more reticent about the fact that his father had compounded his folly by marrying a foreigner. There had been arguments and recriminations, no doubt, although he had never been directly exposed to this family rancour. As children, he and his cousins had rarely inhabited the adult world, being left mostly in the charge of governesses and servants; in Paul’s case, from little more than an infant, in the care of a nurse, an old peasant-woman whose smell he could sometimes even now recall if he ever happened to find himself in a farmyard.
Had his father lived, he supposed he and his mother would have continued to be tolerated — albeit with that acquired Rostov air of faint autocratic disdain. Once his father died, however, they had found themselves disposed of with almost unseemly haste. In retrospect it was perhaps not so surprising given the politics of the time; he could still recall seeing newspaper headlines proclaiming one or other of the numerous political assassinations of the day and could distinctly remember his mother blithely remarking over lunch one day that the nasty man had deserved it. He hadn’t understood at the time how any man, nasty or not, could deserve to be blown to pieces by an assassin’s bomb and had afterwards taken the trouble to ask his old nurse to explain it to him. She had merely clouted him across the head in the time-honoured peasant fashion and forced him onto his knees in the Red Room to pray for the dead man’s soul. What he had only understood later was that Russian politics had become so divisive that many of the liberal intelligentsia had managed to manoeuvre themselves into a cul-de-sac where they had come to accept assassination as the everyday give-and-take of political discourse. By that time, though, he had grown into adulthood and left Russia far behind. What was more, he had managed to acquire the information without the risk of brain damage under the tutelage of some heavy-handed peasant woman.
Given all that had followed since, he couldn’t help but wonder where the haughty arrogance of the Rostovs had got them. He knew well-enough where it had got his father — an early and watery grave in the sea of Japan, going down with his ship and the rest of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, that most humiliating of debacles. But he could hardly pin that on his father’s liberal politics. Sergei Nikolayevich had been a naval officer, after all, and had had to go where his incompetent senior officers had ordered him; might have been one of the incompetent officers himself, for all Paul knew. Had his father lived (or so Paul liked to think), he might have accommodated the changed political landscape of Russia. But as for the rest of the family, he doubted that they were capable of being so nimble-footed. It was always possible they had come to recognise which side of their bread the fresh butter was currently being applied and modify their politics accordingly, yet the news arriving from Russia since the previous November had disturbed even his mother. Since the Bolshevik coup it was beginning to look as if merely swapping sides wasn’t going to be enough. In fact it was all beginning to seem, like his dream, disturbingly reminiscent of the French Revolution.
Had his mother stayed in Russia he supposed she would have at last found something in common with the rest of the family. Although holding radical views — or revolutionary views, as Uncle Ivan, had seen them — had not prevented her from living up to her position as a member of the ruling elite. All well and good while they had lived in Russia, but unfortunately once she had discovered this hitherto unsuspected taste for airs and graces, she had continued to live up to them even once they had returned to England. The fact that she could no longer afford grand houses and estates did not stop her from acting as though she could. After banishing her the Rostovs had at least had the good grace (or perhaps just deep enough pockets) to settle an allowance on her for living expenses, and another on Paul for his education. And it had also been his understanding that, despite their doubts concerning the marriage, there had been a lump sum of sorts settled on them as well, in respect of his father’s memory. Which was the least they could do in Paul’s opinion since, as soon as Sergei Nikolayevich had died, they had tied up his share of the Rostov fortune in the labyrinthine Russian legal system.
This had made little impact upon Paul at the time. As far as he was concerned, his father’s legacy was always something of a waterlogged conception, something he had never quite been able to isolate from the rest of the sunken fleet at Tsushima. Neither had he ever quite decided whether the gratuitous lump sum had been a blessing or a curse, encouraging as it had his mother’s extravagance while at the same time staving off insolvency. Now it had become academic. His mother’s capital had long since been exhausted and, having completed his education, Paul’s allowance had also dried up. What had also dried up, since the Bolshevik seizure of power, had been the income stream provided by the monthly allowance for his mother’s living expenses. That had abruptly ceased several months earlier and had been one of the reasons why he had thought a sound capital investment would be a good idea. The upshot of that, of course, was that the investment had been neither sound nor a capital idea and had disappeared, along with what savings he had, down the road with the departing Valentine.
He supposed it was always possible that the monthly allowance might be restored, although the bank had suggested this would be dependent upon a reversal of the recent events in Russia. So it was against this pecuniary — not to say mercenary — background that he couldn’t escape the irony of being recruited, in part, to persuade his cousin Mikhail that the Legion would support his efforts to reinstate the old order. In essence, reinstating the autocratic order for Mikhail could mean reinstating the money order for his mother.
The real irony though, and the one that bit a little deeper, was that, while for years he had been subjected to the influence of his mother’s political views and those of the exiles she had entertained, he had remained untouched by them. Yet, courtesy of a couple of days spent in a filthy shell-hole with an English-born radical, he had become unexpectedly interested in the upheaval in Russia, and not a little supportive of it. To be honest he had not been able to keep fully abreast of events. The news of the February Revolution, the fall of the tsar and of Kerensky’s Provisional Government, having arrived filtered through the few English newspapers available at the front. His mother’s letters at this time, although full of the news, had often arrived in a state — if they arrived at all — that left them unreadable. A fact that given Kell’s interest in his mother was no longer so mysterious. The subsequent Bolshevik take-over when it came had coincided with the Battle of Passchendaele and by then he had far too much on his mind to worry about what was happening in far away Russia.
Later, lying confused in hospital, he hadn’t been exactly sure whether it was Corporal Jacobs and the shell-hole that had engendered his Damascene moment, or whether some hereditary inheritance from his father had finally surfaced. A mutant strain of liberalism, passed down in a practical demonstration of Darwinism, perhaps. Two years in the trenches cheek by jowl with ordinary working men might have had something to do with it, he supposed, otherwise the seeds, from wherever they had come, would have found no fertile ground.