Rosa had stopped playing when he began to awaken, and Vladimir was standing beside her at the piano. They obviously imagined he was still asleep, and though they were speaking in low tones, he heard most of their words distinctly.
‘You cannot go on. I’ve been telling you for three years.’ His uncle’s baritone voice, gently persuasive. ‘I can’t bear to see it.’
‘There’s nothing to be done. But, Volodya…’ Dimitri had never heard anyone use this diminutive form of his uncle’s name before. ‘Volodya, I’m so afraid.’
‘You need sleep, my little dove. Stop tormenting yourself. At least stay with me here a while.’ Vladimir paused, apparently to think. ‘I have to go to Berlin and Paris next spring. Come with me. We can go to one of the spas for a health cure. I think you know you will be safe with me.’
Dimitri stared, his eyes wide open. He saw his mother touch Vladimir’s large hand affectionately. ‘I know.’
Dimitri sat bolt upright, then winced with pain. He saw their two faces turn towards him: his uncle’s irritated, his mother’s distraught. Then Vladimir said, as calmly as though nothing had happened: ‘Ah, my friend. You have woken up. Let’s all have some tea.’ And Dimitri himself could not make out what it was he had just heard.
The next morning, Rosa announced that she must return to Moscow. ‘I’ve been away from your father for too long,’ she told him. ‘I worry about him so.’ And once again her face looked haggard, suggesting she had not slept the night before.
The days that followed might have been sad for Dimitri. Not only did his mother depart, but Nadezhda was summoned back to Moscow by Mrs Suvorin; and since the doctor said he must not be moved, he was left at Russka almost alone. It was Vladimir who now, quietly but firmly, took over his life.
Just two days after Rosa left, his uncle appeared with several books and scores and dumped them on the table beside his bed. ‘You play well, my friend, and you’ve made some pretty compositions in the evenings,’ he announced firmly. ‘Now that you’re confined to bed though, you should make the most of your seclusion. It’s time you began to understand what you’re doing. These are books of musical theory and composition. Study them.’
It was hard work at first, even boring. But each evening his uncle made him go through the exercises: harmonies, counterpoint, the complex business of musical discipline. Though only an amateur, Vladimir’s understanding was considerable and he was a stern taskmaster. ‘Now I know why your factories make a good profit,’ Dimitri once laughed. But the results, he had to confess, were excellent. In just six weeks, with nothing else in the world to do, the thirteen year old made astonishing progress. And he found something else, too: that as his technical understanding increased, he began to have a burning desire, an absolute compulsion, to use this new knowledge he was mastering, and to compose. So that in September, when the doctor finally agreed that he might travel back to Moscow, he remarked to Vladimir: ‘Do you know, I think perhaps I’m really going to be a composer.’
To which his uncle, to the boy’s surprise, simply smiled and replied: ‘Of course you are.’
And it was because of this period of study that Dimitri Suvorin, long after he had become famous, always remarked: ‘It was a fall from a horse that made me.’
The fall from the horse had one other effect. Whether it was the carelessness of the stable boys who carried him back to the house, or the fact that the fracture was multiple, or the poor technique of the factory doctor who set his leg, Dimitri Suvorin’s right leg was twisted out of shape for the rest of his life and he walked with a stick.
1908, September
As well as visiting whenever he could think of an excuse, Alexander Bobrov often walked past the outside of Vladimir Suvorin’s great house in the hope of catching sight of Nadezhda. Despite the embarrassing incident at Easter he had never, for a moment, given up his idea. ‘I shall marry her,’ he told his father bluntly.
Once already, that month, he had found an excuse for going in and had found Mrs Suvorin and her daughter there, and learned that Vladimir would not be back in Moscow until late that month.
This evening, however, it was already late. The curtains and blinds were all closed, and only habit had made him walk by the Suvorin house at all. A light mist had fallen; the street lamps were so many yellowish blurs; few people were about. He would probably not even have glanced at the house if he had not heard a light footfall in that direction, a sound which seemed to end by the front door.
He peered across the street. For a moment he could not see anyone; then, standing by the portico, he made out a muffled figure in a broad-brimmed felt hat. He paused to watch and to his surprise, a moment later, saw the front door open a little and the figure swiftly step inside. But it was just as the door was closing that he caught his breath. For as the figure took off his hat, Alexander saw, without a shadow of a doubt, the reddish hair of Yevgeny Popov.
What the devil does she want with me? It was a question Popov had asked himself many times. She had everything: a brilliant husband, a huge fortune – all that the bourgeois world had to offer. Of course, the upper bourgeoisie, having no useful purpose, sometimes got bored. In a celebrated case, one of the heirs of a great Russian merchant fortune had recently blown his brains out in his brother’s house – not for any reason, but purely on a whim because he happened to see a revolver on a table. ‘Ennui’, they called it. Bourgeois decadence, of course, was what it really was.
Was she just bored? He did not think so. Unhappy, perhaps, but not bored.
He remembered a conversation he had had once with Lenin. ‘Don’t expect too much from women,’ his friend had told him. ‘I’ve never yet met any woman except my wife who could play chess or read a railway timetable.’ Popov grinned to himself. He knew that in recent years Lenin had been having a sporadic affair with a certain countess who lived in St Petersburg. He wondered if the countess could play chess. And now, as he looked at Mrs Suvorin, he idly asked: ‘Do you play chess?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but it bores me.’
As for Mrs Suvorin, whether she played chess or not, there was no doubt about her intelligence. Although recently he had heard that the authorities wanted to arrest him, Popov had managed to come discreetly to the house several times in the last two years. Each time, she had questioned him carefully about his beliefs; and though she had declined to read any Marx, it seemed to him that she was genuinely interested in what he told her.
It was also becoming clear that she was interested in him.
But why? From the first it had occurred to Popov that Suvorin might be unfaithful. If his wife wanted to revenge herself with an affair though, hadn’t she plenty of her own kind to choose from? Unless of course she wanted him because he represented the revolution that would destroy her husband’s world. That, of course, would be a special kind of insult. But whether that idea amused him, or whether it would make him feel he was being used, he was not sure.
The house was quiet. She had sent the servants to bed long ago. She was sitting on a low chair in front of the fire, which was burning low, and she wore a pale blue peignoir. She seemed to be lost in thought as he sat, his legs apart, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees.
‘Tell me,’ she said slowly, ‘why you come here.’
Popov was silent for a while before answering. There were good reasons of course. The first had been that the Bolshevik Party was short of funds. Whether he could get money out of the industrialist’s wife he had no idea, but it was worth looking into. He remembered how, not long ago, when a rich sympathizer had left a legacy to the party and his two daughters had disputed the Will, a pair of enterprising Bolsheviks, concealing their affiliation, had somehow persuaded the two women to marry them and got the money for the party that way. Even Popov had been impressed by that piece of audacity. It showed what could be done.