The dining-room was reorganized on the principle of treble shifts, and Aunt Molly, a big, full-blooded woman, presided over the long table surrounded by a multitude of her kin. Aunt Teresa, heavily powdered, bejewelled and wrapped in old lace, sat in a great arm-chair, propped up by pillows, a little to the side, to emphasize as it were that, unlike the others, she was an invalid. When she spoke across to Uncle Lucy she raised her voice with an air of self-sacrifice as though it were a cruel strain on her nerves. ‘Ach!’ she sighed, when he did not catch what she said. And when she repeated louder the words she looked at the others to imply that she did so at the cost of her delicate health. When he spoke to her she closed her eyes, as though it were trying to her to make herself listen to his loud unaccustomed voice, as yet not modulated to her sensitive ear. Uncle Lucy continually asked questions about the progress of the Russo-Polish war, in which he was much interested, but could not hear my answers, and so turned to his wife. But Aunt Molly’s intellectual powers had been sapped by a dozen children to whom she had given birth, and in her rendering of my account she mixed up events and issues in such a way that my uncle, withal a clever man, perceived at once that there was something very wrong about it. In desperation he turned to his son, a lout of eighteen, sitting at his side. ‘What did George say?’ he asked, and listened through the ear-trumpet.
‘The Russkis have defeated the Polyakis,’ the lout said right into the ear-trumpet.
‘Speak up. Can’t hear you.’
‘George says,’ shouted the lout, ‘the Russkis have defeated the Polyakis.’
‘Shame!’ cried my uncle. ‘Shame!’ And I wondered what was a shame and why my uncle’s Russophile sympathies should have turned Pole. ‘Shame!’ said my uncle, ‘that you, an Englishman, can’t talk English better than that.’
The lout shrugged his shoulders. Seeing that he had never been out of Russia and never spoke English at home, it was a wonder he spoke it as well as he did. Towards the end of lunch Vladislav brought my coffee machine. In forty-five minutes the coffee machine yielded enough for one small cup. Nevertheless, being polite, I asked Uncle Lucy if he wanted coffee, and devoutly hoped that he did not. But, as usual, he did not hear what I said. He had not as yet got used to my voice.
‘Do you want coffee?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Do you want coffee?’ I cried.
‘What?’
‘Do you want coffee?’ I yelled across the table, so that my own voice reverberated in my ears.
‘Speak up. Can’t hear you,’ he said.
‘George asks,’ shouted Aunt Molly, to whose voice Uncle Lucy happened to be peculiarly susceptible, ‘if you want coffee.’
‘Coffee?… Yes.’
‘Curse you!’ I thought.
Luncheon over, Aunt Molly rose, followed by her offspring, like a hen by her innumerable chicks—‘Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck …’ They ran in front, behind, and to both sides of her, as she moved into the drawing-room where she sat down on a soft chair, an ample, milk-and-blood-complexioned woman with small, kindly, brown eyes, her chicks surrounding her. She had been married a long time, but they kept arriving each year like a birthday present, or sometimes for Christmas or Easter. And when you saw her surrounded by cherubim with the same brown eyes (or blue like Uncle Lucy’s) you felt moved, you spoke and treaded softly, reverently, feeling you had stepped into a sanctum, the holihood of motherhood, as if into the presence of that picture of Raphael. Some were by other mothers, and some, no doubt, fruits of Uncle Lucy’s infidelities. Even so, you could never tell by her demeanour. To her all were alike. She had protested against Uncle Lucy’s love affairs by ignoring him. But she ignored him so gently and meekly that he never noticed it.
And here I overheard a fragment of a conversation between Uncle Emmanuel and Uncle Lucy which I judged had some small connection with the financial nature of their recent correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel, the officer — which suggests swords, courage, honour (of sorts) — said to Uncle Lucy, the landowner — skins, mills, commerce, bills of lading—‘I respect you more than I like you.’ And Uncle Lucy surprised me by his ready wit in replying, ‘And I like you more than I respect you.’ Uncle Lucy, though he held forth a good deal on his poverty, had a pocket-book bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination — foreign as well as Russian. He had small deposits abroad, that was all. The Bolsheviks had taken the bulk of his money.
Aunt Teresa came up to her brother, put her head on his shoulder and said, ‘Oh, Lucy, pity me! I am so faint, so ill, so weak, so miserable! I won’t live long!’
‘Speak up! Can’t hear you,’ he said.
‘Oh, my God,’ sighed my aunt, and looked up to heaven. ‘If father were alive and saw the plight we were in!’
He looked at her with compassion. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You will receive your dividends as before.’
There was a pause, our hearts beat as if in a hollow.
‘We are in debt,’ she said in a whisper.
‘That’s all right, you will get your arrears.’
There were tears in her eyes. ‘I must sit down,’ she said. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar.
‘What a pretty and well-mannered girl — Natàsha,’ Aunt Molly observed.
‘Yes, I am very fond of her,’ said Aunt Teresa, with a brightness and gaiety unusual in her, ‘and I rather like her mother. Her father is a queer fellow, quite harmless, though I must confess I’m not enamoured of his face, and I wonder what he does with himself all day. He’s very meek and mild and servile with everybody, but at home he bullies his wife. He suffers from a kind of mania of persecution, and every now and then he sounds the alarm, wakes up his wife and child in the middle of the night and bids them dress — ready for flight at a moment’s notice. And there they sit, all packed and ready, in their fur coats and muffs and hats and warm goloshes. Then he declares “All Clear!” and sends them back to bed. This happens about once a month or so.’
Aunt Molly sighed. ‘I’m sorry for him. He looks so pathetic hopping on his wooden leg.’
The children’s manner of acquaintance making, in its directness, reminded one of that of dogs. Seeing a photo of Uncle Lucy on Harry’s ‘dressing-table’, Natàsha said, ‘Oh, is that your daddy? He is very nice.’
‘Ah, but he’s not nice to mummy,’ Harry said.
‘I have a daddy too,’ Natàsha said.
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘I have! That Rush-yan gentleman — he my daddy.’
‘I know, but we don’t like his face, and we wonder what he does.’
‘Ooh—! Nasty, nasty, nasty!’
‘He’s not your daddy at all,’ said Harry. ‘He’s the stork that brought you.’
Open-mouthed, she asked, ‘What’s it means stork?’
‘Because he hops about on one leg.’
‘Sylvia, don’t wink!’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘The wedding’—she turned to Aunt Molly—‘will have to be put off till after Christmas.’
Sylvia, grave and timid in the presence of elderly ladies, was all ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ at the approach of her many boy cousins.
‘Do you mind putting off the wedding till after Christmas?’ I asked.
She stopped laughing. ‘Just as you like, darling. Ha, ha, ha!’ She at once became lively again.