Читать книгу The Lieutenant’s Lover - Harry Bingham - Страница 9

Misha made changes.

He made them fast, over the tears and protests of his mother and the servants. He began with the barricade at the mouth of the corridor.

‘It has to come down. Now. You think the red militias will be stopped by a chaise longue and a couple of armchairs? Nonsense. It has to come down. Vitaly, come here. I want you to dismantle this thing. That horrible old wardrobe is no good for anything. We can use it for firewood. Those other pieces you can share out among the others.

‘Next the windows. They’re hopeless. They need fixing properly. We don’t have any putty, of course. But how do you make putty? It’s chalk and oil, isn’t it? Linseed oil. I saw chalk in Yevgeny’s room. We’ll use that. Seraphima, do you know where we can get linseed oil? If we can’t get the oil, ordinary flax seeds will do. We can press them for oil. And in the meantime, curtains.

Do we have any fabric? No? Then use the hanging in mother’s room—’

‘The tapestry, Misha! No! It’s French, you know. Your grandmother—’

‘It’s thick and it’s heavy. It’ll do. Use the carpet too if you have to.’

And on it went.

The fireplaces were useless, so Misha stole some empty oil cans and turned them into stoves. He dismissed the servants. He exchanged the ebony chest for a sackful of millet flour, which would see them through winter. He made an inventory of their remaining valuables and concealed them beneath the floorboards.

But problems remained.

Firewood was the worst. They had terribly little, and decent firewood seemed almost impossible to obtain. And the next thing was his mother. She couldn’t adjust to the new conditions. She was always sick with one thing or another. It wasn’t just physical illness, it was a sickness that penetrated her soul. Misha was certain that if he couldn’t find a way to get her into a place of safety, then she wouldn’t survive. Yevgeny too was having his childhood stolen. It seemed clear that the best thing for all of them was to escape Russia, to make their way to Switzerland to join Natasha and Raisa there. But how to do that, with no money, no friends, no help …?

It was as he was thinking about that precise problem one evening that inspiration came to him.

He had gone, as he had done often enough already, over to the glass cabinet and taken out a bundle of papers: his father’s papers that his mother had managed to salvage. He turned the papers in his hand. Although only a few months old, they seemed as ancient as Egyptian papyrus. Stock certificates. Title deeds. Bank statements. Holdings of land. Everything represented by those papers had been swept away, almost literally overnight. On the top of the pile, there was a coloured picture postcard of General Kutuzov, the victor of the Battle of Borodino a hundred years earlier and a particular hero of Misha’s father. It was odd seeing the card. It was almost as though these stock certificates and the struggle against Napoleon both existed in the same far distant past.

But as well as certificates of ownership, the bundle contained letters from lawyers, accountants, brokers. And a persistent theme ran through them. From about February 1917, his father seemed to have started selling assets. Stocks, bonds, land, anything. There were no huge sales. The country was at war with Germany and Austria, after all. It would have been impossible to sell up completely, even if he had wanted to. But there was a steady stream of sales and yet no evidence from the bank statements that his savings accounts had increased by even a rouble. And yet there were hundreds of thousands of roubles involved. Though Misha had reviewed the papers a dozen times already, he was struck by a sudden thought.

‘Mother? These papers. Where did you get them?’

‘Oh, your father’s study of course. Where else?’

‘Where in his study? His desk? His cabinet?’

‘Oh yes. His desk, the cabinet. Luckily we had the keys. But we had to work fast. One day, we had everything, the next it was a knock at the door and this horrible young man with a leather coat telling us about the new decrees.’

‘You had the key. Who else?’

‘Oh, your father, silly! How else could he have opened them?’ Emma Ernestovna laughed out loud.

‘His secretary, I suppose?’

‘Leon? I suppose.’

‘And how did you happen to have one? Did he give it to you?’

‘Oh no, not me. Why should I have a key to his cabinet? Maria Fedorovna, the housekeeper, had a set of keys. That cabinet! Japanese lacquer. So nice, but the polishing!’

‘Maria Fedorovna had a key, did she?’

Misha’s mother said something in reply, but he was no longer listening. He felt a sudden shock of excitement. Because it was inconceivable that his father would have left his most important documents in a place where a servant could have access to them. It was almost as if the bundle that his mother rescued had been a decoy to draw attention away from the real ones. Misha jumped up.

‘Excuse me.’

He ran out, down the corridor and downstairs. His father’s study had been on the ground floor, behind the drawing room, a place of high bookshelves, cigar smoke, polished wood and leather. Of course, it wasn’t like that now. Two families had been allocated the room, and seemed to fight bitterly over the use of every square inch. A china pisspot tucked behind a curtain constituted the hygiene arrangements. A trail of slops led from there to the nearest window. But that wasn’t what caught Misha’s notice.

What caught his eye was a grey steel safe, bolted and cemented into the wall behind the panelling. The safe had only been exposed when the room’s inhabitants had begun ripping up the panelling for firewood. The plaster around the safe had been smashed off. Misha could see the pale marks where sledgehammers had struck. But the safe had withstood the assault. Steel bars protruding from the side of the safe were deeply set into the masonry. Misha had never known of the safe’s existence. Its sudden exposure reminded him of what his family must have been through in those first weeks of revolution, before his arrival home. No wonder his mother was in a state of collapse. Anyone would be.

He looked up, snapping himself out of this unhelpful change of thought. Both families, fourteen or fifteen people in all, were staring at Misha, grinning. They knew who he was, as did all the occupants of the house. An old man, a grandfather spat in the fireplace and cackled, ‘Come to say goodbye, eh?’

‘I’m looking for logs. You don’t have any, do you?’

The old man wasn’t deterred. He nodded back at the safe. ‘They’re coming to take it away next week. They’re going to put a tractor in the yard out there, run chains in through the window, then bang! Out it comes. It’s full of gold, they say.’

‘When are they coming?’

‘Tuesday. Wednesday. Who knows?’

That gave Misha three days, maybe four. Except he didn’t know the codes and he wasn’t a safe-breaker.