The Man From St. Petersburg

My baby has almost grown up, Lydia thought.

She said: “It’s very lovely, Madame Bourdon.”

“Thank you, my lady.”

Charlotte said: “It’s terribly uncomfortable.”

Lydia sighed. It was just the kind of thing Charlotte would say. Lydia said: “I wish you wouldn’t be so frivolous.”

Charlotte knelt down to pick up her train. Lydia said: “You don’t have to kneel. Look, copy me and I’ll show you how it’s done. Turn to the left.” Charlotte did so, and the train draped down her left side. “Gather it with your left arm, then make another quarter turn to the left.” Now the train stretched out along the floor in front of Charlotte. “Walk forward, using your right hand to loop the train over your left arm as you go.”

“It works.” Charlotte smiled. When she smiled, you could feel the glow. She used to be like this all the time, Lydia thought. When she was little, I always knew what was going on in her mind. Growing up is learning to deceive.

Charlotte said: “Who taught you all these things, Mama?”

“Your uncle George’s first wife, Belinda’s mother, coached me before I was presented.” She wanted to say: These things are easy to teach, but the hard lessons you must learn on your own.

Charlotte ’s governess, Marya, came into the room. She was an efficient, unsentimental woman in an iron-gray dress, the only servant Lydia had brought from St. Petersburg. Her appearance had not changed in nineteen years. Lydia had no idea how old she was: Fifty? Sixty?

Marya said: “Prince Orlov has arrived, my lady. Why, Charlotte, you look magnificent!”

It was almost time for Marya to begin calling her “Lady Charlotte,” Lydia thought. She said, “Come down as soon as you’ve changed, Charlotte.” Charlotte immediately began to unfasten the shoulder straps which held her train. Lydia went out.

She found Stephen in the drawing room, sipping sherry. He touched her bare arm and said: “I love to see you in summer dresses.”

She smiled. “Thank you.” He looked rather fine himself, she thought, in his gray coat and silver tie. There was more gray and silver in his beard. We might have been so happy, you and I… Suddenly she wanted to kiss his cheek. She glanced around the room: there was a footman at the sideboard pouring sherry. She had to restrain the impulse. She sat down and accepted a glass from the footman. “How is Aleks?”

“Much the same as always,” Stephen replied. “You’ll see-he’ll be down in a minute. What about Charlotte ’s dress?”

“The gown is lovely. It’s her attitude that disturbs me. She’s unwilling to take anything at face value these days. I should hate her to become cynical.”

Stephen refused to worry about that. “You wait until some handsome Guards officer starts paying attention to her-she’ll soon change her mind.”

The remark irritated Lydia, implying as it did that all girls were the slaves of their romantic natures. It was the kind of thing Stephen said when he did not want to think about a subject. It made him sound like a hearty, empty-headed country squire, which he was not. But he was convinced that Charlotte was no different from any other eighteen-year-old girl, and he would not hear otherwise. Lydia knew that Charlotte had in her makeup a streak of something wild and un-English which had to be suppressed.

Irrationally, Lydia felt hostile toward Aleks on account of Charlotte. It was not his fault, but he represented the St. Petersburg factor, the danger of the past. She shifted restlessly in her chair, and caught Stephen observing her with a shrewd eye. He said: “You can’t possibly be nervous about meeting little Aleks.”

She shrugged. “Russians are so unpredictable.”

“He’s not very Russian.”

She smiled at her husband, but their moment of intimacy had passed, and now there was just the usual qualified affection in her heart.

The door opened. Be calm, Lydia told herself.

Aleks came in. “Aunt Lydia!” he said, and bowed over her hand.

“How do you do, Aleksey Andreyevich,” she said formally. Then she softened her tone and added: “Why, you still look eighteen.”

“I wish I were,” he said, and his eyes twinkled.

She asked him about his trip. As he replied, she found herself wondering why he was still unmarried. He had a title which on its own was enough to knock many girls-not to mention their mothers-off their feet; and on top of that he was strikingly good-looking and enormously rich. I’m sure he’s broken a few hearts, she thought.

“Your brother and your sister send their love,” Aleks was saying, “and ask for your prayers.” He frowned. “ St. Petersburg is very unsettled now-it’s not the town you knew.”

Stephen said: “We’ve heard about this monk.”

“Rasputin. The Czarina believes that God speaks through him, and she has great influence over the Czar. But Rasputin is only a symptom. All the time there are strikes, and sometimes riots. The people no longer believe that the Czar is holy.”

“What is to be done?” Stephen asked.

Aleks sighed. “Everything. We need efficient farms, more factories, a proper parliament like England ’s, land reform, trade unions, freedom of speech…”

“I shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to have trade unions, if I were you,” Stephen said.

“Perhaps. Still, somehow Russia must join the twentieth century. Either we, the nobility, must do it, or the people will destroy us and do it themselves.”

Lydia thought he sounded more radical than the Radicals. How things must have changed at home, that a prince could talk like this! Her sister, Tatyana, Aleks’s mother, referred in her letters to “the troubles” but gave no hint that the nobility was in real danger. But then, Aleks was more like his father, the old Prince Orlov, a political animal. If he were alive today he would talk like this.

Stephen said: “There is a third possibility, you know-a way in which the aristocracy and the people might yet be united.”

Aleks smiled, as if he knew what was coming. “And that is?”

“A war.”

Aleks nodded gravely. They think alike, Lydia reflected; Aleks always looked up to Stephen; Stephen was the nearest thing to a father that the boy had, after the old Prince died.

Charlotte came in, and Lydia stared at her in surprise. She was wearing a frock Lydia had never seen, of cream lace lined with chocolate-brown silk. Lydia would never have chosen it-it was rather striking-but there was no denying that Charlotte looked ravishing. Where did she buy it? Lydia wondered. When did she start buying clothes without taking me along? Who told her that those colors flatter her dark hair and brown eyes? Does she have a trace of makeup on? And why isn’t she wearing a corset?

Stephen was also staring. Lydia noticed that he had stood up, and she almost laughed. It was a dramatic acknowledgment of his daughter’s grown-up status, and what was fu

The effect on Aleks was even greater. He sprang to his feet, spilled his sherry and blushed crimson. Lydia thought: Why, he’s shy! He transferred his dripping glass from his right hand to his left, so that he was unable to shake with either, and he stood there looking helpless. It was an awkward moment, for he needed to compose himself before he could greet Charlotte, but he was clearly waiting to greet her before he would compose himself. Lydia was about to make some inane remark just to fill the silence when Charlotte took over.

She pulled the silk handkerchief from Aleks’s breast pocket and wiped his right hand with it, saying, “How do you do, Aleksey Andreyevich,” in Russian. She shook his now-dry right hand, took the glass from his left hand, wiped the glass, wiped the left hand, gave him back the glass, stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket and made him sit down. She sat beside him and said: “Now that you’ve finished throwing the sherry around, tell me about Diaghilev. He’s supposed to be a strange man. Have you met him?”