The Summer Day is Done (10 page)

Alexandra, always as affected as any by the national anthem, collected herself and said, ‘Thank you, Mr Kirby, you have been immensely kind.’

‘Mama, he has been immensely tireless,’ said Olga breathlessly, ‘I am quite done up.’

When she speaks like that, he thought, I could find her on any page in a Jane Austen book. She is as delicious as that.

‘If I’ve been able to return a little of your own kindness, Imperial Highness, I am more than happy,’ he said. ‘Grand Duchess,’ he said to Olga, ‘my most grateful thanks. It is something to remember, Livadia.’

He bowed to her, took the white-gloved hand she extended and put his lips to her ring.

‘I have so enjoyed it,’ she said.

He had found her, discovered her and now had no more claim on her. He turned to go, then turned back and said, ‘I will have a new parasol sent to Anna.’

‘Oh no,’ she said impulsively, ‘you are not to send it, you are to—’ She broke off and the scarlet rushed. His heart was wrenched for her sensitivity and he blessed the arrival of Aleka then, as the princess came to take her leave of the Imperial family.

‘I am glad you came, Aleka Petrovna,’ said Nicholas warmly, ‘and just as glad that you brought our new friend from England.’

‘Ah, but what you do not know, your Highness,’ said Aleka, her smile very fixed, ‘is that he is even more terrible than I thought. You would not believe how dreadful his behaviour can be.’

Nicholas laughed like a boy. No one could take Aleka Petrovna seriously. Alexandra smiled. Olga, however, looked at Aleka in wondering curiosity. There was a glitter in the dark eyes of the princess. Olga glanced up at Kirby. He smiled, he shook his head.

It was a long ride back to Karinshka and the sleepy groom was in no condition to drive fast. The night was almost over, giving way to the new day. Aleka was aloof, keeping her distance. He wondered when she would strike. But after twenty minutes she moved closer to him, she sighed and she rested her head against his shoulder.

‘I am a dreadful bitch, aren’t I?’ she murmured.

‘No, it was my fault,’ he said.

‘I should have been more gracious,’ she said, ‘because of course you couldn’t refuse the Empress. There, I’m over it now and so tired. How nice you feel. You have put everyone into a flutter, dancing the waltz with Olga Nicolaievna.
She is a pretty young thing but very shy with people she doesn’t know.’ Her voice was a languid murmur now. ‘I hope they don’t marry her off to some fat German. Do you know, I think I’m going to sleep.’ And she closed her eyes.

The only sound then was that of the carriage wheels bowling over the dusty road. It was the hour when the night was dying, the new day not yet awake.

‘Aleka?’ he murmured after a while.

Aleka was asleep on his shoulder.

Dawn was flushing the horizon when they reached Karinshka. He carried her up the steps and into her palace. Old Amarov, in nightcap and ancient velvet dressing gown that had belonged to his late master, emerged from grey shadows holding a lighted candelabra. He led the way up the staircase and preceded Kirby into the princess’s suite. Kirby carried her through to the bedroom and laid her on the vastness of her bed. Old Amarov switched on a single light and grumbling through his moustache went back to his own bed.

Aleka lay in shimmering repose. He removed her tiara. She did not stir. He carefully took off her silver satin slippers.

‘Ivan?’ Her voice was a husky caress.

‘You’re home now.’

‘Stay with me,’ she murmured, ‘I am so lonely.’

There was a rustle. Karita stood at the bedroom door. She was rosy from sleep and clad in a voluminous white nightgown, red-ribboned.

‘Oh, I am sorry, monsieur,’ she whispered, ‘but
old Amarov woke me and said you were back and so I came to see to her Highness. But—’ She did not finish, she disappeared. He went after her and caught her before she left the suite.

‘See to her, then,’ he said quietly.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, and he was sure she was laughing, ‘if you are able to manage—’

‘Manage what, saucebox?’

‘That is, if her Highness would prefer you—’

‘I’ll pinch your pretty nose for you, minx,’ he said and pulled one end of a red ribbon bow. The bow dissolved, the neck of the nightgown parted and Karita, stifling a shriek, clutched frantically.

‘Monsieur!’ she gasped.

The night, not the dawn, was in his eyes. Exhilarating, revelationary night. He bent his head, he kissed her.

‘Goodnight, Karita, see to her,’ he said and left the suite.

Karita tingled deliriously. It would not do to tell Oravio.

In his own bedroom Kirby opened the windows wide and stepped out on to the balcony. The eastern sky was streaked with pearly-pink radiance, the sea an emergence of soft, misty grey. He thought of the girl he had danced with, a girl who belonged to the dawn.

Some days later, with everything at Karinshka periodically harmonious – in that Aleka could not remain mentally tranquil all day every day – Andrei returned. He was fully convalesced, he said. The implication that after spending a few days at idyllic Karinshka a man needed to go away and recuperate so incensed Aleka that she slipped off a shoe and flung it at him. It passed him by and skittered along the terrace.

‘Ah, the excitement of being loved,’ said Andrei, elegant in a cream suit with thin black stripes. ‘How have you been, dear man?’ he asked Kirby.

Kirby, recumbent in a long cane chair and deeply browned by the Crimean sun, looked up with the smile of a man who had come to terms with his temperamental hostess.

‘Very comfortable,’ he said.

‘Quiet?’ said Andrei cautiously.

‘On and off,’ said Kirby. Aleka made a face.

‘It’s been extremely critical at my place,’ said Andrei.

‘Liar,’ said Aleka, well-figured in shimmering silk.
Its harmonious relationship with her body betrayed an unconventional lack of undergarments. ‘You know damned well you’ve done nothing but lie around with your Crimean concubines.’

‘Well, if not critical that could be very exhausting,’ said Kirby. ‘You had better sit down, Andrei old chap.’

‘I’ll sit him down,’ said Aleka maliciously and she did. But she waited until lunch was served, by which time a host of vivacious women and ebullient men had turned up.

At lunch she placed Andrei between two adoringly possessive women and thereby had a little of her own back. He was numbed within minutes, their tongues seemed to lay hands on him. He was drained within an hour.

‘Dear ladies,’ he said then, ‘why not carry me away now and do as you will with me? What is food when death is so welcome?’

‘Darling Andrei,’ said one, ‘your impatience is delicious.’

‘Darling Anna,’ said the second to the first, ‘I shall be impatient myself as soon as lunch is over. Shall I go first or will you?’

‘Dearest,’ said the first to the second, ‘I’m sure his bed is not as small as that. We will all go together.’

‘Dear God,’ said Andrei to Kirby across the table, ‘I think they mean it.’

They drowned him with shrieks of laughter. He shuddered. They did mean it.

Old Amarov came to tell Aleka she was wanted on the telephone. She took the call in the library,
the telephone itself a gold and white ornament, rather than an instrument, in its appearance. But not until the guests had departed, some invited to return for dinner, did Aleka tell Kirby what the phone call was about. They were on the terrace, Andrei sleeping with his chair in the shade.

‘What has got into you, what have you done?’ she said to Kirby. ‘It was the Empress herself who interrupted me at lunch.’

‘She had probably had hers by then,’ said Kirby, ‘you do dawdle a little over yours, Princess.’

‘I entertain my guests, I do not merely have them come and go,’ she said. ‘It was about you the Empress telephoned. You’ve been invited to Livadia. It’s unheard of. What have you done to make yourself so indispensable to her? Do you read the Bible well, is that it? I was invited too, of course, but she knew I’d have guests and that I couldn’t go. I was put into an impossible position, I had to accept for you. She has been too kind for me to make the feeble excuse that I had as much right to your company as she had.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Kirby, ‘you don’t think that would have sounded feeble to her, do you? Aleka, is this true? I’m invited to Livadia?’

‘She said for a week or so.’ Aleka added maliciously, ‘Or so means they retain the privilege of kicking you out as soon as possible if you appear in the wrong trousers or say damn to the Tsarevich. What are you smiling about? It’s quite sickening, I tell you. I am to be deprived just when I’d made plans for the three of us to cruise for a few days.’

‘Not entirely deprived, darling,’ murmured Andrei, who had woken up, ‘I shall still be here.’

‘Yes, darling,’ said Aleka, ‘I still have one friend who doesn’t fall over himself to favour royalty. I am thankful for you, Andrei Mikhailovich. Ah well, you won’t find it very exciting at Livadia, Ivan, you’ll have to go to morning church and look holy. And all you’ll be allowed to say apart from yes and no are your prayers. You are to go the day after tomorrow. Also, the Empress said that Grand Duchess Olga asked that you be reminded not to forget. Forget what?’

‘A parasol,’ said Kirby. ‘I must go to Yalta tomorrow.’

‘You are completely ridiculous,’ said Aleka.

There was a letter for him later that day, delivered by hand from Yalta:

‘
Dear Kirby. We like your new friends. They are entirely respectable. Could you come and see me soon?
’

It was not signed and it bore no address, but he knew it was from Anstruther.

Yalta was hot. But Anstruther seemed brown and temperate. Kirby tossed the letter on to his desk.

‘What was that about?’ he said. ‘I didn’t like it.’

‘Overnight,’ said Anstruther, ‘you’ve become a man of substance. Not in the material things, but in your new friends. I understand they were very taken with you. I also hear they’re thinking of inviting you to stay with them. Splendid.’

‘No,’ said Kirby flatly.

‘No? No to what?’

‘Whatever you’re going to ask me. I’m on holiday.’

‘I’m not going to ask you anything,’ said Anstruther. ‘Do sit down. I’ll have some tea sent in.’ Nothing more was said until the clerk had brought in the samovar, poured the tea and left. Then Anstruther remarked that friendship was a very happy thing. Kirby thought he had never heard anything so trite, and said so.

‘Ambassadors work all their lives to make friends of king, emperors and presidents,’ said Anstruther. ‘They rarely succeed since their first loyalties are to their own heads of state and they are, therefore, suspect. You, my dear Kirby, have achieved more in a single evening than an ambassador in ten years. You have become a friend of the Romanovs. Now it would be interesting to know what the Tsar really thinks of the Russian alliance with France.’

‘I should imagine,’ said Kirby sarcastically, ‘that he sits up at night wondering if it entitles him to import the cancan.’

Anstruther played that literally and said, ‘Really? I’ve always been under the impression he was the kind of man who could take the cancan or leave it alone. However, putting that to one side for the moment, take the extreme point. In the event of France going to war would Nicholas, no matter what the circumstances, keep to the full terms of the alliance?’

‘Sir George Buchanan can find that out, that’s his province, not mine.’

‘He might conceivably ask the Tsar’s Minister
of War. He’d only get a diplomatic answer. We think the Tsar would honour the terms, but we’d like to know for certain. One likes to provide for certainties rather than possibilities.’

‘Well, provide for a certainty in this case, then,’ said Kirby, ‘and you’ll be covered for both.’

‘Now your report,’ said Anstruther, pleasantly ignoring Kirby’s suggestion, ‘indicates that Russia is simply not ready to go to war on behalf of any ally. Therefore, could the Tsar seriously commit Russia totally and unconditionally on the side of France and under any circumstances?’

‘Why, are we thinking of sneaking up on the Republic?’

Anstruther looked just a little put out.

‘Tut tut,’ he said. ‘Look here, it isn’t much to ask. Nicholas and Alexandra confide in their friends. They might confide in you. It can’t do any harm and it would let us know whether the ramifications of the alliance really are solid.’

Kirby almost lost his temper.

‘Damnation,’ he said, ‘of course they’re solid. What do you think would happen to the Tsar if he pulled the bricks out? He’d never be able to look another head of state in the face. In any case, I’m having nothing to do with it. After I’ve had my holiday I’m resigning from the service. I want to be able to look people in the face myself.’

‘Resigning, you say?’ Anstruther smiled bleakly. ‘Wishful thinking, I’m afraid, Mr Kirby. You can’t, not yet. And please don’t mention it again, it might result in your being sent to
China. We’re badly in need of a man there who can make friends.’

Damn that, thought Kirby. He had no wish to go to China or anywhere else, now or in the immediate future.

Despite his introspective mood when he left Anstruther, he did not forget to buy a parasol.

Princess Aleka, in a typical reversal of moods, compensated for her ungraciousness by being very gracious indeed the morning he left for Livadia. It was as if, thought Kirby, she had suddenly realized how much she appreciated that she and Andrei would be alone, if one discounted the presence of servants and the distractions of table guests.

She was sweetness itself. Not only did she insist that he should take the best carriage, but Karita too. Karita would look after him very well at Livadia. He said that to take Karita would probably be very inconvenient both for her and Karita.

‘Darling, it won’t be a bit inconvenient for either of us,’ said Aleka, richly beautiful in a wide-sleeved morning gown of yellow, ‘and you simply cannot go to the Imperial Palace without a servant. Karita will be a treasure to you there. If she makes any fuss about going I’ll box her ears.’