The Summer Day is Done (43 page)

Olga looked down at him, at his thick, tousled hair, his bruised forehead, his closed eyes. The nurse had cleaned his face, only the bruise discoloured his features.

‘Tasha, I told him,’ whispered Olga, ‘I told him not to be a hero.’

‘Men don’t always listen to women,’ said Tatiana.

‘Oh, Colonel Kirby,’ said Olga, ‘how very very silly you are.

His lids flickered, he opened his eyes. He saw her. The train was moving, the window dancing with light, the sun was in her eyes and her hair was a bright cloud.

‘Nikolayev,’ he said as if his mouth was full of cotton wool. But she heard him.

‘Colonel Kirby,’ she whispered, ‘oh, how badly you have let us down.’

He frowned, trying to understand why everything was so curious. The shining cloud of bright hair became a whiteness flowing around her head, her face, her shoulders. She was all whiteness. Then he remembered. It came quite clearly from out of the fog.

‘I told you we manage to get ourselves deplorably knocked about,’ he said.

Tatiana put a hand to her mouth. Olga smiled brightly, brilliantly through wet eyes.

A spasm of pain came. He closed his eyes and
slipped away again. Olga stood there, silently imploring him not to leave them.

‘Olga,’ said Tatiana, swallowing, ‘if he loses his leg how shall we bear it? How will he ever play tennis with Papa again?’

‘I’ll sit with him,’ said Olga in a tense voice, ‘you go and rest, darling.’

The moment belonged more to Olga than any of them. Tatiana rose, clung to her sister for a second and then went. Olga looked around the room. That they could have brought him to so depressing a place. It was a room for dying in, not living. She leaned over him. Lightly and hesitantly she touched his hair, smoothed its disorder.

She remembered Livadia, his health, his strength, his smile that always seemed so much for her. She remembered the feeling of ecstatic freedom when she had gone with him to Yalta, how he had taken such good care of her. She bent lower and touched his face with her fingertips. Then, in a breathlessly soft caress as fleeting as her shyest smile, Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna brushed his mouth with her lips.

‘I love you, I love you.’

He too dreamt of Livadia.

They took him into the theatre an hour later.

He was still there when the evening became cold and dark. A message came for Olga. It was from her mother. She was to return to the Alexander Palace immediately. For the first time in her life Olga wanted to disobey her mother. She wanted desperately to wait until it was all
over, when they would be able to tell her what chances he was left with.

She returned to the Alexander Palace, she could not disobey the command. She did not think she could even close her eyes that night, let alone sleep. But she did sleep. She was in a fever at breakfast, wanting to know why no one had telephoned from the Catherine Palace. The chatter of the others was subdued, everyone knew that Ivan Ivanovich was very bad. Even so, it strained at her nerves. But she could not go to the hospital in advance of her mother and Tatiana. To wait and to look composed, to hide her tense anxiety, was an ordeal.

As usual, the three of them went together in the end. The warm spring sunshine was like a burst of bright hope. Tatiana said that she wondered how Ivan was. Alexandra said nothing about him until they reached the Catherine Palace.

‘Olga,’ she said then, ‘we must find out how Colonel Kirby is this morning. While I see the doctors perhaps you’d go up to him.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ said Olga. She wanted to fly up the stairs but walked them. At the door of the room she tried to let her pounding heart slow down before entering. She went in. All the lumber had been removed, the curtains were opened wide and the sunshine beamed. The room was bright and clean. Colonel Kirby lay in his bed. The nurse sat by his side. She smiled at Olga.

‘He hasn’t wakened yet,’ she said, ‘he was in the theatre for such a long time.’

But he was still alive. Olga wanted to ask
questions but could not. Her throat was dry, tight.

‘It’s amazing,’ said Nurse Nicola Bayovna, ‘they thought he might lose his arm and his leg, but he still has both.’

Oh, how wonderful. Dear dear Dr Bajorsky.

He came in then. He was tireder, blue shadows ringing his eyes in his thin face. He managed a smile.

‘Well, we gave him all the time we could,’ he said, ‘and he has survived so far.’

‘God is good to us always,’ said Olga, ‘and sometimes very good. Is he going to be all right?’

‘That I don’t know yet,’ said Dr Bajorksy, going to the bedside. ‘It’s impossible to put either his leg or his arm in plaster yet, the wounds are so bad. We’ve had to strap him, it’s going to be very uncomfortable and unpleasant for him, and not very easy for the nurses.’ He lifted the coverings and Olga saw the bulkiness of heavy bandaging, the straps that bound the right arm to the body and long splints to his leg. He wore hospital pyjamas, the left leg of which had been cut away. She saw that the bandages ran thickly from his knee to his thigh.

But she was happier now. It did not matter what Dr Bajorsky thought. She knew that Colonel Kirby was going to recover. She knew.

‘You’re a wonderful man, Dr Bajorsky,’ she said in gratitude.

‘Exhausted is the word,’ he said.

‘Yes. But thank you.’

‘Yours was the faith,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see,
we’ll see.’ He did not seem dissatisfied. He looked at the temperature chart, his lids heavy. He glanced at Nurse Bayovna. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘he is not to move or have his dressings touched until I say so.’

‘Yes, I understand, Doctor,’ said Nurse Bayovna.

‘Good, he’ll be safe with you,’ he said and with a smile for Olga he left. He had had only ten hours’ rest in three days.

Olga did not want to leave herself. But the duty here belonged to Nurse Bayovna. She had her own duties elsewhere. She turned as her mother came in. Alexandra had found out that there had been no amputation, after all, and she did not know whether to be in concern or relief.

‘Mama, he’s better already,’ said Olga, seeing Colonel Kirby’s face turned peacefully into the pillow.

‘Olga, how can you know that?’ Alexandra looked austere in her white uniform and although she was always kind, the nurses were often in a little awe of her. Nurse Bayovna effaced herself slightly.

‘Oh, I’m sure he is,’ said Olga. ‘Mama, I will nurse him—’

‘No, darling,’ said Alexandra firmly, ‘you can’t. How would it look if you devoted all your time to one man alone?’

‘But he’s our friend.’

‘Olga, we aren’t here to only nurse our friends.’

‘I’ll share the nursing then.’ Olga tried to speak casually but could not disguise nervous
appeal. ‘Speak to Dr Bajorsky, Mama. Just for a few hours a day. Papa would say we owe it to him, wouldn’t he?’

‘Oh, lamb, you’ll make it so hard for yourself in the end,’ whispered Alexandra. But she could not deny Olga completely. Her heritage would deny her so much as it was.

So Olga shared the duties with Nurse Bayovna. But it was Nurse Bayovna who was present when at last the patient opened his eyes. He regarded her dreamily, wonderingly.

‘You weren’t here before,’ he said faintly. Nicola Bayovna understood. Patients were peculiar in the way they conceived an immediate affection for certain nurses. She had had a hundred wounded men fall temporarily in love with her. This one had chosen the Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna as the object of his affections. How ambitious.

Nurse Bayovna smiled and said, ‘Someone else will not be long.’

She sent for Dr Bajorsky. He came as soon as he could. He and his patient regarded each other. Dr Bajorsky looked whimsical, Kirby as if the business of being awake was only for the contemplation of more sleep.

‘Ump,’ said Dr Bajorsky. He listened to Kirby’s heartbeats, looked into his pupils and moved the big toe of his left leg. ‘Ump,’ he said again. He ignored the swathed arm and leg. ‘If he stays awake,’ he said to Nurse Bayovna, ‘he can have some soup. If he doesn’t stay awake it doesn’t matter, sleep is more important than food at the moment.’

When he had gone Nurse Bayovna, a strong, vigorous-bodied young woman with a gift for remaining calm when others could not, sent a message to Olga. Olga came flying, bursting into the room with a rush.

‘He’s been looking at me as if I don’t belong here,’ said Nicola, ‘so if you can stay a few moments I’ll see if I can fetch him some soup. Dr Bajorsky has seen him and said he might have some.’

As she left on her errand, Olga could hardly contain her desire to run to the bedside. But she approached without any apparent haste. His sleepy eyes looked wonderingly up at her.

‘Colonel Kirby, you’re awake,’ she said. It was very trite, very obvious, but it was said gladly, happily.

‘Am I?’ he said. His voice was slurry. ‘Let me see you.’ He seemed in abstracted contemplation of a stranger. ‘How odd,’ he said, seeing blue eyes when Nurse Bayovna’s had been green.

Olga felt sudden panic. If he were to go into delirium … But there was no flush, no perspiration.

‘Nicola Bayovna has gone to find you some soup,’ she said as calmly as she could.

He closed his eyes. He opened them again. He smiled. She wondered when the pain would return to him.

‘Good,’ he said dreamily.

The panic went, beautiful relief flooded her.

‘Oh, you’re better, I know you are,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare be anything else after Dr Bajorsky has done so much for you. Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you, Olga Nicolaievna,’ he said.

He went to sleep again. He would not want the soup now. But what did that matter? She sat down by the bedside and waited happily for Nurse Bayovna to return.

There were complications but none so serious that Dr Bajorsky could not deal with them. And when visitors were allowed Karita came to see the patient. She had returned to Petrograd from Baranovichi and had found a small apartment for herself.

Paul Kateroff, a handsome student, accompanied her to Tsarskoe Selo. He was twenty-two and had been a student for many years. He did not want to be anything else until Russia had been turned upside down and made a fit place for a worker. His lank, black hair fell carelessly over his forehead, his eyes held the bright, burning light of the zealot. He refused to enter the Catherine Palace, saying he would wait outside until Karita had finished her visit.

‘I’ll not put one foot inside such a place,’ he said, ‘it’s a marble symbol of a libertine and an oppressor. I’ll only enter it when good Russians have cleansed it.’

‘How anyone so nice can be so silly, I don’t know,’ said Karita. Paul lived in an apartment above hers, sharing it with other impecunious students, with whom he talked and argued far into every night. No wonder he looked so thin and pale. But it was a look that appealed to certain women, for when he emerged he looked like a poet who had spent the night starving
in his garret. Karita thought he would be very attractive when he had grown up. She left him pacing in restless contemplation of Russia’s problems. With help she found her way to the sickroom. Her knock was answered by no less a person than Grand Duchess Olga, looking clinically efficient in her uniform. Olga smiled, Karita opened her eyes in surprise, then dipped in a curtsey as she entered. This seemed to startle Olga.

‘Karita, what on earth are you doing?’ she said.

‘Your Highness—’

‘Oh, no, you shouldn’t curtsey or call me that here, Karita. I’m the same as all the other nurses.’

Karita, who had no idea just how much Olga wanted to be like everyone else, thought the comment graciously modest but extremely inaccurate. Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna was herself. Nearly everyone else was very ordinary.

‘You’re his nurse?’ said Karita in astonishment.

‘Oh dear,’ smiled Olga, ‘do you think me too inadequate?’

‘Goodness, no!’ Karita blushed, then quickly found an avenue that pointed in a better direction. ‘Indeed, I only think Colonel Kirby very fortunate, I’m sure he could never have anyone nicer or more adequate than you to look after him.’

‘What’s all that muttering?’ It was a masculine voice. Karita peeped and there was Colonel Kirby, head and shoulders comfortably propped
on heaped pillows. But he looked very drawn.

‘He’s better than he looks, you know,’ said Olga, observing Karita’s concern. ‘One can tell he is, he’s grumbling all the time now.’

‘Only about Nurse Bayovna’s hot broth,’ said Kirby.

‘There, go and talk to him,’ Olga said to Karita. Karita thought her surprisingly cool and professional, and yet there was something about her as if she were singing inside. She supposed the Grand Duchess very much enjoyed being a nurse.

‘Well?’ Kirby said. His stitched wounds had knitted, the torturing discomfort of strapped and anchored limbs eased by the application at last of plaster. The remorseless pain of splintered bone skilfully joined by Dr Bajorsky had finally retreated. There had been many days of pain and Kirby knew there must have been times when he was neither a pretty nor an admirable patient.

‘Well indeed,’ said Karita, seating herself on the bedside chair, ‘you’re a fine one.’

‘Do you think so?’ he said modestly. She smiled. There was a look in his eyes. She was not sure what it meant. Perhaps it was to say he expected more from her than that kind of greeting. So she leaned forward and kissed him. Olga stiffened and turned abruptly away. ‘That, I suppose,’ said Kirby, ‘was for your mother and father?’

‘It was from Aunt Charlotte,’ said Karita, and Olga relaxed. ‘There’s a letter from her, it’s very old, it was given to me by one of your officers at
Baranovichi and is addressed to both of us, see? Her English is very funny. I’ll leave it for you, she says the ducks are still very noisy at times.’ She put the letter on the locker.

‘Her Highness will read it to me,’ he said.

Karita whispered to him, ‘It seems very improper to have Her Highness nurse you when you’re not even a lord.’

‘Don’t tell Her Highness that,’ said Kirby.

‘Don’t tell me what?’ asked Olga from the window.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Karita hastily. She rushed on to speak of her apartment, the friends she had made and how Paul Kateroff was being extremely attentive and kind. Kirby asked who Paul Kateroff was and Karita replied that he was a student and that she was helping him to grow up. Olga laughed. Karita had always been deliciously quaint. Colonel Kirby was smiling and Olga thought how good it was to see his smile. Karita was a very refreshing person. How attractive she had become, with a flair for styles that suited her.