The Red Staircase

Tentatively I looked up at the man standing beside me, Edward Lacey, late of His Majesty’s Scots Guards, and my travelling companion. I had begun by hating his bland sophistication and his cool English voice. I hated all men, anyway – and pour cause, as our dominie used to say. But he proved kind and considerate during the journey, and relations had improved, though I still found him rather opaque. Now he turned to me with that ever courteous smile. ‘Nearly there, Miss Gowrie.’

We had boarded the small cargo ship, the John Evelyn, going out on the evening tide. The captain had bowed as he passed us on the deck. I was a passenger of special quality on the John Evelyn because I had been seen off by no less a person than Prince Michael Melikov. To my surprise he had been waiting at the Surrey Docks when I arrived. I knew who he must be; Edward Lacey – whom I had met for the first time the evening before, at the London hotel where I was booked for a single night – had told me of the Prince’s presence in London, and that he was a long-standing friend of both the Countess Denisov and my cousin Emma Gowrie. He was wearing a deep violet velvet overcoat. I never saw a man wear coloured velvet before, but on him it looked sombre and rich and yet correct.

He had bent his head to me politely and introduced himself in his deep, sweet voice. ‘And so here I am to see you off, Miss Gowrie. I could never excuse myself to that good lady, your cousin, when we next met in St Petersburg, if I did not see you safely aboard.’

Behind his friendly brown eyes was nothing, he had no real feeling for me. I sensed it without knowing why.

‘I’m looking forward to meeting her,’ I said. ‘I never have, you know. I believe she came once to see us at Jordansjoy but it was years ago, when my parents were not long married and I was only a child. She was old then.’ And must be older now by my twenty years. It was 1912. ‘Our Russian cousin, we call her, but she is as Scots as I am in blood, although four generations of Gowries have lived in St Petersburg now.’ I was talking nervously, for there was something about Prince Michael’s empty eyes that alarmed me.

Edward Lacey arrived at that point, in a cab, and after he had greeted me, stood talking to Prince Michael on the dock. How different they looked: the Prince tall and elegant, but with the withdrawn, inward expression of a man used to books and libraries; and Edward Lacey almost as tall but broader of shoulder, with the look of the open air about him, active and energetic. The one as unmistakably Russian as the other was English.

They were both watching me. The notion struck me and would not be dismissed. I felt as if they were studying me. Politely, of course, but with intent. And not for my looks, either. I knew what that sort of look was like; I knew what it was to be admired. At the memory of some special glances I once treasured, my spirits plummetted. I gritted my teeth, and pushed emotion away. I would not be bitter.

The dock side was very busy, many craft were taking advantage of the high tide to load. A string of lighters and barges was passing down river towards the estuary. Its tug gave a melancholy hoot as it went and another ship answered, part of the perpetual conversation of the river. It was evening, a fine night in early summer. Summer smells mingled with the smells of oil and dust in the Surrey Docks, and with the strong odour of horse. A dray horse, who had brought his load of packing-cases to the side of the John Evelyn to be hauled aboard, was pawing the cobbles. There was a young lad sitting on the dray, ostensibly minding the horse, watching the scene, and calling out jokes and ribaldry to the stevedores and dockers labouring around him. He had a tin whistle stuck in his waist and presently he started to play a tune. A gay little rag-tune; I shall never forget it. I think it was called ‘Irene’, a name which was to mean much to me. Strange, that name coming then; what an uncanny trick life has of striking a note that it means to repeat.

At last we went aboard the John Evelyn. The light was fading fast. I was unsurprised to find that over an hour had passed. I remember Prince Michael’s smile as he finally went away, which accentuated rather than took away the emptiness of his eyes. He smiled, not for me or with me, but because of me; I was quite sure of it.

After I had unpacked, I went on deck again to watch the Thamesside slipping past. The ship had sailed almost immediately on our coming aboard. My cabin was small, but I had it to myself. I had arranged my clothes, put out the silver-backed hairbrushes that had belonged to my mother, and around them placed the photographs of Grizel and young Alec, Tibby and my brother Robin. My pantheon, as naughty Alec called them. Four faces where there had once been five; one god had gone from my pantheon. Again, I tried to repress bitterness, but the taste of it remained in my mouth even as I stood on deck and watched the lights of London and her satellite suburbs, Greenwich and Woolwich, disappear into the dark. The water grew rougher as we felt the pull of the open sea.

I had made myself a hooded cloak of thick plaid, and lined the hood with fur from an old tippet handed down in my family for generations and at last consigned to me. ‘Bring warm clothes,’ my old Russian cousin had written. I pushed back the hood and let the soft fur fall across my shoulders in unaccustomed opulence; and I wondered what the future held in store for me. I suppose every girl wonders this, but I had special cause.

Then Edward Lacey came up behind me. I recognised him by the smell of Turkish tobacco and Harris tweed that I had already identified as peculiarly his own. He moved to my side, he took out his pipe.

‘Do you mind if I light up, Miss Gowrie?’

‘Oh, no, please do. I enjoy the smell.’ I had smoked a cigarette myself once, but I did not tell him; he seemed to find me puzzling enough already.

He struck a Swan Vesta, and the tobacco smouldered fragrantly. He took a puff or two, then the pipe went out. Pipes always do. But he did not re-light it. Instead he stood there looking into the murky river, glancing at me from time to time.

I kept silent. I was aware he was studying my face. I suppose I was studying his in return. We had met only briefly the day before, but now, embarked on our voyage, conscious that we should be much in each other’s company over a long period, it was as if we both knew we were about to move into a new kind of intimacy. As a type he was not new to me; I had seen plenty of his sort come up for shooting parties at the big house. Such men were sophisticated, worldly, and hard to know. Not the sort of person I really felt at home with.

‘So,’ he said, as if recapping what he had already established, ‘you are the strong-minded young lady who likes medicine and healing the sick? I must warn you that you have a sceptic in me.’

‘Why, Major Lacey – ’

‘I mean, as far as women’s education is concerned. I just don’t like to see it overdone. Seems all wrong to me.’

‘You seem to know a lot about me,’ I said shortly.

‘Well, I do in a way. A potted biography, Dolly Denisov gave me. She’s got a knack of putting things in a nutshell.’

‘Accurately, I hope.’ I spoke with a certain asperity.

‘Yes, she’s reliable, is Dolly. And then, of course, I know your cousin and old Erskine Gowrie, too. Not that he’s seen much these days. Not the man he was. No, Dolly told me all about you. The medicine and all that. I thought you’d be a tough, dried, hockey-stick of a girl.’

‘And I’m not?’ I enquiried, thinking that, after all, not everything about me had been relayed to this man through the channels of Emma Gowrie and Dolly Denisov. Not Patrick.

‘Not a bit,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But I ought to warn you – you’ve captivated Dolly’s imagination. And that can be dangerous.’ He was half laughing, but half serious. ‘All Dolly’s swans have to be swans, you see. Ask Mademoiselle Laure about that.’

‘And who is Mademoiselle Laure?’

‘Oh, a sort of French governess they keep there,’ he said vaguely. ‘On the retired list. Except I believe she teaches French to Ariadne still.’ There sounded an ambiguous side to Mademoiselle Laure, I thought.

‘Thank you for the warning. I need this post. The pay is good and I am poor, which is a state, Major Lacey, you probably know nothing of. You have certainly never been a poor, unmarried girl with her way to make.’

‘Touché,’ he conceded.

I needed desperately, too, to get away from my home, but no point in telling him that if Dolly Denisov had not. It was my own private wound, for me to bear and heal.

‘But Russia is a dangerous place to come to make your fortune,’ he said soberly.

‘I shall hardly do that, working in the Denisov home.’

‘No, if that’s all that happens. But one rarely does only one thing in Russia, as I know to my cost. It’s the way things happen there. There’s a sort of persuasiveness to the place.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t bully yourself too much, Miss Gowrie. Sit easy to the world; it’s the best way to take your fences. Goodnight. I’m off below.’ And he strolled away, calm and friendly as before.

With a start, I realised he knew all there was to know about me, and was giving me what he thought of as good advice. Something in his cool assumption that he knew best got under my skin. With sudden tears of fury blinding me, I hammered the iron deckrails till my hands ached. ‘Beastly, arrogant man!’ I cried. ‘Stupid and obtuse like all of them! I hate him. I hate all men.’

I felt better after the explosion of tears, and from then on I started to enjoy the journey. After all, I had done so little travelling that to be on the move was in itself new and exciting. My spirits improved daily, and I even began to enjoy the company of Edward Lacey.

And now I was almost sad that the journey was ending …

I came back to the present, to the view of St Petersburg, and to Edward Lacey’s voice. ‘Peter the Great built St Petersburg because he wanted a door on the world,’ he was saying.

‘Hadn’t he got one, then?’

‘The western world. Moscow was in many ways an oriental capital. He wanted to change all that. He did, too. But I think Russia has been paying the price for it ever since. What a country.’

We had talked a good deal about Russia during the voyage, and he obviously knew it well. His sister, he had told me, was married to a Russian; she was expecting a child in the autumn. Now he said: ‘I shall hope to introduce you to my sister, Miss Gowrie, when she’s out and about again.’

‘Oh, thank you.’ Perhaps he didn’t disapprove of me as much as I had thought. ‘Yes, I should like that. I shall know so few people apart from my godfather and the Denisovs.’

‘That will soon change,’ he predicted briskly. ‘The Russians are an endlessly sociable people. The Denisovs will take you around. Dolly Denisov lives for the world.’

‘Ariadne is only seventeen,’ I said.

‘Never mind, you won’t be cloistered.’ He had his eyes screwed up, staring at the quay. ‘There’s the Denisov motorcar already waiting for you, I see.’

‘A motor-car?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded amused. ‘Did you expect a sledge? It is summer and there are very few motor-cars in St Petersburg, but of course Dolly Denisov has one.’

Suddenly, my new life seemed all too close. ‘I wonder if I shall be happy in Russia,’ I said urgently.

‘Yes. If you are the sort of girl who can accept it for what it is, a country entirely itself, and not be continually comparing it with what you know at home, then you will be happy. Or on the way to happiness.’

‘I think I can manage that.’

‘And learn the language. The real Russia is hidden, otherwise.’