The Grand Duchess of Nowhere (19 page)

It had truly not occurred to me. I was forty years old.

Miechen said, ‘Have you been having a little adventure?’

I said, ‘Absolutely not. I love my husband.’

She said, ‘So you and Cyril still …? Well, aren’t you the devoted one?! I thought he was seeing someone at the Mariinsky these days. Karsavina or one of those girls.’

So then I couldn’t even finish my mint tea.

She said, ‘Don’t look at me that way, Ducky. I’d be very suspicious of any husband who didn’t keep a dancer or two. One has only to think of Ernie Hesse.’

I think I tried to change the subject. I think I said I was pretty sure I wasn’t expecting. It was the herrings.

‘Herrings!’ she said. ‘It’s written all over your face now I look at you. And how absolutely perfect. You’ll have a boy this time, so when Nicky gets pushed off the throne you and Cyril will be the ideal replacements.’

The world according to Miechen. She moved us all around the way she liked to rearrange the enamelled boxes on her little tables.

I said, ‘You mustn’t say anything to anyone. Certainly not Cyril. You may be quite wrong.’

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you can trust me. I won’t say a word. Just
do go and see someone at once. Dobratov. He’s very good, and very discreet.’

I said, ‘If I go to see Dr Dobratov, someone is sure to see me going into his consulting rooms or leaving them. I think I’ll just wait. Time will soon tell.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Time won’t soon tell. You might be going through the change. You might have a growth. Look what happened to poor Lida Guchkova.’

I didn’t know or want to know what had happened to Lida Guchkova.

Miechen said, ‘I’ll give you a few days, Ducky. After that I’ll simply burst if I don’t tell someone.’

I didn’t go to Dr Dobratov. One might as well walk up and down Nevsky Prospekt with a banner announcing one’s condition. Instead I consulted a doctor working at Georgie Buchanan’s hospital, a Welshman with a surgical boot. I suppose he thought I was mad. A strange woman whispering to him in a corridor. But he took me into a store room and closed the door.

He said, ‘This isn’t really my field, you understand? Fractures are more my line. Perhaps one of the nurses?’

I told him I needed discretion. All the nurses knew me by name.

‘Discretion, is it?’ he said. ‘So long as we’re clear, I don’t do female procedures. I don’t dispose of inconveniences, never have, never will.’

I told him all I could. He asked me a few questions.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have certain indications. You have prior experience. If you think you’re up the spout it’s my considered clinical opinion you probably are.’

Cyril came in late. He’d already dined.

I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘Do you?’ he said. ‘That’s funny, I have something to tell you. Ladies first.’

He was very sweet about it. It was a feather for his cap, I suppose. Cyril Vladimirovich, greying at the temples but still siring children.

He said, ‘Let’s hope this bloody war is over by the time she’s born. Let’s hope we’ll have reason to name her Victoria.’

I said, ‘Miechen’s decided it’s a boy.’

‘Good grief,’ he said, ‘you’ve told Ma? Why did you do that? The news will be in Vladivostock by tomorrow.’

Cyril’s news wasn’t so momentous as mine, nor was it welcome. He’d been posted to the Northern Fleet. Its sailors were feeling neglected and forgotten. Nicky had ordered Cyril to go to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, to deliver some inspiring speeches and hand out a few gongs. A shore posting but still, he’d be gone for some time.

He said, ‘It’s just a got-up errand, of course. Nicky wants me out of the way. Bimbo’s got orders too. He’s off to Grushevka and not to come back until he’s sent for. It’s because of all this talk of plots to get rid of Nicky. There is no plot, of course. Only discontent. But Ma doesn’t help matters with her silly gossiping. Sooner or later it all gets back to Sunny. So you can probably blame your mother-in-law for my being sent to the Arctic.’

I said, ‘Speaking of Miechen, she tells me you’re seeing a girl from the Mariinsky.’

I hadn’t planned on saying it. It just came out. I was feeling raw, I suppose. Pregnant, old, husband going away. Cyril didn’t miss a breath. No denial, no astonishment or indignation.

‘As you very well know by now, Ducky,’ he said, ‘my mother lives in a fantastical world of her own. The moment life seems dull she makes up a scandal.’

He didn’t look me in the eye though. He just busied himself with his preparations.

My mother lives in a fantastical world of her own. Now where’s my sheepskin
ushanka
?

‘So it isn’t true?’

‘Honestly, Ducky, I thought you had more sense. Is this really how you wish to spend what’s left of my time at home?’

Therefore, as Cyril didn’t take me in his arms and tell me he loved no one but me, I supposed it must be true. Karsavina was very pretty and very young. We’d seen her in
Le Corsaire
. I’d thought she was married. Perhaps I was mistaken. Or perhaps a husband made no difference if you caught the eye of a Grand Duke.

Had Cyril been keener to go to the ballet recently? I wasn’t sure. But he had unaccountably run out of rubbers, which had led directly to my present condition. All husbands did it, sooner or later. Everyone said so. And I didn’t wish to quarrel with him. He was leaving. There was a war going on, though it didn’t feel much like it at Glinka Street. What if we parted on bad terms and he never came back? I made jolly sure not to cry until he’d left for the station.

Masha said, ‘Don’t be sad, Mummy. Daddy always comes home.’

So I was forced to dry my eyes and dredge up a little cheerfulness, but everything had gone sour. I’d never suspected. If only Miechen hadn’t come to lunch, I might never have known. The less you know the better you sleep. Old Russian saying.

*

Maslenitsa fell in the middle of February this year. It was the coldest I ever remembered it. I brought Masha and Kira into town for the funfairs and we went for a sleigh ride on the Neva. The reindeer had frost on their antlers. Everywhere we went there was the smell of frying pancakes and hot butter. Maslenitsa is no time to be suffering from morning sickness. Peach gave up her half-day to take the girls to Ciniselli’s Circus when she saw I wasn’t well enough to do it
myself. It was considerate of her. I took it as a sign that her restless phase was over and confided in her about my condition. She didn’t seem at all surprised.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d noticed you were a little thicker around the waist.’

I said, ‘You did talk of leaving us. I hope you’ll think of staying, at least until after the baby is born.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m a governess, not a nursery maid. And anyway, who knows what this year will bring?’

Who knows what this year will bring?

Was it really only February when she said that?

The trouble began directly after Maslenitsa. At first it was about bread. There was bread to be had, we certainly didn’t go short, but the quality of it was very poor. Such things happen in a time of war. Supplies can get disrupted. I’m sure it was no reason for people to start milling about the streets and shouting slogans.

I saw Georgie Buchanan at the hospital and told her my news. She hugged me.

‘What a happy prospect,’ she said. ‘Let’s pray the war will be over before the child is born.’

The Buchanans were going up to Finland, to Lake Saimaa, for a short rest. Of all the postings they’d had she said Russia was the hardest. Sir George was frustrated with the Emperor. He wouldn’t listen to reliable intelligence, nor to the fatherly advice of a seasoned diplomat. Frustration can be very fatiguing and Sir George wasn’t a young man.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wish we could be back in stuffy old Darmstadt. Nothing ever happened there.’

Nothing at all. Except for the Grand Duke sleeping with stable-boys and the Grand Duchess going home to her mother.

‘When we get back from Finland,’ she said, ‘we must have tea,
you and I. And of course you must stop your hospital work. You must take care of yourself, Ducky, carrying a child at your age.’

She didn’t really need to say it. I already felt as old as Methuselah’s first shirt. Miechen had given me a recipe for a mask to brighten the complexion, something made with baking soda and castor oil. I never tried it. But I did go to the Mariinsky to see
The Firebird
. I wanted to take a closer look at La Karsavina.

She wasn’t pretty. She was beautiful. More curvaceous than some of those dancers but she had extraordinary flight, as though she weighed nothing. Dark eyes, dark hair, the same type as me, in a way, but so young and so limber. It gave me a strange, painful kind of pleasure to study her. Cyril is my husband, after all. She’ll never be more than his passing fancy. She’ll grow old too. They ruin their bodies, you know, those ballerinas?

I longed to be able to talk to Missy. She was the great expert on managing husbands, and on unplanned babies. She was thirty-eight when Mircea was born. But I couldn’t talk to her. With this damned war she might as well have been living on the moon.

It was women who started it. Their factory had shut down, waiting for supplies of coal, so they came across from Vyborg side, looking for trouble, marching and calling for bread. I must say they didn’t look as though they were starving. Quite heavy, I’d say. Peach begged to inform me that hunger can cause a person’s belly to swell though I’m sure she had no expertise on the subject. I don’t recall Peach ever missing any meals.

If the weather had continued cold, I believe those women would have tired of parading about and gone home, but there was a thaw overnight. They came back the next morning in even greater numbers and they called the men out to join them, first from a boiler factory and then from a big steel works. They began singing.

Vstavay, padimaisya
,
rabochny narod
.

Arise, awake, working people! Or so it was translated by Peach, who went about humming its tune. Masha asked her why the working people needed waking up. Peach said they didn’t because they were now wide awake and on the march.

Kira said, ‘In that case, it’s a rather silly song.’

The only word I could make out was
vpyeryod
. Forward! Forward! Like the beat of a drum.

There were Cossacks posted on Nevsky Prospekt. Not crack Cossacks. They were at the Front. The Cossacks in Petrograd were just boys. The sight of them was supposed to reassure us but as soon as the troublemakers smashed the window at Filippov’s, those boys didn’t hesitate to fill their own pockets with sugar buns. Miechen said she had it on the highest authority that more cavalry were on their way. I don’t know. Sometimes Miechen’s idea of ‘the highest authority’ was Bertie Stopford. I didn’t see any more cavalry. Only machine guns placed at the corner of Gorokhovaya and Admiralty.

I felt uneasy. I told Peach to take the girls back to Tsarskoe Selo. She opened her mouth, as though to object, but then said nothing. They left that afternoon, and just in time. The next morning there were no trams running, no trains and one couldn’t buy petrol at any price.

It was Saturday. I was supposed to be going to the Alexandrinsky that evening with Miechen, to see
The Cherry Orchard
. I quite expected the theatre would be closed but Miechen was confident the play would go ahead and she was determined to attend. She said it was our duty to go about our normal lives and uphold civilised standards. Besides, she couldn’t bear to sit at home listening to the noise from the rabble in the streets. Arise, working people!
Vpyeryod, vpyeryod, vpyeryod
.

The theatre was like an ice house. They had no fuel for the stoves and we had to keep our furs on. There were very few people in the audience. Mimi Vasnetsova, Henny Lensky, hardly anyone else that we knew and certainly no one of any note. At the end of Act II, Miechen looked around and said, ‘Ridiculous people.’

I wasn’t sure if she meant the few who’d gone to the play, the
many who’d stayed away, or Chekhov’s characters, standing around dithering while their world goes to ruin. We sent for Miechen’s sled and left without seeing Act III. I know how it ends anyway. I never liked that play.

It’s no distance at all from the Alexandrinsky to Glinka Street but our short journey home turned into an exercise in navigation because Miechen’s
izvozchik
said we must avoid Nevsky Prospekt at all costs, and Gorokhovaya and Voznesensky. The main avenues were all blocked with crowds and banners. We made our way home along the Fontanka and then by the Kryukov Canal and all the way Miechen kept shouting to her driver not to hurry.

She said, ‘Sit up straight, Ducky. Cover your pearls, but hold your head high. We must never allow these troublemakers to think the streets belong to them.’

Her defiance didn’t last the night. The next morning she left, quite unexpectedly, for Kiev.

Everyone expected Emperor Nicky to come back to Petrograd when he heard about the trouble on the streets, but he didn’t. With Cyril and Uncle Bimbo away, Uncle Paul became my only source of information. As far as he knew, Nicky had simply sent a wire ordering that the streets were to be cleared. Whatever was required.

Uncle Paul said, ‘He means bringing in the army, of course, and armed police, but he forgets, we’re dealing with our own people here, not with Germans or Turks. Will Russians be willing to fire at their brothers? I doubt it. Anyway, most of the troops in the Petrograd garrison are children. Not shaving yet, half of them.’

He recommended that I go home to Tsarskoe Selo.

‘In your condition, Ducky,’ he said. ‘Cyril Vladimirovich wouldn’t want you staying alone at Glinka Street when things are so uncertain.’

I promised to think about it. But the next day was Sunday,
not the best day to travel even in the most orderly of times. I decided Monday would be better, by which time everything would probably have blown over. And actually I rather wanted to stay in town, to see if anything happened. I got up early. The maids hadn’t even lit the fires. I put on my least good cloth coat, wrapped myself in shawls and made my way to the British Embassy. Everywhere was deathly quiet. There was a policeman on the corner by Horse Guards, but he didn’t even look at me. I’d adopted a plodding sort of walk, slightly stooped, the kind of gait one imagines a factory worker might have. It was rather fun, pretending to be someone else. Like taking part in a play. Georgie Buchanan hardly recognised me. She and Sir George were just back from Finland.

‘Gracious, Ducky,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t be out on the streets. Didn’t your doorman warn you? Today’s going to be a very testing day.’

There was quite a gathering upstairs. Excited voices and people still wearing their coats. It was like the start of a parade. From the embassy windows there was the most extraordinary sight. Dawn was just breaking behind Vasilievky Island. The ice on the Neva was starting to colour pink and mauve and the bridges, the Troitsky and the Alexander, were so packed with marchers and banners that the spans themselves appeared to be moving.

The Governor could have had the bridges drawn up. Emperor Nicky’s instruction was to restore order.
Whatever was required
. But as the young man standing beside me observed, drawing up the bridges would only have delayed the inevitable. People would just have marched across the ice instead.

‘Winter’s a good season for protesting, in Peter at any rate,’ he said. ‘And anyway, I expect the men who operate the bridges are marching with the rest of them.’

He called the city ‘Peter’, like its natives always do, not St Petersburg, and certainly not Petrograd. He was a recent addition to Alf Knox’s unit, recruited on the strength of his fluent Russian.

‘Born here,’ he said. ‘And I’ll probably die here if this lot start stringing us up.’

I said, ‘But you’re an Englishman. They like us. We’re their friends.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s not presume. Let’s not forget the French Revolution. Once their blood is up, it’ll be enough to be seen wearing a pair of spectacles or a good shirt.’

He offered me a cigarette.

He said, ‘I notice you said, “
We’re
their friends.” So you regard yourself as English?’

I’d said it without thinking. I don’t know. What am I? Not Russian. I don’t feel even half Russian, though that’s my mother’s heritage. Pa was a British Royal, which is tantamount to being German, and if I were to count the years, I’ve probably lived more in Germany than anywhere else, but that’s not me either. I’m the Grand Duchess of Nowhere.

I said, ‘I’m Victoria Fyodorovna. Ducky, actually.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Gerhardi. Second Lieutenant.’

*

On and on the crowds came. They poured off the bridges into the city and though Sir George said the troops had been called out we saw no sign of them. Georgie gave us soup for luncheon, then Cuddy Thornhill and Willie Gerhardi walked along the Lebyazhya Canal to see what was going on.

‘Side streets deserted, Nevsky packed solid but everyone very good-humoured,’ was their report.

They’d cut through the Engineers’ Castle Gardens and gone as far as the Anichkov Bridge. No one had given them any trouble.
Georgie Buchanan kept suggesting I should make my way home, while it was still daylight, while the crowds were still friendly.

She said, ‘You must be anxious about your little ones, Ducky.’

I wasn’t at all anxious about them. They were out at Tsarskoe Selo, probably playing Go Fish with Peach.

There was then some discussion as to whether, in times of civil unrest, it was safer to be in the country or the city.

Bertie Stopford said, ‘Oh, the city, every time. The trouble with the country is one never knows what’s lurking in the forest. The Alexander Palace for instance. It’s frightfully exposed. In my opinion the Empress should think of moving somewhere that’s easier to guard.’

And someone, I don’t know who, said very quietly, ‘Yes. Germany sounds about right.’

Cuddy Thornhill escorted me home. I’m sure there was no necessity but Georgie Buchanan insisted on it. It was about four o’clock and starting to grow dark. As we walked along the Moika we heard a strange popping sound, like distant fireworks. Thornhill didn’t say anything, but I noticed he slid his hand inside his greatcoat.

I said, ‘Was that gunfire?’

‘Mmm,’ he said.

‘And you’re armed?’

‘Webley.’

I was pretty good with a shotgun when I was a girl. Miles better than my brother. Pa used sometimes to let me use his second-best Purdey. But I’ve never even tried a handgun.

I said, ‘Do you think we should all arm ourselves? I do. I think I may get a pistol. What do you recommend?’

‘A little Derringer,’ he said.

Cuddy Thornhill, a man of few words. It was the most I ever heard him say.

The telephone was ringing. None of the servants would ever answer the damned thing. They’d just look at it and look at it and wait for it to fall silent. It was Masha.

‘When are you coming home?’

I said, ‘Maybe tomorrow. If the trains are running. If it’s safe to travel.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be safe?’

‘Because some people are misbehaving and guns are being fired.’

‘What kind of misbehaving? I want to come and see them.’

I said, ‘That’s a silly thing to say. Daddy would want you to stay out of harm’s way. Let me speak to Peach.’

‘She’s not here. She’s in the kitchen, talking to Kuzma.’

‘Then how did you make this call if Peach wasn’t there to help you?’

She said, ‘Mummy, I’m ten. Besides, anyone can make a telephone call. Even Granny Miechen.’

Kira wished to speak to me.

‘I don’t like Peach any more.’

‘Did you misbehave?’

‘Definitely not. I’ve been as good as gold. What’s a bloody revolution?’