Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

To my grandmother, accustomed to striding briskly over the Downs with a cheese sandwich in her pocket, the Sartov picnics were a nightmare. There never seemed to be less than three troikas and two neighbouring families with whom no one, by the end of the day, was on speaking terms.

And there was the picnic samovar. Even fifty years later, when she described it to me, my grandmother’s voice trembled with hatred for the picnic samovar: a huge brass, convoluted beast which lived in a special shed, took hours to light and then sent terrifying sparks over the tinder-dry forest.

It was because of her struggles with this fiend that my grandmother was careless enough to allow Tata to stroll off alone. An hour later, when everyone assembled in the clearing, there was no sign of her.

The forests of Central Russia are not Hyde Park. The Count roared, the Countess blanched; search parties were assembled. And my grandmother, half-demented with guilt, found herself struggling through the undergrowth with Nikolai Alexandrovitch.

Try as she would, she could not in her long skirts keep up with him. So that it was Nikolai, striding between slanting rays of sunlight towards her, that Tata — lost and lonely and bewildered, with wild cornflowers in her hair — saw first, and she ran forward and threw herself into his arms.

It was impossible, my grandmother said, to blame Nikolai in any way. He didn’t even kiss the girl, just put his arm round her to steady her and murmured something, not in his polite and easy French but in low and throbbing Russian. Even so, as my grandmother came up to them and saw the expression on both their faces, she realised that all was now well and truly lost.

Though she knew she was failing in her duty, my grandmother didn’t read Tata’s diary the day after the picnic. It was all she could do to bear the pain in Tata’s eyes, while the young tutor’s cheekbones looked as though they would tear through his face and Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha had to be carried to bed each night, so violent were the games he played with them.

For time was running out and Prince Kublinsky was growing impatient. He detested the country and was anxious, as the summer drew towards its close, to get his affairs settled and return to Moscow. His visits became more frequent, his moist hands moved ever further up Tata’s trembling arm. And at the party given to mark Tata’s name day, he asked formally for the Countess Tatiana’s hand in marriage and was granted it. After which happy event, the Sartov family plunged into total and utter gloom.

‘I cannot like Kublinsky,’ wrote Petya, ‘but what does it matter? We are all victims, all born to sacrifice…’

And: ‘Give me strength to endure it,’ wrote Tata, smudging the page with her tears. ‘God give me strength.’

It was August now and the days were shortening. While still weighed down by their own particular sorrows, the Sartovs began to share in a new and general despair.

‘Soon now we must return to Moscow,’ sighed the Countess.

‘We are always so sad when we leave the country,’ mourned Tata.

‘Only here is there air to breathe,’ agreed the Count.

They began to pay long sad farewell visits to their favourite haunts.

‘This is the last time we shall ride along this lane,’ Petya would sigh, or, ‘Let us pick our last blackberries,’ the Countess would suggest mournfully. Even Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha were liable to burst into howls of despair as they punted ‘for the last time’ across the lake or picked a final crop of mushrooms. And wherever they went, through birch woods, along the banks of the river, Tata and Nikolai walked as far apart from each other as they could and, if they were forced by the narrowness of the path into proximity, they flinched as if someone had struck them.

Even so, said my grandmother, she would have behaved beautifully right to the end if she had only ever been able to get any sleep . But even when at last she was allowed to go to bed (and the idea always caused deep distress) she still couldn’t sleep because her room was above the veranda and it was often three or four in the morning before the last of the visitors dispersed.

On the night she finally broke, she had just dozed off when she was woken by a scene of passionate farewell between a neighbouring landowner and the Count.

‘Good night, my little pigeon,’ said the landowner moistly. ‘We meet too rarely, Vassily Vassilovitch,’ replied the Count. After which, overcome by vodka and emotion, they began to sing sad songs taught to them by their wet-nurses from Nizhny Novgorad.

It was during the refrain of one of these, which went 7 love your dreary, vast expanses, Oh, Holy Russia Mother Dear ,’ that something in my grandmother quite simply snapped.

She became suddenly and violently homesick. She also became extremely cross. The homesickness took the form of a craving for scrambled eggs, a longing for her quiet, icon-less bedroom on Richmond Hill and a desire to look again on Mr Fairburn’s calm and well-remembered moustache.

The crossness took a different form. My grandmother rose and from her bureau drawer she took out the large black fountain pen which had been a farewell present from Mr Fairburn. Then she put on her dressing-gown and crept downstairs.

The Countess Sartov’s diary was the one she came across first.

‘What a sad day!’ the Countess’s latest entry read. ‘I had a pain in my chest and worried about Tata who looks so pale. Even so, all would be endurable if we could remain here in the peace of the countryside. But soon, now — Ah, God, how soon — we must return to Moscow!’

My grandmother unscrewed her fountain pen. For a moment she hesitated. Then, after the Countess’s last entry, she wrote in large, clear letters and in English a single word. After which she moved on into the library.

Petya’s diary was among a jumble of books on the birchwood table: ‘The leaves have begun to fall from the lime tree along the drive. Each day brings my doom closer. But what help is there? All must be as it must be. I must become a soldier.’

Once again my grandmother unscrewed her fountain pen and once again she wrote the same single word against Petya’s last entry. Then she went out on to the veranda.

Tata’s diary was under a cushion on her favourite wicker chair.

‘How shall I bear it?’ poor Tata had written. ‘How shall I bear the endless, empty years without Nikolai? Yet there can be no hope for me. I must marry the Prince.’

And once more my grandmother wrote the same single word against Tata’s last entry and closed the book.

She was on the way upstairs when an unfamiliar notebook caught her eye. Opening it she saw with a sinking heart that it was the diary of Nikolai Alexandrovitch. Staunch Slavophil that he was, the young tutor had written his diary in Russian which she could not read. Still, from the wildness of the scrawl and the frequent repetition of the Countess Tata’s Christian name, she felt perfectly justified in adding the same, single word to the end of his diary also.

After which she went upstairs, packed her portmanteau, laid out her travelling clothes and got into bed.

Petya was the first to burst into her room at dawn. ‘You have written in my diary!’ he announced, wild-eyed.

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother, sitting up in bed.

‘Where I have said I must be a soldier you have written “WHY?”.’

‘Yes,’ agreed my grandmother.

‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ stormed Petya. ‘You know it was the dying wish of my grandfather that I become a soldier.’

My grandmother settled herself against the pillows. ‘Was he a good man, your grandfather? A man to respect and—’