David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Mikhail Ivanovich, a little older than Paul and son of his father’s elder brother, Ivan Nikolayevich, had been, as Paul always remembered, an insufferable little prig. His attitude had always been one of condescension. His sister, Sofya Ivanovna, in the presence of Mikhail Ivanovich, had invariably followed his lead. Alone with Paul she was happy enough to treat him as an equal. This, despite her inconstancy, had forever left him with a soft spot for her in his memory, one that time never seemed to erode. In fact, she was one of the few things about Russia he had ever missed.

Even, when in England and old enough to understand his parents’ background, he still never fully understood why doing voluntary work for the starving peasantry had been such a black mark against his mother as far as the family was concerned. It was not as if his mother — or his father for that matter — were the only members of their class to man soup kitchens and relief centres during the famine. It was true that his uncle Ivan Nikolayevich was about as reactionary as they came — not a great surprise since he was a member of the tsar’s Interior ministry — but it was always difficult for Paul to view the relief campaign as a radical movement. It certainly had been no rehash of the disastrous Narodnik — ‘going to the people’ — crusade of a decade earlier. During that movement students had flooded into the countryside under the deluded conviction that within the structure of village councils, the peasantry represented the revolutionary ideal of the Russian people. Most of them, unfortunately, had found out the hard way that by and large the peasantry were as conservative a people as their overlords. Ignorant and suspicious of outsiders — and more concerned with land and their own material well-being than in nurturing any ideals towards the common good — they were, in other words, ordinary human beings. His mother, thank the lord, had been too young to join the Narodnik movement for, Paul had been alarmed to learn, many of them had been beaten for their pains and not a few murdered by those they had wished to educate.

But even the vague sort of do-gooder liberalism of famine relief had been radical enough to set the Rostovs against her. The upshot was, after his father’s death, that they sent her and her bewildered son into English exile. Bad enough, psychologically, for a boy of his tender years, but still worse as it left his mother as the sole font of information as to his origins. For she was not — as he very soon discovered — an altogether reliable source.

Despite her Englishness, for years after he had had to listen to lectures on the wonders of Mother Russia. It had been a great anguish to her (she continually maintained) that she had been exiled just as the cultural flowering of the empire had reached its peak. The art! The music! She was forever in lyrical raptures over Diaghelev and the Ballet Russ, over Tamara Karsavina and Pavlova… Prokofiev and Rimsky Korsakov… All while he knew perfectly well that despite the opportunities to see Diaghelev’s company in London, she hadn’t bothered, much preferring the less demanding melodies of the previous generation’s Tchaikovski to the modern stridency of Rimsky Korsakov.

Most insidious, though, was that it was from his mother that he had received his political education. Before he was old enough to know any better, he had inherited her opinions, and it wasn’t until he had found himself in the trenches that he had begun to discover just how unreliable a tutor she really was. Heaven help, he had often thought, those children who had been charged to her care as a governess.

‘So…’ Cumming said as he closed Kell’s file, his sibilant sounding like air escaping a punctured bladder. ‘Your mother seems to have some interesting friends.’

His eye pierced Paul through the monocle; his tone managing to make the observation sound as if she were in the habit of dining out with Lenin himself.

‘How well do you know them?’ Browning demanded.

Paul was surprised that Kell’s file didn’t say. Or perhaps it did and Cumming was trying to trap him into some indiscretion. He knew some of them — familiar faces from that rainbow band of émigrés with whom his mother was acquainted. Others he recalled only vaguely, innumerable adherents to a dozen different movements — anarchists, nihilists, social democrats, social revolutionaries — who had passed through what she had liked to call her ‘salon’. All much of a muchness, as he remembered, parasites mostly who had clung to his mother for years, scrounging free meals and the occasional night’s lodging. Even, when they were able, donations to their ‘good causes’.

She, of course, was in her element playing the political hostess, adept at never looking too closely at the riff-raff that cluttered up her drawing room as long as they had originated in the Russian empire.

‘One or two by sight,’ Paul admitted to Cumming cautiously. ‘I never really got involved.’

‘But you are acquainted with Admiral Kolchak, are you not?’

‘Kolchak?’ The name sounded familiar although Paul couldn’t have said why.

‘He was Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet,’ Browning informed him. ‘He resigned in protest when Kerensky was made Minister of War.’

‘Your mother entertained him when he was in London last year,’ Cumming added helpfully.

‘Did she? How do you know—’

But it would have been in Kell’s file, of course. And, now that he thought about it, he did recall the name Kolchak. She had mentioned him in one of the letters he had received while at the front. It was just before he had been wounded. His post had been erratic just then, particularly letters from his mother. He had received a bundle before going up the line, shortly before the push on Passchendaele, and had had to read them quickly.

Paul generally made a point of taking little notice of the Russian strays his mother mentioned, but he remembered Kolchak’s name because of a connection to his father. Kolchak had served under him on a destroyer during the Russo-Japanese war, his mother had written. According to her, the admiral had been passing through London on his way to America — part of some mission or other — and she had given him dinner. She said she had thought him particularly young to have achieved the rank of admiral and that he’d been commander of the Black Sea Fleet. During the Revolution when his men had mutinied and threatened his life, Kolchak — as his mother had described it — had lined them up on his ship, thrown his sword over the side and told them they could do with him as they wished. He won them over although it had sounded to Paul like a particularly Russian piece of melodrama. His mother, of course, would have lapped that sort of thing up. And no doubt she saw entertaining an admiral, as a feather in her cap. She had always tried to keep abreast of events, maintaining a foot in both political camps although, with the Revolution an established fact, the Russian émigrés she encountered were changing character. Fewer left wing agitators could be found hanging around her apartment, and more exiles from the propertied classes. Or un -propertied classes now, he supposed, as they too always seemed to be looking for hand-outs.

‘I never met him,’ he was able to tell Cumming truthfully. ‘I was at the front at the time. I recall my mother mentioning the admiral in one of her letters because he’d apparently served under my father.’

‘During the Russo-Japanese war?’

‘At Tsushima.’

‘When the Japanese sunk the Imperial Fleet.’

‘¬¬Thought they might have done better than that,’ Browning interposed abstractedly, as if ¬the complete humiliation of the Russian navy had been no more than a poor showing at a rugger match.