The Man from St. Petersburg Read Free Page A

a chance to go back onstage, and he began to remember how absorbing and fascinating the whole business was: the secrecy; the gambler’s art of negotiation; the conflicts of personalities; the cautious use of persuasion, bullying or the threat of war. The Russians were not easy to deal with, he recalled; they tended to be capricious, obstinate and arrogant. But Aleks would be manageable. When Walden married Lydia, Aleks had been at the wedding, a ten-year-old in a sailor suit: later Aleks had spent a couple of years at Oxford University and had visited Walden Hall during the vacations. The boy’s father was dead, so Walden gave him rather more time than he might normally have spent with an adolescent, and was delightfully rewarded by a friendship with a lively young mind.
    It was a splendid foundation for negotiation. I believe I might be able to bring it off, he thought. What a triumph that would be!
    Churchill said: “May I take it, then, that you’ll do it?”
    “Of course,” said Walden.

    Lydia stood up. “No, don’t get up,” she said as the men stood with her. “I’ll leave you to talk politics. Will you stay for dinner, Mr. Churchill?”
    “I’ve an engagement in Town, unfortunately.”
    “Then I shall say good-bye.” She shook his hand.
    She went out of the Octagon, which was where they always had tea, and walked across the great hall, through the small hall and into the flower room. At the same time one of the undergardeners—she did not know his name—came in through the garden door with an armful of tulips, pink and yellow, for the dinner table. One of the things Lydia loved about England in general and Walden Hall in particular was the wealth of flowers, and she always had fresh ones cut morning and evening, even in winter when they had to be grown in the hothouses.
    The gardener touched his cap—he did not have to take it off unless he was spoken to, for the flower room was notionally part of the garden—and laid the flowers on a marble table, then went out. Lydia sat down and breathed the cool, scented air. This was a good room in which to recover from shocks, and the talk of St. Petersburg had unnerved her. She remembered Aleksey Andreyevich as a shy, pretty little boy at her wedding; and she remembered that as the most unhappy day of her life.
    It was perverse of her, she thought, to make the flower room her sanctuary. This house had rooms for almost every purpose: different rooms for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner; a room for billiards and another in which to keep guns; special rooms for washing clothes, ironing, making jam, cleaning silver, hanging game, keeping wine, brushing suits … Her own suite had a bedroom, a dressing room and a sitting room. And yet, when she wanted to be at peace, she would come here and sit on a hard chair and look at the crude stone sink and the cast-iron legs of the marble table. Her husband also had an unofficial sanctuary, she had noticed: when Stephen was disturbed about something he would go to the gun room and read the game book.
    So Aleks would be her guest in London for the season. They would talk of home, and the snow and the ballet and the bombs; and seeing Aleks would make her think of another young Russian, the man she had not married.
    It was nineteen years since she had seen that man, but still the mere mention of St. Petersburg could bring him to mind and make her skin crawl beneath the watered silk of her tea gown. He had been nineteen, the same age as she, a hungry student with long black hair, the face of a wolf and the eyes of a spaniel. He was as thin as a rail. His skin was white, the hair of his body soft, dark and adolescent; and he had clever, clever hands. She blushed now, not at the thought of his body but at the thought of her own, betraying her, maddening her with pleasure, making her cry out shamefully. I was wicked, she thought, and I am wicked still, for I should like to do it again.
    She thought guiltily of her husband. She