The Vanishing Futurist Read Free Page B

I remember so vividly where we were sitting, looking down to the bend in the stream where the cattle were drinking. Mr Kobelev stepped out onto the veranda, rubbing his forehead.
    ‘Dears, it has happened. Russia has declared war on Germany.’
    The prospect of war had been hanging over us, and we felt a sort of ghastly relief when it was finally announced. I thought about but dismissed the idea of going home. I was enjoying myself, and like everyone I was convinced that it would be a short war. Only a handful of governesses in Moscow left at the outset, provoking Miss Clegg’s contempt. ‘We should support our Russian allies,’ she sniffed. Later, with the sinking of HMS Hampshire in 1916, travel to Britain was considered too dangerous and I became used to the idea of staying in Russia.
    The post arrived fairly regularly and I kept up with news about my brothers and my parents. James was training to be a doctor in Bristol, but Edmund had just left school. He joined up immediately. How could my parents have let him, that gentle, diffident boy? Or had they even encouraged him? He had been accepted to read Mathematics at Oxford; surely he could have been of more use in logistics, or munitions, or anywhere but on the front line, but it was quite possible that my mother wanted a soldier son to boast of . . . I lay awake many nights wondering whether I could have changed his mind if I had been at home.
    In the box I find the letter he wrote me from his barracks in Bodmin, scribbled in his unformed, boyish hand:
    Dear Gerty,
    I hope you are still enjoying yourself with the Rooskis! I have joined the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry, there are about three hundred of us here, the most decent chaps you could imagine – Cornishmen all. This evening we had a sing-song, we almost lifted the roof off the old shack! So you needn’t worry about me – we’ll flatten the Hun at a hundred paces with a din like that . . .

3
    In the second box of papers, inside my copy of Chernychevsky’s What Is To Be Done? , I find a half-written letter home to my parents, dated December 1914, and never sent. I suspect I abandoned it. Banal and schoolgirlish as it seems now, I knew it would have shocked my parents.
    Dear Pappa and Mamma,
    I am glad to report that my Russian has improved somewhat and I am now more able to take part in the Kobelevs’ evening gatherings, which are very convivial. I am given charge of the Samovar, quite a complicated matter, for the Russians are even more particular about their tea-drinking than the English!
    We scarcely ever number fewer than a dozen, and the conversation covers every subject imaginable. Pasha Kobelev is in his first year at Moscow University, and his student friends come to visit very frequently. One of them – Nikita Slavkin is his name – entertains us with all sorts of original suggestions – quite ‘ avant-garde ’! Last night he suggested that Russian children should be taught to walk on stilts, to overcome the huge distances in the countryside!!
    He believes, as we all do, that this war is quite unnecessary, a piece of Imperial conceit on a vast scale. I wish I could have convinced Edmund of this. I thought he was planning to study?
    *
    Nikita Slavkin sat a little apart from Pasha’s other friends, arms wrapped around his long, knobbly legs, pale and awkward. He had very short, almost colourless hair that revealed a bumpy scalp, and slightly protuberant pale-blue eyes. He ate a great deal of sandwiches, swallowing them whole, like a snake. When the conversation turned to women’s rights Pasha drew him in.
    ‘Nikita here has some ideas, don’t you, Nikita? He’s an inventor, he’s inventing all sorts of contraptions that will change women’s lives – and all our lives . . . Come over here, tell us.’
    Nikita stood – upright, he was absurdly tall and skinny – and blushed even under his hair. When he spoke, his voice was strangely deep and a little too loud; he looked