‘Life’, a cab driver says to Frank Reid near the opening of this novel, ‘makes its own corrections’. It’s a beautifully enigmatic line (if only cabbies really did come out with such stuff) and one that might stand as the book’s epigraph. For Frank, for his clear-eyed children, for the lovable but not quite harmless Selwyn Crane, for Moscow, for Mother Russia, life will indeed make its own corrections. Fresh confusions will replace the old, men and women will continue to mistake themselves, and in the midst of it there will be the casual glory of a world that doesn’t much care what we do.
Andrew Miller
2013
In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days. In the March of 1913 Frank Reid’s wife Nellie started out on this journey from 22 Lipka Street in the Khamovniki district, taking the three children with her – that is Dolly, Ben and Annushka. Annushka (or Annie) was two and three-quarters and likely to be an even greater nuisance than the others. However Dunyasha, the nurse who looked after the children at 22 Lipka Street, did not go with them.
Dunyasha must have been in the know, but Frank Reid was not. The first he heard about it, when he came back from the Press to his house, was from a letter. This letter, he was told by the servant Toma, had been brought by a messenger.
‘Where is he now?’ asked Frank, taking the letter in his hand. It was in Nellie’s writing.
‘He’s gone about his business. He belongs to the Guild of Messengers, he’s not allowed to take a rest anywhere.’
Frank walked straight through to the back right hand quarter of the house and into the kitchen, where he found the messenger with his red cap on the table in front of him, drinking tea with the cook and her assistant.
‘Where did you get this letter?’
‘I was called to this house,’ said the messenger, getting to his feet, ‘and given the letter.’
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘Your wife, Elena Karlovna Reid.’
‘This is my house and I live here. Why did she need a messenger?’
The shoe-cleaning boy, known as the Little Cossack, the washerwoman, who was on her regular weekly call, the maid, and Toma had, by now, all come into the kitchen. ‘He was told to deliver it to your office,’ Toma said, ‘but you have come home earlier than usual and anticipated him.’ Frank had been born and brought up in Moscow, and though he was quiet by nature and undemonstrative, he knew that there were times when his life had to be acted out, as though on a stage. He sat down by the window, although at four o’clock it was already dark, and opened the letter in front of them all. In all his married life he couldn’t remember having had more than two or three letters from Nellie. It hadn’t been necessary – they were hardly ever apart, and in any case she talked a good deal. Not so much recently, perhaps.
He read as slowly as he could, but there were a few lines only, to tell him that she was off. Coming back to Moscow was not mentioned, and he concluded that she hadn’t wanted to tell him what was really wrong, particularly as she had written at the bottom of the page that she wasn’t saying this in any way bitterly, and she wanted him to take it in the same spirit. There was also something about keeping well.
They all stood watching him in silence. Not wishing to disappoint them, Frank folded up the page carefully and put it back in the envelope. He looked out into the shadowy courtyard, where the winter’s stack of firewood was down by now, to its last quarter. The neighbours’ oil lamps shone out here and there beyond the back fence. By arrangement with the Moscow Electrical company, Frank had installed his own twenty-five watt lighting.
‘Elena Karlovna has gone away,’ he said, ‘and she has taken the three children with her, how long for I don’t know. She hasn’t told me when she will come back.’
The women began to cry. They must have helped Nellie to pack, and been the recipients of the winter clothes which wouldn’t go into the trunks, but these were real tears, true grief.
The messenger was still standing with his red cap in his hand. ‘Have you been paid?’ Frank asked him. The man said he had not. The guild were paid on a fixed scale, from twenty to forty kopeks, but the question was whether he had earned anything at all. The yardman now came into the kitchen, bringing with him a gust of oil and sawdust and the unmistakable smell of cold. Everything had to be explained to him all over again, although it must have been his business earlier on to help with Nellie’s luggage.
‘Bring some tea to the living room,’ said Frank. He gave the messenger thirty kopeks. ‘I’ll have dinner at six, as usual.’ The thought that the children weren’t there, that Dolly and Ben would not return from school and that there was no Annushka in the house, suffocated him. This morning he had had three children, now he had none. How much he would miss Nellie, and how much he did miss her, he couldn’t tell at the moment. He put that aside, to judge the effect later. They had been considering a visit to England, and with that in mind Frank had cleared the family’s external passports with the local police station and the central police department. Possibly when Nellie signed her passport it had put ideas in her head. But when had Nellie ever allowed ideas to be put into her head?
Reids, when Frank’s father had set up the firm in Moscow in the 1870s, had imported and assembled printing machinery. As a sideline he had acquired a smallish printing business. That business was pretty well all Frank had left. You couldn’t do anything with the assembly plant now, the German and direct import competition was too strong. But Reid’s Press did well enough and he had a reasonably satisfactory sort of man to do the management accounting. Perhaps, though, ‘reasonable’ wasn’t, in connection with Selwyn, quite the right word. He had no wife and appeared to have no grievances, was a follower of Tolstoy, still more so since Tolstoy died, and he wrote poetry in Russian. Frank expected Russian poetry to be about birch trees and snow, and in fact in the last verses Selwyn had read to him birch trees and snow were both mentioned pretty frequently.
Frank went now to the telephone, wound the handle twice and asked for the Reid’s Press number, repeating it several times. Meanwhile Toma appeared with a samovar, the small one, presumably suitable for the master of the house now that he was left on his own. It was just coming to the boil and gave out a faint chatter of expectation.
‘What are we to do with the children’s rooms, sir?’ Toma asked in a low tone.
‘Shut the doors of their rooms and keep them as they are. Where’s Dunyasha?’
Frank knew she must be about the house somewhere but was lying low, like a partridge in a furrow, to avoid blame.
‘Dunyasha wants to speak to you. Now that the children are gone, what is to be her employment?’
‘Tell her to set her mind at rest.’ Frank felt he sounded like a capricious owner of serfs. Surely he’d never given them much reason to worry about their jobs?
The call came through, and Selwyn’s light-toned, musing voice answered in Russian: ‘I hear you.’
‘Look, I didn’t mean to interrupt you this afternoon, but something’s happened which I didn’t quite expect.’
‘You don’t sound altogether