The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary
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The child said nothing; then she, too, got up and ran off to join her brother and Nikolai. Eden put down her plate. ‘You say a lot of things that are right, Mr Cabell. You should learn to say them so that they don’t hurt people so much. Especially children. Freddie and Olga aren’t old enough yet to be blamed for what’s wrong with Russia.’
‘I know. I’ll go and apologize—’
‘No, leave them while they’re with Nikolai – he’ll comfort them. Talk to Freddie in the morning.’ She stood up, began to gather up the plates. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we went on alone to Tiflis. I don’t think we’re very compatible.’
He looked up at her. She was flushed by the firelight, strands of her hair had fallen down about her face: goddam, he thought, she’s beautiful at times. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’
Later the children came back, said nothing to Cabell but quietly went about helping Eden with the washing-up. Nikolai, also silent, brought in more wood for the fires. Cabell sat with his back against a tree, feeling as much an outsider as he had ever felt in his life before. Once, as Frederick passed by him, he said, ‘Freddie—’; but the boy ignored him and walked on. Cabell felt a flash of anger at being ignored by a child, but he swallowed it. He had learned diplomacy the hard way, but amongst men. Children were a whole new race to him and it was a wonder to him that he had ever belonged to them. He sat quietly against the tree till everyone had settled down for the night, then he got out his sleeping-bag and prepared to crawl into it.
‘Good night, Mr Cabell,’ said Eden from the rear seat of the car. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done today.’
She and the children were sleeping in the car, she and Olga in the rear seat, Frederick in the front. Nikolai, covered with the trailer’s dusty tarpaulin, slept on one side of the car; Cabell in his sleeping-bag was on the opposite side. None of them was comfortable or really warm; the children grumbled sleepily and Eden shifted restlessly. Only Cabell and Nikolai, the one grown accustomed to discomfort, the other born to it, went off to sleep at once.
Eden lay staring at the patches of stars showing through the tops of the firs. She could hear grunting and movement in the forest, but Cabell and Nikolai had lit four small fires around the car and she hoped they would prevent any wild beasts from coming too close to the car. On reflection she was surprised how calmly she was taking the possibility of a bear or wolf coming into their camp. But then the hazards of living had been building slowly ever since August 1914.
She had come a long way from Croydon. Her father and mother, school teachers both, had not objected when she had applied for the advertised job in the Daily Telegraph; after all, they had encouraged her to read about faraway places and other people’s customs. Of course, being Tories, they had been thinking of the Empire and good solid English-speaking stock such as Australians and New Zealanders and had seen her as the governess to some rich sheep farmer’s family; they had visions of her rounding the Australians’ sat-upon vowels and weaning them away from their aboriginal habits. Her mother had had a fit of the vapours and her father an attack of xenophobia when she told them, after the letter had gone off, that the job was with a Russian family in St Petersburg. Foreigners were best left to themselves to find their own way out of their ignorance; Russians were not only foreigners but barbarians as well. Better that she should become a missionary and go out and teach the Zulus or the Australian blackfellows; at least the Empire would gain something from that. But she was a stubborn romantic, the best sort; and in the end she had prevailed. The job was for two years and she had promised to return home at the end of it.
She had applied for a passport, something she had never heard of up till then; Russia and Turkey were the only two countries in the world that required travellers to have them. She had bought a steamer trunk and a suitcase and in September 1913 sailed on a German ship for St Petersburg. The adventure had begun.
She wrote home to tell her parents that the Russians, or anyway the Gorshkovs, were not barbarians. She told them that they would be surprised at how civilized the Russian middle and upper classes were. French (or sometimes English) was often the first language in a household; one spoke Russian only to the servants. The gentlemen bought all their clothes from English shops in St Petersburg; the women went to Paris to buy their dresses, their underwear and their cloaks; only fur coats, for men and women, were made by Russians for the Russian gentry. Why, Prince Frederick, the boy she was teaching, even wore Norfolk jackets, knickerbockers and Eton collars. She had been acclaimed as a gourmet chef when she had given the cook her mother’s recipe for English trifle; the French governess, from the house next door, invited to tea, had thought the trifle was some sort of culinary joke; but she did not tell her mother that. She had written them not to worry: she was in circumstances every bit as civilized as those in Croydon. She did not mention that she was living in a good deal more luxury. She did not think it fair to compare the 20-room house in St Petersburg with the semi-detached house in Croydon. Nor the Corot, Watteau and Fragonard paintings in the big salon with the Landseer and Holman Hunt prints on the parlour walls. Nor did she think it fair to tell them that she could not see herself ever coming home to Croydon to live there forever.
Then August 1914 had come and Igor, Lieutenant Dulenko, went off to war. Her parents had not known of him; she had still been feeling her way, if that was not too indelicate a way of putting it, with a particular man. Then he had gone away …
But now memory failed her, was not strong enough to keep her awake: she fell asleep, worn out by the day. She slept fitfully, memories nibbling at her like mice, and when she woke she was stiff and cold and for a moment completely lost.
Then she sat up and saw Nikolai warming up one of the legs of mutton on a rough wooden spit and Cabell going off to fill the water-skins from the stream. She woke the children and told them to follow Mr Cabell and wash the sleep from their faces.
Cabell had filled one of the water-skins and was dipping the second into the stream when Frederick and Olga came through the trees. He said good-morning to them, but they just nodded stiffly. They knelt down to wash their faces. And the wild boar, grunting and whistling with terrifying loudness, came barrelling down the slope straight at them.
Olga screamed and fell into the water. Frederick jumped across the stream, leaving the way open for the boar to come straight at Cabell. He swung the half-filled water-skin; it hit the boar on the snout and burst open on its tusks. The beast skidded to a stop, blinded by the water; it let out a horrible sound of rage, shaking its head to clear its sight. Cabell grabbed up Olga, flung her over his shoulder and raced for a tree that had fallen down across a gap between two big boulders. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Frederick haring off through the trees towards the camp and he hoped the boar would not follow the boy.
But the boar had already marked its target. It grunted and whistled again, then came straight after Cabell. He knew how fast the beast could move, had gone hunting them north of Baku; but he had never been as close as this to one before. He staggered up on to the nearest boulder, clutching hard at Olga as she slipped off his shoulder. He lost his footing and fell back as the boar came in beneath him. He landed on its back, heard Olga scream right beside his ear; somehow he managed to keep his footing and didn’t fall over. He leaned back against the boulder as the boar, thrown off balance by his landing on its back, went down on its nose and rolled over and over like a circus dog. Cabell scrambled back up on to the rock, hands scrabbling at its rough surface, his knees scraping against it, and fell on to the fallen tree, only just managing to hang on to Olga as she tumbled forward off his shoulder. She was screaming, seemingly without stopping for breath, and her hands were clawing at him like birds’ talons. Somehow he turned round on the tree-trunk, straddled it, feeling the rough bark against the insides of his thighs, and faced the boar as it came up on to the boulder. It paused, grunting and whistling at him, its tiny eyes red with hate, the tusks bobbing up and down as if already tearing into his guts.
It was no more than ten feet from him as he inched carefully back away from it; he could smell it, felt the heat of it. He was frantically trying to keep his balance on the narrow trunk as Olga still screamed and struggled in terror across his shoulder. He could feel his legs and arms beginning to tremble and he wondered if he was going to have the strength to get off the