Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [155]
Was it so? For weeks this foolish little sentence preyed on his mind. Sometimes he and Elena made love several nights running, and all seemed well; but then some imagined slight would interrupt the uncertain course of their relationship and as he lay beside her in secret fury, the words would come back to Boris’s mind and he would decide: Yes, it is so; and he would even will it to be so, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it was that the young Russian stood on the edge of the chasm of self-destruction, and gazed into it.
Sometimes, in front of the icons in the churches he visited, he would pray for better things; he would pray that he might love his wife always, and she him, forgiving each other’s faults. But in his heart, he did not really mean it.
It was on one of these occasions, as he was standing before a favourite icon in a small local church, that he happened to fall into conversation with the young priest named Philip. He was about the same age as Boris, but very lean, with red hair and a hard, intense face that seemed always to be bobbing forwards as though, like a chicken looking for food, he could seize the subject under discussion with a few quick dabs beyond his beard. When Boris had expressed an interest in icons, and told him that his own family had given a work by the great Rublev to the monastery at Russka, Philip had become wildly enthusiastic.
‘My dear lord, I make a particular study of icons. So, there is a Rublev at Russka? I did not know it. I must go there, to be sure. Perhaps you would allow me to journey with you one day? You would? You are very kind. Yes, indeed.’
And before he knew it he had acquired, it seemed, a friend for life. Philip never failed after that to meet him, at least once every two weeks. Boris thought him harmless enough.
Elena did not tell him she was pregnant until July. She expected the baby at the end of the year.
He was excited, of course. He must be. Her family all congratulated him. It seemed that this news must make all the women busier than ever.
And when he thought of his father, and realized that this might be the son who would continue their noble line, he felt another rush of emotion; a determination that, at all costs, he must succeed, hand the estate on in good condition, and more.
Yet as he sat beside Elena he would look across, see her smiling at him as though to say: ‘Surely now he must be pleased,’ and think: She is smiling at me; yet it is also her treasure that she guards in there. This child just completes her family: it will be theirs more than mine. And, anyway, what if it’s a girl? That will be no good to me, yet I shall have to pay for it. In this way, often, the joy they told him he must feel turned to secret resentment.
He did not make love to Elena once he knew she was pregnant. He could not. The womb suddenly seemed to him mysterious, sacred – both vulnerable, and for that reason, rather frightening. Like a pea in the pod: sometimes, that was how he saw it; and who but a monster would break open that pod, disturb the little life inside, or destroy it? At other times, it made him think of something darker, subterranean, like a seed in the earth that must be left in the warm, sacred darkness before, at its season, emerging into the light.
In any case, Elena was often away these days. Her father had an estate just outside the city. She often went there, in the weeks of late summer, to rest with her family.
As Boris gazed over the city now, on this warm September afternoon, he told himself that he must accept what fate had in store. Elena was due back the following morning with her mother. He would be kind to her. The afternoon was wearing on. There was a heaviness in the golden haze; yet at the same time, in the blue sky, a slight hint of the autumn chill ahead. At last he sighed.
What the devil did Stephen the priest want with him, though? It was time to go and find out.
The tall young priest was polite, even