Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [488]
What the devil does she want with me? It was a question Popov had asked himself many times. She had everything: a brilliant husband, a huge fortune – all that the bourgeois world had to offer. Of course, the upper bourgeoisie, having no useful purpose, sometimes got bored. In a celebrated case, one of the heirs of a great Russian merchant fortune had recently blown his brains out in his brother’s house – not for any reason, but purely on a whim because he happened to see a revolver on a table. ‘Ennui’, they called it. Bourgeois decadence, of course, was what it really was.
Was she just bored? He did not think so. Unhappy, perhaps, but not bored.
He remembered a conversation he had had once with Lenin. ‘Don’t expect too much from women,’ his friend had told him. ‘I’ve never yet met any woman except my wife who could play chess or read a railway timetable.’ Popov grinned to himself. He knew that in recent years Lenin had been having a sporadic affair with a certain countess who lived in St Petersburg. He wondered if the countess could play chess. And now, as he looked at Mrs Suvorin, he idly asked: ‘Do you play chess?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but it bores me.’
As for Mrs Suvorin, whether she played chess or not, there was no doubt about her intelligence. Although recently he had heard that the authorities wanted to arrest him, Popov had managed to come discreetly to the house several times in the last two years. Each time, she had questioned him carefully about his beliefs; and though she had declined to read any Marx, it seemed to him that she was genuinely interested in what he told her.
It was also becoming clear that she was interested in him.
But why? From the first it had occurred to Popov that Suvorin might be unfaithful. If his wife wanted to revenge herself with an affair though, hadn’t she plenty of her own kind to choose from? Unless of course she wanted him because he represented the revolution that would destroy her husband’s world. That, of course, would be a special kind of insult. But whether that idea amused him, or whether it would make him feel he was being used, he was not sure.
The house was quiet. She had sent the servants to bed long ago. She was sitting on a low chair in front of the fire, which was burning low, and she wore a pale blue peignoir. She seemed to be lost in thought as he sat, his legs apart, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees.
‘Tell me,’ she said slowly, ‘why you come here.’
Popov was silent for a while before answering. There were good reasons of course. The first had been that the Bolshevik Party was short of funds. Whether he could get money out of the industrialist’s wife he had no idea, but it was worth looking into. He remembered how, not long ago, when a rich sympathizer had left a legacy to the party and his two daughters had disputed the Will, a pair of enterprising Bolsheviks, concealing their affiliation, had somehow persuaded the two women to marry them and got the money for the party that way. Even Popov had been impressed by that piece of audacity. It showed what could be done.
Yet there was more to it than that. He was frankly flattered that this proud, clever woman should feel attracted to him. Indeed, he had to confess, he felt something for her, and if his first thought had been to humiliate her, now he found himself even wondering: Could she, perhaps, be saved?
‘I find you interesting,’ he said at last.
She smiled. ‘You’re just curious?’
‘Why not?’
Certainly he was curious. Suvorin impressed him. This was not a weakling, like a Bobrov, to be brushed aside. Suvorin was powerful and intelligent, one of the great capitalists whose final overthrow would begin the revolution. How could he not be curious about the man’s world? When he entered the Suvorin house, Popov also realized that it represented something else that had been missing in his life.
For though he had travelled, and studied history and economics,