Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [499]
This preparation included sexual experience. ‘I shall be faithful to my wife,’ he told a friend, a young officer in the imperial guard. ‘But I shall get some experience first. My plan is to have ten mistresses. What do you think?’ ‘My dear fellow, why not twenty?’ ‘No,’ Alexander had replied seriously, ‘I think ten will do.’
He had gone about the business methodically. His first had been the wife of an army doctor – a pleasant woman in her mid-twenties who had been amused, as much as anything, by the solemn eighteen year old’s evident determination to get into bed with her. That had lasted three months. There had been a charming dancer from the corps de ballet in St Petersburg: after all, every man of the world was supposed to have had an affair with a dancer. To make sure he had, so to speak, covered all the ground, he had a brief fling with a gypsy singer from a theatre – though whether she was really a gypsy he was not sure; and for a month he had gone regularly to a certain young lady in one of the capital’s most select brothels, patronized only by those from a certain milieu. Notwithstanding its select clientèle, he lived in constant fear of unhappy consequences and, besides, found it awfully expensive. After a month, he went there no more. He was currently on his sixth experiment, an amusing, blonde-haired widow in her twenties, half-German, half-Latvian, who, it seemed, saw no reason why a young fellow like him should sleep. And with this arrangement, for the time being, he was quite content.
When he looked to the future of Russia itself, Alexander also had reason to be hopeful. The third Duma had lasted its full five-year term until the previous year and now a new, fourth Duma was sitting. The Tsar had succeeded in somewhat increasing the conservative element, though the radicals had also strengthened, leaving the centre weaker; but taken as a whole, the new body was no worse than the last. His father, indefatigably, had got himself elected again. And, it had to be said, the condition in the country as a whole was now excellent.
‘Stolypin’s gone, and his place has been taken by nonentities,’ Nicolai Bobrov had remarked to his conservative son, ‘but his work lives on. Look at the results.’ And he would tick them off on his fingers enthusiastically. ‘Trade: hugely up. Agricultural yields: up, and we exported thirteen and a half million tons of cereals in 1911. The state debt’s well down: we’ve run budget surpluses in three of the last four years. The countryside’s quiet.’ He would smile contentedly.
‘Do you know,’ he told Alexander once, ‘I met a Frenchman the other day who calculates that at our present rate of economic growth, we’ll overshadow the economy of the whole of Western Europe by 1950. Just think: you’ll probably live to see it.’ Of the revolution, little was heard in those years. ‘With a little luck,’ the elder Bobrov liked to say, ‘we may have headed it off.’
Indeed, only if one looked abroad were there any clouds on the horizon; but neither of the Bobrov men, nor anyone they knew, was overly concerned.
‘Diplomacy will sort any problems out,’ Nicolai would tell his son. ‘The great powers have to live together. That’s why we have all these alliances.’
The huge system of alliances, indeed, seemed rather in Russia’s favour. The need for huge French finance, and a better understanding with the British Empire, had drawn these three countries into the pact known as the Triple Entente; Germany, Austria and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance. ‘But they balance each other,’ Nicolai often pointed out. ‘Each keeps the other in order.’
Only down in the mountainous Balkan region above Greece was there any sign of real danger. Here, as the power of the almost defunct Ottoman Empire finally crumbled, Austria was advancing. In 1908 she had taken the two provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited mostly by Slavic Serbs. Other Serbs felt threatened; Russia, sympathetic to her fellow-Slavs, and watchful of this region so close to Constantinople and the Black Sea, monitored each development