The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [31]
5
Olive believed she was a wonderful party-giver, and the belief was infectious, though not entirely well founded. It rested on the charm of her presence, and where she was, her parties were lively. She liked to be at the centre. She liked to charm, and to charm those she was excited to entertain—in this case leaders of culture, Prosper Cain and August Steyning, both of whom stood, champagne glasses in their hands, laughing at her self-deprecating jokes. She relied on others to do what was needful—introduce people, feed people, change the structure of groups. To a certain extent Violet could do this—she saw to bodily comforts, but was uneasy with bright talk. And Humphry could normally be relied on to amuse both men and women, but he had become ominously locked in argument with his brother. Children flickered and flitted along the flowerbeds and in and out of the shrubbery as the light thickened.
Vasily Tartarinov was performing his party piece to the Skinners and the young, Tom, Julian, Philip, Geraint, Florence and Charles. His party piece, which also formed part of his London lectures, was the story of a horse. The English cared about horses. It was the way to hook their attention. This horse, a noble black beast, Varvar the barbarian, had played an essential part in a series of daring escapes from Russian prisons and police surveillance, including Tartarinov’s own. Varvar had been waiting when Prince Kropotkin flung off his immensely heavy green dressing-gown, in a movement practised for weeks, and simply ran out of the prison hospital courtyard and into a waiting carriage, where one conspirator was waiting, whilst another distracted the guards by showing them how to see parasites under a microscope. Varvar had galloped out of sight with Sergey Mikhailovich Kravchinsky, known universally as Stepniak, and now a much-loved member of English socialist and anarchist groups, advising on the translation of the Russian classics, looking like a great, amiable bear in his thick beard. Tartarinov, in his turn, had been on his way down from his apartment, with a small bundle of essentials, to rush away behind Varvar, when he met the secret police coming up.
“I dissembled,” he told them, in his high-pitched voice. “I said to them, we are too late, I am on the same errand, the bird is m-m-m-flown. The trail is cold, that is how I put it. We all descended together, and I got into the carriage, and we walked sedately to the corner, and then away flew the great Varvar, like the wind. He took me back to Cherkasov’s estate, where he lived, and I disguised myself as a seaman, and worked my way, via Sweden and Holland, to my refuge here. Others were less fortunate.” He touched a handkerchief to his eye.
The English socialists were embarrassed to ask certain questions. Three years ago an anonymous article in the New Review had described the cold-blooded killing of a certain General Mesentsev. He had been stabbed with a blade, a kitchen knife wrapped in a newspaper, exactly the method subsequently used to assassinate the French president, Carnot, only last year. The article had implied that Stepniak was the killer. His English friends were deeply moved by his writings on the torture, imprisonment, and execution of Russian nihilists and objectors. But they were troubled to imagine the laughing man they took tea with waiting on the pavement, with the knife and the newspaper. They had become increasingly nervous about random acts of violence. Last year, an unknown man had mysteriously blown himself to bits outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The grown-ups remembered the spate of attacks ten years ago—on government offices, The Times newspaper, underground stations, railway stations, Scotland Yard, Nelson’s Column, London Bridge, the House of Commons, the Tower itself. They understood that suffering caused rebellion. They tried to understand covert, isolated attacks on ordinary people. They tried to inhabit the minds of bombers. It was hard.
“Tell me,