The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

‘He wants to take the three children into his household, Frank, for as long as need be, so that you’d be free of all responsibility. What do you think of that? It seems his wife is a motherly soul who can’t have too many kiddies in the house. And it wouldn’t cost you anything. He held out his arms wide, just like he’s doing now, and said, ‘‘Let them regard me as their second father.’’

‘He’s saying that a man who has drunk vodka is like a child: what is in his heart comes straight to his lips.’ ‘Is that a traditional saying?’ ‘It may be,’ said Bernov, ‘I’ve never lived in a village and I’m not familiar with traditional sayings.’ ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ said Frank. ‘He doesn’t really want to adopt my children. It’s just a general expression of good-will, or more likely the opposite.’ ‘Surely, as a business man, he’ll be as good as his word!’ Charlie cried. ‘Surely he’s the soul of hospitality.’ ‘Of course he is.’ Suddenly bored, Kuriatin got off the sofa with a plunging motion and, not waiting for the samovar, made his way out, yelling for his coat and boots. The carriage had

‘It’s about the kiddies. That offer of Kuriatin’s—there’s a rough diamond for you, if you like—it set me thinking. You turned that down, but how does this strike you—suppose I were to take the three of them with me tomorrow when I go back to England?’

Selwyn explained to him what Tolstoy had told him; if grown men and women live simply, and do tasks of which the need is obvious, the children will soon wish to share them.

‘We don’t want to leave Russia,’ said Dolly. ‘It’s the beginning of spring. We want to go to the dacha.’

‘We don’t want to leave Lisa Ivanovna.’

In silence, Frank set himself to compose a short speech. ‘Dear Lisa, please consider the following three possibilities, which I’ve been asked to put before you by my brother-in-law. First, Karl Karlovich wants you, although he doesn’t know it himself. He would like you to go to England with him to look after the children on the journey, at the same wages I pay you (which he takes it are fair ones), and then later, when he realizes what he really feels, to go to bed with him, to the disgust, disapproval, and envy of all his neighbours in Norbury. Second possibility: Karl Karlovich wants you, &c. &c., but he’s sharper than I

thought, and he does know it himself. The results would be the same, and at the same wages I pay you, (which he takes it are fair ones), but would take place a good deal sooner. A third possibility: Karl Karlovich doesn’t want you, but he suspects that I do. This distresses him, partly on his sister’s account, partly, I think, on mine, as I’m sure he has my moral welfare at heart, and it’s come to him that if he can get you away to England (still at the same wages), he’ll deliver me from temptation.’ ‘I don’t quite know how I’d explain it to her,’ he said aloud. ‘But are you sure the children want to go to Norbury?’ Charlie looked disheartened. ‘Not quite sure,’ he said. Frank decided that after all his brother-in-law was a more honourable man than himself, but he also realized that he didn’t care, and the relief of admitting this combined, to some extent, with the relief of seeing Charlie off with his hold-all, his portmanteau, the presents which he had bought with Dolly in the Rows and the dozen

bottles of vodka and fifty cakes of green tea which Kuriatin, at the last moment,...

‘Quite well, as a matter of fact,’ said Frank. ‘But the trouble is that I can’t do much when there’s so little time. I only see her in the morning and again in the evening.’

‘That’s more, to be honest with you, than I should have expected. I don’t think you ought to reproach yourself on that score. It’s possible, though, that Lisa Ivanovna’s life is, to some extent, joyless. If that is so, I’m quite prepared to take her out some evening, as I did your brother-in-law.

‘To return to what you asked me in the first place: do I consider you to be unkind, or to have the potentiality for unkindness? That, Frank, must be a question of the imagination, I mean of picturing the sufferings of others. Now, you’re not an imaginative man, Frank. If you have a fault, it’s that you don’t grasp the importance of what is beyond sense or reason. And yet that is a world in itself. ‘‘Where

Frank was taken aback when Lisa told him that she also needed forgiveness from him, for actions, for words, and for unspoken thoughts. ‘What could you possibly have done wrong?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know what your unspoken

thoughts are, but I’ve got no complaints about what you do.’

It was the Ministry of Defence, political division, or more precisely, the Security police. ‘We are holding Vladimir Semyonich Grigoriev, a student, who has confessed that he broke into your premises on the night of the 16th of March. Can you identify this man?’ ‘There are six thousand students in the University,’ said Frank. ‘But only one of them broke into Reid’s Press on the night of the 16th of March, with the aim either of printing subversive matter or of stealing type and other materials in order to print it elsewhere.’ ‘Nothing was stolen.’ ‘Why did he go there then? He had the whole of Moscow to choose from. In any case, we are requesting you to come round to Nikitskaya 210, and fetch him away.’ ‘Fetch him away! It’s Palm Sunday: I don’t want him!’ Frank said. ‘I’m always being asked to fetch

‘Frank Albertovich Reid, we know that you’re trying to dispose of your business with the intention of returning to England. During the past eighteen months you have acquired a declaration, made before a notary, that you have no outstanding debts, a police permit declaring that there is no obstacle to your leaving the empire, and a special permit from the Governor General covering the sale of a printing establishment.

‘We shall notify you if Grigoriev changes his address. To recapitulate, if there is any further scandal we shall have to see about the withdrawal of your exit permits, and in any case while Grigoriev is still at the University you will not be in a position to leave Moscow.

‘Oh, but there you’re quite wrong, Frank Albertovich,’ said Volodya eagerly. He was still young enough to speak clearly with his mouth full. ‘I did mean to kill you. That’s what I hadn’t explained. I meant to shoot you, but unfortunately there was something wrong with the automatic.’

‘You took Lisa Ivanovna into your house. That was why I tried to kill you.’

I feel like shouting aloud that it’s too much for me to bear. Listen, please, I should prefer you to understand. It isn’t bearable that she should be approached, spoken to, breathed upon, quite possibly touched by a man such as yourself, Frank Albertovich.’

This Grigoriev told me it wasn’t bearable that you should be breathed on, touched, gone near to, spoken to, no, spoken to, breathed on, gone near to, touched, that’s it, by a man like me. What do you say to that, Lisa? You’re alive. Is it bearable? Is it?’

The birch forest, unlike the pine forest, always gives a chance of life to whatever grows beneath it.

He wondered by what guile or what process of persuasion he had been led to allow them to go to the half-savage, mouldering dacha in charge of the girl whom he pressingly and achingly needed here in his own house.

and an official letter from the Ministry of Defence. This was to say that F. A. Reid, a foreign resident, printer and former importer of printing machinery, was released from his responsibility towards V. S. Grigoriev, student of the University of Moscow, who had been taken once again into preventive detention. There would now be no objection, since he held the necessary permits, to the departure of F. A. Reid and his family from the Russian Empire at his earliest convenience.

Tvyordov had brought out a copy of Tolstoy’s Resurrection—the first complete edition in Russian, without the censor’s cuts. It had been printed by Headley Brothers at 14 Bishopsgate Without, in the east end of London.

‘It’s a new explanation of the gospels. The resurrection, for those who understand how to change their lives, takes place on this earth.

Selwyn said ‘Let me start by saying that we’ve often spoken, you and I, about the two sides of man, the spiritual and the material, as though they were divided. What a mistake that is! The two should be indistinguishable, or rather there should be a gradual transformation, until what seems to be material is seen to be nothing of the kind.’

‘Russia hasn’t changed you, Frank, because you were born here. But didn’t you find that it changed Nellie? Didn’t her whole nature become, as they say here, wider? Didn’t she talk less about the household, and go more often to Shirokaya?’

‘Nellie was turning towards the spiritual. Unfortunately she couldn’t, as yet, distinguish it from the romantic, which casts a false glow over everything it touches. I tried to explain to you, some time ago now, that I had recently been through a period of sexual temptation and trial. You remember that?’ ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Frank. ‘Nellie saw me in a false glow, my friend.’

‘She wanted to go away with me to some more free and natural place. Perhaps under the sky in forests of pine and birch, where a man and a woman can join body and soul and find out what work they have to do in the world.’ ‘Why did she send the children back to Moscow?’ ‘I supposed that, since I had failed her, she didn’t want to take them on with her to Norbury.’ ‘My God, they’d have been better off in Norbury than with you in the middle of a forest of pine and birch. All right, you arranged to meet Nellie off the Berlin train at Mozhaisk. Why didn’t you?’

‘Frank,’ Selwyn cried, holding up his hands in surrender, ‘don’t descend to violence! Candidly, that was why I thought it would be better to discuss all this in a public place, where you couldn’t act violently, even if you wanted to.’

‘I can give it to you, but I fear it will be of very little use. I heard from Muriel Kinsman this morning, and she tells me that Nellie found she didn’t care for the communal life.’

I came to your house only a few evenings ago, not criticizing you in any way, nature and humanity are the only standards I recognize, but it was hardly a moment for discussion, you were with Lisa Ivanovna, with your hands on her breasts. But Frank, perhaps you don’t want to discuss this incident.’

Volodya, thought to be a conspirator, had turned out to be nothing more than a lover. Lisa, who, Frank could have sworn, was a lover, had turned out to be heaven knows what.

He had dangerous employees, or one dangerous employee, at least, a dangerous young woman, pretending to be looking after his children.

‘Remember that what binds us together is the knowledge of the wrongs we have done to one another.’

It’s not true, Frank thought, that she was pretending to look after the children. She did look after them. It’s not true that she pretended to make love to me. She did make love to me.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction for The Blue Flower, the Booker Prize for Offshore, and three of her novels—The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring—were short-listed for the Booker Prize.