'If you do not wish ...'

'I am very touched that you should have thought of it. But she is not used to such presents, Alexander. If you wish you can give it to me and I will give it to her when she is older,' she said kindly. And feeling now that there was nothing else in politeness he could do, Alexander sadly gave it to her.

But the message was clear. He had tried to make a declaration and Mrs Suvorin, for whatever reason, had not let him do so. He felt embarrassed and humiliated. And even when Vladimir put his arm affectionately round him and led him off for a stroll in the gallery, he was hardly comforted.

As for Dimitri and Karpenko, they were beside themselves. 'Poor young Bobrov,' Karpenko mocked. 'Faberge sold him a rotten egg.'

And Nadezhda, deprived of her egg, could hardly decide what she felt about it all.

1908, June In the summer of 1908 it seemed that Russia, after all, might be at peace. The wave of terrorism was passing. Stolypin's harsh measures against the revolutionaries had greatly damaged them; and the recent discovery that the leading Socialist Revolutionary terrorist had long been a police agent had weakened that party in the eyes of the people. There were signs of progress too. The new Duma was not, as some had feared, the Tsar's lapdog. Liberals like Nicolai Bobrov spoke up boldly for democracy; and even the conservative majority backed the minister Stolypin in his plans for careful reform. Finally, that year, the excellent weather gave every promise of a bumper harvest. The countryside was quiet.

And it was in the country that the blow which was to decide Dimitri's destiny fell, quite unexpectedly, out of the blue sky.

It was Vladimir's idea that they should go to Russka. All spring, Rosa had looked unwell and both Vladimir and Peter had urged her: 'Escape the city in the summer heat.' In the end it was agreed that Dimitri and his friends should come; Karpenko would stay for the month of June before returning to the Ukraine for the rest of the holidays, and Rosa would try to come with Peter in July.

Dimitri found the place delightful. His uncle's remarkable vision was already at work. Thirty yards from the old Bobrov house there now stood a long, low wooden building which housed the museum and, at the far end, some workshops. In these Vladimir had already installed an expert woodcarver and a potter, whom Dimitri and Nadezhda loved to watch. The museum, though only just begun, was already a little treasure house. There were the traditional distaffs, elaborately carved painted wooden spoons, presses for making patterns or bread and cakes, and wonderful embroidered cloths, featuring the curious oriental bird design that was customary at Russka. Vladimir had also begun a collection of icons of the local school from the time when the monastery had been a centre of production.

In the house itself, Vladimir had provided a varied library and a grand piano. Mrs Suvorin, evidently rather bored by the country, usually sat reading on the verandah; but the house was efficiently run by Arina, whose young son Ivan was constantly hovering, hoping for a chance to play. He and Nadezhda were almost the same age, and it was amusing to see the sophisticated ten-year-old girl go whooping down the slope after the peasant boy or play hide and seek with him in the woods above the house.

In the afternoons, Vladimir would often take Nadezhda and the boys to bathe in the river. The big industrialist was surprisingly agile and a strong swimmer. Karpenko, it turned out, could hardly swim, but Vladimir personally held him in the water and coached him so that soon he could outstrip any of them. Afterwards, their bodies tingling from the cold water, they would sit on the bank and talk.

The industrialist was a wonderful talker. He would put his great arm round Nadezhda or one of the boys and discuss all manner of things with them, exactly as if they were adults. And it was on one of these afternoons that he gave them his view of Russia's future. As usual, it was to the point.

'It's really quite simple,' he told them. 'Russia is now in a race against time. Stolypin, whom I personally support, knows he has to modernize Russia while he keeps the lid on the forces of revolution. If he succeeds, the Tsar will keep his throne; if not ...' He grimaced. 'Chaos. Peasant and urban insurrection. Remember Pugachev, as they used to say.'

'What must Stolypin do?' Karpenko asked.

'Three things, chiefly. Develop industry. Thanks to foreign capital that's going well. Next, educate the masses. Sooner or later some kind of democracy will come, and the people aren't ready for it. Stolypin is making progress there. Thirdly, he's trying to reform the countryside.' He sighed. 'And that, I'm afraid, will be hard.'

The attempt to change the Russian peasant, Dimitri knew, lay at the heart of the great minister's reforms. In the last two years, important changes had been made. The payments due to the former landowners, together with all arrears, had been entirely cancelled. The peasant had been given full civil liberties, the use of the same law courts as any other citizen, and an internal passport for travel without the permission of the commune, which he was now free to leave at any time. At last, half a century after the Emancipation, he was a free man in fact as well as theory. But there still remained one huge problem.

'For what can be done about the commune?' Vladimir wondered aloud.

Even now, the commune's wasteful strip-farming of medieval times with its periodic redistributions had changed but little. Russian grain yield remained only a third of those in much of Western Europe. In his attempt to change this, Stolypin was trying to encourage peasants to withdraw from the commune, cultivate their own personal land, and be independent farmers. Laws were being passed; easy credit made available through the Peasant Bank. But progress so far was slow.

'Isn't Stolypin trying to make the peasant into a bourgeois, though a capitalist?' Dimitri objected.

'Of course he is,' Vladimir replied. 'Unlike you, Dimitri, I'm a capitalist. But I do confess that it's going to be very difficult to make it work.'

'I'd have thought it would be easy,' Karpenko remarked.

'Yes, my friend.' Vladimir tousled the boy's head affectionately. 'But that's because you come from the Ukraine. Down there in the western provinces of White Russia there's a tradition of independent farming. But in these central provinces, in Russia proper, the commune system is solid. And if you want to know why, just look at the village here. Look at Boris Romanov, the village elder.'

Dimitri and Karpenko had soon come to know Romanov. As village elder now, he was a figure of some power, which he clearly enjoyed. The family, with three strong sons, had the largest share of strips in the village now and Boris's house had handsome carving round the eaves and painted shutters. Yet that spring, when Stolypin's reforms had made some state land by the monastery available for purchase, and Vladimir had remarked to him 'Well, Boris Timofeevich, I dare say you'll be buying some yourself' he had glowered and replied: 'The commune's buying it.' And then, quietly but audibly: 'And we'll smoke you out too, one day.'

'Nothing will persuade Romanov that the answer to everything isn't to take this estate,' Vladimir continued. 'And do you know the irony? In many provinces there isn't enough land even if you dispossess every landowner to do the peasants the slightest bit of good! Their best answer is to resettle to less populated provinces which Stolypin's also trying to encourage.' He sighed. 'So the peasants support the social revolutionaries even the terrorists because they promise to distribute all the land.'

The industrialist smiled grimly as he summed up.

'So the communal peasant does little for himself but waits for a miracle that will solve everything in the twinkling of an eye. Passive, but angry. He'd prefer decades of unnecessary suffering, followed by a moment of useless violence.'

Though Dimitri, coming from the Socialist household of Peter and Rosa, naturally knew that in his conservative politics his Uncle Vladimir was mistaken, he had a great respect for his intelligence and recognized the truth of much of what he said. And thinking of the revolution he knew one day must come, he asked: 'So do you think Stolypin will fail, and the Tsar lose his throne?'

'It isn't clear to me,' his uncle replied frankly, 'but remember this: in 1905 we had a war and a food shortage. That's what actually caused the revolution. My guess, therefore, is that in order to win the race, Stolypin needs two things: peace, and good harvests. That is what will really decide the fate of Russia. Nothing much else.'

Yet it would have been hard, that peaceful summer, to think for long about such serious matters.

It was a happy time. In the mornings, Karpenko would often go out to explore the countryside, or sketch, or devise fantastic games to amuse young Ivan and Nadezhda, who both seemed to look upon him as a god. Meanwhile, for three hours, Dimitri would practise the piano. He had concentrated on the piano now, to the near exclusion of the violin, and though he might lack the driven technical virtuosity of the professional performer, his playing was of a remarkable musical sophistication.

In the afternoons, if they were not swimming with Vladimir, they sat on the verandah and read books or played cards with Mrs Suvorin.

One day Vladimir had taken them round the factories at Russka. It had been an impressive tour. Dimitri had studied the factory workers with interest as they quietly went about their tasks; but Karpenko had been fascinated by the mechanism of the plant itself. 'Such raw power,' he whispered to Dimitri afterwards. 'Did you notice the incredible, harsh beauty of the place? And your uncle he's in charge of this machine. I admire him more every day.'

Several times they had visited the monastery. And in the second week of June, Arina took them across the river and along the little path to the old springs, which utterly delighted Karpenko. 'How Slavic!' he cried. And then: 'How pagan.'

The evenings Dimitri especially enjoyed. For sometimes, while the others laughed and talked in the library, he would quietly sit at the piano and try out his own tentative compositions. It was on these occasions that he discovered a new and extraordinary feature of his uncle's character. For sometimes, as he was playing, he would be aware of Vladimir softly entering the room and sitting in the shadows. But often as not, when he came to a pause, his uncle would come over, gaze thoughtfully at the keys, and then in his rich baritone suggest: 'Why don't you try it this way?' Or: 'If you changed the rhythm here ...' And this was the remarkable thing Dimitri nearly always found that, unknown to himself, it had been what he wanted to express all along. 'How do you know my mind like that?' he would ask. 'Am I composing, or are you?' To which his uncle would reply, with a touch of sadness: 'To some, Dimitri, it is given to create. To others, only to understand the creative act.' And Dimitri could only marvel at this man, with whom he felt he was developing an even closer bond.

It was the day before he was due to leave that Karpenko drew Dimitri to one side and said: 'Let's go for a walk. Just the two of us.'

'Where to?'

'An enchanted place.' He grinned. 'The springs.'

Their walk was delightful. Karpenko was at his charming best, full of infectious laughter, and as they went along, Dimitri reflected how lucky he was to have such a friend. How handsome he was, he thought admiringly. Though fifteen, Karpenko had suffered few of the disadvantages of adolescence. He was nearly always in a sunny mood. The beginnings of his beard were so soft he scarcely needed to shave, his smooth skin was quite without blemish; he might have been conceived by a Renaissance sculptor like Donatello. Their slight difference in age precluded any rivalry: Karpenko knew more than Dimitri, but shared his knowledge freely and always with kindness, like a protective elder brother. Best of all, behind the facade of his jokes and brilliant manner there lay a deeply thoughtful nature that Dimitri loved and respected.

And it was in this last vein that, after they had rested on the mossy ground by the springs for a while, Karpenko suddenly turned to him rather seriously and remarked: 'Tell me, Dimitri, have you ever heard the proposition they call the Extraterrestrials Argument?'

Dimitri shook his head.

'It goes like this,' Karpenko explained. 'Imagine that beings arrived from another planet and saw how we live all the injustice in our world. And they asked you: "What are you doing about it?" And you replied: "Not much." What would they say, Dimitri? How could they understand such madness? "Surely," they'd say, "any rational being would put such a state of affairs right, as his first and most pressing duty."' He looked at his friend earnestly. 'Don't you agree?'

'I do.'

'So, what I wanted to say, before I leave, is shouldn't we commit ourselves to do something, to make a new and better world, you and I?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Good, I knew you'd agree.' Slowly and solemnly now he reached into his pocket and drew out a pin. Then he pricked his finger and drew blood and handed the pin to Dimitri. 'We'll make a pact, then,' he said. 'Blood brothers.'

And young Dimitri flushed with pride. It was the fashion just then, especially among young men in revolutionary articles, to use the ancient custom of blood brotherhood. But to think that Karpenko was doing him such an honour! Dimitri took the pin and did the same. Then they pooled their blood.

Karpenko had only been gone four days when Mrs Suvorin, receiving a message that her sister in St Petersburg was ill, felt obliged to depart. Nadezhda and Dimitri remained, however; with Vladimir and Arina there, it hardly seemed that they could come to any harm. And so a pleasant week passed.

It was the custom for the stable boys to take the horses down to the river each day. If they were being watched, this was done in an orderly manner; but if not, they would mount them bareback and, with loud whoops, go careening down the slope. Little Ivan, whenever he could escape Arina's watchful gaze, would slip off to join in.

If Nadezhda had not been watching, that warm July day, perhaps Dimitri would not have done it; but seeing the nine-year-old Ivan looking cheerfully down at him from a horse in the stableyard, he suddenly decided: If the little boy can do it, so can I. And a moment later he had clambered on to a horse himself, and was moving out towards the slope.

First a walk, then a run: the horses were excited. Hoofs pounding on the hard ground; wild cries; the ground both coming to meet him, yet falling away at the same time. Dimitri clung to the horse's mane. There was dust everywhere, a smell of sweat. Suddenly he felt a branch from a sapling slap him in the face and cut him. He laughed. Then he was losing his balance. How foolish. Next he was falling, headlong, as the flanks of the other horses rushed by. Then the ground, or was it the sky, hurled itself at him.

Dimitri heard his leg snap. In that strange, silent moment before the searing pain, he heard it quite distinctly. And he was still just conscious when Nadezhda came running down the slope to where he lay.

Dimitri did not realize, for some time, that things would never be the same.

They had put his bed downstairs, in the big, airy room where the piano was. He was not too bored. There were plenty of books. Arina frequently came in and Nadezhda would happily sit and chatter in her inimitable way. But he looked forward most to the time when his Uncle Vladimir would come and talk or read to him by the hour. The only thing he missed was that, for the present, he could not play the piano.

And then his mother came.

If there was any consequence of his accident that Dimitri would never have foreseen, it was that it would change his view of Rosa. What had she been to him until then? The loving mother who had helped him take his first steps in music; the woman who adored his father; the selfless, strangely sad figure who worried incessantly about her husband and her son. She did not look well when she arrived. Her large eyes were haggard. Her black hair was streaked with grey, and because it was both thick and long the effect was to make her seem unkempt. He loved her but felt sorry for her, because she could not be happy.

It was Vladimir who revealed another side of her. 'You must rest, now you are here, Rosa,' he urged. 'And,' he added firmly, 'you must play. We cannot allow this young man to be without music.' And to Dimitri's great surprise, the very next day, she began to do so.

How strange it was. He had never heard her play before. He had known that once she had played. Often, when he was younger, she would help him over a few bars here and there, where he ran into difficulties, and from this he knew that she had considerable technique. But for some reason she would never sit down and play. Now, however, hesitantly at first, she began to do so: simple pieces the first day or two. Then a Beethoven sonata or two. Then pieces by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russians. She would play for an hour, then two, her face sometimes frowning with amusement as she asked her fingers to perform tasks they had not done in years, sometimes smiling gently. And as he listened, Dimitri was more and more astonished. She is formidable, he thought. A major talent. He could hear it coming through in every phrase. By the fifth day, the transformation in Rosa was astonishing. It was as if she had shed her sad persona like an unwanted skin. She had drawn her hair back more tightly, so that it no longer seemed untidy. Fresh air and several nights sleep had relaxed her face and smoothed out the lines. Now she threw her head back in calm triumph as the Beethoven 'Appassionata' flowed like a wave from her fingers. And often Vladimir stood beside her.

'I never knew you played like that,' Dimitri remarked one day; and almost added: 'Or that you were so beautiful.'

'There are many things you do not know,' she replied gaily, and strolled out, with a laugh, on to the verandah with Vladimir and Nadezhda.

And then, just as suddenly, it ended. It was a sunny afternoon. Rosa had been there ten days. The day before, Vladimir had brought her the scores of some studies by his favourite of all the Russians composing just then, the brilliant Scriabin. They were wonderful pieces, as delicate and measured as a Chopin prelude, as haunting as one of the Russian Symbolist poems of Alexander Blok. Rosa was playing them while Vladimir basked in an easy chair, a seraphic smile on his face. And unusually Dimitri had fallen asleep.

Rosa had stopped playing when he began to awaken, and Vladimir was standing beside her at the piano. They obviously imagined he was still asleep, and though they were speaking in low tones, he heard most of their words distinctly.

'You cannot go on. I've been telling you for three years.' His uncle's baritone voice, gently persuasive. 'I can't bear to see it.'

'There's nothing to be done. But, Volodya ...' Dimitri had never heard anyone use this diminutive form of his uncle's name before. 'Volodya, I'm so afraid.'

'You need sleep, my little dove. Stop tormenting yourself. At least stay with me here a while.' Vladimir paused, apparently to think. 'I have to go to Berlin and Paris next spring. Come with me. We can go to one of the spas for a health cure. I think you know you will be safe with me.'

Dimitri stared, his eyes wide open. He saw his mother touch Vladimir's large hand affectionately. 'I know.'

Dimitri sat bolt upright, then winced with pain. He saw their two faces turn towards him: his uncle's irritated, his mother's distraught. Then Vladimir said, as calmly as though nothing had happened: 'Ah, my friend. You have woken up. Let's all have some tea.' And Dimitri himself could not make out what it was he had just heard.

The next morning, Rosa announced that she must return to Moscow. 'I've been away from your father for too long,' she told him. 'I worry about him so.' And once again her face looked haggard, suggesting she had not slept the night before.

The days that followed might have been sad for Dimitri. Not only did his mother depart, but Nadezhda was summoned back to Moscow by Mrs Suvorin; and since the doctor said he must not be moved, he was left at Russka almost alone. It was Vladimir who now, quietly but firmly, took over his life.

Just two days after Rosa left, his uncle appeared with several books and scores and dumped them on the table beside his bed. 'You play well, my friend, and you've made some pretty compositions in the evenings,' he announced firmly. 'Now that you're confined to bed though, you should make the most of your seclusion. It's time you began to understand what you're doing. These are books of musical theory and composition. Study them.'

It was hard work at first, even boring. But each evening his uncle made him go through the exercises: harmonies, counterpoint, the complex business of musical discipline. Though only an amateur, Vladimir's understanding was considerable and he was a stern taskmaster. 'Now I know why your factories make a good profit,' Dimitri once laughed. But the results, he had to confess, were excellent. In just six weeks, with nothing else in the world to do, the thirteen year old made astonishing progress. And he found something else, too: that as his technical understanding increased, he began to have a burning desire, an absolute compulsion, to use this new knowledge he was mastering, and to compose. So that in September, when the doctor finally agreed that he might travel back to Moscow, he remarked to Vladimir: 'Do you know, I think perhaps I'm really going to be a composer.'

To which his uncle, to the boy's surprise, simply smiled and replied: 'Of course you are.'

And it was because of this period of study that Dimitri Suvorin, long after he had become famous, always remarked: 'It was a fall from a horse that made me.'

The fall from the horse had one other effect. Whether it was the carelessness of the stable boys who carried him back to the house, or the fact that the fracture was multiple, or the poor technique of the factory doctor who set his leg, Dimitri Suvorin's right leg was twisted out of shape for the rest of his life and he walked with a stick.

1908, September As well as visiting whenever he could think of an excuse, Alexander Bobrov often walked past the outside of Vladimir Suvorin's great house in the hope of catching sight of Nadezhda. Despite the embarrassing incident at Easter he had never, for a moment, given up his idea. 'I shall marry her,' he told his father bluntly.

Once already, that month, he had found an excuse for going in and had found Mrs Suvorin and her daughter there, and learned that Vladimir would not be back in Moscow until late that month.

This evening, however, it was already late. The curtains and blinds were all closed, and only habit had made him walk by the Suvorin house at all. A light mist had fallen; the street lamps were so many yellowish blurs; few people were about. He would probably not even have glanced at the house if he had not heard a light footfall in that direction, a sound which seemed to end by the front door.

He peered across the street. For a moment he could not see anyone; then, standing by the portico, he made out a muffled figure in a broad-brimmed felt hat. He paused to watch and to his surprise, a moment later, saw the front door open a little and the figure swiftly step inside. But it was just as the door was closing that he caught his breath. For as the figure took off his hat, Alexander saw, without a shadow of a doubt, the reddish hair of Yevgeny Popov.

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, Popov had never taken much interest in the arts. When he was with Mrs Suvorin, he was sometimes reminded, with a wry smile, of a conversation he had had in Switzerland last year with his friend Lenin. They had been speaking of the countess in St Petersburg when Lenin burst out: 'Do you know, she showed me a strange thing once. A postcard of a painting called the Mona Lisa.' He had shaken his bald head. 'Have you ever heard of it, Popov? I hadn't. What on earth is it about? I couldn't make head nor tail of it.' And though Popov was not quite so prosaic as the great revolutionary, he had often to confess a sense of ignorance in Mrs Suvorin's presence; and he would let her lead him to one of the rooms where her husband's modern paintings hung and stare at them, fascinated, while she explained them.

But now she was looking at him thoughtfully. 'Tell me,' she suddenly said, 'if you knew, for a certainty, that all this was going to continue, that there would be no revolution for at least a hundred years, what would you do?'

It was a fair question. 'Actually,' he confessed, 'I think Stolypin may succeed. So does Lenin. The revolution may not even come in my lifetime.' He shrugged, then smiled. 'I suppose the truth is,' he admitted frankly, 'I've spent all my life being a revolutionary and I wouldn't know how to be anything else. It's a vocation, you know, like any other.'

'But in the long run, you think all this,' she gestured round the beautifully furnished room, 'has to go.'

'Certainly. There isn't room for such privilege. All men will be equal.'

'And when the revolution comes, you will destroy the capitalists and their supporters ruthlessly.'