The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

Author:Penelope Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

13

There was nothing wrong, nothing that you could lay a finger on, in the way Selwyn did his work at Reidka’s, but the imminent birth of his first volume had unsettled him. Middle-aged poets, middle-aged parents, have no defences. When the Birch Tree Thoughts were printed, sewn, bound, pressed and distributed to the better-class bookshops on the Lubyanka, he would have anxieties, but at least they would be different ones. Meanwhile, however, he had begun to speak of a German version—which would mean borrowing yet another set of type—and a Russian one. It was these two projects which had driven Frank to the idea of taking on a second accountant. The profits at Reidka’s would just about bear the additional salary. He had had to do this without hurting Selwyn’s feelings, but Selwyn was not a vain man.

‘You understand that Bernov will be the costing accountant, something we’ve never had. He won’t be concerned with the management, though we’ll have to listen to his advice.’

‘Yes . . . yes . . . where did you find him, Frank?’

‘He’s coming to us from Sytin’s, a very small firm after a very big one, but I daresay that’ll give him more opportunity.’

‘From Sytin’s! He’ll find it another world. When is he coming to the Press?’

‘I’ve got him down for the 27th of March, Russian calendar.’

‘Excellent, excellent . . . But, Frank, that’s the Feast of St Modestus. There’ll be the blessing of the office ikon.’

‘Not till the afternoon, they’ve agreed to work normal hours till four. It’s not a church holiday. We’ll have all day to show Bernov how we do things.’

Frank knew that Selwyn ought to have been present when he interviewed the alert, ambitious, bright-eyed Bernov, and he felt a pang of shame when Selwyn put only one more question: ‘Would you say that this young man has been touched to any extent by the teachings of Tolstoy?’ He had to say that he didn’t know, but thought it unlikely.

‘But you wouldn’t call him a quarrelsome fellow?’

‘He didn’t quarrel with me when I saw him.’

All that had been fixed before Nellie went away, in what, if time were space, would be a different continent. Every day he sent her a letter which, for 8 kopeks, included a blank reply form. He had mentioned that there was a girl now, a Russian girl, to look after the children. He had, of course, no address for Nellie except Charlie’s, where he imagined the envelopes piling up in the hall under the multi-coloured light from the stained glass window above the front door. Dolly and Ben also wrote once, and Annushka added a wavering Russian A. Frank did not know what Dolly had put, and thought it dishonourable to try to find out. She had asked him how ‘irresponsible’ was spelled. But this letter, too, would come to rest in the hall, in Charlie’s brass dish.

‘You lose your wife, you take on a new clerk,’ Kuriatin shouted down the telephone, to which he’d never got accustomed.

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