The Scarlet Generation Read online

  “What do you think is going to happen?” she ventured.

  Joseph sighed. “Sadly, it is difficult to see what can happen for the better, as long as this country remains isolationist. The British certainly can’t lick Hitler all on their own, any more than I believe he can beat them, at least by invasion. But if he were really to get his U-boats to work he can slowly strangle Britain, and if it went on long enough they’d simply have to make peace on his terms.”

  “You’re talking about a war of several years,” Alex said.

  “Oh, at the very least. It’s a pretty gloomy prospect.”

  “And you think if we went in, we could win?” Elaine asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “But so many people would be killed...”

  “So many people are being killed, Dr Mitchell,” Sonia

  Bolugayevska said. “If not in battle, by execution. It is an unthinkable scenario.”

  She was seated on the Princess’s left, and Priscilla squeezed her hand. “But at least you are safe, here, Sonia, for just as long as you wish to stay. You simply must put thoughts of vengeance out of your mind.”

  “Never!” Sonia said.

  Alex borrowed his mother’s car to drive Elaine home. She wasn’t at all sure whether she hadn’t dreamed the evening; certainly she have never drunk so much champagne and wine at one time — the car seemed to be floating high above the street. Alex appeared to be absolutely sober; she supposed he was used to it.

  The car braked to a stop beside the kerb. There was still a great deal of celebratory noise in the city, especially down by the water, but this street was empty. “I’m sure I didn’t thank your folks enough,” Elaine said. “It was a simply marvellous evening.”

  “They enjoyed entertaining you. I enjoyed entertaining you.”

  They gazed at each other, each just visible in the gloom. “I’d ask you up,” Elaine said. “But...”

  “Tell me this but.”

  “Well, in the first place, my apartment isn’t very elegant. In the second, it’s pretty crowded; there are two other girls up there.”

  “Ah!” he said. “Can’t you send them out?”

  “At this hour? You must be kidding!”

  “Well, in that case...goodnight.”

  Elaine waited for the kiss, and duly received it, but it was chaste and formal. Shit, she thought. I’ve blown it!

  *

  The Reichschancellory in Berlin glowed with light, hummed with music, exuded excitement. Inside was crowded with bare shoulders and heaving breasts, glittering jewels and medals, elegant uniforms, mainly dark blues and blacks, while the walls glowed with the red, black and white of the huge swastika flags draped there.

  “A most impressive display of Teutonic splendour, wouldn’t you say, Countess?”

  Anna von Holzbach turned sharply. The man was speaking German, but with a foreign accent, and his tunic was dark green, with red collar and cuffs and shoulder straps. “How do you know I am a countess?” she demanded.

  “I know a great deal about you, Your Excellency.” This time he spoke Russian. “About the entire Bolugayevski family.”

  Anna inhaled, slowly, while she surveyed him; she could not remember ever seeing him before. But he was Russian, and therefore to be hated. For all her name and background, Anna Bolugayevska von Holzbach was not really Russian at all. Her father, the last true Prince of Bolugayen, Alexei Bolugayevski, son of Colin MacLain Bolugayevski, had actually been Scottish, and her mother had been the Jewess Sonia Cohen. Fortunately, for her present circumstances, she entirely took after her father and was tall and strongly built; now that she was in her mid-30s she could almost be described as matronly, although she had never been a mother. Her features, too, were pure Bolugayevska, bold and strong and handsome, as her curling yellow hair was also a trademark of her family. Thus, as she had long been separated from her mother — who she knew thought her to be dead — and as no one in Germany had thought to look beyond the utter Aryanism of her appearance, she remained welcome in the very inner circles of the Nazi Party.

  But she would not remain so if this lout were to spread her background about. She was not afraid, physically. Although the Jews had been turned into second-class citizens by the regime, forced to emigrate or remain to be locked up in special camps, as she was married to one of Hitler’s favourite young men, and a man who was one of Germany’s new heroes for his exploits in the campaign which had driven France out of the War and Great Britain out of Europe, and as she was herself one of Hitler’s pleasures — he delighted in entertaining her to tea, which always left her breathless with anticipation and frustrated with his total apparent lack of sexual interest in her — she could not imagine that were it suddenly discovered she had a Jewish mother would involve her in any personal danger. But the social consequences would be unthinkable. She looked the Russian officer up and down. “We do not seem to have been introduced.”

  He clicked his heels and bent over her white-gloved hand. “Feodor Ligachev, Your Excellency.”

  “And you are...” she studied his insignia. “A captain?” Her tone was contemptuous.

  “I am an assistant military attaché at the Embassy.”

  “Ah. And you claim to know all about me. Tell me what you know about me?”

  “I know that you are the daughter of the late Alexei Bolugayevski, one time Prince of Bolugayen.”

  Anna waited, almost holding her breath, but he didn’t immediately continue, so she remarked, “That was a long time ago, Captain, and I long ago turned my back on my family. I am Frau von Holzbach, now.”

  “That is good to know,” Ligachev said. “As we are now by way of being related.”

  Anna raised her eyebrows. “I do not think that can be possible.”

  “My father, Ivan Ivanovich Ligachev, is your cousin Jennie’s second husband.” Anna was speechless. “Is that not a happy turn of events?” Feodor Ligachev asked. “As your father was our enemy, while Colonel von Holzbach and his people are our friends.”

  “That must be very nice for you,” Anna said, and sighed with relief as she saw her husband coming to her rescue.

  “What did that fellow want?” Alexander von Holzbach asked, as he swept his wife into a Strauss waltz. Alexander von Holzbach was a handsome man, tall and well built, his somewhat bland features given strength and purpose by the dark blue tunic with its high collar, and the various insignia pinned there, not to mention the Iron Cross, First Class, which hung from his throat. Like all German officers following their great victories in Poland and the West, he was a romantic figure. But Anna would have found him so in any event. With her father, and her brother, he had fought for the White armies seeking to overthrow the Bolsheviks following the end of the Great War. Following their defeat in the Great Civil War, Alexander had accompanied Prince Colin, as he had become on the death of his father, to France, to eke out a meagre living driving taxis while they had dreamed of regaining supremacy in Russia. And when Colin had been murdered by the Red assassin Andrei Gosykin, shot down in cold blood while she had lain in bed only a heartbeat away, it had been Alexander who had swept her up and fled with her to safety in Germany, to become a Nazi hero.

  Anna had not known what to make of Alexander then. For one thing, they had only met the very afternoon Colin had been shot. And she had been so wrapped up in her brother, who had returned to her life after she had already supposed him dead, that the fact of his real death obscured every other consideration, and certainly every other man. But Alexander had promised revenge, and through his relationship with the rising Nazi Party in Germany, such revenge had seemed possible.

  It had been a long time coming. Gosykin himself had fallen a victim to the great purges instigated by Stalin, but his wife and daughter still remained as objects of hatred to be brought down. That Jennie Gosykinya was Anna’s own first cousin only made her the more hateful. But her hatred extended to all Russia and all Russians, beginning with Stalin himself.

  Hitler h
ad promised they would be wiped off the face of the earth. He had not been thinking so much of revenge —no Russian had ever harmed him, personally — but in getting rid of what were to him hordes of sub-human Slays to create living-space, lebensraum, for the German masses. But then he had signed a mutual aid pact with Stalin. Anna had hardly been able to believe it. Alexander had explained it, of course; it was necessary to be friends with Russia while Germany dealt with the West. But that had been accomplished, more than six months ago, and still Germany and Russia seemed the best of friends — which was why such a lout as this Ligachev was at a Chancellory ball. “He claimed to know my background,” she said. “Would you believe it, his father is now married to Jennie Gosykinya!”

  Alexander frowned. He cared nothing for the antics of Jennie Gosykinya, a woman of whom he had only ever heard, not met, but he knew his wife’s background better than anyone else. “He knows about your mother?”

  “I don’t think so. He didn’t mention her.”

  “Bastard!” Alexander said into her hair as he hugged her close. Although they had been intimates for nearly 17 years, from the moment he had found her kneeling naked beside her dead brother’s body, he still adored her. Anna, now 33, was a most beautiful woman who had perhaps just about reached an apogee — with her height and strong build she was liable to become overweight as she grew older. But it was more than her physical attraction. She was a countess, the descendant of princes. That gave her an aura. And he was afraid of her; she possessed a quality of intensity he entirely lacked. “But he will soon be history,” he whispered.

  Anna pulled her head back. “Tell me.”

  “Not here. Would you like to go home, early?”

  “Tell me,” she said, as soon as they had entered the door of their apartment.

  “Keller told me tonight,” Alexander said. “My orders will arrive tomorrow. The Balkans.”

  “The Balkans?” Anna was astonished. “Whatever for?”

  “Well, the Italians have got themselves into their usual mess while trying to occupy Greece. Now it seems that the British are sending men into Greece to help. So, ostensibly, we are sending forces down there to assist the Italians.”

  Anna went into the bedroom. “There will be little glory in that.” She stood before her full-length mirror while she reached behind herself to unbutton her gown. “Do not the British always run away?”

  He joined her, and took over the unbuttoning himself. “I said ‘ostensibly’. As for the British, the sooner they run away the better.” She turned, in his arms, as the gown slipped away from her breasts and gathered round her thighs. “Keller told me, in the strictest confidence, my pet, that the Fuehrer has made up his mind to move against Russia.”

  “There! All set?” Jennie Ligachevna smiled at her daughter.

  They made a splendid pair. Jennie Ligachevna was the daughter of Patricia Bolugayevska-Cromb, the wayward countess who had sided with the Russian Communists and been exiled to Siberia before managing to escape and flee to the sanctuary of England and the arms of her cousin Duncan Cromb. She had carried with her her infant son, Joseph, born to another exile, the Jew Joseph Fine, in the wilds of Siberia. Jennie revered the memory of the mother; she could no longer revere the memory of the half-brother she had once adored. He had turned against Soviet Russia and indeed, herself. She did not know the truth of the articles he had written about his experiences in the gulag, the Soviet prison in which he had been confined for several years. She did not wish to believe any of it.

  Jennie Ligachevna had known very little of what to believe over the past few years. When she had eloped from England with the handsome, dashing Soviet agent Andrei Gosykin, defying her family but not her background — her mother Patricia would have done the same thing, she was certain — the world had seemed at her feet. Welcomed in the Kremlin by Lenin himself, as the first true Russian aristocrat ever voluntarily to return to the Soviet state, she had been the happiest woman in Europe, she had had no doubt at all. Lenin had shared exile in Siberia with Patricia Bolugayevska, and a lasting friendship had grown up between them. Even Lenin’s death so soon after her arrival had not in any way interfered with the even tenor of her new life. She had been made almost a member of the family of Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, for whom Gosykin had then worked.

  There had been a difficult time: her brother Joseph’s so strange visit to Russia in search of her which had apparently resulted in his being sent to prison for several years — if that were true — and the tragedy of her Aunt Sonia and her lover Trotsky, disgraced and then banished. She had been horrified at the news of Trotsky’s murder, last autumn, by an unknown assassin — even Uncle Joe, as she referred to Stalin, had claimed not to know who had been behind it — and only relieved that Sonia had managed to survive.

  Her real personal crisis had occurred several years ago, when her husband had been arrested for treason, tried, condemned and shot. His execution had been one of the first resulting from the murder of Uncle Joe’s close friend Sergei Kirov. Jennie had been utterly shocked. Andrei had denied having anything to do with that murder, but it had been carried out by an associate of his, a man named Leonid Nikolaiev, and when the facts had been put to her by the Party investigators, that the man she had loved, the father of her daughter, should have turned out to be a traitor to the Party, a professional murderer, who had (as it had been proved), only married her on orders from Lenin, she had been left prostrate with grief and humiliation.

  Jennie did not know how she would have survived without the aid and encouragement of Uncle Joe. He had even offered to let her go back to the West, if she wished. But how could she do that? The West was the enemy of the Party. And of everyone in the West, her own brother Joe and his wife Priscilla were the most implacable of those enemies. She had nothing left in the West. Uncle Joe had understood, and had himself bestowed upon her a second husband, one of his very best friends.

  In a perfect world Jennie would never have chosen such a man as Ivan Ligachev as her husband. She would, indeed, have preferred his son. But she was no longer in her first youth — she was 35 — and although she retained much of the beauty she had inherited from her mother, the glowing auburn hair, the boldly handsome features, the tall strong body, she no longer possessed the spirit. Ivan Ivanovich, stolidly unimaginative, earthily passionate, provided the security not only of a man about the house but of a prominent Party member. Being married to Ivan guaranteed her future.

  More important, it had guaranteed the future of Tatiana. Jennie’s only worry was Tatiana. For Tatiana, the events of the past few years had been even more traumatic than for herself. The father she had been brought up to love and admire had suddenly been accused of a host of crimes and shot. Tatiana even took after Gosykin, in many ways. Her height came from both of them — she was 5ft 10 inches tall. Her body also perhaps came from both of them, with the thrusting breasts and strong thighs of her mother, the suppleness of her father. And if her face was pure Bolugayevska, her curling black hair was pure Gosykin. But where was her mind?

  Jennie knew that her daughter was an enthusiastic member of the Comsomol, the Party youth organisation. Descended as she was, at least on her mother’s side, from a long line of soldiers, she delighted in the martial displays, the drills, the gymnastics, which were so important a part of the picture Uncle Josef was intent upon presenting to the world of Communist youth. With her figure, the sight of 18-year-old Tattie leading a parade wearing only vest and shorts could bring all of Red Square to its feet. But she had never brought any of her fellows home.

  Partly, Jennie knew, this was because of Ivan. Ivan was what would be known in England as a groper, and one of the women he most liked to grope was his own stepdaughter. It was embarrassing, and Jennie knew it also embarrassed young Feodor, but in a male-dominated society such as Russia there was nothing anyone could do about it; the one time she had tried to remonstrate with him he had slapped her. She had promptly slapped him back and he had never tried that aga
in, but she did not consider the situation was worth a fist-fight.

  Soon enough Tatiana would find a man of her own. Jennie even had some hopes that it might be Feodor himself. But Feodor was away in Germany as an attaché. So now she smiled brightly as Tatiana hefted her backpack. If there was one thing the girl definitely looked forward to it was summer camp outside Brest-Litovsk. And this year there was the prospect of a friendship. Her friend Galina Shermetska’s daughter Sophie was going to camp for the first time. Galina lived in the apartment above, but hitherto Sophie and Tatiana had not been at all close. Well, Sophie was only 15, three years the younger, and with her spectacles and nervous demeanour she was as much unlike Tatiana as it was possible to imagine. But they were going to camp together. “You will look after Sophie,” she said.

  “Mother, I will do what I can,” Tatiana said. “But this year I am camp captain. I have to look after all of the girls. Not just one.”

  “I know you will do your best, darling,” Jennie said, as she kissed her goodbye.

  Summers in Russia were more important than anywhere else, Tatiana Gosykinya thought. Perhaps even more so than in Scandinavia, or the Arctic, because of the immensity of Russia. And especially Belorussia. Other countries were divided by seas and mountains; Belorussia had only rivers, and of course the great swamp, known as the Pripet Marshes. In the winter, it was an unending, flat, sea of snow and ice, broken only by huge forests. In the summer it was equally unending, but now it was a mass of waving cornstalks.