The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

       4

      The young Reids did not go straight to Moscow. One of the things that Frank’s father had told him at the Norbury wedding was that he’d better have a look at what they were doing in Germany, and so for three years he worked with Hirschfeld’s printing machinery in Frankfurt. Dolly was born there, and so was Ben. Then came the miscarriage. It was summertime, the hot, landlocked German summer. They were living in the suburbs, and in those days there were still barrel organs playing in the streets. From the pavement below their room an organ repeated the same tune Schön wie ein engel. Again and again it tore into the sentimental music with steel teeth. Nellie lay flat on her back, losing blood, hoping to save the baby. She told Frank to throw some money out of the window to the organ-man to bring them luck, but they had no luck that day.

      In the winter of 1905 Bert Reid died in Moscow – not in the uprisings, although that was a year of strikes and violence, almost a revolution against the Russian war with Japan. The German and English papers showed pictures of the streets barricaded with wrecked trams. The electricity had been cut off and the snowy, tomb-like barricades were lit by kerosene flares. Five batteries of artillery arrived to shell the factories in the Presnya and the Rogoznkaya where the men held out. Then they pumped in water through the gaps with equipment borrowed from Moscow’s fire services. The water turned to ice on impact. When the strikers came out to try to escape back to their villages, the soldiers overturned their sledges and scattered their possessions in the snow. The assembly plant was taken over and the Reids moved to the nearest hotel, Sovastyanov’s. There, after a week during which he had no occupation, since the army wouldn’t let him on to his own site, Bert complained of heart pains. These pains were the symptoms of bacterial endocarditis. Pieces of inflamed tissue were making their way from the walls of the heart into the bloodstream. The Greek doctor who was called in – their usual doctor, a German, had left for Berlin when the light and water in his surgery was cut off – had nothing to prescribe except rest and valerian drops and warm water. He told Mrs Reid that in his opinion her husband’s heart had given way from grief at the sad happenings in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Dr Weiss, if he had been there, though he might have diagnosed more accurately, would not have been able to save Bert.

      Mrs Reid, perhaps, really did die of grief. She collapsed in the study of the Anglican chaplaincy, where she had gone to see about the funeral arrangements. Summoned by cables, Frank arrived at the Alexander station with Nellie and the two children, who wanted to start playing immediately in the deep snow. He remembered – though she had left no will and indeed had nothing of her own – that she had expressed a wish to be buried in Salford. All that had to be put in hand, and he had to find somewhere to live. The wooden family house on the site had been half burned down and then swamped with water. Without much difficulty he took a lease on 22 Lipka Street. Some of the men got together to help him rescue what furniture they could. The piano, oddly enough, his mother’s Bechstein, came out undamaged from the ordeal by fire and ice. Everything else he got from Muir and Merrilees, which had remained open during what the manager called the disturbances, its dark blue flag with the golden M&M flying frozen above the shop’s façade.

      It wasn’t a time for risk-taking, because Frank was determined that Nellie shouldn’t have to worry about money. A look through the books showed that the import and assembly business would have to be wound down, or better still, sold as it stood. That was a pity, because Reid’s main suppliers, Hoe’s of the Borough Road in south east London, were as reliable as the day and the night. The trouble seemed to have been two things which Frank hadn’t known anything about. In the first place, although his father had got his letters, giving him some idea of the German competition, he hadn’t acted on the advice, or had acted on it eccentrically. He’d set his heart on expansion, and, worst still, become fascinated by the idea of the Mammoth Press which Hoe’s were putting into production for Lloyds Weekly News at a cost of eighteen thousand pounds. Another Mammoth, not for any definite customer, but most unwisely ordered on spec, had been delivered to the site, and was lying prone under tarpaulin, colossal, unassembled, unpaid for, looking, as it lay under many inches of snow against the pale green sky, like an ominous relic of the past rather than the machinery of the future. By Bert Reid’s bedside when he died, among the letters he was drafting to the Ministry of Interior to plead for those of his people, his ‘hands’, who had been arrested, was an illustrated booklet from Hoe’s describing, in heroic terms, the Mammoth. Now, with the sheds, the plant and the site itself, it must find, even in its dismembered state, a purchaser, probably one of the merchants of the second grade, with whose sons Frank had gone to school. Once it was gone, he could strike a balance, and concentrate on Reidka’s.

      Frank’s affection for Moscow came over him at odd and inappropriate times and in undistinguished places. Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore-houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarists straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers’ dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage-patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village.

      Nellie, too, very much preferred Moscow to Germany. She enjoyed putting 22 Lipka Street in order. The village habits of the great manufacturing city didn’t disconcert her at all. She was at home there, it seemed to Frank. This threw a new light on her hostility to Norbury, which had been neither town nor country.