Magnetic North - Extract

Katya was Russian. She and Gustav had met in the fashionable but respectable resort of Lake Garda in the spring of 1917, a couple of years later than Oscar's union with Charlotta. How it happened was like this.

War or no war, monied Europe continued to feel the need for winter sunshine. It had become used to spending the fag-end of winter indulging itself in a little irresponsible fun far from home. Sun, palm trees and plenty of ozone were invaluable for health. Doctors, peering deadpan over half-moon eyeglasses, solemnly wrote these things down in hieroglyphics on prescription pads, though only for the better-heeled, of course.

The South of France was obviously out, just for the moment but the Italian Lakes were perfectly safe, and where in the Italian Lakes could be safer, more picturesque, warmer and more healthful than Garda? Exciting, too, this winter, buzzy. King Vittore Emmanuele III was even now summoning the Allied Commanders for a conference at Garda, from whose icing-sugar gambling Casino these Great Panjandrums would emerge between the nodding palms to issue a resounding proclamation that the Piave line would be held. Held to the last man. Tremendous stuff!

This was the place both Gustav Oscarsson and Katya Olovanova migrated to in the February of 1917, two trembling swallows from the  frozen North; she from the forests round Moscow, he from a narrow squeak in Oslo. He'd started his journey by sea. Appropriate enough: all Oscarssons sailed the sea, whether to found Dublin, attack Muslim-held Seville, plunder their way down the mighty Russian rivers to Novgorod and Kiev, to take up posts in the Imperial Guard in the Byzantine Court at about the time William was conquering England, or to find Vinland, which might or might not be America. If Oscarsson blood ran sea-blue beneath the skin it was because their veins were capillaries of the sea. Some of Gustav's ancestors had vanquished it. Some had sunk in it and come up again. Yet others had drowned and (being tough) become pickled with salt, preserved like herring in a barrel and were spending the subsequent centuries swooping and swerving within the eddying swirls of the deep tides to this day. The thought gave him no misery. In fact he decidedly enjoyed the idea of his kin adding to the rich soup of the sea. It warmed and expanded a feeling of continuity and fellowship. Should he, one day, take a ducking and add to the number of stubborn pickled old buggers wafting about in the deeper currents, well, that'd be fine. They'd have a party.

Katya Olovanova had obviously not come by sea. She came from Holy Russia and such a journey would obviously have been mad but maybe not much madder than the odyssey by train, an epic in the travel-horror genre, a tale of maggots spiralling from the green meat on the plate, the floors of corridors smeared with the overflowings of chamber pots on their way to be emptied by unsteady babushkas, one case of tuberculosis left unburied for three days, various ladies impregnated by rape or consent, and an engine breakdown , the peasant driver  taking off his hat, crossing himself and waving his icon in front of the engine while waiting in hopeful inactivity several days at minus fifty  for God to mend it.  For, 'He will come. He cannot be everywhere straight away. Too many railway engines have been made for such a thing to happen. But He will come.'

Katya was being sent away for her weak chest. More to the point, she was going through a tiresome stage.  The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the utter formless panic of Russian on the brink of Revolution was bad enough for her parents to endure without being driven made every minute of every day by the irrational demands of a hormonally chaotic, beautiful eighteen-year-old.

A stark flat-chested aunt was routed out of some remote wing to accompany the girl; a financial arrangement was made. The Tëtka, a useless, inquisitive woman with a pinkish-grey hearing-aid, was delighted at this opportunity to avoid her usual dose of winter bronchitis as well as having her living expenses -such handsome expenses! - paid.

During the intolerable train journey, the Tëtka proved herself equal to the heroic task of keeping Katya under control. Exceeding her duties she kept the girl happy, yes happy (extraordinary word in the circumstances) by means of the contents of a small, brown glass bottle.  Two drops taken in a glass of water and Katya would droop as languorously as a full-blown poppy too heavy for its fragile stalk. Her young cheeks would blotch scarlet-crimson, the pupils of her great purple-brown grape-bloomed eyes would dilate, unfathomable black dream-pools, and she would sit idle and content for hours on end, watching the ice-light dance on the sparkle inside her lashes.