‘What’s this? Leave me in peace, I beg you.’

He pushed her aside and walked away – and his face seemed to show revulsion and irritation, she thought. Just then the peasant woman came in, carefully carrying a bowl of cabbage soup in both hands. Olga could see that the woman had dipped both thumbs in the soup. And that dirty old woman with her tightly belted stomach, the cabbage soup that Ryabovsky greedily started devouring, the hut and that whole life which she had loved so much at first for its simplicity and Bohemian chaos now struck her as downright appalling. Suddenly she felt insulted.

‘We must separate for a while’, she said coldly, ‘or we’ll end up having a serious quarrel from the sheer boredom of it. I’m sick and tired of all this. I’m leaving today.’

‘And how will you go? Ride on a broomstick?’

‘Today’s Thursday, there’s a steamboat at half past nine.’

‘Oh yes, so there is… well, take it then’, Ryabovsky said gently, wiping his mouth on a towel instead of a serviette. ‘It’s boring and there’s nothing for you to do here. It would be terribly selfish of me if I tried to stop you. Go then, we’ll meet after the twentieth.’

Olga gaily packed and her cheeks even glowed with pleasure. Could it be true, she wondered, that soon she would be painting in a drawing-room, sleeping in a bedroom and dining with a cloth on the table? She felt as if a weight had been lifted from her. And no longer did she feel angry with the artist.

‘I’m leaving you my paints and brushes, my dear Ryabovsky’, she said. ‘You can bring anything I’ve left behind… But mind you don’t become lazy when I’ve gone, don’t mope, and get on with your work. You’re a very fine person, my dear old Ryabovsky.’

At nine o’clock Ryabovsky kissed her goodbye, so that he would not have to kiss her on the steamboat in front of the others (so she thought), and he saw her to the landing-stage. The steamboat soon arrived and carried her away.

Two and a half days later she arrived home. Without taking off her hat or raincoat and breathless with excitement she went into the drawing-room and from there into the dining-room. Dymov was sitting at the table without any jacket, his waistcoat unbuttoned, sharpening a knife on a fork. There was a grouse on the plate in front of him. When Olga entered she felt quite convinced that everything must be concealed from her husband and that she had the skill and strength to do this. But now, when she saw his broad, gentle, happy smile and his eyes bright with joy, she felt that to deceive that man would be as vile, detestable and just as inconceivable and beyond her as slandering, stealing or murdering. So in a flash she decided to tell all. After letting him kiss and embrace her she knelt before him and covered her face.

‘What is it? What’s wrong, Mother?’ he asked tenderly. ‘Did you miss me?’

She raised her face that was red with shame and gave him a guilty, imploring look. But fear and guilt prevented her from speaking the truth.

‘It’s nothing’, she said. ‘I’m just…’

‘Let’s sit down’, he said, lifting her to her feet and sitting her at the table. ‘That’s it… Now, have some grouse. You must be starving, you poor thing.’

Eagerly she inhaled the air of home and ate some grouse, while he watched with loving tenderness and laughed for joy.

VI

By the middle of winter it was apparent that Dymov had begun to guess that he was being deceived. Just as if his own conscience was not clear, he could no longer look his wife in the eye, no longer smiled happily when they met, and in order to avoid being alone with her so much would often invite his colleague Korostelev home for a meal. This colleague was a short, close-cropped little man with a wrinkled face who, whenever he spoke to Olga, would keep buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket in embarrassment and then start tweaking the left side of his moustache with his right hand. At dinner both doctors would discuss elevation of the diaphragm being occasionally accompanied by irregular heartbeat, or how common neuritis was these days, or how Dymov had discovered cancer of the pancreas when performing a postmortem the day before on a patient diagnosed to have died of pernicious anaemia.