Both seemed to be talking shop only so that Olga could remain silent – in other words, not tell any lies. After dinner Korostelev would sit at the piano.

‘Ah well, my dear chap!’ Dymov would sigh. ‘Play us something sad!’

With his shoulders raised and his fingers spread wide apart, Korostelev would play a few chords and start to sing:

Show me that abode

Where the Russian peasant does not groan.3

Dymov would give another sigh, prop his head on his fist and ponder.

Of late Olga had been behaving with the greatest indiscretion. Every morning she would wake up in the foulest of moods, thinking that she no longer loved Ryabovsky and that it was all over, thank God. But by the time she had drunk her coffee she was inclined to believe that Ryabovsky had alienated her husband and that now she was left without husband or Ryabovsky. Then she would recall her friends saying that Ryabovsky was preparing something quite sensational for an exhibition, a combination of landscape and genre à la Polenov,4 which sent every visitor to his studio into raptures. Surely it was thanks to her influence that he had produced such a painting? And in general it was thanks to her that he had improved so dramatically. Her influence was so beneficial, so vital, that if she were to desert him he would probably go right downhill. She also remembered that on his last visit he had worn a kind of grey patterned silk coat and a new tie. ‘Do I look handsome!’ he had languidly asked. And in fact (or so she thought) he was very handsome, so elegant with his long curls and blue eyes. And he had been very nice to her.

After much reminiscing and reflection, Olga would get dressed and – in a great tizzy – take a cab to Ryabovsky’s studio. She would find him in a cheerful mood, in ecstasies over his painting, which was truly splendid. He would jump about, play the fool and reply to all serious questions by joking. Olga was jealous of Ryabovsky’s picture: she hated it, but she would stand before it in silence for five minutes – for politeness’ sake – and then sigh like someone viewing a sacred object.

‘No, you’ve never done anything like it before’, she would softly say. ‘You know, it’s really awe-inspiring!’

Then she would start pleading with him to love her, not to desert her, to take pity on her, poor miserable wretch that she was. She would weep and kiss his hands and insist that he vowed his love for her, and she tried to prove to him that without her good influence he would lose his way and finally meet with disaster. And after dampening his spirits and feeling that she had been humiliated, she would take a cab to her dressmaker’s or an actress friend to try to wangle a free theatre ticket.

Should she not find Ryabovsky in his studio she would leave a letter vowing to poison herself without fail if he didn’t come and see her that very same day. He would panic, go and see her and stay for dinner. Uninhibited by her husband’s presence, he would be impertinent to her – and she would reply in kind. Both found that they were cramping each other’s style, that they were despots and deadly enemies. And they would become furious with one another – and in their fury they failed to notice how badly they were behaving and that even the close-cropped Korostelev knew everything that was going on. After the meal Ryabovsky would make a hasty farewell and leave.

‘Where are you going?’ Olga would ask him in the hall with a venomous look.

Frowning and screwing up his eyes, he would mention some woman they both knew – clearly he was gloating over her jealousy and all he wanted was to annoy her. She would go to her bedroom and lie down on the bed, biting the pillow and sobbing out loud from jealousy, vexation, humiliation and shame. Dymov would leave Korostelev in the drawing-room, go into the bedroom and softly say, embarrassed and dismayed:

‘Don’t cry so loud, Mother. What’s the point? You must say nothing about it… You mustn’t let people see… What’s done cannot be undone – you know that.’

Not knowing how to deaden that nagging feeling of jealousy that even made her head ache and convinced that things could still be put right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face and fly off to a woman friend. If she didn’t find Ryabovsky there, she would go to another, then to a third. At first she was ashamed of running about like this, but then it became a habit and in a single evening she did the rounds of all the women she knew in her search for Ryabovsky, and all of them were well aware of this.

Once she told Ryabovsky about her husband:

‘That man is crushing me with his magnanimity!’

So delighted was she with this phrase that whenever she met artists who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky she would say of her husband with a sweeping gesture:

‘That man is crushing me with his magnanimity!’

Her routine was just the same as the previous year. On Wednesdays there were the soirées. The actor recited, the artists sketched, the cellist played, the opera singer sang and at half past eleven the dining-room door never failed to open and Dymov would say with a smile:

‘Supper is served, gentlemen!’

And as before, Olga sought out great men, discovered them, found they were not up to scratch and continued searching.