![]() “A horse-and-cab pulled up outside,” Fitzgerald concludes, with one final, tantalising revelation still up her sleeve. ![]() With all of Frank’s future suddenly up in the air again, spring has come. But then, a Russian enigma who is not what she seems, Lisa mysteriously disappears. When Lisa Ivanovna, with her “pale, broad, patient, dreaming Russian face”, joins the Reid household to help out, Frank falls hopelessly in love. Fitzgerald is an instinctively humorous writer whose intuition of life’s tragedies never oppresses her delight in the human comedy. The printing business must carry on his young children must be cared for he must await Nellie’s return – and the end of winter. ![]() This is the breakup that now dominates Frank’s life, much as the impending revolution hangs over imperial Russia.įrank, inveterately English, is stoic in his distress. ![]() When the novel opens (the first line is like a stage direction: “In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days”), Frank’s English wife, Nellie, has inexplicably left her husband and gone back to England. Frank Reid, from a Salford printing family, has grown up in czarist Russia in the dangerous decades before the revolution. ![]()
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