by Eva Ibbotson
‘We always return to Moscow,’ said the Count, entering with a heavy tread. (Old Bull had still not done his stuff.)
‘Father, was my grandfather a good man?’ interrupted Petya.
‘A good man? Your grandfather!’ yelled the Count. ‘He was a louse. A swine! When I was six he locked me in a cupboard for two days. Once he killed a serf with his bare—’
‘Then I can see no reason why you need be bound by your promise to him,’ said my grandmother briskly. ‘As for returning to Moscow, I suppose that’s because the house is not habitable in winter?’
‘Not habitable in winter?’ roared the Count, turning to his wife. ‘Did you hear that, Annushka? Why, the stoves in this house would heat the Kremlin. They would heat the Kremlin without the slightest—’
‘You have written in my diary!’ came a deep and passionate voice from the doorway. ‘Here, where I have written I may never hold the Countess Tata in my arms, you have written “WHY?”.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed my grandmother patiently.
‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ demanded the young tutor,’ when you know that it can never be?’
‘I suppose your father was an illiterate serf and so on?’ enquired my grandmother.
Nikolai looked surprised and said no, his father had been – and actually still was – headmaster of a Boys’ Academy in Minsk.
‘Well then, I take it that you are penniless and futureless?’ prompted my grandmother.
Nikolai turned his marvellous eyes on her and said that as it happened he had been left a little money by an aunt and was going in the autumn to take up a lectureship in Russian language at the University of Basle, in Switzerland. He had, he said, hopes of a Professorship fairly soon.
‘Well then,’ said my grandmother.
The Countess, who had been in feverish conversation with her husband, now turned round sharply. ‘What are you saying, Miss Petch? Tata is engaged to Prince Kublinsky.’
‘Madame, you must forgive me for speaking plainly but I am a doctor’s daughter,’ said my grandmother. ‘And in my opinion,’ she went on steadily, ‘ you would be advised to look … very carefully … into Prince Kublinsky’s health.’
The Countess blanched. ‘No! Oh, my God, it is not possible. Yet I have heard rumours … His early dissipations … Oh, my poor Tata!’ She paused, then rallied. ‘Even so,’ she said, ‘it is out of the question that Tata should marry Nikolai Alexandra—’
‘You have written in my diary!’ announced the Countess Tata, arriving in the doorway bare-footed, tangle-haired and devastating.
‘Tata, Grandfather was a louse,’ yelled Petya, ‘so I need not be a soldier!’
‘We’re staying in the country, we’re staying in the country,’ sang Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha who had appeared from God-knows-where, and began turning ecstatic somersaults.
But it was at Nikolai, standing perfectly still in the centre of the room, that Tata looked.
‘Come here,’ said Nikolai. ‘Come here, Tata.’
He didn’t use her title, nor did he go to her but waited, his head up, until she came to him.
‘We’re going to be together, doushenka,’ he said, taking her face between his hands. ‘ I promise you this. We’re going to be together always.’
In spite of all entreaties, my grandmother insisted on leaving as soon as transport could be arranged. Her homesickness persisted and she felt she had done what she could.
When she reached London, Mr Fairburn was at the station to meet her.
‘How kind of you, Mr Fairburn,’ she said, allowing him to help her from the train.
‘I wish,’ said Mr Fairburn earnestly, ‘ that you would call me Alfred.’
My grandmother realised that this was probably the most passionate speech that she would ever hear from him.
‘Weren’t you disappointed?’ I asked, remembering the mighty Volga, troikas and a little Countess hopelessly in love. ‘ Didn’t it all seem rather tame?’
My grandmother said, no. One should know one’s limitations, she said. And call him Alfred she did.
A QUESTION OF RICHES
JEREMY WAS seven when he first went to boarding school, his expensive new grey shorts enveloping his skinny knees, a roll of comis for the journey smudging in his tight-clasped, birdboned little hand. Even Matron, jovial by profession, felt a pang as she unpacked the belongings of this patently unfledged fledgling and wondered whether another year in the nest would have done any harm.
Except that in Jeremy’s case there wasn’t really any nest. His father, one of the finest climbers of the decade, had died trying to help an injured companion on a distant, still unnamed Himalayan peak. Jeremy’s mother, gay and accomplished, had married again within two years – this time, for solid worth and safety. Jeremy’s stepfather was a mining engineer, kind, decent and magnificently unimaginative. When his firm sent him out to the Copper Belt in Central Africa, it seemed obvious to him that what Jeremy needed was to be left behind in a good English prep school.
And Jeremy’s school was good. When he wrote his weekly letter to his mother out in Africa, his pen digging holes in the thin blue air-mail paper, it was pointed out to him that to describe one’s homesickness was a bit selfish, didn’t he think? So he wrote instead, in his huge, sloping script, of cricket matches and other suitable topics suggested on the blackboard. After a while, too, he stopped crying under his pillow at night because, as Jenkins minor said, he was simply disgracing their dorm. And gradually, as the weeks crept by, he began to forget. He ‘settled’. Really he had no choice.
Fortunately there was no problem about where Jeremy should spend his holidays because he had grandmothers – a full set. There was his mother’s mother, Mrs Tate-Oxenham whose husband, Jeremy’s grandfather, sat on the Board of not fewer than seven major business enterprises. Mrs Tate-Oxenham lived in the centre of the most fashionable part of London in a tall house filled with valuable antiques and had a housekeeper, a chauffeur and a cook. Jeremy called her ‘Grandmother’ in full because abbreviations, she said, were slipshod: one was never that short of time.
Then there was his dead father’s mother Mrs Drayton; she was a widow and managed on her pension. She lived in London too: in a single room, in a shabby peeling house on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. Jeremy called her ‘Nana’ but not when Mrs Tate-Oxenham was around because it made her frown.
It was to ‘Grandmother’, that Jeremy went first when his school broke up for the summer. He had never actually stayed with Mrs Tate-Oxenham before, so that at first he took the uniformed chaffeur who had been sent to meet him at the station for some kind of admiral or chief of police.
‘Mind you sit still!’ said this lordly being, settling Jeremy into the huge black car with its silver fittings and the rug made of a whole dead zebra lying on the seat. ‘We don’t want anything kicked, do we?’
Jeremy wouldn’t have dreamt of kicking anything. Indeed, after a while the mere effort of sitting up straight was all that he could manage, for the great car was almost hermetically sealed against draughts and long before they drew up at the tall house in the hushed street, Jeremy was feeling agonisingly, almost uncontrollably car-sick.
Grandmother had cut short a committee meeting to greet him and was waiting in the hall, beautiful and composed with her upswept silver hair, and it was she herself who showed him round the house.
Jeremy had never seen a house quite like it. It was so quiet you couldn’t hear your feet at all in the deep, deep carpets, nor any noises from the street. All the windows had two pairs of curtains –a thin white pair and a thick velvety pair tied back with cords – and even then there were shutters so that outside it could have been any kind of weather or any time of day.
And everywhere, on the mantelpieces, on the walls, in alcoves all up the stairs were museum-ish sort of things: Chinese dragons, and carved statues and dark pictures of people stuck with arrows.
Jeremy’s own rooms were at the top of the hou
se, a whole suite of them: bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room all to himself.
‘No one will disturb you up here,’ said Grandmother briskly.
‘No one?’ said Jeremy in his thread of a voice, averting his eyes from a grinning bronze head on the bookcase behind which, he was pretty certain, THINGS were already mustering for the night.
‘No one,’ said Grandmother – and sent for the housekeeper to help him unpack.
At his grandmother’s, Jeremy had a lovely time. He knew he was having a lovely time because everyone constantly told him so.
‘It isn’t every boy gets a car like this to ride around in,’ said Clarke, the chauffeur, who often had instructions – when Grandmother had one of her committees – to take Jeremy for a drive. Very interesting drives they were, too – or would have been: to Buckingham Palace or Hampton Court or Richmond Park, except that long before they got there, Clarke would be obliged to draw up in an empty side street and stand with his back turned while Jeremy was violently and humiliatingly sick.
‘I bet there’s not many little princes eat better than you do in this house,’ Mrs Knapp the housekeeper would say, helping Jeremy to get ready for lunch.
And Jeremy, agreeing, sat very straight, his damask napkin sliding relentlessly across his knees, and chewed gratefully on dark slices of grouse in quivering aspic; swallowed, meticulously, his Russian caviare; didn’t even splutter when what looked like a perfectly ordinary doughnut turned out to be filled with liquid fire.
In the hot, softly-lit department store where Grandmother bought him more grey suits and good white shirts and stripy ties, the assistant was almost overcome by Jeremy’s good fortune, as was the waiter in the restaurant with the gold tables and potted palms where she took him when she met her friends afterwards for tea.
And Jeremy really was grateful, everyone agreed on that. Even Grandfather, in the few moments he spent in his own house, found nothing to complain of in the docile, quiet little boy. Except at bedtime …
‘Getting that child upstairs to his rooms – you’d think he was going to his execution,’ said Mrs Knapp. But otherwise his good manners, his evident gratitude pleased everybody. Clearly, he was a child who appreciated gracious living.
It was because of this that Grandmother, after a few weeks, felt compelled to give him a word of warning.
‘We are fortunate, Jeremy, in having been able to give you a good time during your stay with us. Now, however, I’m afraid the time has come for you to move on.’
She waited for a sign of regret but Jeremy’s eyes – those huge, dark, incurably underprivileged-looking eyes, remained obediently on her face.
‘As you know, your mother wanted you to divide your time equally between us and your other grandmother.’
Jeremy nodded.
‘I want you…’ She broke off, unable to find suitable words ‘You will find … things different there. Mrs Drayton is…’ Again, rejecting the unmentionable word ‘poor’, she floundered. ‘You must not be spoilt or difficult to please, Jeremy. You must try to adapt yourself.’
And so, for the last time, Jeremy was packed into the big, closed car and Clarke drove him slowly across London to Nana’s house.
Mrs Drayton, waiting at the window, saw the great car inch into the street with a stab of apprehension. It was so huge, so opulent and in the back Jeremy, poker-straight in his grey suit, looked as remote and aloof as some miniature diplomat isolated from the world. How would he get on here? Though she had managed without lunches now for over three weeks, the pile of coins she had saved towards Jeremy’s entertainment seemed laughable.
But when she opened the car door she forgot her fears.
‘Car-sick?’ she said. ‘You poor chap! Your father was just the same.’
And calmly inviting the lordly Clarke in for a cup of tea, she drew Jeremy gently into the house.
‘Nice little place you’ve got here,’ said the chauffeur, and there was no trace of condescension in his voice.
Jeremy, looking round, agreed wholeheartedly. It was just one room and not all that big, with a single window opening out into the bustling, sunny little street, but this one room was so cunningly worked out! Red and white checked curtains slid back and behind them there was a little cooker and a sink. In one corner was a dresser with blue and white cups and a geranium; and the sofa they were sitting on turned itself most intriguingly, as Nana showed them, into her bed.
‘Where will I sleep, Nana?’ asked Jeremy when Clarke had gone.
Nana, who had been unpacking his case, straightened herself and looked at him anxiously. ‘Well, love, I’ve made up a bed for you behind the screen there.’
The screen had pictures of parrots and humming-birds on it and Jeremy had already admired it. Now he peered behind and found a camp-bed, a proper khaki one like explorers had, with crisp white sheets turned back.
‘You mean I’m going to sleep in the same room as you?’ he said slowly. ‘You’re going to be in the same room as me all night?’
Nana reddened. This was worse than she had feared. ‘ I’ve only the one room, you see,’ she said quietly. ‘But you won’t see me—’ She broke off. ‘Jeremy, what is it?’ She pulled him towards her, ‘There, don’t cry, my pet. Maybe I can go and share with Mrs Post upstairs.’
Jeremy looked at her through his tears. ‘Oh, gosh, Nana, you are silly!’ he said. ‘I want to share a room with you more than anything else in the world.’
There now began for Jeremy one of those periods which makes old gentlemen say that the sun always shone when they were young, the grass was greener and the sky a never-to-be- forgotten blue.
He and Nana lived off the land. Each day they took the cocoa tin from behind the spotted dog on the mantelpiece and counted out their spending money. Lots of money, it seemed to Jeremy: pennies, three-penny bits – far more money than he had ever seen in his other grandmother’s house. Then they did something called budgeting. Jeremy liked budgeting very much because what it really meant was deciding things. For example, you’d decide to go to the park and feed the ducks and take a packet of sandwiches – that was clear. But a deck-chair for another ninepence each? Or sitting on the grass and having the money for an ice-cream?
That was an easy one, but others gave Jeremy many deliciously complicated moments of deep thought. A ride on the tube all the way to the Natural History Museum? Or get off two stops away and walk the rest, which meant sevenpence over, and that was a comic under his pillow at bedtime? Nana never interfered but sometimes when the agony of choice was almost too much she might nudge him gently towards a solution.
‘I think there are those pavements with cracks on them on the way to the Museum,’ she would say, and Jeremy would perceive immediately that this meant playing ‘ the first to step on a crack is a nitwit’, and decide in favour of walking and a comic at bedtime.
To Jeremy it seemed as if Nana knew – and owned – the whole of London; perhaps the world. There was St James’s Park where they sat for hours, laughing at the Canadian geese and the little ducklings making ripple arrows on the butter smooth waters of the lake. Once Nana said there would be a surprise when they came round the corner – and there was a whole band of soldiers in scarlet and gold playing wonderful thumping music. A band they didn’t even have to budget for, because it was free!
Then there were the pigeons in Trafalgar Square – they were free too – more pigeons than Jeremy had ever seen If you stood still and held out the scraps that Mr Oblinsky had saved for Nana, you could cover yourself in pigeons. You could even have pigeons sitting on your head!
Sometimes they would find a bench in a nice crowded place like Leicester Square and play people-spotting, and the good thing about Nana was that she never cheated to let you win. If she saw more men with curly black beards in the set time, or more women with grey hair and poodles, well then she said so and ate the bull’s-eye peppermint they kept for a prize without fuss.
And when they got back at the end of such a busy
day there was still lots more to do. Jeremy would unfold the card-table, set it under the window and lay it while Nana cooked. The food at Nana’s was fantastic! Whole plates of potato cakes or cinnamon toast or an apple peeled and quartered, with little triangular bits of cooking cheese stuck in each bit so as to make a boat with sails.
And the odd thing was that while staying at his other grandmother’s he’d been the lucky one, here it was agreed by Mr Oblinsky, and Mrs Post who lived upstairs and by the people in the shops that it was Nana who was the lucky one. Terribly lucky, having Jeremy to stay!
Now, when Jeremy returned to school, he had three weekly letters to write. The one to his mother was shy and stilted because she had become as distant and longed-for as a mirage. The one to Grandmother, Mrs Tate-Oxenham, was the ‘proper’ letter, the one with the cricket match and his form position and the achievement of Rutledge minor in the 100yards. But the weekly letter to Nana sprawled and spread and was one long question. Had she been to see the pigeons lately? Was the geranium growing? How was Mr Oblinsky’s cough?
During the autumn term the school gave a long weekend off at the end of October. Once again Jeremy divided his time between his grandmothers and once again it was to ‘Grandmother’, to Mrs Tate-Oxenham, that he went first.
At Grandmother’s, Jeremy began being lucky straight away because she took him to something called a ‘Private View’, which was a lot of people standing very close together, drinking and smoking, in a room with pictures on the walls. The next day she had a bridge party and Jeremy was allowed to walk carefully about the room offering trays of canapes to the ladies as they played.
The day after that he went to Nana’s.
At Nana’s the folding table was set out with newspaper spread over it, and on it sat two big turnips and the kitchen knife.
‘It’s Hallowe’en,’ explained Nana when she had hugged him. ‘We’re going to make the most horrible turnip lanterns in the whole street!’