by Sarah Rayne
But Phin realized. It was potential proof that Roman Volf had been wrongly executed. And if it were true, how would that square with the programme makers of the TV documentary? A small voice in his head said, What a terrific scoop it would be if you produced definite evidence that Roman was innocent!
Before he could change his mind, he typed an email to his agent, accepting the commission. He was about to send it, when he remembered something else, and he reopened the email to send carefully non-committal regards to the red-haired Canadian editor who had described his eyes as silver.
If Roman had been guilty, he must have known that leading that defiant march along the banks of the Catherine Canal was courting disaster. It was two days after the assassination – why would he draw attention to himself in that way?
As for Feofil’s suggestion that Roman’s descendants might become tangled in the black spider-strands of his actions – how much of that could be ascribed to the Russian trait for wringing as much angst and melodrama from a situation as possible? But what spider-strands? Had there been any consequences of Roman’s execution? To his family? Had there been family? If so, how easy would it be to track down the descendants?
Mortimer Quince’s diary
This morning I went to an audition at Collins’ Theatre. It went splendidly, even though it’s always difficult to give a performance of any real quality in an empty theatre – empty theatres always echo so dismally.
I gave them ‘O, Moon of My Delight,’ from the ‘Persian Garden’ song cycle. It’s remarkable to think that was written twenty-four years ago – 1896, I believe – but it’s still stirring stuff, and I reached the top notes with such piercing energy that I swear the very rafters shook. I followed it with ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song,’ which is even older, of course – a Victorian parlour ballad, in fact, and I remember it being popular when I was a boy. I put such a sob into my voice that two cleaners who had been sweeping the back of the auditorium were so deeply affected they had to leave by the nearest exit. I count this a true accolade.
This afternoon will be devoted to following a new line of enquiry which may help me uncover the last weeks of my father’s life. I have always hidden the fact that I was Roman Volf’s son. Quite apart from all other considerations (such as the fact that he was hanged in a St Petersburg gaol for murder), the connection is not what could be termed legitimate, and I should not care to have slurs cast on my mother, even though I do not remember her.
But my carefully casual enquiries among the Russian émigrés in this part of London recently brought me the name of Feofil Markov. It seems Markov was a well-known journalist and music critic in St Petersburg around the time of Alexander’s assassination – and therefore during the time of Roman’s execution.
My Russian acquaintance is a bookseller; a charming, somewhat elderly, gentleman who came to this country a year or two ago – almost immediately after the 1917 Revolution in fact – and somehow scraped together enough money to open a bookshop near St Martin’s Lane. The shelves are crammed full of books and periodicals and newspapers, most of them in Russian. Everywhere is pleasantly untidy and slightly dusty, and my friend sits at a high desk, wearing fingerless gloves and a brocade dressing gown, chuckling gleefully over some new and arcane acquisition which he will never sell, and looking like a Russian version of a Dickens character.
He met Feofil in 1914 when the two of them downed a couple of bottles of vodka in a bar overlooking the Moskva River, after which my friend fell off the chair while drinking death and destruction to the Romanovs.
Feofil published several critiques of some of Roman’s performances, as well as an obituary and articles about him after the execution. He also somehow managed to inveigle his way into the condemned cells, and interview some of the assassins after the murder of Alexander II.
Most of the articles appeared in a reactionary Russian newspaper called Golos – my bookseller friend tells me that Golos translates as ‘The Voice’. He adds that the paper was closed down in 1885 and Feofil was lucky not to be arrested for sedition, but that he might be able to track down a few copies for me. Would it help my studies? There would be a small cost, naturally.
‘Purely to cover my time – perhaps travelling – perhaps the buying of drinks or meals for people who could provide the copies … Would that be acceptable?’
‘Naturally,’ I said.
I have started this search largely because the nightmares that plagued me as a child – later as a young man – have returned. They had been quiescent for so long I had begun to believe they had left me for good. But they are back, and they are as vicious and as fearsome as ever. I am increasingly convinced that they have their root in my father’s shameful death and that I will only get rid of them by finding out exactly what happened to him.
Tonight the nightmare was waiting for me as soon as I fell asleep. It did not, God be praised, take on complete substance, but the outlines of it were there – the stone courtyard, the shouting crowds, and, most dreadful of all, the stench of burning … Hands were pulling at me, and I was enveloped in terror, because I was afraid they were pulling me towards something dark and dreadful …
I have tried to tell myself that the nightmare cannot be a real memory. But always, for some half an hour after waking, it is difficult to believe that.
A clock somewhere in the city was chiming three o’clock, when, as Keats has it, I ‘awoke to find me here on the cold hill’s side,’ except that the reality was that I awoke to find me in a cold bed with the bolster all askew and the eiderdown disgorging duck feathers everywhere.
Having tidied the bed and composed myself for sleep again, I forced my mind to reach for a different dream – the dream I always think of as the nightmare’s counterpart. It’s a pleasant dream, that one – a brightly lit theatre with ornate boxes and gold and crimson décor, and a bejewelled audience. There’s the warm scent of flowers and expensive perfume, and there’s a thrum of anticipation.
The memory is my father’s final concert at the Mikhailovsky Theatre. I know it is.
He played Paganini’s outrageous ‘Duetto Amoroso’ – once, delicately nurtured ladies were said to swoon at the explicit sounds depicting lovers’ groans in that music – and then he played the infamous Devil’s Trill – the piece that Giuseppe Tartini swore had been vouchsafed to him by Satan himself in a dream in return for his immortal soul.
Maxim was in the theatre that night. If I half close my eyes, I can persuade myself that I see him – the silky dark hair, the long, narrow eyes that could glow with excitement. He was heartbreakingly young then. But to think of him, even after so many years, is deeply dangerous.
Even so, it’s the memory of that night that I have preserved. I daresay a pragmatist might remark that memories mellow and become rose-tinged with time, and that I’ve sprinkled that particular one with stardust. A cynic might even question whether I was actually there at all, since I was only four years old in 1881. But I know I was there – I know it and I refuse to consider any other possibility.
Whether it’s real or not, it’s a good memory – a shining memory – and it’s the one I always reach for after the nightmare.
On those nights I catch myself wishing Maxim could still be here, but he cannot, of course. He can never be with me ever again.
TWO
Beatrice still sometimes dreamed she could hear Abigail calling to her. Tonight, she woke shortly after 2 a.m. and sat up in bed, shivering, trying to disentangle the dream from the reality, repeating over and over that she could not possibly have heard Abi’s voice. Abi, her bright, lovely daughter, had been dead for two years and she would never call out to Beatrice again.
It was always dangerous to go straight back to sleep after the dream in case it pounced again, so Bea went downstairs to heat some milk, adding a good measure of whisky to it. Niall had drunk whisky, but it had only ever been Irish whiskey. Before Bea had discovered that he was impossibly irresponsible as well as incurably amoral, he used
to tell her that Irish whiskey was the finest in the world. Usquebaugh, he would say, his voice sliding into the soft caressing Irish inflection that Beatrice always found irresistible. They used to drink the soft, smoky whiskey together, curled up in front of an open fire, becoming pleasantly inebriated, after which Niall would carry her up to bed.
On their first night together, he had read part of Dante’s Divine Comedy to her – the cantos where Beatrice was Dante’s guide through Paradise.
‘And now, my darling girl, you’re my guide into Paradise,’ he said, in his softest, most seductive voice, and Bea, trying to hold on to a sense of self and a modicum of self-respect, had mumbled something fatuous about it being a name for elderly maiden aunts or forgotten Victorian princesses.
It was not until some time later she discovered that the poetry-declaiming skill had allowed Niall to lure a disgracefully high number of other females into his bed. It did not help to remind herself that out of all those females she was the one he had married, because she would not put it past him to have married half a dozen others along the way; in fact she would not be surprised to discover some day that her own marriage had been a fake ceremony.
The dream and the sounds of Abigail’s cries had receded, and Bea went back to bed. It felt as if goblin-finger shreds of the nightmare might still be clinging to the room, so she slotted a Mozart concerto into the small bedside CD player. If anything could rout the wizened claws of a nightmare, it was Mozart.
But next morning, even with the kitchen radio tuned to a cheerful bounce of Sixties’ pop music and the sunlight laying patterns of bright warmth across the kitchen, she could still hear Abigail’s cries in her mind. They were impossibly and heartbreakingly clear, and what if—?
But Bea cut off this thought before it could develop. It was the height of absurdity to imagine she might be receiving a spirit-communication from Abigail. It was an even wilder absurdity to let herself wonder if Abi might not be dead after all and if some kind of telepathy had come into being. And yet Bea could not stop thinking how Abi’s body had been so badly burned that identification had been extremely difficult, even with dental records. Was it really so wild to wonder if it had been someone else’s body that was found that day? A gypsy, an itinerant, a runaway – somebody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who ended in being buried in Abigail’s grave? What if Abi herself had wandered off somewhere, injured, or even suffering loss of memory …? With some part of her mind reaching out to her mother for help …? Oh, for pity’s sake, thought Bea, angrily.
This was simply that grief had not yet run its course. Perhaps it never would. Two years was not all that long, not for the loss of a child. Bea was certainly not going mad in any sense, although it might be a good idea to talk to her GP, even perhaps to ask about some kind of counselling. That was what she should do. What she should not do was to consider, with sudden longing, returning to the place where Abi had died. To Tromloy.
Tromloy. Niall’s beloved sanctuary place, their cottage on Ireland’s west coast. It had been empty since Abigail’s death, and it would be empty now. Would weeds have grown up around it, like the thick thorns in a fairy story? Would tiles have fallen from the roof and windows been smashed? The memories of how Niall and a younger Abigail had enthusiastically searched its gardens for fairy rings came flooding in, and it was suddenly unbearable to think of Tromloy being derelict and forlorn.
It was mad in the extreme to own a house which could only be reached by crossing the Irish Sea, then driving across the width of Ireland, but Bea would never sell Tromloy. She abandoned her half-eaten breakfast, and went in search of the keys. They were pushed to the back of a drawer, and they were heavy keys, slightly old-fashioned, but in a good way – in the good way that Tromloy was old-fashioned. The tiny community of Kilcarne, where Tromloy stood, was old-fashioned as well. The place that Time forgot, Niall used to call it. The place that lay beneath a glaze of amber, caught and held in some gentle era that lay outside the modern world.
What if Abigail was still in Kilcarne, still near Tromloy, caught beneath that amber glaze, not knowing who she really was?
An image of Kilcarne, with the smudge of mountains in the distance and the soft shimmer of a lake in the west, rose up to tantalize Beatrice. It would not matter if Tromloy’s gardens were weed-choked or if all the windows had fallen in, or the chimneys were choked with birds’ nests. Gardens could be tidied, windows could be replaced, chimneys could be swept. Her own work, illustrating children’s books, could be done as well in Kilcarne as anywhere else. She had a new commission for a forthcoming series aimed at twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds, somewhat in the vein of the Twilight and Vampire Diaries series. ‘Full colour jacket, of course, about four full colour interiors and another four halftones for each title,’ the editor had said. ‘It needs the suggestion of creatures with not-quite-human appetites prowling through misty forests. Exactly your kind of thing, Bea.’
Bea had accepted the commission gratefully, and she was enjoying working on the illustrations. She could perfectly well go on with them in Tromloy. She logged on to a travel website and scanned the ferry schedules and timetables. If she took an evening ferry from Liverpool, she could be in Dublin around 11.30 p.m. on the same night. Before she could change her mind, she clicked on the ‘Reserve’ button for a ferry leaving Liverpool at 8 p.m. the following day, and typed in her credit card details for payment. She hesitated, then pressed the Confirm button.
After this, she wrestled with the Southern Irish electricity suppliers, who cheerfully agreed that they could switch on the power for her by tomorrow night, and they would see to it there and then. Beatrice, who had had more than one encounter with Tromloy’s erratic electricity, was inclined to regard this with suspicion, but the only thing to do with Tromloy’s power supply was to hope for the best.
I’m going back, she thought, putting her suitcase in the car next morning, and adding her sketching and painting things and the laptop. I’m going back to confront the memories and the ghosts.
Following the road signs for Liverpool Docks, then joining the queue of cars for the evening ferry, she could still hear Abigail’s voice calling to her. She still did not know if she needed a psychiatrist to sort out her mind or a priest to sort out her soul. At least, if it was the latter, once in Ireland she would be in the right country, with priests every ten paces. And perhaps when finally she was in Kilcarne and inside Tromloy, she might be able to finally let go of the dreadful images of Abigail’s death.
And to come to terms with the fact that it was Niall who had killed their daughter, before dying himself.
Phineas woke to the strains of his ebullient neighbour singing ‘Once I was a Virgin, Now I Am a Whore’. He considered thumping on the wall, but the prospect of a row at seven o’clock in the morning was daunting.
He ate breakfast rather absent-mindedly, because his mind was filled with images of Roman Volf and the possibility of finding descendants.
Roman’s name was sprinkled all over the internet, of course – there was even a smudgy representation of his last known concert at the Mikhailovksy Theatre in St Petersburg. Phin studied it, liking the ornate auditorium and the elaborate décor, then began searching for results that might contain the words ‘descendants’, ‘son’, or ‘daughter’. He was not very hopeful, but after about ten minutes a line of text leapt out at him. The heading, emboldened by the search engine, said, ‘Roman Volf, the father I never knew.’
Phin banged the Enter key at once, almost jamming it into the keyboard’s base in his haste. Waiting for the page to open, he reminded himself that this might be a false lead – someone making capital out of a similarity of name, or simply trying to cash in on a tenuous connection to a notorious person.
The webpage had a note to say the content was an extract from something written by a music hall performer whose name had been Mortimer Quince, and whose heyday had been the early part of the twentieth century. The article had been found in a bundle
of old theatre magazines in a bookshop just off the Charing Cross Road, and some of the magazines’ contents had been of use in a thesis on English music halls. So, serendipity being what it was, the author of the thesis thought sections were worth posting for general consumption; they were primary source material that might be of interest to other, like-minded students.
Phin took a deep breath, and began to read.
‘One of my favourite memories is the night of my performance at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 1910. I was billed as “Quality Quince”. Theatres like a descriptive name, and I had initially suggested Quattrocento Quince which I thought had a certain alliterative elegance to it. I could, I suggested, sing a selection from the Italian Girl in Algiers (dear Rossini), to fit with the billing.
The management was not enthusiastic. They said I didn’t look Italian, that people in Shepherd’s Bush would not want to hear Rossini, and that most of them would never have heard the word quattrocento anyway. Ah me, I thought, such is the lot of a man cast among groundlings, and I wondered what my father would have said to such comments.
Then somebody wondered if Quicksilver Quince might suit the occasion. I rather took to that, but somebody else said there were too many letters in it for the poster; ink was expensive and they were not made of money, so in the end we settled for Quality Quince.
Standing on that stage, facing the packed house, seeing the lights and hearing the buzz of anticipation, I had the strongest feeling that the ghost of Roman Volf – the father I never knew – hovered over me approvingly. Perhaps he was just out of sight in the stage box – the box that in so many theatres is said to be haunted. And perhaps the shades of all the people who attended his final, ill-starred concert at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg, were with him, listening and smiling as I sang.