Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘Albertine Whitelaw,’ I introduced myself as the secretary shut the double door behind me. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘Alexei Carr. I prefer to be called Alex.’

  The man stood up from his desk and stepped forward to shake my hand. He was one of the directors of the brewery, he said. One of the oldest family-run breweries in London, he explained, gesturing at more buildings invisible behind the walls. I had glimpsed them as I approached the three-storey terrace that housed his office, a jumble of pitched roofs, clapboard towers and tall chimney stacks, like a walled city half-hidden from view.

  ‘We brew the best beer in England,’ he said.

  ‘I will have to take your word for it,’ I answered. ‘I am not very fond of beer.’

  He was considerably taller than me, and beanpole thin in his chalk-stripe suit. The coat looked double-breasted not by original design, but as though it had had to be taken in, as though it had originally belonged to someone much more solid. Behind the wire spectacles, his eyes were almond-shaped and slanted, a startling pairing with their clear Nordic blueness. I wondered if this was a Russian trait.

  It was an odd job interview, as perfunctory as such a conversation could be. He seemed to wish no more than to set eyes on me. I tried to make sense of my chequered job history and the decade of dislocations that had followed my agrégation. I was the first in my family to go to university. I read English and French. Before the war broke out, I had intended to be a secondary-school teacher.

  While Alex Carr stared at me, barely listening, I explained how I had left Paris in 1937 to teach French in a Bucharest lycée, on a whim; how this might well have saved my life although it had originally looked like a bad move; how I was evacuated to Greece, then to Egypt soon afterwards. I spent the war working at the British General Hospital in Alexandria and lodging with a Sephardic family, while losing touch with what passed for my own.

  In Paris, I had lived with an aunt and her family for four years, I explained. Tante Julie, my mother’s sister, ran a tailoring business with her husband, as my mother and father had done. We were tailors and dressmakers, as far back as memory stretches. My parents and my sister had died in a train crash outside Paris in 1933; a blessed year to die, it turns out, if you were Jewish. I was twenty – too old to be a proper orphan, too young not to feel like one. At least my mother had a sister, I said, someone to go to. For a long time, and until well after I had settled in London with my British husband, I was convinced that my aunt and uncle had made it to Montreal. That had been the plan, sketched on the last postcard I had received from them, just before I left Romania. Instead …

  Alex Carr’s face remained expressionless throughout. He now raised his hand, as if to say that will do. There was no need to explain what happened instead. There were too many stories like mine to need telling again.

  ‘Your husband?’ he asked.

  ‘We met in 1943.’ I named Albie’s regiment.

  ‘I was in Palestine, around the corner,’ he offered, although I had not asked.

  ‘My father is Russian, I think I mentioned on the telephone,’ he added. ‘My mother was French, but not from France. One of St Petersburg’s French. Father decided, when he was nine or ten, that he would never marry a Russian woman, although he is as Russian as they come. So was Mother, in a way. You will find him interesting.’

  Carr did not sound Russian, but that was not surprising. Many people changed their names, to hide or to fit in. My own family had done the same, three times in the past hundred and fifty years. It did not help. We were not good at passing ourselves off, pretending to be what we were not. I recognised the deficiency in myself, the absence of will.

  ‘Father suffered a stroke last year,’ Alex Carr went on. ‘He’s recovering, but he can’t do much and his days tend to get very long. That is why I thought of hiring someone to visit, to distract him. There is a housekeeper already, Mrs Jenkins. She is devoted, but not a companion, she can’t be. Father speaks English to her, and he speaks Russian to me. He always spoke French to my mother. He still does sometimes … although she is no longer around to hear.’

  He took his spectacles off and proceeded to wipe them with a paisley handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket, while continuing to look at me. Without the glass barrier, his eyes seemed larger and younger.

  A copy of a magazine was open at an article about the actress Vivien Leigh. It was illustrated with a photograph, the film star in a dark Victorian dress with a lace collar. Alex Carr followed the direction of my gaze, took a large brown envelope and covered the magazine with it. The awkwardness in his manner persisted. He was happier with long silences than me; happier than most people. There were papers on his desk, account books, invoices, pages covered with columns of numbers speaking of responsibility and tedium.

  ‘Perhaps, if you are still keen, you could start with a visit to my father tomorrow, Mrs Whitelaw.’

  He was implicitly declaring our conversation over, offering me the job.

  ‘See how you get on. If you are free, that is.’ He dictated an address in Bedford Park.

  An ice storm passed through the city overnight. The following afternoon, the streets looked shiny, as though everything on them had been sheathed in glass. Branches glistened darkly, clinking as they swayed. The tips of my fingers, my ear lobes and the flares of my nostrils tingled. The chill stung every inch of exposed skin the moment I stepped off the train. By the time I had left the station and crossed the road, my hands felt as dead as the branches.

  I had memorised the route before I set off. I knew it would be too cold to pause to inspect a map, or to be certain that I would meet anyone en route to ask for directions. I passed a brick church half-buried amid the snowdrifts, then walked down a street lined with bare chestnut trees. If you ignored the temperature – if that were possible even for a moment – the scene could be idyllic. The gables and balustrades with their snow trimmings made the houses look like ornate dwellings in an ancient painting.

  A garden suburb, Albie had said when I told him where I was going to spend my afternoon. I was building my English vocabulary with him like that, pausing when I did not recognise a term, asking him to explain concepts that were new to me. I was already used to the idea that suburbs meant something different in England, not dwellings for the poor, but pretty and quiet places away from the smog. Rus in urbe, Albie had said.

  He was delighted at my news, helpful, almost irritatingly supportive. I was, at long last, following his advice. I was pulling my socks up. White Russians, he surmised when I repeated the scant details supplied by Alex Carr. Britain was frequently the last stage of a long journey. They had fled Russia after 1917, but they often arrived here after escaping Berlin, Paris or Prague, as recently as during the past decade, now doubly exiled and doubly impoverished. There were many in West London.

  I had encountered these White Russians in Paris. There, too, they lived in the west of the city, while my people – the Ashkenazim – had settled in the east. The Russians came to my father to have their clothes repaired or relined. Between the layers of old fabric he sometimes found gold coins stitched into secret pockets, and once, behind a balding fur collar, wedged as interlining between whalebone stiffeners, a document containing the title deeds to twelve hundred desyatinas of Siberian land.

  Father knew something of their world through stories brought over to France from godforsaken small towns in Poland where my ancestors had lived before they started escaping westwards. They had been powerful once, these members of the Russian gentry. Father pitied them and indulged them with old-fashioned deference, refusing large tips they could ill afford. I used to believe there was poetry in poverty and exile. I know better now.

  It was strange to think of this employment by one of these White Russians as my first English job. They could not have done too badly in the end, I thought, escaping Russia for this quiet suburb. It was just past four, yet the lights were already on in many of the houses. Stained glass threw pastel illu
minations onto the snow-covered gardens outside. I heard dogs barking as I went by, saw curtains twitching.

  Mr Carr senior’s house was no different from others on a street which curved in its attempt to emulate a village lane. Sticks poked out of the snow along the path to the front door, the stems of rose bushes pruned back for the winter. Gnarled branches of a dormant wisteria trailed above the porch. A woman opened the door, then left me for what seemed like hours in the hall, next to a coat stand decorated with beaten copper plates, reliefs showing plump pomegranates. Two coats hung on it: one male and exotic with grey astrakhan cuffs; another female, mossy in both colour and texture, with a rust-coloured woollen scarf falling out of its sleeve. Shoes and galoshes were arranged in a neat row underneath. From further inside came the smell of old books and furniture polish. Finally, there was a shuffle of slippers and an old man opened the inner door to beckon me further into the house. He had the same slanted blue eyes as his son.

  ‘Madame Vitélo. It must be you. Sergei Carr. I am delighted.’ He addressed me in French, and kissed my still-mittened hand. ‘Please come in. Do let me take your coat.’

  It took me a while to realise that he had uttered a version of Whitelaw, pronounced with playful French distortion. There is no sound more alien to French than that W with which my married name began and ended. I thought at first that he was hurrying me in.

  ‘Enchantée, Monsieur Carr,’ I responded, taking my coat off and stuffing my gloves into the pockets. I had been reading and translating, but I hadn’t spoken French in months. It sounded strange on my lips, a secret code retrieved.

  ‘Monsieur Ka,’ he echoed aloud, as if amused by my accent. ‘These English names of ours, Madame Whitelaw, they are not very pleasing to the Gallic ear, are they?’

  He must have been in his early eighties and he was as tall and as slim as his son. High cheekbones and a leonine head of wavy white hair lent him an illustrious air. He could have been the conductor of an orchestra. He was dressed and combed with careful deliberation, yet signs of a loss of control were everywhere if you examined closely: a patch of beard missed in shaving, a fleck on the lapel of his tweed jacket, a cufflink holding only the insides of his double cuffs. The left side of his face sagged. It made him look as though he was on the verge of tears even when he smiled. His walking stick dragged along the tiles, the rubber tip leaving faint black trails as he moved ahead of me and into the library.

  The interior – comfortable but far from lavish – was dotted with Russian objects: icons, a samovar on a side table, a few porcelain figurines of ice skaters and ballet dancers on the shelves. This, in a way, was what I expected. I did not expect to see watercolours, dozens and dozens of them, covering every available surface. One or two depicted the interiors we were passing through, creating the optical effect of infinite regression, a mise en abyme. For the most part they were images of flowers, individual blooms and countless bouquets in a variety of vases – lilacs and lilies, roses at different stages of their life cycle, chrysanthemums exploding like fireworks, fat bundles of hyacinths and narcissi, posies of sweet peas, violets and daisies – entire walls covered with fading flowers in near-identical thin frames. Some were verging on abstraction, consisting of two or three simple and elegant lines, others possessed an almost furious verisimilitude, parading the hours and hours of labour that had gone into them. Each picture, individually, might have been beautiful, but there was something overwhelming, depressing almost, about their cumulative effect.

  ‘My wife,’ said Monsieur Carr, lifting a shaky hand with its walking stick towards a picture of a bunch of anemones in a jam jar propped on the mantelpiece we were passing at that moment. He rolled his eyes in mock exasperation, as though his wife was in the room with us and she was able to register his displeasure with the clutter, but he said no more about the paintings. His voice echoed with a loneliness caused by something beyond physical absence, equalled by the loneliness emanating from the images on the walls.

  There were no flowers in the library. Instead, in the gaps between the shelves loaded with hundreds of books hung a couple of framed documents in what I took to be Russian Cyrillic, and, above the fireplace, an unframed oil portrait of a couple. With its uneven edges and deep vertical furrow across the middle, the canvas appeared to have been hastily cut out of its original frame, folded flat for a long while, then stretched again over a new set of wooden bars. It depicted a severe, bald-headed man with strangely shaped ears. His raised eyebrows made him look as though he was about to ask the viewer a question. Next to him, by his side but not touching him – the distance emphasised by the awkward fold – was a younger woman whose shiny curls bled into a backdrop darkened with age. Her smile was directed sideways, at something or someone beyond the canvas. An elegant pale hand with several rings on the third finger was raised slightly away from her body, and away from the man, as if she was mid-gesture, reaching out for something. As a device to show off the painter’s skill her pose could not be faulted, but it exposed something pent-up in her nature. In the entire household – or at least in those parts of it I had passed through – that woman alone seemed to exude a still unsubdued energy, an élan vital.

  ‘My mother and father,’ said Monsieur Carr, ‘in St Petersburg, a month or two before I was born.’

  Only when he said that did I notice the hint of a swollen belly under her severe black dress. Her modest décolletage seemed almost shocking: a milky throat amid so much darkness.

  ‘The painter has caught my father’s likeness, but Maman, I am not so sure,’ continued Monsieur Carr. ‘She died so young. I won’t ask if you have ever visited St Petersburg. It’s too late now anyway, has been too late for thirty years. The city exists no more.’

  I shook my head. I knew so little of Russia. I could not imagine wanting to go to Leningrad, whatever now remained of it. Albie spoke of its siege as the worst episode of the war. Much worse than Dachau, he would say, much worse than Belsen. I refused the possibility of comparison, one infinity of suffering next to another.

  ‘Poor city,’ I said to Monsieur Carr. ‘Things will get better soon, I hope.’

  Platitudes, I know; it is one way to preserve sanity.

  ‘No, not in my lifetime. Nor, dare I say, in yours,’ Monsieur Carr responded.

  His French was perfect.

  The housekeeper brought in a vast silver tray: a teapot and two cups, a small jug of milk, a couple of plates with a single biscuit on each, a pair of folded linen napkins.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Jenkins. Please, feel free to take a break. We will have finished by six,’ Monsieur Carr said as he dismissed her. His English was as good as his French; the English – almost – of a native speaker.

  ‘And now, I am just going to close my eyes,’ he said, switching back to French. ‘It would be lovely to hear you read: from the start, why not?’

  He took a copy of a book from the shelves, seemingly at random, and handed it to me having opened it at the first page, then sat in an armchair by the fireplace. His walking stick slid onto the carpet. He reached for the teacup and closed his eyes. I cleared my throat to the sound of clinking china.

  ‘Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva, comme surpris dans son travail …’

  I paused to glance at the old man. He had placed his cup on the side table. His eyes were closed and his cheek was pressed against the wing of the armchair, pushing his lips further down into the lopsided smile. I had not bothered to check the title of the book before I started, but I no longer needed to.

  I was fifteen when I first read Madame Bovary. All those stories of Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Magritte, Dalí and Buñuel now make you think that Paris in 1928 was the centre of the world, but to me the 3rd arrondissement seemed much duller than nineteenth-century Rouen. I could almost re-enter my teenage body, sprawled on the bed with the
book propped open against the pillow, the beams criss-crossing the eaves above me, the grey clouds sailing past the attic window of the equally grey city, while eight flights down my father and mother laboured in their clothing workshop and – on a floor halfway between us – Arlette, my younger sister, endlessly practised on her piano, trying to memorise her scores.

  How could all that music vanish? Like Monsieur Carr speaking to his dead wife, I even now continued to compose letters to Arlette, explaining about Albie, making Earl’s Court sound better than it was.

  Whenever I paused, Monsieur Carr opened his right eye and waited for me to continue, closing it as soon as the flow resumed. And so I went on, in turn attentive to the words I read, then allowing my thoughts to wander away from the text, until I noticed Alex Carr, standing in the doorway, in his overcoat, listening. Outside, it was pitch-black.

  The Underground station was empty when Alex Carr accompanied me to my train. I had tried to refuse his offer. It seemed no longer necessary, even a bit ridiculous in our new world, this old-fashioned courtesy, seeing a woman off safely to the station. He turned to me a couple of times to say something, but changed his mind. We stood for a long time by the small stove in an empty waiting room, looking down the platforms and along the tracks that stretched west, deeper into London’s suburbs. The amber lights, like cats’ eyes, were visible for the best part of a mile as the train approached through the falling snow.

  ‘That was so kind of you, Mrs Whitelaw,’ he said when the train came to a halt with a low whine of metal on metal. ‘I could see how enormously my father enjoyed your reading. I hope you did too. I hope you will continue. A couple of times a week, more often if you wish, and please choose the days. It doesn’t have to be reading. Anything you like. All sorts of joint projects you can think of.’