Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  He made it sound as though his old man and I might be starting a business together.

  ‘It would do him a world of good, take him out of himself,’ he added.

  ‘Me too …’ I admitted. Without quite realising that I would do it until it happened, I raised myself on my toes and kissed his frozen cheek. In Paris, it would have been an unremarkable gesture. In Alexandria, an invitation. I still had no idea about London. I looked out of the window as my train pulled out of the station. He stood there, while snow accumulated on the rim of his hat.

  At home, Albie had already laid the table for dinner. In the fireplace the gas fire had been lit; bluish flames licked fake coals behind the gothic tracery doors. The room was almost warm. Albie was beamingly expectant.

  ‘Darling Ber,’ he said as he ladled out the soup and lowered the bowl in front of me, smiling tentatively, proud of his cooking skills, clearly expecting a detailed report of my activities. ‘I hope you have had a good day.’

  The liquid was so startling in its vivid greenness that I burst into laughter and, almost immediately, into tears. I did not know how to respond to his efforts. There was a bunch of white flowers in a vase at the centre of the table, a yellow block of butter under a glass dome, a golden loaf of bread on the board. Its shape was even more startling than the colour of the soup: two balls of dough baked on top of each other, like a beheaded snowman.

  ‘A cottage loaf, we call this,’ Albie explained, pausing with the bread knife just above it. ‘White. Still illegal, strictly speaking. For you, Ber.’

  It was on sale only in Soho and Fitzrovia, he added, an Italian take on a traditional British recipe. He must have gone into the West End specially to buy it. He knew that I would recognise the gesture as a gift. Soft, like your challah, like your brioche, he said. The yeasty crown seemed to promise a new world in which food would again be fresh and abundant.

  ‘You look happier today, Madame Vitélo,’ Monsieur Carr said when I re-entered the library two days later, his face coloured by the reflection of the sun through the stained glass and divided into halves. The left was green and frozen in its image of sadness, the right rosy and smiling.

  The side table was laid for tea. Instead of biscuits there were two slices of caraway cake. I picked up Madame Bovary, with its bookmark where I had left it last time, and prepared to read. Monsieur Carr’s lopsided lips spread rightwards into a wide smile. He raised his hand to ask me to wait.

  ‘I enjoyed your reading very much last time. I do hope you will continue to visit me. My son could not have given me a better present than your company. And I wonder if you would like to join me on an excursion soon. To Shepperton. It’s just over an hour’s drive from here. The film studios. I have had an invitation. They will be making a very special film this spring, and my grandson Gigi will be playing a unique part in it: me. Alexei will lend us a car and a driver.’

  The reference to the grandson took me by surprise. I am not sure why. Alex Carr was in his forties; it was logical that he should be married, that he should have a child. Children, even. Several children. And that there should be a mother for those children. I had little time to wonder why anyone would want to make a film about Monsieur Carr. Our lives were strange, particularly at that time when London was so unsettled by the aftermath of war and turbulence on the Continent. The unusual life would be one without a drama, an uneventful life.

  ‘Mrs Jenkins,’ called Monsieur Carr, ‘would you, please, bring that invitation from the dining table? I’d like to show Mrs Whitelaw what we have in mind for our outing.’

  The housekeeper walked in holding the envelope, as though she had been waiting behind the door all that time. I stared at the address.

  Prince Sergei Alexeievich Karenin,

  20 Queen Anne’s Grove,

  Bedford Park,

  London W4

  ‘Open it, please, Mrs Whitelaw,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘Do read the invitation. You will like this excursion. They are making a film about my mother.’

  2

  Air Street

  The evening was an anniversary of sorts. Albie and I had been married for a year and a half. When a marriage is in its infancy we mark the small birthdays because the big ones seem impossibly far apart.

  We dressed up for the occasion. Albie’s new dinner jacket came from some allowance that had nothing to do with ration books and everything to do with the kind of international event he was now expected to attend from time to time. He was moving up in the world, representing Britain. I wore my best – my only – cocktail gown. Made by Tante Julie as a parting gift on the eve of my departure for Bucharest, it was a replica of a Schiaparelli frock, light enough to survive the dislocations that gave it a new audience for each infrequent outing. The Mediterranean sun could compete with it, subdue it even. In London, it glowed like a thousand-watt light bulb, shockingly pink against austerity tweed. Then there was the magic locked in a dozen precise cuts. My aunt was a mistress of her trade. She knew how to tame the silk, to make it flow and follow the skin without ever sticking to it. I couldn’t wear the dress without thinking of my family, yet I had to stop thinking of them in order to do anything at all.

  Albie caressed his moustache in a futile attempt to mask an expression of pleasure.

  ‘Scarlett, my dear,’ he said, mocking the accent of the Confederacy and pretending that he had never seen me in the dress before, although I had worn it on practically every occasion that deserved the name, including our one-night honeymoon at the Cecil in Alexandria.

  ‘That – what do you call it? – is simply spectacular. You are on fire.’

  Given the temperature inside the house, a reference to Gaslight, or some similar bleak and accented drama, would have been more appropriate than Gone with the Wind. Yet Albie’s delight in my un-English looks was genuine. He relished hearing people talk about his ‘European wife’, as though our marriage represented a token of his goodwill towards the new, post-war world, a pledge to the work of its creation. In practice, he was much more European than me. Even the word – Europe – felt tainted to me. I would have preferred a new world altogether, where he and I looked alike, indistinguishable.

  The taxi ride to St James’s took longer than it would have taken us to walk there, but the weather was a good excuse for extravagance. The snow rasped underfoot. The silk hem of my dress felt stiff, like tent canvas. When we reached Piccadilly, I wound the car window down by a fraction and the smell of coal fires and rubble rushed in on the tip of an icy blade of air. Twenty-one months had gone since the Germans’ unconditional surrender, yet warning signs and padlocks continued to guard the ruins, even in the heart of the city. St James’s church was a roofless shell. The walls of the bank next to it had been lacerated by shrapnel. A hundred yards further on the left there had once stood a tearoom, the glass dome shattered by a bomb and now open to the elements.

  ‘Forty-two people died here,’ Albie said. ‘I was in a bar on Air Street. I was killing time in London when I should’ve been killing the Eyeties in North Africa. I kept pestering my superiors, pleading to be sent to Alexandria.’

  ‘You could so easily have died here,’ I said, spying behind wooden hoardings a shard that projected upwards, propped up by a charred stump of a palm tree like the wing of a grand piano. ‘You must have been less than a hundred yards away.’

  ‘A hundred yards felt far enough. I ran to help with the rescue,’ Albie said. ‘There was an odd smell of burning sugar when the bombs hit Piccadilly that night. In the silence which descended after the masonry fell and the screams died out, I heard a sound, like an enormous sail flapping somewhere above. The Angel of Mons, said an old man while we were pulling a woman’s body from under the rubble. I did not know if he meant the body or that sound above us.’

  ‘Yet the ruins look so old now, under the snow,’ I said. ‘As though they have always been here. Like those ancient cities.’

  ‘Not to me,’ Albie said. ‘I still feel that young woman’s hair c
linging to my coat and snagging on my buttons. A black line on the back of her calf was smeared at the ankle, where the man had lifted her. The line had been drawn carefully to emulate a seam on a stocking. It may have been done by a friend before they went out. But now the leg was twisted so strangely that you thought the girl could, almost, have drawn it herself.’

  I had followed the progress of the Blitz from the other end of Europe, feeling, strangely, less and less afraid as Hitler’s armies advanced. At the beginning of 1940 it was already becoming difficult to keep a teaching post in Bucharest. By late September, it was impossible to remain there, although the Germans were still a couple of countries away. I was evacuated to Salonika with a group of teachers from the Alliance Française, and I left them behind in Macedonia. They were trying to get back to France. I knew that France, for me, had become a bad idea. It had long fallen, and between Paris and Bucharest there was just deepening darkness. The news from Romania seemed monstrous and baffling. They were killing not just the Jews but their own, their greatest. I kept moving on, on ever smaller boats to ever smaller islands, further and further south and east, one less piece of luggage each time, until I was completely on my own and everything I owned fitted into a small rucksack.

  In tavernas by the Aegean people spoke about Tsortsil as though he was some mythical creature, Menelaus or Agamemnon. In Crete, I remember, an old man pushed at a row of dominoes with an arthritic finger. When the last domino collapsed, he said: ‘Romania, yes. Vulgaria, yes. Hellas, no. Anglia, never.’ I nodded in agreement but I did not believe it.

  ‘I was certain that London, too, would fall,’ I said to Albie.

  I caught the driver’s glance in the rear-view mirror. He was dark and moustachioed, a fellow foreigner. London was full of people like us; many more people like us, it often seemed, than people like my husband.

  ‘“Stop thinking about shrinking”,’ Albie read from an advertisement for Emu wool which took up the length of the bus creeping alongside us, as if to give me a sign that serious conversation was over for the evening. Above the cartoon of a jolly bird, we saw a man staring out of the bus window, visibly exhausted. His forehead was pressed flat against the glass, and his jet-black beard and strange hat made him look like an extra from an operetta, an officer of some vanquished East European army, a displaced person stuck in a miserable job somewhere in the West End, taking the bus home because it was cheaper than the Underground, because he was in no hurry to get back, because no one was waiting for him.

  Albie raised my hand and kissed the triangle of skin exposed by the flared cuff of the glove. His moustache felt soft, like the touch of a baby seal. His eyes shone in the semi-darkness, the pupils so wide that they covered the rings of his irises; that blue-grey of the North Sea, the German Ocean. In his very English way, Albie seemed unaware of his own beauty, treating it as a fact of nature, like falling snow or clear skies.

  He seemed distant, more unreal to me in London than he had been in Egypt, as though, at some unnoticed moment, an understudy had stepped in to take over his role, someone who had mastered all the lines to perfection but with whom I was no longer properly in touch. We talked a bit, we laughed, we made love, but I tended to inhabit a place several steps outside the body which interacted with his. The Alexandrian Albie would have noticed my distance and demanded that I account for it. The London Albie soldiered on regardless. I shared the pretence. I acted as though I still knew him.

  The restaurant was hidden in the heart of St James’s, in one of those narrow passages which seem forever enveloped in a film-maker’s version of a London fog. An inconspicuous entrance opened up into a small reception area and a vestibule choked with coats, and then surprised you with one of the grandest flights of steps in London, a marble staircase that seemed better suited to a belle époque opera house than to a basement below Piccadilly. I noticed faces turning towards us as we entered, discreet nods of recognition for Albie, eyes briefly resting on me.

  ‘You see, dearest, restaurants do keep their best tables for their most attractive customers,’ Albie said as we followed the maître d’hôtel towards a central platform with the best view in the house. ‘I never worry about having to sit next to the kitchen when I am with you.’

  After the first sip of champagne, he produced a velvet box from his coat pocket. A wedding ring, I guessed, a replacement for the copper band around my ring finger which had served its purpose in Alexandria, as modest as the ceremony itself. There had been an unspoken expectation that it would be replaced at some point, when things are back to normal, whatever normal meant. I had chosen the ring in the bazaar and haggled over its pitiful price because the seller had expected us to, for good luck. It had since left a black imprint that no amount of soaking and scrubbing could erase. Old couples’ fingers thicken around their wedding rings the way branches of wisteria grow around the metal that fastens them to the wall. My wedding ring left a tattoo.

  Albie had noticed the black line while I was washing up. He had lifted the ring from the side of the sink, looked through it as though he was having trouble identifying the object, and promised – although it did not matter – that he would get a replacement. White gold, he suggested; much less flashy. In Egypt, we had grown weary of the dazzle.

  ‘I hope you will like this, Ber.’ He unhooked a fine latch and lifted the lid.

  My guess had been wrong. Inside the box was a chain bracelet made of fine, interlocking gold links. Resting on a dark velvet cushion, it looked like a necklace for a baby or a doll.

  ‘A Prince of Wales chain,’ Albie explained. ‘I bought it at an auction in Berlin.’

  I tried not to think of the previous owner. I had never been to Germany. In my teenage years, I dreamed of summers in Spain or Italy, but rarely thought of Germany. All too soon, it would become impossible not to think of it.

  ‘Now the Germans must suffer; it’s their turn,’ Albie sometimes said when the war was over, as though German suffering could comfort me, as though getting even had a bearing on anything. At such moments I glimpsed the advantages of his English birth. Not the silver spoon, anyone can have that, anywhere, but that particular sense of fair play, the staunch belief that life would deliver justice in the end.

  ‘Berlin, darling, yes,’ Albie said and raised his glass. ‘I’ll take you there soon, I promise.’

  He seemed unable to grasp that I did not want to travel anywhere again. Least of all to Berlin. He hooked the chain around my wrist.

  ‘It is beautiful, Albert. Thank you.’ The bracelet felt too fragile to wear but it was strikingly elegant. He had an eye.

  ‘I knew you’d love it.’ He responded in an exaggerated Yankee accent. ‘The moment I set eyes on it, baby, I saw it on your wrist.’

  All the baby talk, yet we no longer mentioned actual babies. There was another box, not unlike a jewel case, in a drawer by my bedside, and in it a rubber dome, made in the USA, a circular spring tensing at night with unuttered questions.

  ‘A child – having one, I mean – would be a point of no return,’ Albie had said soon after we first made love. I agreed, all too readily, and never asked again. I knew that he spoke not of his commitment to us, which seemed unshakeable, but to life itself. I believed in fate, Albie believed in planning, but neither of us felt ready to become a parent. To hand it on, you had to be convinced that life was worth living. And that was tricky for both of us, for our different reasons, even when the world around was practically shouting yes to life. The papers were full of astonishing statistics, speaking of a humanity dedicated to the business of procreation with the same ardour with which it had devoted itself to destruction only a matter of months earlier.

  After our glass of champagne Albie reverted to beer and what he described as his simple British tastes, although it was he who had chosen a restaurant full of crystal and red plush, so French and so old-fashioned that you could be forgiven for expecting Escoffier to walk out of the kitchens and greet his guests. The waiters busied themselves
with silver cloches and pushed trolleys with paraffin lights and decanters of liqueur, ready to flambé the crêpes Suzette and the cherries jubilee the moment you asked. Albie was sipping his beer and talking about hop picking in Kent, or so I think, though I could not imagine why. The simplest mono-syllables still defeated me on occasion. There were so many that the melody of language drowned in them, sounding instead like the noise of popping corn. Who could tell all those ales, porters and lagers apart? English had too many words for the drink that went best with fried potatoes and tasted of regret.

  A group of ruddy-faced men recognised Albie and stood up from their tables to salute him. He raised his huge tumbler in response. The label on the bottle bore a picture of the familiar brewery by the river.

  ‘I know this place,’ I said, putting my finger on the image of that imposing Georgian terrace where I had first met Alex Carr. ‘The best beer in England.’

  ‘Lucky it’s bitter,’ Albie whispered, turning to me, and, with a nod of his head, he encouraged me to raise my glass to his acquaintances. London was full of young officers like him, demob-happy, appearing to believe that another victory party was about to begin. ‘I’d look like a complete pansy if I still had that coupe of fizz in front of me,’ he said.

  ‘It would not do, would it?’ I said and raised my glass.

  It was I who decided that we must walk home. I felt giddy and bubble-headed.

  ‘What is three miles between friends?’ Albie said. ‘I’ll carry you all the way home, Ber, if need be.’

  The moon hung full and low above us as we crossed the south side of Hyde Park. The snow crunched under our feet. My stockings emitted a dry, frozen rustle, and my ear lobes and my nostrils felt as thin as tissue paper. I had never felt so cold, yet I was too tipsy to care. Albie stopped and turned to face me in the shadow of his namesake’s memorial. His hand found an opening between my coat buttons, sneaked under the edge of the thick woollen scarf and further in through the layers, past the silk dress and the frozen wires of my brassiere.