Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘It’s not Hollywood, and the film business is in a different universe from ours, Alexei,’ said the old man. ‘It is the future. One day young Etonians will queue up to become film stars. What would you like Gigi to do, become an accountant, like you? This is not St Petersburg and there is no shame for us in the film, none at all.’

  ‘I don’t mean to forbid this film part, Father,’ Alex Carr intervened, ‘and you know it. So long as Diana is willing to chaperone him and so long as it is just that once. Let me say it again: I really do not want Gigi to become an actor. Or a film director, for that matter. And neither does Diana. We want him to have a respectable career.’

  ‘Oh, Alexei, you are so boring sometimes,’ the old man said.

  Judging by his expression, Alex Carr took this as a compliment. He turned to me and asked me if I had enjoyed the day. I nodded vigorously and told him how fascinating it had all seemed, how much I had learned.

  ‘And I mean it,’ I added. ‘without witnessing the shooting of a single scene. I would love to see Gigi transformed from a modern, 1940s child, into one from the 1870s. It would give the boy something to remember later in life. And his children too: people will go to the cinema to see him long after we are all dead and buried.’

  ‘But the reasons for wanting to see him will not be something to take pride in,’ he said. He looked disappointed in me. I was not taking his side.

  He was standing up to leave, to make his apologies. I stood up too, to shake his hand, worrying that another triptych of those awkward kisses might be forthcoming.

  ‘Thank you for all your help, Mrs Whitelaw,’ he said. ‘I am glad you were with my old father today. If you could talk some sense into him about Gigi and this film business, in spite of your present enthusiasm, I would be most grateful. He’s got Gigi all excited. The boy talks about earning ten guineas a day as though that is going to change my mind. I am sure my old man put him up to it. We want the boy to be a lawyer or a doctor when he grows up, not Rudolph Valentino.’

  ‘And just what would be wrong with Valentino?’ Monsieur Carr interjected from his seat. ‘Our Gigi might grow up to make an even more devastating sheikh.’

  ‘Oh, Father. Have you lost all sense of dignity and gravitas? Our ancestors would be turning in their graves,’ Alex Carr said.

  With that he left us to our tea. We heard first the front door and then the gate close behind him.

  ‘I have held on to my dignity and gravitas for much too long,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘I’ve let life pass me by, because of my mother and father. I don’t blame them; it was my choice, but I was wrong. Let’s be childish, Albertine. Let’s eat the Russian tea cakes and talk about Valentino. I noticed that you know much more about film than you affect. My son seemed so disappointed in you.’

  But I liked Alex Carr. There was something fragile about his very English propriety. It was acquired and hard-earned. There was not the easy assurance I was familiar with from Albie and his circle; in its stead there was a sense that everything you had could be snatched away just like that, without notice. I knew that feeling well. Strangely, it was not there in Monsieur Carr. In spite of all his losses, he had the childish optimism of someone who expected the gods to be on his side.

  He pointed at the food and urged me to help myself.

  ‘Will you be mother?’ he asked. ‘My hands are too shaky but I did not want to detain Mrs Jenkins. It’s the Russian Caravan today. A present from Sir Alexander. He claimed that it came in fact from Miss Leigh, that she brought a box of it from Paris especially for me. She went over for a costume fitting with Cecil Beaton just last week, he said. I don’t believe any of it for a moment. If it is true, then it must have been some poor assistant getting a dozen boxes in one of the large department stores, for a dozen old fools like me.’

  The tea was syrupy, smoky and as black as coffee. I poured it from a small teapot into glasses in gilded silver holders, then added hot water from the samovar and finally sweetened it with a spoonful of rose syrup. That was the way Monsieur Carr liked his Russian tea: he had guided me through the process.

  ‘Voilà, you are almost Russian now,’ he said. There was a Clark Gable moustache of icing sugar on his upper lip. ‘The roses for the syrup came from our garden. Mrs Jenkins does not waste a petal. While Tonya was alive, those two used to sugar violets and pansies. Tonya believed you had to pick the flowers at five in the morning, soon after they opened, but before the sun was properly out. We used to pick the violets in the meadows by the Thames sometimes. And nettles and sorrel, too. Can you imagine what the English thought? How hungry, how desperate these Russians must be …’

  ‘Ha, I remember being asked something similar about the French by one of the British soldiers who guarded the hospital where I worked in Alexandria,’ I said. ‘Is it true that we French eat snails because we are so poor? Then someone told him I was Jewish and he came back to ask me if snails were kosher. I was the first Jewish person he had ever knowingly spoken to, he admitted. There weren’t many Jews in Shropshire, he said. That is where he was from. But I knew even less about Shropshire than he knew about the Jews.’

  ‘And what if we manage to procure some caviar for that party we are planning?’ Monsieur Carr asked, as though the subject of my diet had not crossed his mind before I mentioned the snails. ‘Do you eat fish roe?’

  ‘I don’t keep kosher,’ I said. ‘I have never tasted caviar and I hope there will be some, particularly now that you conceded I am almost Russian. I take it as a great compliment. What would it take to become fully Russian?’

  ‘You will need to learn to speak Russian. I am sure we will achieve that. If little Gigi can, Albertine can too,’ he said. ‘You are a linguist, my dear, aren’t you?’

  I was preparing to leave and I assumed that Mrs Jenkins had gone home, but she stepped out of the kitchen with a string bag and two jars in it, wrapped in pages from an English newspaper.

  ‘Pickled mushrooms,’ she said, ‘and a jar of rose petal jam. I heard you speaking about it. Not syrup, mind you, thick, proper jam: don’t go putting this in your tea. For you and your husband.’

  ‘There must be a duct of some kind connecting each room with the kitchen,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Mrs Jenkins hears everything. Be careful what you say to me, Albertine.’

  It was late when I returned to Earl’s Court. I heard the telephone ringing well before I opened the front door, a metallic sound echoing in the hall as though it had been going on for days.

  ‘Ber, darling, you had me worried.’ There were sounds of jazz alongside Albert’s voice on the line, somewhere further back, as though the music was reaching whatever space he was calling from through an open window.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ he said, sounding tired but not unhappy. ‘I wanted to hear your sweet voice before I retire. How was Shepperton?’

  He chipped in with explanations as I related the events of the day, giving me details of Elizabeth Montagu’s family, saying that Alexander Korda had employed Churchill at some stage before the war. He seemed to know everything about everyone.

  ‘He’s a plausible chap, your Korda,’ he said. ‘An immense commercial talent.’ Plausible: it was a strange adjective. I could not quite guess what he meant. How plausible were we, all of us?

  Then I started relaying the detail of our impromptu tea party – the pros and cons of a film career for Gigi. There was no interruption from Albie for a while as I spoke and I thought he had fallen asleep, but I realised that the sound of music had vanished too, that I had been speaking to no one. That happened often; lines went dead mid-sentence. I waited for him to ring back but the phone remained silent. There was just the hum of London in the dark, a distant crunch of tyres on icy roads, and closer by, inside the house, that cracking of beams shrinking in the cold.

  I gave up waiting and went into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink, bathed in moonshine. There was a glint of ice over them. I boiled some water and washed up, watching the plu
mes of steam rise around me, and then I took a mop and cleaned the floor, moving on to the hall, carrying on without thinking, mopping and wiping and sweeping and dusting, without properly seeing the dust in the weak light of a succession of twenty-five-watt bulbs, ceasing to feel the cold, without noticing, as I finished, that there was grey light in the windows and the first sound of horses’ hooves, a milk cart in the street below. The snow had started falling again.

  I was woken up late by the winter sun streaming through chinks in the curtains. I had already decided to spend the afternoon making cushion covers for our bed; the deepest blue velvet, with two wine-coloured appliqué As, one bottom left, one bottom right, mirror images of each other. I had dreamed up the design on the Underground, returning from Chiswick, then sketched the pattern for the As on the back of one of Albie’s large Manila envelopes. I thought of the vague pointlessness of the task even as I cut out the paper letters and pinned them to the blue squares, to test out the look before the formal commitment of the lock stitch. I wondered, for the first time ever, what Albie must have written about me to his parents to make them choose a sewing machine as our wedding present.

  ‘A girl I met in Egypt,’ I imagined. ‘A university graduate, and a seamstress.’ Or the other way round. I wondered which came first, which seemed more fitting: the linguist or the dressmaker?

  ‘You are the only woman I have ever wanted to marry, Albertine,’ Albie told me soon after he proposed.

  ‘Why?’ I asked bluntly. Why might that be? was the meaning I intended. I tried to avoid unnecessary verbs in those early days. My conditionals were shaky; may and might seemed interchangeable.

  ‘Because you question everything,’ he said. ‘You’ll keep me young.’

  Whenever I thought of Egypt, I chose to remember only Albie’s days on leave, the few days taken here and there lodged luminously amid the months of his absence and my anxiety, strung close together by memory like a pearl choker, without the bitter knots of worry that separated them. I feared that I might never see him again, that I would be left guessing if he had died or reneged on his promise. I was certain that he would, simply, disappear one day, because things and people did. Death seemed the less likely possibility; I was convinced that I had had my allotted share of it.

  I wound the bobbin, threaded the machine, put my right – my stronger – foot on the treadle and rocked it gently like a seesaw. When I refused piano classes with Arlette, pleading an absence of talent, my mother had given me sewing lessons instead. She was determined to demonstrate that life offered no easy options, no escape into the garret and the company of books. The stitch ran along the edges of the soft blue squares. I soon found the rhythm of the movement I had known since I was a young girl.

  The steady sound of the machine – the punch of the needle piercing fabric, and the beat of the cast-iron base – was not unlike the sound of a railway engine. I followed the lines of the pattern, joined the surfaces together, made sure not to stitch the appliqué through to the back of the cushion.

  The motion became unconscious. Time passed. The beat was soothing and the concentration it required was demanding enough to hold every other thought at bay, to keep me away from myself. This sense of absence was perhaps the purest form of happiness I knew. Yet to maintain it, to make it last for an hour or two, I needed to be persuaded that what I was doing was necessary, and so often I found that almost impossible. When I finished the cushions, I put them on our bed and sat in the window facing them for a while: Albie’s A on the left, mine on the right, their symmetrical flourishes like faces in the mirror, the background as pretty and as blue as midnight.

  5

  Orphans

  We were sitting opposite each other, Monsieur Carr and I, on the seat that followed the shape of the bay window in his library, like passengers in a railway compartment.

  ‘Tell me about Albert,’ he said. ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘In Egypt,’ I said. ‘I was working in a hospital, an administrative job. Boring, you could say, but people like me wanted jobs just like that; the more boring the better it seemed in those days. Albie was part of a small group of English soldiers, wounded somewhere in the desert. They were like young gods, he and his fellow officers, when I first glimpsed them through an open door of their ward. They were lean and sun-bleached. When the nurses gave them their baths, their naked torsos looked as though they had been dipped in cocoa: white where their khaki uniforms had covered their bodies, dark where the rays had caught them. They asked to be given those baths, although many of them could have bathed themselves.’

  ‘I am sure they asked,’ Monsieur Carr said.

  ‘The nurses would oblige, at first,’ I continued, hoping to convey that peculiarly Alexandrian mixture of hardship and poetry to the old man. ‘These men were the walking wounded: a bandaged shoulder, a limb in plaster, the permanent smell of iodine about them, from the sea outside and from the tinctures in the hospital vials. The windows of their ward remained wide open throughout the Mediterranean nights, like the windows of all our rooms, as though the buildings of Alexandria were shells, there to offer shade but otherwise almost unnecessary. The swifts screeched and swooped low against the stone walls, the sea was on its endless roll, and the whole wide horseshoe of the bay hummed with the never-ending collision of the waves. The calls to prayer reached us from the hinterland at their regular hours. “God is great,” they repeated. “God is great.”

  ‘Above all those sounds, the English gods laughed. Their laughter was as sonorous, and as self-confident, as they were handsome. What did they have to laugh about, we wondered, all of us others, when the war is closing in, when they had so many dead comrades on the mortuary slabs and in the desert sands, what did they have to laugh about? Only the English nurses giggled giddily, coming back from the wards, as though they were in on some secret the rest of us did not share.

  ‘I had seen Englishmen before, in Paris, and very occasionally in Bucharest, but these men were of a different kind. Now that I had seen these men, I knew, long before I could say it to anyone else, that there was no way that Britain could lose the war.

  ‘On the day he, one of these young gods, was discharged from hospital, he knocked on my office door, an open door, holding a card of some kind, asking me to note something down on it. He needed to take the note back to his unit. I could barely understand what he was saying. I was thirty, not some inexperienced young thing, yet I looked at him and blushed like a girl of fifteen.

  ‘“Lieutenant Colonel Whitelaw.”

  ‘It sounded as though he was repeating his name for the second or third time, and I still had no idea what he wanted from me, this half colonel, as they called them. I took his card and looked at it, hoping to get some clue from the writing, but the letters swam before my eyes. Away from his friends, in uniform, standing before me, he was not a laughing young god any more. There were wrinkles etched by the sun on his forehead. I noticed tobacco stains on the insides of his second and third fingers, where he held the card. I felt, though it was impossible, that I had met this man before, that I knew him. This close by, he was even more handsome.

  ‘“Lieutenant Colonel Albert Whitelaw,” he said again, now exasperated and a bit worried. He stepped back and read the name on my office door to make sure that he had come to the right place.

  ‘“Miss Cartier, yes?” he asked.

  ‘“Albertine. Albertine Cartier,” I said at last, and offered my hand, as though I had finally understood something, as though he was just introducing himself and not about to explode with irritation.

  ‘For some reason his anger was diffused by the sound of my name and he laughed instead. He shook my hand so firmly that I still felt the squeeze ten or fifteen minutes later.

  ‘“Albertine, did you say?” That laugh of the gods, at last, with me or at me, I knew not and I cared less. I nodded. He laughed again.

  ‘“Well, my dear Miss Cartier, Albertine indeed, if I may, I am asking you to complete this form h
ere. And you must keep a copy for your files,” he said. He jabbed the card I was now holding, then looked at the rows of metal drawers full of identical index cards. He pulled the one labelled W–Z out by several inches.

  ‘“You can’t do that,” I said, and put my hand out. “It is not allowed.”

  ‘“Oh, yes I can. Let’s see how many Xs and Ys you’ve got there, Miss Cartier, in your no doubt excellent filing system.”

  ‘“You can’t,” I repeated and pushed the drawer back in by a fraction, trying not to trap his fingers.

  ‘Albie took out a random card, held it up in his tobacco-stained fingers.

  ‘“Yeast, Mike,” he started to read. “Christ.”

  ‘I snatched the card from him.

  ‘“You misspell diarrhoea, Mademoiselle Cartier. An error like that and the whole system goes down the drain, so to speak.”’

  ‘Charming,’ Monsieur Carr laughed, ‘absolutely charming.’

  ‘Anyway, that was our first conversation as I remember it, more or less verbatim, since you asked,’ I said. ‘Later that month he returned to hospital with a bundle of jasmine branches and a triangular piece of metal mounted on a silver chain.

  ‘“They open at night,” Albie said, pointing at the buds. “They are white inside.”

  ‘A flowerless bunch and a souvenir of what nearly killed him. I still have that piece of shrapnel.’ I pulled the chain out from under my shirt collar, unhooked it and handed it over, a piece of black metal the size of a monkey nut, encased in a filigree silver thread as a pendant.

  ‘You could have that sort of thing made in Alexandria for next to no money and overnight,’ I said. ‘Albie said that he was putting his luck in my hands.’