Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘Yes, yes, I see,’ Alex Carr said, raising his hand in the air like someone dismissing a tedious tradesman in a Middle Eastern bazaar. ‘Of course, dear Albertine. I trust you as much as I trust my own father.’

  He unwound a scarf from around his neck, took his hat, gloves and coat off, laid them over the back of a chair, and sat next to the old man. Shoulder to shoulder, the two looked similar enough: one white-, one dark-haired, both thin-lipped, one with a slightly crooked smile, one with an incipient smirk. There was the smell of snow about the son, the smell of it melting against the wool. He had walked from his riverside office. He said something in Russian to his father.

  ‘I am afraid that Albertine and I have been drinking tea all afternoon, dear boy. How about something stronger?’ the old man responded in English. ‘Some aqua vitae? None of your beer business.’

  ‘You know you mustn’t, Father,’ said the son.

  ‘I’ll worry about what I mustn’t when I am in my grave.’

  Alex Carr disappeared and promptly returned with two thimbles and a frozen bottle of clear liquid. When his father frowned, he took another thimble from the pocket of his jacket.

  ‘We keep our vodka buried in the back garden,’ he said, noticing that I was staring at the thick crust of ice on the bottle. ‘Along with a load of old Russian skeletons.’

  He poured a measure for each of us.

  ‘Let’s drink po-russki, à la russe,’ he said. ‘Down in one.’

  He tilted his head backwards, opened his mouth and upturned his thimble above it, to show me how it was to be done. There was something endearing about the gesture, the staged wilfulness of it; he was a shy, reserved man.

  ‘To our friendship!’ said the old man. Alex Carr refilled his own glass. We clinked the three thimbles and the men downed their drink. I couldn’t. It tasted like acetone. They looked at me, then at each other. I drank rarely and I was no drinker of spirits, not beyond an occasional whisky which I barely sipped alongside Albie after his work. Monsieur Carr shook his head in disapproval. I wasn’t drinking and I wasn’t taking part in the toast.

  ‘Let’s try again,’ said Alex Carr and refilled their glasses.

  ‘To Russia,’ he said.

  ‘To Russia,’ we responded.

  I threw the liquid to the back of my throat. If Albie’s peaty Scottish whisky tasted of ancient rains and smoky bonfires, this vodka was like an invisible fire. Burning was its only aftertaste.

  ‘And again,’ said Alex Carr, and he meant it.

  ‘No, no,’ I protested. The room was swimming around me, as though we were on a houseboat on the Thames.

  He refilled our thimbles nonetheless.

  ‘Your turn to offer a toast, Albertine,’ said Monsieur Carr.

  They stood up again, facing me, the old man propping himself with a stick in his right hand, holding the thimble up with his left, unsteady. The younger was so tall that looking into his eyes required a deliberate twist of the head upwards, in a way which often made me blush. I couldn’t think of anything to drink to, anything to say. They stared at me, waiting.

  ‘À la silence,’ I finally said and downed my drink in one, ahead of them.

  ‘To silence,’ they repeated solemnly in English and drank up, then looked at me.

  ‘What kind of toast is that?’ said Monsieur Carr.

  ‘You make us sound like some secret society,’ said Alex.

  ‘We are like one, now,’ I said.

  The armchair swam upwards to meet me.

  ‘We must not, absolutely must not, do this again,’ I almost screamed as Alex Carr affected another move to refill our glasses.

  He refrained, sat down, took a pipe out of his pocket, fumbled with the tobacco, then lit it. The room filled with a sweet, malty smell. The book spines flickered gold and ochre in the reflected light of the fire. Through the open door I saw Mrs Jenkins as she laid the big table for dinner in the dining room. I heard the clinking of the silver and the china. On the walls behind her there were Tonya’s flowers.

  The old man dozed off. The son smoked, staring at nothing in particular. I looked at the painting above him, observing the similarity between him and his grandfather, yet also a definite difference: the full head of hair, the deep lines around Alex’s mouth, a certain warmth that was surely his grandmother’s.

  I returned from Chiswick to find Albie writing in his study. He had put my typescript to one side of his enormous desk, pushed the typewriter further towards the window and was jotting something down in longhand. The house was so quiet that I heard the scraping of his pen against paper as I tiptoed in. His shoulders were covered with a tartan blanket.

  ‘You startled me,’ Albie said. I kissed the back of his head. His hair smelled of almond oil.

  ‘Are you drunk, Cartier?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all, Colonel,’ I responded. ‘Two small vodkas. My first two ever, I believe.’

  I went to the kitchen to make his supper, but saw that he had already eaten and tidied up. The dishes were drying on the rack and the plates and saucers were arranged as neatly as table placements at the Ritz. When Albert made our bed it took some effort to get into it; everything was folded so tightly, straightened and tucked in. It was unusual, then, but we never wanted any hired help. Marrying a soldier had its advantages in housekeeping matters.

  ‘This is beginning to look like an excellent book,’ Albert called from the study. ‘A fine biography. I hope you don’t mind, but I read your Count’s story. You left it on my desk. I noted down a few corrections in the margins. The sequence of tenses, Shepperton with two p’s, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all,’ I called back. ‘I am so glad you like it. They are sweet, kind people.’

  ‘And you’ve yet to meet the son’s wife? Is she English?’

  ‘English, yes. And no, I haven’t met her. He takes events chronologically and tells them in detail, but then suddenly skips decades. You will have noticed my annotations. I will consult the son before I finally put it together. And I will have to read about Russia. I know so little of Russian history.’

  I heard Albie moving around the room – several steps, then silence, then the sound of speech again. A fire engine wailed in the street outside; it was impossible to hear what he was saying. I went back to the study to find him standing by the bookshelves with a thick volume.

  ‘I was just about to show you this. A Concise History of Russia and the Soviet Union,’ he said.

  That was Albie too. The moment you identified a problem, he found the most logical solution and took appropriate steps to find a remedy. All I had to do now was to read the book. The concise history.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll give it a go,’ I said. I flicked through the final pages. I could not get used to the English habit of putting the contents of the book at the beginning. This ended with the index. Even just skimming it, I picked up a few of the names Monsieur Carr had mentioned: the Oblonskys were there, the Sheremetevs, the Vronskys, the Yusupovs. It was daunting, the history of Russia, running to hundreds of pages, even in this so-called concise form. I put the volume down on Albie’s desk, next to my slim ghostwriting endeavour.

  ‘It’s the last day before their Lenten fast,’ I said, continuing the conversation from where we had left it. ‘This Sunday. The fast leading up to the Orthodox Easter. They start fasting on Monday. Clean Monday they call it. We are invited to a party in Chiswick: a kind of Dimanche Gras. There will be blinis, sweet and savoury, and more blinis. And a profusion of vodka, I suspect. Would you like to come?’

  Albie walked up to me and pressed my body to his against the doorframe.

  ‘Delightful Mrs Whitelaw,’ he said, ‘forgive me, but I can’t think of anything I’d like less. A party in Chiswick with my wife’s employer and his son’s family: a suburban soirée, only with princes. Would you hold it against me if I said no? I’ll happily stay at home and read.’

  He noticed my disappointment.

  ‘You must like them
a lot to want to see them at the weekend – unpaid overtime. Either them or … the blinis, is that what you said you’d be eating?’

  ‘Blinis, yes, Russian pancakes. It’s customary.’

  ‘Blinis and vodka. I see you’ll soon be a Russian expert, sweet Albertine. Even without reading my history book. Are you picking up the language too?’

  ‘Da, Al’bie, konechno. Yes, Albie, of course,’ I said, imitating the Russian words I heard from Mrs Jenkins, with their softness around the L and the N, feeling the weight of his body against mine, every button, every seam.

  I pushed him away gently and walked up to the window. There was a garden square below, enclosed by a black iron railing, like a guard of spears – one of the few that had survived the gleaning of metal in the war. In the square, there were naked trees and skeletal bushes, with park benches and the grilles of litter bins by the pathways. During my first summer in London I had watched the square from this same window, and had often heard the voices of people who were invisible under the lush crowns. I imagined lovers sitting on the benches, speaking softly to each other: what terms of endearment do the English use when they exchange sweet nothings? Then the leafy crowns turned gold, and thinned. The rains came, and after the rains snow. Everything fell silent. I wondered why I had raised my glass of vodka to silence this afternoon. There was too much silence already.

  A car waited in the street below, and in it sat a couple, staring ahead, not looking at each other as they talked. The headlights were off. The snow accumulated on the windscreen wipers: a dusting first, then two soft white eyebrows on a worried face. What were they talking about?

  Albie stood behind me and pulled at the pin which held up my hair. He caught the coil before it dropped onto my shoulders, wrapped it around his wrist, lifted it and kissed the nape of my neck, then held the pin between his lips. He separated the hair into three strands, and plaited it, very slowly. He coiled my hair back again, took the pin out of his mouth and fastened the coil to the back of my head, exactly where it had been, but now tightly plaited where before there had been an untidy bun.

  ‘There you are, Princess, as demure as you always are, but now Russian.’

  ‘You confuse me, Albie. How do you know how to do this?’ I touched the back of my head, the hard, intricate coil of the plait.

  ‘The usages of the army in peacetime – you’d be surprised. Prewar cavalry: I learned the skill on horses. I am good with my hands like that.’ He smiled. ‘The male and the female are closer than you think.’

  He pulled the pin out again, let my hair fall on my shoulders and then slowly uncoil itself under its own weight. The car turned its lights on and made a wide U-turn in the street below, bathing us for a moment in its yellow light, leaving serrated cuts in the virgin snow. I picked up the Concise History of Russia and the Soviet Union from the desk and opened it. There was Albie’s signature in the top right corner of the inside front cover, his handwriting more childish than the age suggested by the subject matter. Below it was a year, a class number that said little to me, and a school crest stamped on the bottom of the page in black ink, its motto too blurred to read in the semi-darkness.

  Albie dragged his index finger over it.

  ‘“Manners makyth man,”’ he read to me. ‘William of Wykeham, the founder of my old school down in Winchester. You would not believe it, Ber. How alone I was, and in how many places, before I met you.’

  ‘And now …’ I started but had no will to finish the sentence.

  I have never been so alone, never so alone so often, as since I met you, I was going to say. Is it England, perhaps? I had dozens of friends in Paris, in Bucharest, even in Alexandria. Always someone at the other end of the table, at the other end of the telephone line. Now, most of the time, no one but you. And you are so often away. Or distant, even when you are here.

  ‘Toska is one of those Russian words,’ Monsieur Carr had said, ‘which have no English equivalents. It means “a dull ache of the soul”.’

  I am becoming a bit of a connoisseur of toska, I was going to say. But then you plait my hair like this and you confuse me.

  8

  Forgiveness Sunday

  ‘Do stay as long as you like, Ber,’ Albie said. ‘I promise you that I’ll be happy. That might not be the right word. I assure you that I’ll be napping. At least until four.’

  It was the Sunday we were invited to Monsieur Carr’s pancake party. I had felt disappointed that Albie was unwilling to join me, but the sight of him was disarming, still in his pyjamas so late in the morning, a newspaper under his arm and a bottle of milk in his hand, as he prepared to return to bed when I left. He needed rest.

  ‘What happens at four?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of colleagues will drop by in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘Stanford and Abercrombie. I don’t know if you remember them from Alexandria. The Europe working party we are called now. We wrote a report last month and now we’ve had our responses, we are to write responses on our responses.’

  ‘It never ends, does it?’ I said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t. Never,’ he agreed. ‘You know how much I love administration. I was born to be a man of inaction. Have as much fun as you can have with your Russians, Ber. For my sake too.’

  He saw me off to the door. When I was in the street, I turned back and I saw him looking at me through the tall front window. He took a waggish swig from his milk bottle and waved.

  There was a chain of paper ribbons between the gate and the front door of Monsieur Carr’s house – a sequence of simple hoops in different colours, made by a child. Lanterns hung from bare branches. I knocked and the front door gave; it was not locked. The house smelled of cinnamon and baked apples. I heard voices from the back garden. Five people. Monsieur Carr, Alex Carr, Mrs Jenkins. With them was a striking blonde woman in a white fur hat, and a boy of eight or nine. They were putting finishing touches to a snowman, a perfect specimen made of three large snowballs, with coal buttons, a carrot nose and a small green apple which the housekeeper had preserved into the depths of winter and which was now halved for his eyes, wide open to match a wide coal smile. A big tin saucepan hat gave him the look of a Byzantine dignitary.

  ‘Mrs Whitelaw,’ said Alex Carr when he saw me, ‘meet Mr Snowy.’

  I curtsied and shook a twig hand. The boy laughed. He had his grandfather’s and father’s eyes and his mother’s hair, with a hint of something darker in the composition, a suggestion that the blondness wouldn’t last, that he might revert to the Carr type.

  ‘I am Gigi, Mrs Whitelaw. My real name is Sergei, like my grandfather’s, but everyone calls me Gigi,’ the boy said and he shook my hand with the exquisite manners of someone much older. He wore a pair of huge sheepskin mittens.

  ‘And I am Diana,’ said the woman. ‘I have heard so much about you.’

  She surprised me by embracing me so firmly that her white fur hat fell off her head. Her eyes were green – an improbable green, like those of the snowman, the bright green of Granny Smith apples.

  ‘Albertine,’ I said. ‘Delighted to meet you finally.’

  ‘What is such a beautiful woman doing married to someone like me?’ Alex Carr said, guessing my thoughts. ‘I am afraid I have no answer to that, dear Albertine. And where is your husband? I was so looking forward to meeting him.’

  ‘Work,’ I said. ‘Work, unfortunately.’

  ‘He should be careful,’ said Diana Carr. Her voice was sweet and dark, like heather honey. My ear was not sufficiently attuned to the nuances of English pronunciation, but I thought that she had a trace of London in her accent. Gigi sounded like his father: neutral, educated, unplaceable.

  The afternoon was enchanted, bathed in the almost horizontal light of the winter sun. At dusk, we set out for Tonya Carr’s grave. It was customary to visit your dead on the day and ask for forgiveness, Monsieur Carr said.

  ‘We have so many, but Tonya is alone in English soil. You start belonging to the land when you bury someone yo
u love in it. We would have taken the sledges in the old country,’ he added as we squeezed into the car which had taken us to Shepperton earlier. It was now driven by Alex Carr.

  Monsieur Carr was helped by his son into the front seat. Behind them, Diana and I sat with the boy between us. Mrs Jenkins had given him a bunch of holly, tied it with a red silk ribbon. He now held it upright like a torch.

  ‘Be careful with that, Gigi,’ Diana Carr said, touching a spine with her index finger.

  ‘Do you have children, Albertine?’ She turned to me.

  ‘No. Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she said.

  I caught Alex Carr’s glance in the rear-view mirror. I tried to respond with something meaningful: I am not sure I want children, or, There is still time. Neither seemed right in front of the boy.

  ‘We had them late too, in our family, and we all seem to stop at one,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘One boy. It makes for a masculine world.’

  Diana Carr blushed, said nothing.

  ‘Not Grandmother,’ Alex Carr said. ‘She was in her late teens when she had you.’

  ‘Was she, Grandpa?’ Gigi asked eagerly, then turned to me.

  ‘I am doing some research for my film role,’ he said. ‘I am nine in the film, just as I am in life, just as my grandfather was when his mummy fell ill and died. But Miss Leigh, who plays my mother in the film – I don’t mean my actual mother, I mean my grandpa’s mother …’ Here he paused and looked at Diana. ‘Miss Leigh must be much older than Grandpa’s mummy was. She is very old.’

  ‘Gigi thinks that anyone over twenty is ancient,’ Diana Carr laughed.

  ‘We are not fully convinced about the film yet, Gigi,’ Alex Carr intervened. ‘Let’s see what your school says about it first, shall we?’

  ‘And how old are you, Mrs Whitelaw?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Gigi!’ his mother admonished him. ‘That is very rude.’

  ‘Thirty-three,’ I said. ‘Just like Miss Leigh.’