‘Just like Mummy when she had me. And just like Jesus when he was crucified. We learned that at school,’ the boy said.
‘Gigi!’ Diana Carr put her gloved finger on her son’s lips. ‘This is shocking. Apologies, Mrs Whitelaw.’
‘Well, he wasn’t very old – Jesus, I mean – was he?’ I said. ‘I feel sorry for his mummy.’
We drove past the tall brick wall of a stately home. Through heavy iron gates I glimpsed an Italianate villa with dark cedars of Lebanon behind it. One of its wings had been shattered by a bomb and boarded off. There was a scattering of walkers in the park. An Irish setter, red and silky like a fire torch, ran across the snow.
‘Chiswick House,’ said Diana Carr. ‘When this winter ends – if it ever does – you and Papa ought to come here for a walk. Have you been?’
‘No, I haven’t even heard of it,’ I said. ‘Before I met Monsieur Carr, I had barely even heard of Chiswick.’
‘The grounds are glorious. There is a lake, and a temple hidden in the park. Gigi and I come to feed the ducks,’ she said.
A few hundred yards further on was the cemetery. It stretched like a theatrical auditorium. The gate was wide open, but there was no one inside, except for the hundreds of metro-politan dead beneath their tombstones.
Diana and Gigi leaped out and walked in the direction of the river. Alex helped his father out and then opened my door. He took my hand: his was warm, gloveless. His hat sat low on his ears. The tip of his nose was red from the cold. He paused awkwardly, as if expecting me to guide him.
‘It won’t take long, Mrs Whitelaw,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long and then I’ll drive you home.’
Gigi was rushing ahead to his grandmother’s grave. Diana had waited for us to catch up and was now holding her father-in-law’s arm as they followed the boy.
‘I am not in a rush. It has been such a lovely afternoon. To be with a family … in a family. I haven’t experienced that in thirteen years,’ I said to Alex Carr.
‘It must be strange, your London life,’ he said. ‘But then, whose isn’t nowadays? We are refugees too. Even Diana, fully English though she is, had grandparents who longed for Russia. It’s all so complicated.’
‘So complicated. My husband always says it is simple.’
The gravestone in the shape of a Russian cross bore an inscription in Latin on one side and in Cyrillic on the other, with Tonya’s name and dates. Gigi read out the Cyrillic for me.
‘Granny died when I was two,’ he said. ‘She was almost sixty: that is very old. I don’t remember her at all.’
He planted his bunch of holly into the virgin snow under the cross. We stood around the grave like visitors around a hospital bed. Crows shuttled along cemetery paths, leaving cuneiform trails and cawing at each other in intermittent bursts. Monsieur Carr broke the human silence.
‘The space next to ours is untouched still, thank God. I wonder if we should purchase it, Alexei. And I might inscribe my name next to Tonya’s so that you only have to add the year of death later.’
‘An excellent idea, Father,’ Alex Carr said. ‘London will grow again now, and so will its cemeteries in due course. I was wondering about a space for Diana and me. It would be so much better to keep the family together.’
Matter-of-fact arrangements for an unavoidable event, like booking a hotel room ahead of arrival. Diana and the boy were not listening. Gigi kept straightening his bunch of holly. The original position had left an imprint in the snow, so he started patting the surface around it into a circular medallion.
‘Leave it, Gigi,’ Diana said. ‘Leave it, darling.’
‘I want everything to be perfect for Grandma,’ he protested, but obeyed. Diana kissed the top of the boy’s head.
‘Forgive us, Tonya,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘Nothing is ever perfect, Seryozha, my boy. That is why there are holidays like this Forgiveness Sunday.’
Alex Carr took a candle and a box of matches out of his pocket, stabbed the candle into the snow at the foot of the cross and lit the wick. He crossed himself. The flame flickered in the dying light. Beeswax melted into oily teardrops.
Diana reminded her son how to make a sign of the cross in the Orthodox manner, the thumb, index and middle finger forming the Trinity. The lines of footprints leading to Tonya’s grave seemed reason enough for Tonya to forgive anything that needed forgiving.
We took a different route back. The car stopped next to an imposing villa by the river. The house was large and ugly – yellow Victorian bricks darkened by smog, a profusion of roof finials, spires and pointed arches, a fuzz of ivy tendrils on the walls. There was something vaguely Germanic about it on the outside, like a forbidding home from a Grimm fairy tale. Judging by the view through its high windows, the inside seemed to be the opposite. The rooms on the ground floor were lit, and there was gold and red on the walls, books, a grand piano, lattice windows on the side facing the river, dark velvet curtains and the sight of the Thames flowing between them. It was a house of comfortably off, intelligent people, not a house of immensely rich people.
‘This is our house,’ said the boy proudly. ‘You must come and visit us sometime, Mrs Whitelaw.’
‘You must, with your husband,’ echoed the mother. ‘We have a lovely garden. It descends right down to the edge of the Thames. I could throw a small party when the weather improves, make some Pimm’s and lemonade, or punch. Yes, you must.’
‘Thank you. That would be lovely. In the spring, perhaps,’ I said as we bade our farewells and watched them disappear along the path to the front door. It looked massive and solid, the door of a castle.
Alex Carr insisted on taking me home after we dropped his father off into the care of Mrs Jenkins. We drove in silence along Bath Road. I was still in the back, as though he was my chauffeur. It had seemed awkward to change places for that last leg, and it would have been even more awkward to sit next to him. The streets around us grew poorer, darker, more congested. The slush churned and crunched under the wheels.
‘I do apologise if you found Gigi too exuberant this afternoon,’ Alex said.
‘He is an only child,’ I said. ‘It must be difficult to know when you can and can’t be childish. He is a lovely boy.’
‘And while we are on the subject of childishness, I hope you are not finding my father too taxing,’ Alex said. ‘It’s been a month now, roughly a month into your job. He tells me that you’ve gone through Madame Bovary, and quite a chunk of family history, that you are taking notes. He says that you are more interested in Russia than any of us.’
‘No, not taxing at all. It has been my best month in London so far. And, in fact, I am writing down your father’s story. I would like to create a gift for him, for the family. I’d like to think of myself as his ghostwriter – that is what my husband calls it. A scribe, if you like. An inefficient one: I am sure I have all the names down wrong.’
‘You have my sympathy. All that nineteenth-century Russian stuff. If you’d like me to read it, do not hesitate to ask. Any time.’
‘I am reading A Concise History of Russia and the Soviet Union, very slowly. I reached the revolution of 1905 last week and have just heard about your family’s story up to the same point. You are taking your first steps and the Tsar is making his concessions. I am trying to keep up with your father, as you can tell.’
‘Survival followed by breakdowns, that’s our family story in a nutshell. It has its colour. I was so keen to become English as fast as possible that it took years before I became interested in our Russian past. You will soon know more about us than I do, I am sure.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But I would be delighted if my notes were to be of some use. To Gigi, perhaps, if not to you.’
‘And Father will love it,’ he said. ‘I would not be surprised to hear that he already knows what you are up to. He and Mrs Jenkins are like the KGB. Nothing passes them by.’
The roads became wider and brighter again. We crossed over a multitude of bridges and past a striki
ng exhibition centre. It looked ghostly in the thickening yellow fog, like a piece of Art Deco furniture under dust covers.
‘I drive into central London so rarely nowadays,’ said Alex, ‘that I forget what it looks like. We are like a village over in Chiswick. Self-contained; fully suburban.’
Our house was in darkness when the car pulled up in front of it.
‘Is this the right number? It’s such a lovely house. I did not imagine …’ Alex said. I assumed he imagined that we were poor, that I had to work.
‘My husband bought it ten years ago. This is the smart end of Earl’s Court, he says. Which is not saying much, apparently. The neighbours call it the Danzig Corridor, because there are so many Polish exiles here. Not that I know any neighbours. The house on the left is occupied by a pianist who is never there; the one on the right is empty. I sometimes feel I am the only resident in the square. The resident alien.’
He laughed.
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course I am going to be all right.’
He accompanied me to the entrance. Our square was too insignificant to be cleared regularly. There was ice under the layer of untrodden snow. He slipped and I steadied him.
‘Thank you. It was meant to be the other way round,’ he said.
Albie was sleeping in the chair by the fire when I entered the drawing room. The newspaper had slipped onto the floor by his feet. The room was lit by the street lamps and the whiteness outside. When I switched the main light on, I heard the car pull away.
‘I needed that,’ said Albie, stretching his arms towards me. ‘I travel too much, and sleep too little. I slept until two after you left, and then again after I saw Ian and Peter off. I hope you’ve had a nice day, Ber.’
He offered his hand and, when I took it, he pulled me down to his lap, still in my coat and gloves, took my hat off, flung it to the opposite chair and kissed me.
‘My little family, that’s what you are, Ber,’ he said. He had guessed what needed to be said.
I told him about the party, the visit to the cemetery, Forgiveness Sunday. I was driven back by my employer’s son, I said.
‘Oh, I’m jealous,’ Albie said. ‘When I go to work, I don’t get lifts home from glamorous young women.’
‘He is not young and he is certainly not glamorous,’ I said.
‘We are a modern couple, you and I, aren’t we, Ber? You look happier when you come back from work and that makes me happy too. My female colleagues are expected to resign when they marry. That seems so unnecessary. I’m sure things will be different, soon. Even in your homeland, France, women now have the vote. Men and women will be equal soon. You and I are the forerunners, aren’t we, the harbingers.’
I did not see us as equal. He carried the world on his shoulders.
‘Work, Albie?’ I asked. ‘I can’t imagine anyone would call listening to Monsieur Carr, or reading to him, work.’
‘I saw your notes, pages of your Russian story,’ Albie said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. You may well have something there that will be remembered. Most of what I write is unsigned, or signed by others. Not that it matters, so long as it works.’
‘So we are both ghosts …’ I said.
I tucked a hand under his jumper and followed the bony ridge of his shoulder, then moved it down along the blade and left it where the white cotton of his shirt covered the scar tissue, his baby wing.
‘I know what your gesture means to imply,’ Albie said, took my hand out from under his jumper and kissed the tips of my fingers. ‘I’m fine, Ber, no need to worry about me.’
‘We haven’t spoken about the war,’ I said to Monsieur Carr when we next met. ‘Your war, I mean. I told you about mine.’
‘This last war was Alexei’s war, if that’s the war you mean,’ he said. ‘I was old already and I was useless. I am not sure I deserved to survive it after Tonya died. But I was old and useless in 1914 too. I am a nineteenth-century man, Albertine. A relic.’
‘So tell me about 1914,’ I said. ‘My own father fought in France and Macedonia. I don’t remember him when he left for the front. I was a baby. I remember him coming back in the winter following the Armistice, seeing my sister Arlette for the first time, although she was three and a half.’
‘Alexei was ten when the Great War started and I was fifty,’ Monsieur Carr said, ‘the son too young to fight, the father too old, and that may have been our salvation. There was euphoria on the streets of St Petersburg when war was declared. We had to defend our Serbian brothers, and we had to defeat Germany and Austria.
‘That August the city was renamed Petrograd. My cousins fought, and died, in places dotted all along the Eastern Front – from the Baltic to the eastern reaches of the Black Sea – and I felt guilty and unmanned staying in the city. By the time Alexei was twelve, he was desperate to join the fight. There were boys his age, boys from the countryside, he claimed, who fought, who pretended they were sixteen. General Brusilov was part of our rich cousinage. Alexei kept his picture by his bedside, wanted to be a soldier when he grew up. Don’t all boys? He dreamed of serving in Galicia, with Brusilov and Wrangel. He cut a four-pointed star and a cross out of cardboard, made his own Order of St George, and wore it pinned on his left shoulder when he played.’
‘So difficult to imagine your son as a soldier,’ I said. ‘He is one of the most peaceable men I know.’
‘Dry, you wanted to say. He was a funny boy, Alexei was, not sweet exactly, but endearing. Neither my father nor I were army types. When I was a child, I played with trains, felt destined to be a new Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to head the Department of Railways, but my mother’s fate changed everything. Tonya hoped to see Alexei grow up to become an artist. Yet in 1914 he joined the First Cadet Corps, a military gymnasium – just like my mother’s lover. Had the history of Russia been different my son would have been happy there, happy as a Russian officer, just as he was happy in Palestine as a British officer. He works in the brewery, he doesn’t complain, but I know that the ledgers don’t nourish his soul.
‘Alexei was thirteen in 1917. We had been prepared for the events of that year, in the sense of expecting the Revolution, not in the sense of knowing what to do. The Germans got ever closer to Petrograd. The Tsar abdicated in March. After October we went through hell. I can’t even speak about those months now. We moved to the country after months of suffering, then to the Crimea. In the dying days of the Civil War Alexei was just old and tall enough to claim to be eighteen and enlist with Wrangel. We were evacuated to Istanbul with Wrangel too, all three of us. We lived in a pension in Pera for almost a year, the most miserable year in lives that included no shortage of miserable years.
‘We continued to believe that we would soon be back in Russia, that communism would not last, throughout those dire months of screeching seagulls and icy rain followed by baking heat, without work for any of us. Tonya painted her flowers and sold them to antique dealers and galleries – nowhere near enough for us to live on, but just enough to slow down the erosion of funds. I call them galleries, but they were wretched little junk shops. There were no tourists on the Bosphorus, and the Turks were hungry and disoriented themselves, another empire collapsing under our feet, though I was not sorry to see that one go. The Ottomans had caused more misery in the world than you can begin to imagine.
‘There were Russians in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, White Russians, people who could help, we were told, Russians who still had their wealth because they had taken it out of the country long before 1917. They loved Russia, those wise patriots, like a husband loves a faithless wife: spending on her for the moments they shared, never investing in her future.
‘We hoped for help from those wise Russians when we took the Orient Express northwards out of Istanbul. When I stepped out of the railway station at Belgrade and saw Orthodox crosses on the churches above the Danube, it felt like a second birth. Vronsky had died for Serbia. I felt that we might be at home in wh
at had been a tiny Orthodox kingdom, no more foreigners than we were in Peter or in the Crimea. But there were thousands of White Russians there already, looking for new livelihoods in the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and where Orthodoxy was diluted by Catholicism and even Islam. Although the country was much bigger than Serbia had been in Vronsky’s time, there was no room in it for us.
‘We knew we had to press on further north, following our instinct like flocks of cranes on their return migration. Prague, Paris, Berlin: they were all full of homeless Russians, once princes and generals, now taxi drivers and doormen in fashionable hotels, or worse, receptionists of brothels for French and German shopkeepers.
‘London, Tonya said. London it must be.
‘We had that address in Kingston, belonging to Hannah Wilson. In 1924, we turned up on her doorstep, unannounced, hungry. There had been the boat to Dover, the Ville de Liège I have told you about, then a boat train, and finally this big, unending city, swallowing us as it was to swallow you in 1945.’
‘I remember that,’ I said. ‘Our train from Southampton, full of suntanned young men and women who had won the war. We are in London, Albie said, finally. And then it took almost another hour to get to the terminus. Albie’s friends chanted “Waterloo, Waterloo,” and glanced at me furtively. It took a minute to realise why.’
‘Ours was Victoria Station,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘And although I came to love London, although it looks in so many places more like St Petersburg than any other European city, it seemed strange and depressing from the train. The garlands of miserable houses backing onto the railway, with outdoor lavatories, and forlorn rows of bamboo sticks marking vegetable patches in the backyards, the washing lines with greying underwear dangling in the sulphurous smog: I can see them all as clearly as on that first afternoon. We were used to poverty, used to the fact that it appears so much more depressing in the north than in the south, but this was worse. Perhaps the Protestants did little to hide their poverty, were not ashamed of it. We were at the very heart of an empire on which the sun never sets, they said. It seemed to me, then and for a while later, that it was the heart of an empire in which the sun never rose.
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