‘Tonya cried herself to sleep that night, as she had many nights before. I had brought her nothing but sorrow. But we had to believe, had to go on, for our son’s sake. I never thought that we would come to depend on charity. Those formidable English ladies who make cakes and jam and organise balls and raffle sales in their churches, they took us on. You’ve never had to depend on them, Albertine, I am sure. The Karenins did, for several years. And we cried ourselves to sleep, Tonya and I, in secret even from each other, in Hannah Wilson’s guest bedroom in Kingston. We slept in twin beds in that room. We held cold hands over a chasm, too timid to move the stand with a porcelain jug out of the way, too shy to push the beds together at our age.
‘“Whatever happens, Sergei, you must remember that I love you,” Tonya would say, worrying me with that “whatever” of hers. What could happen that was worse than what had already happened? And back in Russia she never told me she loved me, nor had she pleaded that I must remember it: both were implied in everything we did for each other.
‘But the employment bureau did find something for me after all: the Splendid in Mayfair. My uncle Stiva, my mother’s brother, used to frequent the hotel on his many visits to London. His champagne bills from the 1880s alone would have amounted to more than the total sum I earned over all those years during which, in one of its many back rooms facing the similar back room of a gentlemen’s club, I dealt with customer correspondence and complaints. Thank you for looking after us so well arrived on my desk much less often than Our room was woefully small, Our mattress not as soft as we have come to expect, the breakfast delivered by room service not as hot. I responded with polite, handwritten expressions of delight or regret – mostly regret. I wrote hundreds of those in English, French and German, even in Russian, yes, sometimes in Russian too. My boss, a boy of thirty-five, praised my reliability, my unerring sense of good measure. Well done, Count, he would say, and pat me on the shoulder, this boy from Penge who was progressing fast in the hotel business. I saved the management hundreds of pounds over the years, he said. It was as though I was born to deal with customer complaints. And, it shames me to admit this, I was not unhappy in that office. I had a gift, honed to perfection in my teenage years, for escaping my own misery; such a gift, indeed, that the miseries of the Splendid’s guests often seemed to me greater than my own.
‘At least Alexei was young enough to change his life. He won a scholarship to Cambridge from one of those charitable bodies established by the good ladies of Barnes, Richmond and Kingston. He was not as academic as me, yet he did not wish to be a soldier any more, not in England, not after everything that we had witnessed. He was a good, hard-working student and he did not disappoint those excellent ladies who helped him with their charity. After three years at Cambridge he was almost English: an industrious, steady, uncomplaining young man, Protestant almost, practically without a trace of an accent, almost a secret to me and his mother.
‘Little by little, as Alexei studied, Tonya and I rebuilt our world. We moved out of Hannah Wilson’s house in Kingston, and into this house in Chiswick. It had once belonged to Princess Trubetskoy. The Princess was my age, but she was, in her own words, old, old and dying. That was charity too, Russian charity. Chiswick was the centre of Russian London and Tonya was the Princess’s final companion: just as you are for me, Albertine. Mrs Jenkins was close to the Wilsons – the families had known each other back in Russia – and she had engineered our move.
‘She herself had been one of the many English people in St Petersburg. There had long been an English church in the city, an English club, even an English shop, from which my mother used to get regular deliveries of shortbread and proper marmalade. We Russians had always loved England much more than England loved us. The good ladies who helped us were an exception.
‘This house too, indirectly, was the work of our guardian angels, the ladies’ circle in South-West London, a network into which Hannah Wilson had miraculously tapped. I am not sure if I should be proud or ashamed to have been put back on my two feet by so many women.
‘She had no children, Princess Trubetskoy, no one to look after her, and she loved Tonya and loved Alexei as though he were her own son. Much of what you see in this house, if you exclude Tonya’s art, is hers. The Trubetskoy coat of arms is imprinted on most things. We brought over so little from Russia that we were grateful for everything that could remind us of our world. The Princess even had recordings of old Russian operas here. But the house is not ours in perpetuity. It will revert to the Trubetskoy clan when I die. The heir is an actor in Hollywood. Of all the strange things my compatriots have ended up doing in the West, Hollywood is perhaps the least strange.
‘Alexei worries that Gigi will become an actor, but how much stranger is that for a Russian count than working in a brewery, or than dealing with customer complaints in a Mayfair hotel? How much stranger than being half Karenin and half Wilson? Than seeing his English blood as the blood to be prouder of, as, I am afraid, Gigi does? That is the way children are. They don’t want to differ from their friends. Gigi’s friends are bourgeois, and his mother and his father are trying to be. Alexei is so determined to be invisible, he has effectively turned himself into a philistine. Have you noticed?’
I nodded, then quickly shook my head. There was no correct answer to that question. The old man understood my predicament and laughed. I blushed at his laughter. His son was not invisible to me.
‘But you are not a bourgeoise, dear Albertine,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘You are a bohemian who has not found a way to live like one, like my Tonya. She would have been so much happier as the wife of a painter or a poet, not the wife of a librarian, let alone an office boy.’
‘I am sure you are wrong, Monsieur Carr. Painters and poets perished in Russia in huge numbers, whereas your library kept Tonya safe,’ I responded, but I did not like the sound of ‘safe’. I knew that ‘safe’ rarely sufficed. Did he perhaps sense that when he called me a bohemian?
‘Why did I say that you were a bohemian, Albertine? Is that what you are wondering? I will explain it, but you must promise not to be angry with me. Not to be angry and not to try to change. Those green stockings you are wearing: everything black, head to toe, then those green stockings. Your hair: the moment you take your hat off it starts running away from you. Your hands: there’s always a piece of plaster on them somewhere, as though you are always burning yourself or cutting yourself doing housework. Did I guess right? Tell me, did I guess right? And, please, forgive me. It is not polite of me to comment on your appearance, even to show that I, an old man, notice those things.’
I crossed my legs in their bright green stockings. It was the only pair I could get with our coupons a month or so ago, but I loved the hue. I tried to smooth my hair.
‘Please don’t do it, Albertine. Korda said you look like Vivien Leigh, but you are prettier and this is why.’
‘If Miss Leigh had my hair she would need a hairdresser in attendance twice a day,’ I said. My hair was Jewish hair, I thought, but did not say. ‘And I am indeed hopeless with housework. We always had housemaids in Paris, not because we were wealthy but because both my mother and my aunt toiled hard in the workshop. Then in Romania I lived alone and had no need to learn more than the most basic elements of housekeeping. I now try to please Albie, although he has no expectations of me, to show off even, but these English machines and utensils follow their own logic. You have to light the gas, and it’s always in some strange place; you turn the tap on and forget that there are two, that the hot water is scalding and the cold is freezing, for some unfathomable English reason, that you have to wait for the water to fill the basin. It is as though I am a left-handed person in a right-handed world.’
‘I do know,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘But how do they wash their faces with these low taps, and two at that? Tonya used to wonder when we arrived; how do they wash their hair? It comes from being first in everything, even modern plumbing. Pioneers: you have to live with the imperfecti
on of the prototype while others reap the benefits and move on. But you are modest, Albertine. I am sure you are better with your hands than you admit. And your clothes, Albertine. So unusual and so beautiful in these drab times. Severe, one might say, at first sight, but then there is always a detail that surprises, that runs away, excites the senses: a knitted collar, an unexpected knot. I am sure you don’t need an old man to tell you this.’
It was my turn to laugh.
‘I make my own. I have a sewing machine and so much time on my hands. And it is in my blood, dressmaking. I come from a long line of tailors. You would never ever have called me a bourgeoise in Paris. “You can’t leave well alone, Albertine,” that’s what my mother used to say, “even at the price of ruining things.” “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” she would say. Perfect is the enemy of good.’
‘Oh, how my Tonya needed to hear that,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘I wish she had had a mother to tell her that. Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. I will remember this.’
Gradually, the bitter winter began to weaken. I read the Concise History of Russia through to the end and continued drafting Monsieur Carr’s memoir. I called it Karenin’s Story at first, then changed this to Karenin’s Winter. Most of the episodes he had narrated were accompanied, in my mind, by a soft, whispering sound in the background, much softer than the pattering of rain.
‘What sound does the snow make when it falls?’ I asked Monsieur Carr. ‘You are Russian, you should know everything about snowfall. What do we call it?’
He thought about my question for a moment.
‘Susurration,’ he said. ‘The same as in French.’
That March I started studying Russian with an old woman in a basement flat in Queen’s Gate. She was called Elizaveta Furst. She was the only daughter of General Baron Furst, as she never tired of saying, and she was as White a Russian as you were likely to meet in those times, and a crushing snob. She seemed to know and despise everyone. I did not tell my teacher about my work, about the Carrs. In order to read your lovely literature in its original language, I said when she asked why I wanted to know Russian, and that seemed good enough. Russian writing was so beautiful, clearly, that such an effort made sense.
Twice a week I sat with her, one-to-one, deciphering simple phrases written in the Cyrillic alphabet. I usually went on to Chiswick straight from these sessions: my days with the Russians, I called them.
One evening, at the end of a Russian day, I decided to visit the grounds of Chiswick House. It was a good twenty-minute walk from Bedford Park, but Albie was away and the air felt almost warm after weeks of sub-zero temperatures. The streets became steadily quieter as I neared the river. Here and there I noticed wives or maids opening the front door to greet the men returning from work. As they took their hats off or wiped their shoes on the doormat, I heard sounds from inside the houses: children’s voices, music from the radio, dogs barking, the sounds of suburbia.
I envied these men and their wives. I wondered if Albie’s life with me would eventually shape itself into something like this. These were beautiful, spacious houses, away from the grime and the smog of Earl’s Court, with their ornate fences and their carefully maintained front gardens. They offered lives of warmth and comfort for those who had survived the war, lives destined to get even better and more plentiful; English lives.
I am not sure why, but I could not imagine Albie and me in a house like this, in a suburb like this, yet neither could I imagine any other story, any other scenario. You make a life, step by step, each one taking you further into a territory that is always half familiar, half new. Gradually, your life shapes up into something barely recognisable. A lover in Alexandria becomes a husband in London. You can no longer call yourself ‘displaced’, living in a nice house in Earl’s Court, but you don’t feel at home either.
Perfect is the enemy of good: isn’t it just, Mother? I was thinking of her and reciting Russian declensions, sotto voce – mother, of mother, to mother – as I walked through the iron gates and towards the Palladian villa I had glimpsed on the day of our pilgrimage to Tonya’s grave. I walked along an avenue of lime trees trimmed into enormous box shapes, almost French. There was the hint of fresh buds, something less than the harbingers of spring and more like the long exhalation of winter. I almost walked into Alex Carr. He emerged out of nowhere, from a side alley obscured by trailing wisteria branches.
‘“To mother,” Mrs Whitelaw?’ he asked, raising his hat, raising his voice.
‘Oh dear, Mr Carr, good evening. I am afraid I don’t know what I was saying.’
‘But you do know you were saying it in Russian, I hope. You never mentioned you knew Russian. That is sinister, almost. I am beginning to worry about you, Mrs Whitelaw.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean no. I am learning. Just beginning. It was supposed to be a secret, a surprise for your father.’
‘It certainly is a surprise.’
‘When you say that you are beginning to worry about me, do you mean that I am—’
‘A KGB spy.’
‘A what?’
‘A Soviet spy. Sent over from Moscow.’
‘You sound like my husband,’ I said. ‘He sees spies everywhere. He thinks I am a spy too.’
Alex Carr started to say something but changed his mind. A dog ran up and circled us. I have never seen such a dog: tall, slender, with a long white silk coat, a frill on its elegant neck, its narrow muzzle like a Roman profile, with almond-shaped eyes set close together.
‘Amur, I almost forgot about you.’ Alex Carr took a leash out of his pocket and hooked it to the dog’s collar. The animal buried its muzzle into its master’s hand.
‘What an amazing creature … and Amour is such a wonderful name … What kind of dog is it?’
‘Amur … A-m-u-r … not French for love but the Siberian river.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I had never heard of this river.
‘It’s a borzoi, a Russian wolfhound. Amur is four.’
The dog wagged its long, feathered tail like a white sabre in the air.
‘I am so glad we met,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it just beautiful here?’ he asked. ‘Have you noticed that chameleon quality in London, how it turns itself into any European city you’d like it to be? Suddenly you are in Rome, or in Paris, or in Vienna, or, God forbid, even in Berlin. Suddenly you are at home.’
We followed the amazing creature through the grounds for a little while. There were patches of snow like scattered white kilims. The Palladian house glinted behind the trees. The boarded-up section to one side was like the sad stump of a severed limb: how could anyone want to drop a bomb on a building as beautiful as moonshine? The branches of the cedars drooped low, as though they were defying gravity for a moment, before an already predestined fall.
10
When the English Speak of Russia
When I next saw him, I was about to tell Monsieur Carr about my walk in the grounds of Chiswick House and my meeting with his son, but he started talking while I was still unbuttoning my raincoat in the hall.
‘I did not sleep last night,’ he said, and held the door of the library for me, then shuffled behind me. ‘There was a wireless programme about famines in the Soviet Union. Almost two years since the war and still so much hunger everywhere in Europe. Even here, in London, we queue and make do and pretend we like Spam. But at least we have that. In St Petersburg, after the Revolution, we threw a party when one of our muzhiks smuggled half a sack of millet into the city, a gruel party, we called it. Russia now seems no better off than Russia then.’
‘In the places Germany occupied, people ate cats and dogs, with grass and tree bark instead of vegetables,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he went on. ‘Millions of Russian lives were sacrificed to put an end to that. Yet there seemed to be glee in the voice of the BBC’s presenter. The Soviets may have won the war but they can’t eat the party books, can they? They may love our music and our novels, but they don’t like
us. There is always a hint of that when the English speak of Russia. Have you noticed it, Albertine?’
‘I couldn’t say I have,’ I admitted. ‘The French are the same. They think the Russians are barbarians and the Germans cultured, in spite of everything that has happened in the last ten years.’
‘Exactly so. Less pity for the Russian ally than for the German enemy,’ Monsieur Carr agreed. ‘That’s what I see in England. We sit on our respective edges of the continent, the Russians and the English, heirs to the two great powers that dominated the nineteenth century, believing that we can run the world better than all those in between. But I don’t want to sound as though I dislike the English, who have been our hosts, our saviours even. They are unassuming, frugal, hard-working. They have their own ways, but I have never thought of them as perfidious in spite of the prevailing stereotype.
‘Gigi is half English. It is likely that his children will be more English than Russian, that they won’t speak a word of Russian. Your children will be like that too. That is the story of Europe. We think we are different from the Americans, with their melting pot, but it has been going on for centuries, the churning of peoples. There was a Russian melting pot too. My ancestors were German, and God knows what else, yet we became Russian, more Russian than most. My son married an Englishwoman, a wonderful woman, not of our class, but I now think about class differently anyway. Diana is the best of the best of the English.’
He produced his little notebook and examined his notes for a moment, then put it back inside the breast pocket of his knitted gilet. It sat there like a starched cotton square.
‘Let me cheer you up,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you about Alexei’s gallanting.’
The term was so unsuited to his son’s character, so unlikely, that I giggled.
Monsieur Ka Page 15