‘We were talking about music,’ Alex Carr said. ‘My first piano lessons in St Petersburg.’
‘Ah, I see. You Europeans. That makes me feel wretchedly philistine. The only instrument I ever played was a recorder. And I found even that impossible.’
The red glow of the setting sun illuminated the lawn when Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier arrived with Julien Duvivier. They stepped out on the back terrace, as though the moment was directed. There was a buzz around them, a movement of air, even here, in this small, private circle. He was in a slate-grey suit not that dissimilar to Elizabeth Montagu’s. His was cut with the kind of precision that takes years of training, and adorned with expensive detail: a golden watch chain, a pocket handkerchief and a tie of grey silk so rich that it shone across the lawn.
She was wearing the kind of dress that the cut of Diana Carr’s emulated, but hers was an item of clothing that subtly but indubitably declared itself to be worth more than most people earned in a year. It came in a brilliant shade of white that set off her blue eyes and her dark hair, and signalled cars and drivers, red carpets and teams of servants.
The sleeves were short and the shoulders soft and strangely girlish after the years of square, masculine padding. Her waist was even narrower and her skirt fuller than Diana’s. It was lushly, obscenely full – yards and yards of expensive fabric – as if meaning to say to all of us: ‘We are fine. We can afford garments like this. We shall never go hungry again.’
We all smiled at her, beguiled by the promise. If Scarlett O’Hara could walk into the late 1940s, I thought, she would be wearing this dress.
‘Here’s Vivien. Here’s my Anna,’ said Korda and walked over to greet her. ‘I will take her to her sons. Her two sons, so to speak: Prince Karenin and our little Gigi here.’
He held Gigi by the hand and walked towards Monsieur Carr. The three men stood together as the two stars approached them. They were radiant in their luxurious familiarity, Leigh and Olivier, yet smaller, both slighter than one had imagined. We all watched them, bewitched, as they talked to the boy and the old man, the aim of the afternoon accomplished.
Diana Carr rejoined Korda and spoke to Vivien Leigh with an air of ease, the blonde towering over the brunette, looking at Alex Carr, who made no move to join them even though he obviously featured in their conversation. Vivien Leigh followed Diana’s glance in our direction, looked at me for a moment, and smiled. Our physical similarity, on which everyone had commented, did not seem to register with her.
‘Well, I never,’ Albie jibed, looking at no one in particular. ‘I hope no one can read my lips, but you are so much prettier, Ber.’
Olivier threw us a flicker of a smile, as though he had registered Albie’s words.
‘We must introduce you,’ Alex Carr said, but made no move to follow the suggestion up. He would have heard Albie well.
‘That would be lovely,’ Albie said, not moving from the spot either.
Alex Carr touched my arm above the elbow for a moment and gave it a barely noticeable squeeze, like a teacher urging his best pupil to come forward. He laughed his awkward laugh but all three of us stayed rooted to the spot.
‘Well, that was fascinating and tedious in equal measure, Ber,’ Albie said as we walked along the river. ‘I had guessed that much in advance. But I enjoyed meeting the old Count so I can’t quite say that I regret coming along.’
Trains rattled the railway bridge, the stars were out and the tide had receded so much that you could see mud-caked objects on the riverbed. An oar, plastered in brown clay, glimmered in the moonlight. You could almost wade across to the other side.
‘Mortlake,’ Albie said, pointing over to the other side, and the name sounded like something from a Romantic poem. There was a warm, brackish smell about the water now, and the Thames looked like a village stream far too insubstantial for its wide riverbed. It was difficult to believe it was the same river that, only a few miles further east, flowed by Parliament and carried boats full of people.
‘She is nothing like my mother, the Count told me as we parted,’ Albie went on. ‘Not a trace of Russia about her, he said. But he thought she was just right for Scarlett O’Hara. Who would have believed that the old man had seen Gone with the Wind?’
‘I know,’ I laughed. ‘Monsieur Carr told me that Greta Garbo was nothing like his mother either. They seemed so much in love with each other, Olivier and Leigh. They were married to other people, and left their spouses and their children to be with each other. She must know what it feels like to be Anna.’
‘Or not at all,’ Albie said, ‘not at all. But how could I know? I haven’t read Anna Karenina. You know I don’t read novels, Ber.’
He walked ahead, along the edge of the embankment, his arms spread into a T to keep his balance.
‘Then who is reading those two novels on your desk?’
‘You little snoop,’ Albie said. ‘Is nothing private? One has to do something to pass the time in those wretched hotels. I recommend Days and Nights, since you’ve noticed it. I respect the Russians, these new Russians, perhaps even more than your Karenins and their Easter blinis and kuliches – is that what you called them? – nice people though they all are, particularly the old man. The society these new Russians are trying to build is much more important. They are clearing the path for all of us, Ber. In the twenty-first century we shall all live in socialism. In a shared Europe, and in socialism, for good or ill, whether we like it or not.
‘I know I am making a speech here,’ he continued, his arms still spread into a T on the edge of the embankment, ‘but it is inevitable. Your Alex Carr agrees. Just don’t let his father hear it.’
‘Why do you call him mine?’ I asked.
Albie kicked a pebble towards the water. He liked to think that everyone was in love with his wife.
‘He seems quite smitten with you, even though you affect not to notice. But I like him, Ber. He’s a decent chap.’
We walked downriver, in silence, thinking of the party. The city gathered its streets and houses in, as though the moon was pulling it upwards by invisible strings.
‘How I love London,’ Albie said as we passed under Hammersmith Bridge. ‘To me it is synonymous with freedom.’
‘London was kind to us in the twenties, much kinder than it was to the Tsar, who was left high and dry although his mother was evacuated by sea,’ said Monsieur Carr two days later, as if continuing Albie’s train of thought. ‘It fed us, clothed us and allowed us to extend our foreign roots in its soil, to survive without losing our soul. And that is something in itself. Just look at us when we arrived and look at us now. Look at us and don’t feel afraid, Albertine; in twenty years’ time you will say the same.’
In Shepperton, the filming of Anna Karenina was about to begin. The magazines and newspapers were full of Leigh’s photographs by Cecil Beaton, interviews with Korda, articles about the cast, costumes and sets. The Carrs stayed out of the limelight, in spite of Korda’s best efforts to get them to speak to the press.
‘I can’t imagine giving interviews, responding to questions about Anna,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Tolstoy’s story speaks for itself. It is like one of those reconstructions of homes made for the great museums: more telling and more perfect than us. The sooner the prototype is forgotten, the better for everyone.’
We were sitting in the house in Bedford Park, Monsieur Carr and I, rereading The Wild Mane for the third or fourth time. Since I had owned up to taking Russian lessons, he often volunteered to read Anna’s book with me. He would read a line or two, I would repeat it, and we then translated her words into French and discussed the simple lines and the allusions only he recognised. We compared his mother’s sentences and his wife’s drawings, and we turned the pages with care.
There was a bookmark at the last page, a ribbon of red leather. Monsieur Carr handed it over to me, put it on my palm. There was, almost, nothing to see: a few tooled lines, a segment of an image etched on leather. It was impossible to
say what it represented, perhaps a section of a bird’s wing. He stretched his hand out to take the piece back, then held it for a moment in mid-air. He was looking away from me.
‘What is this, Monsieur Carr?’ I asked. ‘Tell me, please.’
The red bookmark now rested on a checked blanket on his lap. His head was bent over it, his side parting straight, a rosy glimpse of scalp under the white hair. The final page contained one of Tonya’s drawings – a horse inside a stable, an open door, a glimpse of a snowy landscape outside, a naked birch tree with the moon caught in its branches.
‘That chest I found after my father’s death, there was my mother’s book in it, her locket with my picture, their portrait, as I told you, and then this, this scrap of red that I could never make sense of, these strange frayed edges. I understood, when I finally read Anna Karenina. That specific small detail, which seemed like the wildest leap of Tolstoy’s imagination, was perhaps the truest to life. I can’t begin to understand how he knew it.
‘She was at the railway station. All the railway stations were new then. She carried a red bag. She threw it aside before she jumped. When they pulled her up, when they lifted her body off the rails, someone must have taken her bag and brought it to my father. Empedocles took his sandals off before he jumped into the volcano, left them by the crater, like someone taking a swim in the municipal pool, intending to come out at the same spot. My mother’s dive must have been different. I imagine it as a plunge taken by someone escaping a house fire in a panic, finally getting away.’
He touched the strip of leather. We were at the mouth of a tunnel that connected this quiet room in Chiswick with a small station outside Moscow in pre-revolutionary Russia. On the other side, I now saw, there were people like us, a woman like me.
‘Obiralovka,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Not an elegant name. A place of fleecing. It is as though she threw herself to death in Slough. No more elegant than the Steel Road Town, the name the Soviets came up with. Poor, poor Maman.’
He held my hand.
‘Did you enjoy the party, Albertine?’ he changed the topic. ‘Your husband is a remarkable man. Olivier and Leigh shone, but they competed against each other, although he pretended otherwise. His suit may have been grey, but it was so flashy, and there was so much silk on him. Albert and you were like the male and the female of some noble avian species, you in your funny little purple jacket with that blue scarf, prettier than Miss Leigh. His charcoal worsted was understated, all matt you could say, letting you shine.’
‘Thank you. You notice everything. What a glamorous party. And it felt so good to be there with Albie, a privilege to have been invited.’
‘Duvivier asked me about you,’ he added, ‘asked what you were doing, if you wanted a job. Speak to her directly, I urged him. Find out. He promised he would. Would you like that, Albertine?’
I contemplated an answer.
‘Don’t allow yourself to become consumed by unhappiness, my dear. Do something,’ he said. ‘Just tell yourself you mustn’t give in to sadness, as your husband must do. I can feel that in him, self-restraint in the most literal sense of the term, although we spoke of nothing personal.’
‘Consumed by unhappiness? You mean like your mother?’
He was puzzled.
‘My mother was different. She had allowed herself to be consumed by happiness.’
Although the weather had improved, when I returned the rooms of our house were as cold as ever. It would take weeks to soak up the warmth outside. I spent an hour waiting for the fire to make a difference, while trying to read Albie’s copy of Days and Nights. There were two notes tucked inside its pages, between the last lines of the novel and an unenticing afterword written by an American academic. One had several scribbled sets of numbers, the departure times of a train or a flight, most likely, no words, no explanation. Another, on the notepaper of a Berlin hotel, contained the beginning of a letter. Several beginnings of a letter, crossed out, restarted. A letter to me.
Dear Albertine. Dear A. Darling Bertie. Darling. I cannot. Dearest love. I hope you will understand that
Only the last few words were not crossed out, but there was nothing more. I folded the paper as I found it and tucked it back into the book. Albie had never sent me a letter, never even a postcard. Something had happened, the letter suggested, but, whatever it was, it was obviously over. I could not decide whether to tell him that I had found the note, or to wait until he mentioned it, if and when he saw me reading his book. I could not imagine Albie with a mistress, in Berlin or anywhere else. Yet there was this paper, this note.
Was he thinking of leaving me? I changed my mind. I took the note out again, felt the thinness of the writing paper, its texture between my fingers. I tucked it inside the folder with my Russian exercises. I would wait to see whether Albie noticed that the note had gone from his book. I would wait until he raised the question of its absence.
The house was getting warmer. The water on the stove was slowly coming to the boil. I needed a distraction. There were bones in the refrigerator, big, beefy bones I had queued for at the butcher’s on Gloucester Road, carrots and parsnips I had purchased from the greengrocer in Chiswick on my way back from Monsieur Carr’s. I had queued for them too, worrying that they would run out by the time I came to the head of the queue. Parsley was an afterthought. They had plenty; no one had wanted it. I carried the large green bunch on the Tube like a wedding bouquet. It was unlike any parsley I had known before I came to England, curly, dark green, black almost. I also had a branch of laurel from Monsieur Carr’s garden. Mrs Jenkins had snapped it off a bush by the front door when I told her that I was on my way to the greengrocer.
I halved some onions and roasted them along the cut, until their burning caramel smell rose up from the stove. There was time enough to make the stock, concentrated and sweet, to keep it simmering, then cool it off overnight until it jellified. I would heat it up again tomorrow, add a dash of that South African brandy, keep it simmering again, wait for it to get darker and darker. I was willing myself to stop thinking. Notice the perfection in the ordinary, hang on to it, I kept telling myself. Tell yourself that you mustn’t give in to sadness. I wondered if that’s what Tonya Carr was doing with her flower paintings; a route to salvation can seem disconcertingly similar to a descent into madness. Monsieur Carr told me that people in solitary confinement start speaking to themselves, out loud, sooner or later. How did he know?
Albie was in Bristol. Some meeting with the Royal Artillery, he said, as though it made a difference. Back on Wednesday, he had added, this one is close by. Bristol: every French city seemed to have a posh hotel of that name. I found Bristol on the map of England, in an atlas in Albie’s study. It was close by, just as he said, but also on the other side of England, next to a body of water that looked like an immense fjord on the map, a deep cut, an axe fallen on the land mass.
That night I fell asleep almost immediately. I had a strange dream. I rarely remember my dreams, and never when Albie wakes up first. The images vanish the moment he flicks on the light switch. This one stayed with me. I woke up alone, noticed a thin white line of light between the curtains, the pillowcase wet under my face.
In the dream, our kitchen was empty. It was raining outside. I could hear rain drumming on the window. There was a large pot on the stove and in it bones, carrots and parsnips and a bouquet garni in a muslin bag. The water was simmering and the bones moved slowly, clinking faintly against each other, and against the heavy walls of the copper pot. The actions mirrored exactly what I had done earlier in the day, but everything else felt alien. I was in London and Paris at the same time. I was me, and I was my own mother. The stove was mine but the copper pans and the wooden ladles were all hers.
I had forgotten how to do this, I thought. I was preparing the mirepoix in my dream, throwing handfuls of diced vegetables and chopped parsley into the simmering pot, although I had never done it before, although my mother had never taught me how. Thirteen y
ears since her death, thirteen and a half almost; I rarely thought about her. I did not need to, I thought now. I knew somehow that this was a dream even as I dreamed it. The liquid slowly thickened, the bones got hotter and hotter. Marrow fell out of them and melted, glistening slicks of it appeared on the surface.
‘What a lovely smell,’ said Arlette. I turned and she was sitting at my kitchen table with an empty bowl before her, an enamel bowl, white with a dark blue rim. She was pale and unbearably thin. Her hands, holding the bowl, were like pigeon’s feet, red, dry, raw and twig-like.
‘I am cold,’ Arlette said. ‘I am always cold these days. You would not believe it, Albertine.’
I went over to hug her, and her frayed padded jacket gave way. Her body was not there. It felt like hugging a clothes hanger, a worm-eaten wooden yoke instead of shoulders.
I tried to say something to her but I could only speak English. She looked at me in panic.
‘What are you saying, Albertine, what are you saying? I can’t understand you. Say it again, ma mignonne, say it in French, please.’
I tried to repeat my words, in French, but again, only English came.
‘Albie! Albert,’ I shouted. I called for help, although I knew, even asleep, that Albie was in Bristol, that he would not be able to respond, that he would not be there to help translate my words. Then Alex Carr came into the kitchen.
‘You called,’ he said.
He carried his father’s checked blanket and he wrapped it over my sister’s shoulders.
‘So soft,’ he said to Arlette. ‘So soft. You will be fine.’
And she smiled.
‘Why are you crying, Albertine?’ he asked. I did not know, in that dream, which language he was speaking, just as I did not know it seconds ago, when he addressed Arlette, but I understood him. Both of us did.
‘Why are you crying, Albertine?’
I tried to respond, and I thought I was speaking English, but he just looked at me.
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