Monsieur Ka

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Albie’s mother and father followed slowly, pausing at every step. The driver helped her; Albie’s father took me under his arm.

  ‘I had imagined this day differently,’ I said. ‘No, not this day, I mean. I mean our meeting.’

  He took the last couple of stairs slowly, as if trying to gauge the level to which he had to lift his foot each time. He was an old soldier too. You could see that in the vestiges of his step, in his shoe polish, in his tie, in the white cuffs which emerged from his coat sleeves when he grabbed the banister before taking the next step. He gripped my arm with his other hand, above the elbow, like a rope someone has thrown to a drowning man. He was taller than me, considerably taller than his wife, but he was broken and I could not tell if he could ever be mended.

  I did not want to ask why they had refused to meet me, why they had refused to come to see Albie, if indeed they had. I no longer knew anything for certain. I should have thought this through. They should not have to climb all these stairs. Except I never thought anything through, I realised.

  Elsewhere, people were busy, things were being taken care of. In our house, Albie’s house, there was little conversation and less movement. There were sandwiches on the table, delivered by Albie’s people, picnic food for the saddest picnic imaginable.

  ‘We are so sorry, Annabel,’ Albie’s father said.

  I did not correct the name. They seemed defeated as it was. Annabel was Albert’s sister.

  ‘He spoke fondly of you,’ I added. What was one more lie? They returned the courtesy.

  ‘You’re a lovely girl. Albert loved you a great deal,’ his mother said, her posh voice breaking, barely audible. She patted her lap with a small, dry hand. She could not have known it, could not have known how much Albie loved me.

  ‘Your English is excellent,’ she added finally, unexpectedly, ‘truly excellent.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I was so eager to keep the pretence of a conversation, I almost added, So is yours.

  I played with my bracelet, the one Albie had given me for our eighteen-month anniversary, turning it around and around my wrist, waiting for the chain to snap. It held: it was stronger than it seemed. The Prince of Wales, invisible doubling, I remember Albie explaining, it can take more strain than you would think possible. His voice echoed in my head. I wondered which faded first – the touch, the smell, the sound.

  The telephone rang. It rang and rang, ten, twenty times, before I stood up to answer it.

  ‘Albertine,’ Alex Carr said. ‘You’ve had us all worried. You didn’t come last week. My father called you. Then he asked me to call. Is everything all right?’

  ‘Albie has died,’ I said and put the receiver down. I stood next to the telephone for two, three minutes, wondering if it would ring again. Then it did. I saw Albie’s parents through the open door of the sitting room, in my and Albie’s armchairs, facing each other, saying nothing.

  ‘Albertine,’ Alex Carr said, ‘please forgive me.’ The voice was not his own. ‘I am not sure if this is some kind … I am not sure what to say. That is devastating news. You never mentioned he was ill. Was it a heart attack?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing to do with Albie’s heart. I am sorry, but I can’t speak now.’

  ‘Don’t put the receiver down,’ he said. ‘Albertine, I beg you, please.’

  I did.

  I went back to the drawing room, sat with Albie’s parents as darkness fell outside. There was a pile of unopened telegrams and letters of condolence on a tray on the ottoman between them. We could have done a million things differently, his parents and I. I was not sure which, if any, of these things could have saved Albie.

  The following morning, the morning of the funeral, it felt as though they had always been there with me, the old man and the old woman, sleeping in my marital bed. I hadn’t slept at all, and at four in the morning, with the first whisper of light, I went into Albie’s study. In the past, I had looked at things he happened to have left on his desk, if there were any, less out of curiosity and more as a way of feeling his company. I had never looked through his things in search of evidence. I had not been that sort of wife, a small blessing perhaps, given the sort of wife I turned out to have been.

  I loved his hairbrush with two ivory combs tucked into it, a hideous leather box, the outline of the Corniche in lurid green on the lid, that contained paper clips and pencil sharpeners, Albie’s monogrammed, silver-topped inkwell. There was a picture of me, in a silver frame, on a boat, leaning against the railings, my hair half obscuring my face, and behind, on the upper deck, several soldiers smoking. I held a pair of sunglasses in my right hand. If you looked closely, you could see Albert in the dark lenses, holding the camera, taking a picture. I stared, trying to discern Albert’s expression. I took a magnifying glass to the photo. The image was too small. Enlarged, it became a blur.

  I unlocked his desk drawers, one by one, something I had never done before. I felt I was invading his posthumous privacy. I found them empty, as though – impossibly – someone had already been through them. The paper linings smelled of ink and tobacco and old documents. I lifted them, one by one. There was nothing, absolutely nothing underneath.

  I sat in Albie’s chair and felt exhausted beyond any power I had to describe the feeling. The spines of books on the shelves were so familiar that I could close my eyes and list the titles correctly. One day, not now, I would go through them one by one, looking for my husband.

  I took Albie’s shoes into the back garden and started polishing them with black parade polish, the way I remembered him doing it, standing on our small lawn, working the polish in with a cloth, brushing then polishing again, until the toecaps shone as though they were made of patent leather. I saw the outlines of Albie’s feet on the pale insoles, the feet that took the leap. I pushed my hand deeper inside, and carried on polishing.

  ‘Good morning, Albertine.’ There was something in Albie’s father’s voice that reminded me of his son. He took no obvious notice of what I was doing. ‘Have you slept at all?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all. I took the pills the doctor gave me, but they made no difference.’

  ‘I was thinking, Albertine. I was thinking of him. He was always such a sunny, uncomplicated child when he was growing up in India and then we sent him to school in England and we never really knew him properly again.’

  ‘This happens,’ I said. ‘The price of Empire.’

  ‘I’m glad that he had you,’ Albie’s father said. ‘That he found happiness with you.’

  He was now standing next to me, wearing Albie’s tartan dressing gown over a pair of ancient pyjamas. His clavicles rose above tufts of white hair on his skeletal chest. His skin was parched, like a mummy’s, and his face was criss-crossed by deep lines. There were scaly patches on the outline of his jaw, damage inflicted by years of Indian sun.

  ‘We were happy when the war ended, on the boat coming here,’ I said. ‘I did not like London to start with, but I got used to it. I wish I had known more about Albie. I wish I had asked more questions. I don’t think I was as good a wife as he deserved.’

  ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. He might not have told you more than he did,’ his father said. ‘Perhaps he was not free to tell you more, anyway. In his line of work, loyalty to one’s country is more important than loyalty to one’s wife. I don’t mean this badly, for, ideally, one should not test the other. A man gets used to keeping secrets; secrets breed other secrets, until there are so many that you don’t know where to begin, even when they are secrets no more.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that Albie was a spy?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no.’ He was visibly startled by the word. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I am not even sure what that word means. A spy, I mean. He would undoubtedly have been reporting back from Germany, but is that the same as spying? We always see much more than we say, that is the Borders trait. But he would not, ever, have lied to you. I am sure that you knew as much about him as he knew a
bout you.’

  ‘Do you mind the fact that Albie is being buried in London?’ I asked. ‘It suits me, of course, but wouldn’t East Anglia, or Scotland, have been more appropriate?’

  ‘We agreed to London with his regimental colleagues,’ he said. ‘He was theirs, if he was anyone’s. India might have been appropriate from the family point of view, but it would hardly have been possible now. We belong to so many places that we don’t really call anywhere home.’

  ‘Then London is as good a place as any,’ I said.

  ‘That’s it,’ he nodded in agreement. ‘Although we don’t call London home either. It feels like a foreign city. Especially since this last war. Strange to think that my son’s body will rest in it.’

  The day of Albie’s burial turned out gloriously sunny. I need not have worried about its unfolding. If it involves a ceremony, it will be something that the army does well. Albie’s funeral did the army proud. There were dozens of people I had never met before, men dressed in black or in uniform, wearing stripes and ranks I could not read, and men I knew, the faces of the young gods from Alexandria. They were a little older than when they had confronted Rommel, a little greyer, but they saw the Desert Fox off, didn’t they? The women, elegant young women from Albie’s office and wives standing next to their husbands, threw furtive looks in my direction. They made me hate being there for I did not know what to do with myself, other than at those times when people came to shake my hand, to say words I failed to catch.

  None of it mattered. I knew what the words were. I was sedated, literally so, the world was swimming around me, yet something was stirring amid the elemental numbness, something that was four parts pain to one part anger. When the coffin was lowered, this angerpain shot up my shoulders and squeezed my ribcage, so that I could not breathe at all.

  We had been driven to the cemetery, barely half a mile from home, but the drive seemed never-ending while we progressed along the colonnades in a slow cortège. The ceremony seemed never-ending too. There were speeches, prayers, the rifle salute. There was a choir of boys from Albie’s school, a trio of priests whose vestments shone silvery and purple in the afternoon sun. There was a lone piper, his tune so primeval that it seemed to grab and squeeze my innards, as though the bagpipes were made of them. Someone carried a cushion with Albie’s decorations. He had more than you would expect for a man of his age. There were flowers, headily fragrant in the morning, the whiff of decay discernible as the day progressed. There was stateliness and dignity and just enough pomp about it all to reassure a casual passer-by that we were interring someone important. It was the most complex ceremony Albie and I had ever attended together, yet he was not there to explain the details to me.

  The open grave seemed raw and physical somehow, like a suppurating wound in the middle of a green lawn. At one point I observed, with the corner of my eye only, the arrival of the Karenins. Alex and Diana and Gigi, with a huge bunch of white roses, sixty or seventy roses, tied with a purple ribbon, then Monsieur Carr in an ancient dark suit. They stood at the back, waiting for the moment to come forward, to lay the flowers. They looked different from everyone else, marked by an intangible foreignness that was difficult to define, yet it was there even in Diana and the boy, as though they had come not just out of another country but from another era. The father and the son looked broken. When they approached and took their place in the gathered ranks, I felt something move, deeper than my angerpain, no more than a flutter of a feeling. That is when I knew.

  15

  You, Anna

  ‘And how are you, my dear? Is it all becoming more or less bearable?’ Monsieur Carr asked.

  A whole year, almost, had passed since I started coming to him. It was four o’clock, yet the evening was already settling in, darkness defied only by an occasional flurry of bright yellow leaves. Some hit the windowpanes with the gentle sound of a child’s tapping finger. The crowns of the lime trees in Queen Anne’s Grove had thinned again, and the first stars shone through the branches. There was something eerie in the cries of the magpies: the sound of approaching winter.

  Monsieur Carr looked out, then returned his gaze inside the room. It flitted across my face, and settled on my stomach, hard and round over my lap, like a tethered balloon. I felt movements inside, no stronger than the flutter of a quail’s wing in the charred stubble of a cereal field after the harvest. They went on, these movements, at regular intervals, all day and into the night. I spoke to them in the evenings when I was alone, and that now meant every evening. We got to know each other well, the little bird and I. Everything else was a mystery yet to be unravelled.

  ‘I am not sure about bearable, Sergei Alexeievich.’

  He had insisted on, and I was finally getting used to, this informality. I still called him Monsieur Carr when I thought about him. We continued to converse in French. I had insisted on not being paid for my visits any more. He took a lot of persuading, but Albie’s pension was sufficient. The greater intimacy came with the absence of transactions; the clarity of friendship and devotion.

  ‘I must confess something, Albertine. I have given you a whitewashed version of our family history,’ Sergei Alexeievich said, looking at a slim folder on the coffee table. It now had a morocco binding that nearly matched that of his mother’s book. Nothing produced in these austere times could quite rival the Art Nouveau craftsmanship of the Angevins.

  ‘I am not sure whether to regret it or not. You’ve written it all down, given it back to me and I have reread my story to Gigi and to Korda, but now I feel guilty, after everything that has happened. You deserved better from me, Albertine.’

  ‘What do you mean, Sergei Alexeievich?’

  ‘I told no lies, certainly no lies, but I left so much ugliness out, and I don’t mean just the ugliness that followed my mother’s death. That was as nothing compared to this century of ours, yet now I feel old and I have no stomach left for ugly things. But you may be like me. I now know that you asked me about Tonya only after you had completed your manuscript. You too – consciously or unconsciously – wanted to keep my story as sunny as possible. I should have trusted you more, Albertine. We could have cooperated, edited Karenin’s Winter together.’

  ‘But for that I would have needed to have the confidence to tell you about my project much earlier. Does it matter, Sergei Alexeievich? I was not thinking about my writing as editing, as leaving things out. I suppose I was writing the story down as I would for Gigi, or my own child. Would you want them to know? I left out some other things you said, but I remember everything.’

  ‘I know,’ he said and leaned over, patted my knee. ‘But thinking about Gigi makes me wonder how much I knew when I was his age, how much Alexei knew. What do we do when we sanitise our history thus for our children? I loved my mother more than either her husband or her lover could, and I needed her more, but a son’s love is never enough. Or at least was never enough for Anna. You are about to find out, and I hope you’ll find out differently.’

  ‘They are different, those kinds of love, and we are greedy, we want them all. I don’t know why, Sergei Alexeievich, but I am convinced it is a girl. It is not long now.’

  He had never asked who the father was. Perhaps the question was unthinkable.

  ‘Remember how you and I began, reading Madame Bovary?’ he asked. ‘It seems like a century ago. There is a story about reading books I have wanted to tell you all this year. Soon after the Revolution, they moved dozens of peasants from the countryside into our house in St Petersburg, starving families looking for work in the city, four or five to a single room. We were left with one single room too, but it was just the three of us, a luxury, almost. It was as cold as last winter. Winters always seemed like that then. Our new tenants dug up the parquet flooring to feed the stoves. They started from the corners, replacing chevrons of cherry and mahogany with cardboard. I did not complain. I call them tenants but they had as much right to our property as we did. Wood was now too impractical anyway; it perished un
der the nails of our cheap boots, under the snow melting from the bottoms of coal buckets, or the brine leaking out of pickle barrels everywhere.

  ‘I wished they would take it all up, as fast as possible, burn it away. But once they had, they started feeding the fires with books from the family library. The sight of that broke my heart. No one understood my grief. Latin letters, French and German verse, they might all just as easily have been witchcraft. I sneaked around when these people were out – no one bothered with keys then – stealing my own books from faraway corners of my own house, hiding them in nooks only I knew, in the wine cellar, which was now full of broken glass and mounds of useless furniture waiting to feed the fireplaces. I was caught, and arrested. One of the women found me in her quarters, thought that I was trying to steal a side of bacon. I was one of the former people; nothing was too far-fetched.

  ‘I was arrested and beaten, and cross-examined so many times by different people that everyone forgot the original charge. I ended up in solitary confinement and stayed there for seven months, in a basement cell barely big enough to stand up in, tormented by the thought of my wife and my son. Gradually I worked out that there were identical cells, with prisoners like me, all along the corridor. For some reason the wall which faced the corridor was immensely thick, the metal door we had come through so heavy that the guards delivering our rations – and that happened all too rarely – had to lean against it and push it in with their backs, using the full force of their weight. The dividing walls were much thinner. We could not talk to each other, but we could drum, fingers and palms against the damp brick. Slowly, we developed a kind of alphabet and we used it to communicate late into the night, compulsively, as though we would stop existing if we stopped being heard.