‘I can’t believe you were planning to do this alone,’ Alex said inside the car, while my face contorted and the driver cast worried glances at me.
‘I was going to walk,’ I said. ‘Charing Cross Hospital is only ten minutes away.’
He went there with me and stayed, pacing the lobby, that whole night and the following morning. The midwives must have wondered at the man in a dinner jacket and the woman in an over-the-top ruffled shirt and a long, black, forgiving skirt, who stepped out of a taxi as though she had gone into labour at some glittering event. Everyone knew that he was not my husband. But it did not matter. I needed to have someone to hold me when it was all over. Someone to hold me so that I could hold you.
Afterword
I spent most of 2016 with a calendar for 1947 on my desk savouring the pleasure of time travel. I won’t offer footnotes or a bibliography here, and of course I took my own liberties, but I would like to register three moments in the gestation of the story.
The youngest Count Karenin – Gigi – was inspired by Patrick Skipwith who played Sergei in Alexander Korda’s version of Anna Karenina. Patrick’s mother was a Russian princess exiled in London, and she worked at one point as an assistant to Laurence Olivier. Her life story is the subject of Sofka Zinovieff’s excellent biography The Red Princess (2007).
Readers of Monsieur Ka may recognise many names, either from Tolstoy’s work or from the history of British film. However, Prince Nikolai Rodionovich Repnin, the main character of Miloš Crnjanski’s The Novel of London (1971), one of my favourite Serbian books, will probably pass unnoticed unless I mention him. He is that unnamed East European who looks mournfully at Albertine from the top of a double-decker bus on Piccadilly in Chapter Two. He sits above an advertisement for Emu wool. I am not sure why I thought it important, but I went to great lengths to find the slogan for the ad which is mentioned only in passing by Crnjanski.
Halfway through writing, when I already knew that Monsieur Carr was going to read Anna Karenina for the first time in a revolutionary prison, but I still had no idea how this was to be achieved, I heard a Radio 4 programme about Adan Abokor. Abokor did just what I describe. It took him two full months to complete the reading of Tolstoy’s great work in this way.
I hope my readers take less time than that to read Monsieur Ka. For advice and encouragement, I am grateful to Clara Farmer and Charlotte Humphery at Chatto, my agent Faith Evans, Neal Ascherson, Simon Bradley, Laurence Colchester, Simon Goldsworthy, Alan Hollinghurst, Roderic and Mandy Lyne, Peter Mudford, Graham Swift and Sofka Zinovieff.
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Copyright © Vesna Goldsworthy 2018
Cover: London, 19th December 1946 © Topfoto
Vesna Goldsworthy has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in 2018
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Monsieur Ka Page 25