‘Are the pages glued together?’ asked Inna, looking curious for the first time in days.
Horace said nothing; just grimaced, and yanked.
He was a bit breathless by the time the leather front finally dropped away, with a tearing noise, to reveal hundreds of pages, all stuck together with violin-making glue, to make the sides of a box – a box with a deep square cut in the middle of every page. It was an idea he’d had when he’d first done his deal with Fabergé to hide things from oafish requisitioning Bolsheviks: the perfect hiding place. Little boxes and glittering jewellery tumbled out on to the table.
The Lemans squealed, leaned forward, and put their hands out to touch. They opened the boxes, and more shining objects were revealed. They oohed and aahed as they lifted from the shimmering mound an egg pendant on a fine gold chain whose bottom half of faceted violet amethyst was separated by a gold band from a top half of smoothly creamy enamel; a curvy photograph frame of translucent grey guilloche enamel, decorated with a tracery of silver-gilt lilies of the valley; a delicate bracelet, shaped like another bouquet of foliage and flowers and ribbons, made of sparkling gold, diamonds and enamel; a perfectly lifelike onyx bulldog, with emerald eyes and a miniature golden collar, whose bell actually rang; an art deco brooch in silver-topped gold, with a large aquamarine and a smaller diamond at its wider end; a pair of peasant figurines, in semi-precious stones and enamel, full of the patience and gentleness of old Russia; a pair of gold and enamel cufflinks, with a swirl of tiny lilies across the blue background; and a blue-and-gold enamel cigarette case, with a snake coiled elegantly around it, its tail in its mouth.
‘My own savings, these,’ Horace said, but no one was listening.
‘Take what you want,’ he said, a little louder. ‘I can’t travel with all this. We’ll share them out.’ He was aware of Madame Leman’s sudden sharp-eyed glance – of the disbelief in it, for she must be doing the sums and seeing that, if sold, these playthings of the old rich would keep them in bread and jam and sausage for as long as she could imagine – but he only smiled wider (how they’d always laughed at his quick English smile) and gestured with his hand: take, take. Gradually, they all started to smile, too – soft, radiant smiles. Their hands slowed, reflectively sifting through the beautiful little objects. The charmed look of yesterday was in every pair of eyes.
‘But you, Horace,’ Madame Leman said gently when, even after Aunt Cockatoo furtively stuffed the picture frame into her jacket before he could change his mind, he didn’t move to touch the pile they were fingering, ‘you must take something for yourself, too.’
Horace hadn’t found these little trinkets so remarkable when he’d been putting them by, over the years. They were beautifully made, of course, but too mannered, too refined and dainty to be truly art, as he understood the term, with the sweep and love of experiment and roughness he loved most.
But now, seeing them gleaming on the table among the greasy plates, he was swept with a nostalgia so intense it felt like pain for the lost world they belonged to.
‘Yes,’ he said, simply, reaching forward too, and picking out the ice pendant. Now that was truly lovely, so apparently simple it took your breath away: a long, irregular, octagonal form in rock crystal, frosted and faceted, subtly etched, here and there, with the thin jagged lines that frost draws on glass – icicles, Carl Fabergé had called them – which were applied with rose- and brilliant-cut diamonds so they sparkled when the pendant moved, with only the border of tiny, regular, brilliant-cut diamonds giving away the artificiality of the piece’s creation.
He turned to Inna. ‘This is for you. To remind you of the snows.’
She hadn’t been touching anything, any more than he had, and now looked lost as he fastened the pendant round her long narrow neck. The others all cheered and stamped their feet.
They were right to applaud, Horace thought, appreciatively. Inna was wearing a black dress, and the crystal took on its darkness, but the tiny gemstones winked and sparkled with her breath. With her black hair piled up carelessly on her head, and that magical curve to her cheekbones, that added flash of glamour lent her the air of a grand duchess. If only her eyes weren’t so clouded, Horace thought …
Perhaps Madame Leman guessed at Horace’s anxiety, because she leaned over and, kissing Inna’s forehead, said, tenderly, ‘You don’t have any idea how beautiful you look, I can see. You never have had. But, oh, the havoc you could cause, in that…’
Inna put a hesitant hand to her neck, and touched the chain. Looking bewildered, she nodded her thanks.
‘And for the journey,’ Madame Leman prompted, ‘Horace, do have some sense and take at least one or two things with you. You never know when you’ll need something pretty to please someone on the road.’
Horace nodded, grateful for the tartness in her down-to-earth voice. He picked up the amethyst pendant, and the slim, showy cigarette case, which would be easy to carry. Felix Youssoupoff had had one like it, he recalled. He slipped both items into his pocket.
‘And what’s this?’ Barbarian was digging at the square hole in the dictionary. There was one more box still wedged in there, quite a big one, which Horace hadn’t managed to tip out.
‘Ah, yes,’ Horace said. Using the knife, he levered out the package.
There’d been a time, long ago, when he’d thought of simply posting this to England, to his sister, for her to keep for him, so it was wrapped in brown paper, string and sealing-wax, and addressed to Mrs. William Ingham Brooke, The Rectory, Barford, Warwickshire. He cut through the string.
Inside the paper was a silk Hollywood box, lined inside with velvet, and with the lid satin stamped, heartbreakingly, with words written in the old way of yesterday’s Cyrillic: ‘Fabergé, St. Petersburg, Moscow, London’.
‘Open it,’ Agrippina said, wide-eyed.
Horace did, taking out a fist-sized egg vertically striped in green-and-cream enamel, on a delicate golden stand, with an emerald set at the top.
‘Press it,’ he told Inna, setting it before her.
When Inna touched the emerald, a tiny catch moved. At once, the little egg sprang open, into slices that concertinaed smoothly outwards: each oval slice hinged to the next, each one turning out to be a glassed picture frame bordered by tiny, perfectly matched seed pearls, each frame containing a miniature vista of a different St. Petersburg street, in pastel colours, the throat-catchingly lovely way those streets had all used to be …
They all stared; remembering, suddenly; eyes filled with tears.
‘That,’ he told Inna, ‘I always thought, would show our children and grandchildren where we’d first met. That’s my gift to them.’
As Inna looked at the egg, something in her face finally relaxed. Then, at last, she turned to face Horace, and put her hands in his.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sitting on the bags in the hall beside Horace, Inna joined the Leman family in the ritual minute of silence before departure. Then she left the apartment and walked through Hay Market in a daze.
It was only at the station, on the platform, with the clank and swoosh of trains all around, and bitter little eddies of snow in the air beyond the station building, and the ragged men with guns checking the papers of every person who passed them, and the young Lemans inside the train energetically cramming the bags into the overhead rack of the packed carriage, sandwiching the violin between the two softer ones, and laughing quite hysterically at unfunny things, that Inna looked around at the family and realized she was really leaving.
Her eyes filled with stinging tears.
Her heart lurched at the thought that struck her next. She hadn’t said goodbye to Yasha. Yasha, who, only days ago, she’d felt so close to, spiritually as much as physically, and who must have felt the same; Yasha, who’d helped to rescue her, and who was as trapped as she was, now, in a life not of his choosing; Yasha, more herself than she was, who knew everything about her and always would; Yasha, whom she loved and would never see again
.
Suddenly every complexity, every nuance of emotion she’d ever felt was burned away in the awful simplicity of this truth. She yearned to see him, to feel, taste and smell him so desperately that she felt faint with it. Three days, she reminded herself, in an agony of self-reproach – three whole days – and I never tried to see him, not even to say goodbye …
And now it was too late.
She looked up the platform, searching for his face.
But there were only strangers, hundreds and hundreds of strangers.
Instead she fell into Madame Leman’s arms, hugging her harder than she’d intended, knocking hairpins flying from that white-grey hair, reassured, for a moment, by the familiar home smell of bread and lily of the valley, murmuring broken snatches of words, ‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough, never, dear, sweet, good Lidiya Alexeyevna. I’ve been … you’ll be … we’ll…’
Madame Leman hugged her back. ‘There, darling, there,’ she said soothingly. ‘Don’t you fret, it’ll all be fine, and soon we’ll—’ But then her voice broke too.
‘Look after Horace,’ Inna heard next, but only vaguely, for she was looking along the platform again. Could it be? But no, it was only Marcus, emerging from the crowded gloom, limping towards them with newspapers tucked under his arm.
‘They’re fresh ones,’ he said, trying to look cheerful. He gave the smudgy folded sheets to Horace. ‘Come back and see us,’ he added. ‘And send your children to me, when they’re old enough to be apprentices; I’ll make luthiers of them all.’
Balancing on his crutch, he gave Horace a one-armed hug. Then he hugged Inna, too, looking hungrily into her eyes as if he were memorizing her for the future. ‘And you, dear heart. Look after yourself, look after your husband, look after your children when they come, be happy, wealthy and wise forever, and always as lovely as you are today.’
She clung to him. ‘Dearest Marcus,’ she whispered, trying to laugh, remembering the puppy of a boy he’d once been, and his father rumpling his hair. How proud old Leman would have been to see him now, looking after the family. ‘Marry Olympia, have babies, write poetry, and open up the workshop again soon, do you hear?’
For a moment, behind Marcus, she thought she saw a tall silhouette in the distance: black hair cut short. Her heart stopped. But, as the man came closer and his outline resolved into detail, she saw he was just another nobody; one of the multitudes of strangers the world was filled with; not the shape she was looking for.
The whistle went piercingly in her ear. ‘Get on, quick,’ Madame Leman was saying, wiping her eyes. Horace tugged at her arm.
Panic rose, catching Inna’s throat. She couldn’t go yet.
And then there were arms around her from behind.
She wheeled around, suddenly breathless with expectation—
But it was only Barbarian and Agrippina, both together, breathless themselves from climbing out of the carriage at high speed, both flinging themselves on her, nearly howling at the prospect of parting, ‘Innochka! Write! As soon as you can! Don’t forget! We’ll be waiting! We’ll check the mailbox every day!’
Bitterly ashamed of the disappointment that must briefly have shown on her face, she kissed them both back just as frenziedly. ‘I will! I promise! And you be good for your mother, both of you, and for Marcus, and work hard, and…’
Behind them, the train hooted mournfully, then screeched into slow motion. She couldn’t. She hadn’t. She must. She looked desperately up the platform, through the thickening snow, one more time.
‘Get on, Innochka!’ the children were screaming. ‘Hurry!’
Grabbing the handle on the carriage doorway, Inna leaped on to the latticework outer step behind her husband.
Even when the train speeded up, Barbarian and Agrippina went on running along the long platform beside them, faster and faster, waving and breathlessly shouting, with tears streaking their cheeks and snow pushing unheeded into their faces, until the adults behind them were just a grey huddle against the lit-up silhouette of the station; until, eventually, they fell back, laughing, crying and collapsing breathlessly against each other.
And they, too, dwindled away into points in the darkness, until they were swallowed up in it altogether, and there was just the rhythmic clank of the train, and the conductor closing the door, and the sudden stillness of the sweaty air inside, and the sway of the yellow lamp, and Horace beside her, tall but slightly bowed, blowing his nose and dabbing at his eyes. He was opening the last little package Madame Leman had pressed into his hands, which, Inna could see, even through the mist over her own eyes, contained a dozen hard-boiled eggs and Maxim’s wife’s piece of sausage. ‘Well, that’s that. And now let’s find our places,’ he said shakily, taking her arm, and guiding her into the carriage.
* * *
Long ago, when Inna had come north, alone, by train, the journey had been frightening. But the empire had still existed, and everything about the actual travel arrangements had been as sleek as the gendarmes’ shiny-buttoned uniforms. Her entire trip, with its one easy change of train in Moscow, had taken, what, three or four days?
Going south, now, in the People’s Russia, was an altogether different matter, even up here in the north, where there was no war to worry about. The crowded, broken-down trains limped, agonizingly slowly, from one siding to the next, one tumbledown village or town or city to the next. People got on or off. And everyone argued.
It took four days just to get to Moscow. And Inna wept all the way.
‘So many tears,’ Horace said, gently, with his arm about her. ‘A lifetime’s supply.’ And it was true that the endless flow of salt liquid down her face surprised even her.
They were sharing a top bunk. They lay down on it by night, with the violin under the two bags at their feet, and the dwindling parcels of food on top of everything, and the eggshells slowly filling up the tube Horace had made of one of Marcus’s newspapers. By day they sat on the bunk, side by side, arm in arm, with their legs swinging down in the faces of the people below; or, if the compartment was crowded, as it usually was, they went on uncomfortably lounging on the rumpled bedding and – in Inna’s case – quietly sobbing.
She was aware, even as she cried, that they shouldn’t be drawing attention to themselves. So she tried to stop. There’s so much you don’t need to think of, she kept telling herself. You just have to hold on to what you need: that we’re going to get through the war, that we’re going to find Youssoupoff, that we’re going to be all right. But, however surprised she felt at her collapse, however angry with herself, the tears would well up again, regardless, dripping on to the newspaper, swelling over the eggshells, soaking her front.
Yet, as it turned out, it didn’t much matter what she did, in this rhythmic, trance-like movement from past to future. Many of the passengers didn’t even seem to be aware she was there. Mostly, they were too busy with their business: particularly the fattish, smooth-jowled men, with their mysterious bundles and their suspiciously good clothes and their supplies of chicken drumsticks and brandy and cards and cigarettes.
They liked to sit up half the night chomping, and gaming, and smoking, and warbling sentimental folk songs out of tune in their rough voices, and even when the singing of one merry band (‘Spreading o’er the rii-veer, Golden willow tree-eee; Tell me true: my lover, Whe-e-ere is she?’) reduced Inna to audible sobs in the middle of the first night, long after Horace, with his head by her feet, had fallen into a heavy, exhausted sleep, the men just laughed, not unkindly. One got up, and, in a fiery burst of brandy breath, grinned at her. Frightened, she pulled away from him, but all he did was hold out a square of chocolate, unwrapped and half melted in the heat of the compartment. He said, ‘Here, girl, don’t take on so, it’s all going to be all right,’ and watched, as if she were a child with medicine, while she swallowed his little black-market luxury down. She kept her breathing quiet after that, although even then the water squeezed out under her eyelids, as she lay willing hersel
f to sleep.
Sometimes, kindly matrons, of whom there were fewer, also looked sympathetically up to their high bunk. One reached up before she got out, patted Inna’s knee, and said, ‘Heading south, are you? No need to be so scared; you’re in God’s hands,’ before making the sign of the cross over her. Another passed Inna a hanky, saying hoarsely, ‘Keep it, dearie; I know a broken heart when I hear one.’
Inna told Horace the first evening that it was the shock of having remembered her parents that was making her cry, that she felt as though she was only now beginning to mourn them. Horace nodded as she spoke, as if everything about her were coming together in his head and making sense at last.
‘That’s why you’ve always been so frightened, isn’t it?’ he kept saying, unbearably kindly. Once, kissing her hair, he even added wistfully, ‘And maybe now you’ll lose that fear. Who knows, perhaps you’ll even become a violinist at last, and take Europe and America by storm?’
‘You don’t think, do you, that she, my mother, felt … abandoned … when I went away?’ Inna whispered.
‘Oh dear heart, no. It was exactly what she wanted – for you to get away and be safe. It was what she was telling you to do. You don’t ever need to feel guilty for having obeyed her. You were absolutely right,’ he replied, holding her close.
He also said that it was a blessing to have remembered her family, even with all the pain that the memory had brought. Because she’d felt alone in life, hadn’t she, until now? But now she knew that, however badly things might have ended for her parents, at least they’d known the greatest joy in life: having her. And she could take real comfort, at last, in having brought her parents that happiness; having been at the centre of their world; and in knowing that she hadn’t been alone at the start. ‘You had their love,’ Horace whispered. ‘And you have me now. You’ll never be alone again.’
But I am alone, Inna thought then, in spite of all his kindness, and, out of despair at her own ungrateful contrariness, cried again.
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