Uncle Rudolf

by Paul Bailey

  —Did Mummy tell you any of this, Andrew?

  —She told me nothing.

  —She was too frightened. Running off to America with him was her only option.

  —She might have done it more tactfully, more politely. I was shaken. I was hurt. At the time.

  —Mummy was guided by her feelings.

  —Yes, Mummy was, and gained her freedom in the process.

  —By all accounts, she and Joshua were happy together.

  —Yes, they were. He was Josh to us. Josh was more down-to-earth, which he was, than Joshua.

  —They caused quite a scandal, I told Billy, emphasizing ‘at the time’ yet again. Their names and photographs were in every gossip column. I was cast as the bravely smiling deserted husband, who only months before had led his beautiful young bride to the altar, and she was the gold-digging adulteress who had brought disgrace on her family and English society. Joshua was depicted as a wealthy child-snatcher, using his money to ensnare the gullible Mrs Peters into becoming his slave. On my uncle’s advice, I remained silent throughout, even though it meant I incurred your grandfather’s wrath as well as his lasting contempt. It was he who announced to the press that he would follow his daughter to the furthest flung parts of the world and bring her back to her home and her senses, and it was he who promised to horsewhip the devious Joshua Harris to within an inch of his dirty old man’s life. As it was, he lost Uncle Rudolf’s friendship and never left the country. Billy, I was, in truth, bewildered. My main anxiety was for you. I wanted news of you, and she never sent any, not a scrap, for two whole years.

  —I’m sorry, Andrew. It’s feeble, I know, but I’m sorry, very sorry.

  I had not been granted the opportunity to be even an inadequate father, as we both acknowledged, with not a little irony.

  It was then that Andrew and Billy shared a warm embrace, and then that their friendship was sealed.

  —I am taking you to France, said my uncle. I intend to borrow you from your unmusical fiancée for at least ten days. You will find the excursion rewarding, I guarantee.

  Was there a purpose to the trip, I asked, and was my presence necessary?

  —Yes to the first question, and yes to the second. I still have a purpose to fulfil, and that purpose involves you.

  —Are we going to Paris?

  —Yes, we’re starting out from there.

  —I’m not sure that I ought to go. I’m not sure I can bear to be in Paris.

  —I will be with you. You will be safe. Don’t worry.

  On the eleventh of September, 1950, I stood beside Uncle Rudolf and looked down on Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  —I was a few months younger than you are now when I was here before. Oh, Andrew, I had such confidence. I really believed what my teacher in Botoşani had told me – that my voice was a gift from God. When you have God as your benefactor, my darling, you don’t have any doubts. That’s the Seine, he said, in a softer tone. That’s the Seine, of course.

  It was a fine autumnal day, a day for walking, and as we traversed the Rue des Deux Ponts the chill I felt after reading my father’s letter swept over me once again. I was in its grip, and had to come to an involuntary halt. I shivered, like one in a fever.

  —Do you want to go on?

  I couldn’t, at that moment, answer my uncle’s question, because my tongue seemed incapable of moving.

  —It isn’t far, he murmured, taking my hand in his. My cold, shaking hand in his steady, warm one. It isn’t very far from here.

  He led me, step by halting step, towards the Pont Marie, from which my father, his pockets weighted with stones, had hurled himself in the early morning of the twenty-seventh of February, 1937.

  I stared at the calm water and tried to picture Tata – in his clerk’s suit, the suit he wore on the train, the suit he was wearing as he waved me goodbye on the platform at the Gare du Nord, the suit he would leap to his death in – hesitating, perhaps, on this selfsame bridge; thinking, perhaps, of his son Andrei, who was only seven, and then not hesitating and not thinking, because to hesitate and to think of Andrei might give him a reason for living, and that was something he didn’t want. I tried to picture him, smoking a cigarette, waiting for people to pass. But all I could see of him was on the platform, his sad face soon obscured by the steam from the engine.

  —La revedere.

  On the Pont Marie, staring in vain at the calm water that had closed over him, I mourned my father with resentful tears. I cursed him from the depths of my heart for not hesitating. The well-dressed Andrew Peters that I was cursed Roman Petrescu in his dull, frayed clerk’s suit for not thinking of his only begotten son. And then I remembered that my mother had another’s life inside her, and I begged and begged his forgiveness, in the old words he understood, without speaking.

  I heard my uncle mumbling a prayer, and saw him make the sign of the cross.

  I touched my protector’s arm, which was quickly about me.

  —Let’s go. Let’s go and gorge ourselves with lovely food. Come along.

  My head was aching the next morning and my mouth dry, because – with Uncle Rudolf’s encouragement – I had drunk too much champagne. I had shared a bottle of Fleurie with him at dinner and consumed several glasses of Armagnac afterwards. I had slept a drunkard’s sleep for the first, and not the last, time.

  He smiled as I joined him for breakfast. There was burnt toast on the table. The surly waiter, initially surprised by his strange request, had finally succumbed to his easy charm and exquisite French.

  —A gallon of water for you, you scamp. We’re setting off in an hour.

  I asked him where we were going, but he answered that our destination was a secret and would remain so until we reached it.

  —We are driving in the direction of Fontainebleau today. That much I can reveal.

  It was a relief to have Paris behind us, to sit close to my protector, who was more protective than ever, as he drove the modest car he cherished along dusty country roads. He sang for me sometimes from Die Schöne Müllerin, which he had been practising constantly with the uncomplaining Ivan, the seldom Terrible. Dein ist mein Herz, dein ist mein Herz – he was fifty, but he might have been a pining, love-sick boy, so youthfully and jauntily anguished was the sound he made. It could have been me singing, if I’d a voice, of my own adolescent passion – except that mine hadn’t been an adolescent’s passion. I was attracted to Mary, but not to the extent of singing about her. I think I understood, on that autumnal day of reddening leaves, that if I’d had a voice it would be expressing either the grief I felt for my mother and father or the delight I was experiencing in my protector’s company. If only I’d had a voice.

  We arrived in Fontainebleau at dusk, when it was too late to visit the palace. I slept soberly in the small hotel where, as ever, burnt toast was provided for breakfast. On the thirteenth of September we were in Troyes; on the fourteenth we lunched in Chaumont and spent the night in Langres, and on the fifteenth we crossed the Saône at Arc and drove through Gray on the other side, reaching Besançon, our destination, in darkness. There was a music festival in progress in the city, and that evening we attended a reception in a grand hall where my uncle chatted to some of the artists who were taking part. I remember an elderly woman in a silver ballgown attaching herself to him, saying over and over that he was still the handsomest man in the world and that she had loved him half to death in Vienna.

  —You are kind, Madame. He spoke with strained politeness.

  —Oh, I am not kind in the least, Maestro. I saw your wonderful Danilo as often as I could. I was smitten. Vraiment frappée.

  —Thank you, Madame.

  —Oh, do not thank me, Maestro. It is you that must be thanked. You are a truly wicked man to retire so young.

  —I am fifty, Madame. Fifty is not young.

  —If you are young at heart it is, and you look young at heart. Fifty is nothing. You will, perhaps, be cajoled into singing for us while you are here
, yes?

  —I will, perhaps, be cajoled into singing for you while I am here, no. That is not the purpose of my visit. I have brought my nephew to Besançon for the sole purpose of opening his eyes and ears to the genius of Dinu Lipatti, the greatest pianist to come out of our beastly country. Goodnight to you, Madame.

  Uncle Rudolf, seeing a musician he recognized, signalled to the man and led me across the hall to him. They talked only of Lipatti, and of the possibility that he would be too ill to play the following afternoon.

  —I have brought Andrew to hear him. To watch him as well. I shall offer up a prayer on his behalf.

  His praying woke me in the early hours. He had left his bed and was on his knees in front of the icon of St Nicholas, which he had placed on the dressing table.

  —I packed him, Andrew. I thought he might be beneficial.

  My uncle was on edge throughout the morning of the sixteenth of September. He was not alone in his anxiety, for everyone we met expressed concern about the pianist’s health.

  —I am being intolerably selfish, Andrew. I want him to perform today. I want something for both of us to remember.

  We were to discover, when the recital was over, that Lipatti had willed himself into the Salle du Parlement de la Franche-Comté. In the late morning, after rehearsing, he suffered a feverish attack of such severity that his doctor was forced to tell him he would be incapable of playing. The organizers of the festival were informed by telephone of the decision. Then, on learning that every seat in the salle was occupied, Lipatti disobeyed his doctor’s advice. It took him an eternity to dress; an eternity to walk to the waiting car that would bring him to the recital room. The audience was apprehensive, but strangely patient, for the hour the concert was due to begin had already passed. I can recall the intensity of feeling that seemed to possess everybody present. We were not to know, then, of the Calvary he had endured climbing the steps leading up to the Parliament House, nor that he had stood by the side of the platform clutching a hot-water bottle to warm his frozen hands.

  The dark-suited Lipatti, more apparition than living man, came into view. We applauded as he made his slow progress to the piano. I heard Uncle Rudolf sigh.

  It was no spectre who began to play Bach’s First Partita. The apparition became on the instant radiantly animated. Were we aware of the perseverance, the superhuman fortitude, that propelled him that September afternoon? If we were, that would have been our sentimental illusion, since his undoubted fortitude was kept hidden by the pianist behind a necessary mask of civility. It was afterwards – after we had listened in coughless silence to the Mozart Sonata in A minor, two Schubert impromptus and a captivating string of Chopin waltzes – that we realized what an Olympian event we had been privileged to attend. We had not been watching a showman displaying his skills, nothing so predictable or commonplace. Lipatti was above display and superficial cleverness. He had played for us exactly what the composers had intended us to hear.

  Uncle Rudolf was too moved to speak, and so was I. In the years to come, he would often refer to the miracle that had taken place in Besançon, for Lipatti never performed again in public, and died on the second of December that same year.

  The woman in the market is shrieking the insult she first uttered sixty-four years ago. Her hatred persists. She will be cursing the Debt Collector’s daughter until I die, though perhaps in my last moments she will show me some courtesy and be silent. Or perhaps, as seems likely, she won’t.

  The men who took my mother into the forest have no faces, no voices. The woman in the market is their spokesman, and it’s her jeering face I see this morning as I saw it then, that far-off November.

  —I have spoilt you long enough, said Uncle Rudolf, smiling. The time has come for you to be educated. I have found a teacher for you. I want you speaking English sooner rather than later.

  —Yes, Uncle, I answered, in the new words.

  —Mrs Watson will be here at nine tomorrow. Do not be frightened by her name, Andrew. She is Romanian.

  What I chiefly remember of Marthe Watson is her hair. It must have been a human colour in the past – black, I suspect, or brunette – but now it was purple. I learned, eventually, that she dyed it regularly with henna.

  —Do not stare at me in that rude manner, Andrew. You must always show respect to a lady.

  —Yes, Mrs Watson.

  —Say it and mean it. The future tense of the verb ‘to have’, if you would be so kind.

  —I will have—

  —Shall. Shall is correct.

  —I shall have, Mrs Watson.

  —Carry on.

  I carried on, and faltered, and stammered, and within a month my vocabulary had increased considerably under my purple-haired teacher’s strict tutelage.

  —I forbid you to speak another word of Romanian, Andrew.

  —Yes, Mrs Watson.

  —Say something other than ‘Yes, Mrs Watson’, if you would be so kind. Give me an answer. In sentences.

  —I promise not to speak one more word of Romanian. I promise to only speak English.

  —‘English only’. You will keep that promise, Andrew.

  As she was leaving that day, she spoke to my uncle in the language I was newly forbidden to speak in her presence. She despaired of what was happening in their country, she told him, and he agreed with her. He had been unhappy from the moment Carol the Second had ascended the throne.

  The order established by Ferdinand and his brilliant wife Queen Marie had been dissipated. The alliance with Britain and civilized Europe was now in tatters. Romania was in spiritual and political ruins.

  —Evrei, said Marthe Watson. They are the cause. They poison the world with their greed. They have poisoned Romania.

  My uncle, reaching down to kiss me, whispered:

  —Go to the kitchen, my darling, and have your tea. Annie is ready for you.

  There was no purple hair to distract me the next morning. Marthe Watson’s teaching had been successful, Uncle Rudolf couldn’t deny, but she had opinions he had no wish for me to overhear. I would understand when I was older. There were too many people, not all of them Romanian, with opinions like hers.

  —I will find you another teacher. You are an excellent student. I am proud of you.

  My second tutor, Victor Collingham, had a bushy moustache which was constantly moist with saliva. Victor was in the strange habit (to me) of chortling to himself. Yes, chortling – a word unknown to me then – is what he did. He never said anything funny or silly – as Charlie and Teddy would, to make me laugh – but he chortled even so. His other, stranger habit was to refer to Mrs Collingham as ma femme. ‘According to ma femme’ he would begin, or ‘As ma femme is fond of saying’ – scarcely a lesson would pass without the thoughts of his femme being related to me, his increasingly confused pupil.

  —Mr Collingham, could you teach me a little French?

  —French? No, no. Definitely not. He chortled.

  —Just a little.

  —No, not even that much, Andrew. I don’t speak any French. A smidgen, and that’s my limit. As ma femme would no doubt observe: Victor Collingham, you are not a linguist.

  The chortler taught me to write thank-you letters to those who had been kind to me and very short short stories about the daily routine at Nightingale Mansions. He marked passages in books – novels or works of history – for me to read aloud. When I stumbled over a difficult word, he gave me a chortling explanation of its meaning. My brain was adrift with nouns, verbs, clauses, adjectives and adverbs, but I was determined to succeed for my uncle’s sake and to ensure he retained his pride in my excellence as a pupil.

  —Ma femme isn’t best pleased I’ve been called up for military service. She was under the mistaken impression that I’m too old. I’m not, Andrew. I am a decidedly elderly thirty-seven.

  Victor Collingham said goodbye on the sixth of April, 1940. His departure, with a chortle louder and longer-lasting than all previous chortles, was the subject of one
of my very short short stories, which Uncle Rudolf posted to him. To my dismay, there was no reply. Perhaps – the word on which my life so often seems to be founded – he was offended by what I, a precocious ten-year-old, wrote about him. I did not, could not, use words such as ‘chortle’ and ‘saliva’, but my descriptions of his laugh and his moustache must have offended him.

  I know this with the enduring anguish of hindsight.

  On my happiest days, in those first years in England, I realized that I belonged to, and was the centre of, an unusual family. I had no mother and father – according to my uncle, they were lost or in hiding somewhere, but I did have a solicitous uncle (the word ‘solicitous’ is especially applicable); I had the doting Annie, who baked me cakes when I was well and nursed me with delicious soups and broths when I was sickly; and there was Teddy Grubb, with his card tricks that mystified a gullible boy and still mystify his fond remembrancer, and Charlie the chauffeur, whose Cockney accent he encouraged and dared me to mimic as he drove me through the city streets and down the narrow country lanes that led to Uncle Rudolf’s Sussex home.

  The wakeful Andrew Peters thrived in their company. They were united in a conspiracy to keep the poor little exile happy, and their every plan was successful. What a charmed decade or so that was – the more charmed when I recall the wartime blackout, with Annie making sure that not even the faintest chink of light could be seen through the windows, and the German bombs that seemed to be coming nearer and nearer with each new raid. It was charmed, too, despite my brief separation from Uncle Rudolf – the most degrading week of his entire life, he would tell me later – for by then I was in the relative safety of the countryside and free to play in the garden and roam in the surrounding fields. (He made fun of the white hairs that had suddenly sprouted on his temples, saying they were the inevitable consequences of growing old. He was forty-three.) My life at the grammar school was charmed as well, though I was terrified of being hit by a cricket ball in that most incomprehensible of games, with its terminology that sounded, and sounds, sublimely ridiculous. I learned English poems by heart, and acted as Florizel in a truncated version of The Winter’s Tale, my brown-skinned Perdita a boy named Peter Long, and passed all my exams with ‘flying colours’. I excelled in English, French and History and was never less than my uncle’s pride. When my classmates asked where my parents were I repeated that they were lost or in hiding, and said I was unhappy that they did not know of my progress.