Uncle Rudolf

by Paul Bailey

  —Drink some water, Peters. Take a deep breath and look at me. Trust me, but trust Shakespeare more. Give yourself the faintest ‘e’ as a present and the line is yours to command.

  I was determined, on the evening of the performance, not to let Andrei into Bohemia, of which country, I, Florizel, was prince. I came to the line and spoke it quickly, almost unthinkingly, and the frightened child was banished. He reappeared briefly in the dressing room afterwards, when Uncle Rudolf said I had my mother’s beauty, but that was an embarrassment the sharp-witted Andrew Peters made light of with skill. I had coped with the most difficult, the most complex, poetry in English, and I felt proud at having done so. Compared to my classmates and fellow actors, all of them aged sixteen, I was but a nine-year-old in the language. I had good reason, I told myself, for pride.

  Uncle Rudolf had brought an actress to watch me as Florizel. I glowed from her compliments. Her name has gone, but I do recall that she had very long blonde hair and that she had once played Ophelia – her only excursion (I remember the word) into Shakespeare, she said. Charlie drove the three of us back to the manor. Annie, hearing the car crunch to a halt in the driveway, came out on to the steps to greet me. Although I was tall and confident (by day, at least) I was still her poor, lovely little boy – the goggle-eyed waif she had hugged almost to breathlessness on 23 February, 1937 – and that was how she addressed me as she took me into her arms to enquire how I had fared. It was the actress who gave the answer. In her opinion, I had fared wonderfully.

  Annie had baked a special cake for me, with a layer of the marzipan I loved. There were sixteen candles to blow out.

  —I’ve had my birthday already, Annie.

  —This is to celebrate your arrival as a true English schoolboy, speaking Shakespeare like a native, Uncle Rudolf explained. This is more important than any birthday.

  My triumph as a verse speaker (I blush to think what my acting was like) was toasted in champagne, of which I was allowed one glass, filled to the brim. I was sent off to bed with kisses, and remained Andrew Peters throughout the night and into the early morning hours, unable to sleep for joy.

  Let me now write, with some sadness, of Annie, whose departure from the unusual family bewildered my uncle and mortified me. She had seemed immovable. Only death itself, the vanquisher of every constant, could take her from us, we assumed. She said she was reluctant to go, but blood was blood, and you had to be loyal to it. Her ailing brother needed her. He had no one else to care for him in the entire world.

  —Bring him to London. I will pay for nurses to tend him.

  —Bruce would never accept charity, Mr Rudolf. It’s kind of you to offer. No, I shall have to shift my old bones up to Glasgow, though it breaks my heart to leave poor lovely Andrew behind.

  We saw her off at Euston Station on a drizzly October morning. My uncle kept shaking his head in disbelief as we carried her bags into the first-class compartment in which he had reserved a seat for her. He urged her to change her mind at the eleventh hour and come back to Nightingale Mansions where she belonged. He pleaded with her. Look, he said, here’s the ticket. Give me permission to tear it up and you’ll make me very happy. And your poor, lovely, not-so-little Andrew, too.

  —You will do no such thing, Mr Rudolf. Give me the ticket and be off with the pair of you, before I start to blub. I can’t abide partings.

  And so we left her, with me promising to write, and Annie demanding that I keep my promise, and Uncle Rudolf making a last attempt to dissuade her from going. She hugged me to her, and embraced my uncle. We were speechless and bereft in the taxi taking us back to the rooms in Nightingale Mansions she had graced with her clucking kindliness.

  For it was Annie’s way to express disapproval of Mr Rudolf’s alien habits by pretending to be what she clearly wasn’t – an archetypal Scottish prude, the stern product of an unyielding Calvinism. Her clucks and frowns were parodic in essence, as if she were commenting ironically on the shocked reactions of a genuine daughter of the kirk. She had much to cluck about, given the number of affairs Uncle Rudolf indulged in before and after I entered his life. These had been related to me by the envious and admiring Charlie. Annie had been widowed for twenty years when she first took me in her crushing arms. A framed photograph of her husband in the uniform of a Highland regiment was always at her bedside. She cleaned the glass every day, and kissed his image every night. She was faithful unto eternity, she said. Yet the token cluck and the studied frown were all she exhibited to indicate that Mr Rudolf, her employer and friend, was not like other steady, reliable men – the kind who take marriage vows and stick to them, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Annie was deeply fond of my uncle, whom she once described as a ‘scallywag’. There would have been no scallywags to amuse and tease her if her beloved Gavin had not been killed in the Battle of the Somme. She smiled wistfully at the thought.

  Whenever she talked about her brother Bruce, it was not in flattering terms. She used a word I came to love on her lips – ‘wastrel’. Bruce was a wastrel, a good-for-nothing, a scrounger. He was perpetually short of money, due to his craving for strong drinks, and had been ill with a catalogue of complaints, all of which – she believed – were of his own inventing. If she ever lost touch with Bruce (which, God help her, was a blessing she deserved), she would be sure to find him in one of two places – the saloon bar of the Young Pretender or his doctor’s waiting room. The chances of his turning up, begging cap in hand, at Nightingale Mansions were happily remote. From the pub to the surgery, the surgery to the pub – that was how he filled his days, the wastrel.

  So it was a surprise to me, and to my uncle – who knew more of Bruce’s drunken misadventures than I did – when Annie announced that she was determined to be at her ailing brother’s side for what might be his final illness. As it was, he outlived her by five years. We attended her funeral, the cost of which was met by Uncle Rudolf, although the prudent Annie had already paid for it.

  I kept my promise to write to Annie. I sent her several letters, giving detailed accounts of my various activities, such as they were. I invited her to my wedding. I told her that Mary and I were expecting our first baby. I let her know that the daily help in London and the housekeeper who had replaced her in the country had none of her irreplaceable qualities. And I told her, correctly, that I missed her, and dared to say that if her brother died, she must surely come back to Mr Rudolf. I was to receive a single reply.

  Glasgow, May 12

  My dear Andrew,

  You must be thinking what a very rude old Annie I am. You have written me such lovely letters and I haven’t so much as picked up pen and paper to answer them. The truth is, my dear, that Bruce has been what we call a handful. He brings out the churchwoman in me, I am afraid to say, with his everlasting cursing. It is like looking after a bad-tempered child. Not that I have had much experience in that department, as they say, for you were never difficult, my poor lovely boy.

  I have spoken to Mr Rudolf on the phone. He also gave me your good news. You tell me you miss me. Well, the feeling is mutual. I miss you both. Mr Rudolf was always a pleasure to work for until – My pen is running away with me – until he started having what I call his moods. He has changed. I tried more than once to tell him he has changed but he snapped at me and said he had things on his mind. Perhaps it was that wretched business with Charlie’s son. Well, we all have things on our minds but we do our best to stay polite. Something has happened to him. But tell him I miss him. Will you please, Andrew?

  Your beautiful English puts me to shame. No wonder Mr Rudolf is so proud of you. He has good reason to, what with the storms you have weathered.

  Annie had used this phrase before. I had heard of the storms I had weathered when I was still her poor lovely, and little, boy. What storms had I weathered? I received my answer in 1948.

  You must watch him closely whenever you can and try to keep him cheerful. He used to be Cheerfulness Itself but not any more. I worry
for him. Try and care for him, will you Andrew, but not at a cost to yourself. You and Mary have your own lives to live. Well, there is a stream of words for you. I send you hugs and kisses, my poor lovely boy, which you will always be for me even though you are a grown man. I hear Bruce calling for me. He is a strain on the nerves and that is the truth.

  Remember to tell Mr Rudolf I miss him as I miss you.

  Yours, Annie.

  Reading Annie’s letter of fifty years ago, I see that she was alerting me, in her honest fashion, to the possibility of my becoming the very prisoner I was and am. I think she would have let her preposterously ailing brother rot in his self-created hell if Mr Rudolf hadn’t changed character so inexplicably. She was content with Mr Rudolf the carefree rake, the fêted star of operetta, the dutiful uncle and the blasé man of the world to whom women posted their drawers. It was the melancholic who confused and, perhaps, upset her. At nights, alone in her room, with Gavin’s picture by her side, she too would have been prey to melancholy, to feelings of utter desolation. The happy-go-lucky Mr Rudolf had helped her expunge the worst of her memories – the vision of Gavin being blown to pieces on that day of barbarous slaughter. She had said as much to me over countless meals in the kitchen together.

  —He’s had me laughing with him since the moment he took me on. I often feel I’m acting in a funny play with him. He’s kept me light-hearted, if anyone has, the scallywag.

  After Annie’s simple funeral service, I reminded my uncle that she had said her brother would never accept charity. The devil was in me, I suppose. Spurred on by my remark, he approached the blearyeyed Bruce and said it was his intention, out of respect and for his love of Annie, to pay for everything. He was prepared to match the money she had already paid to the undertaker, with an added bonus to tide Bruce over. My uncle, in the saloon bar of the Young Pretender, wrote him a cheque for five hundred pounds.

  Bruce accepted, tearfully, Mr Rudolf’s charity.

  —This is work for a dogsbody, said my uncle. You shouldn’t be wasting your time with it.

  —I’m not wasting my time. You couldn’t be a recluse without me.

  —If I stopped your salary, you would have to find a job more suited to your intelligence. I have a mind to throw you out of the house and let you fend for yourself.

  This conversation took place every few months, with the words altered but the sentiments unchanged. It was usually light-hearted in tone. Yet once, I remember, he sounded genuinely angry – with himself as much as with me, it seemed.

  —You’re nearly thirty, my darling, and you’ve hardly begun to live. Tear yourself away from me, I beg of you. Go out and find another woman. Sow some more of your wild oats while you’ve got them to sow. I don’t want to feel that I’ve hindered your progress.

  —You haven’t.

  —How would you know? You haven’t given your future without me a moment’s thought.

  It was true.

  —Have you? he persisted.

  —No.

  —Then you should.

  I saw no reason to, I said. I did not add that I still needed the protection his company gave me. I was not going to risk his getting angrier by stating the obvious. I could not imagine being with anyone else – however sympathetic, amusing or interesting.

  —It worries me, Andrew, that you don’t seem to want to be independent. I feel that I ought to be the mother bird and thrust you from the nest. I urge you to consider the future.

  —I shall, I lied.

  —Be sure you do.

  The following morning he suggested we take a summer holiday together, to celebrate the depressing fact that we would each have a nought on our birthdays. He would be sixty in December, and I exactly half his age in January. My immediate future was therefore decided.

  When my uncle broke the news I had been searching for in Andrei’s dreams, my retreating parents stopped and turned towards me, their arms extended in anguished greeting. Their fate was mine, now.

  —Mamica, Tata, I said to their shades.

  My father’s last letter to his brother is before me, in its frayed and faded envelope. Although I know its contents, I lack the strength to pick it up. My hand reaches out for it, and then hesitates. The sight of his clerk’s neat handwriting is more than I can presently bear, for even in distress he delighted in the look of the words he was using. I remember that Roman Petrescu was the town’s corespondent, the calm and thoughtful man who took up his pen on behalf of the poor unlettered, of whom there were too many among us. They sat beside him at his desk in his tiny office in the primarie, marvelling at the exquisite shapes and forms he made out of what they were telling him to write to their distant relatives and loved ones. He remained a calligrapher to the day of his death, when he wrote only for himself. The elegance of his script still unnerves me. I would have preferred him to have gone wild in his grief, to have scratched at the sheet of hotel notepaper as he let his dearly beloved brother Rudi know of his impending plan to disappear. But he didn’t, or couldn’t. He had no truck with wildness. His despair was a stubborn thing.

  I have pushed Tata’s letter beneath a pile of photographs of Rudolf Peterson in his heyday. I am listening to the Golden Age compact disc as I examine them yet again, those mementoes of a time in my uncle’s life when he was the toast of Vienna, Paris, Budapest and the capital of the country he would come to regard as beastly. He is casting roguish glances—I was the absolute master of the roguish glance, Andrew—

  at Hilde Bernhard and the other leading ladies he charmed with his dark handsomeness and angelic voice. He is wearing all kinds of uniform – military, naval, regal, piratical (a fetching eye-patch) as well as the voluminous shirt and baggy trousers of the humane brigand. His face exhibits – I think that’s the correct word – no sign of the melancholy that was already affecting him. He seems to be the happiest man in the world.

  But that was before the events of February 1937, when Rudolf Peterson lost his brother and sister-in-law and gained possession of his nephew.

  How old was I when Uncle Rudolf explained to me the difference between grand opera and the trivia in which, as he said, he had been enmeshed? I think I was sixteen. Not long before, he had given his hugely successful farewell performance, and his public had assumed he was now in retirement.

  —Andrew, my darling, they don’t know that I ache to come back as Don José or Don Ottavio. Or Otello, or Florestan, or Lohengrin. Or anybody other than those fools in silly costumes I’ve impersonated for twenty-five years. I want to sing music that expresses more than idiotic patriotism or soppy romance. I want to sing about real feelings, complicated emotions. That’s what I want to do before I die.

  The plots of most operas are ludicrous, he went on to say. Think of those convenient love potions; those letters that arrive too late; those disguises that anyone with an iota of intelligence would see through. No matter. They are of no matter, those absurdities, when set beside the many moments of truth they help bring into being.

  —There are no such moments in the stuff I’ve wasted my time with. None at all. The sentiments are trite and so is the music.

  Then he talked, once again, of the days he spent in the master’s presence, with Koko the parrot awaiting the opportunity to screech disapproval. He sang the Flower Song for me, in the music room of his Sussex house, just as – he remarked, with a grin – Jean de Reszke had sung it for him between cigars. What a charmed life Andrew Peters led, to have such a tuneful protector, I often told myself. My schoolmates’ fathers were doctors or lawyers or grocers or journalists. None of them, I safely assumed, had the voice of an angel. None of them serenaded their sons the way my protector serenaded me.

  I had seen the newspaper seller from Uncle Rudolf’s car, when Charlie was showing me the varied sights of London. I could merely point at him, because I lacked the new words to express my amazement at his appearance. He looked much more interesting than the statue of Eros Charlie was trying to tell me about.

  —Th
ey say he’s the god of love.

  But my eyes were fixed on the man without a nose, standing in front of the London Pavilion, bawling out News and Star, News and Star. I was mesmerised (a new word I learned in school) by the sight of him. The gap in his face held me spellbound. Each time Charlie drove me through Piccadilly I stared and stared, wanting an explanation for the newsvendor’s missing feature.

  —He put something somewhere he shouldn’t have, Charlie said, and laughed. The phrase has stayed with me thanks to the fact that Charlie repeated it so often.

  —There he is, Andrew. He’s the one who put something somewhere he shouldn’t have.

  Years later, after Charlie had gone from us, I mentioned the noseless man to Uncle Rudolf, and the mysterious observation Charlie used whenever we passed him.

  —If ever anyone was an expert at putting something somewhere he shouldn’t have, it was Charlie. That unfortunate newspaper seller – who, I seem to remember, was pretty cheerful, given his circumstances – had caught syphilis in the days before the discovery of penicillin. The disease must have been untreated to have done such damage to him. It killed Schubert, my darling.

  I learned, that winter afternoon, about the dangers of uninhibited sex, of which busy little Eros, his bow at the permanent ready, was the pagan god. It had struck my uncle as a cruel irony that the poor wretch’s pitch was in Piccadilly, so near to a statue that was intended to represent the Angel of Christian Charity, though ordinary folk knew, or imagined, otherwise.

  —You won’t lose your nose, Andrew. Believe me. You may well lose your heart, but that’s an altogether nicer matter.

  I did not lose my heart to Mary, as everyone assumed, for the brief period of our lonely marriage. I was thirty, and divorced, when I arrived at the realization that it was irretrievably lost. In a hotel in Sapri, on the Tyrrhenian coast, I understood, with terrified delight, that the man who slept beside me was my only love. There could not, and would never be, another.