Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘Do you speak Russian?’ he asked after I stood up from my desk. A book fell off my knees and a pile of handwritten receipts scattered on the floor. I stammered something about understanding and reading. My mother tongue was similar enough.

  ‘What do you read?’ Roman Borisovich interrupted, still in English. ‘From Russia, I mean.’

  ‘Babel. Bunin. Bulgakov.’

  He smiled at my row of Bs.

  ‘But Chekhov also … Tolstoy, of course.’ Having no idea about his literary tastes, I was trying to cover the field.

  ‘No Dostoevsky?’

  There was the merest shadow of a smirk in one corner of his upper lip. He could see I was trying to please.

  ‘Well, yes. And no … I used to, once. I am not sure I would enjoy his work much now. Life is, you could say, hard enough …’

  That sounded wrong. What was I saying about Fyodor Mikhailovich or indeed about myself? All around me there was ample evidence that life, including mine, was anything but hard. He was not paying attention anyway.

  ‘Poetry?’

  ‘Yes, poetry too. Tsvetaeva. Andrei Bely. Akhmatova. Blok. The Silver Age in general. And Puskhin, naturally. Like everyone else. How can you not read Pushkin?’

  How profound, Nikola, I thought with deepest sarcasm, even as I reeled off my all-too-obvious list.

  That, more or less, was it. Our quick chat. The commission that was to transform Fynch’s bookshop for the best part of two years came seemingly as an afterthought. He was, already, almost out of the door when he mentioned the reason for his visit.

  Gorsky was building a house down the road and we were to ensure that, on the day it was ready to occupy, it was furnished with the best library in London. The best private library in Europe. Not just any general library, but a library tailor-made for a Russian gentleman-scholar with an interest in art, literature and travel, and a flair for European languages; a library that would look as though Gorsky had acquired the books himself and read them over many years, or – if he had not already done so – was fully intending to read them. Moreover, a library that would look as though he had inherited much of its stock from bookish ancestors. Gorsky wanted first editions of everything, including the Old Testament, and he wanted his copies in mint condition.

  Money was, I hardly need to add, not an issue.

  ‘I will give you an allowance,’ he said, taking a long, narrow chequebook bound in maroon crocodile skin out of his coat pocket. He paused for a couple of seconds before writing out the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, payable to Christopher Fynch Ltd, as a notice sellotaped to the till directed him to do. The slim barrel of his fountain pen was elaborately encrusted with pin-sized gems. The ink was dark sepia. His handwriting was both beautiful and illegible. The sum was clear enough.

  ‘Spend the money, and when you spend it ask for more. Take thirty per cent off for your time. But I want the receipts for everything, down to the cheapest paperback. Does that seem reasonable?’

  His tone suggested that he was reasonable, indeed generous, but not a fool. It suggested, moreover, that he had had some experience in dealing with people who took him for a fool and that they had found out it wasn’t a good idea.

  As I said, that was, more or less, it. Except, now that I think of it, for one last detail. After I had put the cheque, stupidly, fumblingly, inside the till and closed it, Gorsky gave a final little smirk and paused.

  ‘Art books?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Well, no. I mean yes to Russian art, avidly so indeed, but not in Russian. Yet.’ That, for a change, was absolutely true. I had spent the best part of the previous year swotting up on Russian art, reading every book I could lay my hands on, because of Natalia Summerscale.

  ‘Good. Very good. I’d like my library to be able to enchant an art connoisseur.’

  With that he walked out of the door and into the waiting car.

  2

  Natalia’s phone call took me by surprise. Though surprise seems the faintest little word, nowhere near apt for what I felt.

  ‘I was wondering if you have a copy of that book about Ilya Kabakov just published by Yale University Press,’ she said.

  I knew I was speaking to her although she hadn’t introduced herself. That was the longest sentence I had ever heard her utter. Her English was softened by Russian, like forest fruit macerated in honey. Did I have that Yale book? Did I not?! I made sure we had every last title about conceptualist art, down to the rarest foreign-language chapbook appearing in places like Helsinki or Stuttgart. I had single-handedly, without Christopher Fynch even noticing it, made his bookshop the leading stockist of late Soviet art history, simply in order to keep this woman returning to us, on any book-related whim she could conceivably have. Of course we had that book. I had placed an order practically before the author had submitted his book proposal to Yale.

  ‘Oh, I am so glad, Mr …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Kimović. Nikola. Nicholas, I mean. Nikola is a girl’s name in English: I got bored hearing people explain that to me. Call me Nick, please.’ I stumbled then paused, sensing another question in her hesitation.

  ‘I am Serbian. You know, from Serbia. Belgrade. Not Belgravia.’

  There was a mixture of relief and irony in the little peal of laughter she gave as a response. I could tell where the irony came from. I wasn’t sure about the relief.

  ‘I do know where Serbia is, Mr Kimović. Even Belgrade. I visited it as a girl with my papa. I remember a fortress where two rivers met. A big park with churches. Outdoor cafes everywhere. What a lovely town it was.’

  She offered to send someone to collect the book. She hesitated for a brief moment when I suggested I would be happy to deliver it myself. I was about to close the shop and I would welcome some fresh air and a walk. She could not be too far away, I reasoned. I heard the muffled sounds of a brief conversation then that slightly awkward laughter again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Why not?’

  She spelled out the address, pausing after every letter to make sure I got it. I dutifully pretended to take the directions, and even asked a question or two, although I had known it all for months. I did not for a moment think that my errand would amount to more than the briefest exchange at the door with one of her staff, but it represented a step. Towards what, I wasn’t sure. I hesitate to say it was a step forward, although it felt like one at the time.

  Natalia Summerscale was one of those willowy Russian women who was so tall and so beautiful that your heart missed a beat when she entered a room. She looked like an alien princess. She looked wealthy beyond ordinary dreams of wealth. Her voice wasn’t ‘full of money’; she made you feel vulgar because you dared think that money had any bearing on anything. She stood out, even in this town which was full of beautiful Russian women who followed Russian money as surely as seagulls follow cruise liners. She made Grace Kelly look like a market trader. She was impossibly elegant, impossibly polite, impossibly soft spoken, and made the gentlest of movements – movements that carried a hint of some great disappointment, like someone who had spent her whole life preparing for the part of the white swan, only to lose it because she suddenly grew too tall for ballet.

  I admit it. I was smitten by Natalia although I knew that she was not only married but clearly and conspicuously out of my league, and although I am not given to childish infatuation I spent hours wondering whether and when she would come into the shop. For a long while I had no idea who Mr Summerscale was. It was evident that he was not short of a penny or two. I was convinced that he must also be someone special to have been chosen by this woman, for she could have had any old billionaire she set her eyes on.

  Natalia engaged in no discernible form of work beyond a vague notion of bringing a retrospective exhibition of Ilya Kabakov’s art to London. That at least was what she told me when she first came through the door of Christopher Fynch’s shop one February morning, wrapped in some expensive silver furs and smelling of mimosas. The car that wai
ted for her, although superficially similar to Gorsky’s, looked like the sort of thing any Saudi prince could afford. I soon learned that she did not always dress ostentatiously – in fact, she usually wore jeans and trainers – but that first appearance was almost a parody of a cinematic entrance. How could I forget it?

  Over a few months thereafter, she used to turn up in the bookshop, say a polite hello, look around the art section, drop a few fifty-pound notes on the desk, name a selection of titles, then leave me to scurry around, wrap carefully and write out receipts in my most ornate longhand, adding craven thank-yous in Russian as though she was ever going to check the bills. An hour or two after she left, the driver would turn up to collect her shopping. Her library on the subject must gradually have become quite sizeable, yet weeks passed and her putative exhibition got no closer to fruition. She paid me next to no attention. I don’t think she even realised that I was not English, not until that phone call many months later.

  Occasionally she was accompanied by her daughter, a girl who was as blonde and willowy as the mother, and who looked as though no other genetic material was involved in her creation, as though her existence involved no conception nor labour, but parthenogenesis. The child’s name was Daisy.

  ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Fynch said. ‘An old Russian name, I am sure.’

  I sometimes spotted Daisy in a gingham nursery dress, with a little straw boater perched on top of her head and held in place by a white elastic band under her chin, sitting in the back of the family limousine as it inched down the King’s Road, its liveried driver at the wheel. She would be alone on the back seat, reading a picture book or looking out, always appearing as serene as her mother. Daisy – the name already felt too small for such an Anglo-Russian flower.

  It took a while to name the feeling, so unaccustomed was I to anything like it. Could one be starstruck by someone who was not a star but something more beautiful and rare? Natalia Summerscale was a complicated Fabergé egg, a priceless object I did not desire to possess. I tried to imagine the Russian place where she might have grown up, without much success. She could have been a child prostitute or the granddaughter of Marshal Zhukov; she might have been raised in a Siberian heroin den or a lavish dacha on the outskirts of Moscow; she could have been abused by an alcoholic mother or patted on the head by some Communist walrus with bushy eyebrows and three rows of medals on his chest: no scenario made complete sense, nothing fitted her otherworldly looks. In the imagination, too, she remained out of my reach.

  In those hours when I had nothing better to do – and I had more of those than most men my age – I searched the name Summerscale on the internet. I narrowed it down to a picture of a reasonably good-looking middle-aged man, a very English, strongly built man, like a former army officer, or someone who played rugby rather than cricket at school, but neither long nor well enough to have had his nose broken. He was wearing a dinner jacket over a full, broad chest, and coming out of some charity bash at Claridge’s. Natalia hung on his arm like a silk kite about to take off.

  Mr and Mrs Thomas Summerscale, the caption read. They had paid fifteen thousand pounds at an auction for a dinner with Jeremy Paxman or someone similar. For child leukaemia. No mention of what he did for a living, let alone of what she might be doing.

  I dropped Summerscale’s name into conversations with my Brookner readers and even one or two of my e-mails to Fynch and I got contradictory responses.

  They live in that old hospital off Fulham Road, said one lady. Spent over two years doing it up, drilling God alone knows how deep into the London soil. There was a rumour that she had a slide, a spiral chrome tube, descending two storeys from her bedroom to her private swimming pool in the basement. Also a Russian steam room lined with pre-Raphaelite mosaics assembled from semi-precious stones. Like Kubla Khan’s palace in Xanadu. And the largest private garden in Chelsea.

  Old money, said another.

  Far too much money being splashed around to be old, said the third.

  No one seemed to know what Summerscale was doing in London now, but most suspected he acted as a kind of consigliere for the Russians. The English liked to say that talking about money was vulgar yet they talked about little else. In fact, only earning it appeared to trouble them; spending it, especially on property, was definitely not a taboo.

  ‘I knew his father, something or other in the British embassy in Moscow after the war,’ said Fynch. ‘Good old Cold War days. Decent chap. Young Thomas Summerscale was called to the bar in the late eighties, went over to Moscow with an American consultancy, hooked up with a few people his father knew, came back with trainloads of Russian money and that stunning Russian wife. Had an English wife before. Somewhere in Gloucestershire.’

  He knew Summerscale’s father-in-law too. The first one. A vicar, apparently. A bit on the high side, so a Father. Birettas, bambini, that sort of thing, but nonetheless of the marrying kind. He trailed off into one of his C of E tirades, which usually ended with him wondering how each Archbishop of Canterbury managed to be worse than his predecessor. The Russians held no interest for him unless they were opera singers.

  The address of the hospital was still on a creaking NHS website, illustrated with old pictures – a Gothic folly with a ramp for disabled patients stretching like a drawbridge across a moat, and dozens of blue and white signs for the now redundant wards, their names telling a PC version of British history. No Drakes. No Nelsons. No Nightingales even. Edna this and Frank that. Mainly Ednas.

  I knew the building well. I had walked the streets around it many times, looking over the high walls, across the regimentally striped lawns, trying to see through the ranks of espaliered trees into the darkened windows. The place was called The Laurels, after the hospice that still stood in one corner of the grounds but now looked as though it might house staff accommodation. I never saw anyone coming in or out of The Laurels’ richly lacquered double front doors. The house must have underground access, I thought, or some kind of tradesman’s entrance hidden from view. How could I guess the way these places worked?

  The edifice was so large it could have contained a whole other house inside, a cosier place, like those quaint little mock-cottages at Versailles or Potsdam in which the royals played happy middle-class families; where Natalia and Thomas Summerscale could sit of an evening and watch their daughter practise on her piano while the servants glided along the corridors of the big house, bringing martinis, or camomile tea. A cosy little cottage with a study where Natalia leafed through her expensive editions of conceptualist monographs, planning her great exhibition. It was difficult to see what her planning might involve and why she even bothered dreaming of an event like that. I tried to picture her in the warm glow of a reading lamp, perhaps wearing a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, but fantasising about her day-to-day life was a bit like dreaming of a hand-crafted yacht. I had none of the components needed to put the dream together.

  I spied Natalia on the lawn in front of The Laurels only once. She was holding the arm of Daisy who in turn was holding a tennis racket. They were accompanied by someone who seemed familiar from Wimbledon. They were rehearsing a backhand. I glimpsed them from the top of a double-decker bus and I turned away before either of them could have spotted me. By then I was already living practically across the road, a bit closer to the river, in the gatekeeper’s cottage of a property whose main building was so majestic that it towered over The Laurels. It was a baroque edifice that had once housed an army barracks, with a central dome as big as a cathedral’s and miles of covered colonnades. It looked too grand for a ministry, imposing enough perhaps for the parliament of a medium-sized country.

  It had been surrounded for months by tall hoardings while it underwent a process of reconstruction that in its elaborateness seemed to dwarf anything that the Summerscales had done: less like a private enterprise and more like the rebuilding of the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, or St Paul’s Cathedral. Even the hoardings around the construction site were
painted in an expensive shade of primrose yellow, with the name of a famous architectural practice superimposed on them in midnight-blue in an elegant font. It was the sort of outfit you might engage to add an extra wing to the Louvre or construct a new bridge across the Thames.

  I lived in the shadow of the project for a few months whilst having no idea if the new owner was ever going to show up. This stretch of Chelsea by the river was money-central, a weird corner of a weird city. The rent on my little cottage – it was a mere matchbox, one room stacked above another – amounted to practically nothing because I was happy to live next to the building site for as long as the building took, and happy to confirm that I would leave with a month’s notice as soon as the build was completed. The previous occupant of the cottage had left after the freeholder bribed him in order to sell the place to the Big House. The vast structure that overshadowed my home was officially listed as the Chelsea Yeomanry Barracks, although that certainly wasn’t what the place was going to be called. It was too grand to be a villa, too magnificent to need a name. It made Buckingham Palace look like an ungainly box by a roundabout.

  Even the machinery on the site seemed more suited to large-scale surface mining than domestic architecture. The digging was so extensive that my cottage rattled and hummed with the vibrations. Its walls cracked like the shell of an egg dropped from a great height. New fissures stretched like cobwebs across every wall. I watched from the upstairs windows as Caterpillar trucks criss-crossed fields of freshly dug earth, the smell of which filled my bedroom and permeated my clothes. Armies of junior architects in white safety helmets and yellow high-visibility jackets marched around, builders shouted at each other in Polish all day, cranes as tall as Nelson’s Column went up and down. The entire colossal edifice was being dismantled in order for it to be rebuilt. Enormous mature trees were wrenched up and moved from one place to another to create the sort of avenue Haussmann was fond of in Paris but which the English only ever attempt in the open countryside, well away from their capital, in places where no one but sheep can admire it.