I sensed myself blushing to the roots of my hair. This was clearly matchmaking, yet there was something vaguely humiliating about the exercise. Was Natalia Summerscale putting me in my place by linking me, however tentatively, with her personal trainer?
Daisy arrived carrying a folder of music sheets. Natalia stood up and held Daisy’s head in both hands to plant a wordless kiss on her blonde parting. The child barely glanced at the rainbow-coloured stacks of macaroons piled high around the samovar and took none. She whispered good evening and continued on her way. I used the interruption as a cue to offer my apologies and leave.
No one would have called the visit a success, but it could have been much worse. On the way home, I made a huge loop around The Laurels, cutting through The Boltons, as though I was trying to cover my tracks. Victorian crescents glistened. The sound of car wheels on gravel driveways punctuated the steady hum of rain. The rich interiors, with their carefully draped curtains and flower arrangements, seemed open to the world and positively cosy compared to The Laurels. I could imagine people collapsing into deep velvet sofas at the end of their evening, checking their e-mails, doing the crossword, listening to music. These were the lives I could still, just about, make some sense of.
An hour later, I was almost back where I started. I bought a cup of coffee on the ground floor of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, in whose huge atrium I sat for a couple of hours watching patients and medical staff riding up and down escalators. High above us all, rain pattered against the panes of the glass roof. There was a flower shop behind the cafe and, next to it, several tables stacked with books donated to a cancer charity.
Please help yourself and leave as much as you can, said a note attached to a green collecting jar. I emptied my wallet into it – a tenner and a few loose coins. There was no book I wanted.
In a Serbian hospital a visitor wouldn’t have made it past the porter at this late hour. Here, everything was open, even to a casual visitor like me who had no business inside. The British are squeamish about death, but they have no problem with sickness, so long as we are talking about the body rather than the soul. The body can bend to the will of the soul. You might be born male but become a woman, you can tattoo and pierce your skin, change the colour of your hair and the shape of your teeth and your nose, you can enlarge or reduce your breasts, adjust your outward appearance to whatever you want it to be. The only thing you are not allowed to be is unhappy, particularly if you are an immigrant. Unhappiness is a form of ingratitude, an abuse of hospitality.
In the course of our surreal tea party, Natalia Summerscale had stood up from her sofa twice: once to take Gery Pekarova’s hands and link them with mine, once to kiss the top of her daughter’s head. And both times she held my gaze and said: ‘I am so happy. So, so happy.’
I did not believe it for a moment.
The rain was soft and steady. When I returned home, one of the gates to the building site next door was ajar. Curious to see the works, I walked in and found myself in the middle of a landscape that looked like a First World War battlefield. I carried on along the improvised walkway that stretched over mounds of freshly dug earth. The Thames glimmered faintly through the trees. A solitary barge glided eastwards towards the City and its money mills, and further onwards to Docklands where, amid the towering offices, warehouses that once stored spice and sugar from the colonies were now echoing minimalist apartments and shiny, antiseptic gyms with treadmills and rowing machines powered by the energy of finance. The enormous statue of Buddha on the northern edge of Battersea Park surveyed from the south bank the scene of desolation across the river. High above me, the baroque dome, suspended on a vast iron grid, offered some protection from the rain, like a stone umbrella.
I turned away from the river to light a cigarette and realised that in doing so I had gained a direct line of sight – at some distance – into the upper floors of The Laurels. The complicated shapes of its extraordinary chandeliers sparkled behind the fine muslin curtains, but the cavernous rooms they illuminated seemed completely empty.
I heard a muffled cough and realised that someone was standing right beside me, leaning against one of the stone columns that, for the moment, supported nothing. I turned towards the sound and immediately recognised the long face and the distinctive hair, which seemed moonlit even in daytime. The evening light made it look like liquid silver.
‘You know, young man, you shouldn’t trespass like this. Didn’t you see the warning? Hard hats must be worn. And it is usually alarmed around here. At least no one can accuse you of wanting to steal a Corinthian column.’
‘I live just over the wall.’ I nodded towards my little cottage.
‘We are next-door neighbours then. Or soon will be. But not for long, perhaps. I am sure you know. I will need to put a roof over my boys’ heads.’ He flicked his hand as if to dismiss me, but as he did so, I noticed three men in black leather jackets further around the colonnade step back into darkness.
I bade Gorsky goodnight and descended along the makeshift pathway. The windows of the house opposite disappeared behind the tall hedges. I heard the striking of a match and further away, where Gorsky’s men stood, the panting of dogs tugging on their leashes.
3
In London, April is not the cruellest month but the gentlest. No other season compares to those occasional crisp sunny days which arrive after months of slushy semifreddo, that icy drizzle that never becomes snow, never latches on. You almost forget that the sun is still somewhere out there, above the dirty duvet of cloud that covers the city as though it were a depressed patient unwilling to step out of bed. Suddenly the light breaks through and teases out every bit of red around. You realise that the place is defined by its scarlets and its blacks: red for the post boxes and phone booths, the buses, the coats of Chelsea Pensioners and the guards on duty in front of the royal palaces; black for the taxis, the heavy doors, gates and railings, for iron enclosures everywhere.
Then, as though prompted by an invisible Pied Piper, the milky green grass emerges and amidst it flowers in every colour, like light refracted through a prism. One remembers that no other city in the world has so many parks, so many gardens. The million-pound handkerchief-sized lawns join up into one continuous floral ribbon trailing from Green Park all the way to Richmond and Hampton Court – a relay race of hellebores, daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses under the parasols of magnolia and cherry blossom. In no other city can it be so good to be a bee.
The sap rises. At night, you hear urban foxes, yowling like abandoned babies, the click-clack of high heels on pavements, the ringing of mobile phones and voices saturated with boozy laughter and desire.
Next door, building work continued ceaselessly. Under spotlights that would have put a football stadium to shame, huge forks crunched the gritty under-soil, earthmovers shifted tons of wet dirt. At dawn, before the builders arrived, gulls hovered and screamed over skips full of rubble. I imagined them to be fellow stowaways from the grey expanses of the northern seas which connect the marshy estuaries of the Thames and the Neva, and the two imperial cities between which Gorsky’s money flowed in a gilded cascade. He must have continued to turn up occasionally, but I did not see him again for weeks, although he was now my employer just as effectively as he was the employer of the platoons of builders whose bare muscles shone under their sleeveless high-visibility vests. He gave me the best job of my life.
I once dreamed of being a writer but found that I was too lazy to put words on paper. Now I was determined to make Gorsky’s library my literary masterpiece, a work of fiction as imaginative as any story composed of words, a piece of installation art rivalling anything Natalia wanted to showcase. Every volume in Gorsky’s library would connect with every other one and create a perfect text: the collection would be a work of characterisation as perfect as that of Julien Sorel or Ivan Karamazov. When he briefed me about my task, Gorsky spoke about it enchanting an art connoisseur. I aimed to accomplish more. I wanted to imagine a wom
an falling in love with him simply by walking through his library; that love too would be my creation.
I had little experience of antiquarian book sales but Gorsky’s commission was far too big to be achieved with new stock alone. It required both the present and the past. I scoured auction catalogues for the rarest books and manuscripts, even ancient scrolls. I forwarded lists of purchases and I gradually lost count of the number of top-up cheques I received: the first edition of Childe Harold dedicated by Byron to Mary Shelley, Pushkin’s personal bible, Thomas Macaulay’s History of England with the stamp of the school library at Harrow and exam annotations by a fourteen-year-old Winston Churchill, Seasons in Hell bound in leather reclaimed from a valise Rimbaud purchased in Luxor – the original address tag with his handwriting refashioned into a bookmark. There were Renaissance quartos stitched by the best Venetian bookbinders and rare copies of German novels saved from Nazi pyres, their charred edges still smelling faintly of ashes. Then there were the latest glossy volumes with high-resolution photographs which I purchased purely to indulge Natalia Summerscale, should she ever set foot in her neighbour’s library. My collection – Gorsky’s collection – was taking shape in its expensive, humidity-controlled storage facility as it awaited the day when the shelves, still to be constructed out of acres of rare wood, were ready to carry it in its full magnificence.
I occasionally allowed myself the indulgence of taking one of those precious volumes home, or leafing through it at my desk at Fynch’s, hoping that Natalia would turn up and catch me at it. Here and there, I cut the pages with Fynch’s yellowing ivory paperknife. I did not feel I was transgressing. I doubted if many of them would ever be read otherwise, and it would have been a sin if objects as beautiful as these were not to be adored even once.
Sometimes, late at night, while the floodlights from next door streamed through chinks in my drawn curtains, I thought of moving out of the area and closer to ‘my kind’. I was never sure what that would mean. My co-nationals gathered in ‘our’ church in Notting Hill or in a handful of cafes in Acton and Ealing where they talked of politics and defeat. If I belonged anywhere, it was, vaguely, among the uprooted bohemian types eking out a living in jobs similar to mine, a kind of protracted adolescence possible only in a city where no one knows you and you don’t care about anyone’s judgement. They were as likely to be English as Japanese or Armenian, but they obsessed about their espressos more than about their nationality. They shared ramshackle homes in places like Walthamstow or Peckham, where the main streets were lined with African markets, fried chicken vendors and laptop repair shops, but, unlike here in Chelski, the realm of extreme wealth, they frequented cafes where people sat and talked without looking around for better or more important company, and visited parks where young families came out to play on Saturday afternoons in the same clothes they had been wearing since they got up. Their houses and flats were lived in, their pavements walked upon. Children’s voices competed with birdsong. The deserted streets around my home were like cemeteries lined with gleaming monuments to money: silent, heavily secured sepulchres for people who were buried in the work of wealth creation.
I had no friends and I wasn’t looking for a soulmate, although I was not a younger version of my sexless boss. There were enough women in London who preferred to lead their intimate lives in short and uncomplicated bursts. With no strings attached, they call it. It was possible to find sex on those terms whenever you wanted it, and without having to pay. And you didn’t even have to be particularly handsome. There is a cruel freedom about this city, the freedom of an entire world on the make.
I usually banished my thoughts of relocating by early morning, when I set off on my regular jog along the Thames, alongside the long-distance buses coming into Victoria Coach Station with their cargoes of bleary-eyed East Europeans waking up from the transcontinental ride into London’s new reality, a bustling market for human labour where they will become bricklayers and plumbers, nannies and waitresses, and reinvent the fundamental principles of their being in the process. I may have looked like an image of the bright new world to them, this strange new place in which men and women had so little to do that they pounded the pavements early in the morning, clutching plastic bottles in their hands, but I was just a cuckoo spotting fellow cuckoos. I ran back towards the moneyed Chelsea nest that I had usurped with so little effort, past my first employer’s home in Eaton Square and past Christopher Fynch’s shop, which I would open in an hour or two. It looked so inviting and timeless with its teetering piles of books leaning against the windows and its announcements of local pottery classes and small-time classical music concerts in church halls. I often paused in one of the cafes around Sloane Square and watched the early-morning arrivals pouring out of the underground station: sales staff about to open the stores, professional dog walkers on their way up to Hyde Park with half a dozen empty leashes in each hand, au pairs and nannies hurrying to take their uniformed charges to local schools, waiters and cooks, hairdressers, beauticians, manicurists and pedicurists, acupuncturists, masseurs, life coaches and psychotherapists, personal assistants, psychic healers and spiritual guides, professional de-clutterers, hundreds and hundreds of people like me offering every form of personal service imaginable.
Easter came late. It was almost May, and one of those rare years when both the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic holiday fell on the same day as the Passover. The bookshop was going to stay open, but Christopher Fynch suddenly declared that I must take a day off. I hadn’t had a Sunday off in ten years, he argued, and he was having his mother over. He needed some time away from her or he would go mad. ‘Mater’ was ancient enough to remember sharing a dance teacher with Daphne du Maurier’s younger sister Bing in her – and Bing’s – teens, but was still as sharp as a razor. When she telephoned the shop to ‘check on Christopher’, she spoke about him as though I was his house matron, or – as his school would have it – his dame.
I did not feel like taking a day off. There was no one and nothing I wanted to see and I hardly wanted to stay at home reading books when I could do that more comfortably at work, with fewer distractions. Now I had nothing better to do than join a procession of worshippers somewhere for a bit of people watching, choral music and incense-fumed aromatherapy.
I did not expect to see Natalia Summerscale at Ennismore Gardens, even if she turned up. Easter is the main holiday in the Orthodox calendar in every sense, not just in the narrow theological one of the Christmas-dominated West, and the Russian church gets so packed that the congregation spills out into the surrounding streets. There are hundreds of families with children carrying baskets of elaborately painted eggs, or bringing their Kulich cakes for a blessing on trays held high in front of them. Every variant of Russia abroad is normally to be seen there: from the patrician old guard to the Soviet colonials who had arrived much more recently from places like Kazakh- or other stans; from the impoverished Russian-Lithuanians on their EU passports who now clean the London streets, to the globe-trotting billionaires with wads of fifty-pound notes, which they deposit with a flourish when the collection tray comes around.
*
I did not expect to see Natalia and I assumed Gorsky wouldn’t be there either. If he believed in God at all, I suspected that he worshipped in a different kind of temple. The truth, when it emerged, was to shape our final encounter.
I was about to take the last corner before the familiar Romanesque portico of the former Anglican place of worship when I spotted Natalia and Gery just ahead, holding Daisy’s hands. All three wore white. With her hair gathered in a long plait, Daisy looked like a tiny version of the Russian fairy tale’s Vassilisa the Beautiful. Gery carried a large basket of eggs painted in red, gold and silver. When they turned into the church, I walked straight ahead and across Hyde Park and Bayswater, past the Greek cathedral with its own Easter worshippers, and then up Portobello Road, alongside the tourists hunting for antique bargains and famous film locations.
In a quiet
side street, the Serbian church was full of new British Serbs, the preceding decade’s refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, standing in tight groups and waiting to receive communion after the forty days of Lent. This was still a blue-collar world. There were no billionaires here. Flocks of mournful frescoed angels were taking off into rafters blackened by decades of smoke and incense. A large crack in one of the sidewalls zigzagged like a trail left by lightning.
For a long moment after we collided, and as we both apologised, I did not recognise him. He was wearing a hideous blue tracksuit and a black beanie hat pulled low over his forehead. He looked like someone in the midst of a strenuous jog, but it was an odd corner of London to be jogging in if you lived in Chelsea. We were in one of the side streets between Golborne Road and the Westway flyover, just behind the Serbian church, one of the many indistinguishable Victorian terraces that housed Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s, then the Spanish and Portuguese labourers from what were then impoverished Iberian dictatorships, and finally a wave of North Africans escaping Maghrebian politics and the grimness of French satellite towns. On any weekend, men in loose djellabas and babouches sat in front of working men’s cafes sipping mint tea and smoking. The market looked like a street scene in Fez or Algiers.
Tom Summerscale laughed, unfazed. He had taken notice of me perhaps only because of the look of astonishment on my face.
‘I am just stopping for some oysters and Porter around the corner. Why not join me?’ he said, as though there was nothing unusual about the situation; as though we had, in fact, arranged to meet.
I joined him out of curiosity. Something told me that – like me – he was not a man with many friends. We took a table in one of those gentrified pubs that had become so common in the area: places that looked like a film version of 1947. Fake austerity permeated every detail of the mise-en-scène, every hook on the wall and every plate and glass. The beer was as black as coal, the butter was almost yellow, the bread so warm it was smoking, and the oysters were still alive.
Gorsky Page 4