Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  Daisy’s school was housed in a large Gothic villa on the south side of Hyde Park. Although it looked like a place dreamed up by J. K. Rowling, it was clear – in spite of Natalia’s promise of a ‘bunch of English school kids’ – that its pupils were the offspring of international billionaires; perhaps means-tested scholarships were on offer to the children of mere multi-millionaires. Its theatre may have looked like a scaled-down version of the English National Opera, but the audience was anything but English. There were Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Americans, Germans, and even a few Russian women. On seeing Gorsky, who studiedly remained closer to me than to Natalia, they immediately stopped talking to each other and tried to secure seats nearer us. The air was thick with expensive scents and all the women present were dressed in ostentatious and very un-English ways. Their fur coats, shiny handbags, high heels and multiple rings with huge stones made Natalia’s silk shirt and velvet trousers seem modest, and her chignon positively understated. The only couple whose Englishness I could be certain of was a Premier League footballer and his wife, who was more famous than him, though I wasn’t sure exactly why. I noticed in the glossy brochure that their six-year-old son – with a ridiculously non-English name – was about to play Aslan.

  As the heiress to her mother’s blonde looks, Daisy was destined to play the White Witch. Although her voice still had its childish pitch, she delivered her lines with the poise of the young Queen Elizabeth. All the children spoke with pukka English accents. If you ignored the multitude of races on stage, the performance was positively Edwardian. The teachers, who dressed and sounded like Oxbridge graduates, fluttered about – giving whispered instructions to the orchestra, moving antique furniture on stage, making sure that the elaborate costumes did not trip up the little performers. When the play ended, they led the tumultuous applause, which lasted several minutes.

  I noticed that the Russian women, having manoeuvred themselves alongside us, kept looking at Gorsky as intently as they looked at their sons and daughters on stage. When everyone finally stood up, they moved towards Natalia with great urgency and each kissed her on the cheeks three times in the Orthodox fashion, asking about her health in high-pitched, excitable Russian. When one asked after Tom Summerscale, Gorsky winced. As they preened themselves and waited to be introduced, they clearly did not care if Natalia was stepping out with Gorsky, deceiving her husband or playing some other, more complicated game. Roman Gorsky was the most eligible man in the world: if he could be touched, he could be stolen. Even before Gery materialised from somewhere, with the little White Witch in tow, they were inviting him to their parties, handing out their cards from slim golden boxes, going about their pursuits as elegantly as the courtesans at Versailles.

  Throughout it all, Gorsky displayed barely a flicker of interest. He stared around discourteously, nodding but not listening. When the little girl appeared, her face beneath a sparkling tiara still covered in silvery white powder, he was transformed in an instant. He focused on her expression so completely that the little witch could have touched him with her wand. He barely registered Natalia’s introduction, or heard her as she urged her daughter to shake ‘Uncle Roman’s hand’.

  The child curtseyed and looked at him. Their faces spread into instantaneous wide smiles.

  ‘How old are you, little princess?’ Gorsky asked.

  ‘Five and three-quarters. Almost six,’ she responded.

  She raised her arms towards him and he lifted her as high as he could, then lowered her just enough to bury his head into the multiple tulle layers of her skirt. Natalia looked at Gery, and Gery looked at me, as though we were all witnessing some kind of miracle.

  ‘You are not needed any more,’ Gery whispered in my ear as she pulled me away. ‘Summerscale never attends these plays anyway, but he had to fly to Zurich this afternoon. He won’t be back until tomorrow night. I have just told Natalia. Shall we push the boat out and go for a bite somewhere? Let’s find somewhere normal. A pizza place perhaps? Is there one around here? The three of them are walking, by the way. This is a day of miracles.’

  Her face spread into a broad, simian smile.

  I turned her invitation down. My head was throbbing. Images of the day kept running through it like a bewildering film reel: the security screens at Fynch’s showing that extraordinary embrace when Gorsky held Natalia without so much as attempting to kiss her; Xiulan Xi; the very Anglican magic of the play in contrast with the sheer foreignness of its audience; most of all, perhaps, those Russian women whose eyes so plainly shone as they responded to the naked attraction of Gorsky’s money. It was as though his capital created a kind of vortex around him. He luxuriated in the silent centre where the ozone pooled, while all around him people fainted with breathlessness and greed.

  I longed to escape into something very English and rural, the world which existed on this island before any of us new immigrants had England in our sights: ancient oak forests, valleys full of sheep, the aboriginal population of mean country squires and miserable farmhands, cold little churches with mouldy prayer books and the tattered flags of county regiments; an empty, empty world. I was trying so hard to think of a novel by Thomas Hardy that I hadn’t read, that I felt tempted to dive into Fynch’s and check our now highly organised shelves. Yet the shop too was swept up in Gorsky’s vortex. The footfall increased, the sales rocketed, and we featured in a couple of glossy supplements as one of London’s most romantic ‘secret spots’ just as we became anything but secret. I actually preferred the old shop. It would take years before this glossy new thing even began to resemble it. I thought of Gorsky throwing insane amounts of money about and wished he had thrown them back at villages in Russia.

  I unlocked the door of my little dwelling, which Gorsky now owned. I made a cup of camomile tea, fished out a battered copy of Jude the Obscure and prepared to retire to bed. As I drew the curtains, I tried not to look towards the Barracks. Instead, I went over to the other set of windows. The lawn in front of The Laurels was lit so brightly that my ceiling was bathed in a greenish reflected light, even across two lanes of traffic. In the middle of it stood Natalia and Gorsky, kissing.

  This day was the beginning of something he had planned for over a decade, with the precision of a field marshal. But what if what had been driving him was not Natalia but her refusal?

  7

  I was startled out of my morning reading by a ring on the door. The woman introduced herself as Siobhan MacDonald. Her soft Irish accent, her name and her tired face under a messy pile of grey hair were vaguely familiar. She was once the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, she said. Now freelance, she was working on a series of articles for one of those mid-market dailies I have never even opened. ‘My Russian Neighbours’ was the running title. I was living next door to the most famous yet most elusive Russian of them all.

  She explained all this while standing on my doorstep. Behind her, passing buses and cars threw up sprays of muddy drops and a soft mist. It was difficult to decide whether it was raining or not, and just as difficult to decide whether or not to invite her in. Something about her little black ballerina shoes, completely wrong both for her age and for the weather, made me take pity on her.

  ‘Have you ever met Roman Gorsky?’ She came straight to the point the moment she made herself comfortable in my tiny living room with the cup of tea I had offered and prepared.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘What he’s doing here is that he’s transforming the Chelsea Yeomanry Barracks, a grade-one listed building and one of the most important monuments of the English baroque, into a private palace. Are you aware that he had obtained planning permission by promising to convert a substantial portion into a public space? There are rumours that he was acting under false pretences, that he is already going back on that promise.’

  ‘Should I be worried?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Should you? He is digging four storeys below ground as though owning what is already the largest residential building in Lon
don is not enough. Doesn’t all this work disturb you, living next door, as you do? On top of it, you could say?’ Her eyes followed the length of one of the wider fissures in my walls.

  ‘Not really. I am never at home. I work all day.’

  ‘And at weekends?’

  ‘At weekends, too.’

  ‘It’s not just the ordinary stuff, if you could call any of it ordinary,’ she continued, ‘Walk-in wardrobes, swimming pools, gyms, garages, kitchens that would put the Savoy to shame, a private cinema … even – I hear – a hairdresser’s. Why would a man who lives alone need his own hairdressing salon, for heaven’s sake? It’s also the insane levels of security. Not a panic room but a panic apartment three storeys below ground, with its own escape tunnel to the Thames embankment, they say. All the windows bullet proofed, air purifiers throughout – and not because your Mr Gorsky fears hay fever.’

  ‘Honestly,’ I interrupted, ‘If the man fears a gas attack, or wants his hair done daily, let him have what he wants. This sort of thing keeps the British economy going. It’s not as though it’s any of our business.’

  ‘They keep complaining about the lack of housing in London. Yet he also owns a flat in the Barbican,’ she said. ‘A former bishop’s palace just outside London. A castle in Scotland. A villa on Rublevka, half a mile from Putin’s, valued at thirty million pounds. A chalet in Switzerland. An entire island in Greece. Isn’t it strange to want so much space?’

  ‘Money needs space, I guess. This doesn’t trouble me. If it did, I’d try to earn more than I do.’

  ‘And how much is that?’

  She took a photograph. I named the sum. Fynch had instructed me to give myself a pay rise appropriate for my new tasks, but I hadn’t bothered to do so. I couldn’t face explaining it now.

  Her article, when it appeared some days later in a newspaper owned by another Russian billionaire, had a picture of me, smiling, a chipped enamel mug in my hands, on a tatty sofa with piles of books and papers all around me and a view of several large cranes in the window behind. The caption read: ‘Slav labour.’

  The piece misspelled my name: ‘Nick Himovic (38), a refugee from the war-torn Balkans, lives in the shadow of Roman Gorsky’s project. He says the massive building work is “no trouble”. He spends every waking hour working on the shop floor and he earns less than the minimum wage. He has never met his wealthy next-door neighbour.’

  In the foreground, you could see my big toe, protruding from a large hole in my sock, just above the edge of the coffee table on which lay opened a newspaper on the page that I had been reading, quite coincidentally, when she rang the bell, and which featured a large – and totally untypical – picture of Gorsky in a skull cup. Its graininess suggested a wide lens and a great distance. She had a better eye than I, Ms MacDonald. It could have been worse. I could have told her that I was to be evicted the moment Gorsky moved in.

  Her portrait of Gorsky, which featured my cameo appearance, was presented as a classic tale of rags to riches. Gorsky was born wretchedly poor in a shared apartment in one of those Dickensian warrens within Leningrad’s dilapidated palaces which smelled of sewage, coal and pickle whatever the season. His father, Boris Moiseevich Gorsky, a printer, died of throat cancer when the boy was seven. His mother, Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stern, had worked as a guard at the Hermitage well into the 1990s, even as her son made his first billions. She was one of those babushkas who knew more about art than you would guess from their uniforms. Elizaveta’s brother, Isaac Stern, a chess player, got his nephew interested in mathematics. It was Isaac, through his contacts in the world of international chess, who got Gorsky to Basel for a month when he was a student, a visit that opened his eyes to the riches of the West. Gorsky was typical of that generation of young Russian entrepreneurs who benefited from Yeltsin’s reforms and the murky waters of economic restructuring in the early 1990s: driven, ruthless, possibly murderous. Why would he care about some small Serbian guy next door when he did not care about anyone? He lived alone. His God was Greed.

  Whether the PR effort at establishing good neighbourly relations had anything to do with my interview or not, a few days after the piece appeared I was alarmed to see Tom Summerscale and a small group of elderly citizens of Chelsea standing by my front door, about to embark on a tour of the Barracks. They were led by Xiulan Xi and – most astonishingly – Gorsky himself, escorted not so discreetly by a couple of his bodyguards and three young women who handed out leaflets about fresco conservation and the community benefits of eco-friendly urban garden design.

  I hadn’t seen the boys – his malchiki – for a while. One of them walked over to me and said, in a soft Russian-inflected voice that left no space for refusal, ‘Mr Gorsky asks if you would like to join us, please to join us …’ Gorsky gave me a tight-lipped little nod. The architect showed no sign of recognising me. Summerscale slapped me on the back and made me cough. I wondered if he had any idea about Natalia’s renewed acquaintance with our neighbour.

  ‘I think you will find the sense of community greatly enhanced by this new space, which Mr Gorsky is planning to open to the public to present not only the best in Russian art but in British and European art too. It will be an asset to the whole of London. Mr Gorsky is known to be one of the leading philanthropists in the world …’

  Gorsky stared ahead as though Xiulan Xi’s speech had nothing to do with him. Summerscale smirked visibly. The architect soldiered on, explaining the highlights of her project and talking about community spirit as though Gorsky was building a gallery for the British nation and not a house for himself, yet all the while she was taking extreme care to emphasise that the project did not involve bringing ‘the wrong sort of people’ into the area. Her tour came to an end with what amounted to an implicit pitch for her own practice. No project was too small, apparently, for XX Associates (for a moment I thought she said ‘Excess Associates’). They created some ingenious adjustments to existing buildings for as little as two million pounds. Summerscale took her card before she marched off towards the waiting cab.

  One of the elderly couples – white haired, polite, and as English as they come – walked over to Gorsky just as Summerscale was making a crude comment in Russian about Xiulan Xi, addressing no one in particular. The bodyguards smirked. Summerscale’s Russian was accented but fluent. It was difficult to imagine why he was on the tour. I assumed that his path must have crossed Gorsky’s long ago and much further east.

  ‘Dear Mr Gorsky, thank you so much for inviting us. This was absolutely fascinating. If you are not in a hurry, it would be lovely if you could join us for tea with Mr Summerscale.’

  At that they turned to Summerscale.

  ‘Sir Michael and Lady Leighton,’ Gorsky reluctantly introduced the couple: it was clear that Summerscale had no idea who they were, although they evidently knew him.

  ‘Daphne, please,’ the woman chipped in.

  The couple were dressed in identical green cagoule jackets, with identical green galoshes on their feet. Under her jacket, Daphne wore a black jumper covered in what could have been specks of white angora wool or cat’s hair. Sir Michael’s frayed regimental tie said little to me, or indeed Gorsky, I guess. Summerscale probably knew how to read the stripes.

  The couple spoke in unison, finishing each other’s sentences.

  ‘So wonderful to meet you at long last. We were thrilled to hear that you were moving into the neighbourhood a couple of years ago. We knew your father very well. And, dare we say, your father-in-law, Reverend Hugo Leatherdale.’

  At that, Gorsky took a step closer, suddenly interested in the conversation. Summerscale raised his left hand, as if to stop their next sentence. His signet ring caught the sunlight.

  ‘My former father-in-law …’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Daphne let out a nervous giggle. ‘We do apologise. We didn’t realise.’

  It did not look as though she had meant it.

  ‘A cup of tea would be most excellent.’ Gorsky startled everyone
, including the Leightons. He turned to Summerscale.

  ‘Would you care to join us?’

  Summerscale walked on with them, perhaps not wanting to be left out of the conversation.

  One of the bodyguards gave me a brief nod before he followed the group. No one else said goodbye. My apologies to Gorsky had to wait.

  The tea party must have been a success for, some weeks later, Fynch received an invitation to dinner at one of the fashionable new Indian restaurants in Mayfair. C. F. G. Fynch Esq., and companion, the invitation said. I wasn’t sure how angry Gorsky was after my minute of media fame, but Fynch insisted that I should play the ‘companion’ and try to mend bridges. He was worried about the future of our library commission: even I was, I admit, particularly now that my services as a Russian Cupid had become redundant. So I went along. The choice of cuisine must have been influenced by the preferences of Gorsky’s new acquaintances, for his would have been sushi or caviar. The meal was to be followed by a charity auction for the benefit of Lady Leighton’s Donkey Sanctuary on Exmoor. The brochure stated that every item to be auctioned had been donated by Gorsky – and each one, from medieval miniatures with Christmas scenes to pieces of Meissen porcelain and Lalique glass, would feature a donkey.

  I was not surprised when one of Gorsky’s many assistants called to instruct me to procure as many rare editions of works that included notable literary donkeys as I could lay my hands on at short notice. As I chased signed copies of Winnie the Pooh and illustrated versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I wondered if the whole event had been dreamed up by Gorsky as some kind of coded fuck-you for my interview with Siobhan MacDonald. In spite of my protestations of innocence, even Fynch had it pinned on our noticeboard in a rare act of implicit protest. He did not say a thing. When I tried to apologise, he laughed it off but I was sure that the bit about the minimum wage hurt. I don’t think he paid himself a salary: before Gorsky arrived, the shop had been operating at a loss for over a decade.