Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  I dreaded the evening. I had no desire to go, and I had a bad feeling about every possible outcome of a situation that would put Gorsky and Summerscale in the same room with Natalia for several hours. However, I had little choice but to get into my hired outfit and jump on a bus to Piccadilly. As I gazed at the London streets through the misted windows on the upper deck, I reflected how a few months, or even a few weeks ago, Gorsky would have sent a car for me. I did not think I was forgotten or even unforgiven, I was simply not needed any more. There was nothing personal about this. His generosity towards our business continued, although – having spent so many of his £250,000 cheques – even I was beginning to think that his library was as big as it ever needed to be.

  I was seated at one of the outer tables in the room, with Fynch, his friend Victor, Gery, a buxom Swedish friend of hers who was a receptionist at an indoor tennis club in Fulham, and a taciturn elderly Russian woman who had once worked as a translator for the BBC World Service. She was dressed in a black beaded dress that had seen better days, and a baby-pink bolero made of terry cloth. Victor started flirting with the Swede while we were still examining the noticeboard with the seating arrangements. Fynch tried to talk to the Russian, less out of interest than out of politeness, but gave up halfway through the hors d’oeuvres, although her English was perfect. She spoke with long gasping pauses between words as if to underline the importance of her utterances, yet expressed only absolute banalities, as though she was worried that someone was taping her.

  Although we kept smiling at each other, Gery and I had little conversation. She was now hopeful about the way things were unfolding between Natalia and Gorsky but could neither whisper nor say much within ear-shot of so many others, and yet she did not seem to want to talk about much else. She was hoping that any ‘transfer’ (the word she used to refer to the expected developments, as though Natalia was a footballer) would apply to her as well.

  ‘Tom is a decent guy, and wealthy enough,’ she whispered, ‘but it’s not the sort of wealth that can last, particularly if he stays on in Britain doing nothing as seems to be the case so often nowadays … He is trying to live off his property portfolio, and … you know … there are perils in practically retiring in your mid-forties if you own hundreds of millions, not billions … You have too much time on your hands and you start depending on people you don’t like.’

  She pressed a nostril with an index finger conspiratorially. Victor looked at her, chortled, and – clearly misunderstanding – patted his breast pocket and winked. Soon enough, she disappeared outside with him and the Swede. The Russian woman smiled at me. Fynch was deeply immersed in reading the mottled label on the wine bottle.

  At the table in the centre of the room, under an elaborate bower that was supposed to represent A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Leightons were resplendent in their antique finery. One would barely have recognised them. Lady Daphne’s tiara, atop her white, now carefully curled hair, was like something out of The Merry Widow. Next to her sat Gorsky, his face and his poise oddly matching the Leightons’ late-Victorian charm. In his tailored dinner jacket, Summerscale looked even more like a rugby player than in his usual day clothes. Natalia was in a white silk dress, with a garland of white silk flowers instead of a boa across her shoulders. As usual, she wore no jewellery. When she spotted me, she waved and threw me a big warm smile, the kind I first saw on her face after her meeting with Gorsky. Next to her, on an embroidered booster cushion, sat Daisy, dressed as Peaseblossom, holding a magic wand. The only child in the huge dining room, she seemed to be enjoying the evening more than anyone else.

  Victor had kept his promise to ‘bring the girls back before the puddings’ and was giggling with them at what he called the naughty end of the table. At our end, Fynch was explaining the ins and outs of a small order placed by someone called Roderick Montgomery-Chadwyck as an illustration of the minor travails of bookselling. The books had been posted the previous week and now seemed to be lost somewhere between London and Windermere. Montgomery-Chadwyck had telephoned the shop that morning requesting a full refund and refusing to wait a day longer. Fynch thought the fellow unreasonable. The Russian woman listened intently and nodded in apparent sympathy.

  While the guests consumed white rose petal and Indian pink pepper sorbet between their main course and their pudding, Summerscale, looking flushed with drink, came over to say hello to Victor, who stood up and hugged him like a long-lost friend. Victor introduced the Swede. Summerscale immediately pulled up a chair between them and started flirting with her. Gery laughed encouragingly. She was leaning so close to Victor by this stage that his arm was practically lodged between her breasts. Fynch and the Russian woman had finished their sorbets and were now perusing the auction catalogue most attentively, although it was unlikely that either was going to bid for anything. Perhaps because I kept trying to avoid Summerscale’s insistent gaze, he addressed me directly.

  ‘Young Serb,’ he said (like everyone else, he had clearly read my unfortunate interview), ‘have you forgotten us? You used to drop by to see my lady wife and our lovely friend Gery here; now we hardly ever see you … Have you three little Slavs fallen out with each other, or do you perhaps still come when I am not around?’ He let out a vulgar throaty laugh.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about Nick if I were you, old boy,’ Victor chipped in, bent on substance-induced petty revenge for Summerscale’s flirtation with the Swede. ‘There are bigger Slav fish in our dear old Londongrad than him. Except, sod it, I am wrong. Not exactly Slav.’ He turned towards the central table so pointedly that all of us, including Fynch and the Russian, followed his gaze. Just at that moment Natalia was saying something to Gorsky. Although they were seated at least a foot apart, their faces were lit with a desire that was impossible to mistake.

  Summerscale’s face turned deep crimson as he watched them. He stood up, pushed the chair away and walked noisily back to his table. Gorsky glanced at his bodyguards. The room went quiet.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt your conversation, dear boy,’ Summerscale hissed loudly enough to be heard at our end of the room, then paused. Gorsky waited. Natalia stared at the floral centrepiece. In a flash, Summerscale seemed to change his mind. Slumping into his chair, he laughed, and said, ‘Never mind. Never mind.’

  Before anyone had time to relax, he switched over to Russian – English accented, but still loud and clear, ‘Keep your dirty Yid paws off my wife. Do you hear me?’

  Natalia’s expression, frozen as she awaited Gorsky’s response, confirmed that I had understood the remark. I saw Gorsky look at her, then at Summerscale, then at the bodyguards, then back at her, weighing a decision. Summerscale’s lips stretched into a forced smile. Gorsky still stared at Natalia. Some kind of wordless conversation was taking place between them.

  ‘What did you just say to Uncle Roman, Daddy?’ Daisy said in English. Natalia whispered something in her ear.

  A team of waiters entered with dessert plates covered with silver cloches. The maître d’hôtel looked at Gorsky for a sign. Gorsky nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. We are ready.’

  As the guests started moving towards the ballroom for the auction, I used the moment to slip away. For once, it wasn’t raining. In St James’s Park, couples sat on picnic blankets and drank wine from plastic glasses. A lone violinist – a busker from somewhere in my part of the world – was playing a familiar czárdás. I stood for a long while, listening to the music. Stars glimmered faintly in a long-lost battle with city lights. The vast wheel of the London Eye revolved slowly above the treetops.

  ‘When I was a child in Russia, they used to play music from public speakers. People danced in the streets. Just simple passers-by: they dropped their burden for a moment and followed the sound. Those times were not all bad. Far from it.’

  I was startled to hear Gorsky beside me. He seemed not to be angry with me after all.

  ‘Have all the donkeys gone?’ I asked.

  He looked at me as
though I was raving.

  ‘How was the auction?’ I rephrased the question.

  ‘Good, good …’ he said. Clearly the auction was not what troubled him.

  ‘I was thirteen, you know, when I first knew I was a Jew. Someone used that same word about me at school and I did not even respond … I thought they were talking about someone else. My parents were Communists and atheists. If you asked about religion, and very few people did ask in those days, that’s what they said. Gorsky is not even a particularly Jewish name. I am hardly going to hide my Jewishness, don’t misunderstand – quite the opposite is true – but I am Russian first. I am as devoted to Mother Russia, and I gave as much to it, as any Orthodox Slav, more than most of them, in fact.’

  I knew little of Judaism and had no thoughts about degrees of Russianness. If they were all so devoted to Russia – her Christians and Jews alike – why were they spending their millions in London? Even hearing him say ‘Mother Russia’ in English and without irony sounded strange.

  ‘I am sure Tom Summerscale is not anti-Semitic,’ I said. ‘Or, rather, not really. He does not mean it. He was just thrashing about. He has that peculiarly English prejudice towards anyone who is “not one of us”, yet people like him hate other English people even more than us, because they don’t judge us in the same way as they do their own. Whenever English people open their mouths they reveal the opening chapters of their autobiographies to each other, but we just brand ourselves as foreign. He wants to offend you, and how else could he possibly offend you? He can’t call you a filthy Russian. He is married to one.’

  I am not sure why I persisted in my defence of Summerscale, such as it was. Gorsky was clearly untroubled by him. It was as though I was trying to defend a mosquito that had bitten him.

  ‘I have helped synagogues in this town, and I have attended a service or two, got to understand a bit more than the nothing I knew before. But I have endowed a handful of Orthodox monasteries, too, back in Russia and on Mount Athos. It’s more about helping to preserve beauty than about God, I suppose. How can you be anything but agnostic? When I marry … I am not going to expect my wife, or my child, to convert to Judaism. If she should expect me to marry in church, even to be baptised myself, I would consider it—’ A deep, tormented shiver sounded in his voice as he said this. He spoke as though he was rehearsing an argument.

  ‘That seems most unlikely,’ I interrupted. He was torturing himself.

  He looked at me. He did not seem to understand what I meant. I found it difficult to mention Natalia’s name.

  ‘It is most unlikely that she would want to marry in a church. Particularly given her divorce …’

  ‘What do you mean? It was just convenience, her arrangement with the Englishman. He is so unimportant that I can’t even feel angry with him. We’ll forget all of that.’

  ‘It is sometimes impossible to forget. There are actions you can’t undo. You can’t set the clock back.’

  ‘I see that you are not a scientist, Nikolai,’ he laughed. ‘Of course you can.’

  8

  Things went quiet after that evening. Weeks went by and nothing happened. Even Gery wasn’t sure why. At first she told me that Natalia wanted to send Daisy away to a summer camp, some kind of etiquette school for little goddesses on Lake Geneva, and only then break the news to Summerscale. The beginning of the summer holidays, two months away, would make the announcement less disruptive for the child. Then Gery thought Natalia might have wavered in the face of the sheer strength of Gorsky’s determination. It was as though she was trying to find a way to appease the Fates. In spite of Gorsky’s reticence, there was something so elemental about his drive that it scared her. It belonged to another era, Gery quoted her, like the ransacking of Troy. This cannot end well, she kept repeating.

  I am not sure why Gorsky waited, but wait he did. What are two months compared to ten years? During those two months, his building project was slowly completed. The intricacy of Xiulan Xi’s design was beginning to reveal itself to the world. Open-top buses stopped and people stood up to take photographs. Planting and ornate ironwork would soon hide the vast residential wings from every angle other than that afforded by the windows of what was still – just about – my bedroom.

  One day I saw the workmen deliver two huge baths carved out of rock crystal. Their shapes were complementary, like lovers’ seats, as though they were meant to be installed side by side so that the bathers could face each other. Then there was a week when they kept bringing in chandeliers, with long pendulous diamond drops – dozens of chandeliers, then hundreds of matching wall lamps and candelabra. In due course the gardeners moved in, delivering huge mature trees, hiding away corners with pergolas and dotting alcoves with antique sculptures, while rolling out sections of rich green turf like expensive carpets.

  My turn came, too. I abandoned my desk at Fynch’s to start moving the books into the library – a vast hall, which, through a couple of hidden doorways, connected the private wings with the gallery space. I now had a stay of execution in the gatekeeper’s cottage – rent free – until I had finished the task of shelving.

  My commute to work became very short. I crossed the gravel path towards ‘Château Gorsky’ each morning. I unpacked boxes and placed the titles in the order I had been planning for many months. Some went on open shelves, others were displayed, with the help of consultants from the British Library, in sealed glass cabinets with controlled temperature and humidity. Some of the precious volumes were opened on a particular page in their display cases. They bore handwritten annotations or dedications with signatures so familiar that they looked fake. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Lermontov, Turgenev, Goethe, Donne, Byron, Balzac: I ensured that Gorsky’s literary idols – and those who could be his idols – were all there. I included writers he enjoyed, like Dickens and Scott, neither of whom I cared for at all, but I also smuggled in slim volumes by my own heroes, often retiring small-time clerks, or booksellers like me, people like Kafka and Cavafy, Saba and Svevo, Pessoa and Walser. One day, he might even find the time to read them and remember me.

  Framed in a little mahogany box, with an ornate lid inlaid with Siberian gemstones, was the manuscript that represented the collector’s Koh-i-noor: Pushkin’s poem of undying love for Anna Kern, the very sheet that the poet tucked between the pages of Eugene Onegin when he presented the book to Anna on the day of their parting. I overheard Gorsky recite the opening verse to Natalia when they met at Fynch’s. It was, and even then by virtue of citation, the only time I heard him address her with an informal you.

  I own up to pangs of pride as ‘my’ library took its final shape. I had a guilty secret. I inscribed my signature, in Serbian Cyrillic, on the title page of a first edition of Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, the theme of my futile doctoral dissertation. It was a desecration, like Rimbaud’s graffito on the pillar in Luxor, which I could not resist and which I would not have dared inflict on any of the Russian greats. In hindsight, I recognise that Gorsky had already started to change me. I was beginning to care. I wanted both of them to remember me.

  I was in the Barracks early one morning, scrolling through one of the many lists of titles, when a removal van arrived. A couple of burly Russians carried in Gorsky’s personal possessions: files, a baby grand piano, an old-fashioned record player, then clothes in zippered covers, shoes, boots, several hat-boxes … I stood and watched. Gorsky’s personal ‘stuff’ amounted cumulatively to less than my own. Was he not that keen on ownership after all, or was he extremely good at getting rid of things? It took four or five trips to and from a modest white van. Compared to everything that had already been delivered to the house, this was positively ascetic.

  Then the familiar majestic car arrived and the man himself stepped out with a bottle of champagne. I was soon summoned by a solitary butler to an enormous and – but for the piano already installed in the corner – completely empty room. Gorsky approached me with two glasses.

  ‘You are my house-warm
ing party,’ he said.

  ‘To the move!’ I responded, taking a sip of a Grande Cuvée. By then, I had come to know the difference. ‘I hope I will get a guided tour when it’s furnished.’

  ‘Oh, that will wait a little while longer. You need a woman’s touch to furnish a woman’s home.’

  ‘To homeliness, then,’ I said. One would need to be an interior decorator of genius to make these football pitches homely.

  ‘I am keeping my place outside London for the moment.’ I assumed that he was referring to that former Bishop’s palace, which had six pages in Pevsner to itself. ‘I have a few acres of forest down there and a natural swimming pool. It can be oppressive in town during the summer yet I don’t want to leave Britain more often than I have to until everything is sorted out.’ I wondered if anything could possibly dent his optimism.

  I invited him to view his library. We started from the large alcove that housed the Romantics. He seemed to me to be one of them, in spite of the way in which he spoke of his ‘narrow, mathematical mind’. I held up a copy of Goethe’s Faust which used to belong to Shelley. I reeled off amusing anecdotes which involved the Brits, the French and the Germans, and I occasionally invoked the Russians as if to suggest that the best that Europe had ever produced was now in his possession.

  I hope it won’t sound immodest, but that impromptu talk was more impressive than my viva all those years ago. I was hoping that he would appreciate the story his collection – our collection – was telling, that he would acknowledge that, like Cyrano, I had created something that would, if our Roxane or anyone else bothered to look, go on seducing on his behalf. Yet he followed my explanations absentmindedly, exclaiming well done, well done intermittently, glancing across the road towards The Laurels more often than at the shelves. He perked up only when I mentioned Natalia, but he realised that I was speaking of Puskhin as he lay dying after the duel with the French baron who had tried to cuckold him.