The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

Constance had been thrilled to be of help when Miller’s deputy downstairs, General Skoblin, had first shown her the German newspaper clip of the miraculous recording machine that had been displayed at the Berlin Radio Show. It used magnetized tape to catch the human voice. Skoblin wanted to buy one, and even knew someone who could bring one back from Berlin. But he didn’t have quite enough money right now …

  Constance didn’t really like General Skoblin, with his thin black comb-over, little moustache, comically short eyebrows – an inch of black over the middle of his eyes – and impassive face. In her head she called him the Goblin. She liked most of the other White Russian officers downstairs, who she was on chatting-on-the-stairs terms with. They loved her knowledge of Russian and her ability to reminisce with them about their long-ago glory days in St Petersburg. Yet she’d never managed to look at the poor Goblin with anything like affection.

  All the same, she’d wanted to help, because the Goblin was Plevitskaya’s husband. And he’d wanted the machine to make a recording of his wife’s voice. And that was only right and proper, because Plevitskaya, anyone could see, wasn’t taking the slow fading of her singing career well. As her husband had only half explained, out of a delicacy that Constance rather admired, the great benefit of this new recording technique with tape was that you didn’t have to sing perfectly all the way through a song any more. (And poor Plevitskaya didn’t, always, any more; there were, all too often, strange fades, and swoops, and hoarse shouts, and notes that were so off-key you had to bite your lip to avoid a smile.) The beauty of tape was that you could sing your thing over and over until you had a good version of every line, separately, then cut out all the bad bits and just stick together the good ones – and end up with a magically perfect version of whatever you’d sung. Constance liked the sound of that editing and improving on reality, the auditory equivalent, she thought, of the half-knowing way she ignored her wrinkles when she looked in the glass. We could all do with a bit more imaginary perfection as we get older, she thought kindly.

  ‘I LOOOOOVED HIM,’ the amplified voice bellowed, again.

  The door was almost vibrating. Constance looked anxiously at it. She knew her modish art enthusiasms often tested Miller’s patience. Was this one odd project too many?

  ‘You were too soft with our Nightingale,’ he said, but to her relief his exasperation had gone and his voice was gentle again. ‘You should have told her this part must happen in her home.’

  ‘But I couldn’t, chubchik,’ Constance said. ‘You know she lives out in the sticks. And I expect the engineers are German, like the machine. Foreigners would never have found their way out there without a car. Anyway, she steamrollered me. You know no one can resist Plevitskaya.’

  She looked pleadingly at him. As he moved towards her in the dusk behind the front door, she was suddenly aware of his bulk and pompous tie and waistcoat and old-world whiskers, so unlike her wavy thinness and boyish, straight, progressive bob, which her artists always said she was right to stick with, whatever the latest fashion for waves, because she was expressing her inner essence. No wonder her adorably skinny and starving young geniuses didn’t even seem to see Miller, let alone speak to him, any more than he had shown any interest in them, on the very few occasions she’d been unable to prevent them briefly crossing paths. They were just too different. She thought, and it was a bittersweet notion: What unlikely lovers we would seem, if anyone ever did see us together …

  … but then he was pulling her to him, and she stopped thinking. He’d once told her that Cossacks greeted each other with one-armed hugs like this, pulling up their horses side by side and embracing from the saddle. She breathed in his cologne. She could hear his heartbeat and feel the rumble of his laugh. And, with the knowledge that brought, that he was as happy as she was, peace returned. ‘Different though we are,’ he was whispering. ‘Different though we became before finding each other now, we are one.’

  ‘There’s something we should talk over together,’ she whispered back, at last forcing herself to raise the question that had been on her mind all day. She couldn’t let him go without even mentioning it. That would be too cowardly. And it was already nearly too late. ‘I wondered … maybe you’d come back on your way out, later?’

  There. She’d said it, or started to. They were really going to have to talk about what was on her mind, and very soon, too.

  But he was shaking his head. ‘I regret,’ he said, though with such tenderness that she knew he really did regret it. ‘Tonight I have a meeting downstairs. A long and important meeting. And later, a family commitment …’

  Constance knew better than to look downcast. He did, sometimes, have family commitments. He had a wife, a helpless invalid, wandering in her mind. And a grown-up son, who wrote, and also, like so many Russians here, drove a taxi; a good-looking young man who kept the entire family financially afloat with his night job, she knew. Of course sometimes Miller had to be with them. These were things you had to take with grace. But tomorrow would be too late.

  ‘Maybe a quick cocktail before you go home?’ she persisted.

  He shook his head. ‘Tomorrow, I hope,’ he said. He kissed her hand and stepped out.

  Feeling deflated that she’d have to think out the next step on her own, Constance watched him descend the apartment-block stairs. He already had the thoughtful look that suggested he was far away, preparing himself for that meeting. She still found it hard to imagine why the Reds of Moscow would be remotely interested in pursuing these ageing, defenceless class enemies. She had no picture of what all those dear, courtly gentlemen – clinging on tight to their memories, refusing to let their children go to French school (at least Miller hadn’t been that much of a fool) and still dreaming of some impossible, glorious reconquest of the land they’d lost – did all day down in their office. But she couldn’t believe that meeting today would really be about something very earth-shattering. All the poor officers seemed to talk about was setting up night schools to teach Russian literature to veterans and their children, finding charitable funding for more Russian old people’s homes, and poring over the Soviet newspapers for possible signs of weakness in the enemy. Constance had long ago decided she wouldn’t try to know too much.

  As she shut the door, a new phrase began. ‘LOOOOVE IS STILL PERHAAAAPS …’

  Squeezing back against the corridor wall, she made way for Marie-Thérèse, that stubby monument to Gallic disapproval in her brown serge and apron, who was bearing down on her, weighed down by her tray and her rage against the music.

  ‘Encore …!’ Marie-Thérèse muttered in long-suffering tones as she passed, just loud enough for Constance to hear. ‘Mais j’en ai marre de cette musique!’

  Constance bit her own lip to stop herself smiling. It was no secret to her that her housekeeper disliked all immigrants, but loathed the many Russians living in Paris most of all. And now this music … Marie-Thérèse pushed open the kitchen door with an energetic, angry swing of the hips and passed through into her domestic domain, and Constance grinned as she heard her cross voice again, much louder, from the other side of the door: ‘Sacrés Russes!’ (‘Darn Russians!’)

  Eventually Constance settled down in her bedroom. It was a little quieter there. She fished in her bag for the wire she’d got before lunch from Le Havre. She put on her spectacles.

  ‘HOPE YOU GOT LETTER STOP ARRIVING EVENING TRAIN STOP EVIE’, it still said. (She’d been half thinking, all through lunch, that when she looked again it might turn out to say something quite different.)

  She’d had no inkling, until it appeared, that this was about to happen. Evie’s letter, presumably sent many days ago, before the ship set sail, had not arrived.

  Just as it had this morning, the sight of that telegram form set Constance’s stomach churning. It was one thing to put out tentative feelers in the hope that something might come of them and that maybe someday … and quite another for it to just happen like this, with no time for mental preparation. Altoget
her different. Altogether hellish.

  Constance wasn’t a strategist by nature. As she was always telling her artists, spontaneity was more her thing. But the idea of improvising this visit, with all its complications, was making her feel sick. ‘Mon Dieu,’ she said wanly, out loud. Then, perhaps still influenced by Miller’s change of languages earlier, she added, ‘Bozhe moi,’ and watched her reflection in the dressing-table glass shake its dark head and put hand to brow. For all her worry, she was – just a little – impressed by the elegance of the reflection’s gesture. She put back on the chic modern black-and-white geometric bangle she’d taken off when Miller was due. Somehow, that made her feel better.

  What did she even look like now, that excitable little girl? Constance tried to picture her stretched and straightened and twenty-one, but her imagination failed her.

  There would be so much to catch up with. So much to find out … but also (don’t get distracted, she warned herself) so much to tell. That was the part she needed to think out – what to say to the child; how to explain herself; and what was she going to say to Miller? And when?

  Explanations, so unimaginable … But she mustn’t let it all crowd in at once. One thing at a time.

  The important thing was not to panic. She started to try to picture herself relaxed and calm, speaking to this unknown Evie … an adult Evie who behaved like a friend, who wasn’t full of the stuffy, huffy spite of the rest of the family, who’d learned to read and think independently while away at school and was easy to talk to, a girl who loved pictures and ideas as much as she did.

  ‘I always wanted to know you and be close to the family. But it seemed too difficult, for a long time,’ she told her reflection in the glass tentatively. ‘Then, three years ago, quite by chance, I met someone I’d known when I was young in Russia, playing chess right here in the Jardin du Luxembourg, under the lilacs. And, even though our lives had each taken such different paths since those young days, we fell in love. And that inspired me to try again. To write to your mother. To offer you an education. To send you books …’

  There were so many other things they’d move on to, later, once they’d got to know each other. But that would do, wouldn’t it? For a start …?

  And maybe she’d show Evie that picture?

  It was hidden away in a small cardboard box of trinkets packed in tissue paper that she’d pushed under her bed when she’d moved in. The trinkets were those long-ago lover’s gifts you never quite want to throw away: mineral monstrosities, jewelled troikas poised on marble ostrich eggs and the like. Oh, how she’d treasured them when she’d first been given them. But now it was only the photograph she could bear to look at. There she was, all sepia and faded, young and pretty in a white lace blouse, sitting in a boat – a picnic, she remembered. A summer’s day near St Petersburg, a river bank, a meadow of wild flowers. Maybe thirty people, Americans and Russians both. The picture showed two or three people on the bank – arms and backs, anyway – and one other person in the boat with her, a very tall, thin young man buttoned up to the neck in a military tunic despite the heat, with thick wavy fair hair and wide-set eyes, holding the oars. (Preobrazhensky Regiment, First Brigade, she remembered him telling her, and his blue eyes smiling, though had that been here, in this boat?) In the picture, her young self, looking over at her boatman, was the one smiling.

  Constance put it up against the glass above the fireplace.

  That first step felt like an achievement.

  She went over to the ugly little lap desk that was part of the apartment’s overdone clutter and opened it. There was no writing paper inside. She’d forgotten to order it again. There weren’t even any discarded envelopes in the wastepaper basket (curse Marie-Thérèse for her impeccable housekeeping). There was just blotting paper.

  Sitting down on the bed, she wrote ‘Now’ down the left-hand side of the blotting paper, and ‘Later’ down the right.

  After a while, she added a question mark to each side. She put down the pen, and sighed.

  She still had no idea what else to tell her granddaughter, who was probably already on the train here. Or when.

  But she was, at least, relieved when the music stopped, and footsteps came out of the study. They’d done for the day, then. Thank God. Two very deep male voices in the corridor rumbled polite goodbyes at the silent presence that must be Marie-Thérèse. She was a little surprised to hear these engineers speak the Russian-accented French of so many shabbily dressed people here in Paris. (Heavens, why had she thought they’d be German?)

  Shamed by Marie-Thérèse’s surly silence, she called out, warmly, ‘Do zavtra, gospoda.’ (‘See you tomorrow, gentlemen.’)

  When the door had shut quietly behind the men, she asked Marie-Thérèse to bring her apéritif to the now-empty study.

  You got the sunset from the study.

  She pulled up a chair to the French window in there and, lighting a cigarette, looked out at the honeyed evening scene before her: trees fuzzy with leaves and pale-gold house fronts. She liked the stillness of this time on a hot day. This is where she’d bring Evie, for the first discussion she’d imagined … Slowly, she felt a fragile sort of quiet return. This was what she’d wanted, after all, wasn’t it, even if it was now coming more suddenly than she’d have liked? If all the reversals Constance had survived had taught her anything, it was that life was, almost always, more of a comedy than a tragedy. And this, too, would almost certainly all come out all right in the end.

  When Marie-Thérèse came in with her glass of champagne, Constance asked, in a voice she had to make as calm as possible, trying to believe this was the most normal request in the world, ‘Would you make up the spare room before you go? And also ask Gaston if he’d meet the Le Havre evening train later on? My grand-daughter’s coming to stay.’

  To her astonishment, Marie-Thérèse’s reply of ‘Oui, madame’ was only slightly grumpy.

  Taking a sip of champagne, she moved away from the window to the big table she used as a desk.

  The men had left their equipment out.

  The machine – a big futuristic-looking thing, with two spools of magnetic tape wound round the front, and knobs and buttons everywhere – was standing right in the middle of the table. There was a pile of tape sweepings on the floor, with a broom beside it.

  Absurdly, considering how she’d hated hearing the music playing all day, Constance now wanted to see how the machine worked. Maybe it would amuse Evie, later.

  She plugged it in at the wall and it whirred into life. Lights flashed. But she couldn’t see which was the ‘on’ button that would make the reels move, or how you would operate it.

  Still … imagining herself further into this game, she picked up the heavy headphones the men had left on the back of the chair, sat down, and fitted them on her ears.

  What would you hear, with these on?

  It took her a moment or two just to get used to the feel of them covering her ears, like a pair of hands. It seemed a very long while before she realized that – even though the recording machine wasn’t moving – she was hearing something through them.

  At first all she could make out was static, like a badly tuned radio station.

  But then voices came muttering through the storm, loud, then quiet, then loud again: men’s voices, speaking Russian.

  Why, she thought, astonished, surely the engineers haven’t just been sitting in here recording themselves?

  It took a moment or two more to be able to make out what the voices were saying.

  MAN ONE: ‘I may have the news we’ve been waiting for by tomorrow.’

  MAN TWO: ‘What, really? My dear colleague, do you really mean it? At last?’

  The second voice, fuzzy and hard to hear though it was, was so endearingly full of hope that Constance warmed to it even as she tried to puzzle out what was going on. Was there a radio receiver built into this equipment, perhaps? she wondered, still hoping that a sensible explanation would come to her. Could one of the engi
neers maybe have been listening while the other edited?

  But who would transmit Russian radio here in Paris? Miller’s people certainly didn’t have a radio station. She didn’t think even those other Russians – the ones at the Soviet diplomatic mission – did …

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’ the second voice went on emotionally. How familiar its cadences seemed through the crackle and fuzz in her ears. And then there was a sneeze.

  Of course she knew who it was. Miller. He’d had a cold for two days. Which meant this wasn’t a recording, or a radio. It was reality. Somehow, and Constance didn’t like to imagine how, she was listening to Miller quietly talking to someone downstairs.

  ‘Well, let’s just see tomorrow,’ the first man was saying, through the thump of her heart. ‘But it is looking pretty good.’

  Constance began twitching for a cigarette. She needed to think, but she had a pain in her chest.

  Hurriedly she let the headphones drop, pushed the chair back and ran out of the room, stumbling against bits of furniture, clattering on the parquet.

  ‘Marie-Thérèse!’ she called hoarsely, hoping the housekeeper hadn’t already finished making up the bed in the spare room for Evie and gone upstairs. ‘Marie-Thérèse! I need you. Now!’

  8

  Marie-Thérèse couldn’t help noticing that the two muscly Russians were sitting outside at the café again when she let the doctor in at dusk. As usual, they were muttering at each other and ignoring the chessboard they were supposed to be looking at.

  They’d been there every day for a month, those two men, with their cheap suits, bad skins and pudding-bowl haircuts. They looked … well, wrong, in a way she couldn’t place.

  She was too preoccupied this evening, what with the doctor, Madame’s crise and the bit of whalebone that had strayed out of her corseting and was prodding into her flesh, to give her full attention to resenting these sacrés Russes in the wholehearted way she usually did – thousands of them, wherever you went, feckless vodka-swilling drunks, taking jobs from good French workers, always kicking up a stink about their papers and their tragedies, cooking cabbage, assassinating and kidnapping people, as had happened downstairs a few years back, which had meant police prying everywhere for months. There goes the neighbourhood.