Midnight in St. Petersburg (51 page)

‘Close range. Now, better check on your man. That ride won't have done his foot any good either.'

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The sun was still hanging over the jewelled sea. Horace, in his chair on deck, tucked under a blanket but with his head up and colour in his cheeks again, was watching it sink into the sea. His foot was mending nicely, the English ship's doctor had said. That might be because of the poultice the old man in Yalta had put on it – maggots, the doctor said – or it might just be because Horace had the constitution of an ox and was destined to live. At any rate, he'd managed to get up and limp to his chair this evening, leaning on a stick, with Inna at his side.

She'd wanted them both to see the sun set on Russia. There's God in the glitter on that water, she remembered Father Grigory saying in St. Petersburg long ago, back when he still had his innocence. And now Inna could understand why. It was only now, looking at the great oblivious majesty of it, the tranquilly deepening gold of the horizon ahead, that she could calm the anxious whirring of detail in her mind; that she could understand that Yasha was truly gone, but that, because of his last magnificent act of self-sacrifice, the two of them were safe and heading towards the future, and give thanks. Yasha had despised his own cowardice before getting away from town, but that was just the trap his idealism had caught him in as that world back there went wrong. She wouldn't remember him like that, but as he'd been at the last – and long ago, too, before politics had changed him. She'd remember his idealism. His selfless kindness.

The first crisp naval officer she'd found and pulled towards Horace, back at the jetty at Koreiz, had barely wasted a moment listening to his weak whispering before having space cleared on the gangway for him to be stretchered on board. There'd been strong young ensigns assigned to walk alongside, too, carrying their bags and keeping off the fretful, panicky press of other people; and the sailors had waited on deck with their burdens for Inna to pull the amethyst pendant out of her waistband and, with hasty thanks and handshakes, slip it into Selifan's hand, before stumbling back along the jetty to rejoin them. Yet despite all this, leaving Russia hadn't been quick or easy.

While the passengers were still milling frenziedly around on board, their two ships had stopped, almost immediately, offshore from Koreiz, to meet a third British craft at sea. This sloop had braved Yalta to pick up four hundred officers of the Imperial Guard who were to be set down again at Sevastopol. And then they'd all stopped again, this morning, at Sevastopol, and, after the Imperial Guardsmen had been put ashore, taken on more White refugees. There was no room on the smaller ship ahead, the
Marlborough,
where Prince Youssoupoff and his family, and many others of his kind, were accompanying the Dowager Empress, but this ship, the
Princess Ena,
had somehow found space for the stragglers. There'd been clouds and choppy seas at Sevastopol: thin clouds rising from the fires in town, and billowing grey in the sky, too. Fidgety and claustrophobic, morbidly curious to see what had become of Sevastopol, Inna had left Horace sleeping in the officer's little cabin, which he'd given up for them, and come up on deck to stretch her legs and get a breath of air.

As the sloop carrying the Imperial Guardsmen had set off to take them back to land to fight the advancing Reds, Inna had seen the Dowager Empress and Grand Duke Nicholas and a crowd of others gather on the quarter-deck of the
Marlborough.

For a moment, Inna had thought she might also see Youssoupoff, whose violin they still had – because of course there hadn't been a moment, in the chaos of departure, to think of running around trying to find
him
; and Horace's first word, when he'd opened his eyes in the cabin and seen the fiddle box propped up against their cabin wall, had been a hoarse but deeply satisfied ‘good'. And so she'd briefly wondered whether, if she did spot Youssoupoff on that other deck, she should wave and make herself known to him, or just turn her face away.

But then she'd forgotten all about Youssoupoff, because, at the sight of their former Empress, the Guardsmen had started to sing. As the solemn words of the old anthem Inna had never expected to hear again began ringing out – ‘God Save the Tsar' – the hair had risen on the nape of her neck. The noisy conversations on the crowded deck of the
Princess Ena –
the where-next question that everyone on board had been trying to answer since they'd found out these ships would only take them as far as Malta, the my-cousin-in-Paris, my-aunt-in-Rome, opportunities-in-Switzerland, chances-in-London cacophony of hopes – had died away in an instant, too. All those who'd been sitting were on their feet, suddenly, and the men were standing to attention. Some had saluted, like the Imperial Guard. There'd been handkerchiefs, too, and closed eyes, and sobs, and Inna had seen the undisguised glitter of tears. For this was goodbye.

Inna thought she'd never forget the melancholy sight of that little elderly woman on the other ship, standing apart from all the others under a white flag marked with a bold red cross and with the complicated crossed blues and reds and whites of Britain in the top left-hand corner, stiffly upright as she prepared herself for exile, listening to the deep voices drifting across the water.

Inna would never forget, either, the long, long silence that followed.

She'd gone back to the cabin, feeling hollowed out but strangely healed, wanting to share with Horace the feeling of completion that the singing had brought her, and hoping he might feel able to come on deck for their last Russian sunset, and make his peace with the past, too.

Now Inna leaned against the deck rail, finding herself once again able to rejoice simply at the fact of existence, at the wind in her hair. The gold was slowly fading from the sky, as the first faint stars came out in the dusk. Horace was as lost in his thoughts as she was in hers.

Here, at vanishing point, the past seemed as unreal as the future. Inna let her mind wander back all those hundreds of versts north to St. Petersburg, where there would still be snow on the ground, yet the Lemans might be looking out into the deepening heavens at the same stars as her. She closed her eyes, and suddenly it came flooding back, and she could almost smell the brutal, scouringly salt air of the city she'd left behind, and imagine Marcus and Olympia laughing over a parcel, or Madame Leman looking exasperated as her two youngest quarrelled over the size of their portions of kasha. For a moment, too, she was lost in the painful poignancy of another memory, a kiss in the deserted street, late at night, with litter blowing at her ankles, and her heart full of the certainty of youth, and snowflakes melting on his eyelashes …

She opened her eyes. The landline of Russia was already far behind, over the horizon. Ahead lay nothing more definite than a shimmer of transformation: the hope of a new life and an uncharted happiness. But that was enough.

Out of habit, she curled her fingers into her palms to touch the old scars – angry wounds once, faded now to a gentle silvery trace. Then she let her hands straighten again. If surviving this journey had proved anything, it was that she was strong enough to face whatever the future held for her unaided. She didn't need the help of those lines any more.

She shifted against the rail, wondering if that was the beginning of a swell in her belly that she could feel through the stuff of her coat, and then whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, and then, with the sorrow for him that she knew she would soon feel still strangely suspended, what it would be like to hold this child – Yasha's share of infinity – in her arms, and see a new being grow up whose cast of eyes, or turn of calf or cheekbone, would always remind her of him.

Then she became aware of movement at her side.

Horace had turned and was smiling up at her from his chair, with the beginning of his old carefree grin. She wasn't sure yet what he remembered from the time when he'd been so ill, or whether he even knew that Yasha had been there for those few precious hours, but she was certain he was vaguely aware that something important had happened to her. He hadn't asked, though, any more than he'd started to wonder, aloud, what was uppermost on the minds of everyone else on this ship: what to do after Malta? She had the sense he was just grateful that they were together, and that the worst of their journey was behind them. But she'd tell him everything when he was stronger, she resolved, or at least as much as she could without hurting him, and there would be no more secrets in the life they were about to begin.

Inna looked tenderly down at him.

‘When the sun comes up tomorrow,' he said, ‘I wonder where we'll be, you and I?'

 

AFTERWORD

This book is a very personal story for me, and not just because I drew so heavily for it on the seven years after the end of Communism which I spent living in Moscow and St. Petersburg, or because I made the Leman family with whom my heroine lives in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg so very like the wonderful Karpov family with whom I lived with in modern St. Petersburg (they share an address), or because my own parents are musicians, or even because, in the course of describing violin-makers in Russia, I learned to make a violin myself.

There's one even more important thing. One of the book's three central characters is an Englishman called Horace Wallick who worked for Fabergé the jeweller's in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. He's drawn from real life. He was my great-great-uncle.

The real Horace Wallick was, just as I have him in the book, a jobbing artist who painted miniatures – the kind that went inside lockets, or in miniature portraits, or on top of jewelled boxes. From 1910 to 1919, right through the last days of Tsarism and both the Revolutions of 1917, he lived a few streets away from the Fabergé shop and worked for the Swiss firm. Then he escaped from the starving city during the civil war between Red and White forces that followed 1917. Like many White hangers-on, he ended up among Whites in the southern resort of Yalta. Eventually he was spirited away by a British ship in 1919, along with a good chunk of the defeated Russian aristocracy, just as the Reds won the day. He never returned to Russia.

I can't claim that I learned Russian as a schoolgirl, or travelled to the Soviet Union as a student, or loved the art of the early twentieth century, or went to work in new Russia as a journalist as any kind of homage to Horace Wallick.

In fact, I only discovered he existed when I'd already spent years living in a Russia that was returning to the overblown, turbo-charged, thrillingly transgressive form of capitalism he must also have experienced nearly a century earlier. In my Russian 1990s, hardly a day went by without a coup, or a war, or a banking battle, or a smear campaign, or a corruption scandal, or a shoot-out, or a millionaire being caught in a post-KGB honey trap. You gasped and stretched your eyes at all the exaggeration, but you were never bored. I couldn't leave – I was always worried that, anywhere else, I
would
feel bored. And yet I'd been there so long that it was beginning to seem I might end up staying forever.

And then I found Horace. I went back for a quiet weekend in London at my family home, still the house where my great-grandmother, Horace's sister, had died, and still full of many of her books – I'd found my first Chekhov and my first Tolstoy, in old Everyman editions, on those bookshelves. And I saw an old catalogue of a London exhibition of Fabergé eggs from the 1950s. That's very Russian, I thought, and it might come in handy if I have to write about Fabergé starting up again, which was always being talked about at the time. So I took the book back to Moscow with me.

To my astonishment, when I flicked through it, I saw it was full of notes. What drew my attention first was simply nostalgic pleasure that they were written in my much-missed grandmother's handwriting. They told the story of my ‘new' relative and his hasty departure from Russia on the British
Princess Ena
from Yalta to Malta and on to England and, as she sweetly wrote, ‘peace and plenty'.

I was thrilled to find this unexpected family member who had lived in Russia even longer than I had. Between us, we neatly book-ended the Communist years. And I was also thrilled to find this connection to the city where the Russian family I loved lived. It was a joy to be linked to the place where I'd spent so much of my recent life. I knew very little about my father's relatives. Feeling rather rootless was part of the reason it was easy to live abroad for years on end – but, at the same time, it had left me wondering quite where ‘home' was. St. Petersburg seemed like a pretty good answer.

I spent a year trying to find out more about Horace Wallick's time in Russia. I had only the patchiest of success. I went to libraries and archives and Russian Aristocracy Associations, where the very Soviet-looking doctors and lawyers behind the office doors barked into very Soviet-looking orange plastic phones on giant desks but answered to the recently revived title of ‘your excellency'. But no one could tell me anything. The past, as one of my interviewees said, really is a foreign country in Russia. You might never find out.

Back in London, eventually, I raised the subject of our shared relative with my father, and discovered that he had not only heard of Horace Wallick, but knew him, and remembered him as ‘Uncle Horace'. All I learned, though, was that Horace had stayed too long enjoying the glitz and over-the-top drama of Russia. He'd let his own life drift. He was spoiled for England. He never quite settled back into quiet English phlegmatism, into ‘can't complain' and ‘mustn't grumble'. He drifted around, doing bits of art jobs for friends and relatives and making ends meet. He used to show my teenage father pictures of what my father called the Tsar's treasures. He always wore slightly grubby white gloves, my father remembered, and he liked a luxury or two, though he couldn't afford them. From time to time, he used to bust out of the old people's home in Richmond where he lived and come over to cadge a fiver off my father's parents, to keep him in gold-tipped black Balkan Sobranie cigarettes. ‘I got the impression Russia hadn't been kind to him,' my father said.