The White Russian (18 page)

Jean

The time …

‘Oh God, I’ve done it again, look, it’s half dark and he’ll be expecting me … I must go,’ I said, sounding, as even I could hear, shamefully inept. But neither of us moved.

‘Can I come too?’ she whispered.

I was so startled by that that I did let go of her.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘To talk to him, of course. To explain what we know, and ask him to tell me all about Grandmother.’ She sounded a little impatient, as if it were obvious. And, of course, it was.

But I also knew that it was a nonsense. Because her bit of paper didn’t represent her grandmother’s last wishes, and Father wouldn’t for a moment take seriously her notion that she was on a quest to carry them out. And anyway, if he’d never talked about his relationship with her grandmother, even with someone as close to him as me, why would he open his heart to her?

When I looked down at Evie’s expectant face, and into her eyes – which, I thought, with a new kind of foreboding, must have that moonlight look because she expected to be
able to just walk downstairs and find herself in conversation with some handsome young cavalry officer, all courtly manners and Tsarist mystique – I realized that I didn’t even want her to try.

I didn’t want her to talk to Father as he was now, or find out how different he’d become from that young cavalry officer of her grandmother’s letters.

She might think she’d like their funny little world in the office downstairs, but that was only because she probably imagined it as a realm of ghostly charm, and thought they just went round bowing very formally at each other in their threadbare uniforms under dusty chandeliers, and calling each other ‘Your Excellency’, and quoting Tolstoy together … But what would a girl who’d so recently spouted that naive bit of know-nothing socialism at me – ‘how good it must be to live and work among simple, honest people’ – make of Father today: too fat for his jacket, staring at that letter with the black Gothic print that I’d seen him with this morning, dreaming whatever terrible dreams he must be dreaming of marching back to Moscow at the head of a fascist army?

I knew the White cause wasn’t romantic any more. It hadn’t been for a long time. Sirin had taught me that, once and for all. After his only visit to ROVS, during which he’d maintained an ironic politeness as Father poured him brandy and plied him with his best
zakuski
and talked excitedly about the state of the world, Sirin had taken me aside for a private, laconic word. It was no wonder, he’d said, that Hitler’s view of history was so distorted when so many of my father’s men, the very Whites in question, also spent so much of their time ranting in this way against the
Bolshevik murder squads bumping off everyone who didn’t bow to what they called the Jewish–Bolshevik dictatorship.

I’d cringed, thinking of Sirin’s Jewish wife. That
was
exactly the sort of way Father talked. And I hadn’t even seen, until I’d been shown it through his outsider’s eyes.

I hadn’t wanted to take anyone to ROVS since then. I didn’t want to take Evie now.

I tightened my grip on her shoulders. ‘But will he talk?’ I said, shaking my head so that she’d understand the answer would be ‘no’, hoping she’d be acquiescent enough to accept my judgement.

There was a mutinous look in the eyes gazing back at me. I could see she didn’t agree.

Trying harder to be persuasive, I went on, ‘Whatever their reason was for keeping their relationship secret – whether it was his having a wife, or her having a whole separate life sponsoring all those young artists (because he won’t have appreciated them, you know; he doesn’t follow art today), or even if it was just that she wasn’t Russian (because they like to make a big thing of preserving their Russianness, you know, and try to keep themselves and their children as much apart from foreigners as possible) – it will still hold. He really won’t want to talk to you.’

She shook her head. ‘But, Jean,’ she said insistently, ‘talking to him was the whole point.’

‘He’ll have some old-fashioned notion of honour,’ I said, a bit louder, overriding her voice. ‘People’s dignity is important, too – their privacy. Sometimes people don’t have anything else,’ I added sternly.

I could feel her thinking. After a moment, she looked up again.

‘But Grandmother wanted me to make amends to him,’ she said. ‘ “Protect” and “Make amends”.’

She still sounded so determined, so American.

‘Look, let me think about it a bit more,’ I said finally, wanting somehow to find a way to make all these incompatible wishes come true, but lost as to how. ‘I’ll see if I can think of a way to approach the subject with him. But you think too, meanwhile, because you should be aware that telling him all this won’t change anything, for you – it won’t bring your grandmother back – any more than it will improve things for him. And it might distress him more if you turn up, raking over all his memories … because he’s grieving, you know. He’s been quiet and irritable for days. Isn’t it enough for you just to
know
about him and your grandmother?’

At last, at that, her eyes softened – a bit. ‘Can we talk about it again tomorrow, at least?’ she said. Her hand brushed against mine – the softest of touches, but one that sent a powerful current running up my arm.

‘Same time?’ I agreed, moving towards the door, more relieved than I had words for, both that she was letting herself be talked out of confronting Father, and that, even though the letters were now all read, she still seemed to want to see me again.

Evie

I put on a robe and sat at the desk without switching on a lamp until it was quite dark, and the photo in my hands had faded to no more than grey-and-yellow smudges, remembering Jean.

So he’d come back tomorrow. I could already picture his eyes lighting up as they met mine, and feel the heat and tremble of his body once he was holding me in his arms.

My thoughts went round in a rapturous circle: from lovers in the photograph in my hands, forever in their boat, on another summer’s day, long ago, to the miraculous-seeming way they’d been hiding here, all along, just waiting to be found, to the flesh-and-blood touch of
his
lips on mine this evening.

I didn’t want to let my mind focus on the other, much more unresolved question: why Jean was so against my going to talk to his father, the General, and how I was going to persuade him tomorrow that it would be all right.

But it was there, nagging away, because of course I couldn’t just sit here. I’d been on the point of telling him, ‘But, you see, I’ve got the gifts he gave Grandmother,’ and,
‘Grandmother wanted me to share her jewels – all those little gifts he wrote about – and her pictures, with her Zhenya.’ And then caution had stopped me. Because that was a conversation that might so easily have gone wrong with someone as touchy as Jean. I could so easily have made a mistake, and insulted him. He could have asked, ‘But why didn’t you say?’ And then I’d have had to explain that Marie-Thérèse told me not to tell anyone, and he wouldn’t have been altogether wrong to think she’d suspected Russians, as well as the taxman, of being after Grandmother’s money. Or I could have done something even worse, and said, ‘The jewels look valuable. He’ll want them back,’ and he might, again not altogether wrongly, have heard, ‘He’s poor now; he might want to sell them.’ So I was glad I hadn’t taken the risk of insisting further tonight, when there was so much to absorb, and so much else to be glad for.

I went to bed, still pondering. Every time I went round that loop of thought, it seemed clearer that Jean must be wrong. I couldn’t believe that someone who’d loved Grandmother for as long as his father had wouldn’t want to have someone to talk about her with. I wanted that, too, but, now I knew he must be her Zhenya, I also
had
to talk to him, and offer him whichever jewels and pictures he wanted. Finally, there was a newer reason for wanting to stick to the plan in my head. It was one so new, at this fluid moment when nothing was yet certain, that I could barely articulate it to myself. I certainly wouldn’t be able to explain it to Jean. But I knew it, without needing much in the way of words, to be important. I wanted to befriend the man who was Jean’s father.

Maybe all I needed was a night’s sleep to find the right
words, I thought sleepily. And then the memory of Jean’s lips came into my head again, and I floated away.

‘I’ll be back at four; I’m off to the Louvre,’ I called back, shutting the apartment door. When I’d woken up, my first coherent thought as I came out of a warm, relaxed sleep-memory of an embrace was that it might never have happened, and there might have been no Jean in my life, if it hadn’t been for Grandmother. My first grateful whisper, half letting myself believe for a moment that she was up there, somewhere, watching over me, had been, ‘Thank you, Grandmother.’

It was another glorious morning, with a breeze rustling the sticky leaves outside. I had six hours to kill before Jean came back, and Paris to visit. I had my Baedeker in my hand. But as I clattered down the stairs, enjoying feeling so strangely happy and heading for the building’s main door, I saw first a head, then a large body in shirtsleeves, in the courtyard. It was General Miller, moodily smoking a cigar.

It was irresistible.

‘Good morning,’ I called breezily, telling myself it would be rude not to.

He straightened with automatic courtesy and sketched a bow. He had very light, wide-set eyes above his beard and moustache, I noticed – you’d have thought them beautiful if he hadn’t been so bulkily masculine that the idea seemed absurd – and there was a pleasing frankness in them. How dignified he looked.

I walked out into the courtyard, with my hand outstretched. ‘General Miller.’

Why, I could sort everything out before Jean even came
back, I’d started telling myself, elated that Fate had put this opportunity my way. The General and I might be firm friends by teatime.

And then he realized who I was, and his face became still and guarded.

That was less encouraging, but now I was there I couldn’t just run away. Still smiling, I let my hand drop away – for he was showing no sign of taking it – and said, ‘I just wanted to say again how grateful I was for the flowers you brought my grandmother …’ Trying, rather desperately, to charm him into a laugh, however reluctant, I added, ‘… and I’m sorry if I got you into trouble with your son, too.’

He just nodded, watchfully.

Good grief, I’d never even heard his voice, I thought. Opting, on the spur of the moment, for strong-man tactics instead, I went on, ‘And, now that I’ve started going through my grandmother’s papers, I’m beginning to understand what very old friends you were …’

There was a flash of alarm in his eyes at that. But at least he engaged. His voice, when he did speak, had the deep, measured, sorrowful bass of the Volga boatmen, but his manner was poised. I could see at once that he was much more a man of the world than his son, for, rather to my surprise, he was as quick as someone like Hughie might have been to respond with what looked like ease, even charm. He wasn’t a panicker.

‘May I offer my condolences on your loss, miss?’ he said in slow, excellent English with a faint American accent (but why be surprised at that? He’d have spent a lot of time talking to Grandmother, after all). ‘And invite you to step into my office, if you’d like to talk?’

Without another word, he led me through a French window off the courtyard into his office – a sombre, mannish sort of room, with just a huge desk, a hard chair on either side of it, a map of Europe above the fireplace and, in the corner, a shabby divan. The chandelier was so high up that you were only vaguely aware of the cobwebs.

Even if he hadn’t wanted to talk in the open, I still hoped he’d become confiding now he felt private in his own office. I waited till he’d settled me in the visitor’s chair. Then I went on, more uncertainly, ‘… whereas I didn’t know her at all. There was an estrangement in the family. Perhaps you knew? But she’d started writing to me, and I’d been hoping we’d become close. And then I got here, and she died …’

He kept his eyes on me as he walked around the desk. He didn’t flinch at the mention of her death. I couldn’t help admiring that old-Europe soldierly steadiness.

I drew a deep breath and squared my shoulders. ‘And I was hoping you might tell me more about her,’ I finished bravely, looking straight at him. ‘Because I’d like to know – oh, what she talked about, what she laughed about, what she was like …’

He nodded, settling himself into the other chair, behind that long sweep of scuffed mahogany. How straight he sat: a cavalryman’s stance. He wasn’t going to be hurried.

‘Whom she loved …’

‘You’re very like her,’ he said, brushing that last foolhardy phrase away. He wasn’t going to answer any of my other questions, either, I realized with a sinking heart – or at least not properly. He looked at his hands. They were extremely clean, with neatly squared nails. He looked back
up. ‘I don’t mean to look at. She is – was – so dark. I mean that you’re very sure of yourself.’

But I was feeling more and more like a child, caught being naughty before a superbly self-possessed grown-up – worse still, before one whose assurance made me want to impress him with mine. Now,
this
man – unlike Jean – I could so easily imagine at ease in the chandeliered salons I’d read about in Tolstoy’s novels, rubbing shoulders with the Karenins, or dancing a perfectly executed waltz, or galloping down the Field of Mars with his regiment, sabre in hand. I could, equally, imagine him talking with Hughie and my mother, and all of them feeling quite at home.

He steepled his hands on the desk. With awful certainty, I saw that he was preparing, if not a polite lie, then at least the most minimal version of the truth. I’d seen Hughie do this too often not to know the signs. ‘It’s absolutely true that the Countess Sabline and I were acquainted, a very long time ago, in our youth,’ he said smoothly. ‘She was a diplomat’s wife at the American embassy in St Petersburg, and I’d been seconded from my military academy to brief her husband at the time on Russia’s position on the Balkans. As you will know, he – your grandfather’ – and here he looked at me and gave me what seemed, but wasn’t, quite, an almost avuncular half-smile – ‘was the US military attaché. The three of us got on well. Your grandparents were good enough to make me several invitations.’

‘And then he was killed,’ I blurted, full of disappointment that he wasn’t, after all, going to confide in me. He clearly regarded me as no more than a young stranger to be politely got rid of. It was an effort to call to mind the blurry, pleading letter this man had written, after that death,
begging my recently widowed grandmother to let him leave the army and take her away from Russia (had it been her tears that had wet that page, or his?). It felt crass to intrude the ugly fact of my grandfather’s sudden death into this calm narrative. Yet I so wanted to provoke him into at least a reference to what Jean and I had read yesterday in that correspondence that I couldn’t resist. ‘What happened next?’

But he wasn’t going to be rattled. He only spread his hands, and shook his head with a public speaker’s practised regret. ‘She went back to America, to her family,’ he said mellifluously. ‘We didn’t see each other for many years. And then, one summer’s day a few years ago, I was playing chess under the lilacs in the Luxembourg Gardens with my deputy; I felt a tap on my shoulder; and there she was …’ He nodded, with just the right amount of reminiscence on his face. ‘A widow again, and a Russian by marriage by now, but quite unchanged otherwise. After that, naturally we met, occasionally, for lunch. Our lives had taken quite different paths. But it’s always a pleasure to renew an old acquaintance.’

He smiled. I could see he was waiting for me to go. His performance was complete. And it was a good one. It told a bland public version of his relationship with Grandmother, and, feeling myself turning back into the quiet, don’t-rock-the-boat child I’d once been, I realized I had no idea how to challenge him.

‘You’ll appreciate in time how one treasures former acquaintances, I expect, when you’re as old as me,’ he added when I didn’t get up. There was a note of finality in his voice, as though, if I didn’t take the hint and go, he
might start looking at his watch and getting papers out of his desk drawer.

His beautiful dark voice wasn’t unkind, exactly. But it was enough to rattle me. Clear though everything had seemed while Jean and I had been reading those letters the evening before, my mind now went blank as to what we’d found out. I could barely remember why we’d felt so certain that Grandmother and the General were so close.

Dumbly, I scraped my chair and stood up, holding my Baedeker.

And then, after all, I did find words.

‘It must have been a surprise, after you’d met by chance in the Luxembourg Gardens, to find she’d been living one floor up from your office all along?’ I said.

For a moment, I saw his eyes flicker. ‘That came later,’ he said, after a pause.

And then, after another pause, he added: ‘I knew it was vacant, and she was looking for somewhere to live. I wanted to do her a service.’

Even though, by now, he was doing his best to give me that superb ambassadorial smile again, we both knew he’d just explained a little too much.

And then I saw it, leaning against the map of Europe, in the gloom: his framed copy of that same picture of young lovers in a boat that I had upstairs. With relief, all our discoveries of yesterday came flooding back to me – because this was his copy! That was proof in itself, wasn’t it?

‘Oh look – I recognize your lovely picture,’ I said. ‘The one Grandmother also kept, upstairs. How beautiful that you both went on treasuring it all your lives.’

For a moment, as I watched him look up at the picture, then bite his lip, I felt triumphant.

And then, as he turned back to me, all hope faded. With his now cold eyes on me, I saw I’d taken quite the wrong approach – much too frank, too New World, too hectoring. He didn’t want to be shown to be evading the truth. He was feeling bullied. The last thing he was going to do was level with me.

It was new for me to have had such a strong negative effect on anyone. Most men of his age, if they noticed me at all, did so with avuncular, or what they liked to call avuncular, affection; no one at college or elsewhere had ever responded with hostility, or felt threatened if I asked questions. It must be a sign, I thought, of how vulnerable this man felt below the grandeur of his carapace, and I was suddenly sorry.

‘Alas,’ he said, and his nostrils flared to white points. He was speaking very slowly and clearly, so as to make his point absolutely comprehensible. ‘I have few mementos. Few possessions of any sort. Like all my fellow officers, I left Russia with what I stood up in. I’m afraid mine is a life devoted to public duty, miss. I spend my days looking after the needs of my fellow countrymen in exile, and, when I’m not on duty, I spend my evenings looking after the needs of my wife and son. I have little time for other friendships.’

‘I understand … I understand. But please just hear me out,’ I said. I fixed pleading eyes on him. ‘You see, there’s something I think Grandmother might have wanted me to do for you …’ and I explained about how her last wish had been for me to find a person called Zhenya.

‘Last wish?’ he said faintly. He blinked, once or twice.

Yes, I rushed on, hoping I’d found the right note at last,
she had some things she wanted me to share with this Zhenya. There were the pictures she’d been buying – lots of them, in every room. And there were her jewels – not just the very big jagged modern ones she’d worn in recent years but also, I was careful to mention, some little Russian trinkets. A marble ostrich egg with a troika on top. A cigarette case. A sapphire bracelet. Things that she’d kept in a box for most of her life, and that must have meant a lot to her.