The White Russian (5 page)

‘Wonderful,’ I echoed, feeling something new opening up and my own tentative smile grow to radiantly joyful proportions as well. ‘
Wonderful.
’

‘But I already knew you would be,’ I added, with a heady flash of boldness, ‘before I heard you, because I think my grandmother has seen you in Paris. Countess Sabline …’

I couldn’t have been more surprised at her reaction. Her eyes opened wider in a great melodrama of astonishment.

‘
Constance!
’ she cried, as if overcome. She reached for my hand, and held it very tenderly, and gazed into my eyes. ‘Can it be possible! You – my dearrr Constance’s granddaughter! Of course – your eyes! Everything! I see! My God! Sit, sit! Please!’

Overwhelmed, I sat. ‘You mean … you
know
her?’ I whispered.

But it took only a moment more, as my shock receded, to see that she wasn’t going to ask difficult questions. She wasn’t going to ask anything, in fact. She was going to talk.

‘Dear Constance,’ she said throatily, and I thought she might weep from pleasure. ‘Of course! My God. An
angel.
My benefactor.’

She looked mistily down at the empty table. The balalaika player too. Why, oh why, I wondered, once the possible cause of these looks dawned on me, hadn’t I asked the barman to send them drinks before approaching? I hadn’t got at all used to having my father’s allowance – a hundred dollars a month! A fortune! – at my disposal.

But, before I could risk breaking the mood by looking for a waiter, she sighed and went soulfully on: ‘My sponsorrr.
A wonderful, generous woman. An arrrtist at hearrrt.
She
appreciates a voice once admired by the Tsar of all the Rrrussias … our Little Father … the Tsar’s Nightingale, they called me once …’ Her voice died away. She dropped my hand and crossed herself; then she resumed, with much more bite and boastfulness: ‘She is having Magnetophon recording made of my voice. For posterity, you understand.’

My head was spinning. Still half looking for a waiter while wondering what I might ask about her voice recording, I hardly noticed the tapping at my shoulder.

‘Dearrr Constance speaks often of you,’ Plevitskaya went on, superbly.

‘She does?’ I said eagerly, feeling a shimmering happiness spread through me. Again I disregarded the tapping on my bare upper arm.

‘She has told me
so much
…’

It was Plevitskaya who became aware of the extra presence in our midst first. Her big dark eyes widened as they shifted to somewhere above my left side; her smile became flirtatious again.

I followed her gaze. There was Winthrop, in his peacock pinks and shimmering greens, brushing hair out of his eyes, laughing back down at her, enjoying the scene but coming to take me away. ‘They’re all ready to go, Evie,’ he murmured, turning to me. ‘We’ve heard there’s a man at a place up the street right now who can tell Bill and me about Spain. He knows the cheapest way to get to Europe – some ship they practically pay you to take passage on – and everything else, too. We want to catch him.’

I nodded, feeling disappointed that we’d been interrupted, but also obscurely relieved. Of course, I told myself, I hadn’t
really believed, not for a moment, that Plevitskaya would have heard stories about me from Grandmother. She’d just been telling me what I wanted to hear. It was best to go now, and keep this moment magical.

Plevitskaya was looking at Winthrop with frank admiration. Well, he
was
good looking. ‘Young girrrls. Things just
khappen
to them.
Won
derful,’ she purred, almost licking her lips. He grinned back. He liked being admired. And he had nice manners.

‘May we’, he said, with perhaps a quicker understanding than mine, ‘leave you with a glass of champagne? We all loved your singing …’

While they happily cooed and billed, and I got to my feet, he gestured for a waiter.

‘Will you’, I asked Plevitskaya as Winthrop, having ordered their drinks, put his arm through mine, ready to go, ‘be singing here again?’ Even if I didn’t believe her, I couldn’t quite bear to just let her go, all the same. Just in case. I might regret it tomorrow.

I thought there was regret in her eyes too as she shook her head. But the words she replied with were all grandeur: ‘Tonight is the end of my Amerrrican tourrr. But come to Paris. Come, please! I am performing there verrry often.’

‘How would I find you?’ I persisted. ‘Before you leave town?’

Her eyes flickered. ‘Ritz-Carrrlton Khotel,’ she said splendidly, but I could tell right off that she wasn’t really staying there. It was just a boast.

‘Well, please,’ I said, feeling deflated, ‘if we don’t meet, give my best to …’

But what was the point? Winthrop was applying gentle pressure to my arm to get me to start moving towards the door. The others were waiting.

She inclined her head and eyed the sparkling glass in front of her. ‘Of courrrse.’

I could tell it was late as soon as I opened my eyes. There was mid-morning sunshine streaming in through the window, and Florence was in the doorway, only her skirt and ankles visible under that big pile of laundry I’d left yesterday.

‘Ten o’clock, Miss E.,’ she said. Then, kindly, ‘Thought you should sleep through.’

I sat up guiltily. ‘How’s Mother today?’ I asked.

‘Got a visitor.’

By the time I’d dressed and run a comb through my hair and got to Mother’s room, Aunt Mildred was getting wheezily to her feet, ready to go.

She eyed me with disfavour. ‘Up late, I see,’ was all she said. Mother, sitting up against her pillows, sighed.

‘Let me see you out, Aunt Mildred,’ I said hastily, eager to make amends. I leaned over and kissed Mother’s cheek, miserably aware of her faint movement away from me.

Aunt Mildred sailed down the corridor in her summer grey, ominous as a battleship. I hastened after her, bobbing in her wake. We were at the door, and I was fussing around finding the parasol she said she’d come in with but which neither of us could see, before she cleared her throat and
said, ‘I’m assuming you do know that your mother has been feeling unwell?’

I straightened up and stepped out of the closet, full of sudden dread. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I could hear my voice sounded thin.

She shook her head. ‘Well, I think she would have appreciated just a little concern and care,’ she said grimly.

‘But …’ I stammered with a last flicker of self-defence, ‘I have …’

My proof: hadn’t she and Mother been sitting together in the healing rose fragrance that my white flowers, so lustrously fresh and perfect, were sending out into the room?

‘She’s hardly seen you, she says.’

I hung my head. The rest of what she said washed over me: the ‘children can be so unthinking’s, and the ‘of course their own lives seem so much more interesting’s.

‘It doesn’t do a girl’s reputation any good, you know,’ Aunt Mildred added, more severely still, and the force of whatever else she and Mother had also been discussing made it sound as though every word she said were capitalized, ‘What You’ve Been Doing.’

Whatever That Is, I told myself with inner defiance, though ‘going out till all hours drinking cocktails’, ‘keeping company with disreputable young men’ and ‘letting communists disturb the neighbourhood’ possibly had something to do with it.

‘My parasol is there,’ she added in a different voice.

Wordlessly, I passed it out.

She gave me a challenging stare. ‘I don’t need to say any more, do I?’ she finished.

I shook my head.

‘I can only say it’s a good thing you’re all coming to the island from tomorrow,’ she added, opening the door herself. ‘We’ll have some good behaviour
there
, at least.’

The door clicked shut.

In my room, where the bright sunshine through the windows now seemed to be mocking me, I looked at the books still in the bottom of my trunk. They didn’t seem to be in quite the same places I remembered. I couldn’t see the French poetry book with the bundle of extra bits of paper, including the torn-out ad for Plevitskaya, the so-called Nightingale, whom I’d met last night, and the photo of Grandmother, folded inside the cover. I turned the whole box out. It wasn’t anywhere.

I went to the kitchen. There were noises from the washroom behind.

‘Are we really going to the island tomorrow?’ I asked Florence.

Florence, half-submerged in a sudsy tub, looked up at me sympathetically.

‘That’s why I’m washing everything today,’ she said carefully. ‘Though how all this will ever get dry in time God only knows.’

Then she scrunched up her face in that sympathetic, I-know-more-than-I’m-admitting way she had, and added, ‘Nothing for it but to say yes, Miss E. Just like I do.’

‘But for how long?’ I asked, ignoring her advice. ‘Did she say?’

She shook her head.

I turned away. ‘Did you move any of my books?’ I asked, half out of the door. ‘The ones in the trunk? While you were getting the washing?’

She shook her head again. I could see the kindness in her eyes. And of course I’d known the answer already.

I didn’t knock on the way into Mother’s room. She was lying in bed, reading the paper.

‘A little better,’ she murmured, turning her eyes to the wall. ‘Aunt Mildred … so kind …’

I stood by her bed, looking down at her. She shifted her shoulder a little further towards the wall.

Looking round, I saw that one of the big pots of orchids from the window was on her bedside chest this morning – its blooms white and smooth. Unnatural-looking, parasitic things, I thought, suddenly disgusted by them: half-flower, half-fungus.

‘That’s a pretty orchid,’ I said brightly. ‘Did Aunt Mildred bring it?’

A tiny frown appeared on her face, as if pain might be returning. ‘No, it’s always been there …’

‘Well, yesterday, for instance, there were some white roses there. I bought them for you myself, and put them in a vase right here,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady and reasonable as I could. ‘I had to move all the pictures on to the window to fit the vase on to the chest. Don’t you remember?’

Yet the pictures were in their usual place now – the whole shiny array, dusted, in tidy rows around the orchid pot. For a yawning moment, looking at them, I wondered whether I hadn’t just imagined, dreamed, the white roses …

And then Mother’s eyes flickered. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking down at her hands, ‘those. They died.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

In the silence that followed, a whirring, chattering, pounding-red interior monologue began inside me.

What time had she had to get up this morning, that voice was asking, to make sure my flowers were disposed of and the orchids in place instead and the pictures dusted and arranged, all before Aunt Mildred’s early call? Had she known, beforehand, that she’d want my roses gone so she could complain about my selfishness more freely? And, if she was so sick, where had she found the strength to heave that heavy orchid pot into place?

‘But, oh look,’ I went on, with bright, false concern, ‘I think you must have dropped one or two of the pictures you had here yesterday?’

Mother put one hand to her forehead, and shook her head.

‘Both the ones of Grandmother …?’ I went on, pronouncing the taboo word with the greatest possible precision. ‘Because they’ve gone.’

Her frown deepened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘Grandmother,’ I repeated sweetly. ‘Yesterday you had her wedding picture here, and also that recent one she sent from Paris. The one from my poetry book. Would you like me to look and see if they’ve fallen under your bed?’

Silence.

‘Your mother,’ I prompted, after a moment, but I could already feel that brief flush of heat and anger fading inside me. ‘Constance.’

She closed her eyes. ‘Inconstancy, more like,’ she whispered.

‘Grandmother then,’ I prodded. ‘Shall I look for the photographs?’ I moved towards her bed.

‘I don’t know what you mean about pictures,’ Mother
suddenly snapped in a much stronger voice. ‘There are no pictures of her here.’

I straightened, smiling down at the floor. ‘Ah, well, perhaps I imagined them,’ I said with what insouciance I could still manage. With the last vestiges of my brave anger, I told myself: So she’s put the pictures somewhere else, that’s all
that
means.

‘I need to rest,’ she said.

I got almost all the way to the door before she whispered at my back, ‘Did Aunt Mildred tell you she’s asked us all to the island from tomorrow evening?’

I turned, submissively. The darkness had gone from her face. She was almost smiling.

‘I’ve asked Florence to get your clothes ready.’

I nodded again. I so wanted to trust that hint of warmth. My mind was leaping ahead, showing me wishful-thinking pictures of sunlight on the water, and us all laughing together – but such pictures, I knew even as I imagined them, were only illusions.

As soon as I’d left her room I went straight to the telephone in the hall.

‘Eliza?’ I whispered, when she came to the phone. ‘What was the name of the ship to Europe the man was talking about last night?’

An Apartment in Paris

September 1937

‘Two o’clock already,’ General Miller sighed as soon as he’d finished the lunchtime
plat
, showing none of his usual interest in the cheese. ‘I must go …
Davno pora
.’

Constance glanced around, a bit surprised by his change of language. He didn’t always talk Russian with her. His English wasn’t bad at all, even if, after all these years here, his French was still lousy. Her Russian was good enough, but she still preferred to speak English with him. But it only took a moment to see why he’d reverted to his native tongue. The housekeeper was in the doorway, ready to take away the plates.

Constance smiled up at him. Our secret, his eyes flashed back. As usual there was both laughter in them and a mute appeal. It was fine, they were telling her, for Marie-Thérèse to be aware that he sometimes came up from his office on the ground floor for lunch with his old friend one floor up. But anything else was not a housekeeper’s business.

As it happened, there’d been nothing at all private in the conversation they’d been having. In fact, Constance had
spent the meal quietly agonizing over
not
having found a way to broach the big subject on her mind.

Instead they’d just had their usual disagreement about art. It was almost a ritual, this bantering argument, in this big rented apartment, whose fussy pastel-flowered walls and Louis Quinze furniture she’d by now pretty much covered with all her purchases of wildly colourful avant-garde art. He’d shake his head at the latest item, whatever it might be – today a rather magical exquisite-corpse sketch done collectively, one foot or breast or mouth at each fold of the paper, by the wonderfully dishevelled Surrealists she’d fed last night. He’d say, clearly enjoying his mock despair, ‘My God! Another daub! A scrrrible! terrrible!’ while she laughed back and said, ‘Ah, what have you ever understood about art?’ (‘All our exchanges about art are conducted in an atmosphere of controlled mutual contempt,’ she’d once told him wryly, and liked his unabashed reply, ‘Ah, but there is warmth in it, at least, and that is the important thing.’)

But the ordinariness of what they’d been talking about wasn’t the point, she thought tenderly. It didn’t matter whether there was really anything that needed keeping from Marie-Thérèse. It was enough that he felt vulnerable enough to want the protection of secrecy. Russians did, these days. She would, too, if she, like him, were running a White organization whose previous leader had been kidnapped in broad daylight right here on a Parisian street seven years ago, and never been seen again, and the one before that poisoned. She knew that was why there were all those burly young secretaries at the office of his military outfit, which was what the White Army had become after
being driven out of Soviet Russia fifteen years ago. They didn’t like him to go about the streets on his own. It was also why she’d taken this grimly conventional apartment in the staid, cheerless 8th arrondissement, when, frankly, she’d rather have been in chic Montparnasse with the art crowd: because the apartment one flight up was the only place he could easily get away to.

If he also wanted to pretend to her housekeeper that he never came back at night, after Marie-Thérèse was safely tucked away upstairs in her
chambre de bonne
, well, that was fine by her, too – even though, for God’s sake, Marie-Thérèse was an unshockable Parisian, who’d surely seen it all. Her housekeeper was also the last person Constance could imagine reporting to Soviet Moscow, if that was the unlikely way his mind was turning (though she rather enjoyed the absurd notion of Marie-Thérèse mumbling into a secret radio with her coat collar turned up). She watched him sometimes, in the morning, eyes scouring the bedroom for any forgotten trace of himself before he left. Maybe he just thought the housekeeper would gossip, and somehow word that he had a mistress would pass through the Paris concierges’ bush telegraph, and reach his son. But Constance never asked – and to be honest she didn’t really care – why he pounced so energetically on stray socks and shaving brushes, tucking them away in his briefcase with that furtive glance her way, as if worried she’d notice. He should know, she thought, that he was safe enough here. But if being so terribly cloak-and-dagger made him happy, what did any of it matter? She could humour him.

All Constance wanted was for him to feel comfortable whenever he could get away to her here.

As he took her hand now, formally, and kissed it with the absurd old-world courtliness she laughed at in him, but privately adored, Constance felt the familiar stab of a sweetness that was almost pain, both at the beautiful straightness of his back and the vulnerable-looking silver of that head of hair, which she remembered once so strong and wavy and golden. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger, she thought wistfully.

It was three years since she’d run into him again, here in Paris. She hadn’t been able to believe her luck that first day. She still remembered the tremor in her voice when the face of the sternly staring man hunched over the chessboard in the park had, somehow, resolved itself into that unformed young face from long ago; when she’d whispered, ‘… Miller?’ and those altered features had relaxed into a joy that looked so
exactly
like what she’d already started feeling inside, too … She still couldn’t always believe her luck.

And now she was overwhelmed by her good fortune at simply being here with this man, in this moment, after all those other less happy years – here, and gratefully watching time draw its lines on him. On both of them. She’d never expected so much of life.

‘
Dorogoye serdtse,
’ she murmured, entering his game of secrets by speaking Russian. (‘Dear heart.’) Then, leaping up, she completed the sentence in English. ‘I’ll see you out.’

Leaving Marie-Thérèse with the ruins of the rack of lamb – all those little bones sticking up, never Constance’s favourite meal, though in this hot weather the scent of thyme and rosemary and garlic reminded her happily of the Midi – she walked behind him down the corridor.

Just before he reached for the catch on the front door – no need for him to stop for coat or hat for he’d slipped up here as he was, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, leaving his jacket on the back of his chair – the music started again. It was so sudden, and so loud, that they both jumped and turned to stare at the closed door of the study they’d just passed.

A deep woman’s voice belted out the word ‘LOOOOOVE’ from behind it. Then there was a skidding plastic noise, and a whir. Then the same phrase began again.

Constance sighed. She must have heard it a hundred times this morning, since Marie-Thérèse had let in the engineers who’d come with their big machine to sit in the study going through the tapes they’d recorded, playing them over and over to find the best versions. She could have done without this, today of all days. There were too many other things for her to think about.

He sneezed. He had a cold. He’d been sneezing all through lunch. Grumpily he said, ‘I can hear it from downstairs, too, you know. What a torment.’

Constance looked at him with slight worry as the peace of a moment ago faded. She knew he was happy, in principle, that she’d offered to pay for the Magnetophon recording of the voice that all his Russians downstairs loved so much. But she also knew he’d been less happy to discover that she had agreed the editing could be done at her home. To be honest, she never would have done if she’d realized how noisy it would be, or how long it would take.

‘Too awful,’ she replied pacifically, ‘darling. But it’ll be done by the end of the week.’

She didn’t regret her generosity, not really. You had
to share your luck. And poor Plevitskaya – time hadn’t been kind to
her.
That once lovely, coarsened face danced before Constance’s eyes, with its thick kohl and rouge, that disconsolate look. Constance had been touched by the hope that had come into the singer’s mournful eyes when she’d first suggested this; a hope she’d seen growing and growing as she talked persuasively on, through ‘You have to keep up with the times’, to ‘You’re only as old as you feel’, and ‘Who knows? Wouldn’t it be a hoot if the recording was a hit? You still have armies of fans …’

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.