The White Russian (9 page)

It was late. I was too tired to care. I stripped off my clothes and fell into the bed. But when I woke up the next morning, I found myself unable to look peacefully at the great rectangle of hot blue sky through the window, and
gather my thoughts for another day, because it made me so uneasy being stared at from every side by large naked ladies, roughly drawn in thick blue paint, all of them fleeing and panic-stricken, with sketchy draperies streaming behind – and a misshapen bull, too. So I turned some of the more dreadfully dramatic pictures towards the wall.

I dressed and went to the dining room. (More pictures! This time with an odd kind of romance in them, mostly men in suits clutching at naked women, all floating in rudimentary treetops, sometimes with goats and violinists.) Today, mercifully, the table was only set for one. It was so hot outside that when I glanced through the window I could see wavy lines in the air. There were birds in liquid song outside, between the honkings of car horns. There was a tree outside the open window, partially covering the blue of the sky with soft dappled green. It was the kind of weather that couldn’t help but make you feel happy and hopeful. I sat down, glanced at the newspaper set by my place but didn’t unfold it, drank down some warm milky coffee and ate a couple of mouthfuls of very fresh bread and damson jam.

The morning was – almost – glorious enough to make me able to conquer the dread I felt at the idea of going into Grandmother’s room.

But I still felt a little ill at the prospect. I had to force myself. It was only after I’d run out of things to do – after I’d poured more coffee, prepared a little more bread on the same plate, and picked up the newspaper – that I went next door to sit with the invalid.

I’d been imagining that I might give her a sip of coffee … read the news to her, maybe. But any thought
that she might have recovered enough to take food from me, sit weakly up, even begin to talk – well, any of those fantasies went as soon as I entered the close darkness of the sickroom. Here there was no summer joy. The drapes were still drawn, though the windows behind them were open and there was a bunch of peonies in a vase on the dressing table. The lamp was still on. The air, warm and sour, smelled of illness.

I was rather relieved to see that Marie-Thérèse had been here, and recently, too, because Grandmother was in a new white cotton nightgown, which still looked impeccably laundered, with sharp creases at the edges of its thin pintucked sleeves. There was a fresh water jug on the tray by the bed, and a half-full bowl of chocolate, and the torn-up remains of a croissant, and a cloth that she must have used to wipe Grandmother’s mouth after popping in little morsels of the soft bread dipped in chocolate. By the door stood a bigger bowl, too, of warm soapy water, with the flannel Marie-Thérèse must have sponged her down with still sodden in it, and yesterday’s rolled-up nightgown beside it, and another, covered pot. The housekeeper was good at her job, I could see: attentive and kind-hearted, however much she disliked Russians. And she was clearly a far more expert and experienced nurse than I’d have been. But, for all the housekeeper’s care, the woman lying with closed eyes in front of me, breathing shallowly through that dragging, sideways mouth, was far away, lost in a dream I couldn’t follow.

Quietly I sat down in the chair at the side of the bed, and put down my bread and coffee. I’d thought I might read the paper while I watched her, but now that seemed
uncaring. As I listened to the distant sounds of outside, and watched the dust motes dance in a stripe of sunlight falling across the neatly remade bed, I realized, again, that I didn’t know what to do. Grandmother’s good right hand crept out across the sheet, pushing it down. Perhaps she was hot. Feeling brave, I leaned forward and stroked that hand. But there was no response.

I was just leaning back and, trying to suppress the thought that I might get bored, sitting here alone with a sleeping invalid for hours, and wondering whether, after all, I shouldn’t try to read the paper and drink that coffee, when the doorbell rang.

I heard heavy, hurried footsteps come out of the kitchen and go to answer it.

Then I heard men’s voices at the door – rumbling deeply in French so gutturally accented that, at first, I couldn’t understand it – and Marie-Thérèse’s tart answer: ‘
Mais Madame est malade. Vous allez donc revenir demain, vous n’allez quand même pas la déranger aujourd’hui avec vos histoires de musique
…’ (‘Madame is sick, so you’d better come back tomorrow; I’m not letting you in to annoy her with your music today.’)

What’s all that about? I wondered, rather shocked at the housekeeper’s frankly rude tone of voice. In front of me, still with her eyes shut, Grandmother began uneasily stirring. Putting my hand on hers again, I listened for the door to click shut on the snubbed guests. But instead I heard a brief discussion in an unknown foreign language, after which the men came pushing in anyway, I sensed right past the reluctant Marie-Thérèse, saying with great certainty in their bad French, with heavily rolled Rs,
‘
Notrrre trrravail ici
– fini
’ (‘Our work here – finished’) and ‘
il faut prrrendre le … la … apparrraturrra … avec
’ (‘We’ve got to pick up our … our …
apparatura
’). Then I heard the creak of a door, and the male footsteps going determinedly into another room, followed by Marie-Thérèse, who’d started squealing, very fast and outraged, through the thumping, banging sounds of machinery being gathered up that ensued. ‘
Mais je suis persuadée que l’appareil est à Madame, pas à vous! Vous n’allez pas la lui prendre comme ça sans sa permission, dites donc!
’ (‘But I’m sure that’s Madame’s machine, not yours! You’re not going to just take it like that, without her say-so!’)

On the pillow in front of me, Grandmother’s eyes suddenly opened. For a moment, she looked straight at me: an urgent gaze that seemed to take me in, and know me. For a moment, I thought she might be about to come to. But my hope disappeared when she screwed up her wrinkled sideways face in a grimace of utter horror, and started waving her good hand helplessly in the air, and opening and shutting her mouth, and nearly shouting those frantic sounds she’d been making last night, ‘MMM … MMMM … MMM!’

I didn’t lean forward and try to hear what she wanted to say. I didn’t do anything. She might be having another attack. She looked so frightening. For a long, long moment I just hovered, feeling helpless. I needed Marie-Thérèse, I told myself, leaving the room and going into the corridor. She’d know what to do.

Behind me, Grandmother was tossing to and fro, plucking at the air with that frighteningly waving hand. ‘Mmm … mmm!’ she was calling. I turned my back on
her. In front of me, Marie-Thérèse was looking very put out, and shutting the door to a room I hadn’t yet been in. ‘
Sacrés Russes
,’ she muttered, turning to me with outraged eyes. ‘You see?’

‘She’s woken up,’ I said urgently. ‘I don’t think she’s well. Please come.’

Marie-Thérèse’s face changed, and she came into Grandmother’s room with me. But by the time we’d got back to her bedside, there was no movement from it at all.

There was an hour or so more of panic-stricken endgame: the hopeless attempts at resuscitation; the calls to the doctor and the concierge; the injections; the strangely friendly eye-meets and muttered reassurances that created a brief semblance of normality between each new person’s intervention. It was almost lunchtime by the time a kind of dull flatness settled on us all, and the concierge was sent out to fetch an undertaker. But I’d known, from that first moment when I turned my eyes back to the sudden stillness on that bed, that the shape in it, so familiar and unfamiliar all at once, still with the lines of cheekbone and nose and chin and shoulder that I recognized, the source of so many memories that I was only just beginning to regain, had stopped being Grandmother.

And mixed up with my sadness was a numbing sense of inadequacy. Not only had I not got to know her, I hadn’t even been brave enough to sit with her at the last. I’d left her on her own, as surely as all the rest of my family had, long ago.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Marie-Thérèse said, ‘about Madame’s note.’

It was mid-afternoon. Two men from the undertaker’s had taken the still shape that had been Grandmother away. When they’d shifted her off the bed on to their trolley as roughly as if she’d been a side of meat and an arm had come swinging out from the side of the sheet, horribly, and I’d glimpsed that fragile blotched hand before one of the men had grunted and shoved it back against the body and flapped the sheet over it again – well, I suppose Marie-Thérèse must have seen my face, because she’d bustled me into the kitchen with a determined look. ‘I think we all need a dose of medicine ourselves,’ she’d said. ‘Leave them to it.’

Gaston seemed as shocked as me. He was pale under the red spider-veins in his cheeks. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ and, ‘Just like that,’ and, ‘She was right as rain this time yesterday.’

We both gathered around Marie-Thérèse as she poured out three stiff slugs of brandy. We did our best not to listen to the men in the corridor grunting and groaning and banging into things as they manoeuvred their burden to
the front door, and the stairs. And when the door had shut, and we were the only ones left, we raised our glasses, met each other’s eyes, and drained the brandy.

I could feel the comforting burn of it in my throat.

‘I called Madame’s lawyer. I said she’d passed away. He’ll drop in at four,’ Marie-Thérèse said, pouring more brandy. ‘He needs to discuss arrangements with you.’ She set the bottle down on the table. ‘Which is why I’ve been thinking about the note,’ she went on.

She had an idea, I could see. I felt as though I were seeing everything at a great distance, very small and quiet. I didn’t understand anything quite enough.

‘What note?’ I said.

‘The one you showed me,’ she said patiently. ‘The one on the blotting paper.’

Those jottings hadn’t been a note when I’d last thought of them, just random words. And they had no more certainty or positive meaning than anything else, especially now that I was facing the prospect of having to go creeping home to Mother and Aunt Mildred, like a dog with my tail between my legs. Now that I’d failed.

But Marie-Thérèse’s eyes were gleaming. ‘It seems to me’, she said, ‘that Madame must have had a premonition of what was in store for her … and she must have been writing that note for you, mademoiselle, so you would know she wanted you to have her pictures and jewels. That note was like a will – her last wishes.’

‘Oh,’ I said dully. What difference did a few bits of old jewellery make?

But Gaston, who was beginning to look a bit more his usual self after that brandy – after draining his second shot,
his cheeks had gone back to their usual red colour – had a hungry look in his eye. ‘What jewels?’ he asked.

Marie-Thérèse wasn’t wasting her story on him. Keeping her gaze fixed on me, she said: ‘Do you want to see them?’ Then, without waiting for me to respond, she was on her feet and out of the room.

As soon as the door shut behind his wife, Gaston poured himself a third brandy.

‘It’s always Russians, isn’t it,’ he said, reflectively, as he put down the glass.

Puzzled, I looked up. His cheeks were sheeny with sweat.

‘Those men this morning,’ he explained. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the way they stormed in and grabbed that machine – the
noise
they made – wasn’t what set Madame off.’

‘Who
were
they?’ I asked.

‘Engineers,’ he said truculently. ‘Russians. They’ve been making our lives a misery for days. Madame had them here to work on a music recording – some singer who’s scraped her acquaintance. She said they’d be here all week. A godawful racket it made, too – that singer’s voice really set your teeth on edge.’

I remembered now that the Russian singer in New York had been talking about Grandmother and a recording. I might have said I’d met the singer, but Gaston rushed on: ‘We’re pretty sure that Madame bought the machine. But they’ll have been thinking, if the old lady’s ill, no one’s going to ask any awkward questions; we’ll help ourselves and be off. That’s Russians for you.’ He shrugged, eloquently.

Feeling overwhelmed, I shook my head. But Gaston went quiet as soon as Marie-Thérèse came rushing back
in a moment later, looking excited. Excited, too, he drew closer as she put the hatbox in her hands down on the table.

‘Look, mademoiselle,’ she breathed.

Inside was a big messy bundle of letters, tied together with a faded ribbon. They were on their sides, stashed between some little packages balled in newspaper.

My hand went straight to the letters. For a moment, I felt a new flicker of hope that, even if Grandmother had gone, the letters might tell me something about her.

‘Open the packets, mademoiselle,’ Marie-Thérèse whispered raptly.

I hesitated, with my hand on the bundle of letters.

‘Oh, those. You won’t understand
those
,’ she went on a little impatiently. I picked up the bundle. Sure enough, even though they were written in what I could see was an elegant, old-fashioned, copperplate hand, I couldn’t make out a word. ‘You see? Foreign,’ I heard.

(But how had Marie-Thérèse known? I asked myself, though it was clear by now that she must have taken a peep herself at some point. I could hear Aunt Mildred’s resigned voice in my head, saying, ‘Servants always know everything.’)

So I put the letters aside – I wasn’t giving up hope on them, but I’d have to come back to them later – and picked up one of the little newspaper bundles instead.

The newspaper wrapping was French, and only a few years old – yellowed, but not brittle. The contents must have been rolled up in it during a relatively recent move – but then Grandmother had moved around a lot in her lifetime.

As I pulled it off, Gaston’s and Marie-Thérèse’s heads came eagerly closer, almost obscuring my view. Inside the
newspaper was a medium-sized jeweller’s box. When I opened that, I saw a very finely made cigarette case in lilac enamel, with gold vines chased over its surface and gold fastenings.

Marie-Thérèse gasped in loud awe. Even though she was clearly acting, and wasn’t looking at the cigarette case for the first time, her awe was real enough. She didn’t even notice Gaston pour himself another inch of cognac.

We soon had six ornaments on the table in front of us. They were fussy little things, and not at all to my taste, but I could see that each one was more finely finished than the last and they’d certainly all been expensive. The second package we opened contained a scent bottle. Then came a hip flask, and a bracelet with a sapphire clasp. There was a monstrously vulgar miniature bulldog carved out of reddish semi-precious stone, with a tiny gold-and-jewelled collar, and a still more ornate and awful jewelled miniature troika on a marble egg. Finally, there was a pendant on a chain – a malachite-and-silver egg that opened up to reveal two spaces for portraits.

‘Look at the box, mademoiselle,’ Marie-Thérèse breathed. The jeweller’s name was inside the last box. Half the letters were nonsense, but the other half were clearly enough printed, in French. They read: ‘Carl Fabergé & Cie, St.-Pétersbourg, Moscou, Londres.’

I drew a sharp breath too at that. I didn’t know much about jewels, but everyone had heard of Fabergé. The Tsar’s favourite jeweller, the man who’d created the ornaments that Russians everywhere, even today, were still said to be trying to sell to finance themselves in exile. Hadn’t Hughie told me that, years ago now?

So these are the jewels she meant, I told myself, as the words Grandmother had written on the blotter shimmered and became, in my memory, something much more like the will Marie-Thérèse was suggesting. A faint but delicious warmth spread through me. Maybe it was just the brandy, but I so wanted to believe that Grandmother had been thinking of me – writing to me – from her sickbed, and leaving me a message. And those scribbles were, after all, quite likely to be her last wishes, weren’t they?

I’d come here thinking I would find the one person in my family who wasn’t bound hand and foot by convention. I’d thought of Grandmother as brave and original, someone who might be more like me than the more familiar relatives I’d grown up with. I’d hoped she would show me how to be an adventurer. And then I’d disappointed myself, shamed myself, and spoiled everything by running away. But maybe everything wasn’t completely lost, after all? Because if I could only understand the words on the blotting paper, interpret the last wishes they must represent, and carry them out … it might be that I had a reason to spin out my time here, and not just to slink back to New York in defeat. Because how could I rush off home if I had a mission to complete for Grandmother in Paris?

I looked up at Marie-Thérèse with the beginning of excitement on my own face.

‘Why I’m showing you now, mademoiselle, is because you wouldn’t want the taxman to know about
these
,’ said Marie-Thérèse, licking her lips. ‘They’ll be worth something. So when the lawyer comes, I think you shouldn’t mention them to him either.’

For a moment I was a little repelled by the bright greed
in her eyes. But then I thought: No wonder she’s so excited. She wasn’t rich, and these ornaments must look like a wonderful treasure trove to her. I told myself I should be grateful for her honesty; admire it, even. She could so easily just quietly have pocketed them, and I’d never have known. If Gaston, by now looking rather fuddled at her side, had been the one to find the little things, I doubted I’d ever have seen them. But Marie-Thérèse had made sure I’d got them. She was looking after me.

How motherly she was feeling towards me became clearer still when she added, ‘And you ought to find out what that other word Madame wrote meant, too. Because – you never know – it might be something else; some other memento for you.’

‘It’s a person’s name,’ I said, with growing certainty. The idea was developing in my mind, too. ‘I’m almost sure it is, because of the place where she wrote “Evie protect make amends” with that word next to it. She must have wanted me to go and find someone, do something to help them and look after them; maybe someone she’d fallen out with. Perhaps she wanted me to share her pictures and jewels with them.’

I’d gladly carry out that wish, I thought. In fact, I’d give them all the jewels. I didn’t even much like jewellery, especially not this ostentatious stuff. I’d far rather have those wild daubs of pictures as my memento of the woman who’d danced with me to Russian violin music, getting faster and faster, whirling me round till I laughed with joy … They’d be a better reminder of her.

Marie-Thérèse and Gaston looked doubtful.

‘She had a Russian husband once,’ I said, wishing I
knew more. ‘If those things are Russian, they must be old gifts that he gave her, and his letters, too, I suppose. And maybe some of his family is here – and that word is the name of some relative of his whom I should find. After all, in a family, there’s always someone to make amends to …’

It sounded a promising line of inquiry.

But Marie-Thérèse decisively shook her head. ‘Oh, no, mademoiselle,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s not it. Madame and that husband were only together for a year before Madame moved back to Paris. And she once told me that he’d been a shameless fortune-hunter, who’d only married her in the belief she was rich and would support him in style, and who started threatening to leave her as soon as her family cut off her allowance. She met him because she used to give money to the Russian orphanage that his sister – another vulture – ran out in the suburbs here. She said he’d spent all his own money long before he latched on to her. That was no surprise to me, of course; in my experience, Russians usually take more than they give. He had very nice manners, she said: he could charm birds down from trees. But it was a blessing in disguise that he died when he did.’

Yes, I’d known about him, hadn’t I? Hughie had said something similar. But what struck me most about Marie-Thérèse’s last remark was the reference it contained to Grandmother’s family having cut off her allowance. I’d never heard anything about that from the family. This casual mention of it filled me with a searing pity for Grandmother, and anger against the rest of my family, who, I hotly told myself, had so spectacularly failed her – Mother in particular, but even affable, no-nonsense
Hughie. He administered the family trusts, after all. He must have let Mother’s spite affect his judgement. He’d just cut her loose! If Marie-Thérèse was right, and it had happened while Grandmother had been briefly married to her Russian count, he must have done it after that time she’d stayed with us, when I was small. They must have been punishing her for that, when what had poor Grandmother actually done on that visit that was so terrible, except dance with me and organize a harmless procession in favour of women’s emancipation? Without her allowance, I knew, she’d have been left with nothing more to live on than her small widow’s pension from the diplomatic service. Was this why she’d stayed in Paris all these years, where life was so famously cheap, and not come home again? Was
that
why I’d never had a chance to get to know her?

This was when my resolve formed. I was going to do what someone who’s needed does, I told myself. No one at home even knew Grandmother was dead (and even if they did, I thought hotly, would they care?), so it would be up to me to clear up the remnants of her life here, and while I did so I was also going to make it my business to find out what Grandmother had been trying to tell me. By the time I was done, I’d know everything that had been in her heart, and I’d take that knowledge home with me. They’d tried to write her out of their story, but I was going to be her historian. I was going to write her back in.

‘Well, at least I should go and visit that sister at the orphanage. Maybe, if it is a Russian name, she’ll be able to tell me more,’ I said carefully.

Marie-Thérèse nodded unenthusiastically. ‘But be sure
to ask all of them – all her Russians,’ she added cannily. ‘Not just that one woman. You’ll have to phone them all at some point, anyway, to say she’s died and tell them about the funeral. Remember, you can’t trust Russians. Every one of them will probably tell you that the word is their name. Make sure you double-check.’