The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Naturally Prince Michael was distressed at having to dismiss us, and he arranged with a friend that the three of us should immediately be taken into the family of good friends of his ‒ a very rich family, where we would have had much the same position as with the Ovrenskys. My father was Russian enough not to want it. The Ovrenskys were his family. He would be with them, or with no one. That was when he determined to emigrate. He was going to America. It was the land of the free, wasn’t it? It was the place where everyone was equal and had a chance to get rich ‒ the place where there had never been serfs. Well ‒ they weren’t called serfs. There was much crying and embracing, many gifts when we left them. I don’t think any of them envied us going. There’d been stirrings of revolution, of course, but no one ever imagined it would ever come to the overthrow of the Imperial Family and the whole system. Anarchists were appearing all over the world, not just in Russia. I remember crying myself sick when I left the Ovrenskys behind. It seemed such a cosy, familiar world ‒ I can remember the samovars always ready for tea, the big stoves, the sweet cakes. I was certain that somehow the estates would be restored, the houses in St Petersburg and Moscow would be opened again. Everything would be just as it was. I was fifteen years old. It was 1907.

  ‘We only got as far as Paris. My father had many introductions in Paris ‒ and my mother was already ill from travel, and homesickness. Everyone seemed to need music teachers, and naturally we all spoke French. He taught music and we had rooms high up in a tall house overlooking Paris. It was pleasant enough, except that my mother didn’t get better. My father had managed to have me accepted at the Conservatoire, and between lessons and practice and nursing my mother, there was no time for anything else. I remember my mother used to lie on her sofa and listen to me at my scales, and even when she was weakest she wouldn’t let me skip one single half-hour of them. She died of tuberculosis when I was seventeen. She’s buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.’

  Anna looked sharply at Nicole. ‘That’s something you have always to remember. They say the tendency to it runs in the family. You must always have a proper diet, and plenty of rest. You must never live in damp places. You must be very careful that colds never go to your chest ‒’

  ‘Mother, you have other things to say, don’t you? You know I’m as strong as a horse. I’m never ill.’

  Anna seemed to have been brought rudely back to the present. ‘It doesn’t hurt to take care. Since I’m telling you about your grandmother, I might as well tell you. Just be careful, that’s all. You don’t look strong …’ Then she waved her hand. ‘Oh, well. That’s past. I hope for ever. My father seemed to think that way. He couldn’t bear Paris after that. So we packed again, and he talked of America once more, but we only got as far as London. He took up teaching music again. It wasn’t as good as Paris. There weren’t so many Russian families in and out, coming for shopping, to see the sights, having friends there. In Paris we heard a lot of gossip from Russia. The Ovrenskys still wrote. They told us who was coming, and who we were to see. London was different. To start with, our English wasn’t nearly as good as we had thought it. We learned, of course. It was necessary. My father took up his rounds, going from pupil to pupil. The best families. He had introductions from Paris. The houses were all in Belgravia or Mayfair. He had such nice manners, my father, and he never let anyone see that it hurt him to have to come in at the servants’ entrance. He used to say, “Ah, well, Mozart ate in the servants’ hall.” But he wasn’t Mozart, and he was desperately homesick. We talked of going back to Russia, but kept putting it off. Then he took a chill, which turned to pneumonia. He didn’t have the will to fight it. He hadn’t really lived since he’d left Russia. The dream of America was just that ‒ a dream. Russians are great dreamers, Nicole. The dream seemed to end with his death.

  ‘I gathered myself up, of course, and went on. I’d been teaching a little myself, taking on pupils who were very young and ones he hadn’t time to go to. My English had grown quite good. One learns more easily when one is young. I might have gone on just as he had done, but the pupils were not so numerous after he died. I had been accepted as a substitute for him because people thought some of his skill would rub off on me, but after he died the pupils seemed to drop away. Perhaps I wasn’t as ready as he was to accept the things that I thought of as slights and insults from those terrible Englishwomen. I remember as I was leaving a house in Eaton Square one day, packing my music in the hall I heard one woman say to another in the drawing-room ‒ I wonder why they always seem to think people like myself are deaf? ‒ “My dear, she’s far too pretty to have around any house where there are young gentlemen.” I couldn’t make myself go back to that house. You see, I had my time of being soft, too, Nicole. I was nineteen.’

  Nicole thought her mother regarded her with more kindness in those moments. The memories of herself as a young girl had perhaps brought its own reaction. She was remembering that she was pure Russian, and she had been happy there. Looking at her mother’s face, Nicole regretted the years that she had not asked for these memories to be shared. What had she been afraid of? Was Anna right in saying she had feared some peasant saga; if that was so, she was more than a snob, she was a coward also.

  ‘It was then I was offered a steady job ‒ more or less steady ‒ with a small group who hired out to play at people’s parties. Just a quartet ‒ strings and a piano. Nothing serious either. Nothing more advanced than a waltz. Very genteel. It was 1911. We usually played behind a screen of potted plants. No one wanted to see the musicians. Everyone went to Ascot dressed in black. We found work rather hard to get. We were hired for small dinner parties at which no one danced, and for small balls for the débutantes who couldn’t afford a really grand ball. It was a pretty lean time. Not everyone would have a lady pianist with the quartet, and then they called in someone else. I was running pretty low on the money my father had left.

  ‘Around Christmas and New Year things picked up. People were giving parties. We were booked every night. It was New Year’s Eve that I remember. I can remember everything about that house where we played. It was a dinner party for about twenty-four. We were to play in the hall. Noises off, sort of thing. They were going on to a much bigger affair later, and we were going on to play at some other party. The dinner was over, I remember, and the ladies had gone to the drawing-room. The men were still having their port. The three others in the quartet had gone down to the kitchen to have their supper. I didn’t go. I still wasn’t used to eating in the kitchen. I suppose I was a snob, too, Nicole. Well, there I was behind the screen of plants, and a man came into the hall. He was looking around on all the chairs and the tables for his cigarette case. One of us had found it on the floor. We put it on the top of the piano, and I was to tell the hostess as soon as I could where it was. It was very heavy gold. I can remember how we all looked at it, and tried to figure how many nights’ pay for all of us it would have been worth. Well, there he was, and I guessed what he had come for, so I called to him. He came over and seemed surprised to find me behind the potted plants. I remember I was wearing the last of the good dresses Tatiana Fedorovna had given me. It was the best silk, but it had been made for a schoolgirl, and it was tight and too short. But he looked at me as if I were a queen, and from that moment the rest of the whole situation didn’t matter. He asked me if I minded if he smoked, and he just sat there and talked to me. He asked most of the questions, and I found myself telling him all about Russia ‒ at least the part I knew. He wanted to know more about the political side of things. All I could tell him was how things had been on the Ovrenskys’ estates. All the world knew about Alexander II being blown to bits. He talked about the defeat by Japan in 1905 and about Bloody Sunday. He seemed to think there was something rotten in Russia, but I didn’t agree with him. All I wanted was to get back there ‒ to be with the Ovrenskys. I talked so much. I suppose I had become rather desperate for someone to talk to like that. He listened so well. He never went back to the dining-room, nor d
id he join the ladies in the drawing-room. In polite society, what he did that night was unforgivable. He even asked me to play for him ‒ that was after I’d told him about being at the Conservatoire in Paris. I played “Für Elise” ‒ it begins so gently, and I didn’t want people to hear. Of course they heard. I can remember when I finished he was sitting there still as a cat on that chair, and the hostess was standing behind him with a face like a fury. “Really, Lord Manstone, I didn’t know you had such a keen interest in classical music,” she said, and he answered, “Neither did I, Mrs Tatenham. I’m just learning.”

  ‘The upshot of it was that I was invited ‒ no, I was commanded into the drawing-room and ordered to play. The gentlemen had joined the ladies by then. They were all there, talking, talking, taking no notice at all of me. I think it was the hostess’s idea to make me look ridiculous, and reprimand him. Well, I played better than I ever had before. I chose the Chopin “Military Polonaise”. It was loud enough to rattle the coffee-cups, and by the time I was finished, a few of them had stopped talking, and a few were even decent enough to put their hands together in a little polite applause. “Really ‒ quite an artiste, your little protégée, Lord Manstone. But I don’t believe Miss ‒ I don’t believe this lady has had her supper. Her fellow musicians will be waiting …”

  ‘Well, I was out of the drawing-room like a slapped child, and this Lord Manstone was following me. He came downstairs, and that threw the kitchen into an uproar. The butler was furious, but he hadn’t quite the nerve to order him out. He sat there while I ate; and then he drove me and the other three to the next party. He hadn’t been invited to that party, but they let him in as if he were one of the musicians, until someone recognized him, and that seemed to be a great joke. It was five in the morning and very cold when he drove me home.

  ‘I had about four weeks of that. When I was working, he would drive me to the house, and if he didn’t know the people and couldn’t get inside, he’d just wait in the car, freezing, probably. A few nights he said he was a friend just driving us all, and he was invited into the kitchen and the butler or the hostess never knew. When I wasn’t playing, he took me to dinner. When I was playing, he waited and took me to a late supper somewhere. Heaven knows what he paid in tips to keep those waiters on their feet. He ‒’

  ‘What was he like?’ Nicole said. She felt the scepticism thicken her tone, and tried to stifle it. ‘How old was he?’

  Anna smiled. ‘You think I picked up someone old enough to be my grandfather ‒ just because he could drive me about and give me supper? It wasn’t at all like that, Nicole. He was not only charming, with charming manners ‒ at least to me ‒ but he was twenty years old and unmarried. He was also extremely handsome. He was John Ashleigh, thirteenth earl of Manstone. I called him Johnny, and I fell very much in love with him, and, for a while, I do believe he was in love with me. At least he thought so himself ‒ then. He asked me to marry him. I said “yes”. Of course I said yes. What girl wouldn’t have?

  ‘I didn’t know it, because I didn’t read newspapers very much or society magazines, but we were the talk of fashionable London. Or the joke ‒ both, I suppose. Naturally everyone assumed I was his mistress, though no one could figure out why I continued to go about and play half the night at little dinners. I wasn’t his mistress. We were as romantically in love as any two young people can be. We meant to get married.

  ‘Then the talk must have reached his mother ‒ his father had recently died. We were both summoned down to the family home in Kent. I suppose if I’d been English I might have known about Lynmara, might have heard it was one of the show-places of the country. I was used to something different, you see. The aristocracy in Russia were different. Extremely grand when it came to formal things and in their contacts with the Imperial Family, but on their estates and with their families, life was ‒ well, it was almost chaotic. It seemed to be a mad mix-up of children, silver samovars, furs, jewels ‒ and loads of debt which no one took seriously until they were forced into bankruptcy.’

  Anna gestured impatiently. ‘Oh, what am I trying to tell you? It’s all there ‒ it’s there in Tolstoy and Chekhov. You can read all that. What it didn’t prepare me for was my introduction to the English aristocracy. It felt then, in that pre-war period when they were still masters of the earth, as if things were so ordered and orderly that they could hardly breathe out of rhythm. I wasn’t prepared for Lynmara. I wasn’t prepared for the Countess. I had expected Johnny’s mother would be ‒ just Johnny’s mother. Instead, she was the Countess of Manstone. It didn’t matter in the least to her that Johnny and I were in love. I was clearly totally unsuitable, and that was that.

  ‘Perhaps I began to feel a little frightened when we drove past the gate-lodge of Lynmara. Lynmara was not at all like a country house in Russia. It was more like a palace. By the time Johnny stopped the car and the butler came to open the door, I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering. I didn’t actually trip up the steps, but I almost did that. Instead I dropped my handbag just as I was being introduced to the Countess, and I can remember being so ashamed of the few little things that fell out. I don’t know why ‒ there was no lipstick, no powder or anything like that. She stood and watched me and Johnny and the butler pick the things up ‒ a comb, a few hairpins, a tiny bottle of perfume. How ashamed I was of that perfume. She stood and watched it all, that woman ‒ I really can’t think of her as Johnny’s mother ‒ and I think she knew right then that she had won.’

  ‘Won?’ Nicole said sharply. ‘Won what?’

  ‘There was a battle, of course. An undeclared war. She wasn’t going to let Johnny marry someone like me. And I’m ashamed to remember now that I didn’t even fight very hard. If I had weapons, I seemed to forget how to use them. I was demoralized.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Nicole said. She couldn’t imagine Anna routed, giving up without a struggle.

  ‘There’s quite a long way between a girl of nineteen and a woman of thirty-eight, Nicole. There’s a big gap between a place like Lynmara, and this …’ Her gesture encompassed the room about her, the building, the low sound of the jazz band behind the heavy door. It even seemed to take in the world beyond that, the lights of Times Square, the noises. Most of all it seemed to acknowledge the crowd, the rich out there dancing to a jazz band, the gap that existed between this and the era of the musicians hidden behind the potted plants.

  ‘The Countess made use of every opportunity to show Johnny how unsuitable I was. The place was always crowded with guests, and they would talk about things I couldn’t know anything about. Worst of all were the jokes ‒ their private jokes. My English seemed to get worse instead of better, my accent was thicker. My clothes were all wrong. I just didn’t fit in. In the end I didn’t have to be dismissed. I simply packed my bags and went. Johnny made some poor, weak protests, but they were only protests. He knew he was beaten, too. What I can’t forgive him for was letting it happen at all. He should never have asked me to marry him. He was very young, of course ‒ and that’s about the only excuse I can find for him. He wasn’t even twenty-one, and he would have needed his mother’s consent for marriage. She had time on her side, and she used it. I had the happiest, and the worst weeks of my life all inside those two months. The only forgiveness I can find for Johnny was that in those first weeks he was happy too. And he was just as miserable as I was during that time at Lynmara. I think he was weak and foolish, and he should never have led me into the situation. But he was young … You may think so now, Nicole, but the fact is that being young doesn’t always mean being right. The young can be so unintentionally cruel. Johnny just failed to see past those first few weeks when we were in love.

  ‘I couldn’t stay in London. So I took up where my father had left off, and I went to New York. I actually got a job playing in the salon of the first-class section of the ship I sailed on. I had no money, so I didn’t tell them I was going to leave the ship in New York. There were gales all the way ‒ that time of
year is bad for ships on the Atlantic. I was playing every afternoon and evening to an almost empty room. Funny, I didn’t get seasick at all. Perhaps I was too sick in my heart to notice what my stomach felt like. But one of the people who showed up day after day to listen and stand by the piano, and to buy me champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning, was Stephen. He was going, he said, to make his fortune in America, and it seemed to me he was going to spend a fortune before he got there. He was charming, eager, kind, and good fun. He laughed a lot, and that was what I needed. He had introductions in New York, he said, and almost as soon as we landed he had got a job selling Rolls-Royces. He asked me to marry him, and I did. A sort of sea-change had worked in me. I put Johnny and the whole London thing behind me. I was the person I used to be, not awkward or miserable, or too young. I can’t say I ever was in love with Stephen, but I did love him, and I was immensely grateful to him for giving me back to myself, for helping me to believe that I wasn’t some sort of freakish fool.

  ‘We had only a few years together. Stephen was kind and wildly extravagant with his money. He only got a tiny salary, and commissions, and he had a little money from his mother’s will. He never told me how much. He insisted on spending and spending. He had me take piano lessons again, and he hired someone to work with me on my English. He was very good to me, Stephen. But the fact that I was pregnant in 1914 didn’t stop him from rushing off back to England the second that war was declared. It simply never occurred to him that his place was anywhere else. Those English …’

  ‘Hadn’t he a family in England? You’ve never told me.’

  ‘You never asked, did you, Nicole? He had a father, with whom he’d quarrelled, a mill-owner somewhere in the north, and a sister. He didn’t like to talk about either of them. But when he was in France, he began to write about perhaps taking one of his leaves in England and that you and I should come over. His father should see his only grandchild, he said. But he didn’t do anything definite about it, and after the Lusitania was sunk, he thought it was too dangerous. He never took that leave in England, and he was killed in 1917. He never saw you, except in photos.