The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  Occasionally she mentioned these journeys to Frank Hayward at the real estate office. ‘For God’s sake, Anne, why do you go trekking out into the desert? Isn’t anything there. You sound as if you could get like these old prospector guys ‒ rock happy, sun happy. Look, if you want a bit of sun, why not the beaches? Beautiful beaches all along this coast.’

  ‘Other people have found the beaches, Frank,’ she said, in much the same tone she had used when she had once told him that she had been married. ‘It’s the desert for me. I’m thinking about trying to get a few acres out there …’

  ‘For God’s sake, Anne,’ he repeated. ‘You really must be crazy. That’s Indian land. It isn’t worth a dime. To get the rights to a site you’d have to track down the descendants of about a dozen Indian families. Take you years to get title …’

  She shrugged. ‘Well … I’m not in a hurry.’

  Then she found a small wooden frame house, in a rather run-down condition, on five acres of land up off Laurel Canyon. There were no near neighbours, the road leading to the house was choked in red dust in the summer, and treacherously slippery for the Ford to negotiate in the rainy season. But it had a good well, and the makings of a garden. A Japanese living farther down the canyon promised to come and help make a vegetable garden for her and to tend it two days a week. She paid a down-payment and took out a mortgage on it.

  Then Frank Hayward really exploded. ‘For God’s sake, Anne, what do you think you’re doing? It’s nothing up there but rattlesnakes and chaparral! What do you want to go and live in the goddamned wilderness for?’

  She couldn’t explain to him that it was the closest she could come to making her own re-creation of the sense of spaciousness lost to her since the family had left Russia. She bought a German shepherd puppy whom she named Mikhail, but whom everyone called Mike, and she bought, and was taught to use, a gun. She became quite used to carrying it as she walked her acres in her desert boots, and she shot many snakes. The little house was painted and put in good order. No one came near her ‒ the obstacles of the road, the dog and the gun were enough. In the silence there at night it seemed she was less alone than when she had lived in the efficiency unit in Santa Monica. She rarely now saw the new mailman; he put her few bills, the renewal notices, the newspapers and the glossy English magazines, months out of date, in the big mailbox by the gate.

  Mike rode with her in the car to Frank Hayward’s office every day, and on the weekend tours of the slow sprawl of Los Angeles. Her own private maps were now heavily marked, and she said nothing to Frank Hayward when she put a small down-payment on some parcel of land here and there which no one else seemed to want. The depression still lived with them; there were few people like Anne Maynard who had money in the bank and the courage to back an idea, a theory ‒ in the last sense, a wild hope and belief.

  Mike came with her on the weekends in the desert. The motel keepers had learned to know her, and accepted Mike in the beginning as a favour to her. Then they came to accept the two as inseparable, and made no more comment. Anna continued to visit the places in the desert where the springs of green clear water rose, and continued to talk to the people who could lead her to those Indians who were the true owners. She knew if it took her ten years, she would own one of those shaded places by the water, a place where she and Mike could sit together on a rock and no sound but the silence of the desert would be their companion. It was here in such a place, by a spring of water, that she opened her lunchtime sandwiches; carefully apportioned a piece to Mike, and opened the first of the pile of magazines which had come by the last English mail. It was there in the Tatler that she saw the photograph of Nicole at the piano, read the account of her coming-out ball. A little smile flickered on her features. After she had read every scrap of information about Nicole several times, and digested it, she went wading in the water with Mike, throwing stones for him, and singing, to her own surprise, a Russian melody that had seemed lost to her many years ago.

  And the next day she sold a house that had been on Frank Hayward’s books for almost two years ‒ an expensive house in Beverly Hills. It was sold to a man who thought he really couldn’t afford it, but had come to make his pile in the burgeoning film industry. He bought it because Mrs Maynard, cool and convincing, had steered him cleverly through the tangle of his finances, had taken him to the bank which would give him a mortgage, and charmed him into believing he had got a bargain. Anna knew if he managed to hold on to it, if his Hollywood bets worked out, it was indeed a bargain.

  For a day or two she kept the photograph of Nicole on her desk at her remote house in Laurel Canyon. Then, on the odd chance that someone might come by and remark the likeness between them, the shape of face, the high cheekbones, the dark, straight hair, she put it away in the fire-proof filing cabinet where all her other treasures lay.

  The acquisition of the house, the news of Nicole for which she had waited so long, seemed to mark the point in Anna’s life at which she suddenly was aware of a growing sense of isolation within herself. It was not the remoteness of her house that troubled her, the emptiness which only her dog’s presence even began to fill, but the gradual knowledge that she was deliberately pulling herself farther and farther away from people, creating barriers which need not be there. It was now more than two years since the night she had signed that agreement in the office of William Osborne, the night she had written her last letter to Nicole. The months had been so busy, the time so filled with her own striving to achieve some goal which she herself could not exactly name, that she had only been aware of the externals ‒ the struggle to master shorthand, finding a job and helping to keep Frank Hayward’s business going, the new house, the mastery of the elements of business practice, even the terminology of her new job. She had carefully built a new identity around herself leaving behind Anna Rainard, but the identity was a shell, and nothing seemed to live at the core of it. She realized with some alarm that she was on the verge of becoming an eccentric, someone whom people would talk about. She had never wanted that to happen, but it was difficult to stop it. She began to accept the repeated invitations of the Haywards to come to their house for dinner, to meet their friends. But the habit of reserve built up over the years when she had hidden so much from Nicole, could not be overthrown. She knew that people called her ‘that nice, quiet Mrs Maynard …’ and left it at that. She had no family to talk about, no background that would stand investigation. She was aware that the few times she invited the Haywards and other people to visit the house in Laurel Canyon she struck them as odd, and the life she led as odd. There was no hiding the books she had collected. The books on economics in their sombre bindings, the Russian writers that no one had ever heard of. ‘They belonged to my father,’ she lied, and knew that it was recognized as a lie. She bought some records of Duke Ellington and a second-hand record player. She didn’t buy a piano.

  She had one or two dates with men she encountered in business, and they weren’t very successful. If they were divorced, or widowed, they carried the stamp of their first marriages indelibly, and Anna knew she did not want to cope with a shadowy past, did not want to reveal her own. If they were still unmarried, they had hardened into a kind of selfishness she was beginning to recognize in herself ‒ the mould of pleasing oneself becoming harder month after month. She had no enthusiasms she wanted to share. It didn’t attract men to talk about the state of Wall Street or real estate. She never wanted to go near a restaurant or nightclub, the movies mostly bored her, and she was beyond the stage of caring to be pawed in the back seat of a car.

  ‘Let’s face it, Mike,’ she said to the dog as they worked in the vegetable garden, he digging with a rock and ruining the new lettuces, she with a hoe, her head protected by a big hat like those the Japanese wore against the blazing sun. ‘I’m not much of a success socially. I don’t care enough. So, better suit myself and let people wonder. I hope ‒ I hope Nicole finds the going easier.’

  It was about then that she bought t
he Russian icon from a Pasadena antique dealer. She had seen it in the shop more than a year before, and had not allowed herself the extravagance of buying it. It was not very valuable, but she had been so used to making her money buy only what was useful that the purchase had a sense of a wild breaking with the identity she had tried to build up about her, and had failed. She was beginning to recognize that she could be nothing but what her life had made her, and if that meant being remote and alone, of finding the daily reports of Wall Street more interesting than the movies, of being more comfortable in her own company than pretending to be interested in a man who bored her, then that was how it would be. Triumphantly she hung the icon in her living-room, and didn’t care who saw it, or who might ask questions about her Russian background. There were numbers of Russians who had followed the film industry to its capital in Hollywood. They had emigrated from the New York theatre, to act, to design, to write the music for the films the studios were now churning out. To be Russian was not so strange in America. She felt better when she had hung the icon there. She was giving recognition to a past she had tried to bury since the rebuff and the hurt she had suffered in England. At the date of the Russian Easter, she even sought out a Russian Orthodox Church, closed her eyes as the chanting went on, smelled the incense, and for a time was back in the small wooden church at Beryozovaya Polyana. Tatiana Fedorovna was there in her furs, and her mother was coughing her soft, apologetic cough. It was not entirely a success, that sharing of the Orthodox service. She started out for the desert at once, telephoning Frank Hayward that she needed a few days off, and thinking how much the hot dry air would have helped her mother. That was the time when she drove to Desert Hot Springs and started a real search for land to buy. It wasn’t easy. People were beginning to discover the desert; weekend shacks were beginning to appear. Palm Springs had already been discovered, and was out of her price range. She hunted the edge of the great Joshua Tree National Monument, knowing that it was land which could never be built on. She found a piece of land at Twenty-Nine Palms, thirty acres of it. And then with a madness that surprised her, she bid for, and got, five acres at Desert Hot Springs itself. She couldn’t afford to build a house on it, but it was a place of her own, a piece of land. As a Russian she broke at last from the tight straitjacket she had placed on herself since the time she had left, defeated, the arena of battle to the triumphant Countess of Manstone. She loved her earth in the way a peasant loves it, values it, guards it. In that time the woman who had been born Anna Nikolayevna Tenishevna began to found her true links and bonds with the American earth. For the first time since she had left the birch woods and the cornfields of the Ovrenskys, she began slowly to develop, to feel, the sense of belonging.

  Chapter Four

  Afterwards the sequence of events in the crowded weeks that constituted the London ‘season’ were never clear in Nicole’s mind, and certainly the names and the faces were never properly linked. Young men were called Thomas and George and Charles and John and many other names she forgot; some were on Iris’s list as eligible, others were present at dinner parties and balls only because they had the right family connections, the right manners, and the right clothes. Sometimes Iris grew impatient with Nicole’s failure to distinguish between the two. ‘Yes, but which Thomas Hamilton did you have supper with? You know, there’s one who wouldn’t be suitable at all …’

  ‘Aunt Iris, am I really supposed to fall in love and find someone to marry all in the space of two months? It isn’t very likely ‒!’

  She was cut short. ‘You may mock at this sort of thing, Nicole, but there are fresh faces appearing each season, and there’s nothing quite so wilted as last year’s deb. I advise you to make good use of your time, and remember who is who. And as for falling in love …’ Iris’s face twisted a little, and she took up her pen to check once again a dinner party list. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. People marry ‒ people in our circles marry because they seem suited to each other. It is a better foundation for a marriage than some wild fancy which is in tatters after a year. And don’t,’ she added, ‘suppose that because you’re said to be pretty and intelligent that you can have your pick of all the young men you meet. Your fortune is only very modest by the standards of some of the other girls who are still unmarried, and, while we’re being honest about it, we might as well admit that you don’t bring great family connections to a marriage. I hope you understand. Marriage is a serious business. You’re far more likely to be satisfied and content with the rest of your life if you take the business seriously now. I advise you to look at it that way. The time goes very quickly for a young woman. If you’re still unmarried after a season or two, people will begin to think you’re on the shelf.’ She bent over the list, and the last words were muffled. ‘I hope you heard that, Nicole. I know all about how cruel people can be in those circumstances.’

  Nicole knew she wasn’t meant to reply, and she left Iris alone, going to the only place in the house in Elgin Square which seemed to give her peace and rest, the music room high up where the sounds she made hardly reached the rest of the house. She knew Iris was irritated by the amount of time she still spent at the piano, but Iris was not to understand how playing endless scales and arpeggios somehow helped to wipe out of her mind all the maddening repetition of the jazz tunes she danced to every night, how the severity of the brown-and-white room cleansed the cloying sweetness of balls with pink tablecloths and balls with pale yellow ones, or two shades of blue. She never brought flowers to this room. She thought, after these few weeks, that she would never want to look at a vase of flowers again. Their scent sickened her.

  She was grateful, also, for the serenity that Charles provided through those weeks, the anchor of his quiet humour. Strangely, she was also grateful for the presence of Henson, the maid whom she thought would be an intolerable intrusion on her privacy. The middle-aged woman had developed a surprising fondness for the rather aloof young woman whose personal effects were her business. It shocked Nicole at first to find Henson waiting up for her when she came back from balls in the summer dawn. She protested, and tried to stop it, until she realized that it actually gave Henson pleasure to be there, to question her about the evening, to ask her about the young men with whom she had danced or had supper. She had a curiously deep knowledge of the London social scene. ‘Oh, yes, Miss, I remember Frankie Denton when he came to visit the Standishes when I was personal maid to Lady Caroline. Well, so little Lord Francis is grown up, is he? Rather good-looking, isn’t he, Miss? I saw a photo in Tatler … I hope he’s better behaved than he used to be. His poor sister, Lady Mary … quite hopelessly plain, and so clumsy. Can’t even ride. The horsy girls can so often get away with it because they can sit in a saddle. Many an unlikely match has been made on the hunting field just because a girl had a good seat …’ And all the time she talked she would be removing and hanging up Nicole’s clothes, folding the underwear, folding the stockings, even though it was all to be removed for laundering. And she would be there quite early the next morning, wearing her grey day-dress, carrying Nicole’s breakfast tray, not seeming to care that she had so few hours to sleep in between. Henson had been ‘in service’, as she liked still to call it, most of her life. ‘I was thirteen, Miss, when I went to the household of the Marquis of Bentley. I was under-nursery maid. I’ve never,’ she added with supreme pride, ‘worked as a scullery- or a kitchen-maid. Always above stairs. I’ve looked after the nannies of the children; I’ve been a parlourmaid for a time, but then when the Honourable Mrs Hugh Latymer’s maid was taken ill, I filled in for a while, and I’ve never been anything but a lady’s-maid ever since. And tell me, Miss …’ as she fixed Nicole’s pillows and settled the breakfast tray with the inevitable pink rose, ‘How is young Mister Hugh? You said you met him last night. Did he make it into the Foreign Office? I know he had one try at the exams and failed … Miss Nicole, I wish you’d try to eat something. You’re going all to bone and shadows …’

  Eat … it was all she ever
seemed to do. Every dinner was the same, or seemed to be; smoked trout, chicken, roast beef, ice-cream done up in a dozen ways but all tasting the same. Cold salmon for supper, more chicken and ham, either strawberries or raspberries with thick cream. And in case someone might be hungry ‒ and many of the young men who followed the débutante balls were stoking up for the next day ‒ there was always a bacon and egg breakfast. After a few weeks the thought of food began to make Nicole feel sick. She made a fine pretence of eating it; it did not do to make anyone feel uncomfortable because they did not feel the same way. She nibbled on a piece of dry toast for breakfast, got up and did the routine exercises she had been taught at Madame Graneau’s, and then went upstairs to the piano and her scales. There was a kind of sweet relief in the very discipline they imposed, the almost silence in her mind that they created.

  ‘Nicole, what’s happening to you?’ Richard Fenton asked one evening after he had escorted her to a dinner party, and then on to a ball. ‘You look as if you’re totally detached from the whole thing. I know of a couple of men who are dying for a word from you, and you don’t even know they’re there, even when you’re dancing with them.’

  ‘I’m dancing with you, Rick. I know you’re here.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re treating me as an old family friend. I’m not that old. And I’m not family.’

  ‘Rick, do you mind? Couldn’t we just sit this one out, and not talk? Let’s make a pact not ever to talk about the band or the supper, or any of the other things. We won’t ask each other if we’ve been to so-and-so’s dance. We pretty well know where we’ve been this season. It’s usually the same place.’

  He smiled at her and took her hand and found a place for them to sit down. He signalled a waiter for champagne, and raised the glass to her. ‘Well, I suppose I should be grateful you want to sit with me and just be quiet. Do you know something, Nicole? You’re getting delicious hollows in your cheeks. If you don’t die of exhaustion before the season’s over, you’ll end up the most beautiful girl in London. How many men tell you that? Lots, I’ll bet. And you don’t pay any attention. You’re not even interested, are you? What is it you want? Haven’t you got everything?’