The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Yes, Mike,’ she said happily. The unexpected compliment had pleased her to a degree she hadn’t thought possible. In the darkness she smiled to herself and swung the car back towards Wilshire and Mike’s lot. They didn’t talk on the way back, and she was conscious suddenly of how little she knew about this man with whom she had now done business for years. She didn’t know if he had a wife and children, or a dog, or where he lived; he had talked to her about the inside and the outside of cars, and now he talked about horses. In the dimness she saw his hand go without fear to stroke the head of Mike, her dog, who, with no regard for the new upholstery, had placed himself on the back seat. The lights of MIKE’S appeared on Wilshire, and she turned smoothly into the parking area.

  ‘We’ll go and sign things up,’ she said.

  She was paying cash, so it was an easy transaction, but it took time to fill up the guarantee form, and make out the insurance certificate. While Mike did this, she made out her cheque, and then she sat and watched him as he swiftly filled out the blank spaces on the form. He had become more grizzled in these few years, but his hair still sprang back from his forehead full and thick. Long hours in the drying Californian sun showed in the seams of his deeply tanned neck and face, the lines beneath his eyes. His eyes, she noticed for the first time, were an intensely dark brown, close to black. And yet he hadn’t the features of any of the Italians she came across. She realized that this was the first time she had ever sat down with him in the neat office off the showroom. Always before, when she had bought a car, or come to pay for some repair, once Mike had seen that the car was in proper working order, she had been dealt with by one of the salesmen, as if Mike’s time away from one of his beloved engines was too precious to be spent at a desk. But now the place was closed, the salesmen gone, only the lights blazed in the showroom to tempt those who might pass in the darkness. She watched the big, work-seamed hands, with the grease embedded almost beyond cleaning, as they worked with the pen. But he did make efforts to clean his nails. After the careful, clearly readable script in which he filled in the details, he signed his name with a swift flourish, and then stamped his name and the address of the dealership from a red rubber stamp. He turned it around and passed it across to her. ‘There you are, Mrs Maynard … if you’ll just sign there, where I’ve put the cross …’

  She never signed anything without reading it all, and she was about to explain this, and ask his patience when her eyes went to his almost illegible signature, and the name stamped clearly beneath. Michael Ovrensky … Ovrensky. She felt a swift coldness in her whole body, and she shivered. Beside her the dog was aware of it, and put his head on her knee.

  ‘Ovrensky?’ she said. ‘Your name is Ovrensky?’

  ‘Sure … why ‒?’ Then he stopped. ‘Something the matter, Mrs Maynard? You don’t look well.’

  ‘You come from Russia?’

  He nodded. ‘From …’

  She whispered the name ‘Beryozovaya Polyana. A place called Beryozovaya Polyana. Quite close to Tula. Your father was Prince Michael Ovrensky.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Yes …’

  Her voice sank even lower so that he had to lean across the desk to hear her words. ‘Mikhail … Mikhail Mikhailovitch. It is I … Anna Nikolayevna Tenishevna. You remember my father, Nicholas Tenishev? … and my mother, Katerina Andreyevna? … speaking French with you, teaching your sisters the piano … you remember?’

  He got to his feet. ‘Anna Nikolayevna … we cried when you left … I remember we cried. And Papa’s estates were all gone, and even some of the ponies sold. Anna Nikolayevna …’

  They laughed and wept and embraced as they had done when they were children. The words tumbled out. Some half-forgotten Russian words came to lips that had not used them for so many years. The unsigned contract and the unsigned cheque lay on Mike’s desk forgotten as they went out into the parking lot. Anna trembled so much that she crashed the gears of the new Ford sickeningly so many times on that drive up to the house in Laurel Canyon, with the lights of Mike’s car following steadily behind.

  They were still sitting by the fire in the small wooden house when the dawn spiked the eastern ridge of the canyon. They had drunk vodka and wine, and eaten steak, but eating had been a mechanical thing, something each had done while the other talked. The ageing dog lay between them, his paws and head on the hearthstones, and occasionally looked at Anna as if he wondered why, after all these years of quietness and near solitude, this outsider should have caused the excitement, the talk, the occasional tears that still came to her eyes. The dog was bewildered by the tears because the voice was the one Anna used when she was her happiest, so often the voice reserved for him alone. And yet he did not resent the stranger. The dog sensed Anna’s contentment along with her excitement; a strange peace had come to the house along with this unending babble of voices, jumbled with odd sounds he had never heard before. So while they sat and toasted each other and other people whose names the dog did not know, and filled the glasses again and again, the dog dozed. He was dozing when they fell into exhausted silence as the first day of March dawned.

  There had been much to tell. It came in a disorganized fashion, each trying to tell their own story, and asking questions of the other, trying to fill the gap of the years. ‘Andrey died at the Front before the Bolsheviks took over. Vasily was at Tsarskoe Selo guarding the Tsarina when the Tsar abdicated … afterward he was killed in the fighting. Alexis must have gone the same way. We never knew. I was the youngest … you remember I was the youngest, Anna Nikolayevna?’ The whole of the great surge of the Russian Revolution was encompassed in these brief personal histories.

  ‘I remember. You are two years younger than I, Mikhail …’

  ‘I fought a little, scared to death all the time. It was a bitter time. We were all so hungry. And then word came to me that my father had died, and I found my way back to Beryozovaya Polyana. They had burned the house. My mother and Olga and Marya were still there, living in a hut, and starving by inches. Tatiana Fedorovna had a few jewels left, enough, when they were pawned, to get us to Paris. I had a dozen jobs in Paris, and the girls tried to do dressmaking. Nothing was very successful. I borrowed the money from Dmitry Alexandrovitch for a passage for us all to America. I felt if we could get here, that working would have some point. But my mother … she wouldn’t leave. Paris was full of Russian émigrés, all borrowing off one another. She spoke French but no English. She was frightened of America. She clung to Paris because of all the old friends there. It was like some suburb of St Petersburg. In the end I went alone. Olga married ‒ married quite well. Into a Bordeaux family. Marya finally opened her own dress shop … very chic, expensive, she said. It failed. She and my mother lived on what I sent from New York. And then my mother died. No real illness … just pining for things as they used to be. Marya became a housekeeper to an old man in Brussels. Eventually she married him, and died before he did. They weren’t good transplants, the women of our family, Anna. They didn’t take to foreign soil. Now you …’

  By this time he knew her story. She had broken the silence that had not been breached since the night she had talked to Nicole in Lucky Nolan’s. Every stage of the journey from the Conservatoire in Paris, every part of the agony of her love for John Manstone, the humiliation of her leaving England, the meeting with the young Stephen, Nicole’s father, had been told. Without faltering she told him about Lucky Nolan, and she told him what she did when the will of Stephen Rainard’s father had laid its strictures on her. From the place where she kept it locked in her desk, she brought out the old photo of Nicole from the Tatler, and the latest, published in a Boston newspaper, of Mrs Lloyd Fenton on the committee of a fund-raising dinner for the pension fund of the members of the Boston Symphony. She told him about the desert acres, and the hard work at the little white-painted building that still bore Frank Hayward’s name.

  ‘Aren’t you lonely?’ he said.

  ‘Never …’ And then she stopped. ‘I’ve never
been lonely until I walked into this house with you, Mikhail Mikhailovitch …’

  She knew now about the wife who had divorced him. ‘I suppose I bored her, Anna. I was always working … working late at night to fix cars. There wasn’t much money in the beginning. I didn’t understand Americans. She looked pretty to me … pretty and blonde. She was always playing the radio. She once had a part in the movies …. that was before the talkies came in. She never forgot it. She used to say if she hadn’t married me she would have been a famous movie star. From the moment our little girl was born, she was going to be a movie star. By the time she could walk, she was learning to dance. It … it sickened me. I just fixed cars. More and more I fixed cars. Machines were something I could understand. Machines and horses. I had a job for a year on a cattle ranch in Montana, and then I went … this was before I was married, you understand? … I went to Nevada, and then to Salinas. I learned about machinery. I love machinery, Anna. It’s hard to say. I love it the way I love horses. I was commissioned in a cavalry regiment, Anna Nikolayevna. It’s very different, but it interests me the same way. But Americans don’t know about horses. They’ve forgotten. Automobiles interest Americans. I don’t remember any machines at Beryozovaya Polyana. There were so many workers. Who needed machines? Well ‒’ He stopped to fill their glasses once more. He stopped to walk around the room, touching the shelves of books in Russian, the two icons, the samovar. ‘So she ‒ my wife ‒ found a man in the movie industry. I don’t know what he promised her ‒ how could I know? I didn’t promise her anything. But our little girl … she’ll grow up one of those little kewpie dolls ‒ maybe she’ll look like Shirley Temple. I don’t understand … I remember the children in Russia. They were probably hungry, and I didn’t notice it. It’s all past now. Now they say no one in Russia is hungry. I wonder how that can be if there are still people hungry in America. Do you understand that, Anna Nikolayevna?’

  ‘No ‒ I have never understood that, Mikhail.’ She didn’t want to talk about reading the Wall Street Journal because all of her reading of it had never made her understand this simple fact.

  ‘So ‒’ Mikhail gestured. ‘So now she is married to the man who works with the movies. Maybe my little daughter will be a movie star. I hope not. She is very pretty, my little daughter, but I hardly ever see her. Her mother doesn’t like my greasy hands …’ He spread them before her, and then shrugged.

  Suddenly she reached out with a gesture she had thought long dead, something that perhaps died back there when they had all said their tearful farewells at Beryozovaya Polyana. She took his work-hardened, grease-stained hands in hers. Her own had always been perfectly kept, kept soft and pliant for the piano, which she now never played. The hands fitted together. ‘You always have had beautiful hands, Mikhail Mikhailovitch. Clever, useful, skilful hands … Beautiful hands …’

  Two weeks later Prince Mikhail Mikhailovitch Ovrensky and Anna Nikolayevna Tenishevna were married in a civil ceremony, and later, because suddenly it seemed to matter to them both, they were married according to the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Chapter Two

  Nicole wondered if all her most abiding impressions of England were somehow to be of times in the afternoon, times of mellow sun, and flowers, and the sound of birds. She remembered Elgin Square in the afternoons, she remembered the bitter-sweet afternoon in May when they had all sat in the orchard at Fenton Field, and had seemed so impossibly young and innocent; she remembered the languorous afternoons of that August at Lynmara, the afternoons when she had learned to love the house, and wished she could have loved David Ashleigh also. This was yet another afternoon and they were again at Fenton Field, with the rays of the September afternoon sun already seeming to hold in them the hint of autumn. They were all here, the same people, and a few others. But they sat, not in the orchard, but in the drawing-room. There was little conversation among them, and when they did talk, the talk was of war.

  She looked around the familiar faces, only slightly altered by the years that had passed. There was Judy and Gavin, Gavin half-scowling, or seeming to, and Judy smiling still. There was Richard, restless, leaving his chair often to pace the room, and always followed by the gaze of his wife, Celia, as if she did not quite trust his presence, as if he might leave at any time. Nicole found herself sorry for this almost plain little mouse of a girl that Richard had married; she was so much in love, and Richard seemed so incredibly indifferent to the fact. Joan, Allan’s wife, was there; she was seated at a secretaire copying recipes from a tattered book into a new, well-bound one. She looked around at Margaret Fenton, her mother-in-law. ‘I wonder how severe the rationing will be? I mean, is it any use writing up something that starts “Take nine eggs …”?’

  Margaret raised her head from the big garden book she was studying. Nicole recognized it as Margaret’s own personal record of all that had been done and planted at Fenton Field since she had come there as a bride. She removed her glasses and shook her head; there was a close rapport between herself and Allan’s wife that was missing in her relationship with Celia. Perhaps Celia’s own nervous impression of a sense of impermanence was responsible, her own shrinking into the background. Margaret said, ‘Impossible to say, isn’t it …? I mean, if we’ve suddenly got to start to feed ourselves. We don’t produce enough food for ourselves in England, that’s certain. I was just trying to calculate where would be the best place for the new vegetable garden. The south lawn, I expect … luckily I ordered the wire and stakes long ago. But we’ll have to start digging at once, or nothing will go in this autumn …’

  ‘The south lawn!’ Nicole said. ‘You can’t dig up the south lawn, Aunt Margaret!’

  Gavin chuckled as if he enjoyed her naivety. ‘What ‒ you’re thinking of that old English joke about what it takes to make a good lawn? A bit of seed and four hundred years of rolling it? Well, we’ll be digging up quite a few lawns, Nicole, before we’re through.’

  Nicole looked at him with distaste. He seemed almost to be amused by the situation, as if he took some macabre satisfaction in being able to say ‘I told you so’, though he had never actually said it. He had prophesied war long ago; he had disturbed that peaceful afternoon of her memory by his disquieting forecast, but then so had Richard, in a dramatic and practical way. That, Nicole remembered, was the afternoon he had announced he was learning to fly. He had been a member of the Air Force Reserve for the last two years. He was ready, and it almost seemed that he wanted to get started, and his wife’s eyes were terrible to look at.

  Finally Nicole looked at Lloyd and found no comfort there. His expression was unreadable; he seemed lost in a world of his own thoughts, and she felt excluded, shut out. Nicole felt her sense of irritation and grievance rise as she stared at him and he did not respond. Oh, God, she thought, what was the matter with him? Why were they still here, at this side of the Atlantic, when they should be now settled back into the house in Boston, Lloyd picking up the threads of his practice, getting his lecture schedule for the fall settled? The fall semester was about to begin at Harvard, and still they lingered over here, seeing out the end of an English summer.

  Nicole was coldly conscious that they might be seeing out the end of a world that might never be refashioned again. Last year Austria had been annexed almost overnight; the Sudetenland had been handed over to Hitler at Munich, and he had proceeded to take the rest of Czechoslovakia. And now Poland had been invaded, and England was tied to her by treaty. A feeling of frustration and anger grew in Nicole as she stared at her unseeing husband. These were all matters which did not concern them. They were Americans; they belonged in America. And yet he dragged out this visit, even to postponing their sailing, which had been planned for last week. What in God’s name, she wondered, was he waiting for? If war was declared, they could just as well know of it, and know of it in more safety, if they were already back in Boston. What was so special about England that he had to be here when her fiddling government was finally shamed and fo
rced and pushed into a declaration of war? And when would that be? She looked at the date on the copy of The Times which lay across the arm of her chair, 2 September. They should have landed in Boston yesterday.