He was as suave and charming as his name suggested. So much so that I mentioned him at our next editorial meeting; he appeared on the show that week, a feather in my cap at last, even if not the one I had intended.
Trialling independence with tentative steps, I never told my parents about the Serpico episode because they were so overprotective. I feared they would try to impose restrictive conditions on my working life and embarrass me with my employers.
Something else prevented me: the acute, persistent awareness that children raised in an atmosphere heavy with silence have, a kind of sixth sense for unspoken trauma. They guess at it, even if they don’t know its size, shape and exact colour. My narrow escape from a predator happened several years before my mother told me of her own. I was the same age my mother had pretended to be when she was raped. And unlike her at the same age, I was sexually active, a fact with which she found it difficult to come to terms. The only comment she made on learning that I had lost my virginity was, ‘I always found sex very messy.’ The implications of that remark were too sad to contemplate.
We were not given to easy confidences, like some mothers and daughters I know. A friend told me her mother once came into her room when she was a teenager and said without a shred of embarrassment, ‘Now look, I know you’ve stolen my vibrator.’ Sensing that my mother’s prudish reserve hid a deeper pain, I kept my brush with danger to myself.
Even though the Serpico episode had shown me fame unhinged, that did not deter me. Even if they were damaged and flawed, or perhaps because of these handicaps, the famous continued to exert an irresistible force over me. An edge of fear in the presence of these types only added to the thrill. Fear was an emotion with which I was all too familiar, even though I would have been unable to recognise the adrenalin rush it provoked as my flight-or-fight syndrome kicked in.
But this charge attracted me to work for men who resembled my father—after Parky, with his irascible hard-to-please nature, I foolishly signed on as a cookery book researcher for Time Life; on paper the job looked safe enough, but in the kitchen I was faced with a venerated gastronome who also turned out to be an A-grade tyrant and bully before such egos were fed by television ratings. On days when I was responsible for coordinating a food photo shoot, I would first lock myself in the toilet and repeat to myself that I would not cry or vomit (as others did when faced with our prima donna’s rages, brought on by something as trivial as finding a stock cube in the pantry). From here I transitioned to the most complex version of the same impossible-to-satisfy version of the same character in Melvyn Bragg.
Recognising his demanding, exacting personality, I thought I knew the territory: a charismatic perfectionist and fault-finder prone to a quickly flaring temper, but also capable of generosity and lavish praise.
The interview for a position on his prestigious television arts documentary team was unlike anything I have ever experienced: there were five people in the room, four producers and Melvyn himself, which was intimidating enough. Without preamble, Melvyn launched into an idea for a hypothetical documentary about Rudolf Nureyev and how to make a film that was different from all the previous ones. I offered some thoughts but no matter what I said, he came back at me arguing every point, rejecting every suggestion I made to see if I would stick up for myself. It was just like being at home. We ended up having the most knock-down argument I have ever had with a complete stranger. It was gladiatorial combat, verbal jousting. Voices raised, gloves off. It was curiously enjoyable. Intoxicating, because it was about ideas. I knew what I thought and did not back down. It was him and me, mano a mano. No one else in the room said a word.
Afterwards I staggered to the elevator, winded, and burst into tears. I wanted that job more than I had ever wanted anything since Oxford. I had been too vehement, too heated. As I waited for the elevator, Melvyn came out, smiled fleetingly and said, ‘Nice work.’ The next day I was offered the job. Of the two thousand who had applied, two were picked. No pressure then.
Our relationship over the next two years was an uneasy dance of one step forward, two back. We never quite found our rhythm. I put in a poor piece of work on my first film and he withdrew his trust. Grudgingly, he gave me a second chance and I redeemed myself, but was never secure—ours was only ever a truce, not a lasting peace treaty. Working this way was nerve-racking, like trying to build foundations on quicksand. Meanwhile, the tectonic plates at home were also shifting.
CHAPTER 14
The Cold War
Usually the first thing I do when I get to my parents’ home in London, after making the obligatory pot of tea, is look in the fridge. It delivers me an instant update, a state-of-the-nation report, like an electrically powered oracle. Tell me, oh great Westinghouse double-door fridge–freezer with ice-maker, how are things round here? Will I get through this visit without tantrums and tears? I should, of course, just pay attention to its constant, thermostat-controlled existentialist message: CHILL.
I’m not sure what prompts me to open the door, beyond relentless insatiable gluttony. It is a completely unconscious reflex action. But it’s not a behaviour unique to me. Often, in Hollywood movies, you see people get up in the middle of the night and open the fridge. There, in the darkness of the kitchen, light pours out like a beam of wisdom while they lean in to find a bottle of milk. Sometimes they don’t even bother to retrieve anything: just contemplating the contents seems to help the players in any overheated domestic drama cool down a little.
What I am looking for is reassurance and love. Because of all the places to find love, it is more likely to have survived in this frosty universe than in the rest of my parents’ stuffy hothouse, where rows eventually occur because I am opening too many windows and complaining that I can’t breathe or sleep and my face is swollen and puffy from near suffocation.
My parents store love in the fridge, where it will not perish as rapidly: in jars, bottles, packets and opaque Tupperware containers. The ingredients refrigerating there are the most unconditional expression of affection possible between my mother and father. And between them and me. So when I look in the fridge, they are proud that it is full to overflowing, as if it were proof not only of boundless prosperity—particularly for two survivors of World War II who know about hunger, shortages and rationing—it is also incontestable proof of their capacity to share this plenty with me.
But while my mother is always happy for me to look in the fridge, to admire its contents as if I were looking into a cabinet of curiosities, sometimes she doesn’t want me to touch. She is saving some things to eat on certain occasions, and does not want me to pre-empt those plans with my random foragings. She gets apprehensive if I start rummaging or help myself, as if she would prefer it if the fridge came with a PIN number to which only she had access.
On an ordinary day, this is what I might find in the fridge if I went on an archaeological dig to the very back of the shelves:
A tin of goose fat from Fauchon in Paris
A tin of foie gras
A jar of rillettes de porc
Eighteen—yes, really—different kinds of mustard and chutney
Imported Scandinavian herrings in dill and mustard sauce
Several cheeses: a bitey aged cheddar in its red wax coat, a
Coulommiers on a bed of straw in a wooden round box, demi-sel cream cheese in little silver foil squares, fromage blanc, Cantal,
Leyden, Emmental
A pair of weisswurst
A saucisson à l’ail
A vacuum-sealed cotechino sausage
A jar of sauerkraut
A bunch of long small radishes, brought back from a French market
A corn-fed chicken with giblets in the body cavity.
This small sample of ingredients represents the United Nations kind of food we ate at home for the eighteen or so years that I was fed on a more or less daily basis by my mother. Between them, my parents speak English, French, German, Russian, a little Italian and some Spanish. But my mother’s lib
rary of more than 2000 cookbooks includes many in languages she does not speak but can cook in. When she developed a crush on meatballs and wanted to make authentic frikadeller, she simply bought a Scandinavian cookbook on the subject and translated the recipes.
Each night my mother served up a three-course meal cooked from scratch. For many years it was a matter of pride that her repertoire was so varied that she did not repeat herself unless by popular request. The food was gobbled down by her appreciative audience in a matter of minutes; while my mother ate at a dignified French pace, my father, having learned to eat at speed in the English public-school system, passed on the urgency to me in the form of contests to see who could finish first and secure a second helping, his greedy shovelling mouthfuls punctuated with carnal grunts of appreciation. Then, when the plates were clean, dishes were discussed and critiqued with the same seriousness as a concert or play.
So imagine the chaos, the confusion, and the sense of threat when one day in 1980 I came home from university, opened the fridge and was faced with an entirely unfamiliar set of ingredients: stacked glass dishes of herrings, fermented red cabbage, beetroot soup. Things smelled yeasty, sweet but sour: slightly farty.
That was how I learned that Vitya Borovsky, my mother’s Russian teacher, had moved in with us for an unspecified period of time that was to stretch to nearly a decade.
My mother had taken it upon herself to rescue him from woeful rented digs after hearing his sob story of how, when he first arrived in Britain, he lived on a park bench. He was now ensconced in a cheerless bedsit where he could not play the cherished record collection he had acquired with his earnings to remind him of his glorious musical heritage. When she took me to meet him after class one day, our first exchange was baffling.
Me: So, Vitya, what did you do before you came to the university?
Him: I was a postal order.
Me: Sorry? (stifling urge to giggle)
Him: (firmly and more slowly) I was a postal order.
(I dare not look to my mother for clarification as I can see from the corner of my eye that she has her hand over her mouth, smothering her urge to laugh, which only makes mine worse.)
Me: A postal order? But that’s a piece of paper.
Him: A postal loader, is that how you say? Yes, a postal loader.
(By now my mother and I are convulsed with laughter. Vitya looks on, delighted to have entertained us with such a humble job description of delivering mail bags.)
Once Vitya was installed, my mother found herself feeding an assortment of Russian dissidents who dropped in on their former compatriot whenever they were let out of their country on brief cultural visits: dancers, film-makers, conductors, theatre directors and designers. The fridge was stocked in a state of hypervigilance, ready for half the Red Army, should it choose to defect, to eat at our place.
After a few vodkas, bowls of my mother’s authentic borschtsch or shchi prompted high-profile dissidents to suddenly announce that they either would not or could not go home. Our house was invaded as swiftly as Czechoslovakia, except without the tanks. All the rules changed. Meals were eaten at irregular hours. The phone rang very late at night. People we hardly knew came to eat and to stay. The only thing that remained the same was that copious amounts of tea were drunk, though Russians like to drink it from a tall glass and suck it through a sugar cube.
At first, I paid little attention to the guests at the kitchen table beyond taking the opportunity to revive my lapsed Russian vocabulary. I was too absorbed in my shaky career and serving the cultural tsars who were my bosses. But gradually, our visitors became more stellar than anyone I was meeting at work. One day I came home to find Mikhail Baryshnikov wrapped in one of my father’s bathrobes watching Dynasty, his tousled hair still damp from a shower.
Speechless in front of someone I’d had a major crush on since the age of sixteen, I stumbled into the kitchen.
‘What’s HE doing here?’ I stammered.
‘He shared a flat with Vitya in Leningrad,’ said my mother casually, savouring the impact of her superstar visitor. He had, she added, arrived bearing a tin of the very best caviar and she was now preparing blini for dinner, as if this were an everyday occurrence.
‘Mischa’, as he was known, was shooting a film called White Nights and on his days off, he would visit our home to relax, sometimes singing plaintive Russian songs or repeating jokes told to him by his best friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky.
On several occasions he brought his co-star Isabella Rossellini with him. Shy, scrubbed free of make-up, quick to blush, and without any of an actor’s customary vanity, she carried a tube of truffle paste in her handbag and squeezed it liberally onto whatever food was put in front of her. She also insisted on doing the washing up.
For my father, to whom ballet was a total bore, Mischa was no one special (he referred to him as ‘that nice boy’) but he almost swooned listening to Isabella talk. Closing his eyes, he could conjure up her mother, Ingrid Bergman, one of his screen goddess pin-ups. Having met Bergman, I could hear how mother and daughter shared the same intonation, accent and cadences to an uncanny degree. In Isabella’s presence, my father wore a foolish, lopsided smile I rarely saw. As for myself, I could hardly look at Mischa, I was so churned up with puppyish devotion.
His visits were social rather than political—he had defected much earlier and remade his life brilliantly in America. But others who came to visit were in a much more precarious situation. Gradually, without us even noticing, our home, once a solemn fortress to which strangers were never admitted, was turned into a safe house for those who needed a discreet sanctuary in which to seek counsel and refuge. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for weeks. Having had very few of my friends stay the night as a child, I was somewhat put out to discover my mother was having wild sleepovers that involved group singsongs, rowdy jokes and cheeky impersonations of world leaders. She blossomed in this company: became more beautiful and more animated, emboldened by her rapidly improving Russian and the new audience’s appreciation for her skills and cuisine. She laughed more than I had ever seen, which made her seem girlish and suddenly younger.
My father raised no objections to the changed rhythms and habits of the house. In the past, whenever I have thought about this time, I have always seen this as my mother’s story: it was she who invited Vitya into our lives, she who came to converse fluently with him and his friends, fed them, translated documents, made calls, drove them to meetings, acted as intermediary and messenger in endless to-ings and fro-ings. Vitya made her vital.
But while language was a barrier to my father, excluding him from much of the soul-searching that went on deep into the night, he provided a kind of still centre in all the emotional chaos of the Slavic soul agonising over questions of leaving behind homeland, and in some cases family, that took place over countless dinners around the kitchen table. My father offered counsel in these endless conversations about strategy, conducted in an atmosphere of conspiratorial intensity.
He may only have ever learned to say ‘pass the salt’ in Russian, but Papa commanded the respect of men who had faced real tyranny. He also did not hesitate to lecture them about their own culture: one night he delivered a sermon-like address to Mischa on the importance of reading Tolstoy, who listened graciously and without interrupting.
When the high-profile theatre director Yuri Liubimov came to London to present his critically acclaimed production of Crime and Punishment, we suddenly and unwittingly found ourselves caught up in a real political maelstrom.
A canny operator who had triumphed over censorship for many decades at his progressive Taganka Theatre company, Yuri decided to defect during his visit, and sought asylum in our home with his wife, the daughter of a Hungarian government minister. He was leaving behind a remarkable career and all the privileges that his status at the helm of a major company brought. It was a major embarrassment to the Soviet Union, which considered him its most high-profile defector since the cellist Mstislav R
ostropovich.
Yuri gave a defiant interview to The Times in our sitting room, where he was photographed proudly wearing a crucifix around his neck and declaring his religious faith in protest at the Soviet regime’s official policy of atheism.
Then he calmly asked my father if he could borrow his study to make a private phone call, oblivious to the fact that my father did not let anyone use that room, ever. When he came downstairs, he told us with solemnly that he had just spoken with Yuri Andropov, the ageing leader of the Soviet Union, at the Kremlin, telling him that he was resigning his citizenship. After that, it was on for a cat-and-mouse game at the highest level.
Fearing that his rental apartment was bugged by the Soviets, Yuri decamped in secret to a safe house provided by a network of supporters, which caused me significant headaches at work.
As a result of his novels selling well in the Soviet Union, Melvyn had become interested in all things Russian. When Yuri brought his Dostoyevsky adaptation to Britain, Melvyn decided to make a documentary about the production. I was assigned as the researcher on the film because of my Russian language skills. But I was unprepared for the tricky conflict-of-interest loyalties the situation produced.
One morning shortly before his defection had become public, Yuri did not turn up to film an interview with Melvyn. I knew where he was hiding. But sworn to secrecy as to his whereabouts and situation, I could not tell Melvyn why he had been stood up. When I was eventually given permission to do so, my boss was visibly annoyed that I had the inside story.
Mrs Thatcher offered Yuri her personal protection. Whenever Yuri visited my parents, MI5 parked a car outside their home, matched on the other side of the street by a car belonging to the KGB. Meanwhile, to add to the general cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, a young Latvian conductor, Mariss Jansons, then a rising star, turned up at our house one evening with a device he had bought on tour in Germany that was meant to identify bugging devices. Sure enough, our phone, which had been making constant clicking sounds during conversations, was tapped. A few days later, the drama ramped up another notch: after Yuri left his secret address under escort to attend rehearsals of his production, he was threatened by Soviet thugs in a botched kidnapping attempt at the theatre.
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