by Susan Moody
‘The bookshop idea,’ her brother was saying. ‘That was a good one – I buy lots of books, and I could get all my colleagues and their families to—’
‘Magnus, dear Magnus, what it boils down to is that I don’t really know what I want to do – I’m pretty useless at just about everything.’
‘Don’t keep putting yourself down, Kate. I’m not Brad your ex-husband, I’m your big brother and I have every possible admiration for you, for your guts and perseverance, your humour, your – your abilities.’
‘I wish I had,’ Kate said. ‘Whatever they are.’
‘You just have to get yourself together again, that’s all.’
‘I will, I promise, but it’s taking a hell of a long time.’
‘OK, even though the accident was nearly ten years ago, it’s only, what, just over a year since Brad took off?’
‘True.’ She held out her glass. ‘Can I have a drop more?’ While Magnus poured another fingerful of Armagnac into her glass, she added, ‘So how are the imperial Russians doing?’
Magnus topped up his own glass and leaned back, happy to put contemporary matters aside. ‘Those poor people – given their privileged backgrounds, it’s amazing that they stood their imprisonment so well. The adults at least must have realized that they had no-one to turn to, having been abandoned by all their cousins in the Royal houses of Europe, and that it could only end in disaster, but for the sake of the children, they tried to make it all seem normal, almost bourgeois.’
‘It sounds very brave of them.’ She picked up one of Magnus’s more precious palekhs, the highly lacquered papier-mâché boxes which were as much works of art as any icon, the more valuable ones having their own provenance and artist-signatures. This one showed a Snow Princess in a wood of white trees, with snow falling and a moon casting a mother-of-pearl light over everything, against a blue background.
‘It was probably Nicholas’s finest hour,’ Magnus said. ‘He certainly wasn’t much cop as a tsar, in fact he was the most inept, anti-Semitic, useless . . . he was really the last of the medieval monarchs. Even so, I hate to think what those last few weeks were like in the Ipatiev house: the hottest days of a stifling summer and they were all – a family of seven, two of them semi-invalids, plus their servants – they were all forced to stay inside, only let out once a day, otherwise cooped up in a few small rooms with the windows whitewashed and kept shut. Mind you, those were small inconveniences, when you think of the atrocities the landowners were able to inflict on their serfs, thanks to Nicholas’s ineptitude and indifference, the pogroms, the disastrous attempts to put down rebellion, not to mention his high-handed attitude to political advice.’
‘So in one sense, he got exactly what he deserved.’
‘You could say that. Did you know that in addition to more formal titles, he referred to himself as the “owner of Russia”?’
‘How very arrogant. But I don’t know how I’d have handled being shut up like that,’ Kate said. ‘You hear these awful stories of girls kidnapped and kept inside wheelie bins, or in boxes under the bed. I would definitely go mad.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, you’d think of some way to escape. Remember that time we both got stuck in the garden shed because Dad locked it by mistake? You got us out, picked the lock with a screwdriver or something.’
‘A kirby-grip, actually.’
‘Well, I couldn’t have done it – I’ve never been very practical, as you know, whereas you . . . enterprising in the extreme.’
Kate made a face. ‘It was that or die.’ Even now she could remember the hot dread which had flooded her, the incipient panic as she realized what had happened, the certainty that if she wasn’t out of there in seconds she would disintegrate into a screaming heap of raw ganglia, nerves and arteries bursting like wires through her skin, eyes blinded by waterfalls of blood, fingertips dissolved into bleeding stumps. Since then, she’d never been able to travel on the Underground; even on an ordinary train she would lose control if they stopped in a station without the doors immediately opening.
She glanced at her watch. ‘Look at the time! I’m off to bed. By the way, I’ll be out on Friday evening, we’re having a girls’ night out.’ Girls’ Night Out, she amended, mentally adding capitals because Jenny had summoned them together to impart some Very Important News.
‘How are they all?’
‘Just fine.’ Kate sighed – a great deal finer than she was, that was for sure. ‘Jenny’s got something really big to announce so we’re going to Fabers so she can tell us in suitably pleasant surroundings.’
As Kate stood up, Magnus said, ‘Think seriously about what I said, sweetheart.’
‘I will. Honestly.’
Magnus
Two
Listening to her run up the stairs, Magnus Lennox reflected how much he enjoyed having his sister’s company, how satisfactory it was to have her under his wing, as it were. At the same time, having that sort of a mind, he considered other brother-and-sister combinations, Charles and Mary Lamb, for example, or Tom and Maggie Tulliver, or Dorothy and William Wordsworth. W. B. Yeats lived with some sisters, didn’t he, and there were the Brontës, though perhaps they didn’t count since they lived with their father as well.
Had those brothers worried about their sisters the way he worried about his? He thought not. Yeats had been a surly bugger, from what he’d read, rude and demanding; Tom Tulliver (admittedly he was fictional) was criminally careless of Maggie until the end; William took Dorothy mostly for granted while Branwell was a drunk and an opium eater. He felt himself to be much closer to Charles Lamb, who had loved his sister Mary without question, had made all sorts of sacrifices in order to care for her, even after she’d murdered their mother.
He had not been called upon to make many sacrifices for Kate, in fact so far, none. It was hard to imagine what they might be were he asked to make any, but he worried about her all the time, coming back late at night on the bus, she could be mugged, abducted, gang-raped, turned into a drug-addict and sent out on the streets to earn a living for a pimp in a sky-blue doubled-breasted suit and a salmon-pink shirt, like the ones he’d seen in the red-light district of Amsterdam. He had regarded Bradleigh Fullerton III, his erstwhile brother-in-law (supposedly the scion of a family which could trace its roots back to the first wave of Pilgrim Fathers), as little more than a successful con artist. He’d always had a sneaking liking for him (being likeable was probably the most important stock-in-trade of a fraudster) but when Brad had abandoned Kate, Magnus had been secretly relieved to have her back where he could keep an eye on her. When he said he was happy to be a silent partner in whatever business she might want to take on, he meant it most sincerely. He saw himself seated Buddha-like upon a rock, wearing only a loincloth and uttering the odd gnomic sentence from time to time, or like Simeon Stylites, never opening his mouth, simply there on top of his pillar, a mentor nonetheless, not that Kate would have heard his words if he had spoken, unless he’d used a megaphone. Simeon’s last pillar had been, if he remembered correctly, sixty-six feet high. Magnus feared that at the age of no more than thirty-five, he himself was fast turning into a metaphorical stylite, set upon the pillar of a Young Fogey or even a Middle-Aged one. If, indeed, he hadn’t already become an Old Fogey, with his patent coffee-making machines and his two pretty dogs, his collection of hand-painted matrioshkas and palekhs, his peaceable bachelor household, his sister, for God’s sake. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with being a fogey, old or young (fogey deriving from foggy, or moss-bound, he’d discovered, looking it up one evening when the Romanovs were being less satisfactory than usual, though that seldom happened). In fact, he rather liked the idea of it, a small rotundity about the middle, snuff stains on a canary-coloured waistcoat (he’d worn one at Cambridge and considered himself no end of a dog), the suggestion of rich port emanating from his jacket. It’s not too late, he told himself, getting up and staring into the Venetian mirror, which long ago Magnus’s mother had
brought to her marriage as a gift from her Finnish grandmother (though Magnus was never to know this), in order to examine his eyebrows from a couple of inches away, thinking they were taking on a decidedly Denis Healey sort of growth pattern. Something must be done . . . but what?
In his final year at university, Magnus had seriously thought of taking Holy Orders. He’d liked the idea of a rural ministry, the Early-Victorian rectory with its many bedrooms and pretty overgrown gardens, parishioners stopping for a chat (‘Morning, Vicar’) as he laboured with a spade or pruning shears in a short-sleeved black shirt and dog-collar, his hybrid tea or damask roses regularly winning a prize at the annual Flower Show, joining a team of rustic bell-ringers. Matins, he had thought, in some sixteenth-century parish church, his voice sonorous and encouraging from the pulpit. Dinner up at the Hall every now and then, mothers coming to him to confide their fears about their adolescent sons or daughters and himself dispensing wisdom, pointing to his own children who’d been caught in some minor transgression (‘This too shall pass, Mrs Harkness!’) and how well they were now doing, the girl studying medicine, the boys (maybe they were twins) doing awfully well at university. There’d be an occasional peaceful death which he would attend in an outlying farmhouse, holding the dying man’s hand, while his tearful widow (or about-to-be widow) wept quietly on the other side of the deathbed (‘Oh Vicar, I don’t know what I’d have done without you’) until the day of his own quiet dying, mourned by all.
He’d thought, too, of joining some contemplative order, might even have done so if it had not been for his perceived responsibility for Kate. He’d done his three years at Cambridge more to please his father than for his own satisfaction, reading Russian, because the careers master at school had told the Modern Languages Sixth that with glasnost and perestroika, it was the language of today, gentlemen; with Russian at your fingertips, the world will be at your feet. He’d always had an ear for languages, already spoke fluent French and Spanish, and he had worked hard, with a view to going into the Foreign Office or starting on the lower rungs of the ladder of the Diplomatic Service. Sitting on the low wall at the Mill between essays and tutorials, with a pint of beer in his hand while punts moved along the river below, he’d pictured himself en grande tenue, kissing hands, showing his credentials – in the purely professional sense, of course – perhaps with some kind of sash across his chest and a diamond starburst pinned to his bosom, bestowed upon him by a grateful monarch for unspecified services to the Crown, though he was a little unclear as to whether monarchs, grateful or otherwise, bestowed starbursts and the like upon their diplomats. Sometimes he envisioned a wife standing at his side, well-born, elegant, thin, a bit like Edwina Mountbatten during her brief post-Partition tenure as Vice-Reine of India, only with a more modern hairstyle. There’d be an ambassadorial residence, perhaps with peacocks and camellias in the garden, and staff to deal with all the tedious day-to-day matters, and the Edwina-wife throwing stylish little receptions, entertaining visiting notables and VIPs, perhaps even the younger royals, attending parties at other embassies, and being pleasant (‘Such a nice couple’ or, ‘He’ll go far’).
But he couldn’t really believe in it. He was afraid that once he’d got his foot on the first rung of the ladder, he would never get it any higher, it would stay there, forever poised below the second, and in the end, he decided to take the easy way out and stay on at Cambridge and do a further stretch to get his PhD. But his heart hadn’t really been in that either, and he was very conscious of simply putting off some inevitable and possibly calamitous decision.
Having completed his thesis, he hadn’t known where to go next and since he had the Russian, he’d decided to go to St Petersburg for a year. Once there, he flirted with Russian Orthodoxy for a while, loving all the golden grandeur of it, the chanting and the incense, the rattle of chains from the smoking censers and the Feast Days, the gilded gates opening and closing, the knee-bending and sign of the Cross in triplicate, sad cadences in the deepest of bass voices wafting upwards to the buttressed roofs, weeping Madonnas and black-faced saints. Until the day the white-robed acolytes had swung open the shining gates of the iconostasis a little too soon and he’d seen the celebrant munching on what, from Magnus’s kneeling position on the stone floor of the cathedral, had looked suspiciously like a Macdonald’s hamburger. Somehow, the magic was lost after that, and he was back to wondering what to do with himself.
He took a job teaching English as a Foreign Language, walking every day from his shabby room in a shabby hotel along a shabby backstreet behind Nevsky Prospekt, to spend several hours a day in an Institute of Language which was housed in part of what had originally been a grand house belonging to some archduke or other, and was in the process of being restored amid a jungle of plastic sheeting and precarious wooden scaffolding from which workmen filled in holes and scraped plaster. He taught in a room which had once been magnificent and was now filled with battle-scarred tables at which, for the most part, sat equally battle-scarred throwbacks to the Communist era, large men with red ears, plump women in rusty black skirts, the occasional very young girl in clothes so revealing of stomach and breast as to insinuate, to Magnus, at least, that she was some kind of call girl. He could scarcely imagine why his pupils were there in the first place, since none of them had any feel for language. Perhaps it was some kind of mandatory outreach programme, because the circumstances in which any of them might need to speak English was difficult to conceive. Helping tourists, perhaps, or serving behind the high glass counters at the covered market, doling out the thick cream cheeses or the multicoloured honeys, or, in the case of the (possible) call-girl, directing her foreign clients into ever-more pleasurable postures. The Director of the Institute was an oddly hairless man with the kind of shiny skin which suggested that every other week he boiled himself in depilatory wax, whose own grasp of Magnus’s mother-tongue was so tenuous that for his first week at the Institute, Magnus assumed the man was talking in some kind of Russian dialect. He found himself moderately happy.
And then came the phone call. ‘Your parents, Señor, your sister, also Señora Bailey, so sad, so very sad, we do not know exactly what happened but—’
‘What?’ he said. ‘Who is this?’
‘Dottore Eduardo Gonzalez, the lawyer in Quito, the lawyer of the Professore James Lennox, your father.’
‘Yes. What’s happened, what is sad?’ He could feel the blood draining right out of his body and dared not look down in case he found himself standing with a pool of it lapping redly at his shoes.
‘Your family, Señor, an accident on the road, I am very sorry.’
‘My family . . .’ An accident, was that a euphemism, did he mean they were all dead?
‘Your mother, your father, Señorita Bailey, your sister—’
‘I have another sister,’ he had shouted down the phone. ‘Which one are you talking about, which of my sisters is . . .’ It had sounded then, and still did in retrospect, as if one sister mattered to him more than the other, though that had not been in his mind at all. He had been juggling with the horror of losing Dad and Luisa, his stepmother, the prospect of having to act as a surrogate father to his little half-sister Annie, the late and unexpected daughter of his father and Luisa, or as a rock for his full sister Kate. And who was Señorita Bailey, anyway, what did she have to do with anything?
‘Your sister is in hospital, many burns,’ the heavily accented voice said. ‘The emergency services . . . could not, unfortunately . . . in time to save . . . so very sorry . . .’
Magnus had cleared his throat loudly. ‘I can’t hear you very well . . . who did you say was in hospital?’
‘Señorita Lennox, Señorita Katerina Lennox.’
And for the rest of his life he would be ashamed at the relief he’d felt in the deeper recesses of his being at not being required to bring up eight-year-old Annie, a child he hardly knew. She would have required things from him he wouldn’t have known how to give, though obviously,
just as Dad had done after Mother died, he would have given it his very best shot (‘once a month, darling, it means you’re a Woman now’), buying brassieres and tampons for her, worrying about boyfriends and unwanted pregnancies.
‘Dad . . .’ he said. ‘Kate . . . Oh dear God, this is terrible.’
‘Yes . . .’
And Luisa, too, the pretty South American biologist his father had married fourteen years ago, plus the unknown Señora (or was it Señorita?) Bailey.
He pulled himself together. ‘Mr Gonzalez, I shall fly to Quito as soon as I can make the arrangements. Is there someone I can contact, someone who could meet my plane, take me to wherever my sister is?’ and he scrabbled at the drawer of his bedside table for a biro and some poor-quality lined paper with the name of his hotel stamped crookedly across the top.
Kate
Three
‘We’re a young company,’ the woman who interviewed her – Janine Taylor – had said. ‘Small, specialist, dynamic. At the moment, there are only three of us: me, Fran and you . . . if you prove to be the best candidate for the job, that is . . . plus another girl who helps out three days a week during peak times. Do you think this is the sort of work you’d enjoy?’
‘Definitely.’ Kate was looking as specialist and dynamic as she could. She had spent half the morning doing typing tests, familiarizing herself with the office computer, and conversing with people on the end of the phone, part of Janine’s impressive interviewing techniques.
‘We try to offer something a little more offbeat than your average high street travel agency. And because we’re competing with the big boys – Thomas Cook’s, STA, Thomsons, not to mention the cut-price people, we have to offer a more personal approach. This job is all about people skills. Are you good with people? ’
