‘Soutien-gorge’ – he named the undergarment in French. His impossibly English accent made it sound as though we were staging a late-night language lesson for the blind. I pushed him away and he fell with slow deliberation, taking me with him onto a mound of virgin snow. The dark figure soared in the moonlight above us with the unrestrained joy of someone recently released from hiding; a German prince, protected by the British, even in the middle of the Blitz.
‘It is outrageous, this monument,’ Albie said, looking up. ‘And I’ve never thought of that before. The sheer lunatic size of it. How could a woman build this for any one man? Would you, Ber? Would you erect something on this scale for your husband, when he is dead?’
‘I would,’ I said. ‘And I would gild it, if I had the money.’
He kissed me. His lips tasted autumnal even amid so much snow; of tobacco and bitter. Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha watched over us, his wide face that of a country groom.
Back home we fell into a late, deep sleep so that the alarm, when it woke us, felt as though it was only minutes later. I waited for Albie to turn it off, then stretched my arm towards the left side of the bed to find him no longer there. The bedding smelled of our lovemaking and his pillow was still warm, but he was already up, clean-shaven and ready to go, standing in the kitchen in his overcoat, a Gladstone bag waiting at his heel like a bulldog. He was taking the last sips from his teacup. Outside, the sky was as brightly starlit as when we came in.
‘Go back to sleep, darling,’ he said, kissing my parting on his way out. ‘There’s no reason to be up so early.’
I hugged him goodbye, gulped the remainder of his toast, washed the dishes and swept the kitchen floor, then went back to bed. It was going to snow later, as it had snowed most mornings since the beginning of the year. There was nothing else to do but sleep until late afternoon, until my appointment with Monsieur Carr.
I found the copy of Madame Bovary on the same footstool where I had left it, and proceeded to read aloud for some forty minutes, waiting for Monsieur Carr to interrupt me. Flaubert suddenly seemed too much, over the top, the prose almost delirious in its lack of restraint. Or was I, without even sensing it, becoming English?
Emma was attending a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor.
‘She permitted herself to be lulled by the melodies and felt her entire being stirred as if the bows of violins were passing over her nerve-ends …’
Entire being: what did that mean? It felt indecent, vaguely voyeuristic, reading about something so physical to an old man. His eyes were closed, and his lips moved in a soundless echo of the words. I kept my voice as inexpressive as possible. We would have been better off with Daudet, I thought.
‘Please, Madame Whitelaw, I hope you don’t mind, but I can’t hear another word of Madame Bovary today,’ said Monsieur Carr abruptly, as though he had guessed my thoughts. His fingers toyed with the fringe of the checked blanket covering his knees. He dragged one of his fallen slippers closer to the chair with the tip of his right foot, a thick maroon sock with a careful darn on the big toe, like a miniature spiderweb made of black wool.
‘My little sister loved that book. She was an ugly little thing, Annie was, seven years younger than me. Strange, for both her parents were good-looking, as though nature had somehow wanted to revert to the mean when she was conceived. We had the same mother, but impossibly Annie resembled my own father more than I did. Yet she was charming, and no one would accuse him of charm. When she was little, she dreamed of becoming a ballerina. She remained in the old country after the Communists took over, I believe, and we had no idea of her whereabouts afterwards.’
‘Since you mention your sister … perhaps I may ask? That invitation, Monsieur Carr, I’d love to accompany you to the studios, but I don’t understand … I know Anna Karenina – who doesn’t? I love the novel, yet … I don’t even know how to ask this. I thought … everyone does, of course … it is not history, not about real people … Are you really a prince? Are you really a Karenin?’
Our conversation had switched to English when he interrupted my reading. I always followed his lead.
‘My dear girl, certainly not a prince – I am a count, a Graf, as we Russians would have it,’ he said. ‘The film people seem to think of all of us as princes. We changed the family name three times in the last hundred and fifty years, like our native city.’
‘I am familiar with that,’ I said. ‘The need to change the name, I mean.’
‘You think it important,’ he continued. ‘You think the name defines you, but then you find yourself re-imagined by Count Tolstoy. We were Russian and Orthodox, but the family was of German extraction. Hartung, we were called originally. An ugly German name few Russians could pronounce properly. The servants called us Kertung, Gartung, Karning. When the instalments of Anna Karenina started appearing, when it became clear that Tolstoy’s story was about us, people began to call us Karenin behind our backs, to show that they knew, that the adulteress and her brood could never hide. I was a child still, and children were even less reticent about the link than adults. They called me little Karenin all the time. At first I answered to the name to spite my father. I liked Karenin better than Hartung anyway: it made me feel more Russian. Besides, Hartung was his name and I wanted nothing to do with him after she died.’
‘After Anna died, you mean?’ I asked.
‘Anna, yes. That was my mother’s real name. Father may not have been aware at first that people had made the connection. The gossipmongers had more pity for him than for her: they shielded him long after she was dead and buried. By the time we came to bury him, everyone in St Petersburg called me Karenin – the Karenin boy. The name was not inscribed on my father’s tombstone, naturally, but it appeared in my Nansen passport, the document I travelled under after the Revolution, by what you could describe as a clerical mistake. I let it pass. The German original would have been an even greater liability by then. My father was dead, there was no need to worry about him.
‘And so we reached Britain as Karenins, but we changed it again, soon afterwards, to Carr. I made that last one up – learning the lesson from your people – in order to become invisible among the English. I did not want to be a stranger in a strange land. You can hardly think of a less conspicuous name than Carr. I dropped the title too. The British don’t care about our silly coronets any more than we care about theirs. Or than the Bolsheviks did. The film people love them, however. Many of them have purchased, or made up, titles and names considerably more fanciful than ours.’
‘And how did they find you, Monsieur Carr?’ I asked.
‘Mr Kellner is to blame. Mr Korda, that is, or Mr Heart, if you will. Our dear Sir Alexander has even more avatars than I. His real name was Sándor – Hungarian for Alexander – Sándor Kellner – but that was not good enough. Kellner must have sounded too German, too prosaic in its meaning. He fashioned a new name for himself from sursum corda, he told me. Lift up your hearts. How much more odd than our name change is the case of a Jewish boy borrowing a name from the Holy Eucharist, yet you call Korda a real name? He changed the spelling to keep the initials,’ Monsieur Carr said.
‘A. K., like your mother, like the film he is producing,’ I interrupted.
He paid no attention. ‘Sir Alexander is to blame for our involvement. I was happy to end my days as a plain Mr Carr. He got to hear about us from an Englishwoman who had met Count Tolstoy back in Russia. Constance Garnett: “Garnet Stone”, we used to call her. It was a childish pun, but it suited her. She was as hard as a stone. Churchill, of all people, recommended her as a consultant to Mr Kellner, to ensure the authenticity of the film. Authenticity, Mr Kellner, I remember asking when he approached me, what do we mean by authenticity here? How do you begin to know what authenticity stands for, dear Albertine, when you speak of Anna Karenina?’
‘I sometimes feel that the life I lead is not real,’ I said. ‘That the real Albertine lives on somewhere else. The fictional lives we read about –
your Anna, your Emma Bovary here – are so much more authentic than ours, and not just in the sense that they leave a deeper, more permanent mark on the world, while we, so-called real people, vanish without a trace. Is that it? Was that your question?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But the film people don’t want to hear anything as knotty as that. They found their Russian prince. A scoop: that’s what they would love me to become. I am more Karenin than anyone else, living or dead, and that’s a fact, they say. No need to complicate matters.’
‘And you do know more about Russia than your Garnet Stone,’ I said.
‘I would not be so sure, dear girl. The Englishwomen of her kind seem to know everything. But that is beside the point. She could not take the consultancy, too far gone, practically blind, and a recluse,’ he went on. ‘She died last December, in fact, poor soul. I read her life story in the papers. I had no idea that she was part of an illustrious literary circle – an English kruzhok, a group of writers so famous that I had never heard of any of them.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’ I asked.
‘She visited us once, Mrs Garnett, soon after we settled in London; as frail as you can imagine but full of the most unbelievable stories. Alexei can still imitate her Russian. It sounded so English, it took a while to realise she was even speaking it. And her yarns … most of them sounded like pure fantasy. She had known Chiswick in the 1880s, she told us. Claimed she had learned her Russian from an anarchist assassin called Stepniak who lived around the corner here, on Woodstock Road. This Stepniak, Stone said, was run over by a train half a mile from where you and I are sitting now.
‘You never knew what to believe. Not Mrs Garnett’s fault, though, she told nothing but the truth, it turns out. This city is full of people with made-up names and made-up histories, and the real stories often sound the most fantastic. How the British can trust us at all, with so many tuppenny Munchausens going about, I am at a loss to make out. You know where you are with someone called Carr. I won’t even ask you for your maiden name. Whitelaw seems real enough to me.’
‘I was born a Singer,’ I said. ‘My family changed their name too … three times. Kantor, originally, in Kraków. Singer in Strasbourg. We moved to Paris with it, when Alsace became French again. But my father thought that Cartier would be better for the clothes business, so we ended up as Cartier.’
‘Carr and Cartier,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘We are a fine pair, Madame Whitelaw.’
‘There is nothing made-up about Whitelaw. There were Whitelaws in the North when the Normans came. My husband’s people were never called anything other than Whitelaw. You know where you are with the Whitelaws too. Shrewdness enriches, says the family crest. English when sober, Scottish when drunk, my husband says.’
The memory of our drunken night made me blush.
‘That sounds very Scottish to me,’ the old man said, then, taking a vast white handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes and his forehead and finally blew his nose, sonorously. His face was bright red too.
‘Doesn’t it, Mrs Jenkins?’
The housekeeper had just stepped in. The smell of food reaching the library was irresistible. Outside, the snow continued to fall.
‘Would you join me for dinner, Mrs Whitelaw? I can only offer cabbage soup and pickled mushrooms, like a muzhik.’
We followed Mrs Jenkins into the dining room. The tureen on the table was hideously ornate. It was covered with poppies, roses, anemones and tulips. It had two large, yellow, leaf-shaped handles, like giant ears. A cherub sat on top of the lid in a matching yellow toga, holding a cornucopia from which bright fruits spilled into his lap. It wasn’t hard to guess that this vernal riot had been chosen by the person who painted the watercolours hanging on the walls around us.
‘My wife’s possessions. Oh, dear,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘She was not always like that. As a young woman she had subtle, impeccable taste. But something snapped after the Revolution. By the time we reached Chiswick, she had become a hoarder, a magpie, and, like a magpie, she went for bright, gaudy things. She had always been a quiet, withdrawn person, and she became practically mute towards the end. The less she said, the louder the objects with which she needed to surround herself.’
‘But you kept it all,’ I said.
‘You would never believe, Mrs Whitelaw, how much I have always hated my wife’s late taste in interior decoration, and how unable I was to remove a single thing after she died. Something similar happened to her taste in food. The older she got, the more elaborate it became, the sweeter her tooth. The millefeuilles, the croquants, the choux: I often asked if she was trying to kill me with them. Not that she deigned to respond. But I did stop eating French food when she died. English and Russian cooking are similar in many ways, medieval and honest – aren’t they, Mrs Jenkins?’
‘Of course, Mr Carr, how right you are,’ said Mrs Jenkins as she ladled the soup without appearing to listen to his speech. She was wearing a pinafore whose flowery pattern was as riotous as that depicted on the dinner service, but its colourways were confined to a dozen shades of brown. Her food was relentlessly brown too. The soup and the mushrooms were coffee-coloured, and the bread as dark as the coal in the fireplace. The old man looked at me and nodded towards his plate with amused approval. He raised a thimbleful of vodka.
‘For England, Mrs Whitelaw, for King George.’ He downed the liquid in one gulp.
‘The King-Emperor!’ I said and took a tiny sip of mine. It tasted of cucumber and was as strong as absinthe.
I was wrong to be suspicious about the food. The cabbage was sweet and sour, and as delicious as anything I had ever tasted in England. The bread and the mushrooms were even better. I looked at Mrs Jenkins with astonishment and admiration. She noticed and straightened her pinafore.
‘This is delicious. And I cannot imagine anything more Russian,’ I said, trying to pay her a compliment.
‘In spite of her highly misleading name, Mrs Jenkins is almost as Russian as I am,’ Monsieur Carr intervened.
Her appearance suggested otherwise. Mrs Jenkins looked as English as it was possible to look, and I am saying that without prejudice. Englishwomen could be, and often were, impossibly beautiful. Some of the young secretaries from Albie’s office who knocked on my door to deliver envelopes with translation work were stunning, their skin pale and glistening like porcelain. Although few would have described Mrs Jenkins as beautiful, she was unmistakably English, from the vast clump of hair on top of her head to the wide woollen slippers on her feet, so English that she merited an appellation d’origine. As if to confuse me further, she said something in Russian to Monsieur Carr and he nodded.
‘The Countess, Mr Carr’s mother, had a ward,’ she said. ‘A girl by the name of Hannah Wilson. She came to the Countess from the Vronsky household. The Countess took Hannah in, and looked after her whole family – Hannah’s mother and brothers – when their father suffered from delirium tremens.
‘My grandfather and Hannah Wilson’s father worked in the Vronsky stables. Everyone knew these two men. They had brought the first Arabians from Aleppo to Russia. Count Vronsky loved his racehorses. He employed Englishmen to look after them, for no one knows more about the horses than the English. But Vronsky’s Englishmen caused many problems too. They were fond of their drink, and in Russia they drank even more than they did at home.
‘My family returned to Britain when I was a girl, after the Revolution, when the stables started disappearing. People were so hungry they used thoroughbreds for sausage meat. The racehorses had all gone. The Wilsons were in London already, they helped us settle.’
‘The Wilsons helped us as well,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘They were the first to come back here; returned to England soon after my mother died. My father paid for their relocation. Handsomely, you could say, considering that they were Vronsky’s staff. Who could have guessed when we fed the English that one day the English would feed us.’
‘Oh no, Mr Carr, it was for such a short time.
You mustn’t mention it.’ Mrs Jenkins collected the empty plates and disappeared into the kitchen. There was the sound of pots and pans moving and then a sweet smell of pancakes.
‘After 1917, there was a small colony of British returnees from Russia in South-West London – language teachers, nannies and governesses, butlers, grooms, most of them, but merchants, bankers and industrialists too,’ Monsieur Carr explained. ‘One ran into familiar faces all the time. They, those St Petersburg English, did not always know what to say to you. Some crossed to the other side of the street to avoid having to talk.’
‘And are you still in touch with the Wilsons?’ I asked. ‘Count Vronsky’s groom and his people? His descendants, I mean.’
‘But of course. We are related now. My son married Hannah Wilson’s granddaughter,’ said Monsieur Carr.
Mrs Jenkins returned to the dining room with a stack of pancakes on a green plate shaped like an enormous cabbage leaf.
‘I suspect you know it, Madame Whitelaw, but it is Shrove Tuesday,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘We must eat blinis now. Although the Lenten fast for us Orthodox is still some days ahead, and although I know that you are Jewish, Mrs Jenkins says we must eat blinis and honey and sweet cheese. She calls it Pancake Day.’
‘Mardi Gras,’ I said. I had forgotten. I did not think I could eat any more, but it seemed impossible to refuse.
‘We will eat blinis on Forgiveness Sunday too, to see our Russian Clean Monday in,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Would you care to join us with your husband? I’d love to meet him. My son will be here, his family too. And you must meet Gigi, my grandson.’
‘I would love to,’ I said. ‘I am not sure I believe in God, but I do believe in pancakes. Blinis, did you say?’
Monsieur Ka Page 4
