‘You sound like a Bolshevik, Madame Whitelaw,’ the old man said.
It was like a long-forgotten childhood supper, this feast of pancakes and sweet cheese. It was hard to leave Monsieur Carr’s house, to walk alone along the icy pavements. At the bottom of the street, on the green in front of the church, there was a queue of women and children wrapped tightly against the cold, waiting for water with huge canisters. In many places the pipes had been frozen for days. One saw such queues across London. A bobby hovered over them, like a benevolent bat in his dark cape. People shuffled from foot to foot to stave off the cold. The path before me was gritty and liquid. Someone had scattered a tray of hot ash onto a patch of ice. The smell of fried fish hit me in gusts. Only the rattle of a train on the embankment reminded that we were almost halfway through the twentieth century.
Back at Earl’s Court, our house was as freezing as the streets outside. Albie’s dinner jacket still hung on the back of the chair in the dining room, like a headless guest at the table, his black tie thrown over the right shoulder. I switched the wireless on and listened to the Tuesday Serenade in bed, a broadcast from the Wigmore Hall. The sound of the piano filled the room. The only other noise was the intermittent fall of footsteps in the street. The pianist was a woman of twenty-five, the announcer said, born and raised in Tel Aviv. She had studied at the Conservatoire in Paris before the war. She was sixteen when she graduated. During the war, she had performed to the British soldiers in Egypt and in Palestine. It could have been Arlette. For a moment, I imagined that it was. I saw my sister’s hands and her profile above the keyboard.
‘No Chopin,’ Arlette would say when I begged her to play a nocturne or an étude for me. ‘You can be such a sentimental fool, Albertine.’ Yet when I was up in my room and she thought no one could hear her, she played Chopin all the time.
I knew the Wigmore Hall. Albert and I had been there once or twice, to listen to music on a Sunday morning. The painting in its cupola depicted the genius of harmony, a golden sphere which floated in the sky above, while human figures below extended their hands towards it through a tangle of thorns. The memory of those figures, forever thirsting, brought back the face of the man on the bus the night before, looking, with his black beard, like some sad, sad devil; the faces of waiters reflected in the silver cloches; Mrs Jenkins’s face above the ochre shades of her pinafore; Monsieur Carr’s face, redolent of a Byzantine saint even in its asymmetry; the face of Alex Carr under his snow-brimmed hat; then, finally, Albie’s face, his hair oiled and carefully combed yet falling in strands above me; all of us striving for that golden sphere; Albie again on this same bed less than twenty-four hours ago, getting closer, moving away, falling towards me, moving away.
3
An Excursion to the Edge
I had never been outside London before, if you could call my trip to Shepperton with Monsieur Carr ‘outside London’, and if you did not count my not-so-grand entrance into the city in the summer of 1945. There had been no reason to leave the capital. I had not felt in the mood for pleasure trips, and Albie travelled all the time anyway.
Albie had a family: a childless older sister, married across the caste lines of the Raj to a tea planter, who wrote to him from Darjeeling; and parents in East Anglia who, after their wedding gift, had sent two tight-lipped little Christmas cards and who might easily have been living even further away than Darjeeling. They kept inventing reasons to postpone a meeting until I began to suspect that they might be hoping a divorce would render it redundant. Not that this troubled Albie. He had spent most of his childhood and youth away from his parents, at boarding school, then in the army. He protected himself by silence, and he probably assumed that he was protecting me too. Give them time to get used to the idea, he said. The British are spartan and this is the spartan way.
Nor did I long for the open country. I am an urban creature. London parks provided a more than ample supply of countryside. I remained sufficiently Parisian, even after a decade away, to prefer the rose garden in Regent’s Park to the wild grasslands of Richmond, and I sometimes walked all the way from Earl’s Court just to see the roses in bloom, to read their exotic names on black tags planted on stakes alongside the paths like little alien flowers. The streets of Paris, Bucharest and Alexandria were like sentences using the same grammar. They huddled inward against encroaching nature, whereas London opened up to it, allowed it to invade. London was a city created by people who didn’t like cities, I had concluded, who in their hearts preferred villages but with the convenience of urban life. Albie agreed. He seemed puzzled one day when I said that I had spent my afternoon on a bench in the local park, reading. He asked where this park was.
‘It’s just a square, silly girl,’ he said when I looked out of the window, towards Chelsea. A square. I couldn’t see what the difference was. There were lawns in this square, benches and gravel paths under vast crowns of trees, nannies in beige uniforms pushing prams with huge, finely crafted wheels, office workers on the grass, taking their midday breaks, sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper in metal lunch boxes next to them, and young saleswomen, skirts pulled up high above the knee, sunning their legs in that eagerly joyful way only young Englishwomen do when the sun is out. How was the square not a park?
That was before this endless winter set in.
‘We could be back in Russia,’ Monsieur Carr said as our car headed westward, out of London. The world around us was still, wrapped in snowy silence. Snowdrifts were ten feet high in places, milky and yellow at the peaks where the sun touched them, bluish and solid like icebergs at the foothills. The road ahead was empty. Only an occasional lorry rattled by on snow chains, moving in the opposite direction, towards central London. More often than not, the vehicles were olive green, covered with grey tarpaulin. They belonged to the army. It seemed, in the outer reaches of London, as though the war was not quite over.
The interior of our car was warm, too warm. I was fighting sleep, trying to see the outlying stretches of this strange city whose inhabitant I had become. It spread around us in undulating waves, in wider and wider necklaces of squat houses, until it appeared that there was no getting out of it, that the entire girth of southern England was just it: London, coast to coast.
We crossed the river twice for some reason, on bridges suspended above ice floes that glided slowly on murky water. I could never quite grasp the way the Thames looped through London, and I gradually lost even the last of my bearings in the tangle of suburban roads. After a while I had no idea whether we were driving east or west, north or south. The sun was to our left, then to the right, then left again. At times the houses thinned and it looked as though we were about to leave the city behind, but then the settlements coalesced around us again, entire high streets with queues of people huddling in front of butchers’ shops and corner dairies; schools and churches; deserted squares; grand villas floating behind bare branches like cruise ships stranded at low tide. And everywhere there were bomb craters, dwellings missing from rows of identical facades like gaping holes left after tooth extractions.
At one point a cemetery straddled the road, and angels with snowy wings watched us go by. An iron bridge, black against white, connected the two parts of the graveyard. I could not imagine anyone using it. I noticed graves with unfamiliar white crosses, three bars on each. Monsieur Carr noticed them too, and crossed himself, thumb and the first two fingers in a point, up, down, right, left.
‘We could be back in Russia,’ he repeated and took my hand. I left it there, on the tartan blanket which covered his knees, in the bony cup of his fingers.
‘My dear Madame Whitelaw … Albertine,’ he said. ‘Allow me to call you Albertine. It is so good to have your company. We are survivors, you and I.’
‘I am not sure, Monsieur Carr. You perhaps, yes …’
‘Oh yes, dear girl, you too. I can tell that in you. Just wait and see …’
It seemed almost like a let-down when we finally arrived at our destination, a cl
uster of grim warehouses on the outskirts of Shepperton. Forklift trucks moved between them, loaded with rolls of canvas, and workmen carried ladders and tool-boxes. From the outside, the site could equally have been a vast storage facility of some sort, a set of furniture warehouses. We were directed to the largest of the warehouses where, we were told, members of the crew waited for us. We must have looked like a strange pair as we entered an immense, echoing hangar: an old man in a black coat with an astrakhan trim and a matching fur hat on his white head, the beat of a silver-capped walking stick bouncing off corrugated walls, a dark-haired younger woman on his arm. My heavy winter clothes were British all right, but I was not sure if people could still tell that I was foreign, even before I opened my mouth.
‘Welcome to the British Lion Studios, Prince Karenin. Julien Duvivier. I am not sure if you remember. We met at Claridge’s last autumn.’ The film director spoke in French-accented, American-inflected English. We were now standing with Duvivier on a set that represented a railway station’s concourse covered with mounds of fake snow. The train tracks to our right narrowed sharply at one end, creating a false sense of perspective; at the other, they stopped before a camera crane. A railway engine stood on them, a real, life-size, black engine, with fake icicles hanging from its front lights. I was momentarily stunned by the surroundings: the presence of the film director whose French work I knew well, the scale of the scenery, the painstaking, detailed illusion of it all.
‘We could be back in Russia,’ Monsieur Carr repeated for the third time that day.
‘But we could be anywhere in Europe,’ I said finally, looking at the pillars, a grand, neoclassical facade that, but for the Cyrillic signs, had nothing distinctively Russian about it.
‘Anywhere in Europe: precisely. That is how it should be,’ said Monsieur Carr, making sure that Duvivier heard him. ‘I feared that I would be greeted by onion domes and Baba Yaga huts. Then the next thing you’d see would be Miss Leigh in a peasant dress, with a kokoshnik on her head. At least the set designer knows his Russia better.
‘And as for all the tons of fake snow,’ he added, ‘is it not bizarre to have to produce it, with so much of the real thing around us?’
Outside, on real snow, there were pieces of decoy aircraft, wooden tanks and gun emplacements painted to look like the real thing. It was hard to know if they had been left there from a war film, or from the war itself, as a trap for German bombers. Even the landscape connived in the trompe l’œil. The entrance to the studios faced an abrupt hill with a steep rise, flat-topped like an extinct volcano and behind an ornate fence, the kind of ironwork that had all but disappeared from the streets of London, where iron had been requisitioned and metal stumps continued to scar the streetscapes. The extinct volcano was a mirage too, a water reservoir, a raised lake.
‘Mr Andrejew knows his Russia.’ Duvivier seemed pleased by the old man’s reaction. ‘André Andrejew. He has worked with Pabst, with Reinhardt, with Brecht! He is one of the best things about this film. There is no better art director in the world just now. We are lucky to have him. He had a spot of bother in France after the war, because of a film he made in 1943: a great work, much misunderstood. That’s France for you. Its loss is Hollywood’s gain.’
Shepperton was not Hollywood, that much was obvious the moment you left the hangar. Monsieur Carr chose not to say so; nor did he show any sign of recognising André Andrejew’s name, or any of the others the film director mentioned.
There was something conspiratorial in the way Duvivier gazed at us, his puckish expression at odds with his severe business suit. His eyebrows rose above then fell below the frames of his glasses, like strange little leaping fish. I knew his face from newspapers back in France, before the war. I had been looking forward to this meeting, thinking how surreal it was to come across a famous Frenchman in an anonymous London suburb, alongside this Russian count who was now my employer.
Monsieur Carr chatted to Duvivier as though he met French film directors every day, as though they were becoming a bit of a bore. He opined that he considered theatre by far the superior art, and that opera and ballet towered over both. There were so many versions of Anna Karenina already, he said – one wondered why the world needed a new one.
‘They are all imperfect in one way or another,’ Duvivier responded. ‘We are making the definitive version. No one will dare to follow ours. You need a producer like Sir Alexander, with a vision to match Tolstoy’s, to do justice to such a big story.’
‘War and Peace is a big story,’ said Monsieur Carr. ‘Anna Karenina is a small story. The smaller you make it the better it will be.’
I was waiting to hear them switch to French so I could tell Monsieur Duvivier how much I enjoyed his films, how much I loved Pépé le Moko. In the run-up to the day I had imagined the kind of repartee he would remember me by. I dreamed of meeting Jean Gabin but I married Leslie Howard instead, and here I am, in Shepperton, I would say wryly. But the men carried on in English. Eventually, the director remembered I was there. He raised my hand to his lips and said:
‘Et vous, Mademoiselle …?’
‘Albertine,’ I introduced myself.
‘La Prisonnière?’ Duvivier referred to my Proustian namesake.
‘Pas du tout,’ I said.
‘Albertine Whitelaw,’ said Monsieur Carr in English. ‘So inconsiderate of me not to have introduced you, Mrs Whitelaw.’
‘Vous ressemblez tellement Madame Vivien,’ Duvivier said. ‘You look so much like Vivien, you left me all confused. I thought for a moment I was seeing our future Karenina when you approached.’
This was not the first time I had been told I looked like Vivien Leigh. Albie had said it too, but nobody else had ever observed the alleged similarity before. Albie also said I looked like Hedy Lamarr. I took neither comparison seriously. There was something, perhaps, in the set of my face which was vaguely reminiscent of Leigh, but I had assumed that pictures, even moving ones, were deceptive. I would never have guessed that someone who knew Vivien Leigh might make the same comparison. Perhaps I really look like her, I thought.
There was one major difference, however. My nose, small by the standards of my family, goyish almost, was nothing like Vivien Leigh’s. The star’s profile had a proud, royal curve. My nose was long, with deep, pinched nostrils, like something drawn by a mournful child. My mother used to call it ‘noble’, but she also used to go on about my beautiful hair when I was a girl and that is always a bit of a giveaway; she was like natives of countries with nothing but clean air to boast of. My face needed all the favourable angles it could get.
Two workmen carried a toy train past us. A woman approached but then just stood next to us, hugging a clipboard against her tweed-clad chest.
‘Let me introduce you to Elizabeth Montagu, and see if she will spot the resemblance,’ Duvivier said. ‘What do you think, Elizabeth? Who does Madame Albertine remind you of?’
Without waiting to hear her answer, he returned to Monsieur Carr.
‘Sir Alexander will be here in a moment.’ He uttered the title à la française, Sér Alexandér, with an unnecessary rhyme and a dash of sarcasm.
‘We have so much to talk about. Mr Andrejew will be here soon, too. I cannot wait to tell him how much you liked his sets. A lot has changed since we last met. I am not sure if you have had a chance to read the new script. Mr Morgan – Guy – has greatly improved Jean Anouilh’s version, Sir Alexander believes.’ The sarcasm was now palpable.
‘The idea of moving the story to France seemed unnecessary to me,’ said Monsieur Carr, choosing not to notice it. ‘You would not have needed my advice anyway. I suspect that the British prefer the French to the Russians, but not by much. And I shall have to believe you when you say that Monsieur Anouilh is illustrious in France. However, some stories don’t travel so well. My parents were not bourgeois, not even haut bourgeois, and France has long got rid of their equivalents. The Vronskys’ equivalents too. If the three main characters – my fat
her, my mother and her lover – were to become French, the whole story could so easily have become a silly confection. Which is not to say it won’t, even so.’
He took in the station building, the facade propped with supports and sandbags, and proclaimed it, again, very Russian indeed.
‘Ah, I am delighted to see you, Prince Karenin,’ said a tall man striding towards us. He shook Monsieur Carr’s hand, then stared at me and finally back at Duvivier, who shrugged as if to say, yes, I can see the similarity.
‘Korda,’ the man said and grabbed my hand, holding it in both of his for a moment, then – still with both hands – raised it a fraction, bowed and kissed it, clicking his heels. Duvivier’s eyebrows shot up above the rims of his glasses.
‘Sir Alexander,’ Elizabeth Montagu intervened, ‘let me introduce Albertine Whitelaw. Count Karenin’s assistant.’ She alone used the correct title for Monsieur Carr.
Alexander Korda was an imposing figure, angular and owl-like behind his thick spectacles, yet handsome and charismatic nonetheless. He was so dapper in his Prince of Wales check, his face under the carefully combed greying hair so English-looking, that it was impossible to think of him as a boy from a Hungarian village, a Jewish boy. The less you arrived in England with, the more freely you seemed able to reinvent yourself.
Korda excused himself and took Duvivier and Monsieur Carr to the far corner of the studio where rolls of paper were piled high on a trestle table. He started unrolling them, explaining and pointing at something here then there.
‘I am the dialogue director here,’ Elizabeth Montagu said to me, as we watched the men from afar. ‘Although my job description means different things on different days. I am the only native speaker of English, but I also make an excellent cup of tea. I was at RADA with Vivien before the war. Hartley, she was then. Four years younger than me. You must be of a similar age.’ She was friendly and unaffected but authority and even aristocratic grandeur lurked behind her nonchalance.
Monsieur Ka Page 5
