‘The same age,’ I responded, revealing that I had more than a passing interest in the star. ‘We were born only weeks apart, Miss Leigh and I.’
‘You do resemble her, but Duvivier exaggerates. Her eyes are blue, although most people think of them as green because of Scarlett O’Hara. They made them green in post-production. Yours are so dark, they seem to be all pupils. Vivien is a couple of inches shorter … and …’ She slowed down.
‘The nose, I am sure that’s what you wanted to say,’ I interrupted. She was too tactful to mention it.
‘I meant something more complex than features. Vivien manages to look as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But the nose too, I suppose.’ Elizabeth traced the line of my nose with her index finger. ‘Much more interesting than Vivien’s, dare I say. You’d have been a better Cleopatra. And you are French, I take it, from your accent. Though it is barely noticeable: not like that lot there. Those men are often impossible to understand, especially when they speak English to each other. Duvivier speaks French to me most of the time. I was an ambulance driver in France at the start of the war. Mechanical Transport Corps.’
She paused as if to ponder recollections she was not going to share. I was silent too, confused by the unexpected touch of her hand.
‘What a coup for the film,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I couldn’t think of a better period consultant than Count Karenin. The people we have here – such a cosmopolitan gathering seems possible only in London. And I do hope we will be seeing more of you too, Mrs Whitelaw.’
We watched Monsieur Carr, Jean Duvivier and Alexander Korda as they talked to a series of men who came and went with papers and photographs, like military chiefs of staff hearing reports of distant battles. A young woman walked up to them, said something, then came over to us with the same news.
‘We were hoping that Prince Karenin would meet Miss Leigh today, Miss Montagu,’ she said. ‘She was due in for a consultation with Miss Penfold and the hairdressing team, but she is not feeling very well, unfortunately. The girls have gone to her place instead.’
‘How very sad,’ Elizabeth Montagu said and they exchanged looks that suggested the news was not unexpected. ‘There will be other occasions, Mrs Whitelaw, I’m sure. You are part of the film business now.’
It was mid-afternoon when we left the studios and settled in for our journey back to Chiswick.
‘Mrs Jenkins will be expecting us with some proper food, Albertine. I hope you are not too hungry. I did not want us to have to have a meal with the film people, although they had offered. The food would probably have tasted of papier mâché,’ he said.
‘I was so fascinated by it all I forgot to feel hungry. I have never been anywhere near a film studio before. All those powerful men, so much money and so much thought going into something that looked like a child’s game. I would have loved to see my husband’s reaction to that toy train they brought in to show you.’
‘And the station platform they created – they asked if it was anything like the real place where my mother died. “Just like it,” I said. “It is as though I have stepped back in time.” They seemed pleased, the film people.’
‘How else do you begin to answer a question like that?’
‘Well, I could have told them that my mother died at Obiralovka, a small suburban station outside Moscow, and that I assumed we were standing in the mock-up of St Petersburg, for example, but Andrejew will sort that out soon enough. He is an educated man, André Andrejew, he knew what he was talking about. He looked at me, shrugged, and said just “Znayu.” I know. No one else paid any attention.’
‘Obiralovka. Where is that?’ I asked. I had read Anna Karenina in my late teens, and I remembered everyone shuttling between Moscow and St Petersburg when they were not going to their country estates. I was pretty sure this was the first time I had heard of Obiralovka.
‘A small station outside Moscow, where the Vronskys had their country estate. They tell me that it is now called Zheleznodorozhny. The Steel Road Town. Very appropriate for this new world of ours.’
‘But you should have complained,’ I said. ‘About Obi—I mean. I can’t pronounce the name, I am afraid.’
‘I don’t complain. The Carrs are quiet people,’ he said, then, after a brief pause, ‘My mother and her lover produced enough excitement for the whole of the nineteenth century. And the twentieth. My son certainly seems to think so.’
‘Did you hate her when you were a boy?’ I asked. ‘Do you hate her for the way she ended her life? I lost my family when I was twenty. I promised myself that I would not talk about their deaths. I know this is irrational but it seemed that by talking about their accident I was condemning them to die again and again. It was an act of God, people said, because there was nothing else to say. There is human error and there is bad luck. But your mother’s …’
I did not know what to call Anna’s end in front of her son. She had wanted it.
‘When Mother died, for a long while I could not even think of what happened. I wanted the event to unhappen, to be allowed to be ordinary, like other children. And you must remember that I lost her twice. My father, my awful, boring, dear old father, told me, lied to me, that she was dead because after she left him, he did not want me to see her ever again. But she came into the house on my birthday, secretly – my ninth birthday. I woke up and saw her and thought I was dreaming. She was a ghost. Then, so soon after I realised that it was really her, that she was alive, I lost her again.
‘I had such a lonely, uncomprehending childhood, dear Albertine, in that bleak house. It was a mausoleum where we prayed for her sinning soul four, five times a day, with a procession of priests and monks who hovered around Father like vultures around a particularly juicy carcass. He converted my mother’s dressing room into a chapel, had it consecrated. Father was fundamentally Orthodox, but there was this joyless Protestant side to him, a throwback to our German ancestry no doubt. He was interested in right and wrong, the rule of law; no music, no mystery, and no salvation unless the ledgers tot up. I couldn’t wait to grow up, to escape from him and his joyless world, and I believe he felt the same about me in the end. He wanted me out and away. Physically, I may have resembled him as much as her, I am not sure, but finally, looking at me, he could see only her, and that other Alexei, Vronsky, who was everything he was not. I hated him and then I pitied him. I pitied him so much that even many years later I gave his name to my own son, my only child, blind to the fact that I was also naming him after my mother’s lover. God forgive me.’
‘But you left him anyway?’ I asked. ‘You left him behind long ago in Russia, I assume?’
‘Yes, I did, well before the Revolution. I went abroad to study. That, at least, was my excuse. I came of age at the time of great expeditions and discoveries – the great Victorian era as the British like to think of it – when scholars and scientists risked their lives to cross deserts and climb mountains. I was sixteen when I went to hear General Przhevalsky at the Imperial Geographical Society in St Petersburg. He spoke about his journey into the Tibetan interior, places unvisited by Europeans since Marco Polo. I wanted to travel further, if that was possible. And long before I knew whether I wanted to be an archaeologist, or an explorer, or something else altogether, I dreamed of running away from my father.’
‘And your father? Did he sense that? Did he try to stop you?’
‘He was almost relieved when I chose Tübingen, happy to send me to Germany although there was no reason to go so far to study; our Russian universities were very good. Germany had united just over a decade earlier and, in theory at least, was an exciting place to be, but I wasn’t interested in politics, wasn’t interested in Bismarck. I was interested in ancient languages and scripts, pre-Christian and even pre-Greek, the older the better. It may well have been all those priests and confessors who, promising to save Father’s soul, had damned my sister’s soul and mine. Annie believed in God, I was not sure, but neither of us wanted anything to do with off
icial religion. I became interested in the distant past, before the world as we knew it began, some place with different moral codes and different gods.’
He repeated the names of people and places several times, spelling them out for me as though I were taking dictation. Russia – nineteenth-century Russia – seemed a distant and incomprehensible place. Now this Russia no longer existed, and there was an enormous new country, the Soviet Union, that was our ally. Many English people spoke ill of it – it was a barbarous, Communist land, they said – though Albie rather admired the war-winning Soviets. Yet here I was, in a car in outer London, with a man whose world had been destroyed by the Soviets. But you could also argue that his world had in fact been shattered decades before the Soviet Union even existed, by his own mother.
‘Before my mother died, everyone thought I was a technically minded boy, destined to be a great architect or engineer – a Russian Brunel,’ he continued. ‘After her death, I did not want to know about building anything. I became such a recluse that the family worried I would become a monk, withdraw from them and the world, see my life out in a hermitage on Mount Athos or on some other holy mountain. They were wrong. I hated even the thought of God. I just wanted to escape them all, to be left alone.
‘In 1875, for my eleventh birthday, my uncle Stiva gave me a piece of parchment from St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. I had an epiphany then, found my vocation. I would spend my life deciphering old manuscripts; I would become a palaeographer. Stiva’s piece of parchment – my parchment – I learned, had a matching page in the collection of Freiherr von Gutschmid in Germany. I wanted to study with him. Father was happy to send me away. I was his son and heir, but I was also Anna’s son and he couldn’t forget that.
‘Neither could I. I came to hate her because, when she couldn’t have us both, she wanted that other man, my father’s rival and namesake, more than she wanted me. For a long time I believed that her sin against me was more serious than her sin against my father. When you become a mother, Albertine, I am sure you will understand me better.’
‘I am not sure that I will ever have children,’ I said, trying to make it sound as though my childlessness was not a matter of anyone’s choice. I did not want him to pity me, but pity was preferable to talking about Albie and me, to relaying the intimate conversations that Albie and I only ever half had.
‘Oh, you will want a child, I know.’ He appeared, perhaps deliberately, to misunderstand. ‘Forgive me for speaking so directly. There will come a moment when you realise that you love someone so much that only having their child will do. Conception is the highest form of lovemaking: the only one that makes sense. My mother knew that in the end. I am not sure my father was capable of such love.’
I hoped that the driver did not understand French. I glanced into the rear-view mirror: the man’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead. He was one of those short, wiry English types who could equally have been eighteen or thirty-eight. An ex-Tommy, probably, judging by the back of his head, covered by a close ginger crop. I wondered – you always did, about everyone – where he had spent the war.
‘I remember my first journey to Tübingen in 1882,’ Monsieur Carr continued. ‘September it was. The night before, Father and I went to a concert. He had no understanding of music, no love for it; he just wanted to show me to the world before I left. I was taller than him, and I looked like him. Anyone could see that I was his child.
‘Father was seventy-three when he died, ten years younger than I am now. Neither of us suspected that he would be dead before I completed my studies, or we might not have passed that last Russian evening together in stony silence. Rimsky-Korsakov was at the concert hall; spoke to Father at some length. Turkey and Bulgaria were mentioned. Some problems with Prince Alexander of Battenberg on which Father saw fit to opine. Everyone knew Father. There was the scandal, of course, but he had been part of the Establishment, and the Establishment closed around him to protect his honour and their own. Russia felt very small in those days, several dozen families, all connected.
‘It was a strange year. I left Russia after the old Tsar was assassinated in 1881 and I was in Germany when the grand coronation of the new one took place in 1883. Father travelled to Moscow for that ceremony. There is a famous painting of it. You can see Father’s bald head in the crowd at the Uspensky Sobor if you squint. No bigger than a sunflower seed. He was so proud.
‘He had been a Slavophile, at heart, my papa, not a Westerniser. Like many Russian officials of German descent, he had believed all the more zealously in Russia’s mission in the world. My mother’s lover, Vronsky, somehow managed to be both, to be a Westerniser who died in Serbia for a great Slavophile cause. Now Father couldn’t be either. He let himself be guided by the sort of people he would once have despised. He called himself Orthodox, yet he was seeing psychics and diviners. He was a lost soul.’
I looked to my right and saw the wide curve of the Thames and a hill rising from the meadows, a vast red-brick edifice on its brow, rows of lit windows and dark chimneys. Lower down, closer to us, there were Georgian villas, and cedar trees in elegant clusters. They spoke of gentler centuries, but that was a mirage. There had been no gentler times than ours, just times when the wars and the sorrow happened to take place elsewhere. To be spared: I no longer had a sense of what that meant.
‘How confusing it must have been for your father,’ I said. ‘I am sure he loved you. Or believed that he ought to.’
‘While I was in Tübingen, he wrote from time to time,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘A father’s instructions to the son: like a Russian Polonius or Chesterfield. Do not drink, do not gamble, do not duel. Be Russian and be proud of it, but be wary of other Russians. There were so many spoilt brats, frittering their family fortunes in the casinos of Baden-Baden, just forty miles away, that they were building a church there for them, with golden domes worthy of Yaroslavl.
‘There was very little warmth in Father’s letters. He wrote to me in French, but it did not sound like his French, it was as though someone was dictating the letters to him. As I studied ancient scripts during the day, so late at night I studied my father’s handwriting. It was looking more and more like a cuneiform script: angular, sharp, as though he was scared of flourishes, of connections. He packed his lines tightly on the page, leaving no margins. If you saw the letters, you would have guessed that they came from a man unhinged in some way. I kept them in their envelopes, often without reading. When the news reached me of his death and I had to pack quickly to return to Russia for his funeral, I threw the letters into the stove in my room and slammed the fire door.’
Monsieur Carr fell silent and closed his eyes. I watched the houses along the road; in rooms here and there, people were already closing the curtains for the night. The moon sat low in the sky, unmoving and near enough to touch, like a picture painted on the window of the car.
4
Absence
I expected Mrs Jenkins to open the front door, but instead it was Alex Carr, in the same roomy suit I had seen him wearing at my job interview. He stooped down to kiss me on the doorstep, awkwardly and three times, in the Orthodox way, each kiss clumsier than the one before, all the while holding my hand in his between us, like a metal railing on the edge of a cliff. There was no intimacy in his action, no warmth, just something that suggested he had deliberated and decided on it as an appropriate response, a way of acknowledging that single, unpremeditated peck on the cheek I had given him at our first parting.
His movements were wooden, as though his body was a puppet or a toy horse, forced against its will to do the bidding of his mind. His height made his awkwardness more obvious. I felt almost protective towards him. I smiled and extolled the excitements of the day. I thanked him for his solicitousness in providing a driver, as though the Shepperton excursion had been my idea and not his father’s.
Monsieur Carr remained close behind, removing the snow from his shoes with the boot scraper. He took no notice of our exchange. He was
perhaps used to his son’s gaucheness. He said something in Russian. Alex Carr responded briefly, then turned to me.
‘Do stay on for tea if you can,’ he said. ‘The samovar is ready, there is plenty to eat with the tea, and the electric fires were turned on at four. We watch our meters as we are instructed to, but we don’t shiver a moment longer than we have to. I am not sure how far people’s patience with the government stretches in this weather. “Shiver with Shinwell”: did you hear that one?’
And, when I did not respond:
‘I hope you are not too exhausted by your excursion?’
He held my coat, then his father’s, and we walked into the library. The samovar was steaming; platefuls of food waited on the table, some piled with cheese scones and sandwiches, others with small pastries dusted with icing sugar, like pyramids of tiny snowballs.
‘Oh, you must stay, you must, dear Albertine,’ said Monsieur Carr, then, pointing at the snowballs, ‘You’ll love these. Our famous Russian tea cakes. As the old joke goes, they are not Russian, have nothing to do with tea, but at least they are not cakes.’
We settled to a stream of Russian from the father, punctuated by now familiar names – Korda, Anouilh, Duvivier – and interwoven with dollops of French and English when they wanted to include me. Mrs Jenkins stood in the doorway and listened to the conversation, as fascinated by the film business as everyone else.
‘It seems that my grandson won’t be required in the studios more than half a dozen times, mostly during his Easter break and the summer half-term,’ Monsieur Carr said to his son. ‘By the summer most of the filming will have been completed. Strange how it takes years to set everything in motion, then it’s all over in a blink.’
He was trying to talk his son into something, speaking English now as if to have me as his witness.
‘I don’t know, Father, I really don’t know,’ Alex Carr responded. ‘Gigi does seem to have the talent, if school plays are anything to go by, but I would hate to see the boy want to become an actor, and worse, to be encouraged to think about family history, to see his Russianness, in the context of this film. To learn about our past by drinking a glass of Hollywood lemonade. It’s all frippery.’
Monsieur Ka Page 6
