‘You are the sweetest person, Albertine,’ Monsieur Carr said. ‘Would you read the book to me? Would you read Karenin’s Winter ?’
He handed me the folder.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It will take a couple of hours. Do tell if you get tired. We can always pause and continue next time.’
‘Get tired of my life?’ He laughed and I saw more tears streaming down his cheeks. I joined him in his laughter.
‘Oh, Albertine, you are the only person to laugh at my jokes. I so love puns and double entendres even when they are trite and childish. It comes from being a linguist, I suppose.’
‘Or being a foreigner, in my case,’ I said. ‘Always on full alert, worrying that you will misunderstand, that you will be caught out.’
I read Karenin’s Winter to him as he sat in his usual chair, looking, behind his glasses, like a blind man. I could tell from the rhythm of his breathing that he was attentive, listening. He did not interrupt, not even with his usual ‘Oh, dear,’ but would occasionally sigh a quiet yes, or, at times, a no that sounded like a yes.
When I finally finished, he reached out for the folder and looked at its cover again.
‘That is so lovely, Albertine. I can’t believe you did all this. The hours the work must have taken,’ he said. ‘And I can’t believe I told you so much. You organised it all so well and the writing is beautiful.’
‘And I kept it loose-leaf deliberately, so that you can add photographs and further stories to it,’ I said. ‘Or I can do it for you.’
‘Dearest scribe,’ he said, ‘you have left yourself out of Karenin’s Winter, but I demand a colophon at least, a line or two with your name at the end, and a small illumination perhaps, like those ancient books. Would you do that for me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But please give me some time to think. It is not easy to know what to write. The ending is the most prominent spot.’
‘Albertine,’ Alex Carr called. ‘I had expected you to come by much earlier.’
I was at the bottom of Monsieur Carr’s street, next to the green opposite the Underground station. The day was almost over. Men left the station, hurrying home to dinner, to their families. Their clothes were as grey as the dusk, their shoulders relaxing as they walked away from their trains. He was sitting on a bench at the corner of Bath Road, just outside the reach of a cone of street light. He was half hidden by a cluster of budding hollyhocks and crimson peonies, flowers the colour of a deep wound, like something his poor mother might have painted. His thin body fitted the scene: the wooden slats, the high stalks, the flint-coloured dying light of the day. His face was long and wan, like the crescent moon just rising beyond the tile roofs, the circles beneath his eyes darker than the peonies. I sensed the tension. It was radiating from his very bones.
‘Albertine,’ he repeated. I sat down next to him. There was a pub opposite, its small garden wedged into the corner below the railway line, a space criss-crossed by bunting above a collection of ramshackle tables, like the washing lines with drying bandages in the courtyards of Egyptian hospitals. Towering above the courtyard were the crowns of horse chestnut trees, dark leaves supporting candelabras of buds about to burst open. Alex looked across the road as though he was thinking of inviting me over, then changed his mind.
‘How are you, Albertine?’ he said finally. ‘How have you been?’
There was no easy way to answer the question.
‘What shall we do, Albertine?’ he asked.
‘I have no regrets,’ I said.
‘That is not what I’m asking, Albertine. Although I’m happy to hear it.’
‘But it is very hard, your question. I am confused. I have never been in anything like this situation before. I keep changing my mind. I am not sure there is anything to do. Anything we have to do, I mean.’
‘I want to do the right thing. I have been in a similar situation.’ He hesitated, noticed my expression. Had he not said that he was a faithful husband?
‘Oh, not that similar,’ he said. ‘I was the one who was expected to forgive. The wronged party, as they say. And I was in Palestine when the question arose. I really can’t say any more.’
I liked his unwillingness to share Diana’s secrets, his sense of propriety, even as I felt it shaking to the foundations.
‘Contrary to what you might expect,’ he continued, his voice almost inaudible, ‘to forgive is the easiest thing to do in this situation. It does not demand any action beyond itself. The declaration of forgiveness, I mean, that first step, the sign of goodwill. I gave that sign long before I could forgive in reality, but I had all the time in the world to deliver on what was expected of me. Until you arrived, Albertine. That was difficult, but this is so much more so. What do you think, Albertine? Dearest?’
I shivered. I shivered so much that I had to get up and move on. He followed. We walked in silence for half a mile or so. I hoped that he knew where we were, that he was not simply coming after me. The chances that someone could see us and recognise him were considerable, yet he did not seem to care.
‘Have you told your husband?’
‘I tried. But I did not in the end. Not because I could not. Does Diana know?’
No, no, no. He repeated the word three times, each time after a long interval.
‘No one knows then,’ he added. ‘No one but us.’
‘Your father? He often says things which make me feel that he knows everything, sees everything,’ I said.
‘No,’ Alex repeated one more time. ‘There is no way he could … But what does all that matter, Albertine? Does it matter who knows? You mean a lot to me. I want to do the right thing. Except, I have no idea what the right thing is. I will obey your wishes. Whatever you ask me to do, I will do.’
This, the delegation of power, and I could see that it was meant, made me shiver again. It seemed to me that he was paralysed by his need to act honourably and an inability to see what the honourable thing would be. You mean a lot to me: the words of someone who did not love. Or the words of someone who was afraid.
‘I have no idea, Alexei. Has one afternoon changed so much?’ I said one afternoon because I couldn’t call it anything else. I was, it turns out, the sort of person who could betray her husband, but who could not say the word sex out loud.
‘Of course it has,’ he said. ‘It has changed everything, don’t you see?’ He paused. ‘Oh, Albertine, your lapels are completely wet from this silent crying of yours.’ He had caught up with me.
The survival instinct of a pogrom baby, my mother used to call it. You had to learn how not to make a sound. She was, and I was not, a pogrom baby. Alex Carr took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket, reached out towards my face, as he had once already at the Acton hospital, and now, as then, he embraced me instead. I knew his smell under the rough cloth: tobacco, tar soap, and something clear and bright underneath, like ozone after a spring shower.
‘Would you prefer me to sob loudly?’ I said.
Someone was coming down the road. An old woman with a dog, I saw as she walked past us, slowly, limping a bit. Her left shoe was stacked by several centimetres.
I stepped away from him.
‘We will need to pretend that nothing has changed,’ I said. ‘See how that feels, at least for a while. Get used to the feeling, both of us. I don’t see how anything else could be possible now.’
He took a deep breath, abruptly, as though I had hit him in the solar plexus, and stared at me. He seemed to bend a little, caving in under an invisible force, then straightened up.
‘I am used to acting as normal; you can say that about me, Albertine. An accountant in West London: how do you think a dispossessed Russian becomes one? So yes, if you are sure that is what you wish. But, please, dearest, remember that I had wanted to do the right thing by you before I did right by anybody else.’
We had looped back to the Underground station. In his tiredness, his anxious expression resembled his grandfather’s face in the portrait in Monsi
eur Carr’s library, yet he now seemed much more handsome, for a handsome, good soul shone out of his eyes. I kissed his cheek, once, quickly, and walked up to the platform alone.
‘There was something you wanted to talk about last night, Ber,’ Albie said when I returned to Earl’s Court. He was in the kitchen, eating. I apologised for my lateness. He waved my apology away.
‘I have not forgotten. Is it about your allowance?’ he asked.
‘Oh? Did I? You may remember but I don’t. I have no idea. It certainly isn’t my allowance. I don’t think I spend a third of it, Albie.’
Here we are. The shape of silences to come. I was saving us both, saving all four, five, six of us, I thought. I wondered how many people could be said to have been deceived on Monday afternoon.
Albie looked relieved.
‘But you should, dearest, you should go shopping, please yourself. And I used it, but I hate that word, “allowance”. You have your own money from the Carrs. Or is it the job that worries you? You don’t have to stick with it, Albertine, if it bores you, just because you thought it was a good idea four months ago. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.’
He put his knife and fork down. He was eating a kipper – a pungent butterflied smoked fish, like something crucified on a plate, with a fried egg on top, burnt and dry around the edges, a supper he had improvised while I was out in the streets of Chiswick talking to Alex Carr, a meal which looked so English and so joyless that it made me want to cry for Albie. He was washing it down with a cup of tea so strong that a drop of milk had turned it the colour of copper. I heard the liquid as it descended Albie’s gullet, a roll of waves on a shallow beach. I thought it was going to crush me, just that sound. I stood up to make a cup of black tea for myself, then sat across the table from Albie and watched him eat. He mopped up the last smears of yolk from the plate. The moment passed.
He might well have waited for me, wanted us to eat together, before he gave up on the wait, before it was too late to make anything more elaborate, but he had not asked why I was late. Was the question there, wrapped in another question, drowned by the tea? Was he waiting to see if I would tell him anything? I knew Alex Carr better than I knew Albie, I thought.
‘Shouldn’t we invite your parents over, Albie? I don’t understand their continuing absence. They have been promising to visit us for so long. Is it perhaps because we don’t push, because we don’t insist, that I haven’t met them yet? A weekend, perhaps? Or just a Sunday lunch, if you prefer. East Anglia is hardly the other end of the world. It’s almost two years since we arrived, since you brought me here. It doesn’t seem normal. Don’t you miss them at all?’
‘Is that what has been troubling you, Ber? Is that what you wanted to talk about?’ He looked relieved. ‘Dearest, you should have said it. I don’t care if my parents visit or not. I missed them, horribly, for a month or two when I was eight or nine, never since. They made sure I had enough for the tuck shop, enough to blunt my sorrows with sweets when other parents visited. They couldn’t just nip over from Darjeeling, could they? Even their letters were written in a kind of code: You’re having a wonderful time, boy, we know that. Please don’t say anything but yes. But we are on speaking terms. At least I assume so. If it means so much to you, I’ll invite them, of course I will. I’ll write to them. You’re a good person, dearest. You had me worried.’
He was the second man to call me dearest that day, the third to call me good.
A day or two later, I promised Albie that I was going to go to Debenhams for lunch; that I was going to shop, to have my hair done. How can you not love a husband who makes you promise to do whatever you want to do?
The department store was full of women, alone or in twos and threes, walking from floor to floor under artificial light, sniffing scents, fingering fabrics, turning the saucepans upside down to see what they were made of.
‘How can I help you, madam? That’s lovely, that silk, excellent quality too, and I don’t say that often about Indian fabrics. You have an eye,’ a sales assistant said.
I was looking for a project, twisting the corner of a bale of silk chiffon, a spray of blood-coloured petals on a khaki background, the fabric so fine, so slippery that it was bound to test my sewing skills to the limit, running away long before the first cut. The assistant spelled out the width of the bale and suggested the lengths I would need for different garments, in inches, all too fast.
‘A shirt,’ I said. ‘A long-sleeved shirt with a ruffle collar.’
Everything seemed absurd, but I tried this new life, like someone trying a new garment for size in front of a mirror. I kept promising myself to give it a decent go. The young man took the bale to the cutting table, turned it over and over to unroll the lengths of silk I wanted, measured it carefully, counting inches out loud through his thin, feathery moustache, stretching the fabric along a measuring stick, drawing a thin line with chalk, cutting then rolling the silk into a thin salami, saying see, it rolls into nothing, wrapping it, tying the parcel with a red string and handing it to me, walking me to the till to pay, like a gentleman walking his lady to a promised dance. The idea that I would be making a ruffle-collared shirt, that I would be wearing it at some point in the near future, seemed the most absurd of all.
At the hairdresser, an hour later, I asked for the most elaborate set, a profusion of curls and twists, and then a chignon. I sat for the best part of three hours in a small salon on Half Moon Street, looking at taxis going past, at a roofless house across the road, leafing through women’s magazines, sitting under a dryer in a gaudy floral gown with pads over my ears while curlers got hotter and hotter and my scalp burned. My new hairdo emerged gradually from under the comb and a newfangled spray pump, more spray than I thought it possible to need.
‘An updo is always the elegant option,’ the young woman said, teasing the odd curl out of the interlocking plaits that formed the complicated chignon. Updo: not a word I had ever heard before.
‘Too much control never looks good,’ she said. She held up a mirror at the back to show me how elaborate it all was. I saw myself reflected in triplicate. I saw what Albie would see some hours later: an alien woman.
‘You have such lovely, lustrous hair, madam, so un-English. You are so lucky. I am sure your husband will love it,’ she said, looking furtively at my left hand, noticing my wedding ring, touching her tight blonde bun, which was no bigger than a golf ball. Her own rings sat in an ashtray by the washing basin. She looked at them too, as if to make sure that they were still there. I had a hairdo fit for a wedding ceremony. I wanted it to speak for itself. To speak to Albert of hours wasted, pleasing myself in order to please him, just as he had urged me to do. If I was not happy, he would see it as his own failure, not mine.
Someone gave me a seat on the Underground. I smelled of hairspray and scents from the department store. There was a young man with a wooden leg next to me, a crutch protruding out of his unseasonally heavy winter coat, a field-grey coat with strange buttons. I wondered what made me deserve this seat. I wondered if I looked too ladylike for public transport, or like a woman unhinged in some way. There was no shortage of men with wooden legs, no shortage of unhinged women, in London.
Albert loved it all: the silk, my plans for the shirt, the curls, the lot. He circled me, tugged at one of the curls, took it all as proof that I had had a wonderful day, just as I said. We sat on the sofa in the drawing room, his head in my lap, and I massaged his temples. He stretched one of his legs up and along the top of the sofa, the other rested on the arm. His toes danced inside his black socks, aping the slow rhythm of my fingers, as though I was making his whole body unfurl. He reached up, touched my curls again. There was music on the radio, one of those pieces with long violin solos you always recognise but cannot place. Albert’s eyes were closed.
‘When I was last in Berlin, just before that Russian party of yours, I went to the opera,’ he said. ‘A golden, baroque space which by some miracle had survived the war. The a
udience applauded for fifteen minutes after the last curtain call. I was in the dress circle, first row. Next to me, a German woman of perhaps seventy or seventy-five, mouthed every line, and cried at the end.
‘She stayed in her seat through five or six curtain calls, sobbing all the way through. On my other side, an American couple took off in a hurry and left a box of chocolates on the edge of the balcony, an almost empty box, a couple of pieces left behind at the most. I could hear the rattle as I took the box from under the railing and put it on the seat behind me, just so that the box did not fly off into the stalls when someone’s coat-tails swept by. I let the German pass in front of me. She looked me straight in the eye, took the box, then hid it behind her programme, like stolen treasure.’
‘Oh, Albie, that is heartbreaking,’ I said.
‘I know. And the way she looked at me as she took that box was not furtive at all. Rather, there was something both proud and accusing in it, as if to say, “See. This humiliation I’m going through. This is your doing.”’
‘I am sure you are imagining it, Albie. I am sure she was thinking nothing of the sort. The British were their liberators.’
‘People survive on four hundred calories a day in Berlin now, less than the inmates had in Belsen,’ he went on. ‘The concentration camps are full of people – displaced persons – with less to eat than the inmates had in the war. I know I’ve often said that now it’s the Germans’ turn to suffer, Ber, but I’ve changed my mind. I can’t take any more suffering. What do you think, Albertine? Don’t tell me to give it time. Everyone says that. What is the right thing to do?’
‘The question never gets any easier,’ I said from under my ridiculous edifice of hair. ‘I am not sure, Albie, I am not sure what I think. There are places in London where they collect food aid for the Germans. Many of the people who run these collections are Jewish. Do you want me to take food there?’
Monsieur Ka Page 21
