Louise felt ambushed. In the nature of her work, visiting
AIDS hospices, refugee camps, famine relief centres, aftermaths of tragedies, she was used to being confronted with stories of everyday but still extraordinary suffering, everyday but still extraordinary endurance. Father used to say that one of the main categories in the royal job-description was specialist social worker. You had to acquire a sort of soft shell which allowed you to feel and express compassion without being overwhelmed. Now, though, she felt momentarily at a loss, having Mrs Walsh’s story sprung on her, with its remoteness and horror and illusory romance. It took her an inward blink before the well-worn phrases came to her lips.
“But that must have been terrible! What an adventure! Why doesn’t everyone know about it?”
Again that smile.
“There was a time when the world might have known,” said Mrs Walsh. “My husband was not a regular soldier. He was an adventurer, an explorer, a passionate anti-Bolshevik. He had attached himself to the Serbian brigade in order to fight for the cause he believed in, and though your War Office had given him some kind of semi-official status in order that he might act as liaison officer with the British contingents, when he returned to England with his health broken after his hardships they refused to accept any responsibility. We sold what was left of my jewels, apart from this, which was given to me by my mother as she died.”
She raised a hand to the brooch in her toque. So the diamonds were real, Louise thought. She herself preferred costume jewellery, but there were functions at which she was expected to parade around wearing gew-gaws worth several decent semi-detacheds. The brooch looked in that class.
“We were penniless,” said Mrs Walsh. “So we decided to write a book about our adventure. There was a great interest in our war then, and many books published. Nobody cares to remember about it now—it is an embarrassment between the great powers. Be that as it may, we had high hopes of success. But the publishers we had chosen proved weak and incompetent, and when pressure was put on them from certain quarters they made excuses and delayed, and then went bankrupt.”
“That’s awful!”
“It was, mercifully, the end of our misfortunes. The copies were already printed, and knowing His late Majesty’s view on Bolshevism my husband had taken the liberty of sending him one. His Majesty himself, as you may be aware, read very little, but his interest was aroused enough for him to express a wish to meet us, and when he discovered our plight he was gracious enough to offer my husband a post at the Palace, with residence and stipend.”
“Yes, I see. Great-grandfather was a funny old thing, but he got it right sometimes. I’d love to read the book. Have you got a copy you could lend me?”
“Sadly, no. The warehouse in which they were stored was bombed in 1942, so we lost every copy.”
“And you’ve never thought of writing it again?”
“No.”
“It would make a terrific film.”
Mrs Walsh smiled. You could tell she had lived a lot of her life in a formal court, in which only royalty could change the subject so the courtiers had to find ways of signalling that it was time to do so.
“You must have found life a bit dull at the Palace, after everything you’d been through,” said Louise.
Mrs Walsh nodded. There was for the first time a sense of some barrier coming down, an acceptance that Louise, unlike most people, was in a position to understand the peculiar boringness of court boredom.
“For myself, no,” she said. “After adventures such as we had endured dullness can be very precious. For my husband—he was, as I told you, an adventurer, but …”
She fell silent at the movement of the door. Aunt Bea came wheezing in, followed by Carrie with the tea-tray. By the time they had settled and the cups had been poured Mrs Walsh had withdrawn into her hawk-like remoteness. Louise tried to imagine her on her adventure, sixteen—softer-looking then, surely, but with those clear, chilly grey eyes—screaming at passing trains for help, or tramping the immense Russian landscape—they’d gone south, but even there the winters could be icy and they must have got through a winter somehow—the mother dying, the rest of the family too, or lost on the way—and then the love affair with the Englishman who had saved her. Love, really? Looking at her now it was hard to imagine her loving anyone. Seduction? Rape? The mere need to share warmth in sub-zero hutments? Perhaps they’d found some louse-ridden drunken priest, fleeing the Bolsheviks as they were, to marry them. A year of that, the high plateaux, the fierce but uplifting primitiveness of places and people, the endless danger—and then to dwindle into the notoriously stifling ennui of Great-grandfather’s court. What a marriage.
“Mrs Walsh has been telling me that she met Granny in St Petersburg when they were both girls,” said Louise.
“No!” whispered Aunt Bea.
“And she had astounding adventures escaping from the Communists.”
“Dear me. Do you mean to say, Mrs Walsh, that you can actually speak Russian, like HRH?”
“It is my native tongue, Lady Surbiton.”
“Well, I must say, that might be very convenient.”
“What on earth do you mean, Aunt Bea?”
“Well, you see, my dear, HRH did at one point insist on giving me lessons in Russian, only I was so stupid, and now I have all these letters to sort through. I just thought Mrs Walsh might be interested in helping …”
Aunt Bea looked round the other three with the innocent and vulnerable appeal of a child who doesn’t expect to understand the adult world, but assumes that someone will come and hold her hand and show her what to do. For the first time it crossed Louise’s mind that though it had appeared to everyone that Granny had mercilessly used and abused Aunt Bea—persecuting her with Russian lessons was a typical ploy—the traffic in exploitation might have gone both ways.
“These are letters people wrote to Granny, I suppose.”
“Oh, yes, some of them. But do you remember, after the funeral, you brought a man called Alex Romanov to talk to me? There’s a whole thick box of copies of letters HRH sent to him. I think that’s what they must be. He was talking about them. Carbon copies you know.”
“That doesn’t sound like Granny at all. Hang on. He did say she’d started using a hard pencil—she’d need that for carbons. They must be absolute hell to read.”
“Oh, yes, dreadful. Like those scribbles on walls. In Russian, too.”
“Honestly, it would be hardly fair on Mrs Walsh … wouldn’t you do best just to sling the whole lot off to the Palace and ask them to sort it out?”
“Oh, no, my dear. You know what HRH thought of the Palace. And somebody’s got to go through them. I’ve no idea what she’s saying, but she could be very, very personal, you know.”
Louise glanced at Carrie, who nodded. The signals were a joint mental note, so that in the car Carrie would say “Something about the Dowager’s papers?” and Louise would then get out her Filofax and make a physical note to get Joan to telephone Sir Sam …
“What did you make of Alex Romanov?—You might have known his mother, Mrs Walsh. Apparently she acted as a sort of gossip-exchange for the whole family.”
“We saw very little of the exile community. They centred, of course, round your grandmother, with whom Her late Majesty was barely on speaking terms.”
“HRH often said that Queen Mary had swindled her out of millions of pounds worth of jewels,” said Aunt Bea.
“I very much doubt whether the jewels in question would have come to Her Royal Highness,” said Mrs Walsh. “But it is certainly true that Her late Majesty paid less than a third of their true value for the Dowager Empress’s jewellery. We exiles were all in the same case. We sold what we could for what people would pay us. We were fair game.”
She spoke calmly, with no bitterness. If anything her reproach was less against Great-grandmama’s ra
pacity than against the Romanovs for making such a fuss about this notorious scandal.
“I liked Count Alex,” said Louise. “He’s got a lot of charm, hasn’t he, Aunt Bea?”
“I suppose so, my dear, but I’m afraid my life has taught me to be just a weeny bit suspicious of charm.”
Louise caught Carrie’s eye and looked away. The point was that some male gene in the Surbiton line seemed to pass on a unique form of loutishness, as repellent in its attempts to please as in its more usual manifestations of aggression. Aunt Bea had doted on each generation in turn, down to the present Lord Surbiton, her grandson, now serving a gaol sentence in Japan.
Conversation became the normal vaguely probing exchange you’d expect between new neighbours. Mrs Walsh relaxed her hardness and reserve, if only slightly, and listened to Aunt Bea’s sighings and meanderings with patient attention. The subject of offspring naturally arose. Aunt Bea described her grandson’s plight with surprisingly deft prevarications—something legal, but of course the Japanese were so different, there were bound to be misunderstandings, weren’t there? Mrs Walsh said only that her daughter lived abroad and hadn’t married. You’d have been hard put to find two less well-matched old ladies, Louise thought, but when she rose to leave it was clear that Mrs Walsh intended to stay a bit longer, and just as clear that Aunt Bea wanted her to. They were both lonely, and at least they had the shared experience of court life. That counted for a lot. People outside didn’t understand at all.
As on most evenings Louise rang Mother to tell her what she’d been up to. She described the visit to Aunt Bea, and in passing asked Mother to see if Mrs Suttery, the Palace Librarian, could find the copy of the book about Mrs Walsh’s adventures which had been sent to Great-grandfather. It was probably there somewhere. The Palace had no machinery for actually throwing things away.
Two mornings later, timing her arrival with her usual precision, Joan waddled in to the bedroom with note-book, diaries and post-bag just as Louise was finishing burping Davy after his feed.
“You’re looking smugger every day,” said Louise.
“Am I? I had one wild night. They were lurching around like Sumo wrestlers. They’re going to come out fighting.”
Joan pulled out the flap of the escritoire, put the papers on it and took Davy to practise on. She sat down and perched him like a squinting Buddha on the ledge of flesh beneath which her twins, due in three weeks, were housed. Louise started on her make-up.
“We’ve got thirty-three mins,” said Joan. “There’s nothing that couldn’t wait till tomorrow, really.”
“Let’s clear up as much as we can,” said Louise. In the mirror over her shoulder she could see Davy and enjoy the way an air of puzzlement would sometimes cross his benign features, probably only caused by a bubble of unrelieved wind but making him look like some indolent gross ruler slowly becoming aware of the revolutionary activities of the twins beneath his throne.
“Nothing new about today,” said Joan. “Your speeches and briefings are in the folder. Lady Anne’s got copies. You’ll have to read the ones for the cement-works before you get to the spina bifida place, unless you’re going to try and get them read in the helicopter.”
“No thanks. Did the Palace OK that bit?”
“They niggled, but I said you were keen. Apparently the local MP is a rabid cost-cutter, but he’ll be there and you can wheedle him. They said provided you don’t go beyond the script …”
“I never do. What’s the weather look like?”
“Clear but nippy. There’s a bit of fog in Lincolnshire, but they say it’ll be gone before you get there. I think that’s all about today, but something’s just come up about Edinburgh …”
“That isn’t till … when?”
“Thursday week. I’m afraid the Scottish Office have been on to the Palace again saying if Lord Chandler’s coming up with you can’t he …”
“No.”
Joan said nothing.
“I’m not even going to ask him,” said Louise. “He’s coming up to talk to two or three people about his work. They think just because he could fit other things in … Oh, God, why can’t they tell the bloody people themselves? They know what the answer’s going to be. It’s just bloody unfair making you ask me and getting us both upset.”
“It’s all right,” said Joan. “Part of the job.”
“What on earth am I going to do without you?”
“It’ll only be six weeks with luck. I’ve got a couple of girls coming in today, to look at. There’s plenty of time to show them the ropes. It isn’t a difficult job, provided you don’t get in a fluster.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it.”
“I couldn’t do yours. I’ll bitch at the Palace for you, with pleasure. Now here’s something you’ll enjoy. Do you remember Chief O’Donovan Kalaki … ?”
Janine, already in her out-door clothes, came in to fetch Davy and get him ready for the trip. Louise and Joan worked at the post until the buzzer sounded to tell them that the Daimler was on its way round to the door. As Louise was putting on her gloves Joan said, “Oh, there’s a book come from Mrs Suttery. She said you’d asked for it. I’ve put it in Lady Anne’s box, in case you want something to read on the way home.”
It smelt of dust-thick shelves. Its pages didn’t want to come apart. Its spine crackled. Decades must have passed since anyone had looked at it. No dust-cover. Dark blue linen binding. Escape from the Reds by Sirius. Inscribed on the fly-leaf in careful copy-book writing, “With my greatest loyalty and devotion, J. J. Walsh, Major.” Published by Danton and Bute in 1922. Illustrations by M.B.W. Frontispiece of an officer, booted and spurred, with a huge holster on his sword-belt and wearing a peculiar fur hat with four up-turned flaps which looked as though they could be pulled down to cover not only his ears but his face and nape as well. He was about thirty-five, already a bit stout, with a fuzzy moustache. He looked in reasonable health, but there was something comic about uniform, figure and pose, as though the costume had been hired for amateur theatricals. Of course he hadn’t been an officer in the British Army—the “Major” presumably referred to the temporary rank bestowed on him for his liaison work with the Serbs. Mrs Walsh had described him as an adventurer, but he didn’t look the part at all.
About thirty-five in 1922, so perhaps a bit over fifty when Father succeeded in 1938. Father had been only eight, and Granny had already been feuding with the Palace for years, so she would certainly have done her best to create maximum havoc by clearing out all the old courtiers she could, including one dim, semi-invalid figure whose reason for employment in the first place no one could now remember. In fact the Palace had probably fought her off. Granny had lost most of those battles, including the legendary ructions over the Regency, because of her known sympathy for the Nazis. No, surely if she’d been directly responsible for Major Walsh’s retirement Mrs Walsh, for all her self-discipline, would have spoken with greater bitterness.
Sadly the book turned out almost impossible to read. Perhaps in 1922, when people knew who General Kornilov was, and what the Bolsheviks had done at Perm, and why the Czechs were the only people who controlled the railway, it might have seemed less bitty and bewildering. Louise, looking for the adventure, skipped rapidly through the first two-thirds of the book, which seemed to be mainly about intrigues between Absolutists and Social Republicans, with rival parliaments sitting in every town and Japanese and French and British and Americans intervening, and counter-orders arriving from London or Paris as soon as any possible compromise had been reached. Then, without warning, in the midst of all this, the adventure seemed to begin.
“Some two hundred miles east of Omsk our train halted for an obstacle on the track. Leaning from my compartment I observed the ruffians from the forward wagons attempting to drag some ladies towards the train. Naturally I intervened, and in the ensuing scuffle my trusty servant, poor Fred Creech, w
as killed by an unlucky shot from the wagons, no doubt aimed at me. Despite my protestations the train then steamed on without me. Since the next train to pass that way was all too likely to be manned by terrorists I decided to head south, accompanied by the ladies it had been my good fortune to rescue.
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