The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  But all she said was, ‘Well, he made a good investment in you, I’d say.’ That startled me. ‘Because you’re so loyal to him, I mean,’ she added hastily. ‘Loving son. Breadwinner. Bodyguard. You do it all – much more than anyone else I know does for their family, and certainly a hell of a lot more than I do for mine. Where would he be without you?’

  It was possible she’d blushed. I couldn’t tell. I’d gone too hot and red in the face myself at the frank admiration in her voice to be able to look properly for a moment. I picked up my milk glass – there was no point in turning into an alcoholic like everyone else in here – and drained it. At my side, I heard her doing the same.

  It was a while before I heard her put her glass down. Her voice was muffled. ‘So, about the letters: if you really mean it, when do we begin?’

  The sky was lightening, and there were pink streaks on the horizon as I drove her home, and, in the quiet streets, the first scrapings and bangings of deliverymen trundling the day’s barrels and boxes into doorways.

  ‘Where did you live before the soldiers came?’ she asked, companionably, in the taxi. She sounded muffled by now, as though she were fighting sleep. Unlike me, she wasn’t used to being up all night. For the first time in years, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be awake by day.

  ‘In an orphanage. Well, a kind of orphanage. A nunnery, really.’

  She made a little sound of enquiry.

  ‘It wasn’t bad,’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for the war, and being hungry all the time. The nuns weren’t unkind. I was lucky. They’d kept me after they found me in the woods when the other war was still on, the one with the Germans. And the Germans had left them pretty much alone. I was just a little kid when they found me, they said – so young that I couldn’t even walk properly yet. They kept me a few years before I went off with Father and the regiment. They called me sharik. It means “little ball” – Father still calls me that, when he wants to get in my good books. Apparently I’d had a knitted ball tied to my wrist when they found me – a toy that must have been a nice light colour once, they told me; but it was so encrusted with dirt by the time they found me that they just cut it off and threw it away. Mothers tied toys to their children all the time: there was less chance of losing the toys if you had to pick the child up and run. But the nuns used to have a joke about how I’d really been given that nickname because I’d been such a fat toddler …’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said drowsily.

  The pink on the horizon was tinged with gold. The birds were singing.

  ‘I knew it must be a joke,’ I went on, ‘even then, because I was so thin. We all were. Like skeletons. All I ever thought about was eating.’

  There was silence from the passenger seat. I glanced around. She was breathing very softly, and asleep.

  It didn’t matter. We could read the letters later. The important thing was that we’d agreed.

  I touched her arm. She stirred. ‘You’re home,’ I said gently. ‘Get some rest now. You’re tired. I’ll come before work, this afternoon. I could stay an hour …’

  She nodded, dazedly. Long after she’d gone in and I was on the road again, to pick up Father, I was still treasuring the look of trust I’d surprised in her eyes. I was astonished, too, that I’d had the presence of mind to resist that overpowering urge that had come over me, just for a moment when I’d watched her sleeping, to kiss her.

  21

  Evie

  I woke up at midday, panic driving me to my feet. Good God, I was still in yesterday’s clothes, I realized blearily. I must have just lain down on my bed when I’d come in at dawn and passed out straight away.

  How had I slept so late? He’d be back in a few hours.

  There were so many things to do first. I should set out the letters on the desk, make sure there were chairs, and that Marie-Thérèse knew to put out something for him to eat and drink, and find a book to write translations of the letters into, and pens, and ink …

  But what I found myself rushing to do, instead of all that, was to bathe and wash my hair. Marie-Thérèse was doing the washing today, and nothing would be ironed and ready in time. Thank God I still had one clean dress left: the plain beige linen one with the short sleeves. I thought it too severe, but it would have to do.

  Once the dress was on, and Marie-Thérèse had promised to leave out some cold cuts and the fruit tart she was already stoning apricots for, I went tiptoeing back into Grandmother’s room. I was intending to borrow her big modern black-and-white bangles, to wear for luck. But when I tried them they kept banging against my wrists. I knew I’d never be able to write with them on.

  In the end, I put on the amber necklace I thought I might recall Grandmother having worn long ago instead. On me, it had none of the wildness I remembered, but the beads gleamed discreetly against the pale linen of my dress, and took away its severity, at least.

  I also opened Grandmother’s square, faceted, black-edged, glass-stoppered bottle of scent and dabbed it at wrists and neck, as I’d done yesterday. The perfume aroused no memories of her in me, but I liked the mysteriousness of it. It made me feel more worldly. I patted down my curls, so they would dry flat. The face in the glass looked white but, I thought, feeling a little reassured, far more composed than I felt.

  For luck, I picked up the picture of young Grandmother, and took it with me when I left her room. I put it above my own bedroom fireplace, and went on looking at it. But, inside, I was half thinking, even as I looked at it, of another face.

  It was the sudden tenderness I thought I’d seen in Jean’s pale-blue eyes, leaning over me in the cab, which had unsettled me.

  I’d so hated his coldness earlier. His dismissal had seemed unjust enough to be worth fighting, because, I thought, what he’d been turning away from wasn’t me but the smugness that he must think went with whatever he assumed was my place in life. I knew I wasn’t that girl. I might not have been expelled from my past in quite the same way as he and his father had – or Grandmother, come to that; I might not worry about money, either. But, all the same, I knew what it was to feel an outsider.

  How strange, I thought, that, after always feeling so detached from all those other young men – the Winthrops and Bills, with their sense of fun and their interesting clothes and their certainties; or Cousin Theo in his midnight-blue dinner suit and his (different) certainties – I should suddenly mind so much what this one, in this shadowland city filled with ghosts and regrets, might think of me.

  As I carried the letters along the corridor to the study, where I’d decided to sit with Jean – it got the late sun – a line from Grandmother’s poetry book flitted through my head.

  I have dreamed so much of you

  that my arms, accustomed

  while embracing your shadow to cross themselves over

  my chest would maybe

  not fold around the contours of your body.

  And that, faced with the actual appearance of

  what has haunted and

  governed me for days and years,

  It might be I who became a shadow.

  O sentimental scales.

  ‘Wish me luck, Grandmother,’ I said, out loud. My hands were trembling.

  22

  Jean

  I almost laughed when Evie showed me the desk where she’d set out her treasure trove. Why, this was a classic love-story cliché: a whole bundle of yellowed letters, faded ribbons, the smell of lavender – you could see, even before reading them, what flowery phrases these letters must be full of. I imagined Father downstairs at his desk, being careful not to breathe too hard in his tight jacket in case he popped the straining buttons over his gut as he sat penning these sentimental billets-doux to the thin woman I remembered living up here. Why, the old rogue, I nearly said, and even though I bit back the jocular phrase, I could feel the corners of my mouth turn up. She’d had long limbs, the American woman, I recalled, and at least as much grace and dash as yo
u could have expected of a woman of her age. She’d worn expensively tailored clothes under the kind of straight boyish blackish haircut that had been fashionable a decade ago, and big modern jewellery. But she was old. Wrinkles at the eyes. Wrinkles at the neck. And he was too.

  If you’d asked me how he’d be in love, I’d have guessed at something a bit more worldly than these old-fashioned, lavender-scented outpourings. He wasn’t an unsophisticated man, for God’s sake. Why hadn’t he just picked up the telephone, or walked upstairs?

  As I sat down at the desk chair Evie was gesturing me to, with one side of my body as intensely aware of her slipping into the chair beside it as if our bodies had become magnetized, something else occurred to me. The size of the bundles alone suggested that this sekretny roman must have gone on for some time. Many dozens of letters had been preserved, and this was only one side of their correspondence. Could those two already have been in correspondence as far back as, say, three years ago, when the Stavisky fraud had brought down the government (and nearly got all us Russians thrown out of the country)? Or five years ago, when the lunatic Gorgulov had somehow got through the President’s guards and shot him dead at a book fair (and also nearly got us all thrown out of the country)? Could it possibly have been part of his life as long as seven years ago, when poor Kutyopov had been kidnapped? I couldn’t believe I’d had no idea at all when, all that time, I’d been driving him to and from work every day, thinking he had nothing more significant on his mind than clipping articles from the Soviet press that suggested possible weak points in the enemy’s defences, and setting up more evening classes and retirement homes around Europe for failed fighters, and moving pins around on his maps …

  Father must, I couldn’t help thinking, feeling a mixture of reluctant admiration and – though I didn’t like to admit this to myself – hurt, be far better at keeping secrets than I’d thought.

  I shook out one of the packets. Letters fell in a scatter on to the desk. I opened the top one up for a proper look. Then I stopped.

  With the letter still in my hand, I turned to her.

  She was sitting almost timidly at my side. She’d opened a big leather-bound book of thick creamy sheets and was smoothing down the first page. I noticed that pen and ink were set out at her side. ‘I thought you could translate,’ she said encouragingly, as if her plan of work needed explaining, ‘into French, and I could jot down as much as I can, in English. That way I’ll be better able to keep track …’ Her voice died away.

  I said, ‘Have you seen the dates?’ and pointed.

  She couldn’t read the Russian letters, but she could understand numbers. The piece of paper in my hand, covered in brownish ink, bore the date 20 September 1893.

  Her eyes widened. ‘You mean they’re old letters,’ she whispered, doubtfully. ‘From nearly a lifetime ago …?’

  Then her fingers started scrabbling at the other brittle sheets. Mine too. The letters were in two sheaves. Those in the fatter one were all from 1893, the other contained letters sent in 1894 and 1895. Both lots were more than forty years old.

  I could see Evie’s head drooping as, with her hands still twitching at the confetti of old paper now covering the desk, she turned her suddenly sad face to me.

  ‘So does that mean that they’re not …’ she said in a small voice, ‘not what I thought? Not letters from your father to my grandmother at all?’

  I turned one over.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and hope made my voice suddenly bold. ‘They still might be, you know – if you think it’s at all possible that they could have got to know each other first years ago, much further back than we thought, when they were still young in St Petersburg?’

  I pointed at the scribbled single-letter signature at the bottom: a ‘Ж’ – ‘Zhe’ in Latin letters. ‘Because this one’s signed “Zhe”.’

  We read chronologically. The letters described a life that, though relatively recent, was already so utterly vanished that it was as alien to me, in everything but language, as to Evie. We were both explorers in a foreign country.

  The first letters were punctilious. Correct. Distant, almost. They were addressed to ‘Worthy Madame Vanderhorst’ – Evie’s name now, it turned out, and her grandmother’s then, she said, as the mother had married a cousin, so at least we could be sure who one of the people in the correspondence was.

  But, after just a few moments, the whole question of ‘who’ almost stopped mattering. As I read them out loud, I was quickly so entranced by the courtly, carefree, young people’s world of waltzes and quadrilles and concerts and parades and dressing-up and cheerful gossip that I was entering that I just let myself get carried away by the story. Usually I would have shut my eyes and ears to any reminiscences about this past that wasn’t – never would be – quite mine. Usually such reminiscences had a nasty colouring of self-pity and loss. But these letters had none of that, because it hadn’t all been lost yet. These people were just enjoying themselves, living. Perhaps part of my willingness to enjoy their story was because Evie was at my side, with her writing arm working so fast, and her other carelessly on the desk, so close to mine that for once I didn’t feel alienated by the thought of that other life, but almost as if I were actually there myself, in the thick of it with the writer.

  The letters started as no more than polite thank yous for an embassy reception here, an outing to a concert there. Monsieur Vanderhorst was also thanked, in the third person. The writing was clear and simply phrased. The writer was doing his best to be comprehensible for a foreigner.

  After a while, however, compliments on the standard of Madame Vanderhorst’s Russian became a dominant theme, along with the discussion of articles in that week’s press, the loan of books and recommendations for more reading, as the writer, ‘Zhe’, became Madame Vanderhorst’s guide to St Petersburg culture. ‘I am so thrilled’, he wrote, ‘that you enjoyed First Love. Turgenev has always been among my favourite writers …’

  There was a period of intense artistic discussion: a planned trip to the opera to see Prince Igor, with observations about the ethical superiority of the disciplined Russians over the sensual Asiatic Polovtsians – proof, as one rather sententious comment had it, that the Mighty Five group of composers had not, after all, been too rebellious for their times and that they’d fully understood the need for patriotism and support for the great imperial idea.

  ‘I think of my grandmother as having always known a lot about art – but she didn’t, back then, did she?’ Evie said doubtfully when, accidentally brushing against my forearm for a moment, she put down the pen and shook a hand that must be aching from all the writing she was doing. She’d filled several pages in her book already. ‘She was still learning; and he was her teacher …’

  ‘Let’s just see what happens next,’ I said, not wanting to stop, or dwell on my own dawning realization of how very different Father’s youth among all that glitter must have been from mine, and how much more of an adjustment he’d have been compelled to make from that busy life at the heart of a civilized metropolis to the aimlessness of our exile now … We couldn’t even be sure, yet, that this young letter-writer was Father. But I was rooting for him to have had this happy interlude, long ago.

  Gradually the tone changed. Sometimes there were two or three notes in a single day, all glowing with absorption and interest, the tone getting steadily more relaxed and chatty. The pair were clearly having a wonderful time getting to know each other, even though the subject matter went on being so innocent.

  All ‘Zhe’ was really talking about, still, was military parades, and poker nights at barracks. There was nothing furtive about the month of planning the almost impossible task of getting tickets for the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony at the Assembly of Nobility (until ‘joy of joys!’, ‘Zhe’ managed to get a pair of seats after all, from his colonel-in-chief). There was nothing underhand about the passing on of enjoyable bits of art gossip, including the snippet that Grand Duke Konstan
tin Konstantinovich, the royal poet, had heard the Pathétique in rehearsal, and was said to have wept at its beauty and called it ‘a requiem’ for the age.

  It was my turn to pause and feel doubt. I still couldn’t be sure that this was a younger Father writing. Even though it was a young officer from Father’s regiment, signing his letters with Father’s initial, I didn’t quite recognize Father in ‘Zhe’. This young man had loved music and dancing and talked quite knowledgeably about the artists of his day, while the older man I knew never talked, or as far as I knew, about anything artistic. I’d always thought of him as a military man through and through – a bit of a Philistine, in many ways. I certainly couldn’t imagine him writing ‘joy of joys!’ at the idea of a Tchaikovsky concert, though it was true he did sometimes vent his frustration at some Paris reverse by putting a recording of the 1812 Overture on the gramophone and banging along to the ‘God Save the Tsar’ bits, and the bells and cannon, with glasses and spoons.

  But perhaps in those days, before life had shaped him in the particular way it eventually did, he’d still had the capacity to be enchanted by art? Perhaps he had known enough, back then, to teach a young foreign lady the essence of Russian court culture? And perhaps, if he hadn’t spent those years and years fighting, and losing, and planning his return – and being diminished in the process – he’d have come out a different kind of man …

  We ploughed on. But, however much we wanted just to reminisce with ‘Zhe’ and his reader over all their small pleasures, we couldn’t help sitting closer and letting our arms cross (till they touched and we pulled hastily back) as we pointed out one thing or another, or asked each other questions. We couldn’t help noticing, either, that, before the year was out, they’d got closer. There was no more ‘Worthy Madame Vanderhorst’ (she’d been just ‘K’ – the letter ‘Ka’, which is what the Russian version of the name ‘Constance’ would have been abbreviated to – for months) and there was precious little mention of Monsieur Vanderhorst either.