The White Russian (6 page)

As she shut the door, a new phrase began. ‘LOOOOVE IS STILL PERHAAAAPS …’

Squeezing back against the corridor wall, she made way for Marie-Thérèse, that stubby monument to Gallic disapproval in her brown serge and apron, who was bearing down on her, weighed down by her tray and her rage against the music.

‘
Encore …!
’ Marie-Thérèse muttered in long-suffering tones as she passed, just loud enough for Constance to hear. ‘
Mais j’en ai marre de cette musique!
’

Constance bit her own lip to stop herself smiling. It was no secret to her that her housekeeper disliked all immigrants, but loathed the many Russians living in Paris most of all. And now this music … Marie-Thérèse pushed open the kitchen door with an energetic, angry swing of the hips and passed through into her domestic domain, and Constance grinned as she heard her cross voice again, much louder, from the other side of the door: ‘
Sacrés Russes!
’ (‘Darn Russians!’)

Eventually Constance settled down in her bedroom. It was a little quieter there. She fished in her bag for the wire she’d
got before lunch from Le Havre. She put on her spectacles.

‘HOPE YOU GOT LETTER STOP ARRIVING EVENING TRAIN STOP EVIE’,
it still said. (She’d been half thinking, all through lunch, that when she looked again it might turn out to say something quite different.)

She’d had no inkling, until it appeared, that this was about to happen. Evie’s letter, presumably sent many days ago, before the ship set sail, had not arrived.

Just as it had this morning, the sight of that telegram form set Constance’s stomach churning. It was one thing to put out tentative feelers in the hope that something might come of them and that maybe someday … and quite another for it to just
happen
like this, with no time for mental preparation.
Altogether
different. Altogether hellish.

Constance wasn’t a strategist by nature. As she was always telling her artists, spontaneity was more her thing. But the idea of improvising
this
visit, with all its complications, was making her feel sick. ‘
Mon Dieu
,’ she said wanly, out loud. Then, perhaps still influenced by Miller’s change of languages earlier, she added, ‘
Bozhe moi
,’ and watched her reflection in the dressing-table glass shake its dark head and put hand to brow. For all her worry, she was – just a little – impressed by the elegance of the reflection’s gesture. She put back on the chic modern black-and-white geometric bangle she’d taken off when Miller was due. Somehow, that made her feel better.

What did she even look like now, that excitable little girl? Constance tried to picture her stretched and straightened and twenty-one, but her imagination failed her.

There would be so much to catch up with. So much to find out … but also (don’t get distracted, she warned
herself) so much to tell. That was the part she needed to think out – what to say to the child; how to explain herself; and what was she going to say to Miller? And when?

Explanations, so unimaginable … But she mustn’t let it all crowd in at once. One thing at a time.

The important thing was not to panic. She started to try to picture herself relaxed and calm, speaking to this unknown Evie … an adult Evie who behaved like a friend, who wasn’t full of the stuffy, huffy spite of the rest of the family, who’d learned to read and think independently while away at school and was easy to talk to, a girl who loved pictures and ideas as much as she did.

‘I always wanted to know you and be close to the family. But it seemed too difficult, for a long time,’ she told her reflection in the glass tentatively. ‘Then, three years ago, quite by chance, I met someone I’d known when I was young in Russia, playing chess right here in the Jardin du Luxembourg, under the lilacs. And, even though our lives had each taken such different paths since those young days, we fell in love. And that inspired me to try again. To write to your mother. To offer you an education. To send you books …’

There were so many other things they’d move on to, later, once they’d got to know each other. But that would do, wouldn’t it? For a start …?

And maybe she’d show Evie that picture?

It was hidden away in a small cardboard box of trinkets packed in tissue paper that she’d pushed under her bed when she’d moved in. The trinkets were those long-ago lover’s gifts you never quite want to throw away: mineral monstrosities, jewelled troikas poised on marble ostrich
eggs and the like. Oh, how she’d treasured them when she’d first been given them. But now it was only the photograph she could bear to look at. There she was, all sepia and faded, young and pretty in a white lace blouse, sitting in a boat – a picnic, she remembered. A summer’s day near St Petersburg, a river bank, a meadow of wild flowers. Maybe thirty people, Americans and Russians both. The picture showed two or three people on the bank – arms and backs, anyway – and one other person in the boat with her, a very tall, thin young man buttoned up to the neck in a military tunic despite the heat, with thick wavy fair hair and wide-set eyes, holding the oars. (Preobrazhensky Regiment, First Brigade, she remembered him telling her, and his blue eyes smiling, though had that been here, in this boat?) In the picture, her young self, looking over at her boatman, was the one smiling.

Constance put it up against the glass above the fireplace.

That first step felt like an achievement.

She went over to the ugly little lap desk that was part of the apartment’s overdone clutter and opened it. There was no writing paper inside. She’d forgotten to order it again. There weren’t even any discarded envelopes in the wastepaper basket (curse Marie-Thérèse for her impeccable housekeeping). There was just blotting paper.

Sitting down on the bed, she wrote ‘Now’ down the left-hand side of the blotting paper, and ‘Later’ down the right.

After a while, she added a question mark to each side. She put down the pen, and sighed.

She still had no idea what else to tell her granddaughter, who was probably already on the train here. Or when.

But she was, at least, relieved when the music stopped, and footsteps came out of the study. They’d done for the day, then. Thank God. Two very deep male voices in the corridor rumbled polite goodbyes at the silent presence that must be Marie-Thérèse. She was a little surprised to hear these engineers speak the Russian-accented French of so many shabbily dressed people here in Paris. (Heavens, why had she thought they’d be German?)

Shamed by Marie-Thérèse’s surly silence, she called out, warmly, ‘
Do zavtra, gospoda
.’ (‘See you tomorrow, gentlemen.’)

When the door had shut quietly behind the men, she asked Marie-Thérèse to bring her apéritif to the now-empty study.

You got the sunset from the study.

She pulled up a chair to the French window in there and, lighting a cigarette, looked out at the honeyed evening scene before her: trees fuzzy with leaves and pale-gold house fronts. She liked the stillness of this time on a hot day. This is where she’d bring Evie, for the first discussion she’d imagined … Slowly, she felt a fragile sort of quiet return. This was what she’d wanted, after all, wasn’t it, even if it was now coming more suddenly than she’d have liked? If all the reversals Constance had survived had taught her anything, it was that life was, almost always, more of a comedy than a tragedy. And this, too, would almost certainly all come out all right in the end.

When Marie-Thérèse came in with her glass of champagne, Constance asked, in a voice she had to make as calm as possible, trying to believe this was the most normal request in the world, ‘Would you make up the spare room
before you go? And also ask Gaston if he’d meet the Le Havre evening train later on? My grand-daughter’s coming to stay.’

To her astonishment, Marie-Thérèse’s reply of ‘
Oui, madame
’ was only slightly grumpy.

Taking a sip of champagne, she moved away from the window to the big table she used as a desk.

The men had left their equipment out.

The machine – a big futuristic-looking thing, with two spools of magnetic tape wound round the front, and knobs and buttons everywhere – was standing right in the middle of the table. There was a pile of tape sweepings on the floor, with a broom beside it.

Absurdly, considering how she’d hated hearing the music playing all day, Constance now wanted to see how the machine worked. Maybe it would amuse Evie, later.

She plugged it in at the wall and it whirred into life. Lights flashed. But she couldn’t see which was the ‘on’ button that would make the reels move, or how you would operate it.

Still … imagining herself further into this game, she picked up the heavy headphones the men had left on the back of the chair, sat down, and fitted them on her ears.

What would you hear, with these on?

It took her a moment or two just to get used to the feel of them covering her ears, like a pair of hands. It seemed a very long while before she realized that – even though the recording machine wasn’t moving – she was hearing something through them.

At first all she could make out was static, like a badly tuned radio station.

But then voices came muttering through the storm, loud, then quiet, then loud again: men’s voices, speaking Russian.

Why, she thought, astonished, surely the engineers haven’t just been sitting in here recording themselves?

It took a moment or two more to be able to make out what the voices were saying.

M
AN ONE
: ‘I may have the news we’ve been waiting for by tomorrow.’

M
AN TWO
: ‘What, really? My dear colleague, do you really mean it? At last?’

The second voice, fuzzy and hard to hear though it was, was so endearingly full of hope that Constance warmed to it even as she tried to puzzle out what was going on. Was there a radio receiver built into this equipment, perhaps? she wondered, still hoping that a sensible explanation would come to her. Could one of the engineers maybe have been listening while the other edited?

But who would transmit Russian radio here in Paris? Miller’s people certainly didn’t have a radio station. She didn’t think even those other Russians – the ones at the Soviet diplomatic mission – did …

‘I can hardly believe it,’ the second voice went on emotionally. How familiar its cadences seemed through the crackle and fuzz in her ears. And then there was a sneeze.

Of course she knew who it was. Miller. He’d had a cold for two days. Which meant this wasn’t a recording, or a radio. It was reality. Somehow, and Constance didn’t like to imagine how, she was listening to Miller quietly talking to someone downstairs.

‘Well, let’s just see tomorrow,’ the first man was saying, through the thump of her heart. ‘But it is looking pretty good.’

Constance began twitching for a cigarette. She needed to think, but she had a pain in her chest.

Hurriedly she let the headphones drop, pushed the chair back and ran out of the room, stumbling against bits of furniture, clattering on the parquet.

‘Marie-Thérèse!’ she called hoarsely, hoping the housekeeper hadn’t already finished making up the bed in the spare room for Evie and gone upstairs. ‘Marie-Thérèse! I need you. Now!’

Marie-Thérèse couldn’t help noticing that the two muscly Russians were sitting outside at the café again when she let the doctor in at dusk. As usual, they were muttering at each other and ignoring the chessboard they were supposed to be looking at.

They’d been there every day for a month, those two men, with their cheap suits, bad skins and pudding-bowl haircuts. They looked … well, wrong, in a way she couldn’t place.

She was too preoccupied this evening, what with the doctor, Madame’s
crise
and the bit of whalebone that had strayed out of her corseting and was prodding into her flesh, to give her full attention to resenting these
sacrés Russes
in the wholehearted way she usually did – thousands of them, wherever you went, feckless vodka-swilling drunks, taking jobs from good French workers, always kicking up a stink about their papers and their tragedies, cooking cabbage, assassinating and kidnapping people, as had happened downstairs a few years back, which had meant police prying everywhere for months. There goes the neighbourhood.

From her earlier observation of this little conspiracy of Russian café visitors – and every gathering of Russians
was
a conspiracy, she was sure of it – she knew that, any minute now, they would be joined by their more recent friend. This more definitely lower-class man might even – she recoiled almost physically at this thought – be a market trader, if his apron stinking of crab was anything to go by. Marie-Thérèse knew from past experience that this person, wildly unsuitable for a café in the serious, respectable rue du Colisée, wouldn’t be playing chess any more than his cronies did. They’d all just sit there all evening, ignoring the game and muttering away together.

If only Madame wasn’t so taken up with Russians, she thought, and her regret was tinged with shame and anger that, as a result of her mistress’s poor social judgement, she too was, at one remove, also implicated in Russian goings-on. Not that the courteous, old-fashioned officers were bad neighbours, exactly, but those dirty artists who were always round here, staying up all night, eating Madame out of house and home, draining the wine cellar and stubbing their cigarettes out in the flower vases; not to mention the fact that a decent young Frenchman like her nephew Pierre couldn’t get work in the car factories at Billancourt these days, because he couldn’t understand what was being said around him if he didn’t speak Russian …
ça alors!

She shut the door on the scene with feeling, and followed the doctor up the stairs towards Madame’s bedroom.

It didn’t take General Skoblin long to spot his wife through the clouds of murky steam that the trains were blowing back along the platform.

Plevitskaya always stood out. Ignoring tonight’s heat, she was wearing a wide-brimmed dark felt hat festooned
with ostrich feathers. Her lips were a crimson pout, and she had gold hoops in her ears. In that clinging burgundy dress, walking with a slight waddle caused by new shoes he could see were too high and small for comfort, she was sweating but magnificent.

Watching her approach, amid the stares and turning heads of the other boat-train passengers, her husband quietly folded up his newspaper. In the half-hour he’d been waiting under the great glassed-in roof of the gare Saint-Lazare, no one in the crowds of porters and pigeons and passengers pushing one way or the other had spared
him
a second glance. But then he was an inconspicuous man in late middle age, with neat grey-black hair, a moustache and a suit of about the same colour as the dark metal stanchion he’d been standing by. He didn’t stand out. He was used to playing second fiddle.

Even though he could see her eyes searching the crowd for him now, he didn’t do any of the flamboyant things people might expect the husband of such a woman to do: run forward, sweep her up in his arms, press passionate lips to hers, or even wave. He wasn’t given to melodrama. He just stood there, thinking, and sighing a bit at the mountains of luggage bobbing along behind her equally mountainous form. He didn’t like to think of the shopping she must have done in New York, whatever she’d promised him before leaving. At least she’d travelled second class this time, so hopefully there’d be fewer new debts. Thank God, in so many ways, for the second job, and his good news.

‘Darrrling!’ she erupted with her best throaty vibrato when she finally sighted him from ten feet away. She speeded up to a curvaceous totter, rushing to his arms.
He stepped dutifully forward and embraced her back. He could smell at once that she’d been replenishing her supplies of Chanel No. 5, and at American prices too. As she and the porters and observers all clearly expected, he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. She curved her big mouth up into a satisfied smile, then, before he’d had a chance to say a word, opened it again and started volubly talking. ‘My golden treasure! My little sun!’ Her lips caressed each endearment, showing off for the watchers she was pretending to ignore, giving them a performance as she always did. Her great stone-studded gold cross flapped energetically up and down between her breasts. Her black-rimmed eyes widened theatrically. The train –
dreadfully
crowded. The ship – a tossing, turning, heaving nightmare full of God knows who; the
indignity.
The
unworthiness
of the restaurants she’d been booked to sing in in New York. And the hotel waiters – all Chinamen in pigtails …

Silently he nodded and smiled. He distributed francs among the porters (she didn’t even look – she was too busy talking). He shepherded them all along towards the waiting car. She’d shut up sooner or later. Then he’d get a chance to speak.

Her monologues never needed answers. So at least there was a kind of peace to be found in them. He used it to recall that there’d been a time – so long ago he could barely remember – when the sight and sound of her hadn’t made him sigh.

Back in the Crimea … and for a moment General Skoblin could once again smell the thyme and sea in the glittering air of his youth – and call to mind, too, the hasty packings of tents, the listing of rifles and ammunition
(fewer every time) and the terrifying creepings and rustlings of the night. The last thing he’d needed, on top of his part in the fading hopes of that campaign, was a consignment of Red prisoners sent down from Kursk to deal with. Until he’d seen
her
among them, and heard the indrawn breaths and whistles: the Nightingale! She’d gone to the Red lines, it turned out – joined the enemy. She’d been caught singing to keep the Bolsheviks’ spirits up. That’s how she’d got herself tangled up in that impossibly churned-up war world. But before that, and even before she’d been the Tsar’s favourite musician, given jewels and asked to perform at Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace; before both her previous husbands, in some impossibly remote, lost dream-era when there still was no Revolution, and no war, he’d seen her sing at the Yar restaurant, back when she was still just a country girl who’d run away from a provincial convent choir and wore a red sarafan: a dark slip of a girl with a magical voice and a liquid-eyed way of looking at you …

And suddenly there she was, his prisoner. He’d married her two years later, in a refugee camp in Turkey. By then no one remembered she’d briefly been the Red Nightingale. By then, the Civil War had been lost, and everyone just wanted to forget.

And of course it had been a blessing, in some ways, their marriage. While most of the other White officers he’d fought and lost with had been completely down on their luck – stuck for years in those transit camps, some of them – she’d whisked him off on the new touring life she soon began, turning herself effortlessly back into the Tsar’s Nightingale and lucratively singing the sad songs of exile to
any nostalgic émigré Whites who’d managed to make it as far as Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria …

They climbed into the Cadillac. (His little weakness, this; sometimes he explained it by saying he needed a grand car to drive his wife around in; sometimes, more churlishly, he told himself that surely he too was allowed a gesture of flamboyance every now and then?) Out of the corner of his eye, he watched his wife dump her handbag carelessly on the creaking pale-leather back seat. He was pleased when, apparently only now realizing it had landed on a newspaper whose front-page article was illustrated by a solemn picture of Yezhov, the new head of Soviet intelligence, she carefully moved the bag to the floor, giving him a furtive look.

He nodded grimly. She liked to show off in public. All right. But he was the man. It was right that she should respect him and his work. Alone together, they both knew who the boss was.

It was only when they were on the road out of Paris, and she’d stopped complaining about the indignity of second class, that Skoblin lit a cigarette and said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, ‘Tomorrow, to celebrate your return, we’re going to go back into town and buy’ – he paused for emphasis – ‘
crab in the market
.’

He preferred talking in the car. There weren’t so many cats here as in their little house in Ozoir.

‘Oh!’ she said weakly, sounding as shocked as if she’d never expected to hear the phrase.

‘Yes,’ he continued, level-voiced. ‘The crab salesman is here.’

He wasn’t displeased with the nervous way she shifted in her seat.