The White Russian (8 page)

All he actually did, though, was to shake his head and turn on his heel, go back to his car, slam the door shut behind him, start his vehicle up and roar off into the night with his passenger.

‘
Sacrés Russes
,’ I heard Gaston mutter. (Ah, so
that’s
what they were!) Then, louder and slower, nodding to me and then to the door to indicate where I should go, Gaston – who no longer seemed half as tricky a proposition, compared with this other Parisian driver; was suddenly looking kind, even – added: ‘
Mademoiselle.
’

Keeping his face averted and his nose high in the air, Gaston swept past the remaining Russians without acknowledging them, and entered the building.

The frail shape in the bed was so thin, the hair so dull and tousled on the pillow, that I couldn’t help my gasp of shock.

There was just one faint lamp glowing on a table in the corner of the room, and a plump woman who must be the housekeeper – Gaston’s wife, too, I guessed, because he went straight to her – stirred in an armchair beside the bed, as if the sound of our entrance had disturbed her from a doze. There was a tray on the floor beside her, I could see, but nothing had been eaten.

Nodding to the housekeeper as she rose clumsily to her feet, I stood near the enormous feather bolster under Grandmother’s head, looking down. Gaston and his wife were at the other end of the bolster, side by side, looking expectantly at me. I realized they were waiting for directions. They were only servants, and I was family – the only family there was, too. It hit me right in the gut. I’d have to take charge.

The left side of Grandmother’s face had sagged. She wasn’t asleep – she raised anxious prisoner’s eyes to me, and a trembling right arm, though her left side did no more than twitch. I took both the raised right hand and the stiff
left one in mine, and pressed them very warmly in mine. Hers were frail and papery, blue-veined and brown-spotted, and cool. But the right hand, at least, gripped mine with bony urgency. ‘MMMM,’ she mumbled, out of one side of her mouth. Her voice was shockingly loud.

I didn’t know how to respond. ‘Dearest Grandmother,’ I started in a whisper, gazing back into her mute, imploring face with a mixture of tenderness and pity and fear. I hadn’t expected to be in a situation where I was so very out of my depth. ‘I’m here. I’m so happy to see you,’ I stumbled on, relieved to find I had the presence of mind, after another moment’s wordless panic, to at least add, ‘but I’m so sorry to find you unwell.’

Even like this, I’d known her as soon as I’d seen her. I could now picture us together, long ago, on the island. It was a very precise memory: the two of us laughing together. I could clearly picture the charisma and glamour Grandmother had had back then. We’d been dancing … yes, that was it, to Russian violin music that kept getting faster and faster. And then Mother had walked in. I could remember the moment she did as if it were now: my arms outstretched and my head raised rapturously, spinning around with my slender, breathlessly smiling giant of a partner.

Now that same face, though diminished, was lying before me, in a pitiful halo of thin, too-black hair. Her mouth opened, and there was a frantic message in her eyes. But the only sound that came out was another strangled ‘Mmm …’

It wrung my heart, and it frightened me a bit, too, that the person I remembered so alive had become this spittle-stained, moaning ruin. I tried to concentrate on the fact
that there was so clearly something this new version of Grandmother wanted to tell me, and couldn’t. ‘What is it, darling?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice soft and appealing because I could see she needed me; trying not to remember myself asking the same anxious question of Mother so very recently. But still no words came, just more gurglings.

It was a relief when the housekeeper diverted me by nodding towards something on the bed that showed Grandmother had been trying to communicate in writing.

It was a lap desk – one of those awkward boxes you fold out to make a sloping writing surface. There was writing all over the blotting paper on top of it. The housekeeper – who must have set the thing out on the bed – was nodding at the paper.

I picked it up, but I couldn’t make out the words, which looked like a drunk spider-in-the-inkwell scrawl. There were lines and question marks and words all over the page. What caught my attention was something that I thought looked a bit like the letter M, repeated several times in enormous letters, like a child’s first attempt with a pen. There were many other less dramatic squiggles, too, in smaller but still jagged script that, in the dim light, I couldn’t make head or tail of either. I took it over to the lamp. Written sideways from the worst of the nonsense were some relatively legible words, in a clump dotted with ink soaks and splodges.

‘Pictures’, I eventually thought I saw. ‘Jewels’. ‘Evie’. And then a shape I couldn’t read, which reminded me of ‘Xxxx’. This last shape was the most neatly written of the lot, though what was Xxxx? Try as I might, I couldn’t make sense of that word. Then another moment of clarity, when, further down, amidst a lot of spiky nonsense going
in a different direction, right off the page, I saw, in wildish letters, ‘Evie’ … ‘Xxxx’ … ‘Protect’ … ‘Make amends’.

Did it mean something? Doubtfully, I came back towards the bed with the box still in my hand. The housekeeper nodded encouragingly at me. I thought she wanted me to tell Grandmother I’d understood her message. As soon as I looked at Grandmother, dribbling out of the corner of her mouth, with that alarmed look still on her face, I realized I couldn’t let her see I hadn’t understood. It would be too cruel.

From here, I could see grey roots at the top of Grandmother’s pitifully rumpled black hair. In the heavy silence broken only by our four different sets of breath, each clearly audible, I thought: Maybe I shouldn’t worry if I can’t understand what she’s written; maybe it’s some memory from long ago that’s troubling her? After all, what could be so frightening other than what’s happening to her?

‘Grandmother, don’t worry; everything’s going to be all right,’ I said as reassuringly as I could. But my voice came out scared and small. I knew I should put the lap desk down, take her hands in mine and reassure her. But I couldn’t. I didn’t admire myself, but I didn’t feel grown-up enough.

After a few minutes, her eyelids started to droop, and she slipped into a snuffly sleep.

The housekeeper nodded. Taking our cue from her, we tiptoed out.

Gaston and his wife, the housekeeper Marie-Thérèse, lived in a little maid’s room at the top of the house, so they didn’t mind staying late at work, in these circumstances, they told me.

I’d come out of the bedroom ashamed that I hadn’t known better how to deal with my sick relative. Now it was a relief to see, from the sympathetic glances they were giving me, and the warmth of their voices, that they didn’t seem to think any the worse of me. We were sitting in the kitchen and, in fact, they seemed to be mothering me. I brushed aside their wish for me to take dinner
comme il faut
in the dining room, where the table had been set hours ago, now so sadly, for two. Instead, I ate the chicken stew that had been waiting on the stove for me at the scrubbed-pine kitchen work table with them, while the housekeeper talked.

‘
Avec les trains, on ne sait jamais
,’ she began darkly (‘You never can tell with trains’), I thought explaining the dinner she was ladling out, which was far too hot and hearty for this weather. ‘
Il vaut mieux avoir quelque chose qui mijote.
’ (‘Best to have something you can simmer.’)

I didn’t think I’d be able to eat it, but I was so relieved to discover that Marie-Thérèse didn’t seem to have any of her husband’s fear of talking normally with foreigners that I decided to make an effort. I took a polite forkful, and it tasted delicious. So did the glass of white wine that Gaston poured from an already opened bottle standing next to a dish of little cheeses covered with a wire-mesh dome – pulling out the cork with an expert pop and placing the glass on the table beside me with the care of a waiter. I was surprised at how hungry I was, and I was childishly pleased when Marie-Thérèse and her husband, both on their feet hovering around me – they wouldn’t sit – raised their eyebrows and said appreciatively to each other, ‘
Elle avait faim, la petite, dis donc!
’ and ‘
Elle apprécie la cuisine française, celle-ci!
’ (‘Hungry!’ ‘And likes French cooking too!’) as I finished my serving.

The doctor would be back in the morning, Marie-Thérèse said as she put the cheese in front of me, while Gaston chopped more bread and dropped it into the basket on the table. Madame had had a stroke, but it wasn’t one that would kill her. She’d recover, in time, even though she might never be as good as she’d been before. It would take her a good while to learn to walk again, probably, and talk, too, though people often did make a good recovery.

I nodded, encouraged. ‘Well, I’ll be here,’ I said, so restored after all that food that I felt better able to believe I’d be confidently running things by tomorrow. ‘So I can—’

‘But what you have to watch out for is the next one, the doctor said,’ Marie-Thérèse swept on, cutting across me with gloomy gusto. ‘Because there might be another stroke at any moment, he said. It happens a lot. A shock, a door slamming, anything might bring it on; or it might just happen anyway. And
that
one could be the end of her.’

The way she smacked her lips at that, the way Gaston shook his head … Suddenly I wasn’t quite so sure we were all going to get along as well as I’d been hoping.

I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t eat the cheese. I didn’t want them to think me a complete fool, though, so instead of sitting there like a dejected child, or worse, I looked fiercely round, found my bag, dug in it for the bit of blotting paper with all the scrawls on it that I’d brought out of the sickroom with me, and held it out.

‘Can you read this?’ I asked. ‘What does it say?’

Marie-Thérèse took it. Gaston came and stood behind her shoulder. They both stared at where I’d pointed. ‘But it’s English, isn’t it?’ Marie-Thérèse said doubtfully after a long examination.

‘Not that word,’ I replied, pointing again at the mystery ‘Xxxx’ word. ‘The other words are “Evie” – that’s me – and “Pictures” and “Jewels”. It’s over there again, too, look: “Evie “– “Xxxx” – “Protect” – “Make amends”. It’s just that one word I can’t read. I can’t make out the letters; but then I don’t know her handwriting … I thought maybe you would?’

They stared hungrily at it again. I could see they were disappointed not to be able to uncover a secret, and reluctant to admit they were none the wiser than me.

‘Maybe it’s a Russian word,’ Marie-Thérèse said, after another long pause.

It mobilized them, that new thought, but not in a good way. As soon as I saw Marie-Thérèse’s face darken, I remembered the way her husband had hissed ‘
sacrés Russes
’ as he’d swept past the men outside.

‘Because I’m afraid Madame has a weakness for a lot of the tramps and ne’er-do-wells who like to make out they’re artists so they can come and fill up our city,’ Marie-Thérèse said crossly. ‘The Russian ones, too, who let me tell you are worse than all the rest put together. It’s because she speaks their language, you see. It makes her a soft touch. They all turn up, with their hard-luck stories, weeping and asking her to save them. It’s unbelievable how they prey on her. She buys all their rubbish – pictures, she says, but, my God! I could do better myself. This place is full of the things; you’ll see; and the dusting I have to do … And they’re always here, her vagrants, dropping in by the dozen and eating and drinking and smoking and God knows what else till all hours. Very noisy they are, too: they wake the whole building up, sometimes, shrieking and roaring into the night.’

I’d loved the idea of all things Russian for so long that this seemed very strange. But then my idea of Russians was based on the highly civilized gentry in the novels I’d read, or my thoughtful café companions. Yet the two faces going red in front of me showed that an altogether more hostile view was possible. Gaston was puffing himself up like a bullfrog. Marie-Thérèse had her hands on her hips. ‘If we can’t read it, and it’s Russian, all I can say is that there’ll be no problem finding people in
this
town who can.’

And off they both went, nodding at each other, capping each other’s phrases, gesticulating and grimacing as their voices rose and rose until they got dangerously close to shouting.

Russians were cheats. Russians were thieves. The only way to please the supervisors at the Peugeot factory and the Citroën factory was to speak Russian, because all the supervisors were Russians. They crept in through every nook and cranny … All the waiters’ jobs had gone to Russians, too. There were probably Russian waiters who’d once been grand dukes spitting in your soup in every restaurant in town! And as for the taxi drivers, reading Russian novels in their fancy white gloves, and the balalaika orchestras you couldn’t get away from in every public place … And the worst of it was that these people came all this way to get to civilization, and yet brought their violent ways with them and still went around kidnapping each other and bumping each other off! A Russian with a gun had even shot and killed the President of France!

‘They said he was crazy,’ Gaston cried, looking a little crazy himself. ‘The man who shot President Doumer, I mean. They said he was a Red. They said he was a White,
too. But what I say is, they’re all crazy. And They Should Send Them All Back Where They Came From.’

The words ‘But they can’t’ trembled on my lips, because of course I knew that Red and White Russians didn’t mix, and that if you sent the White refugees back to Soviet Moscow now, twenty years after the Russian Revolution and the long civil war that had followed, which the Whites had lost, they’d all be shot by the Red Soviets.

But I didn’t want to argue with these two. In the end I raised a warning hand – a signal to stop.

They stared at me, baffled, with their angry eyes.

‘Thank you for dinner,’ I said. ‘But I’m tired. Would you show me my room?’

It was only when they took me to my room that I realized the extent of Grandmother’s art habit. There were pictures against every wall, along the corridor, and propped against every one of my new room’s walls, half a dozen deep: rough canvases in every imaginable size and shape, but also bits of paper, things stuck to other things, and things sticking out of things. Some were luridly coloured. Some were faded and brownish. There was thick oil and there were spindly pencil lines. There was nonsense. There were doodles around the edges of poems I couldn’t make sense of. There were imprints of leaves in primary colours. There were broken bits of glass from which the imprints of leaves in primary colors had been made. The artworks covered everything.