11

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Marie-Thérèse said, ‘about Madame’s note.’

It was mid-afternoon. Two men from the undertaker’s had taken the still shape that had been Grandmother away. When they’d shifted her off the bed on to their trolley as roughly as if she’d been a side of meat and an arm had come swinging out from the side of the sheet, horribly, and I’d glimpsed that fragile blotched hand before one of the men had grunted and shoved it back against the body and flapped the sheet over it again – well, I suppose Marie-Thérèse must have seen my face, because she’d bustled me into the kitchen with a determined look. ‘I think we all need a dose of medicine ourselves,’ she’d said. ‘Leave them to it.’

Gaston seemed as shocked as me. He was pale under the red spider-veins in his cheeks. He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ and, ‘Just like that,’ and, ‘She was right as rain this time yesterday.’

We both gathered around Marie-Thérèse as she poured out three stiff slugs of brandy. We did our best not to listen to the men in the corridor grunting and groaning and banging into things as they manoeuvred their burden to the front door, and the stairs. And when the door had shut, and we were the only ones left, we raised our glasses, met each other’s eyes, and drained the brandy.

I could feel the comforting burn of it in my throat.

‘I called Madame’s lawyer. I said she’d passed away. He’ll drop in at four,’ Marie-Thérèse said, pouring more brandy. ‘He needs to discuss arrangements with you.’ She set the bottle down on the table. ‘Which is why I’ve been thinking about the note,’ she went on.

She had an idea, I could see. I felt as though I were seeing everything at a great distance, very small and quiet. I didn’t understand anything quite enough.

‘What note?’ I said.

‘The one you showed me,’ she said patiently. ‘The one on the blotting paper.’

Those jottings hadn’t been a note when I’d last thought of them, just random words. And they had no more certainty or positive meaning than anything else, especially now that I was facing the prospect of having to go creeping home to Mother and Aunt Mildred, like a dog with my tail between my legs. Now that I’d failed.

But Marie-Thérèse’s eyes were gleaming. ‘It seems to me’, she said, ‘that Madame must have had a premonition of what was in store for her … and she must have been writing that note for you, mademoiselle, so you would know she wanted you to have her pictures and jewels. That note was like a will – her last wishes.’

‘Oh,’ I said dully. What difference did a few bits of old jewellery make?

But Gaston, who was beginning to look a bit more his usual self after that brandy – after draining his second shot, his cheeks had gone back to their usual red colour – had a hungry look in his eye. ‘What jewels?’ he asked.

Marie-Thérèse wasn’t wasting her story on him. Keeping her gaze fixed on me, she said: ‘Do you want to see them?’ Then, without waiting for me to respond, she was on her feet and out of the room.

As soon as the door shut behind his wife, Gaston poured himself a third brandy.

‘It’s always Russians, isn’t it,’ he said, reflectively, as he put down the glass.

Puzzled, I looked up. His cheeks were sheeny with sweat.

‘Those men this morning,’ he explained. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the way they stormed in and grabbed that machine – the noise they made – wasn’t what set Madame off.’

‘Who were they?’ I asked.

‘Engineers,’ he said truculently. ‘Russians. They’ve been making our lives a misery for days. Madame had them here to work on a music recording – some singer who’s scraped her acquaintance. She said they’d be here all week. A godawful racket it made, too – that singer’s voice really set your teeth on edge.’

I remembered now that the Russian singer in New York had been talking about Grandmother and a recording. I might have said I’d met the singer, but Gaston rushed on: ‘We’re pretty sure that Madame bought the machine. But they’ll have been thinking, if the old lady’s ill, no one’s going to ask any awkward questions; we’ll help ourselves and be off. That’s Russians for you.’ He shrugged, eloquently.

Feeling overwhelmed, I shook my head. But Gaston went quiet as soon as Marie-Thérèse came rushing back in a moment later, looking excited. Excited, too, he drew closer as she put the hatbox in her hands down on the table.

‘Look, mademoiselle,’ she breathed.

Inside was a big messy bundle of letters, tied together with a faded ribbon. They were on their sides, stashed between some little packages balled in newspaper.

My hand went straight to the letters. For a moment, I felt a new flicker of hope that, even if Grandmother had gone, the letters might tell me something about her.

‘Open the packets, mademoiselle,’ Marie-Thérèse whispered raptly.

I hesitated, with my hand on the bundle of letters.

‘Oh, those. You won’t understand those,’ she went on a little impatiently. I picked up the bundle. Sure enough, even though they were written in what I could see was an elegant, old-fashioned, copperplate hand, I couldn’t make out a word. ‘You see? Foreign,’ I heard.

(But how had Marie-Thérèse known? I asked myself, though it was clear by now that she must have taken a peep herself at some point. I could hear Aunt Mildred’s resigned voice in my head, saying, ‘Servants always know everything.’)

So I put the letters aside – I wasn’t giving up hope on them, but I’d have to come back to them later – and picked up one of the little newspaper bundles instead.

The newspaper wrapping was French, and only a few years old – yellowed, but not brittle. The contents must have been rolled up in it during a relatively recent move – but then Grandmother had moved around a lot in her lifetime.

As I pulled it off, Gaston’s and Marie-Thérèse’s heads came eagerly closer, almost obscuring my view. Inside the newspaper was a medium-sized jeweller’s box. When I opened that, I saw a very finely made cigarette case in lilac enamel, with gold vines chased over its surface and gold fastenings.

Marie-Thérèse gasped in loud awe. Even though she was clearly acting, and wasn’t looking at the cigarette case for the first time, her awe was real enough. She didn’t even notice Gaston pour himself another inch of cognac.

We soon had six ornaments on the table in front of us. They were fussy little things, and not at all to my taste, but I could see that each one was more finely finished than the last and they’d certainly all been expensive. The second package we opened contained a scent bottle. Then came a hip flask, and a bracelet with a sapphire clasp. There was a monstrously vulgar miniature bulldog carved out of reddish semi-precious stone, with a tiny gold-and-jewelled collar, and a still more ornate and awful jewelled miniature troika on a marble egg. Finally, there was a pendant on a chain – a malachite-and-silver egg that opened up to reveal two spaces for portraits.

‘Look at the box, mademoiselle,’ Marie-Thérèse breathed. The jeweller’s name was inside the last box. Half the letters were nonsense, but the other half were clearly enough printed, in French. They read: ‘Carl Fabergé & Cie, St.-Pétersbourg, Moscou, Londres.’

I drew a sharp breath too at that. I didn’t know much about jewels, but everyone had heard of Fabergé. The Tsar’s favourite jeweller, the man who’d created the ornaments that Russians everywhere, even today, were still said to be trying to sell to finance themselves in exile. Hadn’t Hughie told me that, years ago now?

So these are the jewels she meant, I told myself, as the words Grandmother had written on the blotter shimmered and became, in my memory, something much more like the will Marie-Thérèse was suggesting. A faint but delicious warmth spread through me. Maybe it was just the brandy, but I so wanted to believe that Grandmother had been thinking of me – writing to me – from her sickbed, and leaving me a message. And those scribbles were, after all, quite likely to be her last wishes, weren’t they?

I’d come here thinking I would find the one person in my family who wasn’t bound hand and foot by convention. I’d thought of Grandmother as brave and original, someone who might be more like me than the more familiar relatives I’d grown up with. I’d hoped she would show me how to be an adventurer. And then I’d disappointed myself, shamed myself, and spoiled everything by running away. But maybe everything wasn’t completely lost, after all? Because if I could only understand the words on the blotting paper, interpret the last wishes they must represent, and carry them out … it might be that I had a reason to spin out my time here, and not just to slink back to New York in defeat. Because how could I rush off home if I had a mission to complete for Grandmother in Paris?

I looked up at Marie-Thérèse with the beginning of excitement on my own face.

‘Why I’m showing you now, mademoiselle, is because you wouldn’t want the taxman to know about these,’ said Marie-Thérèse, licking her lips. ‘They’ll be worth something. So when the lawyer comes, I think you shouldn’t mention them to him either.’

For a moment I was a little repelled by the bright greed in her eyes. But then I thought: No wonder she’s so excited. She wasn’t rich, and these ornaments must look like a wonderful treasure trove to her. I told myself I should be grateful for her honesty; admire it, even. She could so easily just quietly have pocketed them, and I’d never have known. If Gaston, by now looking rather fuddled at her side, had been the one to find the little things, I doubted I’d ever have seen them. But Marie-Thérèse had made sure I’d got them. She was looking after me.

How motherly she was feeling towards me became clearer still when she added, ‘And you ought to find out what that other word Madame wrote meant, too. Because – you never know – it might be something else; some other memento for you.’

‘It’s a person’s name,’ I said, with growing certainty. The idea was developing in my mind, too. ‘I’m almost sure it is, because of the place where she wrote “Evie protect make amends” with that word next to it. She must have wanted me to go and find someone, do something to help them and look after them; maybe someone she’d fallen out with. Perhaps she wanted me to share her pictures and jewels with them.’

I’d gladly carry out that wish, I thought. In fact, I’d give them all the jewels. I didn’t even much like jewellery, especially not this ostentatious stuff. I’d far rather have those wild daubs of pictures as my memento of the woman who’d danced with me to Russian violin music, getting faster and faster, whirling me round till I laughed with joy … They’d be a better reminder of her.

Marie-Thérèse and Gaston looked doubtful.

‘She had a Russian husband once,’ I said, wishing I knew more. ‘If those things are Russian, they must be old gifts that he gave her, and his letters, too, I suppose. And maybe some of his family is here – and that word is the name of some relative of his whom I should find. After all, in a family, there’s always someone to make amends to …’

It sounded a promising line of inquiry.

But Marie-Thérèse decisively shook her head. ‘Oh, no, mademoiselle,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s not it. Madame and that husband were only together for a year before Madame moved back to Paris. And she once told me that he’d been a shameless fortune-hunter, who’d only married her in the belief she was rich and would support him in style, and who started threatening to leave her as soon as her family cut off her allowance. She met him because she used to give money to the Russian orphanage that his sister – another vulture – ran out in the suburbs here. She said he’d spent all his own money long before he latched on to her. That was no surprise to me, of course; in my experience, Russians usually take more than they give. He had very nice manners, she said: he could charm birds down from trees. But it was a blessing in disguise that he died when he did.’

Yes, I’d known about him, hadn’t I? Hughie had said something similar. But what struck me most about Marie-Thérèse’s last remark was the reference it contained to Grandmother’s family having cut off her allowance. I’d never heard anything about that from the family. This casual mention of it filled me with a searing pity for Grandmother, and anger against the rest of my family, who, I hotly told myself, had so spectacularly failed her – Mother in particular, but even affable, no-nonsense Hughie. He administered the family trusts, after all. He must have let Mother’s spite affect his judgement. He’d just cut her loose! If Marie-Thérèse was right, and it had happened while Grandmother had been briefly married to her Russian count, he must have done it after that time she’d stayed with us, when I was small. They must have been punishing her for that, when what had poor Grandmother actually done on that visit that was so terrible, except dance with me and organize a harmless procession in favour of women’s emancipation? Without her allowance, I knew, she’d have been left with nothing more to live on than her small widow’s pension from the diplomatic service. Was this why she’d stayed in Paris all these years, where life was so famously cheap, and not come home again? Was that why I’d never had a chance to get to know her?

This was when my resolve formed. I was going to do what someone who’s needed does, I told myself. No one at home even knew Grandmother was dead (and even if they did, I thought hotly, would they care?), so it would be up to me to clear up the remnants of her life here, and while I did so I was also going to make it my business to find out what Grandmother had been trying to tell me. By the time I was done, I’d know everything that had been in her heart, and I’d take that knowledge home with me. They’d tried to write her out of their story, but I was going to be her historian. I was going to write her back in.

‘Well, at least I should go and visit that sister at the orphanage. Maybe, if it is a Russian name, she’ll be able to tell me more,’ I said carefully.

Marie-Thérèse nodded unenthusiastically. ‘But be sure to ask all of them – all her Russians,’ she added cannily. ‘Not just that one woman. You’ll have to phone them all at some point, anyway, to say she’s died and tell them about the funeral. Remember, you can’t trust Russians. Every one of them will probably tell you that the word is their name. Make sure you double-check.’

By that night, I knew a few more things.

The first was that Grandmother had left me her money. The lawyer (thin and faintly disapproving and dressed in hot black, regardless of the weather, like all lawyers everywhere) had shown me her will, written seventeen years before. Below an official declaration that she had no other family – I guessed, from this disavowal, that the will must have been her angry response to my mother and stepfather and her own sister’s decision to cut her out of our family finances – she’d written that I was to be her sole beneficiary.

‘Mais, mademoiselle,’ he’d added cautiously, nibbling at his pen and raising an eyebrow, ‘it is my impression that there isn’t much to leave. The apartment is rented – it’s paid for until the end of the year. She had an American official widow’s pension which dies with her. There are personal effects, of course: clothes, furs, jewels, which I don’t think are worth enough for you to worry about their incurring tax. But there is nothing else.’

Remembering Marie-Thérèse’s warning not to let the taxman know about the Fabergé trinkets, I’d kept quiet about the box. But I’d gestured around at the pictures – the ones in the salon were mostly curling-up pages of yellowed paper pinned to the wall, with jagged lines and cut-out bits of violin curve stuck on to them, and asked, timidly, what about these? The lawyer had just smiled.

My second discovery was that both afternoon and evening were bad times to telephone Parisians, whether French, Russian or American. I hadn’t managed to strike up a chatty friendship with a single White Russian, trustworthy or otherwise. Every number I was put through to was answered by a haughty-sounding maid saying, ‘Madame revient prochaînement,’ or ‘Monsieur dîne à l’extérieur,’ and offering, with no great grace, to take a message. There hadn’t been many gracious expressions of condolence, either, when the message I’d dictated had been an invitation for Monsieur or Madame to attend a funeral the day after tomorrow.

One person I’d thought I might show the paper to, and ask what the mystery word meant, was the singer I’d met in New York – Plevitskaya, the so-called Russian Nightingale. Briefly, I’d been pleased at the idea of our paths crossing again. Here, among strangers, even someone I knew as little as Plevitskaya felt like a dear old friend. But, when I’d looked in the book, I hadn’t seen anything that looked like the singer’s long last name. (Or had I just remembered it wrong?)

Nor was there an entry I could recognize as being the orphanage woman’s number. I’d just have to wait to talk to the people who came to the funeral to find out more, I saw.

Grandmother’s Russian artist friends didn’t even have a telephone number. There was just an address: ‘Surrealists – chez Père Boucher, passage Dantzig, rue Dantzig, 15e. Or try Café Dantzig (NB beware drunk butchers)’.

So, when I’d given up on the telephone, I’d got Gaston to take me there, through a district of slaughterhouses, foul smells and screaming cattle. Sighing deeply, he’d dropped me at a half-ruined octagonal building I’d felt a little scared to enter. The plot it was built on was full of other, smaller, more definitely ruined temporary buildings, like exhibition pavilions long gone to seed, with a garage at the end. It was very noisy. There were people banging at metal and wood on all sides. Most of the windows were broken. There were makeshift stovepipes sticking out of several squares with no glass. A man dressed as a cowboy was howling from a tiny balcony near the top, ‘Moi génie! Moi génie!’ But no one was listening.

Everywhere I looked I saw depressed-looking people in rags dragging themselves about or muttering together. No wonder they looked so miserable. It smelled of herring and filth, cabbage and turpentine. I could feel the rats. I was about to leave without daring to speak to a soul when I saw an old Frenchman wearing a military ribbon in his buttonhole, wandering with a donkey on a halter through a litter-strewn garden dotted with sculptures (or so I thought – though they were so odd that I also thought they might just be bits of buildings that had come down). When I explained my errand, his eyes filled with sympathetic tears and he took me straight into a not-so-bad apartment on the ground floor. As he murmured, ‘Ah, la pauvre Constance,’ a crowd of other lost souls followed us in, all of them emaciated and paint-damaged but suddenly bright-eyed too.

‘My bees,’ the old man explained vaguely, and the way they were buzzing around him was rather like bees; was this, then, the beehive – La Ruche – that the Dutchman I’d talked to on the train, a lifetime ago – yesterday – had been heading for?

‘Are you making tea, Papi?’ one of the young people asked in guttural French; Russians, I thought, and my hunch was confirmed when he turned to me and explained, with a joyful flash of a smile, ‘Tea is the centre of all our nostalgias.’ Then, turning on the skeletal youth behind him, the speaker added, quickly: ‘Because if you are, I happen to know Kostya has a bottle of vodka in his pocket. So if you have bread and maybe a bit of sausage for a zakuska, too, we could all treat this lovely young lady.’

And so it had been maybe an hour before I’d got away – an hour during which several more people had crammed in to see me, many of whom had said warmly that Grandmother had been their dearest friend and patron, most of whom had asked me to their studios to see their work, and all of whom had said, very eagerly, that they’d be sure to come to the funeral. It had felt encouraging to be among people who’d known Grandmother and wanted to tell me how much they’d enjoyed her company and support, and who might at any moment let slip some inconsequential story that would perhaps let me feel closer to her. I yearned to hear her spoken of in a way that would illuminate her. So I’d sat very quietly, smiling at everyone and letting them pour more drink and talk, being patient when they broke into the language I couldn’t make head or tail of but now knew to be Russian. And it was only when I’d been getting up to go, with my head swimming from the vodka my new friends had been making me gulp down, neat, from a tin mug, followed by a tiny bite of herringy bread, followed by roars of applause, that I’d remembered my blotting paper.

‘Женя!’ they’d all sung out, on seeing the mystery scribble. ‘It says “Zhenya”!’ And I’d gazed back, soft with euphoria and hard liquor, loving them all, before I’d realized that this didn’t really solve anything for me, since I didn’t know what it meant. It was a name, of course, they said. The short pet name for Yevgeny – a Russian man’s name.

‘Well, are any of you called Yevgeny?’ I asked, hoping against hope that Grandmother would turn out to have one favourite among this lot. But the tousled heads shook, one by one. When they’d finished cheerily calling out all their first names, which went from Khaim to Konstantin but didn’t include anything like the one on my paper, I’d swallowed my disappointment, thanked them and left. Why did you even think it would be that easy? I’d told myself sternly. All the same, I blinked, very hard, all the way back to the car.

It had taken me the entire drive home to see things more optimistically.

It was only as I got into bed that I finally could. The third and most important thing I found out today, I told myself, as I switched off the lamp, is that I’m looking for a man called Yevgeny.