Jean
The time …
‘Oh God, I’ve done it again, look, it’s half dark and he’ll be expecting me … I must go,’ I said, sounding, as even I could hear, shamefully inept. But neither of us moved.
‘Can I come too?’ she whispered.
I was so startled by that that I did let go of her.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘To talk to him, of course. To explain what we know, and ask him to tell me all about Grandmother.’ She sounded a little impatient, as if it were obvious. And, of course, it was.
But I also knew that it was a nonsense. Because her bit of paper didn’t represent her grandmother’s last wishes, and Father wouldn’t for a moment take seriously her notion that she was on a quest to carry them out. And anyway, if he’d never talked about his relationship with her grandmother, even with someone as close to him as me, why would he open his heart to her?
When I looked down at Evie’s expectant face, and into her eyes – which, I thought, with a new kind of foreboding, must have that moonlight look because she expected to be able to just walk downstairs and find herself in conversation with some handsome young cavalry officer, all courtly manners and Tsarist mystique – I realized that I didn’t even want her to try.
I didn’t want her to talk to Father as he was now, or find out how different he’d become from that young cavalry officer of her grandmother’s letters.
She might think she’d like their funny little world in the office downstairs, but that was only because she probably imagined it as a realm of ghostly charm, and thought they just went round bowing very formally at each other in their threadbare uniforms under dusty chandeliers, and calling each other ‘Your Excellency’, and quoting Tolstoy together … But what would a girl who’d so recently spouted that naive bit of know-nothing socialism at me – ‘how good it must be to live and work among simple, honest people’ – make of Father today: too fat for his jacket, staring at that letter with the black Gothic print that I’d seen him with this morning, dreaming whatever terrible dreams he must be dreaming of marching back to Moscow at the head of a fascist army?
I knew the White cause wasn’t romantic any more. It hadn’t been for a long time. Sirin had taught me that, once and for all. After his only visit to ROVS, during which he’d maintained an ironic politeness as Father poured him brandy and plied him with his best zakuski and talked excitedly about the state of the world, Sirin had taken me aside for a private, laconic word. It was no wonder, he’d said, that Hitler’s view of history was so distorted when so many of my father’s men, the very Whites in question, also spent so much of their time ranting in this way against the Bolshevik murder squads bumping off everyone who didn’t bow to what they called the Jewish–Bolshevik dictatorship.
I’d cringed, thinking of Sirin’s Jewish wife. That was exactly the sort of way Father talked. And I hadn’t even seen, until I’d been shown it through his outsider’s eyes.
I hadn’t wanted to take anyone to ROVS since then. I didn’t want to take Evie now.
I tightened my grip on her shoulders. ‘But will he talk?’ I said, shaking my head so that she’d understand the answer would be ‘no’, hoping she’d be acquiescent enough to accept my judgement.
There was a mutinous look in the eyes gazing back at me. I could see she didn’t agree.
Trying harder to be persuasive, I went on, ‘Whatever their reason was for keeping their relationship secret – whether it was his having a wife, or her having a whole separate life sponsoring all those young artists (because he won’t have appreciated them, you know; he doesn’t follow art today), or even if it was just that she wasn’t Russian (because they like to make a big thing of preserving their Russianness, you know, and try to keep themselves and their children as much apart from foreigners as possible) – it will still hold. He really won’t want to talk to you.’
She shook her head. ‘But, Jean,’ she said insistently, ‘talking to him was the whole point.’
‘He’ll have some old-fashioned notion of honour,’ I said, a bit louder, overriding her voice. ‘People’s dignity is important, too – their privacy. Sometimes people don’t have anything else,’ I added sternly.
I could feel her thinking. After a moment, she looked up again.
‘But Grandmother wanted me to make amends to him,’ she said. ‘ “Protect” and “Make amends”.’
She still sounded so determined, so American.
‘Look, let me think about it a bit more,’ I said finally, wanting somehow to find a way to make all these incompatible wishes come true, but lost as to how. ‘I’ll see if I can think of a way to approach the subject with him. But you think too, meanwhile, because you should be aware that telling him all this won’t change anything, for you – it won’t bring your grandmother back – any more than it will improve things for him. And it might distress him more if you turn up, raking over all his memories … because he’s grieving, you know. He’s been quiet and irritable for days. Isn’t it enough for you just to know about him and your grandmother?’
At last, at that, her eyes softened – a bit. ‘Can we talk about it again tomorrow, at least?’ she said. Her hand brushed against mine – the softest of touches, but one that sent a powerful current running up my arm.
‘Same time?’ I agreed, moving towards the door, more relieved than I had words for, both that she was letting herself be talked out of confronting Father, and that, even though the letters were now all read, she still seemed to want to see me again.