By the time I reached puberty it would be fair to say I was confused: surrounded by material comfort, but told that nothing was mine; smothered with love, but also controlled, judged and punished. Conflict raged inside me. I daydreamed about getting away but my attachment to everything that was comfortable about my existence held me back. And I felt a loyalty to my mother, whom I needed to protect and defend as the victim of my father’s bullying.
School provided welcome respite. I thrived academically and socially. At weekends, in search of relief from the claustrophobia of home, I spent more and more and more time at friends’ places, amazed at how different the atmosphere was in other families: it was as if there were more oxygen in their air. Some I visited so frequently that I thought of them as surrogate families, able to supplement my own with siblings and grandparents, and my desire to belong to a bigger tribe drew me to multi-generational dynasties. I was intrigued by dinner conversation that was neither an interrogation nor a lesson. Teasing was good-humoured and mild rather than spiteful. Parents and grandparents told silly jokes or stories that had no particular point but lubricated an easy harmony. Children spoke freely. Interruptions were tolerated. Noise levels were higher. Discipline was not the be-all and end-all, table manners were slacker, and while the food could never match Maman’s culinary repertoire, meals were more enjoyable if less abundant and tasty.
I found myself appreciating packet-made mashed potato, custard and strawberry whip just as much as our more cosmopolitan homemade desserts. Soon, to my mother’s chagrin, I was requesting baked beans and fish fingers at home. We reached a compromise: I could have these as treats on nights when she and my father went out and a sitter or au pair was in attendance. (I never spent an evening, never mind a night, alone in my family home.)
Little did they suspect that the Swiss milkmaids who lived with us were capable of corrupting my innocence; one of them taught me how to smoke while my parents were away on a business trip. When our cover was blown by the smell in my room, she was instantly dismissed. Another had come to London under the pretext of learning the language only to confess that she had, in fact, come to get an abortion. She disappeared overnight after I overheard her sobbing out her real motives to my mother.
Becoming more socially adventurous and independent triggered a new conflict for which I was completely unprepared: my mother became jealous of my friends. It had not occurred to me that she might feel threatened by the bonds I forged with my peers. I was unfamiliar with the term insecurity, had never heard of self-esteem. But Maman grew more and more hostile when I brought anyone home regularly. Her welcome was frosty and my home soon acquired a reputation for being strict and not fun. If friends came for the afternoon, they were rarely invited to stay for dinner, never mind for a spontaneous sleepover. Those who were game enough to stay were subjected by my father to a lecture or a cross-examination on general knowledge and geopolitics that made me cringe with embarrassment.
When they left, my mother often sighed with relief, as if their presence had exhausted her. Her disapproval was often sufficient to kill a friendship with a single remark: ‘She’s a bit vulgar,’ or ‘She doesn’t have very good table manners, does she?’ was enough to make me consider companions in a new light and find them wanting. I was porous, malleable and easily manipulated.
Mostly, my parents rowed in private. I heard snatches of raised voices followed by door-slamming, but it seemed to me that my mother rarely gave as good as she got. Instead of matching my father’s spiteful tirades of invective, she resorted to what we would now call passive aggression: stony silence was her weapon of choice. When my father’s swearing reached tantrum pitch, she walked away with an exaggerated sigh of exasperation, her features hardened into death-mask-like rigidity as if all her bones had become more angled or her flesh sunken from combat. Sometimes she rolled her eyes and covered her mouth with her hand, pretending to stifle a mocking laugh of contempt.
The violence was mainly verbal, though I do remember an occasion when my father pulled one of the heavy wooden drawers out of his wardrobe and hurled it down the stairs. My mother and I were out of range as his balled fine-denier socks bounced down each step like skimming stones.
Both my parents were champion sulkers and could go for days without speaking, even at mealtimes. I learned from the best of them and was able to sit across from my father at the dinner table for up to three weeks without us exchanging a word. Even in the car on the way to school—a ride that lasted up to forty minutes—I could endure the entire trip without saying anything.
Building up inside me was a geyser of contempt and hatred. I wanted my father dead, nothing less. His presence changed the very nature of the air we breathed. When he was in one of his furies, the atmosphere in the house became thick and leaden or else it fizzed with static electricity, as if the oxygen might combust at any minute.
Occasionally, my mother matched fire with fire. When the pressure in the house rose to intolerable levels, she took refuge in the garden, where she created her own controlled inferno, hefting piles of raked leaves and twigs to build an enormous bonfire. This pyre was her distress beacon, a flare sent high into the sky fuelled by incandescent rage. The leaping tongues of flame alarmed neighbours, who called the fire brigade. Once it was clear there was no danger, they disappeared, little realising where the real threat lay. When my mother came inside, her face was often smudged with soot and her clothes reeked of the bitter smoke of burned chestnut. It was acrid but not entirely unpleasant: hugging her, I rubbed my face in the corduroy of her gardening jacket, inhaling the reek of defiance.
How she continued to dish up exquisite meals throughout this period baffles me; I thought she should sprinkle ground glass in my father’s food. Even when they were not on speaking terms, he ate wolfishly.
Listening to my parents’ barbed exchanges, I absorbed the tactics of both sides. I had inherited my father’s short fuse and explosive temper, my mother’s harsh judgement and dripping sarcasm. As a thin-skinned adolescent, quick to take offence, I interpreted every comment as an insult, every remark as a jibe. As angry as a scorpion, I grew bratty and insolent, picking fights. Occasionally, when I went too far, my exasperated mother would threaten me with a slap. I kicked, I bit, I swore, mostly in French, borrowing my mother’s expressions and turning them back on her: ‘Fiche moi la paix’, espèce d’enquiquineuse’, (‘leave me alone, you bloody nuisance’). We sparred vigorously, she swatting me away with a spatula or spoon like a nuisance fly. At my most aggressive, I lunged, ducking her brandished wooden implements, pinching her hard on the upper arm. I don’t remember her landing blows, but she must have, because these scenes usually ended in tears, with her locking me out of the kitchen. I was foul.
On holidays the pressure increased, like the tropical build-up before a monsoon. Special occasions that should have been the focus of heightened anticipation were sabotaged by the pressure of expectation anxiety. At Disneyland my parents had some kind of major meltdown in the car park before we even reached the turnstiles, prompting my mother to lead me away in one direction. Together we worked our way through the rides joylessly while my father sat at the entrance, chain-smoking furiously for three hours. Something similar occurred at the Sistine Chapel: a sudden unprovoked explosion of rage from my father meant that we filed into the hallowed space too shocked and cowed to raise our heads to the celestial glories above us. Only at the last moment did I lift my gaze from the patterned mosaics on the floor to catch a glimpse of heaven, but I was looking up from hell.
By the time I was fifteen I had been out and about enough to know that my parents were unusually severe. When I challenged their ways, my father’s explanation was always the same: ‘They don’t love their children like we love you.’ I would have traded some of that love for freedom like a shot.
Never more so than when my Russian teacher announced that she would be taking our class to Leningrad (as it then was) for an intensive two-week language laboratory course. I was, by common consent, the class’s star pupil, and expected to do extremely well at exams the following year. The intensive immersion program would give me a boost in achieving top marks. It would also be my first experience of travelling with friends rather than family. I was bursting with excitement at the prospect.
I had allowed myself to be persuaded into studying Russian by my mother’s passionate Slavophilia. My preference was to choose the easier and more seductive Spanish, like my closest friends. But biddable again, I let the decision be made for me. I knew the words (if not their meaning) to simple Russian folk songs like ‘Kalinka’ from hearing them sung in the recordings by the Red Army Ensemble my parents often listened to at weekends. The sonorous bass voices stirred something in me, resonating in my chest like big deep bells. Maman sang along, having taught herself rudimentary Russian as a teenager in Paris as the result of an intense friendship with Natasha Babel, the daughter of Soviet dissident and writer Isaac Babel, who was sent to a gulag by Stalin.
Eager to please her, I embraced Russian after initial resistance, and soon found that I had a gift for it. Our teacher, Madame Manoras, insisted that we all choose Russian names at the start of the first year, to immerse ourselves more fully in the culture. My mother encouraged me to choose Natasha. The name suited my unformed longings, while the language fuelled my tendency towards melancholy. I became fascinated by the last Romanov archduchesses and their fate at Ekaterinburg, dwelling on the fact that when they were shot, the bullets ricocheted off the diamonds sewn into their corsets. I steeped myself in the tragic poetry of Anna Akhmatova and the yearnings of Chekhov’s women trapped on their estates in the provinces. I watched slow languid films full of birch trees and snowy landscapes, and recognised my spiritual home. I fantasised about being a Russian princess, wearing sable and riding in a troika, like Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostova. The very sounds of the language, with its whispering SHs and SHTCHS, and its caressing AYAs and OUYOUs, called out to my overheated teenage romantic nature.
In class, I made friends with a shy girl with real Slavic heritage carved into her high cheekbones. When she took me home to meet her histrionic family of White Russian émigrés, I felt instantly at home in the clove- and sandalwood-scented ambience of incense, amber beads, fringed shawls, glinting icons and nostalgic tales of treasures left behind. The name of Fabergé was whispered in asides of gentle regret. Candles were lit for elaborate meals at Easter. I had found my very own Romanovs, living in converted stables in Chelsea. Elated by their authenticity, I watched my mother fall under the spell of their bohemian charm. She felt welcomed as she did not in English homes and I relaxed to see her enjoying the chaotic meals we shared there—so different from our own.
My Russian receptivity forged a new connection between Maman and me. She sat with me while I did my homework, learning new words and grammar by my side, rekindling her own long-dormant linguistic talent. Little did we suspect where this ability would lead.
When my parents refused to let me go on the class trip to Russia, it came as a bolt out of the blue. For months, I had been imagining myself walking down Nevsky Prospect and coming face to face with the astonishing green façade of the Winter Palace, catching sight perhaps of a last few melting ice floes on the Neva. All my diligence and success were rewarded with privation, which made no sense either to me, or to my teacher, who came to our house personally to plead with my parents to reconsider. I wept, I begged, I promised all manner of things, but they were unmoved. I was too young to travel without them, no matter how much Madame Manoras reassured them of constant supervision and care. ‘We will take you there,’ they said, failing to grasp that I ached to go with my classmates.
In an act of pure masochism and melodrama, wallowing in the misery of being denied, I insisted on going to farewell my comrades at Victoria Station. My father drove me there. I stewed in silence until I reached the platform. Then, as the train pulled out of the station, I made a shameless scene, sobbing and wailing while my friends Sasha, Dimitri, Varvara and Yelena waved goodbye. My face swollen and my throat raw from sustained crying, I was most probably hysterical.
When I was allowed to go on the class trip the following year, my former classmates had abandoned the language and the cohort I travelled with was less close-knit and less talented, making the experience a disappointment. By the time I learned that I had scored the country’s top marks in my final-year exams, I wanted nothing more to do with Russia. But Russia, as it turned out, had other plans.