‘Not habitable in winter?’ roared the Count, turning to his wife. ‘Did you hear that, Annushka? Why, the stoves in this house would heat the Kremlin. They would heat the Kremlin without the slightest—’
‘You have written in my diary!’ came a deep and passionate voice from the doorway. ‘Here, where I have written I may never hold the Countess Tata in my arms, you have written “WHY?”.’
‘That’s right,’ agreed my grandmother patiently.
‘Why have you written “WHY”?’ demanded the young tutor,’ when you know that it can never be?’
‘I suppose your father was an illiterate serf and so on?1 enquired my grandmother.
Nikolai looked surprised and said no, his father had been — and actually still was — headmaster of a Boys’ Academy in Minsk.
‘Well then, I take it that you are penniless and futureless?’ prompted my grandmother.
Nikolai turned his marvellous eyes on her and said that as it happened he had been left a little money by an aunt and was going in the autumn to take up a lectureship in Russian language at the University of Basle, in Switzerland. He had, he said, hopes of a Professorship fairly soon.
‘Well then,’ said my grandmother.
The Countess, who had been in feverish conversation with her husband, now turned round sharply. ‘What are you saying, Miss Petch? Tata is engaged to Prince Kublinsky.’
‘Madame, you must forgive me for speaking plainly but I am a doctor’s daughter,’ said my grandmother. ‘And in my opinion,’ she went on steadily, ‘you would be advised to look… very carefully… into Prince Kublinsky’s health.’
The Countess blanched. ‘No! Oh, my God, it is not possible. Yet I have heard rumours… His early dissipations… Oh, my poor Tata!’ She paused, then rallied. ‘Even so,’ she said, ‘it is out of the question that Tata should marry Nikolai Alexandro—’
‘You have written in my diary!’ announced the Countess Tata, arriving in the doorway bare-footed, tangle-haired and devastating.
‘Tata, Grandfather was a louse,’ yelled Petya, ‘so I need not be a soldier!’
‘We’re staying in the country, we’re staying in the country,’ sang Vashka, Mishka and Andrusha who had appeared from God-knows-where, and began turning ecstatic somersaults.
But it was at Nikolai, standing perfectly still in the centre of the room, that Tata looked.
‘Come here,’ said Nikolai. ‘Come here, Tata.’
He didn’t use her title, nor did he go to her but waited, his head up, until she came to him.
‘We’re going to be together, doushenka,’ he said, taking her face between his hands. ‘I promise you this. We’re going to be together always.’
In spite of all entreaties, my grandmother insisted on leaving as soon as transport could be arranged. Her homesickness persisted and she felt she had done what she could.
When she reached London, Mr Fairburn was at the station to meet her.
‘How kind of you, Mr Fairburn,’ she said, allowing him to help her from the train.
‘I wish,’ said Mr Fairburn earnestly, ‘that you would call me Alfred.’
My grandmother realised that this was probably the most passionate speech that she would ever hear from him.
‘Weren’t you disappointed?’ I asked, remembering the mighty Volga, troikas and a little Countess hopelessly in love. ‘Didn’t it all seem rather tame?’
My grandmother said, no. One should know one’s limitations, she said. And call him Alfred she did.
A Question of Riches
Jeremy was seven when he first went to boarding school, his expensive new grey shorts enveloping his skinny knees, a roll of comics for the journey smudging in his tight-clasped, bird-boned little hand. Even Matron, jovial by profession, felt a pang as she unpacked the belongings of this patently unfledged fledgling and wondered whether another year in the nest would have done any harm.
Except that in Jeremy’s case there wasn’t really any nest. His father, one of the finest climbers of the decade, had died trying to help an injured companion on a distant, still unnamed Himalayan peak. Jeremy’s mother, gay and accomplished, had married again within two years — this time, for solid worth and safety. Jeremy’s stepfather was a mining engineer, kind, decent and magnificently unimaginative. When his firm sent him out to the Copper Belt in Central Africa, it seemed obvious to him that what Jeremy needed was to be left behind in a good English prep school.
And Jeremy’s school was good. When he wrote his weekly letter to his mother out in Africa, his pen digging holes in the thin blue air-mail paper, it was pointed out to him that to describe one’s homesickness was a bit selfish, didn’t he think? So he wrote instead, in his huge, sloping script, of cricket matches and other suitable topics suggested on the blackboard. After a while, too, he stopped crying under his pillow at night because, as Jenkins minor said, he was simply disgracing their dorm. And gradually, as the weeks crept by, he began to forget. He ‘settled’. Really he had no choice.
Fortunately there was no problem about where Jeremy should spend his holidays because he had grandmothers — a full set. There was his mother’s mother, Mrs Tate-Oxenham whose husband, Jeremy’s grandfather, sat on the Board of not fewer than seven major business enterprises. Mrs Tate-Oxenham lived in the centre of the most fashionable part of London in a tall house filled with valuable antiques and had a housekeeper, a chauffeur and a cook. Jeremy called her ‘Grandmother’ in full because abbreviations, she said, were slipshod: one was never that short of time.
Then there was his dead father’s mother Mrs Drayton; she was a widow and managed on her pension. She lived in London too: in a single room, in a shabby peeling house on the ‘wrong’ side of the river. Jeremy called her ‘Nana’ but not when Mrs Tate-Oxenham was around because it made her frown.
It was to ‘Grandmother’, that Jeremy went first when his school broke up for the summer. He had never actually stayed with Mrs Tate-Oxenham before, so that at first he took the uniformed chaffeur who had been sent to meet him at the station for some kind of admiral or chief of police.
‘Mind you sit still!’ said this lordly being, settling Jeremy into the huge black car with its silver fittings and the rug made of a whole dead zebra lying on the seat. ‘We don’t want anything kicked, do we?’
Jeremy wouldn’t have dreamt of kicking anything. Indeed, after a while the mere effort of sitting up straight was all that he could manage, for the great car was almost hermetically sealed against draughts and long before they drew up at the tall house in the hushed street, Jeremy was feeling agonisingly, almost uncontrollably car-sick.
Grandmother had cut short a committee meeting to greet him and was waiting in the hall, beautiful and composed with her upswept silver hair, and it was she herself who showed him round the house.
Jeremy had never seen a house quite like it. It was so quiet you couldn’t hear your feet at all in the deep, deep carpets, nor any noises from the street. All the windows had two pairs of curtains — a thin white pair and a thick velvety pair tied back with cords — and even then there were shutters so that outside it could have been any kind of weather or any time of day.
And everywhere, on the mantelpieces, on the walls, in alcoves all up the stairs were museum-ish sort of things: Chinese dragons, and carved statues and dark pictures of people stuck with arrows.
Jeremy’s own rooms were at the top of the house, a whole suite of them: bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room all to himself.
‘No one will disturb you up here,’ said Grandmother briskly.