At his most cynical Paul had usually pictured the marriage ceremony as little more than the two of them in front of an equally liberal priest, exchanging rings and a vow before a candle. It seemed as if the rest of the Rostov family had inferred a similar interpretation of the event. Not that, while a child, he had ever been fully aware of the tensions within the family that his father’s actions had engendered. At least, not at first. It had always seemed curious to him why his two cousins, Mikhail and his sister Sofya, although of much the same age as Paul adopted an equally supercilious attitude towards him as that their parents displayed towards his mother. At the time, he had been innocent enough put this down to some innate quality they possessed through their being fully Russian rather than, as he was, only half-Russian. He assumed he could expect only to display in ratio half the superciliousness they did. It wasn’t until later he realised that his cousins had had a better understanding of the domestic situation than he had ever grasped. They, of course, had had the benefit of parental tutelage. Paul, being fatherless by this time, received no such bigoted instruction, being forever encouraged by his mother to ‘get on’ with his little cousins regardless of their attitude.
Mikhail Ivanovich, a little older than Paul and son of his father’s elder brother, Ivan Nikolayevich, had been, as Paul always remembered, an insufferable little prig. His attitude had always been one of condescension. His sister, Sofya Ivanovna, in the presence of Mikhail Ivanovich, had invariably followed his lead. Alone with Paul she was happy enough to treat him as an equal. This, despite her inconstancy, had forever left him with a soft spot for her in his memory, one that time never seemed to erode. In fact, she was one of the few things about Russia he had ever missed.
Even, when in England and old enough to understand his parents’ background, he still never fully understood why doing voluntary work for the starving peasantry had been such a black mark against his mother as far as the family was concerned. It was not as if his mother — or his father for that matter — were the only members of their class to man soup kitchens and relief centres during the famine. It was true that his uncle Ivan Nikolayevich was about as reactionary as they came — not a great surprise since he was a member of the tsar’s Interior ministry — but it was always difficult for Paul to view the relief campaign as a radical movement. It certainly had been no rehash of the disastrous Narodnik — ‘going to the people’ — crusade of a decade earlier. During that movement students had flooded into the countryside under the deluded conviction that within the structure of village councils, the peasantry represented the revolutionary ideal of the Russian people. Most of them, unfortunately, had found out the hard way that by and large the peasantry were as conservative a people as their overlords. Ignorant and suspicious of outsiders — and more concerned with land and their own material well-being than in nurturing any ideals towards the common good — they were, in other words, ordinary human beings. His mother, thank the lord, had been too young to join the Narodnik movement for, Paul had been alarmed to learn, many of them had been beaten for their pains and not a few murdered by those they had wished to educate.
But even the vague sort of do-gooder liberalism of famine relief had been radical enough to set the Rostovs against her. The upshot was, after his father’s death, that they sent her and her bewildered son into English exile. Bad enough, psychologically, for a boy of his tender years, but still worse as it left his mother as the sole font of information as to his origins. For she was not — as he very soon discovered — an altogether reliable source.
Despite her Englishness, for years after he had had to listen to lectures on the wonders of Mother Russia. It had been a great anguish to her (she continually maintained) that she had been exiled just as the cultural flowering of the empire had reached its peak. The art! The music! She was forever in lyrical raptures over Diaghelev and the Ballet Russ, over Tamara Karsavina and Pavlova… Prokofiev and Rimsky Korsakov… All while he knew perfectly well that despite the opportunities to see Diaghelev’s company in London, she hadn’t bothered, much preferring the less demanding melodies of the previous generation’s Tchaikovski to the modern stridency of Rimsky Korsakov.
Most insidious, though, was that it was from his mother that he had received his political education. Before he was old enough to know any better, he had inherited her opinions, and it wasn’t until he had found himself in the trenches that he had begun to discover just how unreliable a tutor she really was. Heaven help, he had often thought, those children who had been charged to her care as a governess.
‘So…’ Cumming said as he closed Kell’s file, his sibilant sounding like air escaping a punctured bladder. ‘Your mother seems to have some interesting friends.’
His eye pierced Paul through the monocle; his tone managing to make the observation sound as if she were in the habit of dining out with Lenin himself.
‘How well do you know them?’ Browning demanded.
Paul was surprised that Kell’s file didn’t say. Or perhaps it did and Cumming was trying to trap him into some indiscretion. He knew some of them — familiar faces from that rainbow band of émigrés with whom his mother was acquainted. Others he recalled only vaguely, innumerable adherents to a dozen different movements — anarchists, nihilists, social democrats, social revolutionaries — who had passed through what she had liked to call her ‘salon’. All much of a muchness, as he remembered, parasites mostly who had clung to his mother for years, scrounging free meals and the occasional night’s lodging. Even, when they were able, donations to their ‘good causes’.
She, of course, was in her element playing the political hostess, adept at never looking too closely at the riff-raff that cluttered up her drawing room as long as they had originated in the Russian empire.
‘One or two by sight,’ Paul admitted to Cumming cautiously. ‘I never really got involved.’
‘But you are acquainted with Admiral Kolchak, are you not?’
‘Kolchak?’ The name sounded familiar although Paul couldn’t have said why.
‘He was Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet,’ Browning informed him. ‘He resigned in protest when Kerensky was made Minister of War.’
‘Your mother entertained him when he was in London last year,’ Cumming added helpfully.
‘Did she? How do you know—’