‘Russians other than Bolshevik Russians,’ Paul said for the sake of clarification.
‘Naturally,’ Cumming replied. ‘Our view is that events should be allowed to take their natural course.’
‘What would that be — our “preferred natural course”?’
‘What is imperative,’ Cumming went on obliquely, his face remaining expressionless, ‘is the need to convey to Admiral Kolchak — and to the Legion for that matter — that in the event of the gold falling into their hands but not the tsar, any attempt to purchase the Imperial family’s freedom which results in the Bolsheviks getting their hands on the gold reserves would be — in our view — unwelcome.’
‘But if the Legion doesn’t get to the tsar but does get the gold and won’t ransom the family, doesn’t that rather reduce the Bolsheviks’ options?’
‘That will be for the Bolsheviks to decide.’
‘So then, in the event of the unforeseen,’ Paul said, beginning to understand and stressing Cumming’s own word, ‘the odium will fall on them.’
Cumming gave him a wintry smile.
‘Isn’t that going to be counter-productive? I mean for people like Mikhail? One assumes if they want to see the Romanov dynasty returned to power they’re not going to agree to this.’
‘That’s true, which is where a certain delicacy on your part will be required. In dealing with Admiral Kolchak on the one hand and your cousin on the other.’
‘Are you saying you want me to tell Mikhail one thing and tell the admiral another?’
Cumming smiled again, this time the expression not entirely lacking in warmth.
In the years since he had grown old enough to consider the question, Paul had often wondered if a family connection with Russian nobility had done him much good. After meeting Cumming and finding he was to be sent back, he realised it had not.
He suspected his mother had finally come around to the realisation that she was best out of it, too. She was a silly woman, he had with objectivity come to understand: vain, snobbish and not without arrogance. But she was not stupid. She must know that she was being taken advantage of in émigré circles and yet tolerated the fact in order to maintain a social position. Being able to talk politics from a position of equality with men, bourgeois and aristocratic, as well as the radical refugees, no doubt flattered her. Paul himself, as soon as he was old enough to make up his own mind, had decided to leave all that behind. He had had no interest in politics of any colour, Russian or British. Not then, anyway. What he had wanted was to fit in with his fellows and not be regarded as a curiosity.
He had had no trouble passing for English; he had learned the language at his mother’s knee. The rest of the Rostov family had spoken it as well — English having earned something of a social cachet as it was the language the Imperial Family used between themselves. The Empress Alexandria had apparently never achieved more than a rudimentary grasp of Russian. At the time his mother had expressed some qualms about changing his name from Rostov to the more British-sounding, Ross, as if in doing so he was showing a disrespect for his father’s memory. Paul had not seen it that way. He hardly had a memory of his father beyond a vague image of a uniformed character stomping down the path through the snow to a sleigh while he and his mother watched on. He sometimes wondered if the scene was a genuine memory at all and not just a construct fabricated after the fact from stories his mother had used to tell him. What might have been evidence of its authenticity was a recollection he had of throwing a snowball at the departing figure; but whether this was evidence of authenticity or imagination, he could only guess.
The one thing he was sure he did remember was his mother, standing in the snow beside him and wailing like one of those matronly characters from a Wagner opera. Although he had to allow that even this memory, though real was purely theatrical, designed to give her the kind of dramatic rôle she had always craved. This suspicion was based upon the fact of his mother’s fondness for opera, preferring the German but taking the Russian in a pinch — which was really just as well as there’d been precious little German opera on offer since 1914.
Discovering Mikhail Ivanovich had remained a tsarist had come as no real surprise. Given that Mikhail’s father, Paul’s uncle Ivan Nikolayevich, had been someone of note in the Ministry of the Interior — the most conservative of Nicholas II’s government ministries — it was only to be expected that one generation’s politics would rub off on another. Paul had been aware of it as a child, living in the family house following his father’s departure with the Baltic Fleet.
The big house on Tavricheskaya he recalled as a model of Russian orthodoxy, both in the religious and political sense. He had lived there with his mother and aunt and uncle both before and after his father had sailed with the Baltic Fleet on the outbreak of war with Japan. There had been an old grandmother — a wrinkled baboushka — as well, although his memory of her was more conditioned by the photographs his mother had brought to England than by any clear recollection. The house to him had seemed to be a maze of staircases and endless rooms; of corridors peopled by portraits of strangers and landscape paintings of alien countryside he had never seen outside of oil on canvas. His grandfather — according to his mother — had brought them all as a job-lot when he had purchased the house, not only to fill the empty walls but to give himself a ready-made ancestry. Beyond this forged past, though, there had been one room that had been genuinely Rostov: the Red Room, the room that held the holy artefacts, the ikons and candles, before which they had all trooped in twice a day to genuflect and kneel in prayer.
Once old enough to understand, he had come to wonder if this room had not truly been the essence of the Rostovs, a hangover from their peasant past, even if his mother had always insisted that all ‘good’ Russian homes possessed a variation on this theme. How ironic now, he couldn’t help thinking, that the word red — the same in the Russian language as the word for beautiful and derived from this domestic usage for the room in which the ikon was kept — had been usurped by the Bolsheviks to stand for a sensibility diametrically opposed to Russian religiosity.
According to his mother — again, his only source of information beyond a few scattered photo-like memories — the Rostovs had always been, by and large, a reactionary bunch. She maintained they were Johnny-come-latelys as far as the nobility went (a somewhat rich opinion to hold coming from his mother) being no more than descendants of a merchant, a man who himself had been the son of a peasant born a serf. The merchant had founded the family’s fortune on a killing made from procurement for the Russian army during the Crimean War, although Paul had never learned exactly what it was that this first Rostov had procured (food, weapons, women…?) Once the money had been pocketed, though, the usual fastidiousness of the nouveau riche for trade had surfaced and, along with it, the desire to distance themselves from their origins. Paul had sometimes suspected that this keenness to forget the past might also stem from the fact that, given the outcome of the Crimean war, whatever had been procured for the army had turned out to be substandard. The business had been lucrative enough, however, to fund a large country estate in the south as well as town houses in both Moscow and St Petersburg. The merchant had changed his name to Rostov — the city of his birth — and his son, dead husband of the baboushka Paul vaguely remembered, had been a social climber, successful enough to end his life as a minor member of the nobility.