The black shed, a mountainous square slab rising from the pure snow, was empty of people that day. I had ridden in my new 3½-litre Hotchkiss Tourer out to St-Denis mainly to have the driver show it off to Esmé. She thought it the most beautiful car she had ever seen. I suspected, tolerantly, she was chiefly impressed because its blue paintwork matched her eyes. Wrapped in white ermine, her breath like fine powder, she was almost invisible. As usual, I wore my bearskin overcoat, with the Cossack pistols, which I identified as my luck pieces, still in the pockets. Christmas and the New Year had been a heady progress from party to party. We had met everyone then fashionable in Paris, including the strange negress Janet Baker, whose mannish hauteur seemed so perverse to me. I was surprised when she went on to star in Opera, though I suppose a form lending itself so readily to extravagance and grandiosity readily accepts any new sensation. We became great friends with M. Delimier, one of France’s leading ministers, a private shareholder in the Company and an enthusiast for a French government commercial airship line. He was interested in my origins. He said he had a number of good friends in the Russian community. At the same party I met the pseudo-intellectual Communist Jew Léon Blum, who led France so decisively to her doom in the 1930s. In those days it became impossible to avoid Jews in any sphere, be it business, the arts, or politics. They were busy cultivating scapegoats and dupes to blame if their schemes went wrong.
My birthday drive through the snow to St-Denis remains one of my clearest memories of that time. Everything was perfect. I had acceptance, fame, fulfilment and friends. Few young men have celebrated their twenty-first year with such achievements. Straight, bare trees, like saluting soldiers, marched on either side of the avenue; clouds of dark birds cried their applause; a few flakes of snow fell from the branches and hissed on the pulsing bonnet of my car; Esmé clung close to me as the driver operated the controls. Children sprang from doorways of cottages to wave their caps and yell their enthusiasm; church bells sang and even the sheep lifted their heads to bleat a huzzah as we went by. I raised my respectable hat to a family group in a gig drawn by a pair of prancing greys; I reached and squeezed my horn as a peasant and his family made their way across the road from field to field. I shouted with delight, pointing into the steel sky at a flight of geese rising above the great shed and climbing until they disappeared. ‘An omen!’ I told the driver to stop the car and made Esmé get out. The watchman on duty at the gate knew me. He let us through as we tramped across the crisp snow to the shed, entering by a small door set into the main one. The skylights were frosted and magical. Ice had formed in the chilly blue air so struts and scaffolding gleamed like silver. ‘It’s fairyland!’ She advanced into pale light. There was rime in her furs; little stars.
‘It’s fairyland come true.’ The smell of the frost was so good to me. As I spoke snow stirred the echoes. ‘Wait until we’re flying above the clouds together, you and I, sipping cocktails, listening to an orchestra, on our way to America.’
‘You must invite Douglas Fairbanks to make the maiden flight.’ She was directly beneath the massive hull. ‘He’d love the adventure!’
I said I would write to him that very evening.
On the way home Esmé complained the snow was blinding her. She had a dreadful headache. By the afternoon she was in bed, unable to visit the de Grion’s that evening. She insisted I must remain in their good graces and go alone. I left her, sipping tea, with an ice pack on her head, a tiny, touching figure amongst the lace and linen of our bed. I felt I was failing her. Perhaps the transition from the Galata slums to Parisian high society had been too sudden? She frequently became self-conscious in the company of older, more sophisticated people who of course assumed she was from their class. She would be at a loss for words, though all praised her shy charm. As my sister she was courted by handsome young men. I did not blame them for their attentions. I was in no way upset. Esmé’s childlike attachment to me was never in question. I had already made it clear I was content to let her accept their invitations to drive in the park or even to have lunch, though I warned her their intentions would not always be honourable. She should guard against those who invited her to music halls or private suppers. She trustingly accepted my advice without objection. I knew so much more of the world, she said, than did she. In such matters I was her infallible guide, a true brother to her. Sometimes it seemed she had accepted the whole deception as truth. Often she would call me ‘brother’ in private. When we made love, which was rare enough for a whole variety of reasons at that time, she said it gave the occasion a delicious tinge of wickedness, of incest. She remained my fresh, beautiful, unspoiled rose, beyond any real vice; in spirit my virgin girl with the world before her. I myself was at last an adult, so I knew there was plenty of time for her to grow. There was no need for haste. Her girlhood should be enjoyed while she had it. My own youth had been stolen from me by War and Revolution. I envied those who could experience the careless days of adolescence. If I had children I would ensure their absolute security, a long and well planned education. Nothing is gained by early exposure to the world. I felt as if I had a full lifetime behind me, but not one I would wish upon anyone else.
Happily I could leave the Grion’s party early, with Kolya. We said we must discuss engineering problems. At Neuilly, after we had taken some of Kolya’s new cocaine supply, he asked after Esmé. If she continued with her bouts of illness he thought I should engage the specialist he recommended. ‘But possibly she simply suffers from the malaise du papillon.’ I wondered what on earth he meant by ‘the butterfly sickness’. He refused to elaborate, adding: ‘You should be prepared, Dimka, to let her go her own way soon.’
This seemed to me a revelation of unexpected jealousy on Kolya’s part. ‘She has everything she wants! Every freedom she requires. Anything else and she would have it. You know that, Kolya. She’s a child. I have a duty to protect her. Perhaps, when she, too, reaches twenty-one, I’ll marry her. That’s all I expect.’
Kolya was impressed, I think. He agreed there were certain comforts in marriage. He always spoke affectionately of his own wife. He loved her as thoroughly as I loved Esmé. But we were becoming too melancholy. He got up, putting on his clothes. ‘Come along, young Dimka, we’ll go to a decent party now.’
We drove in my Hotchkiss to a nightclub in the Rue Boissy d’Anglais, although it was already two in the morning. Here Kolya felt at ease. It was full of painters and poets. The garish green, red and purple murals were in the latest cubist styles. The music had a frenetic high-pitched neurotic, fitful quality, associated with the current Russian ballets. I was nervous of seeing Seryozha there, for the place seemed crowded with Russians from Kolya’s past; exorcised ghosts lending their sociopathic talents to the general chaos. Here men two-stepped openly with other men. Many women wore tailcoats and had their lascivious arms round young girls. All kissed, squeezed, stroked and touched as they danced. Kolya boldly ordered ‘C et C’ from the waiter and the mixture was brought at once: a magnum of champagne and a little test tube of cocaine. We were almost immediately surrounded by acquaintances, pressing in on our table from the semi-darkness. Some I knew quite well, from our nights at The Scarlet Tango and The Harlequin’s Retreat. They might have come straight from a Petersburg club to this Parisian version without even changing their eccentric clothes. They had seemed harmless enough in those old days, but politicians and gangsters hid amongst them. I assumed the same was true in Paris. Certainly some, who seemed mere clowns, would soon try to squeeze the throat of their protectress Mademoiselle Liberty.