I so wanted to trust that hint of warmth. My mind was leaping ahead, showing me wishful-thinking pictures of sunlight on the water, and us all laughing together – but such pictures, I knew even as I imagined them, were only illusions.
As soon as I’d left her room I went straight to the telephone in the hall.
‘Eliza?’ I whispered, when she came to the phone. ‘What was the name of the ship to Europe the man was talking about last night?’
7
September 1937
‘Two o’clock already,’ General Miller sighed as soon as he’d finished the lunchtime
plat
, showing none of his usual interest in the cheese. ‘I must go …
Davno pora
.’
Constance glanced around, a bit surprised by his change of language. He didn’t always talk Russian with her. His English wasn’t bad at all, even if, after all these years here, his French was still lousy. Her Russian was good enough, but she still preferred to speak English with him. But it only took a moment to see why he’d reverted to his native tongue. The housekeeper was in the doorway, ready to take away the plates.
Constance smiled up at him. Our secret, his eyes flashed back. As usual there was both laughter in them and a mute appeal. It was fine, they were telling her, for Marie-Thérèse to be aware that he sometimes came up from his office on the ground floor for lunch with his old friend one floor up. But anything else was not a housekeeper’s business.
As it happened, there’d been nothing at all private in the conversation they’d been having. In fact, Constance hadspent the meal quietly agonizing over
not
having found a way to broach the big subject on her mind.
Instead they’d just had their usual disagreement about art. It was almost a ritual, this bantering argument, in this big rented apartment, whose fussy pastel-flowered walls and Louis Quinze furniture she’d by now pretty much covered with all her purchases of wildly colourful avant-garde art. He’d shake his head at the latest item, whatever it might be – today a rather magical exquisite-corpse sketch done collectively, one foot or breast or mouth at each fold of the paper, by the wonderfully dishevelled Surrealists she’d fed last night. He’d say, clearly enjoying his mock despair, ‘My God! Another daub! A scrrrible! terrrible!’ while she laughed back and said, ‘Ah, what have you ever understood about art?’ (‘All our exchanges about art are conducted in an atmosphere of controlled mutual contempt,’ she’d once told him wryly, and liked his unabashed reply, ‘Ah, but there is warmth in it, at least, and that is the important thing.’)
But the ordinariness of what they’d been talking about wasn’t the point, she thought tenderly. It didn’t matter whether there was really anything that needed keeping from Marie-Thérèse. It was enough that he felt vulnerable enough to want the protection of secrecy. Russians did, these days. She would, too, if she, like him, were running a White organization whose previous leader had been kidnapped in broad daylight right here on a Parisian street seven years ago, and never been seen again, and the one before that poisoned. She knew that was why there were all those burly young secretaries at the office of his military outfit, which was what the White Army had become afterbeing driven out of Soviet Russia fifteen years ago. They didn’t like him to go about the streets on his own. It was also why she’d taken this grimly conventional apartment in the staid, cheerless 8th arrondissement, when, frankly, she’d rather have been in chic Montparnasse with the art crowd: because the apartment one flight up was the only place he could easily get away to.
If he also wanted to pretend to her housekeeper that he never came back at night, after Marie-Thérèse was safely tucked away upstairs in her
chambre de bonne
, well, that was fine by her, too – even though, for God’s sake, Marie-Thérèse was an unshockable Parisian, who’d surely
As soon as I’d left her room I went straight to the telephone in the hall.
‘Eliza?’ I whispered, when she came to the phone. ‘What was the name of the ship to Europe the man was talking about last night?’
7
September 1937
‘Two o’clock already,’ General Miller sighed as soon as he’d finished the lunchtime
plat
, showing none of his usual interest in the cheese. ‘I must go …
Davno pora
.’
Constance glanced around, a bit surprised by his change of language. He didn’t always talk Russian with her. His English wasn’t bad at all, even if, after all these years here, his French was still lousy. Her Russian was good enough, but she still preferred to speak English with him. But it only took a moment to see why he’d reverted to his native tongue. The housekeeper was in the doorway, ready to take away the plates.
Constance smiled up at him. Our secret, his eyes flashed back. As usual there was both laughter in them and a mute appeal. It was fine, they were telling her, for Marie-Thérèse to be aware that he sometimes came up from his office on the ground floor for lunch with his old friend one floor up. But anything else was not a housekeeper’s business.
As it happened, there’d been nothing at all private in the conversation they’d been having. In fact, Constance hadspent the meal quietly agonizing over
not
having found a way to broach the big subject on her mind.
Instead they’d just had their usual disagreement about art. It was almost a ritual, this bantering argument, in this big rented apartment, whose fussy pastel-flowered walls and Louis Quinze furniture she’d by now pretty much covered with all her purchases of wildly colourful avant-garde art. He’d shake his head at the latest item, whatever it might be – today a rather magical exquisite-corpse sketch done collectively, one foot or breast or mouth at each fold of the paper, by the wonderfully dishevelled Surrealists she’d fed last night. He’d say, clearly enjoying his mock despair, ‘My God! Another daub! A scrrrible! terrrible!’ while she laughed back and said, ‘Ah, what have you ever understood about art?’ (‘All our exchanges about art are conducted in an atmosphere of controlled mutual contempt,’ she’d once told him wryly, and liked his unabashed reply, ‘Ah, but there is warmth in it, at least, and that is the important thing.’)
But the ordinariness of what they’d been talking about wasn’t the point, she thought tenderly. It didn’t matter whether there was really anything that needed keeping from Marie-Thérèse. It was enough that he felt vulnerable enough to want the protection of secrecy. Russians did, these days. She would, too, if she, like him, were running a White organization whose previous leader had been kidnapped in broad daylight right here on a Parisian street seven years ago, and never been seen again, and the one before that poisoned. She knew that was why there were all those burly young secretaries at the office of his military outfit, which was what the White Army had become afterbeing driven out of Soviet Russia fifteen years ago. They didn’t like him to go about the streets on his own. It was also why she’d taken this grimly conventional apartment in the staid, cheerless 8th arrondissement, when, frankly, she’d rather have been in chic Montparnasse with the art crowd: because the apartment one flight up was the only place he could easily get away to.
If he also wanted to pretend to her housekeeper that he never came back at night, after Marie-Thérèse was safely tucked away upstairs in her
chambre de bonne
, well, that was fine by her, too – even though, for God’s sake, Marie-Thérèse was an unshockable Parisian, who’d surely
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