The Russian Album (22 page)

From all corners of Europe, there soon descended on Beauchamps homeless Russian relatives who had to be taken in; Aunt Sonia Wassiltchikoff and her husband Boria, who was slowly dying of tuberculosis contracted in a Bolshevik prison; Uncle Kolya, the squat red-bearded general in the Preobrajensky Guards who had left his family behind in the Ukraine; his son-in-law, the sleek and dapper Colonel Malevsky; and a Judge Misetsky, whose father had been the family priest in Kislovodsk. With only two Cordon Bleu lessons behind her Natasha was soon cooking for twelve Russians at a sitting. When the boys were home from school, she sent them out to find chestnuts with which she made
marrons glacés,
bullet-hard concoctions which played havoc with the judge's false teeth.

For four years, Beauchamps was a crazy Russian circus. Uncle Kolya was put in charge of the wood lot, and every morning he would march into the woods, carrying his axe at the slope, military style, followed by Pug, his faithful Sussex retainer, carrying a dark blue umbrella. Pug and Kolya spent the whole day in the woods, laying up fuel for winter and returning at dusk to wash at the pump. During the boys' holidays from St Paul's, Uncle Kolya would march them along the country lanes down to Hastings, singing the Preobrajensky marching song. The boys were with him once on the sea front at Hastings when the family retriever, named Jack, relieved himself against a lady seated in a deck chair. Uncle Kolya knew only two English phrases, and as the lady rose out of her chair brandishing her umbrella, he tipped his hat, backed away and used both of them: ‘Jack good dog' and ‘I love you.'

Colonel Malevsky was put in charge of a tractor so large for the fields that he could barely turn it at the end of the furrows. Malevsky was enchanted by the tractor but drove it erratically, especially when he had local girls on board. The neighbours got used to pulling a muddy Russian from the ditches, often with a girl underneath.

Judge Misetsky was put in charge of thirty cows. He and the cows did not get on. They would refuse to be milked and he would storm back to the house cursing the English cows for their stubbornness. They would escape and he and Uncle Kolya would have to pursue them through the streets of Battle, once right through the open front door of a sweetshop and out the back.

Every morning, Paul would load the milk cans into the family convertible and make his rounds in the outskirts of Hastings. On school holidays his sons would accompany him, and they were closest then, singing Ukrainian songs as the old automobile rattled down the fragrant English lanes. At every door, Paul would get out, doff his hat and intone in thickly accented English: ‘How much milk, madam?'

Every Sunday, they walked to a little church in the wood at the edge of their farm and joined the parishioners in stout Anglican singing.

In savage lands afar

Heathen darkness reigneth yet

Arise O morning star

Arise and never set.

During term time, the boys learned the English arts of channelling aggression into neatness, politeness and games. Big Dima, gentle, gangling, kindly, made himself into St Paul's boxing champion. Life was harder for his younger brothers, who had to submit to the school regime by day and Peggy's unbending regime by night. Whenever George lost his temper at the boys who jeered at his English and called him – of all things – a ‘Bolshie', the masters would take the contending parties down to the school gymnasium and make them settle the matter with boxing gloves. In his misery, George conceived a durable hatred for the English public school, relieved only by a sense of how ridiculous the English could be. There was a master who used to bellow at them, when he caught them sniggering at the back of class. ‘The sin of Ham, boy! The sin of Ham!' And what was the sin of Ham? Ham was Noah's son, and he came upon his father sleeping naked in a field, and he laughed. ‘And the moral, boy?' the master would bellow. Never laugh at your father's nakedness.

Apart from the holidays at Beauchamps, the boys' other refuge from school and from Peggy was Sunday tea with Uncle Sasha and Aunt Mara Mestchersky in a flat off the Earl's Court Road. Uncle Sasha, Natasha's oldest brother, was a six-foot-six hunchback who went about in a green suit and deerstalker. Aunt Mara was a small onion-shaped woman from the Ukrainian nobility. Sasha and Mara managed to escape in 1920 and came to London, where there was some Mestchersky money, a Mestchersky account at Harrods and a blend of tea in Harrods' food hall called Princess Mestchersky mixture. They had no children and the two of them would pile the Sunday tea table with Russian dishes and watch Natasha's boys, famished from English school food, devour it all. Sasha and Mara lived in a peculiar
ménage à trois
with an old general named Halter, who made a living by forging antique furniture. After tea he would show the boys the little augers he used to make the imitation worm holes. The boys wondered whether there was anything between General Halter and Mara. Much later one of them plucked up the courage to ask and Mara said heavens no, she would die a virgin. She carried her prejudices to the grave, believing, for example, that chimney sweeps were spies for the international Jewish conspiracy.

At half term, George and his brothers would escape from St Paul's and from Peggy and take the train down to the country. Their mother would be at the station to greet them and kiss them and call them by their nicknames and enfold them in their native Russian language. She had learned to sew so that she could replace their buttons and darn their cuffs and she always had a treat for them in the larder. When the oldest ones went to university and came back at the weekends, she had Turkish cigarettes for them and a glass of sherry. Dressed in an old cardigan and a faded striped dress fastened at the neck, Natasha served meal after meal, bringing in the dishes from the kitchen, wandering to and fro, never actually eating, just nibbling on a biscuit or taking a sip of port, listening to her boys chattering and Uncle Kolya and Colonel Malevsky endlessly discussing the disastrous battles of August 1914. Ludendorff's double encirclement of Samsonoff at Tannenberg, the slaughter of the great regiments, still bewitched them and Kolya and Malevsky would refight the battles, with spoons for divisions, knives for batteries, cups for command posts. After the umpteenth refighting of a lost war, Alec, the family tease, asked Kolya what the responsibilities of the Preobrajensky Guards had been.

‘To protect the life of the Tsar.'

‘Then why didn't you?'

Old Uncle Kolya – I feel for him now – his wife and sons left behind in Bulgaria, reduced to dependence on his brother, once an adjutant general on the Imperial General Staff, now a Sussex woodsman with only Pug for company, gripped the table knife till his knuckles were white and stood up amid a hush and shouted, ‘If you were an officer and a gentleman, and not a little schoolboy, I would challenge you to a duel!' Then he was gone, clanking down the passage in his infantryman's boots, slamming the front door, and storming down the gravel path to the woods where he would whittle savagely and brood on the cruelty of children.

That cannot have been the only battle fought at this table between young and old on those school holiday weekends of 1923 and 1924. The first skirmishes in the lifelong disagreement between Nick and his father over the revolution must have occurred here, futile battles about what might have been, with Uncle Boria dying in the upstairs room and Natasha struggling to feed five sons, while the comic-opera troupe of old Russians whom nobody had the heart to dismiss slowly ate the heart out of the farm.

By then a Miss Isobel Adams Brown had moved in next door. She was a Christian Scientist and a saleswoman for the Spirella Corset Company, and once in her youth she had lived on the Ignatieff estate at Kroupodernitsa as companion to Paul's sister Katia. Hearing the Ignatieffs were in the neighbourhood, she moved in next door and fell in love with Paul. At nights, to escape the menagerie at Beauchamps, Paul would walk up the road to Miss Adams Brown and spend the evening, as he put it, ‘doing the accounts'. For company, Natasha turned increasingly to her gynaecologist, a squat little man named Belilovsky who was making a fortune in his London clinic providing heat treatments for Russian émigré women. He would come down by train and listen by the hour as his ‘little countess' poured out her troubles: the money just seemed to disappear, the milk round never netted enough, Paul and Miss Adams Brown seemed to spend every night on the accounts, and the boys came home with tearful stories of school and Peggy.

Back at 10
A
Oxford Road there came a night – some time in 1924 – when Peggy rapped Alec's knuckles with a ruler because he had stumbled over his scales on the piano and he slammed the piano shut and fled the house. He made his way to Belilovsky who went down to Beauchamps to tell Paul that Peggy's regime at 10
A
Oxford Road must be ended, and that for good measure the little countess was breaking down under the strain of cooking for all the Russians as well.

Peggy had been twenty-one when she appeared at the door of the apartment on Galernaya street in Petersburg in 1911. She gave thirteen years of her life to the family. She found them the ship that took them to safety from Novorossisk and in London she found them a roof over their heads. As the reverent photographs of Count Paul in her photograph album attest, she conceived a hopeless and embittering passion for him which helps to explain the frustration behind her ferocious regime. For his part, Paul always enjoyed the flattery of women's illusions. There was a holiday at Easter in 1922 or 1923 when he took her to the Scilly Isles off Land's End on the Cornish coast with two of the boys, leaving Natasha behind. Paul's seductive and elusive smile beams out at Peggy from the photographs she took of that holiday. She held on to those pictures till the end of her life. Back home in her mother's cramped flat in Putney, locked in the routine of raising boys who were not her own, perhaps missing the ease and contentment of Russia as keenly as the rest of them, still unmarried, still fending off Mr Hough, the ship's officer from the
Huanchaco
who wanted to marry her and who wrote an adulatory article about her bravery in the shipping company magazine, she vented her frustration chiefly on Lionel and George. To this day, the oldest boys speak of her with affection, but that is because they got out early enough. The younger ones still cannot forgive her. They were now removed from 10
A
Oxford Road and sent to board at St Paul's. They never saw her again.

Back at Beauchamps, Dr Belilovsky's ultimatum to Paul had its effect. The family dispersed. Aunt Sonia took Uncle Boria to Paris. When he died, she established a finishing school for young ladies which she ran until her own death. Uncle Kolya said goodbye to Pug and his woods and went to Bulgaria to find his wife and sons. There he ended his days as a quiet, gloomy librarian in Sofia. Occasionally he would write a mournful letter asking Paul to remember his old brother and enclosing a postcard of him standing beside his grandfather's statue in the public square in Varna. Judge Misetsky left his cows and went back to Poland, taking along an English nurse whom he had met in a Hastings hospital. Colonel Malevsky went to Paris to help in Paul's work with the Russian Red Cross.

Paul himself was absent from Beauchamps more and more. There were not just the evenings with Miss Adams Brown, but now months on end in Paris at the Russian Red Cross. At first he raised money to send medical supplies to the White Russian armies still fighting against the Red armies in Siberia and then, as the civil war ended, for the flood of refugees in the capitals of Europe. For a time, Russian refugees were a popular cause and he had much success with the charitable rich. But then philanthropic attentions began to wander; other causes began to compete, the money began to dry up. He went to see Herbert Hoover, who had been raising money for Soviet famine relief, and the great man told him the plight of the White Russians was ‘too stale' for the American public. ‘Give me an earthquake or a big flood or some other violent commotion and I would undertake to collect millions in a very short time.' Paul began staying for months at a time in the Hôtel Ramsès in the Square des Batignolles, a dingy square adjacent to a goods yard in northwest Paris. Among the émigré community in Paris he still counted for something. Natasha was left alone at Beauchamps with weekend visits from her boys and Belilovsky.

In the photographs they took of her she is seated on the steps of the old wooden veranda, with her knees up under an old striped frock, always the same one, her hair in an untidy bun, with an aureole of stray grey hairs, her boys around her, laughing soundlessly at a joke or brooding silently in their midst. Increasingly her children protected her as she became more reclusive. When she heard the crunch of a salesman's foot on the gravel or heard Miss Adams Brown or the nosy farming neighbours arriving, she would peek out of the blinds, then steal upstairs to her bedroom and with shooing gestures tell her children to send the intruders away. She bore her hurts in silence: Paul's imperious departures to Paris, his evenings on the accounts with Isobel Adams Brown. When she was fed up with it all, she would lock herself in the bathroom and lie in the bath with a glass of port and mutter to herself.

Paul seemed reconciled to exile, but Natasha continued to ache for the plenty of Russia, for mushrooms in the autumn, for the carpet of wild flowers in the Doughino meadows, for the piles of succulent dill on the market stalls, for the fields of grain. That was what she missed most in the hedged and bordered English countryside, the exuberant, animal plenty of her native land, now in the 1920s starving, verminous, ruined.

Her oldest boys were growing up fast. They towered over her, her five sons, each thin as a rail, each over six feet, loud-voiced, ebullient, melancholy and high-minded like their father. She called them her
durachki
– her little fools. As they became men she teased the seriousness out of them as best she could. She would introduce Nick in company as ‘my eldest, in comparison to whom Napoleon was a mere nonentity'. And Vladimir, with his dangling arms, vast drooping face and lopsided grin, she would call ‘my little wood violet'. They all had nicknames: Alec was Seyka, Lionel was Lino and George, her youngest, she called Giesenka.