The Russian Album (13 page)

In the spring of 1909, to strengthen the children for the coming Petersburg winter, she took them all down to Eupatoria in the Crimea for a holiday. It is there that her son Alec's memory begins. He was three, wearing a sailor suit, sitting in a rowboat with a man in shirtsleeves. Suddenly the boat pitched over and Alec was tossed into the water. There were jellyfish in the water, Alec was screaming and the viscous, milky suckers were closing around him, the milky head pulsating, the tendrils billowing. He awakes now, a man in his late seventies, in the
terra incognita
between memory and nightmare.

There was typhoid at the resort, in the water supply, in the water ices the children ate on the terrace overlooking the sea, in the milk for the littlest one's formula. In two frightful hours, Natasha watched Vladimir come down with the disease, and she saw the life of her youngest – Paul – ebb away before her eyes. In time she managed to speak of all her losses, all her dispossessions, but never this one, never the snuffing out of baby Paul's little life. How many times, in her most secret hours, must she have stalked that accursed ground in her memory wondering what else she might have done, how she might have deflected the falling sword. She never returned to the Crimea again, to those blessed estates of her childhood with the beautiful names – Koreis, Gaspra – but her memory must have marched her back again and again to that hotel bedroom in Eupatoria, to that empty cot. When the time finally came at the end of her life to put down what happened that summer of 1909, she did not write about it at all.

In her silence, I can sense what had been broken and could never be made right again. Paul had not been at the Crimea, he had not lived through those hours with her. He was days away by train in Petersburg, buried in his papers. Was it this, a fatal separation at a terrible hour, that dug the chasm between them, which meant that there was never the same consolation again in his embrace? Paul said only in his clenched way that ‘in her anguish she gave all her attention to her remaining children and cut herself off increasingly from society.' He did not speak of his sorrow, but she withdrew behind the curtains to the solitude of a grieving heart. Through all the waystations of the life to come, she kept just one little picture in a round silver frame on her night table: the smiling image of her dead child.

FIVE

PETROGRAD

In the family album, there is a photograph of Natasha that dates from the period when they came to live in Petersburg in the dark and cluttered apartment on Galernaya street, two blocks from the river Neva behind the English quay. She is dressed for a formal winter evening, a fox fur draped over her shoulders, Brussels lace on the bodice of her dark velvet gown, her hair swept back in a tight chignon and a twelve-stranded pearl choker around her stiffly upright neck. She is thin and pale, the cheekbones of her long angular face taking the light, the eyes deep-set and dark. Her expression is shy and guarded, and she seems at odds with the occasion. Her hands are folded in her lap, the index finger of her right hand curled tautly over her middle finger in a gesture of concealment. She was a private soul: in the public glare, she visibly shrank back. She hated Petersburg society: paying courtesy calls on the wives of Paul's superiors, laying her calling card on silver trays, making curtseys and small talk and all the while feeling she was up on a high wire one step from a fall.

The photograph may be one of those taken by a court photographer during the celebrations held at the Winter Palace in honour of the 300th anniversary of the Romanoff dynasty in 1913. If indeed this is the occasion, she had just passed through the ritual of a presentation to the Empress. Masters of ceremonies in court uniforms, carrying tall gilded sticks, would sort the society ladies by rank and form up processions to the throne, each lady holding the train of the lady ahead. Natasha went with her sister Sonia and they stood in line holding each other's train, joking like schoolgirls until they were ushered forward and had to curtsey quickly and move away before the ladies behind took their places. In the blur there was time only for an instant's glance at the glazed, frozen face of the Empress framed between glittering ropes of pearls that descended from her headdress. Immediately afterwards Natasha was ushered before the photographers set up in an adjacent room of the Winter Palace, and there in a puff of magnesium flare, she was fixed unblinking in the amber of another world.

On that evening in 1913 she was in her thirty-sixth year, mistress of a large household, wife of a rising star of the Petersburg bureaucracy, mother of ‘four little wretches', Nicholas, Vladimir (Dima), Alec and Lionel. She was also expecting a fifth child, who was to be my father, George. In that blurred round of middle age, punctuated by the children's whooping coughs and typhoids, their winter colds and summer fevers, she watched half-aware as the ice formed at the heart of her marriage. In the bedroom, Paul now rose at seven and was assisted in his exercises, his ablutions and his dressing by Demian, his valet. While she remained in bed, he would breakfast downstairs with the children and their nannies. On busy mornings, Natasha remembered, ‘he simply swallowed newspaper and breakfast and no end of phone calls,' and then hurried off down Galernaya street along the quays of the Neva to the Ministry of Agriculture. At seven he would return, bolt down his dinner and set to work on the portfolios brought to him by the office courier. And ‘so till midnight', she remembered sadly, ‘just work and every day for years the same routine'.

From the start, Paul was determined to resist becoming just another Petersburg bureaucrat. Within months of his arrival at the ministry, he had taken his fight to help the peasantry with loans, education and technical assistance right to meetings of Cabinet, while his own Minister, Krivoshein, tugged nervously at his coat-tails to make him sit down. When the Finance Minister muttered that Ignatieff's proposals smacked of Bismarckian state socialism, Paul replied that he preferred to experiment with state socialism rather than wait ‘until the mob, which cannot understand where it is being led by the government, adopts its own simpler solutions and sweeps us away with all our culture'. An old admiral, representing the navy at the Cabinet, was so impressed that he offered the agriculture department expenditure credits worth half a battleship.

Natasha did her best to interest herself in his work, but could not share his worthy fascination with peasant land banks and credit schemes to enable small holders to purchase new machinery, the minutiae of his commitment to the liberalism of small deeds. When she tried to involve him in her life, a round of children's illnesses and endless petty struggles with the servants, his mind would stray back to his papers. In those moments when they were alone together, she shrank from him, either pregnant or recovering from pregnancy, unable to satisfy him, accumulating a weight of grief and guilt about their relations that burdened her heart until her last night alive. Of his own feelings about the widening gulf within their marriage, Paul never spoke.

Towards his sons Paul was an indulgent, if absent, father. He took his breakfast with them and read them items from his morning newspaper. When the
Titanic
went down, he read them the whole front page. On most days he let them walk with him to work, before they went back to their lessons with their tutors in the schoolroom of the apartment. He was back again at night for prayers and then in the summer holidays he took them sailing in the Baltic. On one of these holidays at a ‘mucky' (Natasha's word) German resort called Misdroy, a picture was taken of the family standing in the sand in front of a cane and canvas beach hut. The boys are in ankle boots and sailor suits. Lionel, still a baby, is making a crazy face in the arms of a stout, brown-faced nursemaid while Paul has his arm around Dima, who leans against his father. Paul is wearing a cloth cap in honour of the holiday and he is whistling through his moustache, with a vague, happy expression on his face. He looks as if he is about to buy them all ice cream.

Natasha is wearing a high white blouse fastened at the neck, underneath a full-length travelling coat, and she looks happy and relaxed, her hand resting on little Nicholas's shoulder. Next to her stands a small round-faced black-haired girl in a white servant's uniform. She was Tonia, the eldest boys' nursery maid, and next to her stands a new arrival in the family, a firm-jawed and unsmiling Englishwoman of twenty-one called Peggy Meadowcroft.

In 1912, Natasha applied to an agency in London for a governess. The three eldest boys, by then eight, seven and six, were cadging cigarettes from the cab drivers on the corners and getting into fights. They were becoming more than either Natasha or a succession of nannies could handle, and the boys were demanding that if they had to have a nanny at all, she had better be a pretty one for a change. In due course a stern, fair-skinned girl with golden hair in a broad Edwardian straw hat, a lace choker and a white high-waisted dress arrived with her suitcases at the house on Galernaya. Paul took one look at her and announced, ‘Now hooliganism will be controlled.'

Hooliganism was most emphatically controlled. Peggy Meadowcroft, beneath her fey and feminine straw hats, turned out to be a redoubtable Edwardian adventuress from the lower middle class, armoured with a brisk sense of British cultural superiority. The reign of old Russian chaos was ended. From the beginning, she gave everyone a piece of her mind: the boys for their dirty ears and messy writing, the ladies' maids for their slovenly way with a tucked-in corner, the cooks for the sloppy unpunctuality of her meals. She quickly learned to speak a Russian that surrendered nothing to the accents of Putney. The boys, now edging towards adolescence, were dazzled by her good looks, whispered together under the covers about what they saw when she was wearing that translucent nightie of hers, and watched open-mouthed as she waded into Russian life. When she took them out on walks and came across some old broken-down cab driver beating his horse, she did not hesitate for an instant. Waving her brolly, she would stride across the street and bring the descending whip to a halt in mid-air as she shouted in her high-pitched Putney Russian. The boys would stand on the icy quay, watching the crowd gather and not knowing whether to burn with shame or glow with pride. Natasha was guarded and correct with Peggy, irritated with her ‘bored stiff look' and her humourless bustle. As a wife, she watched the glances that Peggy began casting in her husband's direction and the glances that were returned. Among the photos Peggy took of a family holiday in Switzerland in the hills above Lausanne, during the summer of 1913, there is one reverently labelled Count Paul, of him standing in an alpine meadow, leaning jauntily on a walking stick, knapsack over his shoulder, smiling broadly beneath his moustaches. His gaze seems to bask in hers. They must have gone walking in the mountains alone together. In the same album, there is one of Natasha back at the Grand Hôtel Muverand heavily pregnant, sitting in a wicker chair in the hotel garden, wearing a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun off her face. She is holding on to a walking stick to help her keep her balance. Peggy has asked her to pose and Natasha's averted gaze flickers with a sense of invaded privacy.

The light in the photograph is the pale, bleached glow of autumn, a season that filled Natasha with melancholy. She stayed on with the boys after Paul returned to Petersburg, and the Grand Hôtel Muverand stayed open just for them. She felt heavy and wretched. It was the season of the grape harvest. The vines on the hillside below the hotel were loaded with swollen grapes. She sat on the terrace in the sun trying to gather her strength.

George, my father, was born in the bedroom of 67 Galernaya in Petersburg in December 1913, a child with curly auburn hair – an Ignatieff rather than a Mestchersky in the round fullness of his face, the only one of her children, she thought, who really looked like his father. He cried solidly for six weeks, and when placed in the baptismal font held on to his blanket with a grip no one could loosen. At the baptism, the family priest Father Nicholas placed around his neck a gold cross given him by his grandmother Ignatieff, which he wears to this day.

He arrived into the family just as its fortunes were about to take a dramatic turn. Early in 1914, Paul was named joint heir of the Maltsev industrial empire. Yuri Nechaev Maltsev, an old bachelor, had built up one of the largest industrial fortunes in Russia. His factories southwest of Moscow were one of the pistons driving that frantic industrialization which made Russia the world's fastest-growing economy before the First World War. Cotton from the American South funnelled through Liverpool was turned into cloth and thread in two of the factories, while other plants turned out everything from thermometers to cement. Over 20,000 workmen worked in these factories and lived in a Pullman-type industrial town under the benevolent despotism of old man Maltsev. The women gave birth in his hospitals, their children went to his schools and on Sunday they prayed in his church.

A man without education himself, Maltsev had a reverence for learning and when Ivan Tsevetaev was seeking a patron to support his project of a museum to house Moscow University's collection of plaster replicas of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, it was Maltsev who found him the money. The shrivelled multimillionaire was there leaning on his cane on the grand morning in May 1912 when Nicholas II inaugurated the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow – now the Pushkin Museum – built with his benefactions.

Maltsev was a lonely man who gave elaborate Christmas parties for the Ignatieff boys and who showered all the family with gifts on weddings and anniversaries, even though the family connection between the Maltsevs and Ignatieffs was indirect. Paul was stunned when the lawyers broke the seal on Maltsev's will and announced – to general amazement – that he was to be Maltsev's heir. There was just one catch. Paul inherited the factories themselves, while a friend and relative, Prince Demidoff, inherited the capital.