Gorsky Read online

  At one point nothing remained but a wall of honeyed stone with tall elegant windows and, behind it, heavy metal girders supporting the dome under which, further beyond, you could glimpse the Thames in its languid flow. It seemed as though I was witnessing the building of the Tower of Babel, turned upside down in obeisance to British planning laws, and plunging into the flaming heart of our planet.

  I soon got used to the tremors that shook my new dwelling. I took to fragmentation like a fish to water: contingency was my element, my natural habitat. I wondered what, if anything, Natalia could feel across two lanes of traffic and the two hundred yards of her front garden, inside her cottage-within-a-castle set-up, if that’s what it was. There was no amount of money that could keep things as quiet for anyone in London as successfully as having no money at all. There must be whole squares in the few still unfashionable parts of the East End that have seen no building work in two decades, not even a lick of paint. But everywhere around here the drilling, the digging and the movements of men, machinery and materials were never-ending.

  Had she wanted peace and quiet, I reasoned, she would not have settled in Chelsea. She would have purchased, if not a stately home, then some former general’s or MP’s house tucked away in Hampshire or Dorset, a place with its own trout stream. British generals and parliamentarians no longer had the sort of capital needed to keep the trout swimming. It was easy to get hold of a quiet abode if you kept ten million in your current account.

  I locked the bookshop promptly at five and walked through squares of tall Victorian mansion blocks and down the King’s Road with a parcel under my arm. I was in a daze, rehearsing possible variants of short speeches, in case Natalia opened the door in person. I was keen to make an impression although I wasn’t sure about its purpose. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know more than the sketchiest nothings which fuelled my thoughts of her.

  Her Russianness did not affect me in the way Russianness seems to affect British men, with that undercurrent of sexual thrill that was there even when they weren’t sure whether to cast these East European beauties as submissive pre-feminist goddesses, designed – and designing themselves – purely to please men, or as scary Amazons from James Bond movies ready to exploit your every weakness, each one an impossible cross between Lara Croft and Felix Dzerzhinsky. And although I found it fascinating, Natalia’s wealth wasn’t in itself attractive. There seemed to be just too much of it; it was the kind of money that not only begets money but demands its own space, its own share of your life. It was the kind of money that takes over and becomes a full-time occupation.

  The kind of wealth I envied was the getting-by sort, the Christopher Fynch sort, the equivalent of a couple of hundred thousand pounds somehow forever topping itself up in your deposit account even as you eat your steak au poivre and drink your claret; the sort of money that cascaded down the generations and seeped through ramshackle businesses and holes in moth-eaten dinner jackets until everyone forgot where it came from; the sort of money that wasn’t even affluence so much as a sense of entitlement. I had always known that there were millionaires and billionaires, but Fynch’s capital was the sort of wealth I’d never known existed until I came to England.

  My mother, a school teacher and the family treasurer, divided banknotes into six envelopes on the first of every month when my parents received their salaries in cash: standing charges, food, clothing, pocket money, holidays and savings. Everything that remained unspent in the first five envelopes on the last day of the month went into that final one, to translate eventually into a washing machine or a TV set, or to be put aside for a rainy day. These came with inevitable regularity: things broke down, wore out, died.

  Christopher Fynch’s money gave you choices without obligations. I couldn’t see why someone like Thomas Summerscale would even want to make the leap from the world of that money – the sort of money his old-school diplomat father would doubtless have possessed – to the world he now moved in. Was it his greed to possess women like Natalia, or did it originate in a drive stronger than that – boredom with the Christopher Fynches and their England, a desire to ride with the global big boys? Or simply circumstance? Finding himself in Russia in the early 1990s, with all that cash floating about amid so much poverty, must have done strange things to men like Summerscale. How does a respectable English barrister become a carpetbagger, a court advisor to the new tsars? What does such a transformation do to a man’s mind?

  The bell echoed down some endless corridor as I stood between two CCTV cameras which pointed at the top of my head while I tried discreetly to wipe my feet on a thick doormat flanked by carefully trimmed bay trees in huge black pots carved from what looked like obsidian. By the time I reached The Laurels the rain had seeped into my shoes and was creeping up my socks. I wasn’t sure whether I’d be invited in and, if I were granted entry, was even less sure what kind of etiquette the Summerscale household observed. When I worked as au pair, my ‘house mother’ insisted on people taking their shoes off inside the front door and walking barefoot across the marble floors. Everything in that household was ‘bohemian’ in a neurotic, controlling kind of way, so casual it allowed no dissent. Natalia could not possibly be like that. She did not seem like a woman who would notice whether a man was wearing shoes, or deign to worry about wet socks.

  I imagined acres of white Bukhara carpets ahead of me and the imprints my feet might leave on them. I could, perhaps, drop the parcel and run. Or would they, if I did so, replay the film from their CCTV and point, laughing, inviting Daisy to join in? There was no way to get out now. Like the clerk Yepikhodov and his squeaking boots, my wet feet and I seemed destined to play bit parts in the Summerscale rendition of The Cherry Orchard.

  As I waited for the door to open and listened out for footsteps, conjuring different possibilities, I never expected to see Thomas Summerscale in front of me. He materialised, barefoot, wearing an old Aran jumper and a pair of threadbare red corduroy trousers. He pushed a mop of hair off his face before he offered his hand in a handshake.

  ‘Good evening, Nicholas. I am Tom. Tom Summerscale. Please come in. Natalia told me to expect you,’ he said, somehow implying by his expression that she had told him much more than that, that he thought she and I were friends.

  He clearly did not expect me to take off my shoes although I wasn’t too far off on the white silk Bukhara. The softest, whitest pile imaginable stretched ahead of me. Behind the double front door, it covered acres of the vast lobby, lit by a huge chandelier suspended from the high ceiling and constructed of strangely twisted glass, like a teeming nest of translucent serpents. It was a near twin – almost as big – of the Chihuly chandelier in the lobby of the V&A. Pieces of artwork dotted the cavernous space. It was soundproofed so well that I could hear my own heartbeat. Around us stood several life-size classical statues in white marble, their broken fingers pointing at the ceiling or the door. One held a couple of scarves across its sole surviving arm. The head of another was half obscured by a small straw boater with a blue grosgrain ribbon.

  Summerscale stood there and smiled, allowing me moments to take it all in. He was clearly used to his visitors’ double-take, though he did not look like someone who had much interest in any of the pieces around us. He made no effort to explain what they were, although I hardly managed to hide my curiosity.

  On one wall hung an enormous black canvas overlaid with smaller squares in different shades of black. Against the opposite wall, propped on the floor rather than hung, was an equally huge framed monochrome photograph of a toothless man leering into the camera. He stood in the middle of what looked like the bleakest of Communist marketplaces. Rows of empty stands roofed with rusting corrugated metal sheeting and dusted with scraps of dirty snow stretched behind him. I did not notice, until I had almost passed the image, that the man’s penis hung out of his open flies. It was shrivelled but enormous nonetheless, the most obscenely sized detumescent male organ imaginable. The thought that Daisy had to walk past it ev
ery day seemed even more gross than the photograph itself.

  ‘Russians, eh!’ Summerscale laughed at my effort to pretend I wasn’t shocked, and slapped me on the back as if to encourage me to speed up. It was only then that I saw that he was carrying, under his left arm, a copy of Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. It was one of those thick history books Fynch could never afford to run out of: a ‘steady seller’, in our corner of London, for people who needed to spice their prosperous and comfortable lives with tales of horror and desperation that bore the hallmark of history, rather than mere entertainment. There was something of Antony Beevor about Tom Summerscale’s appearance too, although Summerscale was both more muscular and more caddish.

  ‘Are you enjoying that?’ I nodded towards the volume. An embroidered bookmark stuck out between its pages about two thirds of the way through.

  ‘The Russians,’ he repeated, this time with a shrug and without making any effort to respond to my question. He was now taking me through another double doorway and blocking my view into the room as he turned towards me. I was, at five foot eight, a good five inches shorter than him, and I weighed probably a third less.

  ‘You can’t defeat them unless they wish to be defeated. They are like beasts. They will die in their millions, without needing the consolations of an afterlife. You’ll never find such men and women anywhere else. Forget about the Muslims. They blow themselves up in the hope of seventy-two cherries to pop. The Russians are scarier. They fight hoping for nothing. Do you know Natalia is from Stalingrad? Volgograd as it was called by the time she was born. Daddy was a Stalingrad rat, fifteen in 1945. It takes a special kind of zest to survive all that and then procreate so unstoppably. He had five children in a country in which most people stop at two. And not even religious. Unless you count Communism …’

  Summerscale sighed as though a zest for life was not altogether a praiseworthy trait and turned sideways to let me through. At the far end of the drawing room, there was Natalia, in a dress so simple it could have been a taller girl’s version of her daughter’s school uniform. She was sitting on a blindingly white sofa, holding the hands of another woman and smiling at me in welcome as though nothing in her husband’s speech related to her or as though she had not heard any of it. She made no effort to explain to Summerscale that there was no way I could have known where she was born, that I was neither her cousin nor her friend, that I was barely even an acquaintance.

  ‘Let me relieve you of that,’ Summerscale said with a faint snigger. He took the book parcel from me and handed it to a maid who was standing to attention a couple of feet away. She held it in both hands like a salver and continued to stand on the same spot, awaiting orders.

  The woman next to Natalia looked extraordinary. She seemed considerably shorter – although not short herself – and she wore a tight red jersey dress, like a V-neck jumper, which ended just above her knees. Underneath it, her body seemed constructed from a bundle of thick ropes tied tightly against each other, all muscle and bone and artificially tanned skin. Her collarbones jutted out to such a degree that a pendant she wore on a thin gold chain around her neck almost disappeared behind them. Her small pert breasts looked as though they were made of muscle and not of fat deposits. It was obvious that she was wearing no bra, but also that she did not need one. Her erect nipples showed through like buttons on shirt pockets.

  I am talking about this woman’s body because I have no idea of how to begin to describe her face. It was uncannily familiar, somehow youthful but older than it should be – like those computer simulations that artificially age a young face. Her skin was that of a windsurfer, not so much wrinkled as damaged by exposure to sun, but it clung tightly to her high cheekbones: it seemed as though her skull was coming through. Yet she was bubbling with energy and somehow handsome with it all.

  ‘Gergana Pekarova,’ Natalia said and released Gergana’s hands. Pekarova jumped to her feet and grasped both of my hands simultaneously. Her handshake – left- and right-handed alike – was firmer than Tom Summerscale’s and that is saying something.

  ‘Gery is a famous Bulgarian gymnast, an Olympic gold medallist,’ Summerscale added as he disappeared off into the bowels of the house.

  ‘She is my personal trainer. And my daughter’s …’ Natalia explained. She showed no intention to stand up or shake my hand.

  ‘And art advisor,’ Pekarova said with a faintest smile. You did not know whether she was joking or not. She looked sophisticated enough to make the claim plausible.

  She led me to an armchair which faced the sofa at an angle. The leather the chair was made of, like the sofa, was covered in tiny bumps. I wondered what creature – or more likely hundreds of them – was sacrificed to create these items. My urge to stroke the arms of the chair was only marginally weaker than the fear of leaving my fingerprints all over. Some poor soul was likely to be dealing with my wet footprints in the lobby at that very moment.

  Natalia nodded at the servant who unwrapped the parcel, deposited the book on an embroidered footstool, folded the wrapping paper into a neat square, then waited again.

  ‘Please let Boyana and Maria know that we are ready,’ Gergana Pekarova said and dismissed the woman.

  Natalia smiled at me and thanked me for the book, barely glancing at it.

  Behind the sofa stood a glass pillar encasing an amazing scene: snowflakes falling on a statue of a naked man. His figure was a couple of feet tall and apparently made of frozen blood. His empty sockets stared towards me like the eyes of a monstrous aborted foetus.

  Two maids wheeled in an enormous silver samovar. I stood up to leave but Natalia touched my arm.

  ‘Stay,’ she said. She spoke softly, yet uttered an order nonetheless. It was a tone one might use to housetrain a Pomeranian puppy. I felt my face spread into a smile, the likeness of which I had not attempted since I left my socialist kindergarten.

  Gery Pekarova thanked the women in Bulgarian and started busying herself with platefuls of pastries and sandwiches, all the while asking questions about Fynch’s bookshop and me, about both of which she was, apparently, well informed. Did I enjoy my work, do people read nowadays, what sort of books, how do we decide what to stock among the thousands of titles published every year? While I fielded the barrage of questions, Natalia listened, silent.

  When, in turn, I asked Pekarova about her life behind the Iron Curtain and her successes as a gymnast, she responded half-heartedly – not so much evasively but as though the topic bored her. Natalia turned away from me, looked into the eyes of the bloody foetus behind her, and sighed.

  ‘Let us not talk about Communism,’ she said. ‘It is so boring. You sound so English, Mr Kimović. What Iron Curtain? I have never seen it. Have you? Let us talk of art, of beautiful things.’

  I did not dare say that her art collection, judging by what was on show inside The Laurels, hardly inspired talk of beautiful things. Yet her eyes – and Gery’s – lit up when I obeyed and started praising the pieces on display everywhere around us. I recognised broad trends; I guessed at names; I faked enthusiasm. Gery put a price tag on every piece, each amounting to more than the price of a small house, even in this corner of the city. And every time Gery mentioned a sum, Natalia rolled her eyes slightly – as if to indicate that she disagreed with such a display of vulgar instincts – yet she did not stop her. Natalia clearly knew the market much better than I would have given her credit for, and she did not collect only the Russians. There were the Young Brits, the Spaniards and the French, even a piece by a Vietnamese installation artist based in Zurich, a sewing machine twisted to look like a racehorse.

  It was a matter of huge sorrow, the women agreed, that they did not manage to secure Tracey Emin’s tent, although they bid hundreds of thousands of pounds for it. Had it been at The Laurels, Gery said, it would not have perished in the fire.

  I had a vague memory of a blaze that destroyed a number of artworks in a warehouse in East London some years previously. I was taken aback by the passi
on with which they spoke of Emin, referring to the artist by her first name and with the warmth normally reserved for friends or family members.

  ‘I’d have given Tracey a whole room,’ Natalia sighed, ‘I admire her work so much. I’d have put it on a green Bessarabian kilim, against my favourite Chinese wallpaper with cherry trees, to make it look real. What do you think, Gery? Like a camping site in Kent, in Margate, no?’

  She pronounced the name as though it was French – Ma-gatte – in a way that did not suggest that she was more than abstractly familiar with England. That the three of us should have converged on London from our different corners of Eastern Europe to sit on dodo or basilisk skin and eat macaroons while discussing Tracey Emin’s embroidery felt more than surreal. I had rehearsed Russian and Soviet art stories on the way there, hoping to impress Natalia, yet the only time she displayed a glimmer of curiosity about me was when, on our third porcelain cup of Oolong tea, Pekarova and I started discussing Serbian tennis.

  ‘Djoković,’ said the Bulgarian, ‘your compatriot, no? A handsome boy. Sexy.’

  Natalia suddenly stood up and took us both by the hand.

  ‘I have a great idea, Gery. Why don’t you and Mr Kimović take my tickets for the Wimbledon finals this year? I am sick of corporate hospitality. All those friends of Tom’s trying to be entertaining. And I don’t even think that strawberries and champagne go together. The English have the palates of small boys.’

  She placed Gery’s hand over mine and held them thus. The Bulgarian threw an extraordinary smile in my direction. Her tanned cheeks sank under her cheekbones while her lips, covered by a thick layer of red lipstick, plumped up over her improbably white teeth. She looked like a female – or not so female – version of Mick Jagger, yet I had to admit that, although outlandish, she was far from unattractive. Her fine long legs and her long neck gave her the appearance of a thoroughbred Arabian horse. Without Natalia to compare her to, I would even have called her sexy.