Skeleton-in-Waiting (6 page)

Mrs Walsh seemed now to have recognised who Louise was. She dipped into a centimetre of curtsey but made no effort to leave. Louise, partly to give Aunt Bea as much ammunition as she could for coping with such a neighbour, also out of straight curiosity, stepped forward and shook hands.

“Don't go,” she said. “I've only come to give Aunt Bea her Christmas present. Do you know Lady Caroline Crupper?”

Mrs Walsh bowed her head towards Carrie and deliberately as a moving spotlight returned her gaze to Louise, using the convention that one waits for royalty to speak first to maintain herself at the centre of attention. Louise smiled at her and turned to Aunt Bea.

“Can Carrie and I rustle up a cup of tea?” she said. “We've been listening to speeches about deserts.”

“Oh, no, my dear. I'm sure I can find everything. I'm still unpacking, bit by teeny bit, but of course I got the tea-pot out first.
So
essential.”

“I'll come and help,” said Carrie. “Four?”

Mrs Walsh nodded, waited for Louise to sit, and lowered herself into one of Aunt Bea's bungy chairs, where she settled erect, looking regally out of place, like a hawk Louise had seen in a palace in one of the Gulf States on a quilted satin perch.

“Have you lived here long, Mrs Walsh?”

“For fifty years, Your Highness, since my husband retired as Junior Chamberer to His late Majesty.”

Did Mrs Walsh have the trace of an accent? Granny's had come and gone as she fancied. Fifty years—Great-grandfather had died in 1938.

“He didn't stay on for my father?” said Louise.

“He was somewhat older than I am, and it seemed convenient to the Palace that the young King should have attendants nearer his own age.”

“But you must have known Granny,” said Louise. “That'll give you something to talk to Aunt Bea about.”

Mrs Walsh for the first time smiled, tight-lipped.

“I fear not,” she said. “As Your Highness may be aware, your grandparents' marriage was not welcomed in certain quarters, and communications between the two households were maintained on a merely formal basis. I had in fact met your grandmother once, in Petersburg, when we were both girls, but never in England.”

The accent was still indeterminate, but in this slightly longer speech Louise could tell for certain, even before the reference to being a girl in St Petersburg, that Mrs Walsh had not been born English. Her precision of enunciation was like that of some of the German cousins, governess-taught, but the rhythms were slightly different from theirs.

“Are you a Romanov too?” she said. “You look a bit like her.”

Again Mrs Walsh smiled her thin smile, expressing not amusement but some error or misconception on Louise's part.

“I am a Belitzin,” she said. “It is true that my grandmother was acquainted with the Grand Duke Aleksei Aleksandrovich, whose reputation was such that slander could not be avoided. Had there been any truth in it, which there is not, your grandmother and I would have been second cousins.”

Louise nodded. She was long used to the way in which people want to keep their cake of legitimacy and eat it in the shape of a royal connection.

“But family likenesses are extraordinary, aren't they?” she said. “I was looking at my son in his cot the morning Granny died, and suddenly he looked just like her for a bit. I wonder if people with strong characters like Granny are more likely to be taken after. Do you have any children, Mrs Walsh?”

“One, Your Highness.”

Not a welcome question, obviously.

“How did you come to England in the first place? During the revolution, I suppose.”

Mrs Walsh did not exactly hesitate, but Louise sensed calculation in the brief pause.

“During the revolution, yes. We were fleeing from the Bolsheviks like everyone else. Our major domo bought us places on a train—my mother, my three youngest brothers, two or three servants, all the valuables we could carry. At first we travelled in a little comfort in a proper carriage, though it was very crowded, but then that was commandeered by a general of one of the armies, fleeing like us, and we continued our journey in a cattle truck. Later still our truck was pushed into a siding to wait because an axle had caught fire. The others in the truck crammed themselves into the rest of the train, but my mother decided to wait for another train in the hope that she would know someone in authority aboard and get a carriage again. So we waited. The siding served some mine. There was no town, nothing. Trains went by and did not stop. We finished our food. We waved and screamed at the passing trains. After three days we and the servants dragged timbers onto the track and stopped a train. It was full of soldiers, not Russian, not English—Serbs, I learnt later—going east, defeated, ragged. Some of them climbed out to drag the timbers clear, but when we approached the carriages to plead to come aboard others climbed down and struck at the servants with their rifles and started to drag me and my mother towards the train. We knew at once it was not because they wished to help us. One of my brothers tried to fight them but they cut him down. Then two men came running down the track and began to argue and struggle with the soldiers. One of them had a pistol and shouted at the soldiers in English, so we screamed at him in English, which of course we knew, for help. I was told later that the soldiers were running away from the battle because they had no ammunition left, but the Englishman had bullets for his pistol, so he fired a few shots and forced the soldiers to let us go. By now the track was clear and the soldiers climbed back onto the train, but somebody had found bullets for his rifle and he fired at us and killed one of the Englishmen, so we ran back to our wagon and the train left without us. The Englishman told us the next train would be full of Bolsheviks, so we buried my brother and the dead Englishman and walked away southwards. Fifteen months later we reached England, my husband and I and our daughter. All the others had died on the way. That is how I came to England. I was then seventeen.”

Louise felt ambushed. In the nature of her work, visiting

AIDS hospices, refugee camps, famine relief centres, aftermaths of tragedies, she was used to being confronted with stories of everyday but still extraordinary suffering, everyday but still extraordinary endurance. Father used to say that one of the main categories in the royal job-description was specialist social worker. You had to acquire a sort of soft shell which allowed you to feel and express compassion without being overwhelmed. Now, though, she felt momentarily at a loss, having Mrs Walsh's story sprung on her, with its remoteness and horror and illusory romance. It took her an inward blink before the well-worn phrases came to her lips.

“But that must have been terrible! What an adventure! Why doesn't everyone know about it?”

Again that smile.

“There was a time when the world might have known,” said Mrs Walsh. “My husband was not a regular soldier. He was an adventurer, an explorer, a passionate anti-Bolshevik. He had attached himself to the Serbian brigade in order to fight for the cause he believed in, and though your War Office had given him some kind of semi-official status in order that he might act as liaison officer with the British contingents, when he returned to England with his health broken after his hardships they refused to accept any responsibility. We sold what was left of my jewels, apart from this, which was given to me by my mother as she died.”

She raised a hand to the brooch in her toque. So the diamonds were real, Louise thought. She herself preferred costume jewellery, but there were functions at which she was expected to parade around wearing gew-gaws worth several decent semi-detacheds. The brooch looked in that class.

“We were penniless,” said Mrs Walsh. “So we decided to write a book about our adventure. There was a great interest in our war then, and many books published. Nobody cares to remember about it now—it is an embarrassment between the great powers. Be that as it may, we had high hopes of success. But the publishers we had chosen proved weak and incompetent, and when pressure was put on them from certain quarters they made excuses and delayed, and then went bankrupt.”

“That's awful!”

“It was, mercifully, the end of our misfortunes. The copies were already printed, and knowing His late Majesty's view on Bolshevism my husband had taken the liberty of sending him one. His Majesty himself, as you may be aware, read very little, but his interest was aroused enough for him to express a wish to meet us, and when he discovered our plight he was gracious enough to offer my husband a post at the Palace, with residence and stipend.”

“Yes, I see. Great-grandfather was a funny old thing, but he got it right sometimes. I'd love to read the book. Have you got a copy you could lend me?”

“Sadly, no. The warehouse in which they were stored was bombed in 1942, so we lost every copy.”

“And you've never thought of writing it again?”

“No.”

“It would make a terrific film.”

Mrs Walsh smiled. You could tell she had lived a lot of her life in a formal court, in which only royalty could change the subject so the courtiers had to find ways of signalling that it was time to do so.

“You must have found life a bit dull at the Palace, after everything you'd been through,” said Louise.

Mrs Walsh nodded. There was for the first time a sense of some barrier coming down, an acceptance that Louise, unlike most people, was in a position to understand the peculiar boringness of court boredom.

“For myself, no,” she said. “After adventures such as we had endured dullness can be very precious. For my husband—he was, as I told you, an adventurer, but …”

She fell silent at the movement of the door. Aunt Bea came wheezing in, followed by Carrie with the tea-tray. By the time they had settled and the cups had been poured Mrs Walsh had withdrawn into her hawk-like remoteness. Louise tried to imagine her on her adventure, sixteen—softer-looking then, surely, but with those clear, chilly grey eyes—screaming at passing trains for help, or tramping the immense Russian landscape—they'd gone south, but even there the winters could be icy and they must have got through a winter somehow—the mother dying, the rest of the family too, or lost on the way—and then the love affair with the Englishman who had saved her. Love, really? Looking at her now it was hard to imagine her loving anyone. Seduction? Rape? The mere need to share warmth in sub-zero hutments? Perhaps they'd found some louse-ridden drunken priest, fleeing the Bolsheviks as they were, to marry them. A year of that, the high plateaux, the fierce but uplifting primitiveness of places and people, the endless danger—and then to dwindle into the notoriously stifling ennui of Great-grandfather's court. What a marriage.

“Mrs Walsh has been telling me that she met Granny in St Petersburg when they were both girls,” said Louise.

“No!” whispered Aunt Bea.

“And she had astounding adventures escaping from the Communists.”

“Dear me. Do you mean to say, Mrs Walsh, that you can actually speak Russian, like HRH?”

“It is my native tongue, Lady Surbiton.”

“Well, I must say, that might be very convenient.”

“What on earth do you mean, Aunt Bea?”

“Well, you see, my dear, HRH did at one point insist on giving me lessons in Russian, only I was so stupid, and now I have all these letters to sort through. I just thought Mrs Walsh might be interested in helping …”

Aunt Bea looked round the other three with the innocent and vulnerable appeal of a child who doesn't expect to understand the adult world, but assumes that someone will come and hold her hand and show her what to do. For the first time it crossed Louise's mind that though it had appeared to everyone that Granny had mercilessly used and abused Aunt Bea—persecuting her with Russian lessons was a typical ploy—the traffic in exploitation might have gone both ways.

“These are letters people wrote to Granny, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes, some of them. But do you remember, after the funeral, you brought a man called Alex Romanov to talk to me? There's a whole thick box of copies of letters HRH sent to him. I think that's what they must be. He was talking about them. Carbon copies you know.”

“That doesn't sound like Granny at all. Hang on. He did say she'd started using a hard pencil—she'd need that for carbons. They must be absolute hell to read.”

“Oh, yes, dreadful. Like those scribbles on walls. In Russian, too.”

“Honestly, it would be hardly fair on Mrs Walsh … wouldn't you do best just to sling the whole lot off to the Palace and ask them to sort it out?”

“Oh, no, my dear. You know what HRH thought of the Palace. And somebody's got to go through them. I've no idea what she's saying, but she could be very, very personal, you know.”

Louise glanced at Carrie, who nodded. The signals were a joint mental note, so that in the car Carrie would say “Something about the Dowager's papers?” and Louise would then get out her Filofax and make a physical note to get Joan to telephone Sir Sam …

“What did you make of Alex Romanov?—You might have known his mother, Mrs Walsh. Apparently she acted as a sort of gossip-exchange for the whole family.”

“We saw very little of the exile community. They centred, of course, round your grandmother, with whom Her late Majesty was barely on speaking terms.”

“HRH often said that Queen Mary had swindled her out of millions of pounds worth of jewels,” said Aunt Bea.

“I very much doubt whether the jewels in question would have come to Her Royal Highness,” said Mrs Walsh. “But it is certainly true that Her late Majesty paid less than a third of their true value for the Dowager Empress's jewellery. We exiles were all in the same case. We sold what we could for what people would pay us. We were fair game.”

She spoke calmly, with no bitterness. If anything her reproach was less against Great-grandmama's rapacity than against the Romanovs for making such a fuss about this notorious scandal.