The House of Special Purpose (27 page)

But it was too late. She picked up a book from the shelf and began walking towards him. Despite my better instincts, I found myself watching out of a morbid desire to see what might happen next; there was always a certain voyeuristic thrill to be had from Miss Simpson’s behaviour and, on occasion, I indulged in it. She swaggered across the floor, her hips swaying left and right with all the confidence of a film star, and when she reached him, she dropped the book purposefully to the ground, its hard covers crashing on the marble flooring with an enormous booming sound that echoed around the chamber, causing me to roll my eyes in my head. As she reached over to pick it up, she offered anyone who was near by a very clear view of both her posterior and the top of her stockings. It was almost indecent, but she was a pretty girl and it would have taken a stronger man than I to look away.

Mr Tweed reached for the book and I saw her laugh and say something to him, her fingers caressing the shoulder of his jacket for a moment, but he shrugged her off quickly and muttered a terse reply before replacing the dropped volume in her hands. Another question followed; this time he simply turned the front cover of his own book to display the title and she leaned over to look at it, offering him a clear view of her ample bosom. He seemed unmoved by the spectacle, however, and averted his eyes in a most gentleman-like fashion. From where I was standing, I could see that he been engaged in a study of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and I wondered whether he was an academic or a professor of some sort. Perhaps he had an illness that prevented him from enlisting. There were any number of reasons why he might have been there.

It was not surprising that Miss Simpson was taking such an interest in him. A few years before, there would have been any number of young men passing through the library or the museum on any given day, but life had changed considerably since the outbreak of the war and the presence of an eligible young man at one of our reading tables, when so many of his number had been led away from the cities as if by a military Pied Piper, was certainly worthy of note. Our lives were governed by rationing, curfews, and the sound of the air-raid sirens every night. Walking along the streets, one was confronted by groups of two or three girls together, all nurses now, stepping quickly between makeshift hospitals and their digs, their faces pale, their eyes dark and hollow from lack of sleep and exposure to the broken, ripped-asunder bodies of their countrymen. Their white skirts were often flecked with scarlet but they seemed not to notice any more, or not to care.

For two years I had been expecting the library to be closed indefinitely, but it was one of those symbols of British life about which Mr Churchill maintained a stubborn defiance, and so we remained open to the public, often as a sanctuary for adjutants from the War Office, who sat in quiet corners of the reading room, consulting maps and reference books in an effort to impress their superiors with historically proven strategies for victory. We operated with a much smaller staff than before, although Mr Trevors was still with us, of course, for he was too old to enlist. Miss Simpson had come to us at the outbreak of hostilities; the daughter of some well-connected businessman, she had been given this position on account of the fact that she ‘couldn’t bear the sight of blood’. There were a couple of other assistants, none of whom were of fighting age, and then there was me. The Russian fellow. The émigré. The man who had lived in London for almost twenty years and was suddenly distrusted by almost everyone for one simple reason.

My voice.

‘Well, he plays his cards close to his chest, that’s for sure,’ said Miss Simpson, returning to the desk where I was standing once again, having grown bored of observing her flirtation.

‘Does he indeed,’ I remarked, attempting to sound uninterested.

‘All I did was ask him his name,’ she continued, ignoring my tone, ‘and he said wasn’t that very forward of me and I said, Well I call you Mr Tweed on account of the fact that you wear that gorgeous tweed suit every day. Present from your wife, was it, I asked him, or your girlfriend?
I’m afraid that would be telling
, he says to me then, all airs and graces, and I said I hoped he didn’t think I was being inquisitive, only it’s not so often we get the likes of him in here of an afternoon.
The likes of me?
he asks then.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I didn’t mean any offence, I told him, only he seemed like a superior sort of chap, that was all, someone with good conversation, perhaps, and for what it was worth I was free myself later this evening and—’

‘Miss Simpson, please!’ I snapped, closing my eyes and rubbing my thumbs against my temples in irritation, for she was giving me a headache with her incessant prattle. ‘This is a library. A place of erudition and learning. And you are here to work. It is not a forum for gossip or flirtation or silly chatter. If it’s at all possible, could you kindly reserve your—’

‘Well, pardon me and no mistake,’ she snapped, standing tall with her hands on her hips as if I had just offered her the worst type of insult. ‘Hark at you, Mr Jachmenev. Anyone would think I was after giving State secrets away to the Gerries, the way you carry on.’

‘I’m sorry if I was abrupt,’ I said with a sigh. ‘But really, this is too much. There are two trolleys of books over there that have been waiting to be cleared since early morning. There are books left on tables that haven’t been returned to their shelves. Is it really asking that much for you simply to do your job?’

She glared at me for a moment longer and pursed her lips,
sticking her tongue into the corner of her mouth before shaking her head and turning around, marching away with as much dignity and outrage as she could muster. I watched her for a moment and felt slightly guilty. I liked Miss Simpson, she meant no harm to anyone and was, for the most part, pleasant company. But I shuddered at the idea of Arina ever turning into a young woman like that.

‘She’s quite a piece,’ said a quiet voice a few moments later and I looked up to see him, Mr Tweed, standing in front of me. I glanced down to take his book, but he wasn’t holding any. ‘A bit of a handful, I would imagine.’

‘Her heart’s in the right place,’ I replied, feeling enough solidarity of the workplace to avoid criticizing her to a stranger. ‘I suppose most of the young people have precious little to entertain themselves with these days. However, I do apologize if she was bothering you, sir,’ I added. ‘She’s an excitable thing, that’s all. I think she’s flattered by your interest in her, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘My interest in her?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.

‘The fact that you’ve been coming in every day to see her.’

‘That’s not why I’ve been coming in,’ he said in a tone which made me look at him afresh. He had a curious air about him, one that implied that he was not perhaps the academic I had taken him for.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Is there something I can—’

‘It’s not her I’ve been coming in to see, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said.

I stared at him and felt my blood run cold. The first thing I tried to decipher was whether or not he had an accent. Whether he was an émigré, too. Whether he was one of us.

‘How do you know my name?’ I asked calmly.

‘It is Mr Jachmenev, isn’t it? Mr Georgy Daniilovich Jachmenev?’

I swallowed. ‘What do you want?’

‘Me?’ He sounded a little surprised, but then shook his head
and looked away for a moment before leaning in closer. ‘I don’t want anything. It’s not me who wants your help. Who
needs
your help.’

‘Then who?’ I asked, but he said nothing, just smiled at me, the type of smile that – had she not been finally engaged upon her work in a separate part of the reading room – might have been the undoing of Miss Simpson.

The lightning war over London had been going on for months and had accelerated to the point where I thought it might drive us all mad. Every night we waited in terror for the wail of the air-raid sirens to begin – the anticipation was almost worse than the fact of them, for nobody could feel safe in the kinetic silence until they finally and inevitably began to sound – and when they did, Zoya, Arina and I would run towards the deep-level shelter at Chancery Lane, the two long parallel tunnels of safety which quickly filled with residents of nearby streets, to find a place to call our own.

There were only eight such shelters in the city, far too few for the number of people who needed to find refuge there, and they were dark, unpleasant places, stinking, noisy, fetid underground passages that, ironically, made us feel even less safe than we had in our own homes. Despite the strict rules regarding which shelter each enclave was supposed to go towards, people started to arrive at the stations in the early evening from the more distant areas of London, waiting outside in order to secure their own position, and there was often an unseemly rush to get through the doors when they opened. Unlike the popular legend which has built up over time, stoked by the flames of patriotism and the tranquillity of safe recollection, I can recall no cheerful moments in those shelters, few nights when there was any type of solidarity on display between us poor mice, driven underground by the overhead bombing. We rarely talked, we didn’t laugh, we never sang songs. Instead, we gathered in small family groups, trembling, anxious,
tempers fraying, occasional outbursts of violence pricking the fretful atmosphere. There was a constant terrifying sensation that at any moment the roof might collapse above our heads and bury us all in rubble-topped graves beneath the streets of the demolished city.

By the middle of 1941, the bombing had started to grow a little less frequent than six months previously, but one never knew the night, or the time of night, when the sirens might go off, a situation which left us in a constant state of exhaustion. Although everyone hated the sound of the bombs exploding, tearing down our neighbours’ homes, creating deep chasms in the streets and killing those poor souls who failed to make it to the shelters on time, Zoya found them particularly agonizing. Any notion of firepower or slaughter was enough to send her spirits desperately low.

‘How long can this go on?’ she asked me one night as we sat in Chancery Lane, counting the minutes until we could emerge safely from our tomb to examine the damage of the previous night’s bombing. Arina was asleep, half tucked inside my overcoat, seven years old by now, a child who thought the war was simply a normal part of life, for she could scarcely remember a time before it had been central to her world.

‘It’s hard to say,’ I replied, wanting to offer her some notion of hope but unwilling to create false optimism. ‘Not much longer, I think.’

‘But haven’t you heard anything? Has no one spoken to you and told you when we might—?’

‘Zoya,’ I said quickly, interrupting her and looking around to ensure that no one was listening, but it was too noisy for anything she said to be overheard. ‘We cannot talk of that here.’

‘But I can’t take it any longer,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Every night it’s the same thing. Every day I worry about whether we will survive to see another morning. You have friends now, Georgy. You are important to them. If you could only ask them—’

‘Zoya, be silent,’ I hissed, my eyes narrowing as I glanced around quickly. ‘I’ve told you. I know nothing. I can ask no one. Please … I know how difficult it is, but we cannot talk about these things. Not here.’

Arina shifted in my arms and looked up at me sleepily, her eyes half open, her mouth working slowly as her tongue flickered across her lips, her expression changing to ensure that both of us, mother and father, were still here to protect her. Zoya reached forward and kissed her forehead, smoothing the palm of her hand across her hair until the child returned to sleep.

‘Do you ever think we came to the wrong place, Georgy?’ she asked me, her voice quiet and resigned now. ‘We could have gone anywhere when we left Paris.’

‘But it’s everywhere, my love,’ I replied quietly. ‘The whole world is caught up in this. There was nowhere we could have escaped it.’

My mind drifted back frequently to Russia during those long nights in the shelter. I tried to imagine St Petersburg or Kashin as they might exist after twenty years away from them and could not help but wonder how they were surviving the war, how their people were coping with this torture. I never thought of St Petersburg as Leningrad, of course, even though the newspapers referred to it as the Bolsheviks’ city. I had never become accustomed to Petrograd either, the name the Tsar had inflicted on it during the Great War, when he feared that its original title was too Teutonic for a great Russian city, particularly when we were engaged in a war of boundaries with his German cousin. I tried to imagine this man Stalin, about whom I read so frequently, and whose face I distrusted. I had never met him, of course, but had heard his name discussed in the palace during the last year – along with those of Lenin and Trotsky – and it seemed curious that he had been the one to survive and rule. The reign of the Romanovs had come to an end in an outpouring of repugnance at the autocracy of the Tsars, but it seemed to me that
this new Soviet leadership differed from the old Russian empire in little but name.

Although I thought of them infrequently, I wondered how my sisters were coping with the war, whether they were even still alive to endure it. Asya would be in her mid-forties by now, Liska and Talya in their forties. They were certainly old enough to have sons – my nephews, who might be fighting on the Russian fronts, laying down their lives on European battlefields. I had often longed for a son and it hurt me to think that I would never know any of these boys, that they would never sit and share their experiences with their uncle, but this was the price I had paid for my actions in 1918: banishment from my family, eternal exile from my homeland. It was entirely possible that none of them were even alive any more, that they had grown old childless or had been murdered during the Revolution. Who knew what retaliation might have been visited upon them in Kashin, if news of my actions had reached that small, hopeless village.