Queen K, page 1
Queen K
SARAH THOMAS
For CCB
‘She thirsted for everything but the clear stream of her own life, flowing hidden in the grass.’
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Courchevel
1
2
3
4
Part Two: Monaco
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Part Three: The Maldives
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Acknowledgements
Copyright
I went to dinner with some old school friends the other night and before I’d been there ten minutes they were asking me about that family I used to work for, the billionaires. Everyone does that. Everyone’s heard the story and knows I was there that night. ‘Something crazy happened, didn’t it,’ they say, ‘with that oligarch’s wife; didn’t she just disappear or something?’ They look at me and depending on the mood I’m in I brush them off with an arch quip or I try quite seriously to explain it all: how it came to that, how Kata got it so badly wrong.
On this particular night, I was looking at those girls from school arrayed around the dinner table, in their merino knits, comfortable in their professions: lawyer; TV producer; book editor. I caught the whiff of glibness, that I was being patronised. ‘So exotic!’ said Charlotte. ‘Being a tutor. Makes office life seem very boring!’
Charlotte had seen I was in the country from one of my Instagram stories. I’d been packing up the last of Mum’s stuff and found a big book of photographs, all these pictures from Mum’s youth, on the seafront at Dartmouth with the sailing yachts behind her, hair blown about by that south-coast wind.
‘Wow, you look like her!’ Charlotte said. ‘Come to dinner on your way back through London. I’ll invite some of the others.’
When Charlotte led me down the hall to her kitchen it all came back to me: the lust I used to have for houses like this, the sounds of the street dying away as we passed a sitting room with heavy curtains, a faded sofa full of cushions, a fireplace and, on either side of the fireplace, blue and white china urns. Charlotte had seemed so helpless to me when we first met aged thirteen, both new at a girls’ boarding school in the West Country. There was some incident in the library, a mouse ran over her books and she screamed, then people followed her round chanting: ‘Library Mouse, Library Mouse.’ It irritated me, and one night in the dinner queue I told everyone how lame they were being. ‘Teasing Charlotte is mean and lazy, it also happens to be totally risk free. Now, how about her,’ I said, pointing to this girl a few years above us, someone beautiful and fascinating and tyrannical, known to be vicious in her punishments.
Push up, not down, I suppose is what I meant. Back then, I saw Charlotte as someone in need of my protection. It’s relentless, isn’t it, our need to order ourselves, to form hierarchies? When we were kids together at that school we were ordered by our wits, it was cruel and merciless. In the end of course we are ordered by our capital: it is cruel, it is merciless.
I think I was always aware Mum was heading towards an act of mortal stupidity, but I never saw it coming with Kata. Two such weak women. I grew up wishing my mother could have tried to hide her weaknesses from me, that she could at least have pretended to be some kind of a safe haven. So I could understand very well Alex’s feelings towards Kata, and I could even understand the role she played in the whole sad thing. She clung on to love for her mother for a long time, before that love turned to disgust. She was so sweet and so gentle, my little pupil. I could never quite work it out: was she someone I needed to protect or was she undeserving of my protection, simply because she was so rich?
The email notification was on my phone: my return flight to Vienna the very next day, my apartment, my new life. It really was there, waiting for me. I brought it all up before me in my mind: drinking a cup of coffee in my kitchen, dressing and getting on the underground to the kindergarten where I worked, late afternoons in the cafés, evenings with Jakob and friends. I called it to myself and felt its warmth fill me, then expand outwards. It radiated through Charlotte and the others, and Charlotte’s million-pound house in Clapham that her parents had bought her. I separated Charlotte from my envy, for just a moment: I looked at her across the table, at her face as she lifted the bottle of wine and brought it towards my glass, the light freckles over her nose and the top of her cheeks, and for a moment I thought, Maybe we are all helpless, maybe we are all hostage. I think Kata was helpless and hostage from the beginning to the end of her life, and she was the richest of us all.
PART ONE
Courchevel
1
I first worked for Kata when I was twenty-two. I had done a few jobs for a tutoring agency here and there in London when they told me about a two-month home-schooling job abroad. ‘Sure, sign me up,’ I said, but to be honest I didn’t think I would actually go. February felt ages away, we were in November and I was sure something better would come along by then. One of my brief internships would have turned into a glamorous job, on a magazine, complete with invitations to parties and fashion shows, maybe even an expense account … I said yes to the tutoring job as an insurance policy but really, it was like the certainty I have whenever I buy a lottery ticket: I’m going to win, I always think matter-of-factly, already planning where I’m going to buy my house, considering even the practicalities: hmm, I like that street because it’s near a pretty park but it’s quite far from the tube, but then I suppose if I’ve won the lottery I can take taxis … A combination of magical thinking and – we can put it more baldly if you want – entitlement made me certain things would go my way.
Well, they didn’t. But my belief in my future burned bright, in those days. I decided to embrace the tutoring job as an interesting interlude before I returned to my real life.
Real life was in London. That’s where everyone went after leaving university, and I followed. It wasn’t like I had any intention of going back to Totnes, the small town in Devon where I grew up. Kicking around in Doc Martens, throwing stones into the River Dart. And I hated being in the house with Mum. I’d know it from her very first sip, that look in her eyes, glassy and belligerent. Beer or wine, never spirits. So, no to all that, and yes to London. I’d been spoiled forever, anyway, for a small town like Totnes, first through my scholarship to the boarding school, where I’d mingled for five years with the daughters of bankers and interior designers and diplomats, and then by Bristol University, where I’d sat around in high-ceilinged flats in Clifton and summered at friends’ houses in the South of France. Along with my peers, I now had a horror of the ‘provincial’.
London was where life waited but even so, it was kind of exciting, when the time for the home-schooling job came around, packing up my suitcase in my flatshare in Lewisham, black mould oozing around the mirror in the bathroom, wondering: Where am I off to? What will my bedroom be like? Imagining immaculate white linen, pillows like clouds. And two whole months of not having to think about going to the supermarket, queuing for the bus, the cleaning rota, all the daily administration – no: I’d teach this kid for a few hours, easy, and after that I’d be free. I’d lie on my cloud bed and read; I’d roll around in the luxury.
And I did feel very cosmopolitan, flying off to Geneva for a job. This will be a holiday of the senses, I remember thinking to myself, when the driver opened the door of the blacked-out Jaguar and I got in and smelled the leather, put my hand on its slick surface. We drove through the French Alps way up high to the ski resort, Courchevel 1850. I’d never been to a ski resort before. The scene presented itself through the tint of the Jag’s windows: chocolate-box chalets, snow packed cosily on wooden eaves. We drove through the resort and up a short winding road and then we turned into their place. It was different from the wooden chalets, the same pine facade but larger, the lines more modern. A slim, suited man opened the door to me. He took my coat, he opened a cupboard in the hallway and I remember that first glimpse of furs: blonde furs and white furs and black furs. The man added my Uniqlo puffa into the mix, into this Narnia, then he said, with a little wink: ‘Better come on up with me, Kata wants to meet you.’
‘I’m Sebastian by the way,’ my escort said as we walked up some pale wooden steps without a banister. I assumed Sebastian was a butler, or whatever the modern iteration of that was (‘concierge’, he would tell me later).
The enormous dimensions of an open-plan living area opened beneath us as we climbed. There was a vast glass sculpture of what looked like a stalagmite just to the side of the banisterless stairs and I concentrated on not falling onto it and impaling myself on its glassy spike. We reached a landing. Sebastian knocked on a door and I heard from within a voice bid us enter.
A woman was sitting behind a desk. She was statuesque, her hair a rich ebony black, a colour so sumptuous it must have been dyed. It fanned out in wings around her face. She extended an arm – slowly – and said, ‘Please, take a seat.’ I sat. I heard the door click behind me.
Kata looked at me for some fi
I opened my mouth to answer, but she held up a hand.
‘It is very important, Melanie, that Alex, my daughter, gets into an English school. That is why you have been hired. I have taken Alex out of her school in Moscow because I think she will benefit from one-on-one teaching. You will prepare her for the entry exams and I expect her to get in. You know these schools?’
In front of her on the desk were some prospectuses for girls’ boarding schools. Lots of glossy photographs of girls playing hockey and girls doing science experiments and girls marching across blustery grounds arm in arm and laughing into the wind.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I went to a school like that.’
‘Good, good. Very good. Then you can encourage Alex. In the last months, her marks have gone down. She used to be top of her class. You will make her work hard and get better.’
Kata shook her head.
‘She does not want to go. It is childish, she does not realise the benefit it will give her. But I am the parent. I will decide.’
There was an American twang to her accent, overlaying the Russian.
‘You speak Russian, Melanie? The agency said so.’
‘I studied it as part of my university degree but I wouldn’t say I’m fluent. It’s been a while.’
‘Please, do not speak in Russian with Alex. Only English, her English can get better.’
‘Only English,’ she repeated.
I assured her that I would speak only English.
She pressed her forefinger to a white plastic device sitting on the desk; within seconds, the door to the study opened and Sebastian reappeared.
‘She takes some getting used to,’ he chuckled, as he led me through the house.
‘Yeah …’ I said.
I was looking about me, taking it all in. A modern cathedral in which the icons were pale grey suede sofas, beige carpets, glass occasional tables, willow spray arrangements and chrome, so much chrome, chrome objets everywhere, spirals and hoops and panthers, two huge fingers making the peace sign. My bedroom was at the bottom of the house, away from the main guest bedrooms, but still: it had a small, comfy bed, fresh white linen. A gleaming little ensuite bathroom. There was a large picture window that looked out onto a pristine expanse of snow. ‘Welcome to the team, honey,’ Sebastian said, putting my case down next to the bed. He smoothed his hand over the crown of his head and gave me another wink. He was tall and neat; he picked a piece of fluff off his pale grey suit and smoothed the fabric down. His head was shaved, he was elegant. He spoke English with a global accent; I heard shades of American, I heard French inflections. I got the sense he had travelled the length and breadth of the world, working for people like Kata. We heard his name, Sebastian, floating down the corridor in her carrying, magisterial tone. He saw my pack of cigarettes fall out of my hand luggage onto the bed. ‘Come and have a smoke later, outside the kitchen,’ he said, ‘if it all gets too much.’
*
I had been pleased when Sebastian told me I’d be eating my meals with the family rather than with the staff to give Alex another occasion to practise her English. It was one more chance to observe. I was glad of my Russian, which I’d always been able to understand better than I could speak. Kata saw me glance at the empty chair next to me. ‘Alex is not feeling well,’ she said. ‘You will meet her tomorrow.’
When Sebastian and a female staff member I hadn’t met yet came out with our dinner plates I was provided with my first anthropological artefact. The order in which they distributed the plates appeared illogical at first – they darted here, then there – but as I watched I realised the order in which they were serving followed the pecking order of the people at the table. Kata was served first. Next came Kata’s friend Igor. He was a plump, glossy man, seated to Kata’s left and solicitous of her in a hyped-up, excitable way. As his plate was put before him, he was extolling the wine, insisting Kata have some, raising his glass to her.
‘A toast!’ he cried. ‘To Kata. This is life!’
He picked up a remote lying beside him, turned in his chair and pointed across the room. Music blasted out from somewhere, some unidentifiable house tune. Kata frowned. ‘Lower, lower,’ she said, and Igor obeyed.
Sergei was served next. He was Igor’s boyfriend, as discreet as Igor was voluble, self-contained in navy-blue cashmere. Olga followed. I would come to know them well, because they were often around. They were Kata’s entourage. Nominally based in London, they were members of what I’d come to recognise as the nomadic super rich, wandering the globe from one identikit grey and beige interior to the next, above loyalties and localities, served the same food by the same brand of personal chef wherever they happened to find themselves. Olga’s husband worked in finance and was never around. Sergei had some vague-sounding ventures in hostelry. Igor, as far as I could make out, did absolutely nothing.
Needless to say, I was served last.
The starter was an infinitely delicate thing; it looked like origami. I think there was a scallop in there amid some decorative sprigs of fine red stuff and dashes of pink jus. It was delicious.
Kata spoke, addressing Igor and Sergei. ‘We had a night that was quite … interesting.’ She nodded at Olga, who took the cue.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, we did. The party of Valentin Kemerov.’
‘Oh!’ said Igor. ‘Tell us everything. How was he? What was he like?’
‘He’s involved in everything,’ Olga said. ‘He has many projects.’
She spoke softly. There was something cow-like and placid about Olga’s demeanour, in contrast to Igor’s manic ebullience. She had blonde hair parched by hair straighteners. She was wearing the same kind of clothes as Kata: velour loungewear, grey. Diamanté sparkles spelled the word chaos across her shoulders.
Even I had heard of Valentin Kemerov, because he was often in the UK press. He was a publicity-friendly exile, a regular and outspoken critic of affairs back home in Russia. The son of a high-ranking minister, Valentin had profited from the privatisation of the nineties by gaining control of one of the country’s main newspaper chains, but had fallen out of favour in the 2000s by refusing to share his spoils with the new regime. He was regularly photographed in top hats at sporting events and exiting the revolving doors of stratospherically expensive London restaurants in the company of well-known businessmen, high-profile Russian émigrés, the occasional TV personality.
I pieced together what had happened through the conversation. Valentin had thrown a private party at Calico in London to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Kata had been surprised to receive an invitation in the post as she’d never met him, but Olga had been very excited. ‘We have to go,’ she’d said. ‘Valentin knows everyone!’
They were still reeling from the experience. There had been lots of famous people there. They had arrived, they had milled around and then Valentin had come over, in his black silk shirt, to introduce himself; the crowds parted before them as he led them over to a corner, a roped-off area, his own private table.
‘Who was at the table?’ Igor asked, unable to contain himself. He turned the music up a fraction. ‘I can’t believe we missed this to visit your mother!’ He shook his head at Sergei.
‘Such glamorous people,’ Kata said. ‘He had a friend with him who was very nice. Such impeccable manners. He was an English lord. An earl. His name was Oliver.’
He had been so charming.
Valentin had sat her next to Oliver and he had asked her many questions. How long had she been in London? Was she enjoying it? Had she partaken of any of their rather idiosyncratic summer traditions? Had she been at Ascot, Goodwood? No? That was a shame. If he had known her then, she could have come with his party. She could come with them next year, everyone was there, in the Royal Enclosure. And her husband, did he like racing?
He had known her husband’s name, without her telling him.
‘No? Well, it’s an acquired taste. I’d like you both to come, as my guests. What about tennis: Wimbledon, the Queen’s Club?’
