Queen K, page 5
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s fun, for now.’
I thought of all the other servants there must be in this town, and in other towns like it, in the other billionaire enclaves, an army of people providing tuition and massages and life coaching and vitamin drips; concierges and chefs and housekeepers and trainers and consultants and personal shoppers.
It felt like a recent phenomenon, one spawned by the billionaire class, but then I thought of the first gilded age, of the Rockefellers and Astors and Carnegies as chronicled by Edith Wharton and Henry James and Fitzgerald, the coal, the rail, the steel, the oil: ugly, dirty things, but when they spent their money it was on flowers, grown in hothouses and bought to fill the conservatories of their Fifth Avenue mansions: orchids and camellias and lilies, their scent and colour spilling even in the dead of winter when the sleet froze grim on the ground, and I thought of a recent story I’d heard, of a man at a Dolce and Gabbana Alta Moda couture show who wore a jewelled hourglass round his neck in which miniature diamonds trickled through the waist instead of sand.
‘What shall we do now?’ I asked Sebastian when we’d finished our food.
‘I’m treating myself,’ he said, ‘to a couple hours at the Six Senses Spa. We all got the afternoon off cos Ivan and the guys have gone to Geneva for a meeting. Wanna come?’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure. So you mean, the house is empty?’
‘Yup.’
‘Hmm, no,’ I told him. ‘I think I’ll go back. I think I’ll take the opportunity. While everyone’s gone. I think I’ll take the chance to relax.’
I don’t know what I expected from Ivan and Kata’s room because really it was pretty blank, pretty functional, much like the rest of the house. The tones of grey and beige, the scrupulous tidiness. I couldn’t relax totally because even though Sebastian had said the rest of the staff were off and that Ivan and his mates were away for the afternoon you never knew, did you? Something unforeseen might happen, at any moment the door might open, and Ivan had already seen me staring in at him – not that he’d seemed to care. I left the bedroom door ajar so I would hear the front door should anyone come back unexpectedly.
She seemed to keep her glitziest outfits right at the end of the wardrobe. I touched them all. Bodycon. Bandage dresses in metallic hues. His clothes took up less space. They were more low key. Levis. A black Bugatti fleece. I hadn’t known Bugatti made fleece.
There wasn’t much to see. The bathroom was palatial. Kata had the high-end toiletries one would expect. I wondered which she would miss if they disappeared.
What had I wanted from this room? Why had I rushed to come here, risked the intrusion? Was I so steeped in soporific comfort that I’d do anything just to get my blood pumping, feel my heart beating?
Whatever the strange potency I had sensed in Kata and Ivan’s dynamic, they had left nothing of it here. I opened the drawer of Ivan’s bedside table. There was a photo in there. I lifted it out. It was of him and Kata and Alex but taken a while ago. Alex wasn’t more than five or six. Kata had a different haircut. Both she and Ivan looked rawer and rougher than they did today. Their clothes were bulky and dated. There was a whiff of the eighties about them even though the photo wasn’t from the eighties, couldn’t have been taken later than 2002. They were standing in front of an ugly house that looked like a big prefabricated box. Some sort of red carpet appeared to lead up to the house. Ivan was holding Kata in his arms, about to carry her over the threshold. She was looking up at him adoringly. Alex was in the door of the house waiting for them. Fanning out from the red carpet was a crowd of people, frozen in a collective gesture of applause.
This, I would learn later, was Chukotka, an isolated region at the easternmost tip of Russia, between the East Siberian and Bering Seas. For most of the year the whole of the landscape was white. Ivan would take Alex sledding. She would sit in front of him; he would hold her to him and keep her safe as they hurtled down steep slopes. He was a king in that town, Kata his queen.
‘I would lie in between them,’ Alex would tell me later. ‘When I woke up in the early mornings I would run down the corridor to their room. I can still hear the sound of my feet, running down that long wooden hall. I would get in between them; I would lie there like a puppy until they woke up. Before she turned him against me, when he still loved me. When it was still the three of us, together, in Chukotka.’
4
They were due back after lunch the next day. Walking through the hallway I saw Ivan, standing in the entrance, looking out the window. I heard the sound of a car pulling up. Ivan left his position and went up the stairs to the study.
Sebastian came out from the kitchen and opened the door just in time. Kata swept in.
‘Melanie!’ she said.
‘Hi …’ I said, somewhat surprised by the full-fronted greeting. She sailed down the steps towards me. I felt pinned to the sofa by the force of her energy. She seemed triumphant, resplendent.
‘Alex has been accepted! She did brilliantly, brilliantly. Thank you, Melanie, for all your help.’
I couldn’t help but blush with pleasure. Her high spirits were radiant and infectious. I wasn’t used to this expansiveness from her.
‘Alex!’ she sang.
Alex followed through the front door. She was wearing a blue furry bucket hat – a new purchase, I hadn’t seen it before. With her head tilted down the hat blocked my view of her face.
‘Come here, little chook!’ Kata said, patting the space on the sofa beside her.
Alex sat down. Kata whipped off the bucket hat, rumpled and mussed Alex’s hair and kissed the top of her head.
‘Sebastian,’ she said. ‘Tea.’
Instructing her subordinate seemed to recall Kata to her habitual demeanour. I saw her lips press down, in their usual way. She raised her chin. When she next glanced in my direction her hauteur had returned, the appropriate distance re-established between us.
‘Where is my husband?’ she asked.
‘I think he’s up in the study.’
‘Ivan!’ she called out. She called out a second time, louder: ‘Ivan!’
She turned back to Alex. ‘Brilliant, clever girl!’ Kata smoothed back the hair she had rumpled and I saw Alex’s little face for the first time: tired, she seemed, a bit drawn, her eyes wide and shiny.
Astrid and Francine were bringing stuff in from the car, the cases Kata and Alex had left with but also new suitcases, big ones; I saw Francine struggling to get one over the lip of the entrance. ‘Oof,’ said Kata, leaning back against the sofa cushions. ‘There was so much to do over there, so much to organise. But we got everything you will need, don’t you think?’ she said to Alex.
Alex nodded.
‘Melanie, we have all of Alex’s textbooks for next term. I want you to start going through them with her tomorrow.’
And here, finally, was Ivan, coming down the stairs from the study. He was looking about him at all the stuff being brought in from the car. Cases and cases of it. Then his gaze settled on Kata, on the back of her head.
Maybe Kata saw me staring at something because she turned to look behind her. She got up from the sofa, went over to Ivan and kissed him, full on the mouth.
‘My darling,’ she said. ‘Was everything OK for you while I was away? Did Sebastian look after you? I have missed you.’
His eyes were wary, watching. She was speaking again, moving, fussing around him, calling: ‘Sebastian!’ Asking Ivan: ‘What would you like to drink? Sebastian, bring a Coke for Ivan, with ice.’ She was filling the space with her energy and activity and presence, leaving room for nothing else. It seemed a deliberate tactic, to manage him, to handle him.
‘Come, little chook.’ When Alex reached her she said to Ivan: ‘Congratulate your daughter. She has had a big success.’
Kata was holding on to both Ivan and Alex. Ivan and Alex were not touching one another, they were connected only through Kata.
‘The maths test was quite hard, Papa,’ Alex said. ‘But I got 94 per cent.’
‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Clever girl.’
She looked happy when he said that, she stepped towards him and took his hand. She made a circle of them. Ivan broke away, he went to take his Coke from Sebastian, sat with it on one of the sofas.
‘Alex,’ Kata said, ‘try on your new uniform for Papa. It is in your bedroom. Bring everything down.’
Alex nodded excitedly and shot across the room.
Ivan finished his Coke with a burp.
Alex came down the stairs slowly, shy again when she returned, wearing a grey pleated skirt and a pale blue shirt with a pale blue V-neck jumper over the top. White socks came up to her knees and there were black tasselled loafers on her feet. She was wearing the whole thing at once, every season. She had the summer boater on her head: straw with streaming ribbons. She even had the school lacrosse stick in her hand.
‘Come,’ her mother beckoned. She motioned Alex to the centre of the room. ‘Turn around … Such a little lady.’
‘Now, my darling,’ Kata said to Ivan, ‘this does mean I will have to spend a little bit more time at the London house, in term time, when Alex is at school.’
‘She will be at a boarding school, won’t she?’
‘Yes, but it’s good for her to have me near, in case she needs anything. It’s important to you, isn’t it, Alex, to have me near?’
‘I …’ Alex said. She had stopped twirling. The lacrosse stick drooped from her hand.
‘I won’t be there all the time, of course. Just here and there. I will still be a lot in Moscow.’
‘I still don’t know,’ Ivan said, ‘what was wrong with the school in Moscow.’
A look of impatience flitted across Kata’s face. She paused, she made it subside before answering him.
‘Alex is ready to take the next step,’ she said. ‘She wants to grow up to be cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.’
Ivan kept his eyes on Kata but did not respond. He leaned back against the sofa cushions.
‘Alex wants to go to this school!’ Kata continued. ‘Please, let’s not spoil her moment.’
Alex stood rigid. She was holding tightly on to the lacrosse stick with both hands. She was pressing the stick down into the ground.
‘Come here,’ Ivan said to her. He pulled her gently onto the sofa beside him.
‘Do you want to go to the school? Be honest with your papa. It’s OK.’
She looked across at her mum.
‘It’s OK, little one,’ he said. ‘No one will be angry at you. Be honest.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said. Her voice was a whisper.
‘You are happy in Moscow, you like being at home.’
Alex nodded. She angled her head, she cringed away from where her mother sat, opposite her and Ivan, on her own sofa.
‘But you want to please your mama.’
Alex nodded, the tears spilling out.
Ivan looked up at Kata.
‘You want her to go to the school.’
I saw Alex wilt into her father’s side as he said those words. He held her.
His last words – ‘You want her to go to the school’ – rang in the air. They were working upon Kata. They affected her by degrees. When first he said them, the anger was hard and immediate in her face. But she seemed to bring it under control. She closed her eyes and as she did so her face softened. She opened her eyes and when she spoke her voice was a little girl’s.
‘I try to do my best,’ she said. ‘Maybe sometimes I have the wrong idea. I thought this would be a good thing, for our daughter, but you know best, maybe I should send, should send all this back …’ She gestured shakily at all the suitcases and shopping bags; her voice trembled.
Her uncertainty, her fragility, hung in the air.
‘I just try to do my best,’ she repeated. ‘If you want, I can send everything back, try to re-enter her in the school in Moscow, but I don’t know how to do it, it’s too late.’
There really were tears in her eyes now. I saw one tear slide down her cheek; she raised a manicured hand to wipe it off.
‘No,’ Ivan said, softly. ‘No. No one is suggesting that.’
He sighed.
He looked down, to his daughter. ‘You will give it a try? You will see how it goes?’
He gave Alex a cuddle. He might even have kissed her on the top of her head.
*
Later that night, I went and knocked on Alex’s door. She was tucked up in bed. Sebastian had brought her a drink she liked. Warm milk with honey and vanilla. She wiped a trace of milk froth from her upper lip.
‘Are you getting an early night, sweetheart?’ I asked her. ‘You must be tired.’ I sat on the bed. It was dark in the room, the only light coming from Alex’s laptop, an old comedy series she was watching.
‘Did you have a good time, in London?’
She shrugged. ‘It was OK.’
There was a pause.
‘Mel,’ she said. ‘Will you stay and watch something with me? We can watch anything you like.’
‘Of course I will.’
I got under the covers. Little girl. Alone in here, with her laptop and her milk.
Alex often spent the evenings alone. She was very sweet and very little, I wanted to reach out a hand to stroke her, but I didn’t, because she wasn’t my pet. Kata treated her like a pet. I remembered how Kata had whipped off Alex’s bucket hat, had rumpled her hair. Alex was an extension of Kata, to be handled at will, no permission needed. She would swoop to cover her in kisses whenever Alex had submitted to her, had allowed herself to be an instrument for Kata’s desires – performing well in her tests, getting into an English school. But there was no constancy to this affection, because look at Alex alone here now, as she was night after night, afternoon after afternoon, alone and staring into her laptop or her phone.
But maybe I was projecting my own experiences onto Alex.
My dad’s parents had wanted me to go to boarding school, had encouraged me to go for the scholarship, had helped out with the extra costs, the school uniform, the money required for extracurricular activities. They lived in a big house outside the town, with formal gardens and dim rooms where grandfather clocks ticked. My mother would harp on about the connection, even though my dad had died when I was only two years old, even though her connection with his family had been brief. My grandparents died when I was still in my early teens, and I guess they must have been leveraged up to their eyeballs because when everything was settled, the money my mother had been banking on failed to materialise. The only remaining evidence that she had ever been connected with the upper classes was the fruit of that brief union: me.
It sometimes felt like that was the point of my existence, as far as my mother was concerned: a segue into a particular topic of conversation: ‘Well, you see, Mel’s father …’ ‘Mel takes after her father, in that …’
A strong feeling had come up in me when I had watched Kata whip the bucket hat from Alex’s head. By the end of the day Mum’s drunkenness would have reached its peak of slovenly sentimentality. She called me once, weeping. ‘Oh my Mel,’ she said, ‘I went for a walk today past a field of dairy cows, they’d just had their calves taken away from them and they were crying for their babies.’ She was a howling mess. ‘I love you,’ she wept and I thought, Fuck your love, it’s not the kind of love I want, I want a love that is calm and steady and solid, that is a place in the world where I can go.
A character in the old comedy series made a funny remark and Alex laughed along.
‘Did you get up to anything fun while you were in London? Did you and your mum meet up with anyone?’
‘Papa asked me the same question. He asked me if Mama met up with anyone.’
‘Oh …’
‘Just Olga and Sergei and Igor, they helped us with our shopping. Oh, and we had this really fun night where a chef came over and gave us a sushi-making class. Look.’
She reached for her phone and showed me photos: of them in a big white kitchen, making goofy faces and holding up strips of seaweed. She continued to slide through her camera roll. I saw them lolling around on sofas in the usual loungewear, Igor popping a champagne bottle – that was to celebrate when I got my result, Alex said. I saw Kata lying back against sofa cushions, glass of champagne in her hand, eyes closed in the moment the photo was taken, looking happy and at ease. Olga, Igor and Sergei all lived in London. I found them quite touching, these photos. Endearing and innocent. She wasn’t skulking over there to meet up with Valentin or Oliver. She just wanted to take a breather, see her friends. A breather from what? I didn’t know exactly, but I thought maybe it was the sheer intensity she had wanted to escape, for a few days. The whole scene in the restaurant, his calling her a whore, their extraordinary abundance at the breakfast table the next morning, when both had seemed so saturated, the eroticism of her bruise. By the time she had left, there had been something strained and forced in the air between them, I had sensed the same in their interaction earlier over the question of Alex going away to school. If these photos were to be believed, her trip to London had been one long pyjama party, with some shopping thrown in. I snuggled down into the pillows of Alex’s bed. I was wearing the fluffy bathrobe I’d found hanging in my ensuite bathroom on my first day. I’ll miss this fluffy bathrobe, I thought, and I looked at Alex, that sweet plump little wrist of hers with its bracelet of sweets, she was a good little thing to make the sweets last, not to chomp them all down in one go; she nibbled one now, I watched her do it and I felt very tender.
‘I’ll miss you!’ I said.
‘I’ll miss you too, Mel.’
A character on the screen was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat with ribbons on it.
‘It looks like your school hat,’ I said. ‘It was cute. Let’s see it again?’
I felt her body go rigid. She didn’t say anything. She shut her laptop and got out of bed and walked away.
I heard what sounded like a cupboard door opening, then paper rustling.
