‘Are you?’ said Ollie. A trace of colour was returning to her cheeks.
‘Yes, I am. Of course, if you wish to be sad on purpose that is all right. We can all be sad. Lord Westerholme can be sad because under his shoulder is a piece of shrapnel and this gives him pain when he lifts his arm,’ said Anna, ignoring Rupert’s quick look of surprise. ‘And I could cry almost immediately because my father is dead and they have taken away all our houses—’
‘Did you have a lot of houses?’ asked Ollie, momentarily diverted.
Anna bit her lip and Rupert at his most silky, said, ‘In Russia all the housemaids have a lot of houses, Ollie.’
Not quite understanding, Ollie nevertheless responded to the feeling of warmth and affection which had grown up, almost tangibly, in the back of the taxi. And able, now, to put the dread question into words, she asked:
‘Will Muriel still want me to be a bridesmaid?’
Rupert, not knowing the reason for the question, answered it in a voice that she had never heard him use.
‘Ollie,’ said Lord Westerholme, taking both her hands in his, ‘if you are not a bridesmaid at my wedding then there will be no wedding, and that I swear!’
Ollie sighed and let her head fall back on to the seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was silly.’
Anna nodded, conceding this. Then, allowing the tenderness to come back into her voice she said, ‘Do you know what is best of all? When one has been hurt or saddened, then suddenly to turn everything upside down and be very happy. So I think we should have an absolutely beautiful afternoon - an afternoon that you can lie in bed and remember for years and years.’
‘Can we do that?’ asked Ollie.
‘Most certainly,’ said Anna.
Anna was as good as her word. It was into an enchanted world that she now led Ollie Byrne.
Pinny, opening the door of her little mews house, did not need Anna’s hurried aside to see that the child had had a shock. To the information, tendered by Ollie, that she was not tired or hungry and almost never went to the lavatory. Pinny listened attentively and with respect. Half an hour later, Ollie, having drunk two glasses of milk and eaten a large helping of macaroni cheese, was lying on the sofa feeding the budgerigar the strips of cinnamon toast that were his passion.
But Pinny’s house was only the beginning. Anna had run upstairs to change into her only ‘good’ dress — a green velveteen which Kira had sent from Paris. The Countess Grazinsky gathered up shawls, leaking packets of tea and lorgnettes, and when Pinny was satisfied that the little girl was properly rested they set off for the Russian Club.
For the rest of her childhood, if anyone asked Ollie what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always replied: ‘A Russian.’ The dub was on the first floor of a large, dilapidated house behind Paddington Station, but the trains which shook its foundations every few minutes might have been travelling, not to Plymouth but to Minsk, not to Torquay but to Vladimir the Great, so exotic and foreign were its delights.
For there really was a stuffed grandmother. She lived - so everyone swore - in a most beautiful and gaily painted chest which stood under one window. The chest was heavily padlocked and covered with a crimson gypsy shawl and no one would have dreamt of putting down a tray of glasses or a plate on it without saying, ‘Sorry Baboushka’, or ‘Forgive me, Ancient One’. Nor was there anything sad about her, as Anna was quick to explain. For the old lady had belonged to the two pale young men, Boris and Andrey, who now owned the house the club was in and spent their time at a corner table playing Halma and planning to assassinate Lenin. Boris and Andrey had adored the old lady and when she died had, with the help of a famous Egyptologist, found this way of keeping her with them when they fled then-native land. Or so they said.
Above the Baboushka there hung an icon of St Cunouphrius, the saint who grew a beard to cover his nakedness and whose stick-like arms and little, white legs were all that protruded, wistfully, from behind the curlicues of coal-black hair. Beside him, there was another picture showing forty martyred bishops busily freezing to death in their shifts on an ice floe, and beneath them was a small shrine containing a crimson icon lamp, a bunch of withered marigolds, a lump of bread and a packet of Cerebos salt. There was an enormous, stuttering, smouldering samovar of fluted brass…
And there was Pupsik himself, the mythical dachshund, his sagging extremeties hanging exhaustedly over the edges of a low footstool which had become a kind of altar. Pupsik, to whom his owner the Baroness de Wodzka had fed, in a moment of panic on the Finnish border, the Rastrelli diamond embedded in a chunk of liver sausage. A priceless diamond, the baroness’ only remaining jewel which somehow, mysteriously, the ancient, wheezing animal had managed to retain in some diverticular abnormality along the clogged and malodorous drainpipe of its body … Every day during the six months of his quarantine, the baroness had rung the kennels, terrifying the kennel-maids with her imperious, ‘Veil? ‘ass ‘e voided?’
But Pupsik, though functioning normally in other respects, had not voided the jewel.
Bets had been laid, horrendous physiological disputes had split the club - but Pupsik, returning from quarantine to find himself famous and feted, continued to deprive the baroness of the jewel which would have reunited her with her children in America, secured her a livelihood, a home.
Anna’s entry, with her mother, her governess and Ollie, was the signal for an explosion of hugs, kisses and endearments. The Princess Chirkovsky, Sergei’s mother, enveloped her in an enormous motheaten chinchilla stole; a grey-bearded poet who had been writing verses to her since she was six years old rushed forward with his latest ode. Colonel Terek, who had parked his taxi in the mews, went for more vodka…
For a few moments, Anna gave herself up to the joy of being welcomed. Then she held up her hand and, switching to English, said: ‘I have brought you a very special friend of mine, Miss Olive Byrne. She has been a little bit sad and I have told her that here it is possible to be instantly and completely happy. Was I correct?’
And the party began.
An hour later, Ollie had reached unimaginable heights of glory. Her health had been drunk and the glasses thrown away so that no lesser toast could ever be drunk than the one dedicated to her. Gentlemen behaved in this way in the presence of beautiful women, Anna explained, and she must accustom herself to it. Now she was not only sitting on the stuffed grandmother, but holding in her arms the greater part of the dachshund, Pupsik, bestowed on her by the Baroness de Wodzka herself. On either side of her, as unobtrusively watchful as the Praetorian guard, stood Pinny and Sergei’s erstwhile governess, Miss King. Boris and An-drey, the pale young counter-revolutionaries, were playing the balalaika; Princess Chirkovsky, waving her arms, was expounding to Anna’s mother her latest, absolutely sure-fire method of retrieving the family fortunes: the setting up of a piroshki stall on Paddington Station.
As for Anna, she was everywhere - dancing with a huge blond Cossack, flirting with the eighty-year-old admiral who had lost an eye in the Tsushima Straits, picking up her mother’s shawls - but always returning to Ollie to give the little girl a hug, a smile.
‘Everyone wants to be with Anna, don’t they?’ she said to Pinny, to whom she could have said nothing that would endear her more.
But suddenly something happened. Anna had stopped dancing and was standing stock-still in the centre of the room, her face turned to the door. The colour drained from her cheeks; her clasped hands flew to her mouth…
Then everyone saw what Anna had seen; a tall, tanned, staggeringly handsome man in a dove grey uniform with a high collar, standing in the doorway. The next second, pandemonium broke loose. The Princess Chirkovsky rose, let out a scream and rushed forward, overturning her glass of tea. Miss King, the Countess Grazinsky and a crowd of others followed. Pupsik woke, barked, and slithered out of Ollie’s arms on to the floor.