He delivered her back to Edward and Margaret and others came to ask her to dance and he did not see her again until they went into supper, when Edward asked him to join them.
‘Lydia tells me she is thinking of becoming a translator,’ he said to Edward, as they enjoyed a lavish meal.
‘It is one of her ideas,’ Edward said, smiling. ‘I don’t think she knows what she wants.’
‘She doesn’t have to do anything,’ Margaret put in. ‘She can stay here with us until she marries. I am sure that won’t be long.’
Lydia laughed. ‘I’m not ready for marriage yet, I want to live a little first. Besides, I haven’t met anyone I want to marry.’
Alex was not sure whether to be pleased or sorry about that. The little waif he had befriended was long gone and been replaced by a lovely woman, spoilt and yet not spoilt, whom he loved. The trouble was she was not aware of it and he would not tell her. He had nothing much to offer her. The money his mother had managed to bring out of Russia had soon been used up, and like so many others, he had been obliged to work for a living. He owed his present job at the Foreign Office to Sir Edward. He was thankful they paid him well and in time he would be in a position to marry, but the job he was doing could be dangerous and it would not be fair to Lydia to ask her to share his life. Besides, she must be allowed to make up her own mind about the man she married and he was perfectly aware she looked on him as a kind of older brother.
He escorted her back to the ballroom after supper and claimed another dance before relinquishing her to others: lively, confident young men who knew their place in the world. He watched her treating them with smiling courtesy, listening to their compliments with her head cocked on one side, intent on what they were saying. By the end of the evening more than one was sighing after her.
When the last waltz was over, everyone, except those who had come some distance and were staying the night, made preparations to leave. Lydia stood beside Edward and Margaret, wishing them goodnight and thanking them for their gifts. Then she looked round for Alex, but he was nowhere to be seen. She said goodnight to everyone else and made her way to her bedroom. The evening had gone off without a hitch and she was tired and happy and a little tipsy on champagne. But it was too bad of Alex to disappear like that; she would have liked to mull it all over with him and talk to him about his gift of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original Russian. She wondered if it was a message to her not to forget her roots.
She went with her parents to Paris for the last two weeks in June, taking the train to Dover and then the ferry to Calais, where Edward hired a car and drove them to Paris and the Hôtel St-Germain-des-Prés on the Rue Bonaparte. It was warm and sunny and their days were filled with sightseeing, visiting museums and exhibitions, and going to concerts and the theatre. And when they weren’t doing that she and Margaret shopped for clothes at the best couturiers, until both were exhausted and Lydia began to wonder how they would get everything into their trunks for the return journey.
Paris was home to a great many Russian émigrés who tended to congregate in the area of the 15th arrondissement. Most of them were educated, former aristocrats, bourgeoisie, skilled workers, poets and writers, but few were wealthy enough to support themselves without work and had been obliged to take menial jobs in order to survive. But they maintained their own culture. They had their magazines, publishers, theatre companies, dance troupes, schools and churches. When Margaret was resting in the afternoons, Lydia would wander about those streets, listening to Russian being spoken and daydreaming of finding her parents there, safe and well. She even approached groups of women and asked if they had heard anything of a Count Kirilov or his wife, to which the answer was always a shake of the head and a muttered ‘sorry’.
One day, after a particularly long walk, she found a small park and sat down on a bench to rest. One shoe was hurting her foot and she kicked it off, rubbing her toes up and down her other calf. She did not notice the small dog until it had her shoe in its mouth and run off with it. She shouted and began limping after it, but could not catch it.
A young man noticed her predicament, caught the dog and retrieved her shoe which he presented to her with a half-mocking bow and a broad smile.
‘Thank you,’ she said, hobbling back to the bench to slip it on again. ‘I did not fancy walking back to my hotel in stockinged feet.’
He was blond and blue-eyed with rather appealing boyish features, probably older than he looked. ‘No, your stocking would be in ribbons and so would your foot. Such a pretty foot too.’ He sat beside her, fetched a cigarette packet from his pocket and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit one for himself and sat back to smoke it. ‘Whew, it’s hot today,’ he said.
‘Yes, but I don’t mind it.’ She was wearing a lilac silk dress, loosely tied on her hips with a sash. A large brimmed straw hat shielded her face.
‘On holiday, are you?’
‘Yes, are you?’
‘No, I live here.’
‘But you are Russian.’ Although they had been speaking in French, she had recognised his accent.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Your accent.’
He laughed. ‘Since the Bolsheviks took away my family’s citizenship and France decided to recognise the Soviet Union, I am stateless. But yes, you could say I was Russian. What about you? In the same boat, are you?’
‘No, I was adopted by an Englishman and his wife, so I am English now.’
‘But you were Russian once?’
‘Yes. My father was Count Mikhail Kirilov.’
He whistled. ‘Wow. A count. What’s your name now?’
‘Lydia Stoneleigh. My father is Sir Edward Stoneleigh.’
He held out his hand. ‘How do you do, Lydia Stoneleigh. I am Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov.’
She turned to take his hand. ‘How do you do, Monsieur Andropov.’
‘Oh, please, let us have it the Russian way. Nikolay Nikolayevich, if you please. Or Kolya, if you like.’
‘How long have you been in France?’
‘Since the end of the Civil War. My father was in the White Army and was killed by the Reds.’
‘My father was in the army too. He and my mother were killed by the Bolsheviks. My brother and nurse were murdered. I was the only one who survived. I came out with Sir Edward in 1920.’
He smiled. ‘You could not have been very old.’
‘I was four.’
‘Do you remember anything of it?’
So she told him all she could remember.
‘How interesting,’ he said when she finished. ‘Our lives have run almost parallel, though I am two years older than you are.’
‘Yet you have retained your accent.’
‘That is because I have lived among exiled Russians all my life and we continue to speak Russian. I should think you have forgotten it.’
‘No, I kept it up and studied Russian and Russian history at college. I am thinking of becoming a translator.’
‘They are ten a penny in Paris. So many Russians who need to earn a living are doing that as an easy option. It is better than waiting at table in some sleazy restaurant, or cleaning floors, or portering on the railways.’