Page 9 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)

Thus James was introduced to Tatiana Bebidov.

She worked during the day as a teacher at an infant school, so their meeting took place, conveniently for James, in the time between his office day and his evening engagements.

As well as doing Meredith’s job, he was still expected to be available as before to welcome Charlie’s guests, make them comfortable, show them around Paris, entertain them.

Most evenings were taken up with attending parties or escorting people to the theatre or nightclubs.

Tatiana Bebidov was a tiny person, with an unruly mass of dark brown wavy hair, barely subdued in a chignon.

She had large, dark eyes, and a wide, full mouth that seemed always to want to be laughing.

The effort of restraining it had given her deep dimples on either side.

She had long, expressive fingers and when she moved it was with a grace that he learned later to associate with those who had trained in the ballet.

She was vivacious and disarmingly friendly and he guessed her age to be about twenty-three.

She lived in a small, dark apartment in an old house with a particularly ferocious concierge, a large woman with enormous arms like bolsters, who would not allow James in without reading his letter of introduction several times, and inspecting him with an intimidating scowl.

‘What do you want with Mademoiselle?’ she demanded, at length.

‘She is to teach me Russian,’ James said. It said so in the letter, but this was obviously not a woman to argue with.

‘Why do you want to learn Russian?’

‘My boss has Russian clients. He wants me to make them feel welcome.’

‘What sort of Russians?’

James had no idea what would be the right answer. ‘Nice ones, who like flowers and birds and go to church,’ he said, and got ready to duck.

The woman’s eyes seemed to bulge, and then she broke into phlegmy laughter and reached out to pinch James’s cheek. The pinch hurt quite a lot. ‘You are a wicked boy, but I like you. Go on up. I shall knock every half-hour, so no funny business.’

Telling Miss Bebidov about this encounter broke the ice. She laughed. ‘That is “Maman” Poussin. She eats strangers for breakfast. Never show fear. She likes bold people who make her laugh.’

‘Is there a Papa Poussin?’ James asked. ‘Somehow I can’t imagine it.’

‘Oh yes, she is married, but he is no “Papa”. He has nothing to do with the tenants. He works for a newspaper.’

‘He’s a journalist?’

‘No, a printer. A compositor, I think it’s called. He’s a very small man and never speaks. One sees him scurry in and out, but that’s all. Your French is very good. You speak like a French person.’

‘Thank you. Yours is very good too, Mademoiselle.’

‘But you silly, I’ve spoken it since birth. We spoke it at home, English too. I can talk in English if you prefer. But do not call me Mademoiselle. My friends call me Tata, and we must be friends if I am to teach you properly. Your name is difficult for me. Shems, is that right?’

‘Shems will do very well,’ he said, amused.

‘And you must come every day. You cannot learn with a lesson once a week because you forget everything in between and are always catching up.’

‘I can come at this time every day,’ James said.

‘Good. Then we begin.’

By the time Maman Poussin knocked at the half-hour point, James felt thoroughly at home, though the room had an exotic feeling.

The dark red flock wallpaper was almost hidden with framed photographs, icons of saints, posies of dried flowers, silk rosettes, and hanging strips of coloured silks, like scarves.

The furniture was old and heavy, with crimson velvet upholstery, rubbed threadbare in places; the carpet was an ancient Turkish, mainly dark red and brown; and every surface was covered with ornaments and more photographs in silver frames.

The alcoves either side of the fireplace were shelved and filled with old leather-bound books.

In one corner a candle burned inside a red glass before an icon, and in another a samovar, with the silver worn brassily off, bubbled softly.

Concentration broken by the knock, Tata said, ‘We will have tea.’ She served it to James in a glass in a silver holder, with a saucer of raspberry jam to spoon into it.

He found he quite liked it. Gazing about the room, he asked about the candle in the red glass, and she said, ‘That is St Basil, my birth saint. In Russia we call it the “beautiful corner”. Every house has them.’

‘Is the glass always red?’

‘Oh, yes. That is tradition. In Russian, “red” and “beautiful” are the same word.’

‘Red is a lucky colour for the Chinese people, too,’ he said.

‘Where did you learn that?’ she asked, seeming surprised.

‘Charlie – my boss – told me. He has travelled a great deal.’

‘You are not very like an English person, Shems,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘English men are gruff and stiff, though kind underneath. But you are …’ she waved a hand around, searching for the expression ‘… souple . I think you might be quite poetic.’

James laughed. ‘You can’t call an English man poetic.’

‘But there, I have said, you are not like an English man.’

Richard Howard paused and checked the address.

Each road in that part of Ealing was lined on either side with identical semi-detached ‘villas’, as they were known, in red brick with a slate roof and a bay window.

Each had a little porch over the front door, edged with fancy woodwork, like the canopy in a railway station.

There was a black-and-white diamond path leading from the front gate to the front door, which had two stained-glass panels in the cheerful primary colours of boiled sweets.

There was a small garage attached to the side with wooden doors and a tar-paper roof, and the front garden was an oblong of grass with a round bed in the middle in which stood several March-bare roses.

In fact, the villa was distinguishable from its neighbours only by the house number back-painted on the fanlight above the door.

Richard stared up and had a moment of extraordinary double vision, as though standing outside himself and seeing a different view altogether.

He had been born Richard Arthur Hampden Fitzjames Howard, the second son of an earl.

His maternal great-grandfather had been a duke.

His maternal grandmother’s godfather had been the Duke of Wellington, in whose honour he had been given the name Arthur, and her sister had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.

His widowed mother had remarried, to another earl, and was now the Countess of Belmont with a large estate in Derbyshire.

For a moment, overlying the suburban villa, he saw the ancestral mansion in St James’s Square where he had been born and raised.

There had also been the great estate at Brancaster in Lincolnshire, and another in Yorkshire, and yet another in north Norfolk that no-one much ever visited.

Until his father’s death, he had never lived in a house with a number.

‘This is it,’ he said. He felt Cynthia’s hand tighten on his, and looked down at her. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s lovely,’ she said, in a faint, strained voice.

She was tall for a woman, and rather on the thin side, and you would not have called her pretty, except when she smiled, which she didn’t often – not because she was sullen but because she was shy.

She mostly resembled her father, with his large-featured face, round blue eyes and curly hair; from her mother, who was small, plump and handsome, she had got only the fairness of the curls.

She was wearing a close-fitting wool coat with a black velvet collar and cuffs, and a small round hat trimmed with gold-brown feathers.

Her sensible brown shoes were well-polished and her gloves well-kept.

She looked in every particular neat, respectable and unremarkable.

You would not remember passing her in the street.

She had cried when he had proposed to her. He found that uncomfortable to remember.

‘ Really lovely?’ he asked.

‘It looks new,’ she said approvingly.

In the world he had come from, newness was not looked for in a house. Fitzjames House, where he had been born, had belonged to his ancestors for four hundred and fifty years. But everything was different now. He shook away the double vision.

‘It’s new all right,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly been lived in. Shall we go in?’

Inside, the house smelt cleanly of wood.

He closed the door behind them, and saw how the sunlight coming in through the stained-glass panels made fruit-drop patches on the wall.

This will be my home , he thought. My children will be born here .

The house number, seen backwards from inside, was 27.

That would be his address – 27 Wellington Road.

The streets in this estate were named after Victorian prime ministers, and it was simply chance that they were looking in Wellington Road rather than Melbourne, Palmerston or Canning.

His grandmother’s godfather. Coincidence.

The house was empty of furniture. Downstairs there was a drawing room at the front, a tiny room behind it, which he supposed might be useful as a study, and then a dining room, with French windows letting out to the garden.

Beyond again, in the back-addition part of the house, were the kitchen, scullery, servant’s lavatory and coalshed.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms, a bathroom and a separate lavatory.

Over the kitchen there was the servant’s bedroom.

Each of the rooms had a fireplace; electricity and gas were laid on, as well as mains water and sewerage, and there was a boiler in the scullery to provide hot water to the whole house.

Behind was a garden with a lawn and flowerbeds, and vegetable plots beyond.

It backed onto the garden of the matching house in the next road.

Inspection over, Cynthia looked up at him shyly, and it was not possible to tell anything from her face – except that her cheeks seemed a little pink. With pleasure? Or vexation?

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Will it be all right for you to get to work?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes. I can drive in, or take the Underground. The Piccadilly Line goes straight through. But what about you? Could you be happy here?’

‘It’s lovely,’ she said again. ‘I’ve never lived in a house before.’

She had lived all her life with her parents in a mansion flat in Earls Court.

Her father, his employer – soon to be partner – was buying them the house as a wedding-present.

He would pay for the furniture, which Cynthia and her mother would choose.

Richard imagined them browsing for linens and china in Peter Jones, and refreshing themselves afterwards with tea and buns in the top-floor café, two quiet, well-dressed ladies, who had never caused a moment’s disquiet to anyone in their well-ordered lives.

‘Shall we take it, then?’ he said. She nodded, looking up at him, and he knew she wanted to be kissed, to seal the bargain, here, in their very first house.

So he kissed her, and her soft lips clung for an instant before she made herself release him.

She had been brought up to believe a woman must not make too many demands on her man.

He drove them back to Town. All the way he had that same strange feeling of double vision, a sense of unreality, as though at some point he had gone through the wrong door and was not living in his own life any more.

He feared that if he looked into a mirror just then, it would not be his face looking back.

Everything had changed, of course, when his father died, leaving them literally penniless.

But he was the second son: had his father survived, he would still have had to earn a living.

Probably he would have gone into the diplomatic, or the army, his way eased by connections; and in time, given that he had always been popular with the other sex, he would have married a nice girl with a reasonable dowry, and set up house with her.

Not so very different, then, from what he was doing with Cynthia Nevinson?

But her world was different from the world he had been brought up in.

As he drove along the Uxbridge Road he saw to either side the shops and occasional pubs, the side streets of neat little houses, the omnibuses.

This was Suburbia: his sort lived in Town, or the country, or both, but never this in-between shadow land.

He saw the people in their plain, modest clothes, going about their plain, modest lives.

He thought, I shall be doing that: going to work, coming home on the Underground, letting myself in with a key, having dinner, then a quiet evening reading the paper or listening-in to the wireless. It was how people lived.

And it wasn’t that he missed the old way of life.

Yet he felt as though he was standing still, while the world tumbled past him, like a stream, waiting for his proper life to start.

He did not know how he had got here. And beside him was the girl he would marry in a few weeks’ time.

A register-office wedding. Then a honeymoon on the Riviera: that part, at least, came from his old life.

Ealing people probably went to Bournemouth or Torquay.

Suddenly an image came into his mind, of a poster he had seen for the Cornish Riviera Express, showing a very glamorous man and woman holding champagne glasses and gazing from the carriage window at the sparkling, sunlit sea.

Then he remembered one wet day in Dover when his sailing had been delayed and he had gone for a walk along the seafront while he waited.

A very drab couple, their coats and hats dark with rain, had been sitting huddled on a bench under a seafront shelter, sharing a saveloy and chips out of a newspaper.

They didn’t look like that pair in the poster.

He thought how different the holiday experience was for the working classes: they would have their precious week at the seaside, where a sour-faced landlady would lock them out of their lodgings from just after breakfast until just before ‘tea’.

If the weather was unkind they would have nothing to do but sit and shiver under one of the shelters and watch the teeming rain hitting the grey sea.

There ought, he thought, to be a better way.