Paul Bailey - Uncle Rudolf

—I try not to dwell on the past, Andrew. It’s over, I remind myself. What’s done cannot be undone. The present is all that matters. Remember that, if you can. As for me these days, I tend to forget it. Irina decided wisely when she picked Roman. I offered them money, my Vienna money, to get out of that beastly country – our beastly country, Andrew – but they refused to accept it. I should have gone to Botoşani and bullied them into leaving.

I asked him why.

I was trapped in his fierce brown stare for a moment.

—Oh, it was no place for good people. He added, mysteriously: But you are my future, Andrew. That’s why. Whatever happens, I shall always be at your side when you need me. Yes, you are my future, for the time being.

Perhaps he had considered telling me the real reason why on that April day in 1945, and had then – in the course of staring at me – persuaded himself that a boy of fifteen was too raw for such knowledge. Perhaps.

He suggested that we take a walk in the fields. There was no danger any more from German planes. The lord of the manor, as he mockingly described himself, would inspect the estate with his heir apparent.

We ate an omelette that evening, cooked with the fresh eggs his hens had laid.

—What luxury. What a simple luxury, said my – smiling uncle. We are very fortunate.

I was to receive the real reason why, the real answer to my question, when I was eighteen.

—You are mature for your age, Andrew. I will pour you a large brandy before I say what I have to say. I certainly need one.

What he told me on the tenth of August, 1948, caused me to shiver today.

I remember that I needed a second large brandy after I had read my father’s last letter to my uncle, written in the old words I no longer spoke.

The words that are ashes in my mouth when I catch myself speaking them now.

—We shall have an English Christmas, not an Orthodox one. Santa Claus will come down the chimney with your presents. He’s like Saint Nicholas only different, as they say here. You must sleep tight, my dear, because Santa doesn’t want you to see him being kind. Do you promise me you won’t try to look at him?

—I promise, Uncle.

It was December 1937, and I was still in England, on holiday. We were at Uncle Rudolf’s Elizabethan house in the Sussex countryside, with his devoted entourage – Annie, Teddy and Charlie – whom he now instructed me not to call his servants.

—They are my friends, Andrew darling. They work for me, yes, but on the best of terms. They are our equals, not inferiors.

(Yet the girls Annie ruled over with a steely eye for any slipshod cleaning or polishing or bed-making were obviously there as unobtrusive servants, fulfilling necessary chores.)

Annie, Teddy and Charlie were a privileged trio, and they basked in that privilege. The widowed Annie, the divorced Teddy and Charlie, the dedicated ‘bit of a skirt-chaser’ – a phrase I learned from Charlie’s lips even before my English lessons began in earnest – regarded their friendly employer as a very paragon.

I kept my promise to sleep tight. Uncle Rudolf had ensured that I would, by having dinner served late on Christmas Eve. It might have been the sherry in the trifle and the half-glass of champagne I was advised to sip that made me drowsy, but I was definitely ‘on the way to the Land of Nod’ – as Annie often joked – when my uncle carried me upstairs to bed. And what delights awaited me that Christmas morning, delivered to my little room with such amazing stealth: a train set, complete with signals and stations, with miniature porters and passengers and a beaming driver at the helm; a huge wooden jigsaw puzzle of the Houses of Parliament; sheets of drawing paper, with coloured pencils and crayons; Babar the Elephant in French, and an English dictionary, my first and most beloved, that would, as Uncle Rudolf predicted, bring me not only a new language but a whole new world. These are the gifts, the precious gifts, I remember today, but I think there were others to unwrap beneath my uncle’s adoring gaze.

My playmate, if the term is appropriate, that Christmas was Maurice, the ten-year-old son of Charlie and a skirt he had chased successfully. Maurice was bored and morose in my company, though I did reduce him to jeering laughter whenever I attempted to speak a snatch or two of English.

—You sound funny. Your uncle doesn’t, but you do. You don’t know how funny you sound.

But otherwise Maurice glowered at me – yes, glowered is right – during our playtime. I suppose, now, that he felt too grown-up in my childish presence, too preoccupied with the fact that his parents, Charlie and Edith, were not united in either love or marriage. He had no family, as I had. That may be my old man’s fancy, set down with all the confidence of hindsight, but Maurice, coming home on leave from Malta would try, and fail, to kill his mother ten years later. The young sailor had found her with a stranger, naked on the kitchen table. The man, a respected doctor, dressed in haste while Maurice glowered at him, I imagine, as he had once glowered at me. Alone with Edith, who was offering excuses for her behaviour, Maurice picked up a knife and stabbed her in the arm, the shoulder and, most dangerously, the chest. It was the contrite Maurice who summoned the police. His mother survived, after an emergency operation that lasted several hours. Maurice stood trial, in 1948, for attempted murder, and was found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. The defending counsel depicted Edith as the loosest type of loose woman, and a Sunday newspaper named her the Finchley Jezebel. Maurice was sent to prison, where he shortly died.

Maurice’s laughter as he scorned my feeble English wasn’t happily full-throated. I know that I sensed the strain in it. We were always uneasy together, and grateful when Annie or Charlie or Uncle Rudolf appeared with cake and jellies and chocolate. We both needed those cheerful adults to be with us, and for subtly different reasons, it occurs to me. I can express today what I couldn’t then, even in the old words – that, seeing a few snowflakes fall, my heart was suddenly in my throat. As the flakes fell and almost instantly evaporated, I had a vision of the wonderful carpet I had walked on the previous December, hand-in-hand with Tata. I thought, too, of Mama ordering me away from the window, to eat – what was it I ate? – the pie she had baked with caşcavel cheese, which comes from ewe’s milk, and mushrooms.

My uncle hosted a supper party that Christmas evening. I wore a tailored suit with short trousers, a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie.

—Andrew is the guest of honour, he announced as each of his guests arrived. My nephew, my darling nipote.

Uncle Rudolf raised me aloft to shake hands with a famous actor, a famous prima donna (who kissed me on both cheeks), a famous theatrical designer, another famous actor and his famous actress wife, a famous cabaret singer, a famous playwright and a pianist who wasn’t as famous as he deserved to be. Among all these famous or not-so-famous people, I was the guest of honour, my uncle insisted. He sat me next to him, at the head of the dining table.

We ate by candlelight. No, they ate by candlelight, while I nibbled, nothing more, at the strange food that was set in front of me. The meal was served by the always-perspiring Annie with the aid of two girls from the village, who mumbled ‘Beg pardon, sir’ and ‘Beg pardon, madam’ until Uncle Rudolf ordered them, politely, to stop. It was Annie who noticed my reluctance to touch the dark meat on my plate, and it was she who removed the partridge breast and the pear stewed in red wine, scolding Mr Rudolf for expecting her poor, lovely boy to eat such a rich dish. I was given some Brussels sprouts and a roast potato, cut into small pieces, and felt less discomfort.