Simon Montefiore - Sashenka

Zeitlin waved the sledge driver away and walked on with a spring in his step. I have been safe but captive for decades, he thought. I’m returning to life after a long hibernation. I am going to reclaim my daughter, show her how I love her, interest myself in her tutoring and her further studies. It is never too late, never too late, is it?

At the Donan, Jean-Antoine greeted him. Zeitlin threw off his coat and hat and kicked off his galoshes. He was looking forward to greeting his guest.

Inside the scarlet womb of his private kabinet , Lala awaited him in a prim shantung tea dress decorated with mauve flowers. She stood up when he came in, her gentle heart-shaped face quizzical.

“Baron! What’s so urgent?”

“Don’t say anything,” he said, taking her hands in his. “Let’s sit down.”

“Why here?”

“I’ll explain.”

There was a knock on the door, and waiters brought in the tea: fruitcake, muffins with strawberry jam, fresh cream and two thimble glasses of amber. Lala stood up to serve, but he stopped her and waited until the waiters had poured the tea and closed the door.

“A brandy,” he said. “For both of us.”

“What is it?” she asked. “You’re worrying me. You don’t seem yourself. And why the cognac?”

“It’s the best. Courvoisier. Try it.”

They eyed each other anxiously. Zeitlin knew he looked old, that his face was lined, that there were new fingers of grey at his temples. He was exhausted by relentless meetings and his own bonhomie, desiccated by columns of figures. Everyone expected so much of him, his obligations seemed unending. Even the profits of his own companies ground him down.

Lala seemed older too, he thought suddenly. Her cheeks were plumper, the skin weathered by the winters. Fear of the future and of solitude, secret disappointments, had made her a little older than her years.

Ashamed of these thoughts, he hesitated as the little wood fire surged up, dyeing their faces orange. She sipped the cognac. Slowly the fire warmed them.

She stood up. “I don’t like the cognac. It burns my throat. I think I should go. I don’t like the feel of this place. It’s not respectable…”

“This is the Donan!”

“Quite,” she said. “I’ve read about it in the newspapers…”

It was no good. He could restrain himself no longer. He threw himself at her feet and buried his face in her lap, his tears wetting her shantung dress.

“What’s wrong? For heaven’s sake, what is it?”

He took her hands. She tried to push him away but somehow the kindness that was so much a part of her overcame her habit of prudence. Gently, she stroked his hair, and he could feel her hands soft and warm like a girl’s.

He stood up and took her in his arms.

What am I doing? he thought. Have I gone mad? My God, the lips have their own rules. Just as magnesium burns on contact with oxygen, so skin on skin unleashes some sort of chemical reaction. He kissed her.

She sighed quietly under her breath. He knew she was an inveterate giver of affection—but didn’t she want some for herself too?

Then something magical happened. He kissed her again and suddenly she kissed him back, eyes closed. His hands ran over her body. The very plainness of her dress, the cheapness of her stockings, the ordinariness of her rosewater cologne delighted him. When he touched higher, he could barely conceive of the silkiness of her thigh. The smell of soap on skin, the smoke from the fire, the steaming tang of the India tea entranced them both.

I am doing something utterly reckless, out of character and foolish, Zeitlin told himself. I who have control over everything I do. Stop right now, you fool. Don’t be like your absurd brother! I’ll be a laughingstock! I’ll shatter my perfect world.

But it was already shattered, and Zeitlin found he did not care.

At fourteen, Audrey Lewis had left the village school in Pegsdon, Hertfordshire, to take a job as junior nanny with the family of Lord Stisted in Eaton Square, London.

Her story, as she herself said later, was as sadly predictable as one of the cheap novels she enjoyed reading. Seduction and impregnation by the feckless son of the house (who specialized in servant girls), and her subsequent arranged marriage to Mr. Lewis, the fifty-year-old chauffeur, “so as not to frighten the horses.” Her abortion was humiliating, painful and she almost died from a hemorrhage; the marriage did not prosper, and she left her position with the bribe of a glowing reference. Her adoring parents begged her to come home to their pub—the Live and Let Live in Pegsdon, which they had named to reflect their philosophy of life. But then she saw the advertisement in the Lady . One word was enough for her: Russia!

It was high summer in St. Petersburg when the Zeitlin carriage met the young English girl as she disembarked from the German liner. Samuil wore a white suit, spats, a boater, an opal ring, a snake-shaped silver tiepin and an air of generous optimism that immediately included Audrey in his family’s happiness. He was slim and young with his auburn hair and boulevardier’s mustache. The Zeitlins did not yet live in the mansion on Greater Maritime but in a spacious apartment on Gorokhovaya. They were rich but still provincial: Ariadna, with her violet eyes, her blue-black hair and her queenly bust, remained the girl who had dazzled the private boxes at the theaters in the southern cities where her husband conducted his business. Ariadna was still busy keeping up with those snobbish provincials, the wives of the Russian viceroys and officers, and the Armenian and Muslim oil barons in Baku and Tiflis.

The Zeitlins, Lala discovered, were Jews. She had never met Jews before. There were no Jews in her village in Hertfordshire and Lord Stisted knew no Jews, although Lady Stisted talked disdainfully of the unscrupulous Jewish diamond millionaires from South Africa and the thousands of filthy Jewish cutthroats from Russia who had turned the East End into a “rookery of crime.” Audrey had been warned that Jews were not good people to work for—but she knew her own position would not stand too much scrutiny. The Zeitlins for their part were delighted to find a girl who had worked in a noble London household. They suited each other—especially as the Zeitlins seemed very civilized Israelites.

The moment Mrs. Lewis arrived, indeed before her cases had been taken to her room, Ariadna, who looked dazzling in a dress of turquoise crépe de chine, led her into a nursery to meet her charge.

“Here she is! Voilà ma fille ,” said Ariadna in her pretentious Franco-English. “She almost killed me when she was born. Never again. I’ve told Samuil—from now on, I deserve some fun! She’s an unbiddable child, ungrateful and unruly. See if you can tame her a little, Mrs. Linton—”

“Lewis, Audrey Lewis, madame.”

“Yes, yes…from now on, she’s yours.”

It was at that meeting that Mrs. Lewis had become Lala, and had fallen in love with Sashenka. She herself was in her teens; this child not that much younger. Her doctor in London had told her after the abortion that she would never have a child of her own and suddenly, passionately, she wanted to nurture this young girl.

The child and her governess needed each other and so Lala became Sashenka’s mother, her real mother. What fun they had: skating and sleigh rides in winter, carriage rides, mushroom collecting and blackberry picking at Zemblishino in the summer, always laughing and always together.

The Zeitlins traveled constantly, to Odessa and Baku and Tiflis, by train but in a private compartment. Lala studied Russian on the long trips.

In Baku they stayed in a palace that Zeitlin’s father had had copied from a French château: they promenaded on the seafront surrounded by a phalanx of kochis , armed bodyguards sporting fezzes, wielding Berdana rifles. In Odessa they stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel right on Seaside Street, just above the famous Richelieu Steps; Lala spent her free time sitting in cafés, eating sturgeon kebabs on Deribaskaya. But her English heart remained in Tiflis.