Free The White Russian by Vanora Bennett Page A

wouldn’t it? For a start …?
    And maybe she’d show Evie that picture?
    It was hidden away in a small cardboard box of trinkets packed in tissue paper that she’d pushed under her bed when she’d moved in. The trinkets were those long-ago lover’s gifts you never quite want to throw away: mineral monstrosities, jewelled troikas poised on marble ostricheggs and the like. Oh, how she’d treasured them when she’d first been given them. But now it was only the photograph she could bear to look at. There she was, all sepia and faded, young and pretty in a white lace blouse, sitting in a boat – a picnic, she remembered. A summer’s day near St Petersburg, a river bank, a meadow of wild flowers. Maybe thirty people, Americans and Russians both. The picture showed two or three people on the bank – arms and backs, anyway – and one other person in the boat with her, a very tall, thin young man buttoned up to the neck in a military tunic despite the heat, with thick wavy fair hair and wide-set eyes, holding the oars. (Preobrazhensky Regiment, First Brigade, she remembered him telling her, and his blue eyes smiling, though had that been here, in this boat?) In the picture, her young self, looking over at her boatman, was the one smiling.
    Constance put it up against the glass above the fireplace.
    That first step felt like an achievement.
    She went over to the ugly little lap desk that was part of the apartment’s overdone clutter and opened it. There was no writing paper inside. She’d forgotten to order it again. There weren’t even any discarded envelopes in the wastepaper basket (curse Marie-Thérèse for her impeccable housekeeping). There was just blotting paper.
    Sitting down on the bed, she wrote ‘Now’ down the left-hand side of the blotting paper, and ‘Later’ down the right.
    After a while, she added a question mark to each side. She put down the pen, and sighed.
    She still had no idea what else to tell her granddaughter, who was probably already on the train here. Or when.
    But she was, at least, relieved when the music stopped, and footsteps came out of the study. They’d done for the day, then. Thank God. Two very deep male voices in the corridor rumbled polite goodbyes at the silent presence that must be Marie-Thérèse. She was a little surprised to hear these engineers speak the Russian-accented French of so many shabbily dressed people here in Paris. (Heavens, why had she thought they’d be German?)
    Shamed by Marie-Thérèse’s surly silence, she called out, warmly, ‘
Do zavtra, gospoda
.’ (‘See you tomorrow, gentlemen.’)
    When the door had shut quietly behind the men, she asked Marie-Thérèse to bring her apéritif to the now-empty study.
    You got the sunset from the study.
    She pulled up a chair to the French window in there and, lighting a cigarette, looked out at the honeyed evening scene before her: trees fuzzy with leaves and pale-gold house fronts. She liked the stillness of this time on a hot day. This is where she’d bring Evie, for the first discussion she’d imagined … Slowly, she felt a fragile sort of quiet return. This was what she’d wanted, after all, wasn’t it, even if it was now coming more suddenly than she’d have liked? If all the reversals Constance had survived had taught her anything, it was that life was, almost always, more of a comedy than a tragedy. And this, too, would almost certainly all come out all right in the end.
    When Marie-Thérèse came in with her glass of champagne, Constance asked, in a voice she had to make as calm as possible, trying to believe this was the most normal request in the world, ‘Would you make up the spare roombefore you go? And also ask Gaston if he’d meet the Le Havre evening train later on? My grand-daughter’s coming to stay.’
    To her astonishment, Marie-Thérèse’s reply of ‘
Oui, madame
’ was only slightly grumpy.
    Taking a sip of champagne, she moved away from the window to the big table she used as