She told him he must have imagined such things. A child’s mind is a strange and wonderful thing.

  ‘What about a diary entry? Did I imagine that as well?’

  It took Inessa a moment to digest this and then she said balefully, ‘You read my diaries?’ With mounting anger, she made him recount what his thirteen-year-old self had done.

  ‘How could you, Alyosha?’ she fumed. ‘Rooting through my personal possessions? Besides, I kept my diaries under lock and key.’

  ‘It didn’t take me long to find the key.’

  ‘So, what did you read, you hateful child?’

  ‘Every word. So I know all about Mita Golitzin. The officer in the Army’s Medical School. He didn’t come back from the war, did he?’

  Because she’d hurt him, he didn’t mind hurting her.

  ‘Coffee and cognac?’

  The waiter had been hovering at their table for a while.

  ‘Not yet…’

  Inessa ordered another bottle of Vouvray instead.

  ‘To find some answers Mother. That’s the only reason I did it. To try and understand what I meant to you. What I’d done to offend you. I thought it was my fault, that I’d done something unforgiveable, and that’s why you were so cold towards me, always keeping me at arm’s length…’

  ‘Dearest Alyosha,’ she said, seeming finally moved, ‘My dear son…’

  ‘You can make any claim you want here tonight… But you never loved me. You didn’t, Mother.’ He was overwhelmed with sadness. ‘Not like other mothers love their sons. Not like you loved Georgik, and still love him. You’re giving him a proper education, which is more than I ever had… Doesn’t that say it all?’

  It was too much for him. He stood up to leave.

  ‘Don’t go… Not yet… Alyosha, wait… Don’t leave me… Not now… Darling, I beg you… Stay. Stay with me. I don’t want to walk in there on my own.’

  35.

  The Hollywood Club jazz band was blasting out ‘Choo Choo (Gotta Hurry Home)’ in the Negresco ballroom, and, under the baccarat chandeliers, the party was in full swing. The doors had been thrown wide open to the night, and the dancers had spilled out onto the terrace. As he followed his mother, Alyosha felt as though he were walking through a gallery of faces from his youth. The past unfurled before Alyosha vividly, as nearly everybody there was Russian, some of them the children who used to run up and down the corridors of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin when he lived there with his parents.

  His mother took him around the tables, introducing him to her friends, first whispering in his ear to remind him who they were. He recognised Baroness Witte, dressed soberly, with her hair plaited neatly on her head without any ornament, and her companion, Natalia Eristova, newly married after barely wiping the tears dry for her first husband. Then, there was Baron Chichagor, a man who professed sanctity, though in fact he was a selfish old goat. After a lifetime of heavy drinking, his health was starting to deteriorate, though he was still to be found in a backstreet bar with a glass of spirits in front of him at ten o’clock in the morning. As he greeted Alyosha, there remained some unruly energy about him, though his hand shook badly.

  At midnight, with a full moon hanging high in the sky, the band stopped playing and they all sang ‘God Save the Tsar’ to the accompaniment of just the trumpet. Then, before cutting his birthday cake, Prince Maktuyev gave a short, emotional speech, his voice occasionally cracking.

  When he declared that life was hard, he spoke for them all. He extended sympathy to everybody there who was struggling with life’s complications, but that, unfortunately, was their fate, ever since they had been forced to turn their backs on their dear Mother Russia. Without a country of their own, their plight was a pitiful one. For even the strongest soul set adrift in a foreign land, the simplest endeavour could be insuperable, and all their dreams were broken dreams.

  A few of the women had become emotional and one or two were weeping quietly.

  ‘But what will it profit us to be downhearted? To live without hope? We must act!’ Prince Maktuyev’s voice no longer cracked, it boomed with authority. ‘We must rediscover our faith that Russia, one day, will be restored to us in all her glory.’

  From the back of the room, somebody heckled, ‘If it was such a precious way of life, why didn’t you fight to the death to preserve it when you had the chance?

  ‘We did,’ Prince Maktuyev roared, ‘but who ever truly understands the worth of something until it has been lost?’

  The voice shouted, ‘Hypocrite! You and everybody else in this room! The Romans took their own lives in preference to living a life without honour.’

  He had clearly been drinking and people turned on him angrily and told him to be quiet, but the Prince said ‘I agree with you, sir. Friends, we may all hate the Bolsheviks, but as the gentleman over there is suggesting, we should rather hate ourselves for giving Russia up so easily. All the more reason, then, for every one of us here tonight to commit, with every fibre of our being, to winning her back. It is incumbent on every one of us who fought in the ranks of the White Armies to continue that fight, until our hands are stained red with the blood of the communists.’

  After that, the dancing resumed and up in the balconies, the young people tugged at the netting which had been suspended across the ceiling, releasing balloons, buckets of confetti and strips of golden ticker tape onto the dancers below. Some of them had little whistles which they blew, clashing with the jazz in a noisy cacophony. The young women who took to the dance floor wore their hair shingled, exposing their white necks, and their dresses were also daringly short, coming just to their knees, while the eyes of the older women noticed everything above their old-fashioned fans.

  Around the room were the remnants of the royal court and the hangers-on – distant relatives of the Tsar, his former ministers, princes and princesses, some former oil merchants from Baku, hopeful and hopeless capitalists. They were nearly all impoverished, many up to their necks in debt, managing somehow to obtain a little more credit on the basis of their aristocratic pedigree. So used to a life of luxury, they still continued to worship the golden calf with faith and hope, waiting for their luck to change – for the natural order of things to be reinstituted.

  But, for now, life was an endless, exhausting struggle, lived in nondescript rooms in shabby houses along back streets. Some of them still clung by their fingernails to the sort of life they thought they deserved, spending as though there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, there were many tomorrows, forcing them to sell their palaces and estates in Russia for a song. The bankers of Europe, like a pack of wolves circling their prey, were ready to pounce on their cheaply bought spoils the moment communism came to an end, but as it obstinately survived, it seemed as though their gamble, for once, would not pay off.

  A bearded giant of a man was weaving clumsily towards Alyosha, bumping into people and swaying. He grasped his elbow tightly in an effort to steady himself.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, leaning so that his face was only an inch or two from Alyosha’s. He wore a row of medals on his chest, and his epaulettes were as yellow as a canary. Without waiting for an answer, he launched into his experiences as a commanding officer in General Nikolai Yudenich’s army during the attack on Petrograd, in the ice and snow of that harsh November in 1919, when they had been just a hair’s breadth away from beating the Bolsheviks. If it hadn’t been for the treachery of Baron von Mannerheim, who had promised Yudenich, ‘on the life of his mother’, that he would advance with his army from Finland, the city would have been captured, no doubt about it. But Mannerheim didn’t keep to his word.

  ‘Can you imagine?’ he almost howled. ‘Can you imagine how we felt, twenty thousand of us out under the stars, frozen stiff as corpses in the snow?’ He went on to give his thoughts about the best way to win the country back. ‘From the Baltic countries, young friend, that’s where we need to mount our attack.’ He kept staggering until he completely lost his footing and went crashing backwards, mid-sentence, into a table of champagne glasses.

  Alyosha watched his mother dancing. When Prince Maktuyev led his wife onto the dance floor, Inessa and a few of the other women gave him a small curtsey. The Prince was not the best dancer, and his wife winced when he stepped on her toes, but they persevered. Alyosha had a boy’s memory of him at the opera in Petrograd, in the box next to the Tsar and his family.

  Inessa came over to him after the dance ended, and dragged him round to meet more of her many acquaintances. Mathilde Kshesinskaya was one, a former prima ballerina at the Mariinskii Theatre, who used to be the mistress of Tsar Nicholas II. She was now a widow, having buried her husband, Archduke Andre Vladimirovich Romanov, some fifteen months previously. Mathilde Kshesinskaya, in turn, introduced them both to her companion, Duchess Vera Meshcherskii, who intended to open a house for Russian exiles in Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois. She was filled with compassion for the victims of the world, and kept referring to the horrors she had witnessed in the port of Izmit in Turkey shortly after she sailed from the Crimea in 1920. She wouldn’t elaborate, but it was obvious the experience still weighed heavily on her.

  They spoke to Prince Alexander Buxhoeveden, too, who had just moved with his family from Paris to Nice. Life had been hard in Paris, and they had been poor. But he had managed to raise a little capital and had begun to dabble in buying and selling; property, sailing boats, motor cars – anything and everything. Moving to the Côte d’Azur was the best thing he had done since leaving Russia, and he felt that his luck had finally turned, though he was more than sensible of the fact that it could change just as easily again. He was a man who had experienced the bad, as well as the good, that life can dole out. At one time, he had been very fond of dancing, but he no longer had any strength in his left leg, and his right leg was beginning to stiffen in the same way. His greatest fear was that he would become a cripple, and be a burden to his family.

  At the same table sat Prince Felix Yussupov, enjoying a leisurely smoke with Archduke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. Alyosha listened to the hypocrisy of their small talk, so full of malice about their friends and acquaintances. These were the two who had been responsible for murdering Rasputin and throwing his body into the Neva. But that had been a long time ago.

  It wasn’t all spite and venom. There was also witty repartee, lively anecdotes, real affection and goodwill, and of course, among the younger set especially, flirting and romancing. But his eyes strayed to some of the older women who were accompanied by younger men. Boys like him, at work, dancing with women who could easily have given birth to them. He noticed how some of the elderly couples watched the dancers fondly, no doubt reminiscing about the balls of their youth. He gazed at their faces, thinking to himself that there was a sort of beauty to old age that was absent in the young.

  Inessa persuaded him to dance with her. It was a slow dance, and she grasped his fingers in order to place his hand flat at the small of her back. He felt the heat of his mother’s body mingling with his as she leant heavily into him. She had been drinking all night, and the champagne and wine seemed to have gone to her head.

  He realised, not for the first time, how important it was for his mother to be seen and admired. That was the main attraction of this occasion for her, an opportunity to put her best foot forward. She had always been adept at presenting herself in the best possible light, because she thrived on admiration and attention.

  She whispered in his ear that he was, by far, the most handsome young man in the room. Then, she told him how proud she was of him that night. She was sweating, he could smell it on her, mixed with her perfume and the slight wine-sourness of her breath. He felt the fluttering of her fingers on the nape of his neck, which was also damp with sweat. He whirled her around in a slightly unstable turn, and she threw her arms up, her hands stroking his cheeks, her eyes shut and her lips mouthing the words of the song. The drink had caught up with him, too, and an attack of heartburn made the pressure of her body against his chest unpleasant.

  He realised that she was properly drunk, and suggested it was time to leave. Slurring, she agreed, and he decided he should see her safely back to her bedroom. She could barely keep her footing, and kept stumbling, so he put an arm around her and almost carried her from the lift to her room. She couldn’t unlock the door either, and, giggling like a schoolgirl, gave him the key. He helped her to the bed, and she fell back, holding on to him so that he fell with her. He had the strangest feeling, as though he had left his body and was looking down on himself and her, with the sound of the sea crashing on the beach in his ears.

  He tried to pull himself free, but she had grabbed him by his hair – two fistfuls of it, and mumbled something about how he was meant to stay all night. She tugged her dress over her head clumsily, pushed him on the bed, climbed on top of him and kissed him. He hesitated, then took hold of her waist, pulled her closer and kissed her back. She rummaged at the buttons of his fly, but he had to undo it for her, their fingers tripping over each other. She pawed at him and grabbed his erection, but she couldn’t push it into herself. She gave up and started to kiss and bite his ear. Alyosha rolled her over onto her back and, half in anger, half in fear, he delved between her thighs, his desire mounting. He pressed his lips against her neck, her chin, her nose, he kissed her lips and her forehead. She cupped his testicles with one hand, her sharp nails catching at the flesh. He couldn’t hold. He couldn’t hold. Suddenly he was inside her…

  Her breath was laboured in his ear. She ran her nails slowly along his back, sending shivers through him. His desire evaporated quickly now that he had come, and a shudder of cold horror replaced it. She moved slightly, before turning onto her side. They lay there without a word, with her light scratching of his flesh the only sound, like the beating of insect wings at dusk.

  36.

  In the cool early morning air, they were already hard at work wiping down the tables and sweeping the pavement outside the cafés in the Marche aux Fleurs and Place Gautier. The delivery boys in their grey aprons were heaving the flowers and fruit and vegetables down from their carts, while the market traders had started to unpack the boxes and arrange the produce on their stalls.

  Alyosha hurried past unheeding, heading for the narrow streets of the old town. The watery early morning sunshine was abruptly extinguished by the confining walls of the Rue des Serruries, and he had lost his heat by the time he emerged back into the light at the Place du Carret. A refuse lorry rumbled past him slowly, but there were very few people about; a man walking his dog, a few early risers taking their morning constitutional. He crossed the Promenade des Anglais, went down the stone stairs and picked his way across the stony beach to the water’s edge, where a light morning mist rose from the sea.

  His mother had been lying on her stomach when he woke, a tiny bit of spittle at the side of her mouth, and her mascara smudged down her cheek. The sheet had barely covered her, and he’d surveyed her semi-nakedness for a brief moment before quietly dressing.

  High in the sky, a faint blush of dawn remained. At the Hôtel de la Méditerranée, Sebastien would be waiting for him. He made his way back to the market, and stopped at a café for a cup of coffee. Then, he walked aimlessly down the Rue Droite. He remembered crying out between sleep and wakefulness, and the sweat and the heat and the weight of her body on his, the taste of her breasts, the saltiness of her armpits. He washed his hands, face and neck in a stone basin under a little fountain pouring out of a cherub’s mouth – a fat-cheeked baby with voluptuous lips which had half birthed itself from the wall of the church. Her perfume still lingered on his skin. He pushed his hand down the front of his trousers, fingered his cock, and lifted his finger and thumb to smell her.

  37.

  A shipwright gave him a lift in his truck and told him cheerfully about his work maintaining pleasure boats, but Alyosha barely understood one word in ten because of his thick Niçois accent. Further along the coast, he asked to be dropped off at some nameless town, and wandered aimlessly towards the harbour, where old men sat under a café’s parasols playing dominos.

  When a woman in a white apron came over for his order, he asked if he could have a glass of water. He sniffed at his hand, then his arm. She was still on his skin. The sun hurt his eyes and his head throbbed. Even at the end of October, it was still hot; he felt his forehead prickle, and wished he’d thought to wear a hat.

  He gulped down the water and set off again, leaving the town and walking a fair distance along the coastal road. Already, the previous night had started to bend, distort, escape to some other part of his memory: the blaring of the band; the rapt faces of the dancers as they escaped the reality of their lives for the length of the song. Everything was a charade. Fun and games, frenetic enjoyment, living in one perpetual present because the past had disappeared like mist from a mountain. How could anybody live in a perpetual present? Easily – that’s what he was doing. What choice did he have? He was a boy from the lost generation, without a country, without roots, without anything. No wonder the Russians on the Riviera lived such chaotic lives, searching for the next thrill in a desperate bid to escape the yawning abyss which lay just ahead of them.

  Several white villas stood among the dusty trees, their red pantiled roofs dotting the hillside. He passed a couple before reaching a stone by the roadside with Manoli les Pins painted on it. The villa stood high on the hillside, in a rather isolated spot, and the hard clay drive leading up to it was steep, so he was rather breathless by the time he reached the house. He hadn’t had a crumb to eat all day; he was weak with hunger and his legs ached.

  A little boy was playing ball on the terrace, and when he saw Alyosha approaching, he paused his game to stare at him. A middle-aged lady looked up from her seat in the shade, where she was podding peas, splitting the pods lengthwide with her thumbnail and tumbling the peas into a bowl. Seeing Alyosha, she turned her head and called to somebody inside the villa.