The White Russian by Vanora Bennett Read Free Book Online

the door, trying to sound excited and not just nervous, peering into the gloom of drawn drapes, ‘aren’t they beautiful?’
    Slowly, she turned her head and, when she saw theflowers, and maybe the worry in my face, she let her tight, sick expression loosen just a bit, and nodded weakly before turning back towards the wall.
    ‘I’ll put them here, on the chest by your bed, shall I?’ I babbled, hoping against hope that this was the beginning of something better. ‘Look, do you see, I’ll move the water glass over here, and these photos on to the window … then you’ll be able to see them easily.’
    I moved the photos in their silver frames, very carefully. Mother in white lace, with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Herbert. One of a young Mother, looking beautiful in pearls and very carefully made up, with a small, howling, red-faced, newborn me. Mother and Hughie, waving from a yacht … a family shot of all the cousins, grinning at the camera, on the island … Hughie and Mother, in Venice, waving from a gondola … there were so many of them.
    It was only when I lifted the big vase on to the chest that I noticed something was lying on the mahogany top, among all that metallic display. It was a small sepia photograph in an oval card frame that I hadn’t ever noticed before among these stiff public mementoes. It didn’t have a frame. It must have got stuck at the back of something else, I thought, picking it up. It showed two young people in long-ago fashion, side by side, hand in hand, a young, timid-looking girl in white lace mutton-chop sleeves, with her black hair pinned up in a bun, looking very seriously at the camera, and a thin young black-haired man, maybe her cousin or brother – they were very alike – in a stiff jacket, waistcoat and high collar, looking just as serious.
    When I turned it over, a little furtively, I saw the words ‘Constance and Eddie, 1893’ in faded ink and old-fashionedloopy copperplate. I held my breath. That must be my very young grandparents, in the year they married and set off for Imperial Russia together. I’d had no idea that any such picture existed. I wanted to stop and stare, or even ask … Touched that my mother had secretly kept it all these years, tucked away behind the display of her happy family, I put it carefully down with the others on the shelf.
    And then I caught sight of another faded picture, which had slipped down somehow behind the chest and was stuck between its back and the wall. I nudged it out, not wanting to tear it.
    It was the same picture as the one I’d kept for the past few years, which was now tucked into that book of French poems, with the wrapping next to it: Grandmother in her sixties, looking straight at the camera, with that hint of a smile, half-amused, but a little bit nervous too, on her face. No frame or anything. How strange, I thought, straightening it out, unable not to stare. It even had a fold in the bottom right-hand corner, where the photographic paper had cracked, in the same place as my one.
    Had she been receiving more letters from Grandmother then? I turned to her, almost ready to ask, before my nerve failed me, and I pushed the picture under the other one, face down, on the window ledge. ‘What a lot of pictures you have here …’ I half whispered, but Mother didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t say any more, either, but when I tiptoed out a moment later, murmuring, ‘You have a little sleep, now,’ I was easier in my mind, because, although she was still wan and wild-haired, she would, at least, have those flowers to look at and smell when she turned around: a reminder that I’d been there, and that I’d tried.
    We didn’t make it to the Stork Club or Twenty-One that night, as it turned out. There was a flyer up outside the Russian Tea Room for a singer. ‘The return of Nadezhda Plevitskaya!’ it read. ‘La Tsiganka! The Tsar’s Nightingale!’ and when I looked closer I saw the same stout, heavily rouged face that