Читать книгу Uncle Rudolf - Paul Bailey - Страница 15

Here I was, in London, safely delivered by the French guard – who gained a small fortune in English money from my smiling uncle – looking about me, bewildered.

—You will be Andrew, Andrei. Andrew. For all the time you are in my care.

I was still in his arms. He was bearing me out of the station and into the chauffeur-driven car that was waiting for us.

—This is my nephew, he said to the driver in the new language I would soon be learning.

—Welcome to England, Andrew. My uncle translated Charlie’s greeting, and instructed me to say thank you, which I somehow did.

—Thank you. My first new words on that first evening.

I had never been in a lift, because we had no such modern thing in our town, but here I was, with my uncle’s hand on my shoulder, going up and up to his apartment on the top floor of Nightingale Mansions. That lift would become a golden cage in which I was happy to be imprisoned. I loved the way it clanked to a stop. In summer, when most of the Nightingale’s residents were on holiday in the south of France, I lived in my cage whenever I was free to play, working the magic handle that set it in motion, jumping in and out of it as the mood took me.

I heard the clanking sound for the first time that evening, and then here I was entering my uncle Rudolf’s London home. I was hugged and kissed by Annie, his housekeeper, who smelt of a soap I would discover was called carbolic, and who whispered Andrew, Andrew, over and over again, into my ear.

—You poor, lovely boy, she was saying, you poor, lovely boy. I heard affection in her voice, but with no knowledge of what she was really telling me. Annie would say to me later, as she poured porridge into my special bowl, that I was her poor, lovely boy from the moment she saw me on that cold February night. I was her clever boy, too, for speaking English so well.

My uncle’s flat was sumptuous. The word was unknown to me in 1937, for I had not been raised in anything like luxury. My parents had had no cause to use it, ever. Somptuos. Our house in the small country town – the house I was expecting to live in again – was humble, and humbly furnished. But Uncle Rudolf’s furniture was of a kind I could not even dream of, and had no words to describe until I became the English nephew he wanted me to be. Although I was tired and confused, my eyes took in the vast sofa, the shining mahogany table, the chaise longue, the grand piano, the chandelier, and the paintings and drawings that covered every wall. I gawped. I gawped in wonder, in utter astonishment.

I slept alongside my uncle that night. He sang me to sleep with a lullaby.