Uncle Rudolf

—They are my friends, Andrew darling. They work for me, yes, but on the best of terms. They are our equals, not inferiors.

(Yet the girls Annie ruled over with a steely eye for any slipshod cleaning or polishing or bed-making were obviously there as unobtrusive servants, fulfilling necessary chores.)

Annie, Teddy and Charlie were a privileged trio, and they basked in that privilege. The widowed Annie, the divorced Teddy and Charlie, the dedicated ‘bit of a skirt-chaser’ – a phrase I learned from Charlie’s lips even before my English lessons began in earnest – regarded their friendly employer as a very paragon.

I kept my promise to sleep tight. Uncle Rudolf had ensured that I would, by having dinner served late on Christmas Eve. It might have been the sherry in the trifle and the half-glass of champagne I was advised to sip that made me drowsy, but I was definitely ‘on the way to the Land of Nod’ – as Annie often joked – when my uncle carried me upstairs to bed. And what delights awaited me that Christmas morning, delivered to my little room with such amazing stealth: a train set, complete with signals and stations, with miniature porters and passengers and a beaming driver at the helm; a huge wooden jigsaw puzzle of the Houses of Parliament; sheets of drawing paper, with coloured pencils and crayons; Babar the Elephant in French, and an English dictionary, my first and most beloved, that would, as Uncle Rudolf predicted, bring me not only a new language but a whole new world. These are the gifts, the precious gifts, I remember today, but I think there were others to unwrap beneath my uncle’s adoring gaze.

My playmate, if the term is appropriate, that Christmas was Maurice, the ten-year-old son of Charlie and a skirt he had chased successfully. Maurice was bored and morose in my company, though I did reduce him to jeering laughter whenever I attempted to speak a snatch or two of English.

—You sound funny. Your uncle doesn’t, but you do. You don’t know how funny you sound.

But otherwise Maurice glowered at me – yes, glowered is right – during our playtime. I suppose, now, that he felt too grown-up in my childish presence, too preoccupied with the fact that his parents, Charlie and Edith, were not united in either love or marriage. He had no family, as I had. That may be my old man’s fancy, set down with all the confidence of hindsight, but Maurice, coming home on leave from Malta would try, and fail, to kill his mother ten years later. The young sailor had found her with a stranger, naked on the kitchen table. The man, a respected doctor, dressed in haste while Maurice glowered at him, I imagine, as he had once glowered at me. Alone with Edith, who was offering excuses for her behaviour, Maurice picked up a knife and stabbed her in the arm, the shoulder and, most dangerously, the chest. It was the contrite Maurice who summoned the police. His mother survived, after an emergency operation that lasted several hours. Maurice stood trial, in 1948, for attempted murder, and was found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. The defending counsel depicted Edith as the loosest type of loose woman, and a Sunday newspaper named her the Finchley Jezebel. Maurice was sent to prison, where he shortly died.

Maurice’s laughter as he scorned my feeble English wasn’t happily full-throated. I know that I sensed the strain in it. We were always uneasy together, and grateful when Annie or Charlie or Uncle Rudolf appeared with cake and jellies and chocolate. We both needed those cheerful adults to be with us, and for subtly different reasons, it occurs to me. I can express today what I couldn’t then, even in the old words – that, seeing a few snowflakes fall, my heart was suddenly in my throat. As the flakes fell and almost instantly evaporated, I had a vision of the wonderful carpet I had walked on the previous December, hand-in-hand with Tata. I thought, too, of Mama ordering me away from the window, to eat – what was it I ate? – the pie she had baked with caşcavel cheese, which comes from ewe’s milk, and mushrooms.

My uncle hosted a supper party that Christmas evening. I wore a tailored suit with short trousers, a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie.

—Andrew is the guest of honour, he announced as each of his guests arrived. My nephew, my darling nipote.

Uncle Rudolf raised me aloft to shake hands with a famous actor, a famous prima donna (who kissed me on both cheeks), a famous theatrical designer, another famous actor and his famous actress wife, a famous cabaret singer, a famous playwright and a pianist who wasn’t as famous as he deserved to be. Among all these famous or not-so-famous people, I was the guest of honour, my uncle insisted. He sat me next to him, at the head of the dining table.

We ate by candlelight. No, they ate by candlelight, while I nibbled, nothing more, at the strange food that was set in front of me. The meal was served by the always-perspiring Annie with the aid of two girls from the village, who mumbled ‘Beg pardon, sir’ and ‘Beg pardon, madam’ until Uncle Rudolf ordered them, politely, to stop. It was Annie who noticed my reluctance to touch the dark meat on my plate, and it was she who removed the partridge breast and the pear stewed in red wine, scolding Mr Rudolf for expecting her poor, lovely boy to eat such a rich dish. I was given some Brussels sprouts and a roast potato, cut into small pieces, and felt less discomfort.

The wines were poured by Teddy Grubb, who was said to ‘have a nose’ for them. In later years, my uncle would tease me for saying ‘Mr Grubb has a nose’ before I had even mastered the alphabet. The faces of the famous became redder and livelier as the supper progressed. They cheered when Annie brought in the Christmas pudding, which Uncle Rudolf doused in brandy. Someone shouted ‘Whoosh’ when he put a match to it, sending flames rising. I was afraid the flames would spread and that we would all be burnt, but they soon subsided, to everyone’s applause.

—Clap your hands, Andrew. It’s the custom.

Everyone clapped again when I discovered a bright new shilling in my slice of pudding. I had to lick it clean of custard to appreciate its brightness.

—That’s a sign you’ll be wealthy one day. As you will be, I promise.

My uncle stood up and asked for silence. Conversation and laughter slowly drifted away.

—I should like us to drink a toast to absent friends.

He patted me on the head as the famous guests rose and said, almost in unison:

—Absent friends.

Did I realize that I was the object of pitying looks? I think I must have done, for the eyes of everybody in the dining room were suddenly focused on me.

—To all our dear ones.

—To all our dear ones.

—To those who are with us.

—To those who are with us.

—And to those who have been taken from us.

There was a hush. No one responded to this toast, as they had responded to the others. I waited to hear them repeat ‘And to those who have been taken from us’ but the hush prevailed. Uncle Rudolf told me, some years on, that I wriggled in my chair and blushed with embarrassment, to have so many kind and thoughtful eyes fixed upon me that night.

—Now let’s be happy again.

After the ladies had ‘powdered their noses’ and the gentlemen had smoked their cigarettes and cigars, the Christmas party took place in the drawing room. I sat on the famous prima donna’s knee and watched the adults play charades. I was, of course, mystified. Maurice, who had not eaten supper with us, was invited to join in. One of his few boasts would be that for three Christmasses he had acted with two of the most famous actors in the theatre, thanks to the fact that his dad was Rudolf Peterson’s personal driver.

It is the not-so-famous pianist I remember best, simply because he was my uncle’s regular accompanist. His name was Ivan, but he wasn’t Russian. Uncle Rudolf called him Ivan the Terrible whenever he hit a wrong note or was out of time. The prima donna refused to sing that first Christmas and the cabaret artist was so drunk that he forgot his words, to everyone’s amusement, and so it was that my uncle, who was not sober, beckoned Ivan Morris over to the piano.

—You must forget Danilo, and the Gypsy Baron, and the Vagabond King, and that bloody idiot of a brigand Zoltan, and all the other halfwits in my repertoire.

My uncle cleared his throat, signalled to Ivan that he was ready to begin, and then sang the aria from Handel’s Jephtha in which the anguished father offers up his only child for sacrifice:

Waft her, angels, through the skies,

Far above yon azure plain;

Glorious there, like you, to rise,

There, like you, for ever reign.

I was unaware of Jephtha’s plight, and I had never heard Handel’s music before, but I did understand, at the age of seven, that I had just listened to something radiantly beautiful.

On a fine morning in November 1919, my uncle went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looked down on the city.

—It wasn’t only Paris I was seeing, Andrew. I had the world in my sights. I was young and glowing with confidence. I really believed what my teacher in Botoşani had told me – that my voice was a gift from God. When you have God as your benefactor, my darling, you don’t have any doubts.

Uncle Rudolf walked the streets of Paris for most of that day, speaking French whenever he could. He stopped for lunch at bistro, where he ate cassoulet and drank, such was the state of excitement he was in, an entire bottle of claret. When he boarded the night train for Nice, he was in a mood to sleep, but his by now highly-charged nerves would allow him no rest. Towards the end of the eighteen-hour journey – tired, and with dust in his eyes and throat – he began to wonder if God, who had been his inspiration and ally in Botoşani and at the Conservatoire in Bucharest, might now be abandoning him, relegating him to the ranks of mere mortals. It was an anxious Rudi Petrescu who stood on the platform at Nice, wondering for a terrified moment if he should return to Paris, and thence to the country in which God had not deserted him. But some hope, a residue of the confidence he had enjoyed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, spurred him on, pushed him – so to speak – in the direction of the little pension where he had a room reserved indefinitely. The pension’s owner, Mme Barrière, inspected him through pince-nez, and let out a noise indicative of her approval of his looks. She was fifty, perhaps, and gone to fat, but he was seduced, quite literally, by her charm. They made love in his room – quickly, passionately – for the one and only time. From then on, he was her ‘pretty Romanian boy’; her fils