The Honourable Mrs Graham

The details of my childhood are of little consequence. There was the stench off the river in the heat, and the onion domes in Petersburg ripe and golden all over, and I always wondered whether a curious finger would recoil from their metal cold. There was Jenny hiding behind father's mahogany desk in the study, and me behind the embroidered fire screen; snatches of French passing between us like stolen sweets, sugary mouthfuls which Ekaterina had not a hope of interpreting. She wanted civilised Russian ladies, but we soiled our slippers playing with Stepka in the orchard and I had a drawer full of lonely gloves without their mistresses — I would be whipped for holding out a left hand of cherry velvet and a right of kid with lace trim, but the gloves seemed quite determined to leave themselves behind all over the place. Once I held out five fingers clad in silk to the Tsaritsa and was told that I would do. This, I suppose, was the crux. Lying in my casket, my body exposed to the hands of Frenchmen and their spit and filthy touch — still, I do. Theirs is an obscene wish, but let us be kind.

I spent my childhood touching, taking matted feathers from the ground and sticking my paws in the cook's dough — she would rush in cursing me for spoiling it, but my fingers would be fat worms, happy in a new clay. Seventeen years appreciating the tactile surfaces of my world — it was all blessedly mine, for which I am grateful, having never known poverty or hunger. When I was handed off the carriage in Edinburgh something was undone, or reversed, and it seemed then that the world came to me for its touch. My clothes blush to touch my skin, which is whiter than the sky over Palace Square in January. The ostrich feather is delighted to curl upwards into my grip. Thomas saw heaven in the flesh of my waist and hardly dared look higher. And so, careful not to embarrass for I know what it is you want, I look away. I am kind, for I have been shown kindness. And so — I do. There is no changing that now. Look at me; the cold world is no colder than I am. Thomas! You are wrong! Pray stop your fretting, for they do not hurt me now I am gone. While I was by your side — then your anxieties were justified. You waited all my life for another highwayman to cross your path so that you could prove to me just how safely I was bestowed. I should have told you, dear, that I knew.

The chestnut gelding took fright and kicked Pyotr's son square in the skull. I had imagined myself in love with him, but that was that. In the library there were books I never opened, and there was the great atlas which I pulled off the shelf to stroke the thick spine with its bands of gold. I looked at it again and again, as when your neck prickles and you are so afraid of seeing someone has crept behind you in the dark but you have to look, and so you do and — ah! There's no one there, but if you hadn't looked it would have been so much the worse. Ivan's eyes were open and his blonde hair was sticky with dark blood. It was not peaceful. Death stole from him the things he knew, straw and tallow and pickled cucumbers and tea with Stepka at his feet, and the things he wanted, embroidered waistcoats and little golden coins in piles on an oak table, and a ringletted head beside him on the pillow. But you must not worry. You may be sure that I am at peace. Death stole only my breath — the rest is yours; the turn of my throat, and the curve of my top lip, down. He would insist on singing at the easel, this Gainsborough, with his little bird's beads for eyes and eyebrows which met above the nose and made him seem always arch and quick.

I am at peace because I wanted for nothing. You rode a hundred miles to bring me the jewels I had forgotten so that they might flash about my neck under the Duke's chandeliers. I would have settled for nothing less, from you — and yet I thought you a silly man for bending so low for a handful of stones. Forgive me now, Thomas; for not yet knowing myself what it was to love, I was unable to recognise how greatly you served me, how you made me a more perfect version of myself. But in this — something was lost. Having given over the steppes of my Russia I could not go tramping through wood and over fell with you. I was a handsome horsewoman, but a timid one. That about me which was childish, wild and excessive, was lost — the red on my cheeks, the oath when I caught my elbow on the door frame, my hair free of its trappings. This was all part of doing, but what I had never known when learning how to be good, and how to be civilised, was that it would also mean giving away so much. Even now you are taking from me — what I no longer possess! I learned from you, Thomas, to look away, to be charming and Mary Cathcart and to have always two gloves about me and accept the eyes of strangers like water over stone. To give yourself away was, I learned, to love.

You wanted a child. He would, perhaps, have taken after his father. A large nose, and retreating chin. Hair like a chaffinch's breast. Soft at the base of the neck, unbearably tender. I am aware that I have failed you — that though for the rest of the world I will do and do and keep on doing, for you, my Thomas, I might as well have remained the quick-tempered girl with mud beneath her nails. I have left you behind. The illness wanted my flesh too, and it won, in the end. Something else did as well — you feared this most of all. A gathering, a generation of Ivans who missed the horse and wanted the gold. There was a short, fat man who would have a laurel crown. Perhaps you never would, but I had changed — I was becoming less honourable by the hour.

Once I thought in a dream that it was you who was dying, and I was glad. Forgive me, Thomas, but I had arms and ankles and I wanted to keep them, I wanted them for my own. Death obliged me, for a brief hour, and then took them forever. My darling, how it hurt! I was a child again, feeling a fire on the surface of my skin, and trembling through. I walked with you in early autumn through the park, and on the edge of the woods, by the stream, we stopped to look at the fern. You took my hand and touched with it the damp frond, you pointed at its ever tinier versions of itself. Then you made a fist and told me how it would curl inwards. In the fever I was like an ant on that leaf, marching ever inwards and getting smaller and smaller. I called for Ivan but I wanted you, and it was you who came; I grasped for your hand and it was tan and strong and dry, and I was glad for it.

When I stood on the deck of the Vogelstruys I saw the wake kick up behind us like the snow about the troika, and I thought of Boris at the reins, singing to the sky. England seemed Holland's brother, with its fens and ditches and great wheeling seabirds as big as my father's chest. I was sleepy, I remember my head going forward and forward and then snapping back and I would open my eyes to see the fields rushing the other way, as if the whole country knew something we didn't as we headed north. I was shy when you took my hand and I bent my neck and saw the tips of your boots shine, and then I was proud too. You joined me by the window and we sipped at tea, you endeavoured to make me laugh, anxious to put me at ease. And then you pointed at the sky, and I looked, your finger crinkled under as it pressed the pane, so keen were you for me to see what you saw, and that finger was the first part of you I loved. Beyond the lawns, and the avenue of limes, far in the distance where the ground started crumpling itself up into hills, like bedclothes in disarray, there the sky above was plump with clouds, dark at the bottom and tall as cities, and at the end of your finger, to the west, a low sun set one ablaze. Perhaps you never knew how pleased I was; I smiled, and looked away. We were married in the autumn.

The same sun catches the pedestal at my feet; a breeze stirs the feathers of my hat. Look on, for so I remain; your dearest Mrs Graham.