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.
—Annie burns the toast to perfection, said Uncle Rudolf in the old language. I have trained her well.
It was at breakfast, on my third day in England, that he announced he had to visit Paris. Urgent business. A chance to sing, perhaps, at the Opéra. He wished he could take me with him, but it would not be fun for me, waiting in some lonely hotel room for an uncle who was engaged elsewhere. Annie and Teddy would keep me amused, and Charlie would drive me around London, showing me all of the sights, and he would call me on the telephone, speaking the words we both understood. I was not to be worried or upset. He would be back with me by Friday, at the very latest. I was in safe hands.
Those safe hands were Annie’s, Teddy’s and Charlie’s – my uncle’s doting servants. I sat in the kitchen with the perspiring Annie, watching as she prepared the food that was so different from anything Mama had cooked for me; and I walked with Teddy Grubb to the bank that was proud to have Rudolf Peterson’s custom, and where I was given a freshly minted pound note by the cashier, and then I was Charlie’s happy passenger for an entire rainy afternoon, seeing nothing of the promised sights but revelling in the fact – the unlikely fact – that I was in a car the like of which the people in our town would not have believed existed.
I rode in state that day, I realize, and innumerable times after. The Debt Collector’s grandson might have been a prince, to look at him.
What I remember – what I cannot fail to remember in the light of what I was to learn – of that first telephone conversation with my uncle is that he did not tell me the truth. It was part of his deceitful plan to save me for as long as possible from griefs I was too young to bear. He sounded buoyant as he told me he had been in the company of a beautiful woman. Paris was the place for beautiful women.
He brought me back a souvenir. It was a model of the Eiffel Tower, from the top of which, thirteen years later, he and I would survey the city he had arrived in thirty years earlier with the intention of becoming the finest lyric tenor in the world.
My pen is darting across these pages, yet I fear he will elude me, the last and most substantial of my three dear ghosts. ‘My pen’; ‘these pages’ – how quaint I must seem, how moribund, in this age of spectacularly advanced technology. But the pen and pages are appropriate since I am writing of the Rudolf Peterson his public would not have understood, or even applauded, in those vanished years of his immense fame. The music he sang deals only fleetingly with sorrow, but sorrow was of my uncle’s essence, and it encompassed more than his own fierce melancholy, as I came to understand. To begin with, I noticed that sorrow only in glimpses. I would enter a room – in London, or in Sussex – and he would be unaware of my silent presence. He was often staring ahead of him, contemplating something painful, I guessed, to judge by the look of blankness on his normally lively features. Then, seeing me, he would lose the discontented expression in an instant and start chatting to his beloved nephew of everyday concerns, such as the surprise dish he had asked Annie to prepare for supper. With Andrew to entertain and interest, it seemed, there was no call for sadness.
The voice you can hear today on the Golden Age label gives just a hint of what he was about. It is bright and confident, as befits a reckless vagabond; a prince who believes he is a simple gypsy fiddler; a champagne-guzzling gambler who plays roulette with no thought of a ruinous tomorrow. These were the kind of improbable men Uncle Rudolf impersonated, giving them – for as long as he could bear to – angelic expression. But the angel wanted to sing of other matters; of other, more serious, concerns, and he had already left it too late to do so by the time I arrived in his life.
—You are my mascot, my lucky charm, my uncle said as I watched his face in the dressing-room mirror being transformed into that of Zoltan Kassák, the brigand with whom the Crown Princess Zelda falls at first hopelessly, and then triumphantly, in love. Zoltan has a duelling scar on his left cheek, which Uncle Rudolf created each night with a strip of blood-red plasticine stuck on with theatrical glue.
—It mustn’t look too livid, he told me as he dabbed it with powder. Zelda has to find it irresistible.
As Zoltan, my uncle wore immensely baggy trousers that billowed above his leather boots. His brigand’s clothes also included an embroidered shirt and a cap from which protruded an eagle’s feather. The sword and dagger hanging from his belt proclaimed him to be a man who would fight his enemies to the death, should it be necessary. I can remember, now, watching from the side of the stage as he roused his fellow brigands into action with the song ‘What fear we of the foe?’ and marvelling that I was there, on that summer evening, to bring him luck. I stood, entranced, throughout the first performance of Magyar Maytime, though I was confused by the story, and still am, if I think about it. In the last scene, Zoltan is discovered to have noble blood, and this means that Zelda, who is forbidden to marry a commoner, can become his bride. My uncle loathed the coy badinage – ‘You are my lovely, my wonderful Zelly’; ‘You are my handsome Zolly, who is so brave and strong’ – that preceded the duet in which they declare eternal love for one another. His leading lady was equally embarrassed at having to call him Zolly, and sometimes he substituted ‘smelly’ or ‘belly’ or ‘jelly’, and she ‘folly’ or ‘dolly’ or ‘Molly’, and then they would giggle, and the angry conductor in the pit would be forced to wait for them to stop before raising his baton.
—It is a silly life I lead, Andrew. Yours will be more sensible I hope. And happier.
My mother was with me briefly today – speaking the only words she knew – in those moments between sleeping and waking. She said what was true, that she had never left me, although we had been parted.
—No parting, Andrei, was more terrible than ours. Her ghost’s voice was as light and soft as the voice that had soothed and comforted and teased me in my earliest years. She told me that her God was the same kind and merciful God she had taught me to believe in but whom I have since abandoned, and then the voice was gone, and the blurred vision of her young face, and I was on the verge of talking to her when I realized that I was awake and alone and
