The Star of Kazan

The first time Annika went to sit with the Eggharts’ great-aunt, Loremarie was waiting to show her the way. As she tiptoed after her up the stairs, Annika’s feet sank deep into the patterned carpet; Chinese vases stood on pedestals, there was a smell of hothouse lilies.

After the third flight of stairs they came to a landing with a wooden partition and a door. This led to a last flight of stairs, but these were very different: narrow and bare and airless, and instead of the scent of lilies it was the smell of disinfectant that drifted towards them.

Here were the two attics where the servants slept, and a third one, which now housed the unwanted old lady.

Loremarie turned the handle, pushed Annika into the room, and closed the door again.

The room looked like a lumber room. The trunk and the two wooden boxes that had come in the ambulance were stacked in the corner; nothing seemed to have been unpacked. In the middle of the floor was a narrow bed with a chair beside it. On a bedside table was a jug of water, a glass and a pile of books. No flowers, no fruit, nothing that was usual in the bedrooms of the sick.

The Eggharts’ great-aunt was snoring, small snuffling snores like the snores of a pug dog; and her mouth hung open, just as Loremarie had said.

Annika walked to the window. It was strange seeing her own house and her attic from the other side of the square.

Behind her, the snoring had stopped. She turned.

The old lady was so small and wizened that she scarcely made a hump in the bedclothes. Her white hair was so sparse that you could see the scalp through it. She might have been dead already.

But not when she opened her eyes. They were very blue and her gaze was steady.

‘You’re not Loremarie,’ she said.

Annika came over to the bed. ‘No.’

The old lady gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s a good thing anyway,’ she said.

Annika smiled. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’

The great-aunt sighed. ‘Not really. Not from those dreadful books.’

Annika picked up the top book on the pile. It was the colour of bile and the title was Meditations of a Working Bishop. The one below that was called The Evening of Life by One Who Has Suffered.

‘They’re not exactly cheerful books, are they?’ said Annika.

‘No. No indeed. But then the Eggharts are not exactly a cheerful family. That’s why—’ She was stopped by a fit of coughing.

‘Would you like some water?’

‘Yes. You’ll have . . . to help . . . me to . . . sit up.’

She was so light and bony and frail, it was like propping up a bird.

‘So . . . who are you if you’re not Loremarie?’ she said when she could speak again.

‘I’m Annika. I live across the square. And I’m a foundling.’

‘Ah, that explains it.’

‘What does it explain?’

The old lady lay back on her pillows. ‘Foundlings make their own lives.’ For a while she was silent and Annika was wondering if she should go, when she said, ‘We could tell stories instead of reading them.’

‘Yes. I’d like that,’ said Annika. ‘I know a lot of stories because my friend Pauline works in a bookshop, and we act them.’

‘Ah, acting. Do you like that?’

‘Yes, very much. I don’t know that it’s proper acting though; we only do it for ourselves.’

‘Of course . . . Of course . . .’

Annika waited, sitting on the chair with folded hands. ‘Will you start?’ she said.

‘All right then . . . Once upon a time . . . there was a girl who lived in a very pompous, silly family in a very pompous, silly town. Her mother and father were stuffy and her brothers and sisters were stuffy – they used to take two hours to finish their breakfast and then it was time to start laying the table again for lunch: salt cellars, pepper-mills, mustard pots . . . on and on and on.’

Annika nodded. She knew about meals that went on and on.

‘The girl wanted to see the world – and she wanted to dance and act and sing, properly – in a theatre. But no one in her family danced or sang – dear me, no. Dancing was not respectable. So they looked about for a husband for her and they found an alderman with a big stomach and a watch chain across it, and when the girl saw him she decided to run away.’

‘Properly?’ breathed Annika. ‘With a ladder and knotted sheets?’

The old lady nodded. ‘More or less. She escaped at night and she had a little bit of money saved and she went to Paris. You know about Paris? So free . . . so beautiful . . . She found someone who ran a theatre and she begged him for work – any work, so that she could learn and watch – but he only laughed at her. He said he had a hundred girls who wanted to dance and sing, for every place he had.