Nigel Siddall  -  Artist & Writer

CHAPTER ONE
 

The young boy stared resolutely at the huge building rising like a mountain before him. As he lay there, stretched out full length on the grass, his slightly overlong blond hair brushing the fingers that now supported his head, he watched the comings and goings with a decidedly quizzical air. He knew this to be his home, but it was also so much more. This was the Foundation.

 

He had once asked his father, Stanisław, a somewhat aloof man, who, it was fair to say, enjoyed the company of his horses and fellow lancers more than he did the rarefied air that his wife and her friends had brought with her, about this Foundation and, unusually for his father, been treated to a long discourse on its history.

 

It seemed that sometime in the previous century, though the boy had not really understood that notion, a distant ancestor also called Stanisław Skarbek – who both then and subsequently had been referred to in the hushed tones normally reserved for patron saints and visiting Cardinals – had decided to build an orphanage here in Lwow in what was now on the far flung border of Poland. This Stanisław was part of a very old and very distinguished noble family who had earned their fame, their name (which means ‘little treasure’) and the right to wear the celebrated Habdank crest in a memorable piece of medieval history, when their ancestor Jan z Góry had been sent on an embassy to the all conquering Emperor Henry V and had reacted to an attempt to bribe him into betraying his King by throwing his gold ring onto the pile of treasure glinting in front of him and saying 

 

‘Gold to gold, we Poles prefer iron’. 

 

He himself had been born in 1780 in Obertyn, a small town then near Kolomyja, the son of Jan Skarbek and Teresa Bielski. His mother sadly had died in childbirth and his father when he was only four, so he had been raised by Countess Rzewuska who had herself administered great estates and eventually sent off to be educated in Lwow. Having inherited the estate of Brzozdowce from his aunt, Stanisław had also bought up land that the Austrians were selling at only 10% of its value in order to try and recoup their losses from the recently finished Napoleonic Wars. As a result, he had become quite a man of means and when he married Countess Zosia Jablonowska a few years later all had seemed set for a prosperous and happy life. 

 

However, she was fifteen; he thirty-five, and the difference had eventually proved too great, Zosia running off to the more romantic lure of the poet Aleksander Fredro. 

 

Failure had then followed hard on the heels of failure, as legal problems, gambling losses and other financial difficulties had robbed him first of his wealth and then of his health. However, he had recovered, perhaps a wiser and a more generous man, and, like a latter-day Tolstoy, had poured his energies into developing his estate just outside Lwow at Drohowyze, initially with a new tannery and brewery, but then, in 1833, with a great new institution that was to become a huge and philanthropic enterprise dedicated to the welfare of orphans – like he himself had once been – in the area. He had also embarked on the building of a great new theatre in the town of Lwow itself. This was a long awaited project, the land having been made available by Emperor Joseph II some fifty years before but, despite the urgings of the Governor, Archduke Ferdinand, and the Galician parliament, without anyone courageous – or foolish – enough to take up the contract. Stanisław had, though, and, having hired Pichel and Salzmann, as architect and builder respectively, had thrown himself into the work with a passion, supervising each and every development, chivvying and chasing, even handing out the nails to the workers. The theatre, known as ‘the Muse’s temple’, had been finished in 1842 and opened in a great blaze of excitement and to almost universal praise. Strangely, one of the first plays performed had been written by ……Aleksander Fredro. 

 

Having finished the theatre, one of the largest and most spectacular in Europe, Stanisław had, in 1843, turned back to the Institution at Drohowyze and had developed the framework for the project, in which 400 poor and 600 orphaned children were to be accommodated and taught a skill or a trade in a great new building, when he died in 1848. The Institution had been finished, with financial help from Count Władysław  Skarbek and under the custodianship of its first curator, Prince Karol Jabłonowski (the husband of Stanisław’s niece), and opened again with great fanfare and in front of an audience drawn from the whole of Galicia in 1875, before being passed back into the hereditary control of the Skarbek family in the form of Henryk Skarbek, his son Fryderyk and then the second Stanisław - the teller of the tale.

 

And there it was now, some 60 years later, a huge and grandiose pile, encamped on the Galician plain like a giant stone dragon, its wings stretching far to each side, its windows glistening like fire in the bright sunshine that flooded over the boy’s head.

 

The boy, whose name was Andrew Skarbek, continued to gaze sleepily at the comings and goings that broke the monolithic stillness of the building in front of him. He could see the children walking in small clusters, but never running, such was the discipline of this place, and hear the low undercurrent of their chatter; he could also make out the more colourful, rustic clothing of the servants that bustled hither and thither like ants servicing the giant queen that filled their nest and around whom their entire existence revolved; but it was the white coats that really caught his eye. He knew these to be doctors and doctors from the earliest age had fascinated him.

 

He stared hard to see if he could make out the tall, distinguished form of Dr Supinski who he knew was in charge of the hospital, an adjunct of the Institution, for Supinski had become something of a boyhood hero to him, ever since he had taken him to one side and encouraged him to try one day to become a doctor himself.

 

‘Andrzej,’ he had said, ‘you are a clever boy, you don’t want to be like your brother, hunting, shooting, all that sort of thing; you want a good career, where you can use your intelligence ………and help other people. If you work hard at your studies, who knows, you could one day run the hospital here.’

 

This unusual interest in him had brought a warm glow that he could still feel deep inside him. People didn’t customarily pay him any kind of real attention. True, the servants who ran the large eight bed-roomed house in which he now lived with his parents and elder brother, Jas, attended to his needs and provided him with a life-style that others would have envied; True, his parents would occasionally engage him in what was expected to be adult conversation. But that was not the same as real interest. 

 

His father, Stanisław, a tall, handsome, but vain man with aquiline features and a shock of hair already showing traces of silver, had little real involvement in his life. He ran the Foundation, though, at first he had been reluctant to do that, wishing as, he did, to carry on with his career as a major in the 12th lancers rather than have to take up the reins of the curatorship that had been unexpectedly thrust on him by his father; he hunted, boar, stag, whatever moved in the countryside; he drank with his soldier friends and, as they flirted with the local barmaids, reminisced how they had together fought the Bolsheviks, right up to the streets of Kiev; and, when he had to, attended the necessary social functions and conducted a distant relationship with his wife, Zosia. The rest really passed him by. Not that was his fault, though. No, his mother, Roza Czyzewska, had to take the credit for that.

 

Roza was a formidable person, there was no doubt about that. She was descended from a rich and aristocratic vein of Polish society and, perhaps through her father, General Czyrzewski, had inherited an austere, almost militaristic way of seeing the world around her. She would survey one and all with haughty disdain and judge with that precise manner that her father had once evaluated horse flesh. 

 

That she had been born to command she was in no doubt at all. And she conveyed that in all that she did, whether it was the manner in which she demanded the best seat in the theatre, her theatre, or the haughty dismissal of all who dared invade her presence or in the way that she controlled and manipulated her immediate family. Stanisław, emphatically her one child, her husband Fryderyk having been sent from her bed as soon as he had performed the sadly necessary duty, had been brought up not so much in her shadow as in a darkened room to which she had held the only key. She had never allowed him to grow, not as a man, so there was something effete about him, something incapable of real responsibility or commitment. 

 

It was no more, no less than the treatment that she had meted out to her husband, though. 

 

Fryderyk, a kind and surprisingly thoughtful man, had been belittled, manipulated and ignored throughout their marriage. He had never quite been good enough, this Pole from this newly independent but somewhat backward land, not for someone who had been accustomed to her dance card being filled a good week or two ahead of the event. If the rumours were true, there had, soon after the turn of the century, even been an affair in Menton in France, where she maintained a summer house. Years later, letters would surface that showed she had once lost her heart to a dashing young English officer called Gordon Mainwaring. Sadly, her Catholic faith and her reverence for her status and the honour of her family had seemingly precluded the affair from becoming anything more than that and her heart had withered away in the loss. It was not clear whether Fryderyk knew any of this, but he certainly knew of its effects. 

 

Eventually, the problems had been compounded by the financial woes of hyperinflation that wracked the republic like most of the world around it and the long suffering husband had simply got up and gone, leaving his ancestral estates to his son, and setting up home with his secretary in the more mellow climes of Bern in Switzerland where he had died in 1928. 

 

It was not something that Roza talked about, though. Indeed she treated it with same disdain that she had reserved for him and refocused her attentions on controlling her son, lest he too discover the sweet taste of independence.

 

This, though, had almost cost Andrew his existence, Roza having decreed that ‘one child was enough’ and that ‘no more should be countenanced’. Zosia had disagreed and had given birth to the second child after all, justifying herself to her enraged mother-in-law by claiming that she had wanted a daughter to keep her company in her later years. And as if this enforced ambiguity was not enough of an heirloom, the mother had then had her breasts bound so that the child had to endure an enforced distance too. 

 

 

Yes, she was definitely a person for whom a wide berth was necessary. And Andrew had spent much of his short life trying very hard to provide her with just that!

 

As for Zosia herself, she was as cheese to Stanisław’s chalk. A slim built, attractive woman whose delicate features often glowed with laughter and whose vivacity attracted a wide array of friends. 

 

But not Stanisław’s friends. 

 

No, she had spent a good deal of her youth in the more refined climes of France and, ever since she had married Stanisław in 1922 (at his mother’s estates in Bieżanow, near Cracow), she had preferred the company of intellects and artists, of men and women of Austrian sophistication and style, and had devoted her life to the dinner parties and soirees where she could entertain or be entertained by such people. Unlike her husband, who only had one relative in the immediate vicinity, Zosia also had a large family to call on, no less than six sisters and a brother. She was a Czecz de Lindenwald, the grand-daughter of Marian, the erstwhile Governor of Austro-Hungarian Galicia, and, as such, retained strong connections with the now defunct Hapsburg Empire. This perhaps coloured the outlook of both her and her many sisters, all of whom had married well (Tarnowskis, Ledóchowskis, Chrzanowskis, a whole array of mid-European nobility). They were a family of pedigree and something inside Zosia probably struggled to like this distant outpost that lay so far from the more civilised centres of Vienna and Budapest. So she compensated wherever she could and poured herself into a constant whirl of entertainment. 

 

This meant that their house into which he had been born and now the bigger house on the outskirts of the town into which they had moved some years back, with its grand architecture and its highly fashionable orangerie, often hummed with conviviality and splendour, but it was a conviviality from which Stanisław was to some extent excluded because of his innate shyness and his lack of the necessary quickness of wit and manner. 

 

For that matter, Andrew himself was pretty much excluded too. 

 

It had long since been explained to him that his mother was ‘delicate’, and indeed she did suffer from a whole stream of feminine ‘conditions’, whether real or imagined, and that he was therefore to keep his distance and not expect or demand any sort of physical contact. It was perhaps just the old ways of the nobility, but it meant that the boy had always lacked the human warmth that his less illustrious peers would have taken for granted.

 

If there had been warmth, it had come from two of the servants. Bronisława, his bona or nurse, the daughter of his grandmother’s cook and the head coachman of Drohowyze, and Edward or ‘Pan’ Kushlak, the family chauffeur. She had given him what little maternal affection he had known; he had let him drive the grand Lancia convertible that was his pride and joy. Those days when he had been allowed to steer this great chrome-glistening monster around the estate, his eyes peering through the leather-bound struts of the immaculate steering wheel, were amongst his very best memories and the close physical contact as he sat there on the chauffeur’s lap had for that moment, at least, banished the coldness with which his life was otherwise filled. Yes, if he had had parents, in any real sense of that word, it was these two. He would, in later life, readily concede that he loved them as much as he loved anything in those distant days. His mother and his father were instead like the buildings in which he lived, grand, austere, full of sophisticated paintings and furniture, but ultimately devoid of human warmth.

 

So Supinski’s interest had come as something of a surprise. And, when he had, on occasion, allowed him to help in the treatment of patients, the dye had been well and truly cast. That was what he wanted to be; that was what he was going to be. 

 

A doctor. 

 

Just like Supinski.

 

Supinski, however, didn’t appear, not as far as the boy could make out in any case, so he eventually gave up the search and rolled over onto his back. The sky above was a vivid blue fringed by the protruding branches of the ash trees that rolled up the hill behind him. It felt good to be alive today and, as he absent-mindedly crushed the ants scuttling through the grass, he sighed with relief. 

 

It had been a difficult few months for him, and he had been forced to question all sorts of things that he had been able to take for granted as he drifted through the sterility of his life in Lwow. There had been the usual quarrels with Jas which he of course lost because his brother, to whom all was promised and of whom all was expected, was that much older and, if words ever became blows (which they rarely did now that the hierarchy had been firmly established) more athletic too; there had been the customary indifference too.

 

‘Run along, Andrzej, can’t you see I’m busy?’

 

‘Go and wash your hands, you’ll be getting dirt on the furniture, if you’re not careful…….’

 

That from his mother.

 

‘Hello, young man, we must have a chat sometime………….. when I get back from Cracow perhaps….’

 

That from his father, though the chat would of course never happen. Not with him. But there again this was the same man, the same father who insisted on the boys kissing his hand when they greeted him on those occasions when he returned home to the family table, the same father who had once complimented two apparent strangers walking on the other side of the street for their neat and spruce appearance, before it was pointed out to him that they were in fact his own sons!

 

There had also been the long and lonely hours when he would wander round the corridors and rooms of his home or go down to the kitchen where he could exercise his characteristic mischief on the hapless serving maids.

 

But there had been something else, something far more worrying.

 

And it came in the form of his grandmother. The matriarch. Roza.

 

School had never been that straightforward for Andrew. He was bright, yes, you could see that in the sparkle that readily flocked across the blueness of his eyes but he was also disinclined to work and his sense of mischief regularly had got him into trouble. He and his brother had had the tutors that were customary for boys of their background, but they had failed to keep his attention and he had spent most of their sessions in a state of restless tedium. He had also resorted to a whole variety of things to try and relieve the boredom. Endless practical jokes at the expense of tutor and servant alike. The odd cigarette of rolled up leaves that produced vast clouds of smoke and would invariably leave him with a burnt finger or lip, but would, at the same time, satisfy his sense of mischief. Biscuits. 

 

Ah, yes, his mother’s specially imported biscuits which he would regularly raid. 

 

And her clothes too. 

 

He had, from the earliest moment, always displayed a somewhat different, slightly feminine side, which was hardly surprising given the circumstances of his birth and to some extent his parents’ attitude to him, and would, when he thought the coast was well clear, take great delight in dressing up in his mother’s gowns and frocks. Not just hers, though. He would also try on his father’s uniforms, well the jackets anyway, and pose magnificently in the long mirrors in their separate bedrooms. Anything, in fact, to engender some life, some excitement into the dull and meaningless routines.

 

Even his grandmother’s roses which he, on occasion, ate as well.

 

 Eventually, he had been sent to a local school. St Josephs. But that had been no better. He had found it difficult to overcome the largely self-imposed barriers and, although he liked the other boys, the sons of middle-class Lwow, he had invariably felt distanced. True, he did regard many as friends, but they were more his co-conspirators than anything else and he never felt able to commit himself to the relationships, not even to the extent of ever inviting them back to his home. Perhaps it was his ancestry and family status that, despite the teachers’ determination to treat him no different from his peers, still kept him apart in what was a society obsessed with its petty hierarchies, perhaps it was the big house that he lived in and the chauffeur-driven car that brought him to and from school that set him apart, loath as he was to share such things with even potential friends, perhaps it was just his manner, or rather the detached and emotionally sterile manner that had been visited on him, but, whatever it was, he never really developed friendships in the way that boys of his age usually did. 

 

Not that he was not sociable in his own way. No, he had a ready wit and enjoyed the sort of prank that earned a kind of popularity and renown and, as such got on well with his peers, albeit very much on his own terms. It was just that he lacked the ability or interest in developing such things any further. He had learnt from the earliest age to rely on the servants for his material needs and on himself for whatever he needed emotionally and this inevitably had created a curious blend of the spoilt and the self-centred which would become a dominant theme in his later life. It was not exactly a fertile breeding ground for childhood friendship, though, so school had merely served to reinforce both his sense of his own difference………and his indifference to what was going on around him.

 

This had inevitably affected his studies. 

 

And his reports. 

 

Comments, even in their effort to remain diplomatic, had repeatedly referred to his indolence and his manner and, as the tone became increasingly frustrated, so his parents had become increasingly and uncharacteristically concerned. It wasn’t really for the boy’s sake, though there had always been an understanding that this ill-advised second son would, while his more privileged elder brother moved seamlessly into his father’s role of running the estate, have to make his own way in the world. The priesthood was forever an option, but that would slowly fade as the irreligiousness of the character was revealed. The army was also a traditional option, following in his father’s wake, but Andrew had from the very start shown a natural dislike of athleticism, violence and horses so a life in the Lancers would hardly have been right. So, yes that was a concern. But it was more for the image of the celebrated Skarbek family that the parents worried.

 

‘We can’t have this,’ Stanisław had muttered, as he had read one of the less complimentary reports, ‘he really has got to be brought to heel.’ 

 

He had absent-mindedly rubbed the crown and chevron crest on his gold ring and flicked away an irritating fleck of dust from his gleaming riding boots, and then turned to his wife who was sitting on one of the more ornate chairs in the cavernous drawing room, gently picking at a piece of embroidery, her soft red hair glowing in the late afternoon sunshine.

 

‘It can’t go on,’ he had continued more to himself than anything else, Zosia seeming to have hardly noticed his first outburst, ‘what on earth would Fryderyk Florian made of this? He would be rolling in his grave!’

 

Fryderyk Florian? He was a particularly distinguished member of the family. The son of Kasper Skarbek and grandson of Jakub von Fenger, a banker from Torun, he had been brought up on the family estates at Żelazowa Wola and been educated by Nicholas Chopin. He had gone on to achieve great academic success, first at the Warsaw Lyceum and then the College de France in Paris, before working for the Ministry of Treasury and as a translator for the Council of the General Confederacy. Later on, having nearly become embroiled in an uprising about the burial of Prince Józef Poniatowski, he had settled down to a wealthy marriage and a career as a man of letters, holding the chair of political economy at Warsaw University, maintaining a lively correspondence with other academics about such  British novelists as Henry Fielding and Laurence Stern, encouraging such artists as Bacciarelli, Grassi and Lampi and writing a wide variety of books including ‘Pan Starosta’ and ‘Memoirs of Seglas’. 

 

He was also a man of conscience, working on behalf of discharged prisoners and other welfare institutions and, having been a critic of the then government (though avoiding direct involvement in the turmoil that followed the November Uprising in Warsaw) eventually helping in the reform of the prison hospital system, as a senior member of Congress. It was however his connection with the Chopins for which he was revered within the family, having been the tutee of Nicholas and then the godfather and patron of Fryderyk, to whom his name had been bestowed. So, Fryderyk Florian was definitely a memory and a force to be reckoned with and, as such, would probably have taken a pretty dim view of his great, great grandchild’s limited efforts at St Josephs.

 

‘So what should we do about it?’ Zosia had eventually said, without glancing up from the rise and fall of her needle.

 

‘Tutors. That is what we need. Tutors.’

 

And so tutors it had been, all desperately trying to reinforce the learning that so singularly was not happening in the classroom. There had always been tutors of one form or another, it was the way of 

 

the elevated class into which Andrew and Jas had been born. There had been an attractive French tutor called Gonsławska who was of Polish origin but had been raised in France and so had that particular aroma and appeal; there had, when the charms of the first had created a stir within the household, been another, this time the son of a white Russian general, Lavr Kornilov who had fought the Germans and then Kerensky and then the Bolsheviks before perishing at the hands of the Red Army somewhere in valleys of the Don and the Volga. But despite the attraction, the yarns, the deep bass tones of the music teacher, nothing had really stuck, apart perhaps from what was later to become a lingering love of Opera. But his parents duly tried again, and their efforts duly failed again.

 

So the reports had continued to come and continue to besmirch the family honour.

 

Then his grandmother, who still relished her Marianetter’s control of the family, had for some strange reason suddenly taken an active interest in the progress, or rather the lack of progress, of her grandchild. 

 

Perhaps it was no more than a whisper that flicked around the manicured salons which she occasionally frequented, perhaps it was just her way of reminding her daughter-in-law of her displeasure about the second child that she had so unfashionably produced. Chances were, though, that it was Andrew who had brought it on himself with a mischievous grin here or a disrespectful word or two there.

 

Anyway, whatever the reason was, she had started to take an unusual interest in him and he, together with his parents, had been summoned to a share her dining table.

 

What followed was, in a way, inevitable. His clothing, his slumped shoulders, his grab-handing manners at the table, all of which were a natural part of the mutual ignorance that he shared with his surroundings, all were totally wrong. The eyebrows had steepled, the eyes hardened, the lips pursed. The strictures followed soon afterwards and the family lectured about their communal duty to maintain the standards to which she, for one, was accustomed.

 

The next day, the reports had been summoned, inspected through horn-rimmed lorgnette and then used as the conductor’s baton to punctuate the grim music that had inevitably followed.

 

‘How do you explain this?’ she had hissed through curled lips, her eyes fixed on the recalcitrant youth in front of her, like a cobra coiled and considering the prey frozen before it.

 

‘Well? What do you have to say for yourself?’

 

The truth was not very much. He had simply stood there, blond head lowered, eyes resolutely staring at the marble floor. He had half listened to the diatribe that followed, something about family and respect and unruly behaviour and how she wouldn’t tolerate wastrels and vagabonds, and half wished to be elsewhere. He wasn’t accustomed to this direct interest in his life, nor was he accustomed to being spoken to in a manner that befitted the servants downstairs. Resentment fought with humiliation and anger with fear. He had, however, eventually drifted away with the happier thought of putting a mouse in her crinoline skirts……..

 

‘……….boarding school.’

 

Suddenly, his attention clicked back into focus. 

 

‘Yes, that is what we will do. Boarding school will sort things out. And I know just the place. Father van der Ost, he’s the man. He knows how to deal with young men like……you.’

 

And so it had been. Despite all of his tears and kicking heels, he had been duly dispatched to the Benedictines at Rabka, a town in the province surrounding Cracow. And from the very moment he had entered the gates, he had hated it. The black-gowned monks from Belgium had terrified him, not necessarily by any direct cruelty, but through the strictness and the discipline that they expected from others in the same way that they expected it of themselves. There were no luxuries here, no treats in the kitchen, no deference, no tolerance of his whimsical nature. Although he was used to the anonymity of indifference, the anonymity of a uniform, of being just one of a number was something else. True, his cousin, Alek, the son of the family Larisch, was there too, but Jas, his brother, wasn’t. And that, in a way, was the final straw. 

 

He had listened, in the background, as his mother had doted on Jas, as his father had talked to him in terms beyond his years about matters of the estate; he had watched as Jas had received the pick of the presents, the first taste of everything new; he had suffered his brother’s arrogant dismissal and contempt. Now this. It was a bridge too far and he was determined that he was not going to put up with it.

 

But how to engineer his way out of there? That had been the question.

 

And Supinski had unwittingly given him the answer.

 

In one of the conversations that Andrew had had with the doctor from the Institution, Supinski had talked to him about a pretty primitive form of brain surgery which involved inserting a steel plate into the skull. It had inevitably filled the boy’s head with all manner of lurid ideas and a variety of strange dreams. And it had now sprung back into his mind. Yes, that would do, he had resolved in his growing desperation, that would do.

 

And it had. The Prior, Father van der Ost, a strict but relatively kind man, who had his work cut out trying to organise what was still a somewhat new foundation, had listened to him with growing concern as he had described, often with the graphic detail that only someone as fascinated with such medical realities would ever have remembered, the surgery that had been performed on him and the wide range of exotic conditions that it had left him with. He had always been a gifted liar who had regularly fooled all manner of people into believing all manner of things and that without ever even a flicker of his lips, so this was a situation to which he was naturally suited. Father van Ost’s eyes had widened as he heard of the platinum plate - an upgrade from the simple steel of the original – supposedly now resting somewhere in side of his young pupil’s head and had eventually concluded that this was a boy whose needs fell well beyond what he could supply and had promptly summoned his parents to take him back to Lwow. 

 

At first, they had been far from happy with this, he had after all been away for only just over a month, but their rancour was softened by his copious tears and equally unseemly show of affection. Besides, Roza’s interest had by now passed onto some other hapless target, with the point well made and sufficient ammunition having been acquired for later use. No, they had quickly slipped back into their old ways and resumed their previous indifference. Indeed, before the Chrysler Landau had even pulled up into the sweep of their driveway, thoughts had moved on. Zosia’s to her latest dinner party; Stanisław’s to the hunt he was due to attend the following day.

 

And Andrew? 

 

He had gone back to St Joseph’s, older, wiser perhaps, and very much determined never to allow anyone ever to control his life in that way again. He had even resisted the temptation to make fun of the priests who ran the school, well, for the most part, anyway. They were in general kindly, well-intentioned men. Narrow, perhaps, in their view of the world, but otherwise benign. He decided to tolerate them, to duck and to weave and, above all else, to avoid the sort of opprobrium which would inevitably find its way into the teachers’ reports and risk bringing him back into his grandmother’s line of fire. 

 

So here he was, lying on the grass, in front at the monolithic slabs of the Institution. He breathed a sigh of relief, as the memory flicked out of his mind, and grinned that mischievous grin that periodically curved across his broad mouth. 

 

He had got away with it, as he usually did. 

 

And had, since those dreadful days, continued to get away with it. Avoiding Roza whenever he could, playing the game and dutifully performing his party piece for her, when he couldn’t. The rest were no problem. His parents carried on in the balloons of their separate existence, Jas continued to preen himself for what lay ahead. He had even learned how to keep the teachers at bay, doing just enough to stay out of trouble, using his blue eyes and his natural charm to seduce them into the belief that he was a reformed character.

 

He had, by now, moved schools too, going on to join his brother at the Gymnasium 8 secondary school - known as Kazimierz Wielki (The Great) - in Dwernicki Street, a school that churned out middle classdom for Lwow and the surrounding areas. This was a large four storey building in the heart of the town with rows of elegant windows that stretched across the grandeur of its imperial façade and the broad staircases and corridors and tree-lined avenues that one would somehow expect in the manufacturer of young gentlemen that it clearly was. It was clearly a bigger pond and, although he had only been here a matter of months, he had already been able to sink into its waters and find the odd shadowy niche in which to conceal himself, like a young pike lurking beneath the lily pads. Its discipline was strict and its curriculum sought to inculcate the values of hard work, worship and sport, all of which Andrew viewed with a certain amount of distaste, but he was warier now and he had learned the virtue of discretion. 

 

Besides, there was a pretty French teacher there and a poxed and angular Maths teacher, both of whom appealed to him, albeit for entirely different reasons. So he had begun to apply himself, and, with his natural ability, even started to fare well.

 

But what of the days ahead?

 

The Benedictines had changed him. Shattered his illusion that he could simply drift anonymously through his life, unaffected by the eddies and currents that seemed to influence others so much.

 

He knew too that the world around him was changing. He had half-heartedly listened to the half-hearted conversations that occasionally flicked across the breakfast and dinner tables and, although he never felt involved or in any way directly affected, had begun to realise that something was definitely happening, something that was troubling even the humdrum tranquillity of Lwow. He knew that it involved the Germans, he had heard his father spluttering into his coffee about how they were ‘a damned threat’ and would have to be ‘put in their place again’ so often that there was no mistaking that. 

 

He also knew that it had something to do with the Russians too.

 

Ah yes, the Russians.

 

The mention of them always managed to infuriate his father in a very particular way. He would rant until the spittle foamed on his lip and his face would turn various shades of mottled red. 

 

‘Bloody Bolsheviks’

 

‘Should have finished the job when we could.’

 

Were just two of the kinder things that he would say.

 

So, yes, Andrew knew that something momentous was looming on the horizon. It was there in the almost palpable anxiety of the people he passed as he walked to the Gymnasium or encountered in the café bars he had just begun to frequent. It was even there in the classrooms and playgrounds of the Gymnasium itself. The odd whisper there, the muttered conversations about who had said what to whom, who had heard what rumour, whose elder brother had just been enlisted. And Germans and Russians strutted through each of these fractured conversations. 

 

He had no idea how these things, whatever they were, would impact on his life, it was just clear from the whole atmosphere that they would. The sight of his father’s neatly pressed military uniforms being carried up the stairs told him that.

 

He sat up and looked into the distance beyond Drohowyze. 

 

Over to the west lay the foothills which would eventually climb into great sweep of the Carpathian Mountains. Beyond that he knew, from his lessons at school, were Czechoslovakia and Germany, which is where he had slowly realised the storm clouds were gathering. As his eyes arced across the horizon, he could make out the roofs of the higher buildings in Lwow and then, stretching to the east, the open plains that he had been told lead to the Pripyat Marshes, the great river valley of the Dnieper ……and Russia, home to the communist hordes against whom his father had fought some twenty years before.

 

He shivered at the unwelcome thoughts.

 

For a moment, the distant sound of a bell chimed and he was content to be distracted, but today the underlying mood was not to be denied and soon returned again.

 

Yes, what of the days ahead?

 

He put his head on his knees and considered the options.

 

There were, he knew, great estates within the network of families to which he belonged. There was Moroczyn near Hrubieszów where one of his aunts, Isa, and his cousin Tadeusz Chrzanowski, lived; there was Molocin near Lublin, the Larisch ‘palace’ at Bulowice in Silesia, with its 19th Century Scottish style castle, the home of another of his mother’s sisters, Lily, where he would go and ski and toboggan with his cousins Alec and Anoulka; there was Mogilany and Myślenice near Cracow, Zaborze near Auschwitz. And there was Tarnagora.

 

Tarnagora. The thought filled him with pleasure and a smile flashed sunshine into his otherwise sombre face. 

 

This was an 18th Century manor that lay in the folds of the countryside near Lublin. It was the home of Dzunio Smorczewski, and of his cousins. Ralph and Mark. The two families were very close and, on occasion, his mother would take the boys over to stay there. Andrew, and indeed Jas, loved those days. The freedom of the rural estate, with its barns and animals, its fields and its haystacks, allowed them to escape the confines of their urban upbringing and the stiff stare of their grandmother and to run like horses in the wind. The four boys would hunt as one and fall in and out of scrapes with that easy abandon of youth. 

 

They were idyllic times, where the luxury of wealth and servants provided for their every need as they cavorted in the heat of summer days or the snows of wintry ones. 

 

Here there were the racing stables with great horses that stamped and whinnied in the wind, not least the stallion Chenonceaux, who was everybody’s pride and joy and who, like the other horses, would be take out to race on the tracks of Lublin and Lwow. 

 

Here, the presents at Christmas were huge and the plates of food never ending. 

 

Here, Andrew was also able to fulfil his role as the prankster of the pack with his own inimitable sense of glee. Spiders were duly inserted in sleeping bags; ants were duly dropped into the hair of sleeping cousins. Each little success, and the consternation that followed, would be greeted with hoots of delight and the inevitable rough and tumble. It was a side to him that would grow over the years into yet more manipulative forms and gave him that sense of power that at other times he was denied.

 

So, he could always do that. Work on the land. Like his brother.

 

But, as soon as he had the thought, he knew that there would never be any chance of that. He was not like Jas, and never would be. He had no interest at all in the dull tomes and accounts that his brother was already beginning to immerse himself, nor could he stand the physical exercise that such a life would demand, or, for that matter, the animals and peasants with whom he would have to deal. Besides, Jas was promised all the land. There would be nothing for him, not here in Drohowyze, not at Tanagora, not on any of the lands and estates that he knew of.

 

What about the army then? 

 

It was a family tradition, going back to the days of the medieval knights he saw looming out of the pictures that lined the grand staircase of his home. Indeed, there was a side of him that, like any young man of his age, loved the romance and the colour of life in the cavalry. But he knew there was another side to it too. His father had recounted enough gory details of the skirmishes he had been involved in, enough descriptions of the effect of slashing sabre on flesh and bone for Andrew to be under any illusions that battle and warfare was either safe or pleasant. His stomach, never that strong, not even at the best of times, curled at the thought and the image of riding triumphantly behind red and white banners began to fade. 

 

No, bloodshed, pain, and, for that matter, horses and violent exercise, no, none of that was for him. 

 

So what else was there?

 

Politics? 

 

Like his great uncle, Alexander, who had been a deputy in the original parliament set up after Versailles under the presidency of Mościcki. But there was something innately tedious about all that. He had never enjoyed argument, so the idea of endless arguments and debate filled him with nothing but revulsion. No, that too was very much a door to be closed.

 

As he continued to consider his options, his mind kept on returning to the same traditional conclusion. The same conclusion, the same dream that he had maintained since he was a very young boy.

 

Medicine.

 

His thoughts turned again to Supinski. 

 

Dr Edward Supinski, Dodo to his friends, and to Andrew. 

 

He had been trained in the great institutions of distant Vienna and had been a long-standing friend of Roza’s, ever since he had married the sister-in-law of Dzunio Smorczewski The friendship, fuelled as it was by their mutual memories of Austro-Hungarian grandeur, had grown even closer after Roza had started to keep a flat at Drohowyze. If the truth be told, he did have a certain amount in common with her too. The cold detachment of the surgeon matched the cold detachment of the matriarch. But there was far more to him than that. Under the white coat was a warm and generous soul who took a real interest in his patients and a pride in what the Institution stood for. He had also taken an avuncular interest in his friend’s grandson.

 

The link perhaps had originated in one of the more alarming scrapes into which Andrew had got. He had, when he was only five or six, started to complain of a severe stomach ache, but, given the nature of the beast and his predilection for the prank and the tall story, he had not been taken seriously, not until he was doubled over with intense abdominal pain, that is. At that point, the alarm bells had rung, Stanisław had inevitably turned to his mother for advice, and she had summoned Dodo.

 

Andrew, who was by now running a fierce fever, had been rushed into the hospital at Lwow where Dodo’s initial diagnosis of appendicitis had been quickly confirmed and no less a personage than Professor Ostrowski himself had performed the necessary appendectomy. It had cost what then was the princely sum of 300 American dollars, a fee somehow all the greater by the eventual revelation that the condition had in fact been brought on by a surfeit of cherries, but Andrew had nonetheless emerged relatively unscathed and his relationship with Dodo had been born.

 

Over the years that followed, he had regularly found himself sitting on Dodo’s knee or accompanying him on his hospital rounds, watching the minor treatments that had to be carried, listening to the conversations between doctor and patient. The patients themselves had grown to recognise the boy, and indeed offer him the same deference that they naturally accorded the great doctor. Andrew enjoyed this and, although he was never to like the sight of blood, relished the involvement. It made him feel involved and relevant. It gave him a status and an importance that had so long been denied within the context of his own family. 

 

For the first time, he felt like he belonged. 

 

Dodo had smiled warmly as his young ‘assistant’ had helped him, carrying the inevitable clipboard, reading the thermometer, counting out the tablets, and, when he had grown to an age when he could understand such things, had preached the virtues of medicine as a career.

 

It had, by then, been very much a matter of preaching to the converted. And, as he sat there outside the same stone walls, converted he remained.

 

No, medicine was what he wanted, and medicine is what he was determined it would be, there was no other choice that he was remotely interested in.

 

That did pose something of a problem, though. He knew, from what Supinski had told him, especially after his grandmother had informed her friend of the school reports and of the treatment duly meted out, that he would have to work hard at his studies, if he was ever to follow in his wake. He also knew, again from what the doctor had told him, that, out here in Lwow, the opportunities were pretty limited and, even when they did arise, offered nothing like the standards of such places as Vienna.

 

Another problem, though, was his parents. He had tried to talk to them on a variety of occasions about what he would like to do, but they had never taken him in anyway seriously. Admittedly, he had somewhat queered the pitch by his singularly unimpressive performance at school and his general behaviour, but he had tried, particularly in recent months, to persuade them that he was a reformed character. Sadly, however, they weren’t and his requests for a proper audience had been dismissed with the same weary disdain as before.

 

‘It is not the profession for gentlemen,’ his father had firmly stated.

 

‘No, my dear,’ his mother had added, ‘something else will come up.’

 

He had railed at this, in the privacy of his bedroom, but there again what could he expect from parents who had once even had his long fair hair permed like a poodle. These were not people who would take such an idea seriously.

 

Not for the first time, Andrew wished he could be elsewhere and lay back again, day-dreaming of the great boulevards of the Austrian capital, the opera houses where his music tutor, Marian Nowakowski, longed to perform, the hospitals filled with beautiful young nurses………..

 

As he drifted off into his reverie, other warm memories began to fill his mind.

 

He was suddenly back in the big Lancia with its sleek running boards lining its sides and with Mr Kuslak in his immaculate grey and gold uniform and peaked hat smiling down at him. He was sat in the passenger’s seat and trying to peer over the dashboard at the countryside unravelling in front of him. The roads, which were little more than hardened tracks of dirt, rolled by, the car just about succeeding in absorbing the bumps and dips that gave them their character. 

 

He looked up at Mr Kuslak who was now focusing hard on the road ahead. The chauffeur was a big and powerfully built man, clean shaven, unlike many of his training, and with eyes that radiated good humour and warmth. He had been part of the household for as long as Andrew could remember and had always treated him with both familiarity and yet respect. He was often to be found at the kitchen table, chatting to the cook and to the chamber maids, the narrative of his tale frequently punctuated with the deep, sonorous laughter that was very much his mark. Andrew would always be greeted as the ‘little master’ and welcomed to the table, where he would be regaled with all manner of stories, some that were true, some that were clearly fabricated to entertain the listener. In this, Andrew recognised a kindred spirit and warmed to him all the more.

 

Andrew had never quite worked out whether Edward Kuslak had a wife and children of his own, but he did know that he came from a large family in Lwow and had three brothers. One of them, it seemed, was the Head of electricity at the local power station where they burnt wood and gas and oil to produce the power upon which the area depended; another was a tutor working in a variety of the middle class homes of Lwow; the third was, like him, a chauffeur.

 

As they drove further into the countryside, Edward began to tell him more tales. He described, not for the first time, how in his youth the world had been torn apart by war. 

 

The Great War. How Russians had advanced in their thousands, many armed with little more than scythes or even lumps of wood and been mown down in the great killing fields of Tannenberg that lay to the north. How the Russian Tsar had been removed and later killed by the godless Bolshies. How the hated Germans had strutted large on the stage and then slowly been strangled into submission. He had seen the splendidly-bedecked regiments ride out from Poland and return with their tales of victory and derring-do.

 

‘Your father was there, y’know,’ he remarked, for what must have been the umpteenth time. ‘If you ask me, he sits a good horse, your father.’

 

Mr Kuslak clearly had a good deal of respect for Stanisław and would always bow the head when he was called to drive him somewhere. They made a striking pair as well as they drove through the streets of Lwow. The one with his innate good looks and bearing; the other with his smart uniform and well-set features. Andrew loved to hear him talk of his father in this way and would sit and glow as he listened to the hunts that Edward had witnessed and the meetings with high ranking officers and politicians. It was, in a way, as close as he ever got to his father in those days. It was, in a way too, as close as he ever got to having a father.

 

As his day dream took him through the woods and past the lakes that he had grown to know so well, it changed and took him back to another time, a time when he had also been travelling through the woods and the forest that filled his childhood understanding of the world around Lwow.

 

Now, he was travelling through the snowy wastes, deep in midwinter.

 

As the memory resolved itself into focus, he realised it was of the journey that he, together with his family, had made one Christmas. Out to Moroczyn, where they had stayed with Aunt Isa and his cousin Tardeuz, who he knew as Dede.

 

That year, they had gone much of the way by train, but then had been carried the final part of the journey on a horse drawn sleigh. The coachmen from Moroczyn had accompanied them from the great steam clouds that swirled around the steel wheels of the locomotive and holding the hands of his mother and his grandmother, lest they slip, dressed as they were in the folds and layers of their bustles and dresses, on the ice, had escorted them carefully down to the awaiting sleigh. Andrew, and for that matter Jas, had thrilled at the sight of the two black horses in their trappings and plumes and the sound of the sleigh-bells jingling at the trot, and had dived into the carriage behind their parents full of glee at the adventure ahead. Somewhere along the route, they had been really lucky, and been invited to join the coachmen on the raised riding platform, where they were given the reins to hold for a second or two as well. They had tut-tutted at the horses, shaken the reins to keep the fast trot going and, with a tingle in the backs of their necks, had imagined bandits and Cossacks lurking menacingly in the woods past which they sped. 

 

The journey had taken them off onto what, at other times, were well defined roads and track ways, but now were little more than arctic plains of snow, broken only by the firs and poplars that lined the invisible paths. Andrew had listened to the hiss and slash of the skis as they cut through the ice of the frozen surface and watched as the clouds of powdery snow flew up on either side of the sleigh. His parents and grandmother had nestled down under the furs that had been provided to keep out the winter’s chill, but he and his brother had leaned as far as they could this way and that over the edges of the sleigh, their eyes wide with excitement. 

 

And then Andrew had heard, in the distance, the faint echo of first one wolf howl and then more and, as his mother’s dachshund, Coco, bounced this way and that in convulsions of yapping outrage, had hidden under the furs and great-coats and, giggling all the while, sought the protection of their warmth and darkness. 

 

It was all the stuff of legend and fantasy and, by the time, the twinkling lights and the roaring log fires of Moroczyn broke through the tree-line, both boys had been more than sated and their imaginations had been filled with all manner of notion as to what monsters and great beasts might be lying out there in the secrecy of the all-enveloping night.

 

The next few days had passed all too quickly, as the three children renewed their friendship and raced and romped around the great house, in and out of every room, in and out of conservatory and barn, like young spaniels incessantly fawning and yapping and falling out and making up. The play, however, was inevitably punctuated by the age-old traditions. Wigilia with its steaming bowls of Borscht and its endless plates of fish; the Christmas Pasterka, where the priest would chant mesmerically in the ancient Latin tongue and the smoke would billow out from the censer; the ‘show’ that the matriarch of the house would always insist upon, where all would be assembled in front of the huge Christmas fir and would have to perform a song or a charade or some other even more demeaning act for her dry-cackling pleasure; and, of course, the shoot that would take place on the days after Christmas Day itself and all the males would go out and seek to kill whatever the beaters drove out of the woods. 

 

Andrew frowned in his half sleep and woke himself up. He had never understood that bit. Never reconciled himself to the blood lust of the men around him. He remembered a time when he had been to stay on another of his great aunts’ estates and, although he had expressed his dislike of the proceedings, had been told to ‘be a man’ and ‘stop being so soft’ and had been made to go and witness the bloodthirstiness and the kills anyway. 

 

No, for all his love of medicine, he never would take to the sight of blood, or, for that matter, have anything much in common with the primitive barbarism and gung-ho attitudes of most of the men he knew. 

 

Truth be told, he in many ways preferred the company of women. He loved the delicate tinkle of their laughter, their softness, their innuendos and secrets. As he had matured, he had begun to realise that he would rather go to a dance or an opera than a hunt, would rather flirt with the girls that he had begun to encounter at the balls and dances so carefully supervised by their chaperones than drink with the boys. It was the way it was, and another reason why he would relish the chance to escape from the narrow confines into which he had been born.

 

He got up, the sun having now begun to sink behind the great skyline of the Institution and the cold of the later day having begun to seep into his bones, and made his way down the little slope in front of him.

 

As he walked, he thought about calling into see Dodo, but what could he say that hadn’t already been said? What new advice could he give him? Anyway, Supinski was ultimately his grandmother’s man, so he would never be able to suggest anything that she would not approve of, any of the things that he would want to hear.

 

So who was there? To whom could he turn for advice?

 

There was, he thought to himself, always Dobiański. He was the family priest, with whom he had always got on well. Whether it was because he had been baptised by the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lwow himself and so was seen as a particularly blessed child, Andrew wasn’t sure. It wasn’t because he was especially dutiful at his Catholic catechism, of that he sure, because he wasn’t. Maybe it was simply the special status his family held within the town, as the descendents of the original Stanisław. Certainly, they had their own special seat in the Cathedral. 

 

Andrew sighed. Yes, maybe that was all it was. Besides, the priest was another of Roza’s friends so would, like Dodo, would hardly be likely to give him the sort of advice, or indeed assistance that he was after.

 

He thought then of his governess. 

 

She was a tall, attractive lady with silver hair who in many ways ruled her part of the household with a rod of iron, but who, beneath the apparent sternness, also had a heart of gold. Andrew often exasperated her, what with his alternative attitudes towards both his clothes and his manners and with his flippancy and practical tricks, but she loved him too and would often demonstrate her affection with little treats of sweets or cakes. He loved her too, well as much as ever did love anyone from the depths of his self-orientation, and was often irritated by the way in which she would be excluded from the family table or made to sit in the pews behind the family row when they all went to perform their dues at Mass. But she, he decided, was only a governess who, from what he could make out, had a very limited understanding of the greater world outside. She had never really travelled, never married, so what information could she possibly have of the options and choices outside of Lwow?

 

No, it would have to be someone else.

 

What about Nowakowski then?

 

He had known the singer and music teacher for what seemed like an eternity, he being the son of one of his early tutors, and had enjoyed many of his sessions with him. He was an expansive kind of man with a deep bass- baritone voice and there was something about him that made Andrew feel secure and at ease. Nowakowski had taken him to his first opera, Madam Butterfly, in the Great Opera house of Lwow when he was only eight and he felt inordinately grateful to him for that. He had travelled and did know the outside world, they had even talked on many occasions about such places as Vienna and Budapest, even Rome, but, at the end of the day, he was a singer who knew the inside-out of a musical score and an opera house, but little about anything else.

 

The more Andrew pondered the matter, the more he began to appreciate just how trapped he was. It was not a new feeling, but, each time it tapped away at his mind, it felt more pressing, more insistent. 

 

Yes, he did escape on occasion, to the great houses of his extended family and sometimes even to Vienna, when his father or his mother could be persuaded to take him with them on a shopping or a business trip and he would sit in first class splendour, listening to his father or mother chatting to the butler or maid who would, of course, accompany them and watching the hills and the great Carpathian plain of Hungary drift by outside the velvet-curtained window. 

 

But that only served to enhance the frustration of living in what he sensed was a small and somewhat stagnant pond.   

 

He sighed again and carried on down towards the courtyard that lay in front of the now shadowy edifice.

 

By now, fewer children were to be seen. They were probably heading towards the refectories where they would eat, before being washed and scrubbed and put to bed in the great dormitories that lined the upper storeys of the Institution. So, as he crossed the courtyard, he was accompanied by little more than the sound of his own footsteps on the cobbles and the distant echoes of the Foundation orchestra rehearsing somewhere in the bowels of the building.

 

He was headed towards his grandmother’s flat, the thought of which filled him with as much gloom as the shadows now lengthening their grip on the scene behind him. She had moved out here some months beforehand, while retaining her pied-a terre in Lwow. Andrew wasn’t really that sure why, but he guessed it was something to do with keeping an eye on the ancestral responsibility that his father had inherited. Indeed, he would be there too, as he increasingly was, going through the Institutions accounts, talking with the managers and doctors who actually ran the place, discussing new features of the estate with his game-keepers and farmers. 

 

Although Stanisław was an effete and, certainly when his mother was around, somewhat insubstantial man, here he was very much in his element. Here his detached manner could be mistaken for aristocratic style and his good looks, his hand-made shoes, his expensive wardrobe, which he invariably travelled to Vienna to purchase from his tailor, Knize, all could be mistaken for distinction. He enjoyed the role too and the personnel of Drohowyze, whether it be the doctors like Supinski or the game-keepers with whom he would occasionally share a drink, liked him as well. 

 

Andrew knew too that there were vague plans to move the family out here. It had become impractical to keep the big house in Lwow, when his father spent most of his time out here at the Institution. It had put an unbearable strain on his parents’ relationship and meant that the boys simply didn’t see their father during the week. 

 

This was not necessarily a problem for Zosia who carried on with her life almost oblivious of her husband’s absence, but it was an unacceptable situation to Roza, who could see the effect the separation was having on her son’s family and feared a scandal that would undermine Skarbek influence. So, although it had been Stanisław who had had to broach, the inspiration and the drive behind the move had definitely come from his mother. 

 

Whether it would happen, though, was another matter. 

 

He knew his mother was loath to leave the society of the city and become simply the wife of the Curator. He had, on those occasions when his father had come into town, heard the mutterings and the growls emanating from down below and sensed the friction across the breakfast table. 

 

Not that they would decide the matter, of course. No that would be Roza. Whether they stayed or went, it would, ultimately, be her decision. And that decision would never allow any escape from the spider’s web that she had woven for her son and his family.

 

Besides, the times were increasingly uncertain and, although Andrew had no idea why, the tension, both in Lwow and within his own family, was definitely growing. Only the other day, he had returned to his home to find his father dressed in full military costume and had watched him ride away in the company of similarly bedecked men. The streets themselves had a different feel to them too. The normal bustle now had a greater urgency and the faces of passers-by were somehow paler, less welcoming than before. There was clearly something in the wind and, judging from the number of soldiers to be seen in the streets and squares, it was something that would almost certainly bring violence to the tranquillity of Lwow. 

 

He paused as he entered the doorway leading into the depths of the building and glanced back the way he had come. 

 

The woods were now bathed in darkness, apart from the odd ash which continued to glow, almost supernaturally, in the dying embers of the sun. He could just make out faint tendrils of smoke rising into the sky from the cottages and farmsteads that he knew lay out there in the farther reaches of the estate. He thought for a moment of the families inside, enjoying their Wieska and fresh-baked bread and the inevitable bottle of vodka, and, for a moment, envied them.

 

It was not a feeling that would last, not with Andrew. But, at that moment, the thought of simple certainties were strangely appealing.