“What!”

The crude exclamation shot out of Majendie with unaffected force. Except to note its sincere astonishment, Brett ignored it.

“Ivan,” he repeated, “Ivan Karukhin! Do you hear me?”

“A Karukhin,” whispered Majendie, “the Karukhin!”

“Don’t you understand?” Brett went on. “But I was forgetting—of course you do. You’ve lived in England all the life you can remember, forty years, nearly, in Bright’s Row. You’re British, on paper. Ivan!”

He paused. No one spoke.

“All right,” said Brett, “it doesn’t matter. You needn’t say anything if you don’t want to. I can tell you. I know it. I know about the parents you never knew, the dissipated father, the delicate docile blonde mother who bequeathed you all three qualities—and perhaps an affectionate nature. That would have been doomed from the start to wither. You had no one to love, only one to fear. Yes, I know about the grandmother. Grown people feared her when she was sane, so how much more a child when she was mad.”

“Mad, would you say?” said Majendie.

“Oh, not helplessly, pitiably—certainly not pitiably. Not in that state of mental conflict that’s never, by any means, resolved. She was just mistaken in external circumstances, deluded. As if the Leningrad firing squad wanted her for a triumph!”

“Persecution mania—”

“How real was that fear? It was there in degree, of course, in that she went to the extreme length of mewing herself up in Bright’s. Mad, if you like—but also, I think, lazy. Start to work in middle life? Never!”

“But she needn’t have worked,” cried Majendie.

“Pride, both chronic and acute. Sell the only remnant of her consequence, the one tangible assurance that she was truly a princess? No, no, no. Any dolt, any tradesman, can have money. Only Princess Karukhina could have had that particular diamond rivière, that antique heirloom Louis something snuff-box, and so on.”

“She sold some,” observed Majendie.

“‘Formerly the property, I believe, of Princess Irina’—wasn’t that so? And perhaps some pieces she’d never cared for.” Brett paused. “Oh, she kept you, Ivan, just!—till you could keep her. You were an investment, that’s why she bothered to make you safe by naturalisation. Besides, she was always careful of servants. And you served! I know how you passed your childhood, struggling with cheap shopping, buying and eating God knows what—enough, that I’ve seen your adult breakfast!—dressed by the chance of a neighbour’s pity, ill washed, sickly, a plant in a cellar. Healthy children recoil from feeble ones. Asthma must have kept you out of rough games. Besides, didn’t you live with an old witch? The other children in the street probably saw her at the window, even though she never came out—a fact which would make her all the more terrifying. School? I know—years of dimness near the bottom of the class. Lacking in confidence, that’s what would have gone on your reports. And where would you have gained confidence? From work? Independence? What a hope! She stopped selling the odd brooch and sucked up your miserable pittance instead, your reward for fifty weeks a year of grind in a stuffy office in the smoke of a main-line station—”