I WAITED FOR ZOYA in the window seat of a café opposite the Central School of Art and Design, glancing at my watch from time to time and trying to ignore the chatter of the people around me. She was already more than half an hour late and I was beginning to grow irritated. A copy of The Caine Mutiny lay open before me, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words and eventually set it aside, picking up a teaspoon instead to stir my coffee as I tapped the table nervously with the fingers of my left hand.
Across the road, the staff and students from the college were wandering past, stopping and chatting with each other, laughing, gossiping, offering kisses, some attracting the disapproving frowns of passers-by due to the unorthodox nature of their clothing. A young man of about nineteen turned the corner and marched along the street as if he was trooping the colour, wearing a pair of drainpipe trousers, a dark shirt and waistcoat, all topped off with a knee-length, Edwardian jacket. His hair was slick with Brilliantine and turned up at the front in an elegant quiff, and he strutted along as if the entire city was his alone. It was impossible not to stare at him, which was presumably the intention.
‘Georgy.’
I looked around and was surprised to see my wife standing beside me; I had been so entranced by the goings on outside the college that I’d failed to notice her arriving. That, I considered in a moment of sadness, was something that would never have happened a year before.
‘Hello,’ I said, looking at my watch and instantly regretting the move, for it was an aggressive gesture, designed to indicate her lateness without having to articulate it. I was annoyed, that was true, but I didn’t want to seem annoyed. I had spent most of the last six months trying not to seem annoyed. It was one of the things that was holding us together.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, sitting down with an exhausted sigh and divesting herself of hat and coat. She had cut her hair quite short a few weeks earlier in a style reminiscent of the Queen – no, the Queen Mother; I still hadn’t grown accustomed to calling her that – and I didn’t care for it, if I was honest. But then there was a lot that I didn’t care for at the time. ‘I got held up as I was leaving,’ she explained. ‘Dr Highsmith’s secretary was away from her desk and I couldn’t leave without making the next appointment. It took her for ever to get back, and when she did, she couldn’t find her diary.’ She shook her head and sighed, as if the world was simply too exhausting a place to countenance, before smiling a little and turning to me. ‘The whole thing took for ever. And then the buses … well, anyway, what can I say? Except sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, shaking my head as if none of it really mattered. ‘I hadn’t even noticed the time. Everything all right?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘What can I get you?’
‘Just a cup of tea, please.’
‘Just tea?’
‘Please,’ she said brightly.
‘You’re not hungry?’
She hesitated for a moment, considering it, and shook her head. ‘Not right now,’ she said. ‘I don’t have much of an appetite today, for some reason. I’ll just have tea, thanks.’
I nodded and went to the counter to order a fresh pot. Standing there, waiting for the water to boil and the leaves to be drenched, I watched her as she stared through the window, looking out towards the college where she had been teaching for about five years now, and tried not to hate her for what she had done to us. For what she had done to me. For the fact that she could show up late, without an appetite, which suggested to me that she had been somewhere else, with someone else, eating lunch with him and not with me. Even though I knew that this was not the case, I hated her for the fact that she had made me suspicious of her every move.
‘Thanks,’ she said, as I placed the cup down in front of her. ‘I needed that. It’s cold outside now. I should have brought a scarf. So how was your morning?’
I shrugged my shoulders, irritated by her cheerful demeanour and meaningless chit-chat, as if there was nothing wrong in the world at all, as if our lives were as they had always been and would ever be. ‘No different to usual,’ I said. ‘Boring.’
‘Oh Georgy,’ she said, reaching her hand across the table and placing it on top of mine. ‘Don’t say that. Your life isn’t boring.’
‘Well, it’s not as exciting as yours, that’s for sure,’ I said, regretting the words immediately as she froze, trying to decide whether I had meant them to be quite as cutting as they had sounded; her hand remained flat on top of mine for a few seconds longer and then she removed it, looked out of the window and sipped her tea cautiously. I knew that she wouldn’t speak again until I did. After over thirty years of marriage, there was very little she could do that I wasn’t able to anticipate. She could surprise me, of course, she had proved that. But still, I knew her moves like no one else ever could.
‘The new girl started,’ I said finally, clearing my throat, introducing a safe topic for conversation. ‘That’s news, I suppose.’
‘Oh yes?’ she asked in a neutral tone. ‘And what’s she like?’
‘Very pleasant. Eager to learn. Quite knowledgeable about books. She read Literature at Cambridge. Frightfully smart.’
Zoya smiled and stifled a laugh. ‘Frightfully smart,’ she repeated. ‘Georgy, how English you’ve become.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. You never would have used phrases like that when we first came to London. It’s all those years of being surrounded by dons and academics in the library.’
‘I expect it is,’ I said. ‘They do say that language changes as one becomes more assimilated into a different society.’
‘Is she mousy?’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Your new assistant. What’s her name, anyway?’
‘Miss Llewellyn.’
‘Is she Welsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is she mousy?’
‘No. Just because she chooses to work in a library doesn’t mean that she’s some sort of shrinking violet who can’t bear to be spoken to in case she turns bright red, you know.’
Zoya sighed and stared at me. ‘All right,’ she said, shaking her head a little. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just making conversation.’
Irritability. Petulance. Anxiety. A subconscious desire to find something wrong in every phrase she employed. A need to criticize her, to make her feel bad about herself. I could hear it every time we spoke. And I hated the fact of it. This was not who we were supposed to be. We were supposed to love each other, to treat each other with respect and kindness. We had never been Georgy and Zoya, after all. We were GeorgyandZoya.
‘She’ll do fine,’ I said, my tone a little lighter now, not wishing to increase the tension of the conversation. ‘Things won’t be the same without Miss Simpson, of course. Or Mrs Harris, I should say. But there we are. Life goes on. Times change.’
‘Yes,’ she said, reaching down for her handbag and taking out a copy of that morning’s Times newspaper. ‘Have you seen this?’ she asked, placing it on the table in front of me.
‘I’ve seen it,’ I replied after only a slight hesitation. I made sure to read The Times every morning at the library, she was well aware of it. What surprised me was that she had seen it, for Zoya was not a person who particularly enjoyed reading about current affairs, particularly when so many of them in these days were bellicose in nature.
‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ I said, picking the newspaper up and staring for a moment at the face of Josef Stalin in the photograph, the heavy moustache, the lidded eyes smiling back at me with fake cordiality. ‘What do you expect me to think?’
‘We should hold a party,’ she said, her voice cold but triumphant. ‘We should celebrate, don’t you think so?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘What is there to rejoice over, after all? So he is dead. And after him, you think … what? You think things will be as they once were again?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, taking the paper from me and looking at the photograph again for only a moment before folding it over and pressing it forcefully back into her bag. ‘I’m just happy, that’s all.’
‘That he’s gone?’
‘That he’s dead.’
I remained silent. I hated hearing such venom in her tone. Of course I was no admirer of Stalin; I had read enough about his actions to despise him. In the thirty-five years since leaving Russia I had remained well enough informed on the events that were taking place in my native land to feel relieved that I was no longer a part of them. But I could not celebrate a death, even his.
‘Anyway,’ I continued after a moment, ‘I don’t have long before I have to go back to work and I want to hear about your morning. How did it go?’
Zoya looked down at the table for a moment. She seemed disappointed that we were changing the subject so quickly; perhaps she wanted to engage in a long conversation about Stalin and his actions and his purges and all his multiplicity of crimes. She could have that conversation if she wanted, I had already decided in my head. Only not with me. ‘It was fine,’ she said quietly.
‘It was a little more … complicated this time, I suppose.’
I considered this and hesitated before questioning her further. ‘Complicated?’ I asked. ‘How so?’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ she said, her forehead wrinkling a little as she thought about it. ‘When we had our first appointment last week, Dr Highsmith seemed interested in very little other than my daily life and routines. He wanted to know whether I enjoyed my work, how long I had lived in London, how long we had been married. Very basic questions. The kind of things you might chat about at a party if you were talking to a stranger.’
‘Did that make you uncomfortable?’ I asked.
‘Not particularly,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I mean, there was a limit to how much I was willing to talk about, of course. I don’t even know the man. But he seemed to recognize that in me. He challenged me on it quite early.’
I nodded. ‘And how far back did you go?’
‘Quite far, in different ways,’ she admitted. ‘I talked about how things had been during the war, the years leading up to it after we first got here. About how long we had waited to become parents. I talked …’ She hesitated now and bit her lip, but then looked up and spoke in a more determined voice; I wondered whether this was something Dr Highsmith had encouraged her to do. ‘I talked a little about Paris.’
‘Really?’ I asked, surprised. ‘We never talk about Paris.’
‘No,’ she said, her tone betraying a slight accusation. ‘No, we don’t.’
‘Should we?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘What else?’
‘Russia.’
‘You spoke about Russia?’
‘Again, only in the most general terms,’ she said. ‘It seemed strange to discuss such personal matters with a person I’ve only just met.’
‘You don’t trust him?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I do trust him, I think. It’s just … it’s curious, he doesn’t really ask any questions as such. He just talks to me. We have a conversation. And then I find myself opening up to him. Telling him things. It’s almost like a form of hypnosis. I was thinking about that earlier as I was waiting for his secretary to return and he put me in mind … he reminded me of—’
‘I know,’ I said, very quietly, almost in a whisper, as if the very mention of his name might summon the beast back from the afterlife. A snapshot of reminiscence exploded in my memory. I was seventeen years old again, freezing cold, dragging a body towards the banks of the Neva, ready to throw it into the depths. There was blood on the ground from the bullet wounds. A feeling in the air that the monster might yet spring back to life and kill us all. The room began to spin a little as the sensations of that evening returned to me and I trembled. This was not something I liked to think about. It was not something I ever allowed myself to remember.
‘He has a very calming tone,’ she replied, not acknowledging what I had said, not needing to. ‘He puts me at my ease. I was afraid he’d be like Dr Hooper, but he isn’t. He seems to genuinely care.’
‘And did you talk about the nightmares?’ I asked.
‘Today we did,’ she said, nodding. ‘He began by asking me why I had come to see him in the first place. Do you know, I never even realized that last time he hadn’t asked me that? You don’t mind me telling you all of this, do you, Georgy?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, attempting a smile. ‘I do want to know, but … only if you want to tell me. If he helps you, that’s all that’s important to me. You don’t have to feel you have to tell me everything.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose there are some things that would sound odd if I repeated them to you out of context. Things that made sense in the moment, if you know what I mean. But anyway, I told him how I had been waking in the night so much recently, about the terrible dreams, about how they had just come upon me out of nowhere. It’s ridiculous really, after all these years, that such memories should resurface.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Not a lot. He asked me to describe them to him and I did. Some of them, anyway. There are others that I don’t think I can trust him with yet. And then we started to talk about a lot of different things. We talked about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes.’
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ask this question, but there was no way around it. ‘What did he want to know about me?’ I asked.
‘He just asked me to describe you, that was all. The type of man you are.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘The truth, of course. How kind you are. How thoughtful. How loving.’ She hesitated for a moment and leaned forward a little. ‘How you have taken care of me all these years. And how forgiving you are.’
I looked at her and could feel the tears begin to build behind my eyes. I wasn’t angry now; I was feeling hurt again. Betrayed. I sought the correct words. I didn’t want to attack. ‘And you told him about … did you tell him?’
She nodded. ‘About Henry? Yes. I did.’
I sighed and looked away. Even now, almost a year later, the name was enough to shatter my mood and my confidence. I could still hardly believe that it had happened, that after so many years together she could betray me with another man.
*
Arina introduced Zoya and me to Ralph at the end of summer. I hadn’t known what to expect – it was the first time she had ever brought a boy home, after all – and the truth was that I rather dreaded the prospect of meeting him. It wasn’t just that it forced me to acknowledge the fact that my daughter was approaching adulthood; there was also the matter of facing up to my own increasing age. In my foolishness, I still thought of my life as being spread out before me like a flowerbed in springtime, a row of tulips about to burst into brilliant life, when really it was more like rose plants in autumn, when the leaves begin to blacken and wither and the decay of winter is all that remains of their lives. Lost among the filing systems of the British Library, I was quiet throughout the day as this sobering thought settled upon my brain, and when Miss Llewellyn asked me whether I was feeling all right, I could only pass off my gloom with an embarrassed smile and an honest explanation.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have a rather unusual evening ahead of me, that’s all.’
‘Oh?’ she said, her curiosity piqued. ‘That sounds interesting. Going somewhere special?’
‘Sadly, no. My wife has invited my daughter’s young man to dinner. It’s the first time I’ve had to sit through such an ordeal and I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘I brought my bloke Billy to meet my parents a couple of months ago,’ she said, shivering a little at the memory of it and wrapping her cardiganed arms around herself. ‘It ended in the most terrible fight. My father threw him out of the house. Said he’d never speak to me again if I kept going with him.’
‘Really?’ I asked, hoping that my evening would not end in quite so dramatic a fashion. ‘He didn’t care for him then?’
She rolled her eyes as if the scene itself was too awful to describe. ‘It was a lot of nonsense really,’ she said. ‘Billy said something he shouldn’t have said, then my dad said something even worse. He likes to think of himself as a revolutionary, does my Billy, and Dad won’t have any truck with that type of thing. A real old British Empire type, you know the sort. You should have heard the way they shouted at each other when the poor old King was brought into the conversation, God bless his soul. I thought the police would be called out over it! How old is your daughter anyway, Mr Jachmenev, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘She’s just turned nineteen.’
‘Well then, this is just the start of it, I imagine. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more dinners to look forward to in the future. You’ll see. This bloke will be the first of dozens.’
This suggestion didn’t offer me quite the relief that she had intended and I returned home a little later than usual that evening, having stopped at a local church to light a candle – for as long as I live – for it was August the twelfth and I had a promise to fulfil.
‘Georgy,’ said Zoya, turning around to stare at me as I walked through the door, her face flushed with anxiety. ‘What kept you? I expected you half an hour ago.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, noticing how much effort she had gone to with both her dress and her appearance. ‘You’re looking well,’ I added, mildly irritated that she had gone to so much trouble for a boy we didn’t even know.
‘Well don’t sound so surprised,’ she replied with an insulted laugh. ‘I do try to make an effort every now and then, you know.’
I smiled and kissed her. For years, phrases like this would have been brushed off as teasing and affectionate. Now there was an undercurrent of tension, a feeling that whatever we had managed to bury between us was not forgiven at all, and that the wrong word uttered at the wrong moment might, like with Miss Llewellyn’s boyfriend and father, lead to the most calamitous dispute.
‘Are you having a bath?’ she asked me.
‘Do I need one?’
‘You have been working all day,’ she replied quietly, biting her lip a little.
‘Then I suppose I’d better,’ I sighed, throwing my briefcase down where I knew she would be forced to pick it up and put it out of sight once I had gone. ‘I won’t be long. What time is he expected at, anyway?’
‘Not till eight. Arina said they were going to have a drink after work but they’d be along after that.’
‘He’s a drinker, then,’ I said, frowning.
‘A drink, I said,’ replied Zoya. ‘Give him a chance, Georgy. You never know, you might like him.’
I doubted it, but lying in the bath a few minutes later, enjoying the peace and relaxation of the warm soapy water, I continued to ponder the unsettling fact that Arina had reached the age where her thoughts had turned to the opposite sex. It didn’t seem like any time at all since she was a little girl. Or, for that matter, since she was a baby. Indeed, it felt like only a few short years since Zoya and I had suffered and despaired at the thought that we would never be blessed with a child of our own. My life, I realized, was slipping away. I was fifty-four years old now; how had that happened? Wasn’t it only a few months since I had arrived at the Winter Palace and marched along gilded corridors behind Count Charnetsky for my first meeting with the Tsar? Surely it was earlier this year when I stole a moment for myself on board the Standart as the Imperial Family listened to a performance by the St Petersburg String Quartet?
No, I thought, shaking my head at my own foolishness and allowing my body to slip deeper into the bath. No, it wasn’t. That all happened years ago. Decades.
Those days belonged to another lifetime entirely, an existence which was never spoken of any more. I closed my eyes and allowed my head to sink beneath the surface of the water. Holding my breath, the echo of the past filled my ears and memory and I was lost once again inside those terrible, wonderful years between 1915 and 1918, when the drama of our country played out before me. Removed from the world, I could feel once again the sharp bite of the winter air along the banks of the Neva as it nipped at my nose and made me gasp in shock, could picture the faces of the Tsar and Tsaritsa as clearly as if they were standing before me. And the scent of Anastasia’s perfume filled my senses as if in a dream, followed by a blurred picture of the young girl with whom I had fallen in love.
‘Georgy,’ said Zoya, tapping on the door and looking inside, her presence immediately making me spring upwards once again, gasping for air as I ran the wet hair away from my forehead and eyes with my hands. ‘Georgy, they’ll be here soon.’ She hesitated, perhaps unsettled by an unexpected expression of regret and sorrow upon my face. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘It’s not nothing. You’re crying.’
‘It’s bathwater,’ I corrected her, wondering whether it was possible that in fact the suds had mixed with my tears without my even noticing.
‘Your eyes look red.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I repeated. ‘I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’
‘What?’ she asked me, a note of anxiety in her voice as if she was afraid to hear the answer.
‘Nothing important,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just someone I used to know, that’s all. Someone who died a long time ago.’
There were moments when I hated her for what she had done. I never thought that I could have it in me to feel anything other than love for Zoya, but there were times, lying awake in bed beside her, my body feeling as if it would evaporate if I touched her, when I wanted to scream aloud in my frustration and hurt.
When it was over, when we were trying to repair our fractured lives, I dared to ask her why it had happened at all.
‘I don’t know, Georgy,’ she said, sighing, as if it was unkind of me even to want an answer.
‘You don’t know,’ I repeated, spitting out the words.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well then. What am I supposed to say to that?’
‘I never loved him, if that matters at all.’
‘It makes it worse,’ I said, not knowing whether this was true or not, but wanting to hurt her. ‘What was it all for, after all, if you never loved him? At least that would have been something.’
‘He didn’t know me,’ she said quietly. ‘That made him different.’
‘Know you?’ I asked, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My sins. He didn’t know my sins.’
‘Don’t,’ I shouted, lunging towards her, my fury rising. ‘Do not use that to justify what you have done.’
‘Oh I’m not, Georgy, I’m not,’ she said, shaking her head and crying now. ‘It was just … how can I explain something to you that I don’t understand myself? Are you going to leave me?’
‘I would like nothing more,’ I told her; a lie, of course. ‘I would never have done this to you. Ever.’
‘I know that.’
‘Do you think that I’m not tempted? Do you think that I never look at women and want to make them mine?’
She hesitated, but finally shook her head. ‘No, Georgy. I don’t think you ever do. I don’t believe you are ever tempted.’
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but how could I, after all? She was right.
‘That is what makes you you,’ she insisted. ‘You are kind and decent, and I …’ She paused and when she spoke again, enunciating every word, I had never heard her sound so determined. ‘I am not.’
We stood in silence for a long time and a thought occurred to me, one so monstrous that I could not even believe that I was suggesting it.
‘Zoya,’ I said, ‘did you do it so that I would leave you?’ She looked at me and swallowed, turning away, saying nothing. ‘Did you think that if I left you, it would be a punishment of sorts? That you deserve to be punished?’
Silence.
‘My God,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You still think it was your fault, don’t you? You still want to die.’
The front door opened at precisely eight o’clock and Arina stepped in first, a shy smile upon her face, the expression she had always worn as a child when she had done something mischievous but wanted her escapade to be discovered. She stepped over to Zoya and me and kissed us both, as she always did, and then, emerging from the dark shadows of the hallway stepped a young man, hat in hand, his cheeks a little flushed, clearly anxious to make a good impression. Despite myself, I found his nervousness endearing and had to concentrate in order to stop myself from smiling. It must have been a day for memories, for his disquiet reminded me of my nervousness when I was first introduced to Zoya’s father.
‘Masha, Pasha,’ said Arina, indicating the young man, as if we couldn’t see him standing there before us in all his awkwardness, ‘this is Ralph Adler.’
‘Good evening, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said immediately, extending a hand for me to shake and stumbling over my name, although it sounded as if he had prepared his opening gambit many times before delivering it. ‘It’s a great honour to meet you. And Mrs Jachmenev, I’d like to thank you very much for the great honour of inviting me to your home.’
‘Well, you’re very welcome, Ralph,’ she said, smiling too. ‘We’re delighted to meet you at last. Arina has told us a lot about you. Won’t you come in and sit down?’
Arina and Ralph took their seats at the table and I sat opposite Ralph as Zoya finished preparing the food, which gave me an opportunity to examine him in more detail. He was of average height and build, with a mop of shocking-red hair, a fact which surprised me, but he was not a bad-looking boy, I supposed. As far as boys went.
‘You’re older than I expected you to be,’ I said, wondering immediately whether Arina was only the latest in a series of girlfriends he had seduced.
‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Ralph quickly. ‘Still a young man, I hope.’
‘Of course you are,’ said Zoya. ‘Try being fifty-four.’
‘Arina’s only nineteen,’ I said.
‘Five years then,’ he replied, as if this difference in age was neither here nor there, and cutting me off from offering any further observation on it. Every time he spoke he looked across at Arina for approval, and when she smiled, he smiled too. When she spoke, he watched her, and his lips parted slightly. I felt there was a part of him that wanted to lean towards me and explain, in an entirely academic fashion, that he really couldn’t believe his luck that someone like her was interested in someone like him at all. I recognized the mixture of passions in his eyes: admiration, desire, fascination, love. I was pleased for my daughter, unsurprised that she could inspire such emotions, but it made me a little sad, too.
She was so young, I thought. I wasn’t ready to lose her.
‘Arina tells us that you’re a musician, Ralph,’ Zoya said as we ate the kind of dinner we usually only ate on Sundays. Roast beef and potatoes. Two different types of vegetables. Gravy. ‘What do you play?’
‘The clarinet,’ he replied quickly. ‘My father was a wonderful clarinettist. He insisted that my brother and sisters and I took lessons from the time we were very small. I used to hate it when I was a child, of course, but things change.’
‘Why did you hate it?’ I asked.
‘I think it was the teacher,’ he said. ‘She was about a hundred and fifty years old and every time I played badly she would beat me at the end of my lesson. When I played well, she would hum along to accompany Mozart or Brahms or Tchaikovsky or whoever.’
‘You like Tchaikovsky?’ I asked.
‘Yes, very much.’
‘I see.’
‘But your attitude must have changed eventually,’ said Zoya. ‘If you play for a living, I mean.’
‘Oh, I wish I could say that I do,’ he said, interrupting her quickly. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Jachmenev, but I’m not a professional musician. Not yet, anyway. I’m still studying. I take my classes at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, just off the Embankment.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘Yes, I know of it.’
‘A little old to be still studying, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘It’s an advanced course,’ he explained. ‘So that I can teach as well as play, should the need arise. I’m in my final year now.’
‘Ralph plays with an orchestra outside of class too,’ said Arina quickly. ‘He’s performed at the Christmas service in St Paul’s for the last three years; last year he was even given a solo, weren’t you, Ralph?’
‘Really?’ said Zoya, sounding impressed as the boy smiled and blushed to be the centre of so much attention. ‘Then you must be very good.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, frowning as he considered this. ‘I’m improving anyway, I hope.’
‘You should have brought your clarinet with you,’ she continued. ‘Then you could have played for us. I played piano, you know, when I was a child. I’ve often wished we had the space here for one.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Yes,’ she said and opened her mouth to say more, but then seemed to think better of it and became immediately silent.
‘I never learned an instrument,’ I said, filling the silence. ‘I always wanted to, though. Had I been offered the opportunity, I might have studied the violin. I’ve always considered it to be the most elegant of musical instruments.’
‘Well you’re never too old to learn, sir,’ said Ralph and the moment the line was out of his mouth he flushed scarlet with embarrassment, which was not helped by the fact that I was staring directly at him with the most serious expression I could muster, as if he had just insulted me terribly. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said, spluttering out the words. ‘I didn’t mean to imply that—’
‘That I’m old?’ I asked. ‘Well, what of it? I am old. I was only thinking about it earlier. You’ll be old yourself one day. See how you like it then.’
‘I simply meant that one can take up an instrument at any age.’
‘It would be a comfort to me in my dotage, perhaps,’ I suggested.
‘No, not at all. I mean—’
‘Georgy, don’t tease the poor boy,’ said Zoya, reaching across and taking my hand for a moment. Our fingers interlaced and I looked down at them, noticing how the skin on either side of her knuckles was starting to become a little more taut with age; for a moment I imagined I could see the blood and phalanges beneath, as if her hand was being made translucent by the passing years. We were both growing older and it was a depressing thought. I squeezed her fingers tightly and she turned to look at me, a little surprised, perhaps wondering whether I was trying to offer her reassurance or hurt her. The truth was that at that moment I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, how nothing else mattered, not the nightmares, not the memories, not even Henry, but it was impossible to speak such words. And not because Ralph and Arina were there. It was just impossible.
‘Did your father attend the same school?’ Zoya asked a moment later. ‘When he was learning the clarinet, I mean?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No, he never took any lessons in England after he arrived here. His father taught him when he was a child and he simply practised on his own after that.’
‘After he arrived here?’ I asked, picking up on the phrase. ‘What do you mean by that? He isn’t English, then?’
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘No, my father was born in Hamburg.’
Arina had told us quite a lot about her young man but this was something she had not mentioned before, and Zoya and I immediately looked up from our plates to stare at him, entirely surprised by this news. ‘Hamburg?’ I said a few moments later. ‘Hamburg, Germany?’
‘Ralph’s father came to England in 1920,’ explained Arina, her expression betraying a little nervousness, I thought.
‘Really?’ I said, considering it. ‘After the Great War?’
‘Yes,’ said Ralph quietly.
‘And during the other war, the one that followed it, he returned to the Fatherland, I suppose?’
‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘My father was vehemently opposed to the Nazis. He never returned to Germany, not since the day he left.’
‘But the army?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t they have—’
‘He was interned for the duration of the conflict,’ he explained. ‘In a camp on the Isle of Man. We all were. My father and mother, our whole family.’
‘I see,’ I replied, considering this. ‘And your mother, she’s from Germany too?’
‘No, sir, she’s Irish.’
‘Irish,’ I said, laughing and turning to Zoya as I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Well, this just gets better and better. I suppose that would explain the red hair.’
‘I suppose,’ he replied, but there was a resilience in his voice now which I admired. Zoya and I knew only too well what it had been like to be in England during the war with an accent that did not fit with our neighbours. We had been insulted and abused; I had found myself on the receiving end of violence. The work that I had done during those years had been conducted, in part, to affirm my solidarity with the Allied cause. But still, we were Russians. We were émigrés. And while this was difficult enough, I could scarcely imagine what it might have been like to have been a German family in England at the same time. I suspected that young Ralph had more steel in his bones than his nervousness around his girlfriend’s parents implied. I imagined that he knew very well how to defend himself.
‘That must have been difficult for you,’ I said, aware of the understatement.
‘It was,’ he said quietly.
‘You have brothers and sisters, I suppose?’
‘One of each.’
‘And did your family suffer?’
He hesitated before looking up and nodding, his eyes staring directly into mine. ‘Very much,’ he said. ‘And not just mine. There were others there too. And there were many who were lost, of course. Those are not days that I like to remember.’
A silence descended on the table. I wanted to know more, but felt that I had asked enough. Telling us this much, I decided, was a testament to how much he cared for my daughter. I decided that I liked this Ralph Adler, that I would be his supporter.
‘Well,’ I said, refilling everyone’s wine glass and raising mine before them in a toast. ‘We all live here now, émigrés together. Russian, German, Irish, it doesn’t matter. And we have all left people behind us and lost people along the way. Perhaps we should drink in memory of them.’
We clinked our glasses together and returned to our meals, a family of four already, not three.
Arina begged me to buy a television set so we could watch the coronation of the new Queen at home and I resisted at first, not because I was uninterested in the ceremony itself, but because I couldn’t quite see the point of spending so much money on something that we would only use once.
‘But we’ll use it every day,’ she insisted. ‘Or I will anyway. Please, we can’t be the only family on the street not to own one. It’s embarrassing.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ I told her, shaking my head. ‘What is it that you want anyway, that we sit here every night, the three of us, staring at a box in the corner of the room and never speak to each other? Anyway, if everyone else has one, why can’t you sit with one of the neighbours and watch the service there?’
‘Because we should watch it together,’ she told me. ‘As a family. Please, Pasha,’ she added, offering me the beseeching smile that never failed to win me over. And sure enough, the following Monday, only the afternoon before the Queen was due to make her way to Westminster Abbey, I finally relented and returned home with a new wedge-shaped Ambassador console, which fitted snugly into the corner of our small living room.
‘But it’s so ugly,’ said Zoya, sitting on the sofa while I tried to attach the wires correctly. At the showroom I had been momentarily seduced by the models on display and had chosen this particular receiver for its wooden surround, which was made from a similar material to our dining table. It was divided into two halves, a small twelve-inch screen resting comfortably above a similar-sized speaker, the two settings giving the box the appearance of an unfinished traffic light. Despite myself, I was quite excited by this new purchase.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Arina, sitting down beside her mother and staring at it in wonder as if it was a Picasso or a Van Gogh.
‘It should be,’ I muttered. ‘It’s the most expensive thing we own.’
‘How much was it, Georgy?’
‘Seventy-eight pounds,’ I said, astonished even as I said the words that I could have spent so much money on something so essentially worthless. ‘Over ten years, of course.’
Zoya uttered an old Russian oath beneath her breath but didn’t offer any criticism; perhaps she was already seduced by the machine too. It took a little time for me to understand how to operate it, but I finally finished making all the connections and pressed the ‘on’ button and we watched, the three of us, as a small white circle appeared in the centre of the screen and then, two or three minutes later, spread out to fill the screen with a symbol for the BBC.
‘Programmes don’t start until seven o’clock,’ explained Arina, who seemed content nevertheless to sit there staring at the test card.
The whole country had been given the following day off work and the streets were lined with so much bunting and decoration that the city appeared to have transformed itself into a circus overnight. Ralph arrived before lunchtime, laden down with cold meats, chutneys and cheese for sandwiches, and more bottles of beer than I thought strictly necessary.
‘Anyone would think you were getting married, the way you’re carrying on,’ I said to Arina, who had been up since six o’clock, fussing about in great excitement, and had finally ended up sitting on the floor in front of the television in an attempt to get as close to the proceedings as possible. ‘Is this what we’re going to be like from now on, a family of baboons, transfixed by a flickering light emerging from a wooden box?’
‘Oh, Pasha, shush,’ she said, watching as the reporter in the studio repeated the same information over and over again and passed it off as news.
Zoya did not seem as interested as the young people in the events taking place, maintaining as much distance from the television set as was possible in our small living room, busying herself with small unnecessary jobs. But when the young Queen began her journey in the gold-crested carriage from the palace, looking out towards her people with a confident smile upon her face and waving with that particularly regal twist of the wrist, she pulled a seat over and began to watch silently.
‘She’s a pretty thing,’ I remarked as Elizabeth ascended the throne, only to receive another shushing from my daughter, who thought nothing of commenting on every jewel, every tiara, every throne and every piece of ceremonial splendour which was displayed before us, but didn’t want me to interrupt the proceedings with a single word.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she asked, turning to us then, her face lit up with delight at what she saw. I smiled at her, feeling uncomfortable, and glanced across at my wife, who was transfixed by the images on the television too and had, I thought, not even heard a word that our daughter had said.
‘Ralph and I are going to the palace,’ announced Arina when the ceremony was finally over.
‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘Haven’t you seen enough?’
‘Everyone’s going there, Mr Jachmenev,’ said Ralph, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Don’t you want to see the Queen when she steps out on the balcony?’
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
‘You go,’ said Zoya, standing up and stepping away from us, filling the sink with hot water and throwing the used plates into it forcefully. ‘It’s for the young people, not us. We couldn’t stand the crowds.’
‘Well, we better go now, Ralph, or we won’t get a good place,’ said Arina, grabbing his hand and dragging him away before he even had a chance to thank us for our hospitality. I could hear others on the street beyond, leaving their houses too, having watched the Coronation, and making their way along Holborn towards Charing Cross Road, and from there on to the Mall in the hope of getting as close to the Queen Victoria Memorial as possible. I listened to them for a few minutes before standing up and walking over to Zoya.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’
‘Was it the ceremony?’
She sighed and turned around to look at me, our eyes meeting for a few seconds before she looked away.
‘Zoya,’ I said, wanting to take her in my arms, to hold her, to comfort her, but there was something that prevented me from doing so. This disruption in our marriage. She sensed it herself and offered an exhausted sigh, walking away from me without another word or touch and stepped towards the bedroom, where she closed the door behind her, leaving me alone.
I knew that something wasn’t right long before she told me about it. This man, Henry, had arrived at the Central School, where Zoya worked, from America to teach for a year and they had quickly become friends. He was younger than her, in his late thirties, I think, and no doubt found himself lonely in a city where he knew no one and had no friends. Zoya was not the type to feel a responsibility towards people in this way – she typically eschewed any form of social interaction with her colleagues outside of the school itself – but for some reason, she took him under her wing. Soon they were taking their lunch together every afternoon and arriving back late for classes because they had found themselves so engrossed in conversation.
They went for a drink together every Thursday evening after work. I was invited along only once, and found him pleasant company, if a little trivial in his conversation and prone to self-importance, and then I was never invited again and no reference was made to this fact. It was as if my audition to join their little club had gone badly and they didn’t want to hurt my feelings by mentioning it. I didn’t mind particularly; if anything I liked the fact that Zoya had made a friend of her own, for she had never had very many of those, but still, the rejection smarted.
She’d come home and tell me all about Henry, the things he had done that day, the things he had said, how knowledgeable he was, how funny. He did a near-perfect impersonation of President Truman, she told me, and I wondered how Zoya even knew what President Truman sounded like in order to make the comparison. Perhaps I was being naive, but none of it bothered me in the least. In fact, I found her little obsession amusing and started to tease her about him from time to time, and she’d laugh and say that he was just a boy she got along with, that was all, it was hardly worth making a fuss over.
‘He’s hardly a boy,’ I pointed out.
‘Well, you know what I mean,’ she said. ‘He’s so young. I’m not interested in him in that way at all.’
I remember that conversation well. We were standing in the kitchen and she was scouring a pot over and over, despite the fact that it had become entirely clean a few minutes earlier. Her cheeks had grown flushed as the exchange continued and she’d turned away from me, as if she couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye. I had only been teasing her, nothing more, in the way that she had always teased me about Miss Simpson, but it surprised me that she had grown so coy, almost coquettish in response.
‘I wasn’t talking about you being interested in him,’ I said, trying to laugh it off and ignore the sudden tension that had fallen between us. ‘I was talking about him being interested in you.’
‘Oh, Georgy, don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘The very idea.’
And then one day, she simply stopped talking about him entirely. She was still returning home from work at the usual time, still going for a drink with him once a week, but when I asked whether they had enjoyed a pleasant evening, she shrugged her shoulders as if she could barely remember any details of it and said that it had been fine, nothing special. She didn’t even know why she bothered any more.
‘And is he enjoying London?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Henry, of course.’
‘Oh, I expect so. He doesn’t really talk about it.’
‘So what do you talk about?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Georgy,’ she said defensively, as if she wasn’t even present for their conversations. ‘Work, mostly. Students. Nothing very interesting.’
‘If he’s not very interesting, then why do you spend so much time with him?’
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, growing unexpectedly angry. ‘I hardly spend any time with him at all.’
The entire thing began to strike me as quite bizarre, but even though there was a tiny voice at the back of my mind telling me that there was more to this than she was telling me, I chose to ignore it. The idea seemed utterly impossible, after all. Zoya was in her fifties. We had been together for more than half our lives. We loved each other very much. We had been through an extraordinary amount of hardship and difficulty together. We had suffered and lost together and survived. And through it all there had always been the two of us; we had always been GeorgyandZoya.
And then the year ended and Henry went back to America.
At first, Zoya seemed a little hysterical. She came home from work and talked all night long, as if she was afraid that to pause for even a moment would allow her to consider everything that she had lost and break down entirely. She cooked elaborate meals and insisted on our taking expeditions at the weekends to the most ridiculous places – London Zoo, the National Portrait Gallery, Windsor Castle – behaving as if we were a pair of young lovers getting to know each other for the first time and not a married couple who had been together for their entire adult lives. It felt as if she was trying to get to know me again, as if she’d lost sight of me somewhere along the way but knew that I was worthy of her love, if she could only remember the reason why she had once felt that emotion for me.
The hysteria gave way to depression. She started to engage less and less in conversation with me, spurning all attempts on my part to talk or share details of our days. She went to bed early and never wanted to make love. She, who had always taken such pride in her appearance, particularly since she had unexpectedly won the position at the Central School and felt that she had to equal the high fashion standards set by the other teachers and students, started to ‘dress down’, not caring if she went to classes in yesterday’s clothes or with her hair more unkempt than it would previously have been.
Finally, unable to contain her deceit any longer, she sat beside me one evening and said that she had something she wanted to tell me.
‘Is it about Henry?’ I asked, surprising her, for he had left England more than five months before and his name had never been mentioned even once in our home during all that time.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How did you know?’
‘How could I not have known?’ I said.
She nodded and told me everything. And I listened, and didn’t grow angry, and tried to understand.
Not easy.
And then, a few weeks later, her nightmares began. She would wake in the middle of the night, covered in perspiration, breathing heavily and trembling with fear. Waking beside her – for we never slept apart, not even on our worst nights – I’d reach out for her and she’d jump with fright, failing to recognize me at first and then, the lights on, her fear subsiding, I would take her in my arms as she tried not to weep but to describe the images she had been confronted with in the darkness and solitude of her dreams.
Finally, our marriage at its lowest ever ebb, my wife unable to sleep, barely eating, and me filled with love and anger and hurt, she woke one day and said that this could go on no longer, that something had to change. I froze, thinking the worst. Imagining her leaving me alone, facing a life without her.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, swallowing nervously, preparing a speech in my mind that would forgive everything, everything, if she would only love me as she had before.
‘I need to get some help, Georgy,’ she said.