15

FEBRUARY 9

ANNA ASKED LARRY TO DROP HER at the foot of the farm’s dirt driveway. There was some old bare and knotted wood rail fencing that stretched on either side of a sagging gate and disappeared to the right over a rise in the land. She would walk up from there, she told him, and then arranged for him to return in three hours’ time.

“Enjoy him,” Larry said.

She watched him go. Larry liked her son, had looked after him in the safe house in New Mexico two years before, and would have liked to see him. But the time was too precious and she wanted him all to herself.

She turned and looked towards the farm. To the right of her was a paddock with around a dozen horses bunched up together with the car’s arrival. A small circular pen was attached to the paddock for separating them out. Bales of hay were split and scattered near the fence and she saw a horse trough in which ice had been broken and was now floating in thick wedges on the surface. It was cold up here and recent snow still lay in patches on the fields. The horses stood and watched her, heads up, eyes wild, huffing big breaths from flared nostrils in the cold morning air. Then they tossed their heads and began to canter around the paddock in a group, kicking up their back legs in celebration of a new morning.

There was a pond in the paddock to the left of the gate. Ice had formed there, too, thick enough to walk on, she thought. The driveway ahead climbed a hill between the two fields to a wooden house a quarter of a mile in the distance and, behind that, woodland surrounded the top of the farm on two sides and ascended a high hill to the north. A stream flowed out of the wood down through the field to the pond and then on below to a river they’d crossed in the car.

As she always did when she visited her son in his new home, Anna thought it was a good place for him to grow up, to begin a new life. She’d seen many times now how much he loved the place and how he had fit so easily into his new family.

Before she began the walk up the drive, she paused to take in the view. It was a beautiful place, the kind of rural paradise that brought on a wave of nostalgia for the simplicities of a lost childhood. Though the country was nothing like the dacha in the forest where her grandmother had brought her up, Anna was reminded whenever she came here of that life. Anna thought of Dostoyevsky’s reflection that there was nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some memory of childhood, of home.

But this was a working farm, too, and that made it more than just a pretty picture or a vague, rural dream. Little Finn loved the animals in particular. There were mainly cows on the farm, which were now shut up in barns until the winter ended. Then there were the long sheds on wheels she could see higher up and that housed the chickens. The farmer moved the sheds around the fields so that the land was fertilised naturally. Some pigs rooted in the woods. And there were the horses, which the family used for their own recreation and which, in the summer, became a riding school under the tutelage of the farmer’s wife.

Little Finn’s new family had three small children of his own age. The farmer and his wife were in their mid-thirties and had retired young from Cougar, deciding on a new life away from the secret world and its normal business targets and promotional ladders and the expectations of others. They’d bought the organic farm with Burt’s help—Anna suspected it was Burt’s way of smoothing Little Finn’s transition, too—and were now supplying local communities within a twenty-five-mile radius with meat and milk. It was a physically hard living, offered little money, and the two of them were content in the choice they’d made.

Anna waited until she felt still inside. It was necessary for her to arrive composed and quiet, to calm the turbulent emotions the visits here unleashed in her. She had come to this farm in Connecticut more than a dozen times before, but even so she had begun to realize that her yearnings for her son, her frustration, sadness, and anger at the loss of his father, would never happily coexist with the rationality of her decision to effectively give him away for his own safety. Sometimes she felt she shouldn’t come at all, that her visits were a source of confusion. He had this new family now. She feared she was becoming like a distant relation to him, rather than his mother. But always Burt urged her to cast these thoughts aside; it was important that he had a real contact with his mother, Burt said, and to know about his dead father, Finn.

But what good could it do him, she wondered, to be presented with a second, visiting mother, even though she was the real one? However things worked out she was satisfied she had brought him to the right place to live his early life safe from the reaches of the KGB who would use him to get to her. He had a new name, a new identity, and was safe—that was all, she reminded herself, that was important.

As she continued up the driveway, she felt the same hollow feeling in her stomach return. One day, she knew, this family would become his own family and she would be his mother only in name. If not today, then one day, he would look on her as a virtual stranger.

She arrived at the top of the drive and walked up two wooden stairs and tugged the bellpull. Her presence hadn’t yet been noted by the family inside, thanks to leaving the car at the foot of the drive. That was the way Anna preferred it. The door was opened by the farmer’s wife, Naomi, who greeted her as always with a welcome whose fulsomeness seemed intended to forestall any doubts on Anna’s part. Though neither of them had ever broached the subject, it was silently understood between them that Anna’s visits were a strain to her most of all, and Naomi went out of her way to welcome her as part of their family. Perhaps she could empathise with her position, Anna thought. Perhaps any mother could.

They went into the kitchen and Naomi began to make coffee.

“The children are playing outside somewhere,” she said. “They’re probably with Tom.”

“I’ll have a coffee first,” Anna replied. “Thank you.”

Normal conversation was never a choice. She couldn’t talk about her job, what she’d been doing—even who she was. Naomi and her husband didn’t even know she was Russian, let alone that she’d defected and was hunted by the KGB. All they knew was that her son had needed a change of identity and that was enough. The small talk between Anna and this family circled around and avoided the subject of herself, focusing only on the farm and its progress, the seasons, and the children.

“How is he?” Anna asked.

“He’s fine. As I always say, he’s added something to the family, Anna,” Naomi replied. “He’s bright and, to be honest with you, I’m grateful to have him with us. The others love him, they all get along well.”

It was the same in all her previous visits. She’d seen before how Little Finn adapted quickly to new surroundings when they’d been at the safe house. Now he was easily adapting to his new family. He wasn’t plagued with thoughts of loss. He wasn’t even making the best of it, she thought, he just happily accepted what was good. There seemed to be no clouds at all in his life, and she was grateful for that, despite the fact that it could only mean a widening distance between the two of them.

They walked up into the fields after they’d finished their coffee.

“They’ll be up near the wood,” Naomi said. “Tom is doing some coppicing up there. If he’s not keeping an eye on them, I am,” she reassured her.

But the only thing in Anna’s mind was that Little Finn would be four years old in three weeks’ time. That made her think of Finn, as well as her son. Finn’s death at the hands of the KGB, just over four years before, erupted in her mind whenever she saw their son.

They found the children where Naomi had said they’d be, playing up near the wood where the stream emerged. It was a beautiful cold winter’s day, the few white clouds had cleared and the sun stood still in the sky, as if frozen itself.

When Little Finn saw her, he stopped what he was doing and stared at her, as if he wasn’t quite sure. Then he leapt up from the stream bank and ran towards her and she caught him in her outstretched arms.

“He’ll always be yours, Anna,” Naomi had told her many times, and at moments like these she dared to believe it.

Little Finn immediately tugged at her arm and pulled her towards the stream where the other three children were playing. He showed her a small earthen bank they were building “to catch fish,” he explained seriously. They played together by the bank until it was time for breakfast and then all of them walked back to the house. Tom kissed her on the cheek and squeezed her arm like a brother, as if he, too, knew the difficulty of her situation.

Over breakfast, Anna took out Little Finn’s birthday presents and all four children gathered round to watch him open them. She’d bought him a few useful things—clothing mostly—and then the big prize, a farm set with animals and tractors. Suddenly she felt foolish to have bought him a replica of the real place where he was living. But he was interested in it—interested in everything—and the children went off to a playroom solemnly carrying all the pieces one by one and began to put it all together. He was absorbed, his thoughts only with his new family, and she didn’t follow immediately.

“Is there anything you need?” she asked Tom and Naomi.

“No, I don’t think so. We have everything,” Tom replied. “We’ll let you know if he needs something,” he added. The tension of demonstrating that he was well provided for and at the same time allowing her to feel involved was never absent.

“We love him very much,” Naomi added, and there was a sudden awkwardness in the air, as if his own mother couldn’t provide this element of his upbringing, but only material things.

Before she left, Anna went into the playroom and sat with him. They hugged each other once and he showed her how they’d put the farm together. But already he was eager to be off. He’d seen his mother and now he had more important things to do. She let him go with a kiss and a Russian blessing. Then he scampered off back up into the fields with Tom and the other children. She felt bereft, forgotten, and guilty. But, by leaving him, she knew she’d done the right thing for him, the only right thing.

“Come whenever you can, anytime,” Naomi said before she left. “You must come and stay. You know you’re always welcome here, Anna.”

Always welcome in her son’s new home. She fought down a painful feeling at the irony of that. But she knew that this was how it would always be. Little Finn was safe, and that was all that really mattered, she knew that.

“I’d like to do that very much,” she said. “Thank you.”

Larry was waiting at the foot of the drive, the engine running.

“How is he, Anna?” he said with his broad, uncomplicated smile.

“He’s good,” she said.

The car swung back down to the road and Larry took her to the small private airfield nearby where one of Burt’s smaller planes waited to take her to Washington.