The House of Special Purpose (21 page)

‘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.