The Kirilov Star (23 page)

Lydia, who found him, was so shocked she could not take it in for several seconds, then she threw herself across him and sobbed her heart out. Her beloved papa, who had taken her in as a waif and loved her as well as any natural father, who had fed her and clothed her and educated her, put up with her naughtiness, her wicked betrayal of him and still loved her, had gone from her. It was too much to bear.

It was Jenny Graham who came and gently lifted her from the body and closed the dead man’s eyes. Lydia was angry and turned on her. ‘You should have been here, you should have seen it coming. Where were you?’

‘Mrs Conway, it is six o’clock in the morning,’ she said patiently. ‘He was all right when I went to bed. I could not have foreseen it, and even if I had, there was nothing either you or I could have done.’

Lydia gulped and pulled herself together. ‘I know. I woke early, and something, I don’t know what it was, told me to come and look at him. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. Will you ring for the doctor? I’ll stay here a few minutes. No need to wake Tatty yet.’

Jenny left her and she sat beside the bed and took her father’s hand. It was already drained of blood, the white bone of his knuckles showing through the thin skin. ‘Papa, I shall miss you dreadfully,’ she murmured. ‘You have been the backbone of my life and now I have to stand on my own.’ Even as she spoke, she thought of Robert. She was not alone; she had a husband who was an unfailing support and children who needed her. And they must be told. Tatty would wake soon and want her breakfast, happily eager for life and the day ahead. She was going to have to shatter that happiness. Should she defer it, send her to school and
tell her later? That would be a cowardly thing to do and she would hate her for it later. And she must ring Bobby’s school and get in touch with Robert. He had been on his way to Gibraltar when she last spoke to him by phone.

‘The doctor is on his way.’ Jenny had returned; Lydia in her grief had not heard her. ‘I’ll stay with him, if you like. I thought I heard Tatty about.’

Lydia stumbled to her feet and went in search of Tatiana who was singing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ in the bathroom as she showered. Lydia waited for her to come out, wrapped in a bath towel and rubbing her hair. ‘Tatty, sit down, I have something to tell you.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her daughter down beside her. ‘You have to be very brave.’ She found herself overwhelmed with tears again and for a few moments could not go on.

Tatty looked at her in bewilderment. ‘Mummy, what’s wrong? Why are you crying? Have you hurt yourself?’

‘No, I am not hurt.’ She managed a weak smile. ‘At least, not outside. Inside I am hurting a lot. You see, it’s Grandpa. He’s … He fell asleep in the night and … and I’m afraid he isn’t going to wake up again.’

Tatty stared at her. ‘You mean he’s dead?’

‘Yes, darling. But it was a peaceful end.’ Oh, how she hoped and prayed that was true, that he hadn’t been calling out for help and none came.

‘I don’t believe it. He was all right yesterday, shaking his stick at the television – you know, how he does when he’s agitated.’

‘I know. But he was an old man and he had been ill a long time.’

‘I don’t want him to go,’ Tatty said, her lip trembling. ‘I want him to stay here with us. It’s not fair.’

‘I know, I’d like it too,’ Lydia said, then as Tatty began to sob in earnest, she gathered her into her arms and put aside her own grief to comfort her.

Jenny returned to tell them the doctor had arrived and Lydia gently disengaged herself and went to her father’s room to meet the doctor.

The nurse had laid Edward out straight, washed his face, combed his white hair and crossed his hands on his chest. Lydia almost gave way again at the sight of him, but remembering her children, she straightened herself up and prepared to deal with practicalities, after which she decided to go and fetch Bobby home. She shouldn’t leave it to the headmaster to break the news.

The funeral took place in a crowded Upstone church a week later. Sir Edward’s work colleagues were there in force and so were the villagers. A handful of Russian émigrés whom Edward had helped came to pay their respects, as did some of Lydia’s friends and colleagues who had also known Sir Edward. The local vicar, the Reverend Mr Harrington, took the service and Lydia was asked to say a few words. How she got through it without breaking down she never knew and she didn’t have Robert to support her. He was on his way back but had not arrived in time. She ended with the hope and belief her father had joined his beloved wife and invited everyone back to Upstone Hall for refreshments.

They left the church behind the pall-bearers for a short committal service at the graveside. As they stood about the newly opened grave, with heads bowed, Lydia caught a glimpse of someone standing in the shadows of the great yew tree which stood close to the lychgate. Her heart did a crazy somersault and then began to beat so quickly she
could not breathe. She took a half step towards him, her legs buckled under her and she fell to the ground.

She came to her senses lying on the grass beside the grave with her head in Claudia’s lap. Her eyes took in Bobby’s legs clad in his dark-grey school trousers and she raised her head to find him looking down at her, his face screwed up with worry. Tatty was kneeling beside her, clinging to her hand. She scrambled into a sitting position and stared towards the yew, but there was no one there. Had she seen a ghost? She must have. He was dead, had been dead fourteen years. And yet he had seemed so real, albeit older, grey-haired and very thin.

‘It’s all been too much for you,’ Claudia said. ‘Shall I tell everyone to go away?’

Lydia shook her head, as much to deny the apparition as to answer Claudia. ‘I’ll be all right. Help me up.’

Claudia helped her to her feet and she took the children’s hands in each of hers and led the way to the funeral car which took them back to the Hall. By the time she arrived, she decided she had been seeing things. Alex was dead. She must remember that and not be so foolish.

She supervised the refreshments, talked to everyone, thanking them for coming, joining in as people told their own stories about the Sir Edward they knew, some of which raised a laugh. Afterwards there was the reading of the will, though Lydia already knew its contents. Sir Edward had been very generous to long-serving servants, to Claudia, the church and his favourite charities, and he had set up a trust fund for Bobby and Tatty. He had no male heir and the baronetcy had died out with him, and so the residue of the estate, Upstone Hall and the flat in Balfour Place had been left to Lydia. It was enough to keep her in comfort for
the rest of her life and to enable Robert to leave the sea and take up whatever occupation he chose. And he could buy that yacht he had been talking about for ages.

He arrived home just as everyone was leaving. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here in time,’ he said, hugging her and then holding her at arm’s length to look into her face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you.’ And she flung herself back into his arms.

He held her a few moments, then gently put her aside to look to his children, taking Tatty to sit beside him on the sofa. Bobby remained standing, looking down at them.

‘I don’t like the house without Grandpa,’ Tatty said. ‘It seems all wrong.’

‘His spirit is still with us,’ Robert told her. ‘If you love someone, they can never really die.’ A statement that made Lydia, remembering the vision in the churchyard, gulp.

‘The funeral was awful,’ Bobby told him. ‘Everybody was so miserable, though some of them were only pretending; they were laughing afterwards and guzzling sherry and cakes like it was a party. I don’t think Grandpa would have liked that. And Mum fainted. In the churchyard with everyone watching.’

Robert looked up at Lydia, his eyebrow raised in a query.

‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘My legs just buckled under me. It only lasted a second or so. Nothing to worry about.’

She did not tell him she thought she had seen Alex. It had been an apparition, born of her distress; he had not been real, and telling Robert would only upset him to think that after all their years together a ghost still haunted them.

Alex had wanted to pay his last respects to the man who had been a second father to him. It had not been his intention to reveal himself. He had watched from the shadow of the tree, knowing there was no place for him in the group around the open grave. When Lydia had fainted, he had longed to go to her, but seeing her rise and take her children away, he had left. But he had come back later when all the cars had gone and the gravediggers had filled in the grave. He stood over it, reading the cards on the flowers and musing on a life that had brought him so much love and then snatched it away again.

Since returning to England he had discovered Sir Edward still lived at Upstone Hall and Lydia had married Robert Conway and had two children. He had known, when he had sent her away from him in Moscow, he was shutting the door on his own happiness. Someone like Lydia needed a man in her life, to love and be loved, needed children to mother. He ought not to mind. She would not wish to have the past dragged up again and in any case it would only hurt everyone: Lydia, Robert and their children, not to mention his own battened-down feelings.

He stooped to read the inscription on the largest of the wreaths laid at the head of the grave. It was made up of white and yellow roses. ‘In love and gratitude to the best of fathers and grandfathers who gave freely and asked nothing in return. May you rest in peace. Robert, Lydia, Bobby and Tatiana.’ Fighting back tears, he put his hand under the wreath and plucked a tiny yellow rosebud from where it would not be missed and slipped it into the top pocket of his suit behind the triangle of white handkerchief that peeped from it. Then he went back to his car and drove out of the village and along the road past the gates of Upstone Hall, continued on, and took the main road to Norwich.

It was the death of Stalin in March 1953 which had started the process to set Alex free. As soon as the news reached Norilsk, the prisoners rejoiced, thinking they would soon be sent home. Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s successor, was known to want to dismantle the Gulag system and as a first step he transferred the administration of the complex from the gulag to the Ministry for Heavy Industry. It paved the way for the prisoners to apply to the Soviet Procuracy for a review of their sentences. Those whose sentences were shorter than five years, who consisted mainly of the criminal element, women and the elderly, were granted an amnesty, but the so-called politicals and enemies of the people, which included Alex, were left behind, and conditions, already harsh, became worse.

The guards were afraid that if the prisoners were released they would lose their jobs and were anxious to prove that to grant an amnesty to such prisoners would endanger the security of the country, and so their cruelty
increased. They did not seem to understand that, if everyone was suddenly declared innocent, it would make the state legal system look inept, if not worse. When the guards shot at a convoy of prisoners on their way to work it triggered a whole wave of protests which were brutally put down.

Alex was kept so busy processing the prisoners’ applications for a review of their sentences he did not have time to see to his own. It was a miracle that his years in the camp had not degraded him as it had many another. Thin and in rags he might be, but his mind still worked, perhaps because of the translation work he was given which kept his brain cells from going rusty.

It was this office work which had brought him into contact with one of the engineers in charge of the steel works. Leonid Pavlovich Orlov and his wife, Katya, lived in comparative luxury in a larger-than-usual house on a part of the compound reserved for paid workers. Alex didn’t know Madame Orlova, but he had seen Leonid about, directing workers and prisoners, treating both with humanity, something almost unknown in the camp. Sometimes he would come into the office and talk to Alex. He had, he told Alex, worked his way up in his career by diligence, ambition and not a little risk. ‘I seized my chances,’ he had said on one occasion. It was well below freezing, both outside and in, and he was warmly clad in a padded coat and fur hat, which was more than Alex had. ‘During the war Russia needed engineers, people who could design and make weapons, tanks, transports, things like that and I took full advantage. Not everyone in Russia is poor, you know; a man can get on if he’s determined enough. I own my engineering business.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Advancement,’ he had said, laughing. ‘Here I have been allowed to grow even stronger, to make even more money. Mining and engineering together make a lucrative partnership …’

‘Should you be saying this to me?’

Leonid had laughed and looked about him at the empty office. Alex felt he had deliberately chosen that moment to speak to him when everyone else had gone for their midday meal. ‘Why not? There’s no one to hear and no one to care if they did. The guards can do nothing to me, I am not one of their prisoners. Besides, I want to ask you something.’

Alex was immediately wary. ‘What might that be?’

‘You speak English and German?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then will you teach me?’

Suspicion had become part of Alex’s nature and this sounded very suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Leonid repeated. ‘Because I want to learn. One day Russia will be doing business with other countries. It’s inevitable, and it might come sooner than you think. I want to be prepared.’

‘I meant, why me?’

‘Why not you? And who else is there who is so fluent and whom I can trust?’

‘You trust me?’

‘Yes. I have watched you at work. You are scrupulously honest, when anyone else in your shoes would be fiddling the books, hiving off goods and supplies and selling them. Selling the secrets entrusted to you by prisoners too. There are any number of ways in which you could have used your
position to better yourself. And yet you haven’t. So, what do you say? I’ll pay you.’

‘Apart from buying extra food and clothes, money’s not much good here. And it would only be stolen if I had it.’

‘Very well, then – apart from a little tea money, I shall keep it until you get out. You haven’t got long to go, have you?’

‘Who knows? People are always having their sentences increased, sometimes even doubled on the flimsiest excuse. How do I know it won’t happen to me?’

‘The sentences are increased because the government needs the labour and prisoners don’t have to be paid.’ He paused. ‘I could make sure you left on time.’

‘In exchange for lessons?’

‘Yes.’

And so he had agreed, and Alex went to their house on three evenings a week and taught Leonid and his wife English and German. And he was rewarded with supper. It didn’t help his popularity with his fellow prisoners and he received more than one beating, not only because they considered him a traitor, but because they thought he might have been given money and they meant to take it off him. Only when they had been convinced he was not being paid more than a pittance and a meal, and he managed to smuggle food out for them, did they leave him alone. He fancied Leonid, who was nobody’s fool, knew about this but turned a blind eye.

The comparatively soft life came to an end after two years when Leonid told him he was going back to Moscow. ‘My wife has had enough of living out here and she’s homesick for the sun,’ he said.

‘I shall miss you,’ Alex said. They had established a
rapport which, in other circumstances, might have been called friendship and he meant what he said. Besides, he’d miss his free suppers.

‘And I you, my friend. I shan’t forget you. If you need help when you get out, come to me. I will have your fee waiting for you.’

Alex was not such a fool as to believe it – neither the fact that he would get out at the end of his original sentence, nor that Leonid would remember and pay him if he ever did. But then Stalin had died and that had put a whole new complexion on things. To his surprise his application for review of his sentence was granted the following year, probably because he had been a model prisoner and worked efficiently.

In the autumn of 1954, he had found himself, skeletally thin, in a train being conveyed back to Moscow and civilisation. His Certificate of Release had specified he was forbidden to live within a hundred kilometres of Moscow or any other major city and he was given twenty-four hours to make himself scarce or be rearrested. He was given to understand he was expected to make for Potsdam, though no one thought to give him the wherewithal to get there. He had no money, no clothes, no job and nowhere to live, but he was free. He was tempted to go straight to the British Embassy and throw himself on their mercy; he was, after all, a British citizen, but he was plagued by his conscience. He had never forgotten that promise to Lydia. He knew it was an almost impossible task, but he had to try and find Yuri before he could even think of going home. Where was home anyway?

It was then he thought of Leonid Orlov. Would he remember him? Would he honour his debt? He knew the
name of the man’s business and, by asking the way, found himself outside a huge factory making engineering tools. He had washed and shaved in the communal baths, but there was nothing he could do about his clothes except brush them down.

‘You want work?’ the man on the gate asked him, looking him up and down in contempt. ‘There’s no vacancy.’

‘No, I want to speak to Comrade Leonid Orlov.’

The man laughed. ‘You haven’t a hope. He won’t see you.’

‘I think he will. Tell him it’s Alexei Simenov. We knew each other years ago.’

‘He’s always being plagued by people who knew him years ago. The whole population of Russia seems to think he owes them a favour.’

Alex straightened his back and lifted his head. ‘I am not the whole population of Russia. I am Alexei Petrovich Simenov.’ It was said with all the authority he could muster, and it worked. The man sighed heavily and picked up the telephone.

‘Wait here,’ he said when he put it down.

It seemed he had been standing in the street for ages and was beginning to think he might as well walk away, when Leo himself came hurrying out to meet him. ‘My dear man, how good it is to see you again,’ he said, giving Alex a great bear hug, much to the astonishment of the gatekeeper. ‘Come along, you look as though you could do with a good meal.’ Leo himself obviously never went short of a meal. He had been plump before, now he was rotund. ‘And you need some clothes. You can’t go about looking like that.’

Alex breathed a huge sigh of relief. ‘I can’t stay in Moscow long. I’m supposed to leave within twenty-four
hours, and I was wondering how I was going to manage it when I thought of you.’

‘Glad you did, Alexei, my friend, glad you did.’ He took Alex’s arm in a firm grip and led him inside the gate where a monster limousine stood with a chauffeur beside it, who sprang to open the rear door. Leo ushered Alex in and climbed in beside him. ‘GUM,’ he ordered the driver.

They went to the department store where a whole wardrobe of clothes was bought for Alex. ‘A suit and a shirt would have been enough,’ Alex protested.

‘Nonsense. Three lessons a week for two people for two years, at so much an hour, must come to a tidy sum.’

They left the store with Alex looking and feeling smarter than he had in years. ‘Now for something to eat,’ Leo said. ‘Then you can tell me everything.’

‘Everything?’ Alex queried.

‘Yes, you didn’t come to me to beg, I know you better than that.’

‘I thought you might remember the lessons.’

‘So I did, but there’s more to be told. We’ll go home, you’d like to see Katya again, wouldn’t you? And we won’t be overheard.’

In Alex’s experience, if there was one place in Moscow to be overheard it was at home where living quarters were shared and everyone lived cheek by jowl in rooms divided by paper-thin walls, so that it was impossible to have any privacy. But Leonid Orlov’s home was not like that. He had a privileged apartment in a block of flats in Granovski Street where he and his wife had six rooms all to themselves. It was here Alex had a warm bath, the first since that time with Lydia in that dreadful
kommunalka
with its filthy bath along the corridor. Even that room had been spacious
and the bath a luxury compared with how he had lived afterwards. Not that he had cared at the time where he lived when he had Lydia with him, loving him, relying on him. Those times could never come again, neither the worst of them, nor the best of them.

‘Now, tell what’s been happening to you,’ Leonid said, after they had finished an excellent meal cooked by Katya. ‘I assume you have been set free?’

‘Yes, pardoned after review.’

‘Good. I am not going to have the police knocking on my door in the middle of the night, then.’ It was said with a chuckle.

‘Don’t joke about it, Leo,’ his wife said.

‘You can never tell,’ Alex said. ‘I can’t quite believe I’m free and they won’t find some other charge they’d forgotten.’

‘You are safe here for the moment,’ Leo said, making himself serious again. ‘Tell me what your plans are.’

‘It is a long story and I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.’

‘Oh, but I do. I might be able to help. That’s why you looked me up, isn’t it?’

Alex smiled. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘Were you hoping to go back to England? I can’t help you do that.’

‘No. I wouldn’t allow you to risk it anyway. It’s something else.’

‘Fire away, then.’ He opened another bottle of wine and refilled their glasses. ‘You are not in a hurry, are you?’

‘No.’ He paused, wondering where to begin. ‘Nearly fifteen years ago, I made a promise to someone I love very dearly, a promise to search for someone.’

‘In Russia?’

‘Yes. Her father was Count Kirilov. She left Russia in 1920, the only survivor of her family. Her father, mother and brother were all killed during the Civil War. She was taken to England and adopted by Sir Edward Stoneleigh. All she had of her old life was a piece of jewellery sewn into her petticoat.’

‘Oh, the poor thing!’ Katya exclaimed. She was even rounder than her husband.

‘She was luckier than some. Sir Edward is a great man. She adores him.’ This didn’t seem real, this warm room, his stomach replete, his head a little fuzzy with excellent wine and this charming man, who seemed to be listening attentively. He took a deep breath and confided the whole story.

Leo got up suddenly and left the room. When he came back he was carrying a large book. He sat down beside Alex and opened it. It appeared to be about the tsar’s court. ‘Here,’ he said, turning it to show him a photograph. It depicted an autocratic lady in a long straight evening dress, dripping with jewels, including a tiara. Standing on one side of her was a young man, still in his teens, in a white uniform, and on the other the tsar and tsarina.

‘Good heavens,’ he said, reading the Russian inscription aloud. ‘The Tsar and Tsarina with the dowager Countess Irina Kirillova and Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Kirilov at the ball at the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, to celebrate the New Year 1900.’

Alex pointed to the young man. ‘That must be Lydia’s father and that her grandmother. And that’s the Kirilov Star.’

Leo turned the page. ‘There is a little more here about the tiara. According to legend the centre stone was cut from a huge diamond found on the banks of the Ob River by a peasant who was fishing and had no idea of its worth. He could not afterwards remember exactly where he found it. In that region, there are no easy landmarks. He took it to the village priest, who thought it might be worth money and made the long journey to Tobolsk where he sold it to a silversmith who in turn sold it to a travelling merchant. It eventually ended up in Novgorod where Count Kirilov owned an estate. It is not known how much he paid for it, but it would not mean anything in today’s money, considering we are talking about the eighteenth century. He had it made into a tiara for his wife.’