The Other Son (11 page)

Natalya, who has spotted an opportunity, speaks instead. “Is like the house,” she says, avoiding looking at Tim, afraid of his glare.

Tim had specifically asked her during the drive
not
to mention the new house. He knows how his parents latch onto things and worry about them. There really wasn’t any point provoking nights of insomnia for his mother until the deal was confirmed, he had said. And Natalya had agreed. But it’s too late now. “What house?” Alice is asking.

“It’s not even a sure thing, so just...” Tim shakes his head.

“You’re not thinking of moving again, surely?” Alice says. “Poor Natalya has barely finished unpacking from the last time.”

“Oh, I don’t mind!” Natalya tells her. “Is beautiful house.”

“
It’s
beautiful,” Alice says. “‘It’ plus ‘is’ makes ‘it’s’, so,
it’s
beautiful, not
is
.”

“Sorry, yes,
it’s,”
Natalya says.

“So when is this happening?” Alice asks, leaning forward in her chair and already, Tim notices, starting to wring her hands.

“It might not be happening at all,” Tim says, still glaring at Natalya.

“Tim make a very low offer. He hopes they will cave.”

“I’d hardly call two... I’d hardly call
that
much money a low offer,” Tim says.

“This is what the estate agent say,” Natalya says, “Not me. So...”

“Where is it?” Ken asks.

“Really!” Tim exhales, laughter in his voice. “Can we all just wait and see if the bloody thing happens before we get our knickers in a twist?”

“I can’t see why we’re not allowed to discuss it, Tim,” Alice says. “You’re the only one getting his knickers in a twist. Unless it’s a long way away...
Is
it a long way?”

“No, not far,” Natalya says, still keen to get the in-laws on-side even as she begins to doubt the wisdom of having mentioned it, even as she senses the capacity for the conversation to spin completely out of control. “Just Broseley.”

“Broseley?” Alice says. “But that’s in Shropshire!”

“It’s fifteen minutes more, Mum,” Tim says. “Not even that. And, as I keep saying, not that anyone’s listening, it’s not even –”

“Yes, not even a sure thing. We heard, Timothy. We all heard you.”

“The thing, these days,” Ken says, “is that you have to pay the asking price. I saw it on that program. The one with the bald chap and the lassie – the bloke with the posh suits and the lisp.”

“It’s not a lisp,” Alice says. “He just can’t pronounce his ‘R’s.”

“Location location,” Tim says.

“Yes. That’s the one. It’s because of the housing crisis, apparently. Whenever they put in a lower offer, the houses get snuffled by someone else these days. He’s always telling them – what’s his name?”

“Phil Spencer,” Alice says.

“That’s the one. Well, he’s always telling them to go in at the asking price, and they never listen.”

“Thanks to you, Ken,” Natalya says, bowing theatrically. “My point exact.”

“Why are you moving, anyway?” Alice asks. “What’s wrong with the current place?”

“Nothing’s wrong with the current place.”

“Well, then why change? Are you sure it’s going to be worth all the angst?”

“What angst, Mother?” Tim asks, starting to feel exasperated. “There is no
angst
.”

“Well, the cost, and the move, uprooting everyone... the boys will have to change schools.”

“That’s not what you’re worried about though, is it,” Tim says. “You’re worried about the extra five minutes drive.”

“It was fifteen about a minute ago,” Alice says. “I’m glad it’s getting closer. By the time you’ve bought it, it’ll be in the back garden.”

“It’s about another ten minutes. That’s all. Ten minutes.”

“We hardly see you, as it is.”

“And now you know why,” Tim says, opening his arms to embrace the scene of family bliss.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Alice says. “I’m sure I don’t.”

“Is very beautiful,” Natalya says, trying to nudge a smidgin of positivity back into the conversation though she suspects that it’s a lost cause. “It have five bedroom and a pool and–”

“
Five
bedrooms?” Alice interrupts. “What on earth would you want five bedrooms for?”

“Unless they’re thinking of–” Ken starts.

“We’re not thinking of anything,” Tim tells him. To Natalya, he adds, “And Nat... please... just button it. Christ!”

Natalya shrugs. “I discuss our life with my in-law,” she says. “If this is not allowed, maybe you should deliver me a new copy of Little Red Book.”

“What red book’s that then?” Ken asks.

“She means that we’re not in Soviet Russia,” Alice explains. “She means that we’re still allowed to discuss things.”

“Thanks to you, Alice,” Natalya says graciously, even though the Little Red Book was Chinese, not Russian.

“Five beds in Broseley, huh?” Ken says. “That’s gotta cost a pretty penny. That’s got to be over a million, isn’t it?”

“I’m not discussing this anymore,” Tim says. “You won’t get one more word out of me. We’ll let you know if anything actually comes of it.” He glances at his watch. “And now we need to get going. It’s almost eleven and the boys have had a long day.”

“But you’ve only just arrived,” Alice protests.

“It’ll be a quarter to twelve by the time we get home.”

“It would be gone midnight if you lived in Broseley,” Alice says, pointedly. “In fact, I bet you wouldn’t have even come this far for the fireworks if you were living all the way out there.”

Tim closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, then opens them and stands. “Right. That’s enough. I’m suddenly very, very tired.” He shoots Natalya his harshest glare, and she, in return, curves her shoulders, bulges her eyes, and opens her hands at him in a “what did I do?” gesture.

“Just get the kids together, will you?” he says, shaking his head and heading for the door.

***

“So what was that all about, Nat?” Tim finally asks, as he pours himself a whisky.

Tim has driven them home in silence, and carried the boys, already sleeping, to their beds.

Natalya, looking unusually sour, is already on her third shot of vodka by the time he reaches the lounge. “What is what?” she says, looking back at him from the sofa.

“We agreed. We decided, together, not to worry them.”

“Huh!” Natalya says. “You want me to be friend with them, then you want me to not tell them anything! This is your problem, not mine. Perhaps you should decide how you want me to be one time for all.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that we discussed it, in the car,” Tim says, attempting to keep the discussion within the narrow confines of their agreement and Natalya’s failure to respect that agreement.

“So how you want me to be with your parents, Tim? How?” Natalya asks. And this is the problem with trying to discuss anything with Natalya. This, Tim reckons, is the problem with trying to discuss things with women
in general.
Whereas men tend to keep each subject in a separate folder in a labelled filing cabinet so that they can extract one subject and discuss it before carefully putting it back, women prefer to hurl everything into one big pot. It’s all just spaghetti with every subject knotted up with every other, so that it’s almost impossible to discuss any one thing without discussing
every
thing
.

“The point isn’t how I want you to be with my parents,” Tim says. “The point is why, after we decided not to mention it, did you go ahead and bloody mention it?”

“
You
agreed to not tell them, Tim,” Natalya says, rising and crossing to the bar for yet another refill. She’s feeling trembly and unsure of herself, yet angry and accused at the same time. It’s a complex and uncomfortable mix of emotions and the vodka seems to be helping. “It’s what you do,” she says. “You decide things and then you tell me, and then you decide that I agreed.”

“You make me sound like some kind of dictator,” Tim says, “when that’s not what happened at all. What happened is that I explained how my parents work, and we agreed it was best not to tell them, and you told them anyway because you had some half-baked idea that they would tell me to up my offer. Which is to
really
misunderstand my parents’ relationship with money. And now Dad will talk of nothing else for a month, and Mum won’t sleep for worrying about it, and all for nothing because we don’t even know if we’re going to get the damned place.”

“Because of low offer,” Natalya says. “Yes.”

“Two point five
million
is not a bloody low offer!” Tim says.

“Even Ken understands that this is not how market works,” Natalya says. “Even the bald man on the television knows this.”

“So now you’re going to give me lessons in property prices?” Tim says. “You’re going to give me tips on negotiating techniques?
Really?”

“Perhaps you need!”

“So you really want to go there, do you?” Tim says. “You really want to demonstrate that you have absolutely no idea what your husband does for a living, what he does all fucking day while you’re sitting around drinking vodka?”

“Oh
Tim!”
Natalya says in horror. “How dare!”

“Look, I...”

“You
are
like dictator,” Natalya says, her voice rising. “It’s like Timsky Putin. No one can discuss. No one can share. It all have to be secrets and silence. Because Putin can’t do when people disagree. Oh no! Everyone must bow to the great Timsky Putin.”

“You’re shouting,” Tim says. “You’re losing the plot.”

“Oh...” Suddenly the only words Natalya can think of are Russian ones. It happens when she gets really angry. “K Chortu!” she says, waving one hand dismissively at him. Tim knows what it means –
Go to hell.

She grabs the bottle of Stoli from the bar and struts from the room.

In the kitchen, she slumps at the kitchen table and pours herself another drink. She stares at the darkness beyond the kitchen window and tries to calm down.

She’s being unreasonable. She can sense that much, even as she fails to control it. And it’s true that she
had
agreed not to tell Tim’s parents, even as she had agreed with herself that she
might
tell them all the same if she suddenly felt like it. It was just that Tim hadn’t known that. But it was a kind of treason, she can see that now, and the fact of her treason makes her feel both guilty and angry at the same time.

But there’s a larger picture here as well. There’s the fact that Tim
is
always convinced that he’s right, that he knows best about every bloody thing. There’s the fact that no discussion has been possible about how much they might offer on the house, the subtext being that it’s Tim’s money, after all. Which is all the more annoying because it’s so patently true.

She feels scared, too, she realises. It’s not reasonable, this sensation of fear. The fact of not getting the new house
doesn’t
mean that they’ll lose this one, it doesn’t mean that they’ll end up on the street even if that’s how it feels to her. But she’s scared. Now she has imagined herself in this new house, she’s scared, unreasonably scared, that it won’t happen.

It’s a dream house, that’s the thing. It’s literally a house of dreams, a vast, overblown symbol of wealth, of security, of safety, of finally being beyond reach.

Every time she watches an American sitcom she looks at the ridiculously big houses they all live in... (And how is that even possible? How
can
Susan the writer, who dabbles at her laptop about once every season, earn enough to pay for
that
house? Because Natalya knew a couple of writers when she worked in London, and they couldn’t even pay their rent. Does Mike the plumber pay for it all? Is it possible that American plumbers earn a lot of money?)

Anyway, yes, every time she sees their mansions, their entrance halls bigger than her lounge, their shiny happy, perfect lives (with the exception of the occasional murder) she thinks of the house. She thinks,
soon this will be us.
Even Susan and Mike don’t have a lap-pool.

She’d feel safe in such a house. She’s sure she’d feel settled and centred, and, finally, safe. No one is going to drag a woman lounging by a pool back to her old life, but even as she thinks this, she is visualising a man, a big built mafia type in a badly fitting suit, dragging her by her hair from the bed-chair. Her heart starts to race.

“Natalya!” It’s Tim’s voice. He’s standing in the doorway behind her. “Come to bed.”

“Go away!” she says. “I hate you.” She’s a little surprised at the sound of those words. They weren’t the ones she had been intending to say.

“You’re a fucking lunatic sometimes, you know,” Tim says, but his voice is soft, loving even.

Natalya chooses to focus on the words themselves rather than the tone. The vodka has made her reactive. “Oh,
I
am lunatic?” she says, now standing and turning to confront him, her eyes fiery. “And you? You are so
very
macho! So
very
clever. So very bloody everything. You decide this, you decide that. And now you think you’ll decide what I can
say?”

“Nat...” Tim whines.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Stop shouting.”

“Me? Shouting?” Natalya says, though she realises that she
is
shouting. “Oh yes, Mister Putin. And perhaps you would like...”

“You’re impossible when you’re like this,” Tim says, interrupting her. “Call me when your period’s happened. I’m going to bed.”

“My period?!” Natalya says, now pursuing him down the hallway. “My
period!
Well that’s one problem Mister Putin doesn’t have, isn’t it! Because he has such a big dick between his legs! He has his money and he decide everything. He doesn’t bleed either! Oh, Timsky Putin is so fucking clever!”

Tim stops walking away now and turns back to face his wife. She’s out of control, momentarily possessed by some demon from her past. He knows that she has these demons. He has heard her nightmares and knows that she’ll never tell him what she dreams of. And it’s probably best that way, too. Because he’s pretty sure that a beautiful, tiny, fragile Russian girl from the middle of nowhere doesn’t get to be working in the luxury hotel in London where he met her without breaking a few psychological bones along the way. He loves her, whatever she had to do to get there. He loves her, in fact, partly
because
of what she had to do to get there. But it’s best not to know. That’s something they both agree on.