“What submarine commander?”
“From the Black Sea Fleet. Whom she was engaged to.”
“Mother was engaged to a submarine commander?”
“Didn’t you know? He was the love of her life.”
“Not Pappa?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Bogey-nose whines, “no one ever told me anything about it.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
With a snap, Big Sis closes the door to the past and turns the key.
Eleven. Under duress
A date has been set for Valentina to appeal against the Immigration Service decision. Suddenly my father realises he is not so powerless after all. The appeal is to be held in Nottingham in April.
“I’m not going,” says Pappa.
“Yes you go,” says Valentina.
“You go by yourself. Why I shall travel to Nottingham?”
“You foolish man. If you no go, immigration bureaucraczia will say, where you husband? Why you no husband?”
“Tell bureaucraczia I am sick. Tell them I will not go.”
Valentina gets advice from her solicitor in Peterborough. He tells her that her case will be seriously compromised if her husband does not go, unless she can produce evidence of his illness.
“You sick in head,” says Valentina to my father. “You causing too much trouble. Too much crazy talking. Too much kiss kiss. No good eighty-four-year man. Doctor must write letter.”
“I am not sick,” says Father. “I am poet and engineer. By the way, Valentina, you should remember that Nietzsche himself was considered to be mad by those who were his intellectual inferiors. We will go to Doctor Figges. She will tell you I am not sick in head.”
The village doctor, a softly spoken woman approaching retirement, has treated my mother and father for twenty years.
“Good. We go to Doctor Figges. Then I tell Doctor Figges about oralsex,” says Valentina. (What? Oral sex? My father?)
“No no! Valya, why you must talk about this to everybody?” (He doesn’t seem to mind talking to me!) “I will tell her eighty-four-year husband want make oralsex. Squishy squashy husband want make oralsex.” (Please Pappa-this is making me feel a bit queasy.)
“Please, Valenka.”
Valentina relents. They will go to a different doctor instead. Valentina and Mrs Zadchuk bundle my father into Crap car. They are in such a hurry to get to the surgery before he changes his mind that his coat is buttoned up out of kilter and his shoes are on the wrong feet. Instead of his distance glasses he is still wearing his reading glasses, so everything passes in front of his eyes in a blur-the rain, the flicking of the windscreen wipers, the misted-up car windows, the smear of hedgerows as they pass. Valentina sits in the front, driving in her wild self-taught way, while Mrs Zadchuk sits in the back hanging tightly on to Nikolai, in case he decides to open the door and fling himself out. So they career around the narrow country lanes, splashing through puddles, sending a couple of pheasants running for their lives.
They do not take him to Doctor Figges at the village practice, but to a neighbouring village where there is another branch of the same practice, but staffed by a different GP. They are expecting to see the middle-aged Indian doctor, but instead there is a locum. Doctor Pollock is young, red-haired and very pretty. My father does not want to discuss his problems with her. He peers at her myopically through his misted-up reading glasses, and tries to change his shoes around without her noticing. Valentina does all the talking. She is sure the young woman will be sympathetic to her case, and she goes into some detail about my father’s strange behaviour-the coughing, the Toshiba apples, the tractor monologues, the persistent sexual demands. Doctor Pollock looks intently at my father, notices the odd shoes, the staring eyes, the mis-buttoned coat, and asks him a number of questions:
“How long have you been married? Are you experiencing sexual difficulties? Why exactly have you come to see me?”
My father answers, “I don’t know,” to all of them. Then he turns to Valentina with a dramatic gesture: “Because she has brought me! This fiend out of hell!”
Doctor Pollock declines to write a letter to the Immigration Service telling them that my father is too sick to attend Valentina’s appeal. But she does tell my father that she will make an appointment for him to see a consultant psychiatrist at the Peterborough District Hospital.
“See!” says Valentina triumphantly. “Doctor say you crazy!” My father is silent. This is not the outcome he wanted.
“Do you think I am crazy, Nadia?” he asks me, over the telephone next day.
“Well, Pappa, to be honest, I do a bit. I thought you were crazy to marry Valentina-didn’t I say so at the time?” (I want to say Hah hah! Told you so! But I bite my tongue.)
“Ah, that was not crazy. That was a simple mistake. Anyone can make mistake.”
“That’s true,” I say. I am still angry with him, but I am also sorry for him.
“What is all this about oral sex?” I ask Vera. We are swapping notes again. It is getting quite pally.
“Oh, it’s some sordid idea from Margaritka Zadchuk. Apparently Valentina told her we were looking for an annulment on the grounds of non-consummation.”
“But did they…?”
“I’m sorry, Nadezhda. It’s too disgusting to talk about.”
I find out from Pappa anyway. Valentina has been talking to her friend Margaritka Zadchuk, who has a thing or two to tell her. Old Mrs Mayevska was a cunning and thrifty woman, she says. When she died, she had saved up a huge fortune. Hundred thousand of pound. All is hidden somewhere in house. Why is that meanie husband not giving it to her? Meanie husband chuckles when he tells me this. She will pull up the whole house and she will not find a penny.
Mrs Zadchuk has taught Valentina a new word: oralsex. Is very popular in England, Mrs Zadchuk says. You can read about it in all English newspaper. Good Ukrainian people are not making oralsex. Meanie husband has lived too long in England, reads English newspaper, gets English oralsex idea. Oralsex is good, says Mrs Zadchuk, because with oralsex everyone knows is genuinely marriage, meanie husband cannot say is no genuinely marriage.
And another thing Mrs Zadchuk tells her-if she gets a divorce from that meanie wife-beating husband of hers, because of oralsex, she will be sure to get half of the house. That is the law in England. Fired up with dreams of unimaginable riches, she confronts my father.
“First I get passport visa, then I get divorce. When I get divorce I will have half of house.”
“Why not start now?” he says. “We will divide up house. You and Stanislav will have upstairs, I will have downstairs.”
Now my father starts drawing-ground-floor plans, upper-floor plans, doors that will be blocked, openings that will be made. He covers sheets of graph paper with spidery drawings. With help from the neighbours he brings his bed down into the apple-filled sitting-room, the room in which Mother died. He tells Vera it is because he has difficulty climbing the stairs.
But the room is too cold, and he is reluctant to turn the heating up because of the apples. He starts to cough and wheeze, and Valentina, fearful that he will die before her British passport is consummated (so he says), takes him to Doctor Figges. The doctor tells him he needs to keep warm at night. His bed is moved into the dining-room next to the kitchen, where the central heating boiler can be kept on day and night. It was open-plan before, but he asks Mike to put a door up for him, because he is afraid Valentina will murder him in the night (so he says). In this room he sits, sleeps, eats. He uses the small downstairs toilet and shower room that was put in for Mother. His world has contracted into a span of one room, but his mind still roams freely across the ploughed fields of the world.