“ Alice is going to talk to her tomorrow. So, Mum, what do you think?”
“OK.” I reach forward to hug her. (How skinny she is!) “I’ll do my best. You should eat more.”
She’s right. It is stupid.
There are waiting lists at all the sheltered housing developments within reach of Cambridge, but before I can go out and visit them, I get another phone call.
“Dubov is back. Valentina is back with baby. Stanislav is back.”
His voice is excited, or maybe agitated. I can’t tell.
“Pappa, they can’t all stay there. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, I thought you’d agreed to think about sheltered housing.”
“Is all right. Is temporary arrangement only.”
“Temporary for how long?”
“Few days. Few weeks.” He coughs and splutters. “Until is time to go.”
“Go where? When?”
“Please, Nadia, why you asking so many question? I tell you, everything is OK.”
After he rings off, I realise I forgot to ask whether the baby is a boy or a girl, or whether he knows who the father is. I could ring him back, but I already know that I must go there, see for myself, breathe the same air, in order to satisfy my…what? Curiosity? No, this is a hunger, an obsession. Next Saturday I set out in the morning, full of anticipation.
The Lada is parked out on the road when I arrive. Crap car and the Rolls-Royce are in the front garden, and Dubov is there, fiddling around with some bars of metal.
“Ah, Nadia Nikolaieva!” He grabs me in a bear hug. “Have you come to see the baby? Valya! Valya! Look who is here!”
Valentina appears at the door, still wearing her dressing-gown and a pair of fluffy high-heeled slippers. I can’t say that she looks pleased to see me, but she beckons me inside.
In the front room is a white-painted wooden cot, and in it a tiny baby, fast asleep. Its eyes are closed, so I cannot tell what colour they are. Its arms reach up above the coverlet, the hands clenched in little fists beside its cheeks, thumbs out, the nails gleaming like minute pink shells. Its mouth, open and gummy, breathes and sighs and makes a little sucking sound in its sleep, and the downy skin of the fontanel rises and falls in time with the breathing.
“Oh, Valentina, it’s beautiful! He…she…is it a boy or a girl?”
“Is a girl.”
And now I notice that the baby’s coverlet is embroidered with small pink roses, and the sleeves of her little jacket are powder-pink.
“She’s beautiful!”
“I think so.” Valentina beams proudly, as though the baby’s beauty is her personal achievement.
“Have you got a name for her yet?”
“Name is Margaritka. Is name of my friend Margaritka Zadchuk.”
“Oh, lovely.” (Poor child!)
She points to a pile of lacy pink baby clothes on a chair at the side of the cot, knitted with great skill out of soft polyester yarn.
“She make it.”
“Gorgeous!”
“And is name of most famous English President.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Mrs Tatsher.”
“Ah.”
The baby stirs, opens her eyes, sees us standing looking down into her cot, and her face puckers, poised between crying and smiling. “Guh guh,” she says, and a trickle of whitish fluid runs from the corner of her mouth. “Guh guh.” Then little dimples appear in her cheeks.
“Ah!”
She is beautiful. She will make her own life. Nothing that has happened before is her fault.
Father must have heard me arrive, for now he comes in beaming.
“Good you can come, Nadia.”
We hug.
“You’re looking good, Pappa,” It’s true. He’s put a bit of weight on, and he is wearing a clean shirt. “Mike sends his love. He’s sorry he couldn’t come.”
Valentina ignored him when he came in, and now she leaves the room, turning on her high-heeled slippers without a word. I pull the door dosed, and whisper to Pappa.
“What do you think of the baby then?”
“Is girl,” he whispers back.
“I know. Isn’t she lovely? Have you found out who the father is?”
Pappa winks and pulls a mischievous face.
“Not me. Ha ha ha.”
From one of the upstairs rooms comes the rhythmic thud-kerboom-thud of heavy metal music. Stanislav’s musical tastes have obviously matured from Boyzone. Father catches my eye and puts his hands over his ears with a grimace.
“Degenerate music.”
“Do you remember, Pappa, how you wouldn’t let me listen to jazz when I was a teenager? You said it was degenerate.”
I have a sudden recollection of him storming down into the cellar and turning the electricity off at the mains. How my cool adolescent friends sniggered!
“Aha,” he nods. “Probably it was so.”
No jazz. No make-up. No boyfriends. No wonder I started to rebel as soon as I could.
“You were a terrible father, Pappa. A tyrant.”
He clears his throat. “Sometimes tyranny is preferable to anarchy.”
“Why have either? Why not have negotiation and democracy?” Suddenly this conversation has become too serious. “Shall I ask Stanislav to turn it down?”
“No no. Never mind. Tomorrow they going.”
“Really? Going tomorrow? Where are they going?”
“Back to Ukraina. Dubov is building roof-rack.”
In the front garden, there is a sudden roar of a car engine. It is the Rolls-Royce springing into life. We go over to the window to watch. There is the Rolls-Royce, throbbing away, and it has indeed been fitted with a sturdy home-made roof-rack across its whole length. Dubov has the bonnet up and is doing something to the engine to make it run alternately fast and slow.
“Fine tuning,” Father explains.
“But will the Rolls-Royce make it to Ukraina?”
“Of course. Why not?”
Dubov looks up, sees us at the window, and waves. We wave back.
That evening six of us sit down to dinner around the table in the bedroom-dining-room: Father, Dubov, Valentina, Stanislav, Margaritka, and I.
Valentina has rustled up five portions of boil-in-the-bag beef slices with onion gravy, which she serves with frozen peas and oven chips. She has changed out of her dressing-gown, but is wearing the same high-heeled fluffy slippers, with elasticated trousers that have loops under the heels to stretch them tight over her bottom (wait till I tell Vera!), and a tight-fitting, pastel-blue polo-neck. She is in high spirits, and smiles at all of us except Father, whose beef slices are slapped down in front of him with a little more force than is strictly necessary.
Father sits in the comer, fussily cutting everything up into little pieces and examining it closely before putting it in his mouth. The skins of the peas irritate his throat, and he starts to cough. Stanislav is next to him, eating silently with his head bowed low over the plate. I feel sorry for him after his humiliation in court, and try to open up a conversation, but he gives one-syllable answers and avoids my eyes. Lady Di and his girlfriend have, in the short space of their former mistress’s visit, unlearned all their careful training, and are prowling around the table yowling for tit-bits. Everyone obliges, especially Father, who gives them most of his dinner.
Dubov is sitting at the other end of the table, carefully cradling the tiny baby in his arms, feeding her milk from a bottle. Valen-tina’s superior breasts are evidently for display purposes only.
After supper I wash up, while Valentina and Stanislav go upstairs to continue with their packing. Father and Dubov retire into the front room, and after a few minutes I join them. I find them poring over some papers on which they are drawing something technical-a car beside a vertical post and some straight lines connecting them. They put aside the papers and Father takes out the manuscript of his master work, and settles himself into the armchair with his parcel-taped reading glasses on his nose. Dubov sits opposite him on the settee, still cradling the sleeping baby in his arms. He makes way for me to sit next to him.