‘Why?’
‘I thought you’d like a baby to look after’ This was terrible! He was floundering, about to go under.
Sasha looked uncertainly back to her mother. Natalia said: ‘Why don’t you open it?’
Sasha did, with difficulty, because Fiona had been liberal with the tape and the child began by trying to unpick it: eventually, exasperated, she tore at the paper. For several moments she held the doll at arm’s length, seriously examining it, before finally smiling.
‘She has dark hair, like you,’ said Charlie. How did you speak – what did you say – to a child! His child. His baby. His daughter. His own daughter. Mine.
‘What’s her name?’
‘You give her one.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want you to have her. Look after her.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I do.’ Child logic for a child.
Sasha continued to consider the offer gravely, looking first between the doll and Charlie and then to Natalia, who nodded permission again. ‘Anna,’ the child declared.
‘That’s good,’ said Charlie, not quite sure what he was approving. ‘Anna’s yours now. Look after her.’
‘Sasha!’ prompted Natalia.
‘Thank you,’ said Sasha. She waited, for another nod that the thanks were sufficient, before returning to the window. There she set the doll on the chair so it overlooked the still-life farmyard and said something to it that Charlie didn’t hear.
Conscious of the child’s early hesitation, Charlie said to Natalia: ‘I hope that was all right. Something from someone she doesn’t know. I didn’t think…’
‘It’s all right,’ said Natalia, clearer-voiced. She appeared to become aware they were both still standing. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Charlie was uncertain, she recognized. It surprised her because she didn’t remember him confused about anything. She wasn’t, Natalia decided, positively. There was a feeling: nothing more – nothing worse – than discomfort, unease at the oddity of something difficult to believe. It would have been unnatural if there hadn’t been something at their meeting as bizarrely as this, neither knowing what to do or what to say with their child – the child he’d never seen, a complete stranger – playing innocently between them. But she was quite sure that was all it was, a perfectly acceptable reaction to the peculiarity of the situation. He was heavier, although not by much, and he’d tried very hard. The sports jacket was new and the trousers had a crease where a crease was supposed to be. Only the footwear was the same and he’d shuffled several times as if he were embarrassed he hadn’t done something about that as well.
There was a chair just inside the door, separate from most of the other furniture, and Charlie chose that. Natalia sat, too, on the window-fronting couch close to where Sasha was playing. It put them practically as far away from each other as it was possible to get, virtually on opposite sides of the room. Charlie pulled his feet under the chair, as if to hide them.
It could not have been long, just seconds, but to Charlie the silence seemed interminable. Again it was Natalia who broke it, although with near-cliche. ‘Would you like something… a drink…?’
‘No. I’m fine.’ Hurriedly he added: ‘Thank you.’ He would have liked a drink – liked several drinks – but didn’t want her leaving the room, her doing anything but sitting there, opposite him; their being together. He didn’t know what to expect or how today was going to end but for as long as it lasted he just wanted her with him, doing nothing else, thinking about nothing else. Just there. Speak! he told himself: say something. Sasha was the reason for his being there, the swaying bridge between them. He babbled: ‘She’s very pretty… beautiful… like…’ He brought himself up short before adding ‘like you’, which would have sounded crass. There was a similarity which Natalia must have recognized, so the remark would not have been too out of place. Today Natalia wore a loose, long sweater and a skirt and her hair was looser than at the formal meeting, although still bunched at the neck. She’d been irritated, sometimes genuinely so, when he’d called her beautiful, complaining her features were too heavy and her nose too pronounced, but Charlie thought she was beautiful. The freckles – the freckles Sasha also had – were more obvious today so she must have worn more make-up than he’d thought before, to cover them.
‘Yes.’ It was an acceptance of an obvious fact, not a mother’s conceit. He seemed enraptured with her, which was understandable, too. More worrying than understandable.
Unthinkingly they’d reverted to English. Briefly Sasha looked up, frowning, but then started playing again. It was as if the language was familiar to her, Charlie thought.
‘You must be very proud.’ Banality piled on banality: the way strangers talked, anxious to get away from each other.
‘I am.’
‘It’s marvellous… incredible… being able to see her.’ Edith had been devastated at not being able to have children: the guilt she’d felt – which Charlie could never understand, because it wasn’t her fault: not anybody’s fault – had been an obstacle in their marriage in the beginning. He suspected she’d never fully believed it wasn’t important to him and that he didn’t blame her or think she’d failed him in some way. But it really hadn’t mattered to Charlie: it was something that couldn’t be, and with the job he’d done it was probably better that it couldn’t. Which was what he and Edith had decided when they’d discussed adoption. And by the time he’d met Natalia he’d so accepted the fact of childlessness that the idea of Natalia becoming pregnant had never once occurred to him. Or to her, he didn’t think. Certainly they’d never talked about it.
‘She’s mine, Charlie!’ declared Natalia, warningly. ‘All mine! Legally.’ The bubbling discomfort was still there – growing if anything – but easier to appreciate now. She wasn’t going to tolerate any threat to the unthreatenable, to herself or Sasha. He had to accept that. Properly acknowledge it.
‘I know.’
Not enough. Too glib. ‘I mean it! There isn’t any way you can interfere. Upset anything.’
‘Why should I do that? Do anything? Want to. Don’t be silly…’ He shouldn’t have called her silly, but it was too late now. And it was ridiculous for her to regard him as a danger. God, how much he wanted to interfere and upset, although not in the way Natalia meant! Interfere and upset their lives by becoming part of their lives, caring for them, protecting them, so that Natalia would stop worrying any more about danger.
‘Your solemn promise!’
‘My solemn promise,’
‘Don’t ever break it!’ The hissed demand, heavy with all his broken undertakings and commitments of the past, hung between them like a curtain. Natalia flushed, visibly, with what Charlie inferred to be anger.
‘I came,’ announced Charlie, seizing the opening, in a hurry to tell her and start putting things back as they had been between them and he wanted them to be again. ‘Virtually to this very place…!’ He pointed beyond her, beyond the window. ‘I got the photograph. And was sure I recognized the background out there, on Leninskaya. Close to the Gagarin monument. I came and I waited…!’ He looked briefly towards Sasha. ‘It was her birthday, wasn’t it! That’s what I was supposed to understand: that I was to be there on her birthday – August the eighth.’
He had to be lying: cheating her like he’d cheated her so many times and in so many ways before! She knew he hadn’t been there, because she had. And not just that first year, when she’d prayed he’d turn up. The following year as well, on the same date and at the same place, and she’d lingered there for hours.
‘Don’t, Charlie! I know it’s not true. It was August the eighth. And it was the Gagarin obelisk. But you never came. I waited. For hours. But you never came.’
‘I did!’ implored Charlie, so vehemently that Sasha looked up at him, startled, and uttered a nervous whimper.