As Marianne left the party, glancing back at the surprisingly run-down converted apartment building, with its yellow stucco walls, which comprised the US embassy in Moscow, she still felt a sense of dislocation. A twenty-eight-year-old married mother is not supposed suddenly to go weak at the knees at the memory of a first adolescent love. Surely these early fumblings should be moments of acute embarrassment to be locked away for ever, or, at the very least, looked back on with amused indulgence from the comforting security that hindsight provides. But that’s not how it was with Daniel. Perhaps it was the lack of consummation – the fact that their relationship had been forbidden; that their respective parents, assisted by the powers of the state, had erected an impenetrable barrier – yes, Marianne thought to herself wryly, it really was an iron curtain which had been brought down between them after that holiday in Maine.
Descending now down the long escalator into the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, Marianne was brought back to the present by the Alice in Wonderland feeling which going down into the Moscow underground always aroused in her. Despite several visits to Moscow as a tourist, and the three months which she had now spent living in Moscow with Edward, she still could not get used to the sheer ostentation compared to the grimness and drab conformity of so much of 1970s Moscow. Huge rectangular pillars of red granite and white marble rose from the polished stone floor, creating graceful arches supporting domed ceilings; it was as if some team of architects had been briefed to convert the vaults of a medieval cathedral into a casino or five-star hotel.
Down in this subterranean fantasy land Marianne let her thoughts return to Daniel. Nothing more is said between her and Betsy that night after her long clinch, although Marianne receives some curious looks from her best friend. The following day Daniel behaves quite normally until late in the afternoon when, to the whole family’s surprise, he starts a campaign to persuade Betsy that she owes a courtesy visit to Martha, a girl with whom she has spent time on previous vacations in the absence of any other friends of her own age. Betsy’s mother comes down on Daniel’s side: ‘I think Danny is right,’ she says. ‘Just because you have Marianne staying with you doesn’t mean you can completely ignore Martha.’
Grumpily, and with a long death stare at Marianne, Betsy allows herself to be driven off by Daniel to visit Martha. Having dropped her off, he returns to the house where Marianne has positioned herself – as she later acknowledges – so that Daniel will notice her as soon as he comes through the door.
Smiling when he sees her, with a look which is surprisingly diffident, he proposes a walk to the beach and they set off side by side in silence – if it could be called silence in Marianne’s case, given the thunderous noise her heart makes as it pounds through her ears. It’s a moist and breezy afternoon and she can taste the salt spray on the wind which is blowing her hair in damp strands across her face. Once they are out of sight of the house it seems natural, inevitable even, when he pulls her towards him and kisses her. It’s not the first time she has been kissed by a boy but there is a difference this time: there’s a confidence about Daniel – an assurance which allows her a freedom of response she has not experienced before. He takes her hand and they walk on towards the cove; several times he stops and kisses her again. Will he speak to her? It seems not – and she is too nervous to say anything herself.
In the days following their cliff walk, Daniel becomes more talkative and she becomes more confident of her status in his eyes – albeit a status not to be acknowledged or referred to in front of the rest of his family.
‘My Marylou…’ he calls her.
‘Who’s Marylou?’ she asks.
‘Just a character in a book I’m reading – a sixteen-year-old girl. But I guess that’s kind of unfair. You’re really no way like her.’
‘What’s the book about?’
‘It’s just a couple of guys travelling around the country and it’s what I’m going to do when I’ve finished college. Me and Randy, we’re just going to drive around for a year – to the west coast, maybe down to Mexico.’
‘What about your dad’s business? Aren’t you supposed to be starting there as soon as you’ve finished college?’
‘That’s his theory. But it’s not what I’m planning…’
Marianne divulges some of her secrets; she tells him that she was born in France during the last year of the war and that she doesn’t know who her biological father was because her mother won’t talk about it, but she thinks he might have been German. She tells him about the bad dream which she still sometimes has which is hardly a dream at all, more a sensation, a sudden waking with her heart pounding – a glimpse of a mysterious face before it disappears – and a sense that something terrible has happened. He kisses her and tells her that when she can sleep with him she won’t have bad dreams anymore.
The closer that Marianne gets to Daniel that summer the more outraged Betsy becomes. ‘I thought you were my friend,’ she says.
‘Of course I’m your friend – we’re best friends, aren’t we?’
‘How can we be best friends now when you’re behaving like a goddamn little slut with my brother?’
‘What?’
‘Sniffing round Danny like some underage tramp.’
‘Come on? What’s your problem? Just coz Dan likes me…’
‘Can’t you see how ridiculous you’re being? Danny’s twenty-one – you’re not even fifteen – what does he want with a girl like you?’
What indeed does he want with me, Marianne wonders, since Daniel repeatedly tells her how much he respects her, how she is too young to go all the way and he will wait at least until she is sixteen? She knows, though, that she will do anything he asks and when he does ask for something she doesn’t hesitate to comply.
‘You have to do this for me,’ he says, taking her hand and putting it down his pants. Timidly at first, she touches him, then puts her fingers around him, feeling him bone hard but not knowing what to do next; she looks up into his muddy-green eyes which seem to be focused somewhere out to sea. He holds her wrist and moves himself against her. A few seconds later she knows something has happened when he gives a groan and she feels her hand wet and slippery against his flesh.
In the remaining weeks of their vacation, Marianne spends as much time as she can with Daniel. Sometimes it is in his room, Daniel bribing Betsy – or is it threatening, Marianne is never quite sure – to keep her out of the way. Daniel lies on his bed smoking while they listen to music. Marianne sits close to him, but on the floor – nothing too physical can take place in the house in case they are interrupted. More often though, they escape to the cliffs where a grassy ledge hidden behind some bushes provides a degree of privacy. Between bouts of kissing and heavy petting, Daniel reads Marianne passages from novels or poems which he thinks she will like and, fascinated by her ability to speak fluent French, he makes her read extracts from a French novel left over at their holiday house by some previous occupant, even though he can understand barely a word. Sometimes she teaches him phrases in French and laughs at his clumsy pronunciation; then he laughs at himself and blows smoke in her face until she grabs his cigarette and throws it down the cliff.
As each day passes she feels his deepening attachment to her. He tells her that he loves her and, believing it to be true, she loves him back with all the fierce certainty that a million years of evolution have programmed into the first flowering of adolescent passion. And so together they spend those few short weeks, reading about the past and talking of the future, pledging their enduring love and existing only for each other in the fantasy of their imagined world, in their bubble of erotic adventure, in their kingdom by the sea.