Matthew felt as if he had been picked up and flung over the edge of a cliff. There was a rushing in his ears, like a cataract of water, and he felt as if the room was spinning round him. After a moment, he heard himself say, ‘But you told me—’
‘I told you what I thought was the easiest thing for you to accept,’ said Andrei. He turned to face Matthew and Matthew saw that all the old ghosts – the ghosts he had been daring to hope Petra had vanquished – were back in his father’s eyes.
‘And you never found her?’
‘No. I spent ten years trying to find her – all those years when you were growing up I tried to get inside the prisons, to find a lead. In the end – Well, in the end, I attracted too much attention, and you know what happened.’ He stopped, and then said, ‘She might really be dead now.’
‘But she might not.’
‘No. That’s why one day soon I’ll have to go back to find out.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The present
‘He did go back,’ said Petra. ‘He and Matthew both went back.’
Theo, whose mind was spinning, thought, So Matthew was here after all. He and his father spent all those winter nights in this house. Andrei had a love affair with my mother, and both of them talked to her about the agonies of those years. They poured out all the angst to her, perhaps they even had some of Mara’s diaries as well as her letters, and they read them to her and she listened. And I listened as well, without realizing it. That’s how I know it all.
It was remarkable he had no conscious memory of this time. But he did have a subconscious memory – he must have heard far more of what was said than anyone realized. And all these years later, because he had been in Fenn House in another monochrome winter, the memories had come to the surface. I knew Matthew, he thought. I talked to him and rode in a car with him and I watched him sketch things. Maybe I even saw him sketch those pictures in St Luke’s. The knowledge of this was so immense he felt as if his mind might implode.
After a moment, Petra said, ‘And, as I think Theo’s already realized from the likeness in that sketch, Charmery was a cuckoo in the nest. My own nest.’
She looked at Theo, and he pushed away the incredible knowledge concerning Matthew, and said, ‘Charmery was your daughter. Yours and Andrei’s.’ Saying it made it real, but it did not make it any more extraordinary.
‘Yes,’ said Petra, ‘Charmery was my daughter and his.’
His mother’s words spun crazily inside Theo’s head and for a dreadful few seconds he was aware of anger against her, because if she had told him the truth, then he and Charmery… No, I’m wrong, he thought. Helen told me a distorted version of the truth all those years ago – it wasn’t a father we shared, it was a mother, but Charmery and I really were half-brother and sister. We could never have been together.
‘You don’t need the details about the affair and I’m not giving them anyway,’ Petra was saying. ‘My dears, let’s face it, there’s nothing remotely attractive about a woman of my age confiding the details of a youthful love affair. But during that couple of months – Well, it was a shattering experience.’
‘Andrei went back to Romania?’ said Theo, relieved to hear his voice sounded reasonably normal.
‘Yes. I tried to talk him out of it. I think Michael tried as well, but we both knew he would go. And after he left, I discovered I was pregnant.’ She made a brief angry gesture. ‘At first I had no idea what to do. Your father had been dead for three months, Theo, and although I wasn’t especially conventional and I didn’t much mind having a child by myself, the family…’ She looked at Theo and Lesley. ‘The Kendals are loyal and honest, but let’s face it, dears, in the main they’re narrow and old-fashioned. Not you, Guff, dear, and not you, Lesley, either.’
‘Nancy,’ said Theo and Lesley together.
‘And one or two others,’ agreed Petra. ‘I was distraught at losing Andrei,’ she said, ‘but I’d had a brief letter saying he and Matthew had reached Resita and from there had gone on to Sister Teresa’s convent.’ She smiled. ‘The nuns were always prepared to help cheat Ceauşescu and the Securitate,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think one of them was imprisoned for a time. But even for them, the situation with Andrei was very high-risk: he was an enemy of the State and an escaped prisoner. As far as I was concerned – well, he would have been in appalling danger wherever he was, and his health was still precarious from the years in Jilava – I couldn’t hand him the responsibility, and certainly not the financial burden, of a child. I knew I’d have to make my own decisions about it.’
‘You could have told me,’ said Guff. ‘Whatever you decided, I’d have helped you.’
‘I know that, and I wished afterwards that I had told you,’ she said. ‘What I did was to go to the Kendal who wasn’t a Kendal – the one who, like me, had married into the family.’
‘Aunt Helen,’ said Lesley.
‘Yes. And we came up with a plan,’ said Petra. ‘If you think back, Guff, you remember that was the time Desmond went abroad.’
‘The unpronounceable country,’ said Guff, nodding. ‘He left a few weeks after John died.’
‘Yes. Desmond left the following January. In February I found out about the pregnancy. So Helen told everyone she was coming abroad with me for a few weeks – to help me recover from John’s death. We knew we’d have to be away for longer than a few weeks,’ said Petra, ‘but she was going to write to the family saying she was joining Desmond. I was going to let them think I was travelling around. We left England at the end of May – the longest I dared leave it before the pregnancy began to show – and went to Switzerland. I was able to keep in tenuous contact with Andrei from there.’
‘That was when I stayed with Lesley’s parents, and then with Guff?’ said Theo.
‘Yes.’
‘Did Desmond know the truth?’
‘Yes, almost from the beginning. Helen had to tell him. But I trusted him,’ said Petra. ‘My idea was to stay away from the family for the rest of the pregnancy, and then fudge the dates of the child’s birth – tell everyone it was born earlier than it actually was, so it would appear to be John’s. It was only a couple of months,’ she said. ‘I was going to say the child was born in July – actually the birth was September.’ She paused again, and Theo saw the sadness in her eyes. ‘But shortly before the birth I became quite ill. Helen found a Swiss clinic and I was taken into it and was there right up to the birth. She paid for everything, but I was beyond knowing or caring. After the birth I was very ill indeed. I never grasped the medical technicalities, but I don’t think I was expected to live.’ She looked at Theo. ‘I remember clinging on to the thought of you, telling myself I couldn’t die because I couldn’t possibly leave you on your own,’ she said. ‘I think that was what kept me alive. And when finally I did begin to recover—’
Lesley said, ‘You decided to give the child to Helen?’
‘No! Never that,’ said Petra. ‘I thought the child had died,’ she said, with angry pain in her voice. ‘That’s what Helen told me. Stillborn, she said. She came and went between the pension and the clinic, and said she had dealt with all the formalities and I didn’t need to do anything. I was still weak and pretty emotional about losing the child – as I believed – and I didn’t question anything.’