“Is she upset?”
“Kind of… yes.”
“Is Dad back?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Mum doesn’t know where he is exactly. We can’t call him.”
“Jesus Christ. What the fuck is he doing?”
“We don’t even know if he knows about Grandpa.”
“Where the fuck is he? Oh… oh shit.”
She heard the pips and then the receiver clattered.
“Oh bollocks, the money is running out again. I’ve got no more coins.” He spoke quickly. “Tell Mum I’ll phone tomorrow and speak to her again.”
“Okay. See you at the weekend. Bye bye bye bye.”
The old house stood at an odd diamond shape to the road so that it met visitors with a corner angle and seemed to present two different aspects, both designed to be the front. The modest, badly kept lawns gave no clue. And nobody was sure quite when Max had bought it. Sometime during the war, was the rumor.
Isabella sat with her mother in the long basement kitchen warmed by the ancient cooker, neither of them knowing where Nicholas was—Paris somewhere?—passing the time watching the portable television, waiting for him to show up or call and trying to measure the mightiness of history in two-minute segments between show biz and sports. And all the while the telephone kept ringing with Foreign Office officials, the odd MP, old friends, clipped-speech men whom neither of them had ever met, asking for Nicholas and wishing them sincere condolences in his absence; and her mother furious and sarcastic half the time, nostalgic and maudlin and tearful the rest; and Isabella panicked and petrified half the time, thankful and relieved the rest, that the overwhelming stupidity or wisdom or madness or vindication of her leaving Cambridge had somehow been overshadowed.
“Grandpa Max gone, Izzy. Dear oh dear—there’s a chapter finished. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Very hard. And just as the Soviet Union is finally put to death as well. Can you believe it? Can you believe anything?”
“Shitting hell.”
“Please don’t use bad language.”
Isabella looked away from the screen. “I quite liked Gorbachev. Is he going to stay with us in some capacity?”
“He’s better than the fat drunk.” Her mother paused. “But poor Gorby was finished a year ago, Is. And now there is no Soviet Union to rule—even were he able to cling on, which he isn’t. Now we have this CIS,” she scoffed. “The Commonwealth of Independent States. But of course it’s rubbish. There will be chaos. We need a great man now, Izzy, if Russia is to survive. A strongman.”
“You mean a tyrant?”
“Exactly so.”
“Mum, your worldview scares me.”
“Yours me, Isabella.” Her mother lit another cigarette. “Yours me.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Exactly. You don’t believe in anything. Which is understandable.” She waved out the match. “You cannot believe in anything—if you have learned your history lessons. But still, you are the rising generation.”
“And we want marzipan and chocolate.” Isabella rose, her chair scraping on the floor.
Her mother gestured at the television “So here—we bequeath you this desperate, flailing, lopsided world, in a worse and better state than we ourselves received it. We ask only that you look after it as best you can. And make sure that when your time is over, there’s something to pass on. For truly, Izzy, this unlikely blue ball is it. This blue ball is all there is.”
“Anything else you need to tell me?” Isabella tried a second cupboard.
Her mother looked across and smiled. “Whenever you have the chance, try to raise your head from the busy living of your life. And if everything seems compromised or unworthy, then remember the simple and fundamental aim: to reduce human suffering wherever you find it. At least you can be sure that this is a good plan, regardless of God, money, fashion, and the bloody news.”
“Please don’t use bad language, Mum.”
“I meant news of blood.”
“Aha!” Isabella eased the bar out from behind a wall of condiment jars. “Toblerone. Jesus, Mum, you must be the only person in the world who still buys this stuff. Not quite what I was after, but there’s no sense being all judgmental about things before we’ve tried them, is there?” Isabella came back to her chair at the table.
“Your father’s favorite,” her mother said softly. “Half each. You break, I choose.”
Isabella snapped the bar in half and said, “I can’t believe that they are going to let all the states split off.”
“Do not be so sure. Soviet times are over.” Her mother took the smaller piece. “But now we see what happens when Russia wakes up.”
“Do you reckon there’s going to be fighting?”
Her mother nodded. “Lots of things will happen in the night, and we will never know.”
The television cameras left the Kremlin and returned to the studio in Shepherd’s Bush where assembled experts prepared to expatiate.
“Oh, Isabella, will you look at their smug faces. They’re disgusting, these people. Where do they come from? And my good God—listen to that stupid newsreader’s voice! She can hardly read the cue. No idea what she says or what any of it means. These people make me sick. Even that pretentious buffoon of a reporter in Moscow is better than this silly tit. Surely you have some intelligent people in this country somewhere? They can’t all be like this. For the love of Pete. And they think the good guys have won—ha. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots with their news. The KGB will win, you fools. Oh yes—and I’m sure Mr. Bush and the baby Jesus and the World Bank and the pope and all the lovely boards of directors are delighted tonight. Singing into their swill. Well, I leave you in their very good company and care.”
The two fell silent for another while, sitting at the kitchen table, watching the screen together, sometimes turning the sound up in curiosity, sometimes down in disgust, their minds on the different matters of their different ages, though all the while conscious of their fellowship and common cause against their precisely identified private array of culprits, major and minor. The chocolate disappeared peak by peak.
By and by Isabella asked, “How will Dad know?”
“He will find out.”
“Do you think he’ll be back in time?”
“Of course he will.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so sure.”
“Because… because when that bell goes, Izzy, your father is up and out of his corner as hard and as fast as any man you will ever meet.”
And find out somehow Nicholas did. The following day he arrived home at noon, having cut short his “business” in Paris. “I bloody did call. About fifty times from the hotel before I set out. But the bloody phone was engaged all the bloody time, so I decided to stop messing about and get in the bloody car.” And throughout the cremation, the obituaries in the newspapers, the formalities with the solicitors, the surreal service and wake (organized not by Nicholas but by Randolph, an old friend of Max’s whom nobody quite knew)—throughout all of this, it appeared to Isabella that her father took no trouble at all to hide his relief—his glee — that finally, “at long bloody last,” the paintings, the Jaguar, the houses in Leningrad and Scotland, were all 100 percent his. And all the money. The greatest fear of his life, he was happy to proclaim—to strangers, friends, and family alike—was that “the old goat would shaft me one more time.”
Thin as a corkscrew but outwardly as cool as any eighteen-year-old woman had ever been, Isabella wound in and out of the many shadows of the weekend.