“Dad, for Christ’s sake.”
“Isabella, please.”
“I am talking about Mum.” She was aware that her anger was increasing in direct and dangerous relation to her father’s calmness—affected or genuine, she could not tell. But her eighteen-year-old self had no capacity for restraint—and so she went on harder, her throat as red as her knuckles were white.
“I’m not going to live here. So don’t worry. I’m just asking you to consider being decent to Mum—helping her—just once. God.”
“That is between your mother and me.”
His expression, his measured tone, even the way he was standing there looking at her was as patronizing as she had ever known. She wanted now to rouse him to outright anger. She wanted it more than anything. She wanted to prize out his feelings—any feelings.
“I don’t care, I really don’t fucking care what you have to say about me or my life or anything else. I don’t care what you think or what you do. I just want you once—once—to consider someone other than yourself.”
“Isabella, please stop being so tiresome. Your life is entirely your own. To fail with exactly as you please.” He sat down slowly, crossed his thin legs, and reached for the documents, pulling them across the table toward himself.
“Don’t talk to me like that. How dare you? Not one thing you ever started have you finished. You’ve never done anything. You’ve spent your entire adult life swanning around. You’re a total fraud, Dad. A fraud, a failure, and a small-time bully.” She had him now. She had never ever said anything like this to him. She went on, her hot fury the counter to his cold. “Just look at you, sitting there like a pompous little prick—how do you even live with yourself? Well, let me tell you something: I don’t care about your crap either. Whatever it is. I don’t care. Maybe it is too late for Mum. But I—I don’t need you. I don’t need to hear your pathetic little lectures. I don’t need your money, which isn’t even yours, or your control-freak attempts to use it. Gabriel thinks you’re an arsehole, Dad. But I—I think you’re just plain mediocre. So—you know what? Fuck off.”
She made as if to get up. She was rigid with the effort not to cry.
“Isabella, sit down.”
“Why?”
“Sit down.”
“What’s the point?” Her voice was cracking. She wanted to run from the room.
“Sit down.”
All the same, she sat back—suddenly feeling like a child but holding her face tight as stone.
He leaned forward, his voice quiet and deadly clear. “I am sick—sick to the back teeth—of you and your bloody brother. The pair of you. You seem to think just because you feel a thing, that makes it externally true. You—you in particular—seem to live at the mercy of whatever juvenile emotions you are suffering. And please don’t kid yourself, Isabella. Because in this you’re just like all the others out there, all the earnest young women scraped into the polytechnics to do their ghastly gender studies and sociology courses, heads stuffed full of daytime TV and magazines, all the whining Princess Diana housewives who have conveniently forgotten how stupid they were at school and how stupid they continue to be. No, don’t kid yourself—you are just like them. Just because you feel upset, they assume that it’s your right to be upset. Just because you aren’t intelligent enough to do anything but feel, you want the rest of us to live within the tyranny of whatever the insecurity of the day might be. You… You go away for a couple of months and you come back with your head stuffed full of all this rubbish. You disappoint me.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Dad.”
“Nothing intelligent, clearly.”
She was crying and there was nothing she could do to hide it. “You are full of shit.”
The doorbell was ringing.
“Your boyfriend? What’s his name?”
She was determined to walk slowly, not run.
“I sincerely hope you have not left Cambridge on his account. Apart from being embarrassingly slow-witted and a terrible musician, he’s queer. That’s all.”
15
Grisha
A wearer of grievance, a bearer of grudge, shaven head slightly too large for torso, torso slightly too large for legs, and legs slightly too large for feet—this was the squat figure who trod the grimy corridor on the thirteenth floor of tower block number two, Kammennaya Street, Vasilevsky Island, St. Petersburg. Grigori, Gregory, Gregol—known variously here, known nefariously there, in Brindisi, London, Bucharest, but passing these past few years, on and off, in Russia, under the general name of Grisha. A man for whom all the million eddies and currents of human interaction had long ago been distilled down to a single granule of conviction: that the world owed him, so fuck it.
And tonight was just more grist to that rutted mill. Henry Whey-land had not paid what he was due. That was bad enough. (He swapped the angle grinder he was carrying from one hand to the other.) Worse, though, was that Grisha knew the delay was not the result of Henry’s having a lack of rubles but the result of Henry’s having a lack of respect. And if there was one thing that stuck in Grisha’s gullet, it was lack of respect. Indeed, for Grisha, respect was everything. He would have retraced his steps and faced down a mongrel dog if he came to suspect that it might have sniggered as he passed. And anyway, he was acting on orders.
Now was that everything?
He put down the angle grinder and addressed his Slovak employee in Russian: “Gunt, what the fuck is that?”
Gunter heaved up the indicated power tool from the floor and brandished it like a mighty sword.
“Tyrannosaw,” he said with a smirk.
Twenty minutes later, and a little to his own surprise, Grisha (groping unconsciously for his groin) found himself entering Arkady Alexandrovitch’s bedroom with a degree of trepidation. Though he was 100 percent certain that at this very moment the Russian was with Henry, watching Zenit’s Wednesday night game, still his mind seemed to be on tiptoes and his toes themselves a little ginger inside the stretched and swollen udders of his fat white Nikes. Yeah: something had him jumpy in here, no doubt about it.
He sighed.
It wasn’t right.
He stopped just inside the threshold and eventually located his cigarettes in one of the front pockets of his twelve-compartment combat trousers. He raised the packet as if to swig from a bottle and let the first to slide out lodge between his sticky lips before shaking the rest back in. He then set about tracking down his Zippo, patting first one leg, then the other, up and down, forward and backward. Combat—a very compartmentalized business. Keep stuff separate, that’s the thing about combat. Where the hell?
At last the zone just above the back of his left knee grudgingly relinquished the required tool. And so, relieved and taking considerable comfort in the procedure, he now lit up with stagy deliberation.
Better.
Much better.
How did he ever manage before cigarettes? Life must have been terrible. No wonder he’d started smoking at ten. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that was why his childhood was such a piece of shit. Should have started much earlier, should have started at two. He flipped the lighter shut.
Now then: what we got?
The room was more or less bare: a double mattress on the swept concrete floor, bed neatly made, thin cream blanket, white sheet folded over at the top. And that was just about it. No curtain or blind on the window (which, like those in the lounge, looked out on the Gulf of Finland), no mirror, no wardrobe, no desk, no chest, no chair, no posters or pictures, no pinups, nothing. For fuck’s sake, these two lived like monks. He pivoted. There were five or six serious nails hammered into the wall behind him, on which a few items of clothing hung flat: two white shirts, a gray greatcoat, a pair of black trousers, a dinner jacket. Beneath these, two wooden boxes, both containing what looked like underclothes. A pair of shoes. Nothing else.