'How's the back?' I said, looking down on her.
'Bit better today,' she said, 'though I might ask you to wheel me down to the pub later.'
We went to sit in the kitchen and she poured me a glass of wine and an apple juice for herself. She didn't drink, my mother: I'd never seen her so much as sip a sherry.
'Let's have a cigarette,' she said, so we both lit up, puffed away and made small talk for a while putting off the big conversation she knew we were going to have.
'Feeling more relaxed, now?' she asked. 'I could tell you were tense. Why don't you tell me what's going on. Is it Jochen?'
'No, it's you, for heaven's sake. You and "Eva Delectorskaya". I can't get a grip on all this, Sal. Think what it's like for me – out of the blue like this, with never so much of a hint. I'm worried.'
She shrugged. 'Only to be expected. It's a shock, I know. If I were you I'd be a bit shocked, true, a bit unsettled.' She looked at me in a strange way, I thought: coldly, analytically, as if I were someone she'd just met. 'You don't really believe me. Do you?' she said. 'You think I'm crackers.'
'I do believe you, of course I do – how could I not? It's just hard to take it on board: all at once. Everything being so different – everything I'd blithely taken for granted all my life gone in a second.' I paused, daring myself: 'Go on, say something in Russian.'
She spoke for two minutes in Russian, getting angrier as she did so, pointing her finger at me, jabbing it.
I was wholly surprised and taken aback – it was like some form of possession, speaking in tongues. It left me short of breath.
'My God,' I said. 'What was that all about?'
'It was about the disappointment I feel about my daughter. My daughter, who's an intelligent and stubborn young woman but who, if she'd spent just a little of her considerable brain power thinking logically about what I have told her, would have realised in about thirty seconds that I'd never play such a wicked trick on her. So there.'
I finished off my wine.
'So what happened next?' I asked. 'Did you go to Belgium? Why are you called "Sally" Gilmartin? What happened to my grandfather, Sergei, and my step-grandmother, Irene?'
She stood up, a little triumphantly, I thought, and moved to the door.
'One thing at a time. You'll find out everything. You'll have the answers to every question you could ask. I just want you to read my story carefully – use your brain. Your powerful brain. I'll have questions for you, also. Lots of questions. There's things I'm not sure even I understand…' This thought seemed to upset her and she frowned, then she left the room. I poured myself another glass of wine and then thought about breathalysers – careful. My mother came back and handed me another folder. I felt a spasm of irritation: I knew she was doing this deliberately – feeding me her story in instalments, like a serial. She wanted to keep me drawn in, to make the revelations endure so that it wouldn't be over in one great emotional earthquake. A series of small tremors was what she was after – to keep me on my toes.
'Why don't you just give me the whole bloody thing,' I said, more petulantly than I wanted.
'I'm still polishing it,' she said, unperturbed, 'making small changes all the time. I want it to be as good as possible.'
'When did you write all this?'
'Over the last year or two. You can see I keep adding, crossing out, rewriting. Trying to make it read clearly. I want it to seem consistent. You can tidy it up if you want – you're a much better writer than I am.'
She came over to me and squeezed my arm – consolingly, I thought, with some feeling: my mother was not a great one for physical contact therefore it was hard to read the subtext of her rare affective gestures.
'Don't look so perplexed,' she said. 'We all have secrets. No one knows even half the truth about anybody else, however close or intimate they are. I'm sure you've got secrets from me. Hundreds, thousands. Look at you – you didn't even tell me about Jochen for months.' She reached out and smoothed my hair – this was very unusual. 'That's all I'm doing, Ruth, believe me. I'm just telling you my secrets. You'll understand why I had to wait until now.'
'Did Dad know?'
She paused. 'No, he didn't. He didn't know anything.'
I thought about this for a while; thought about my parents and how I had always regarded them. Wipe that slate clean, I said to myself.
'Didn't he suspect?' I said. 'Suspect anything?'
'I don't think so. We were very happy, that's all that mattered.'
'So why have you decided to tell me all this? Tell me your secrets, all of a sudden?'
She sighed, looked about her, fluttered her hands aimlessly, ran them through her hair, then drummed her fingers on the table.
'Because,' she said, finally, 'because I think someone is trying to kill me.'
I drove home, thoughtfully, slowly, carefully. I was a little wiser, I suppose, but I was beginning to worry more about my mother's paranoia than what I had to accept as the truth about her strange, duplicitous past. Sally Gilmartin was – and this I had to come to terms with – Eva Delectorskaya. But, by the same token, why would anyone want to kill a 66-year-old woman, a grandmother, living in a remote Oxfordshire village? I thought I could just about live with Eva Delectorskaya but I found the murder issue much harder to accept.
I collected Jochen from Veronica's and we walked homewards through Summertown to Moreton Road. The summer night was heavy, humid, and the leaves on the trees looked tired and limp. A whole summer's heat in three weeks and summer had just begun. Jochen said he was hot, so I slipped his T-shirt off him and we walked home, hand in hand, not talking, each of us lost in our thoughts.
At the gate, he said: 'Is Ludger still here?'
'Yes. He's staying for a few days.'
'Is Ludger my daddy?'
'No! God, no. Definitely not. I told you – your father's called Karl-Heinz. Ludger's his brother.'
'Oh.'
'Why did you think he was?'
'He's from Germany. I was born in Germany, you said.'
'So you were.'
I crouched down and looked him in the face, took his two hands.
'He isn't your father. I would never lie to you about that, darling. I'll always tell you the truth.'
He looked pleased.
'Give me a hug,' I said, and he put his arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. I picked him up and carried him down the alleyway towards our stairs. As I set him down on the top landing I looked through the kitchen's glass door to see Ludger emerge from the bathroom and wander towards us down the corridor, heading for the dining-room. He was naked.
'Stay there,' I said to Jochen and strode quickly through the kitchen to intercept him. Ludger was drying his hair with a towel and humming to himself as he walked towards me – his cock was swaying to and fro as he rubbed his hair.
'Ludger.'
'Oh. Hi, Ruth,' he said, taking his time to cover himself up.
'Do you mind not doing that, Ludger. Please. In my house.'
'Sorry. I thought you were out.'
'Students come to the back door at all hours. They can see in. It's a glass door.'
He gave his sleazy grin. 'A nice surprise for them. But you don't mind.'
'Yes, I do mind. Please don't walk around naked.' I turned and went back to let Jochen in.
'Forgive me, Ruth,' he called plaintively after me: he could tell how cross I was. 'It was because I was in porno. I never think. No more naked, I promise.'