‘You’re a mom!’ persists Vee. ‘You’re going to need that stuff in the survey, and they’ll pay you five hundred bucks. Just visit a few stores and write down the ticket prices.’
‘Oh. The survey. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Great.’ Vee sits back. ‘I’ll tell the woman at the mission to call you. They’ve been trying for a while to find a third party. You’re what they call an impartial expatriate.’
‘Okay,’ murmurs Rachel, but she’s not thinking about the survey. She can’t get Suzie out of her head. Suzie who bakes apple cake and wears white angora and speaks with a gentle Edinburgh accent. Refined Suzie. Except she isn’t those things at all. Or at least, she wasn’t tonight.
The apartment block is quiet when she and Lucas return. The lift appears when summoned and there’s no sign of the caretaker. Back on the thirteenth floor, Lucas retreats to the balcony for a smoke while Rachel feeds Ivan and settles him into his cot. In the bedroom, the full moon slides through the gap in the curtains and across the shiny parquet. Rachel undresses slowly; she hasn’t drunk as much as the others, but two modest shots of vodka leave her reeling a little. Her skin is white in the moonlight. She pulls open the wardrobe door and stands in front of the mirror in her knickers. Her stomach rolls over the top of the elastic and stretchmarks gleam their silvery trails across her hips. She turns, looks over her shoulder, twisting her neck, but all she sees is the drooping shadow in the overhang of her buttocks. There’s no thigh gap. No triangle of light.
‘Hey,’ Lucas says, stumbling in from the hallway as she climbs into bed. ‘We should do that again.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Rachel, wondering if her husband had even registered what Rob had said.
‘I don’t mean see them. I mean just – go out. Meet people. Have fun. I worry about you, Rach. You need friends, especially when I’m away.’
‘What?’ Rachel raises her head, twisting round. Lucas has his back to her as he peels off his socks.
‘Ah – didn’t I tell you? I meant to tell you before dinner,’ he says. ‘The Ukrainian Service editor called – she wants voices from the regions. I couldn’t say no. It’s only a week – commissions guaranteed. Looks like I’m going on a trip.’
Chapter 7
THE FIRST PROPER snow falls on the morning of Lucas’s departure. While he packs, then shaves, stooping in front of the small mirror in the bathroom, Rachel pulls back the nets and stands at the bedroom window with Ivan in her arms. She watches as the shapes below her soften, the concrete paths become white ribbons and a small lorry fan-tails across the tramlines. When snowflakes drift out of the greyness they don’t always fall, she thinks. Sometimes, they rise. When you are already high in the sky, the air currents lift you and push you up against the building and out and round again. Perhaps you never reach the ground.
‘Lviv tonight and tomorrow,’ calls Lucas, above the whirring of his electric razor. ‘Zoya has the phone numbers. Then three days in the Donbas and a couple in Crimea. More if she can get me a permit for Sevastopol. The Russians are still rattling their sabres.’
Ivan is in the shuddering phase after a prolonged bout of screaming. His eyelids droop, his damp head lolls from the exhaustion of his assault upon himself, yet every time Rachel turns towards his cot the crying begins again. So she flicks off the lamp and rocks him in the strange blank snow light, swaying from one hip to the other in a movement that sometimes she continues even when she isn’t holding him; when her body, no longer weighted, tries to float up into the air.
‘Once upon a time,’ she whispers, ‘once upon a time there lived a little old man and a little old woman in a hut in the middle of the forest.’ She pauses, brushing Ivan’s ear with her lips. There’s a story about the snow buried deep in her childhood. If she thinks too hard she won’t remember, but if she speaks it, she might. ‘They had enough to eat and plenty of kindling for the fire and they had each other, yet still this wasn’t enough. They longed for a child.’
The whirring sound stops in the bathroom.
‘Then one winter,’ she continues, pressing her forehead against the cold glass, ‘when the snow lay deep and thick on the ground, the old couple went outside and made a child out of snow.’
‘I know this story,’ says Lucas from somewhere behind her. ‘Snegurochka, the little snow maiden. She melts in the spring. Mind you, these days poor Snegurochka has Ded Moroz for a sugar daddy. She’s morphed into some busty blond with plaited hair extensions handing out free samples of coke in a spangly cape down in Independence Square.’ He pulls open a drawer. ‘The nationalists hate those Russian folktales, but as long as Snegurochka dispenses gifts, she’s a keeper.’
Rachel stops swaying. She thinks she can see a figure far below – a smudge, really, sweeping the path that leads away from the flats towards the road. Is it the caretaker? She looks like a small grey crab, jabbing and flailing.
‘Sometimes the caretaker comes up in the lift and leaves Ivan’s dirty nappies on the doormat,’ she says.
‘What? Oh Jesus, that old witch is such a communist. I’ll get Zoya to put her straight.’
‘Zoya says it’s not her job,’ Rachel reminds him. ‘Anyway, she says the caretaker hates nappies because they can’t be re-used. Plastic, cardboard, food waste is all good. But not dirty nappies.’ She touches the bridge of her nose, comforted by the familiar contours of cartilage and bone. ‘Do you think we could buy a washing machine soon?’
Lucas packs his aftershave into his holdall and steps over to the window. Small words can open deep chasms, he finds. He never knows what might set his wife off these days, or cause her to retreat into the dull silence that made him put that call in to his editor at Bush House. It’s just a short trip he’s taking, so he can clear his head.
‘Maybe,’ he answers, cautiously. ‘We’ve maxed out on Visa, but I’ll be earning while I’m away. Then in the new year I’ll focus on my film project.’ Another pause. ‘Vee says she’ll call you. But if you’re worried, I mean, worried about anything – the snow, Ivan – you could use the emergency office dollars. Zoya can always book you a flight. You could go back to the UK and spend Christmas with your mum. I bet she’s missing you, even if she’s crap at showing it.’
Rachel has been waiting for this. She knows it would be the sensible thing to do – the midwife, her GP, the few acquaintances she can call on in London would all agree. The prospect cannot be allowed to distract her. Fear, ever-present, makes Rachel grip Ivan more tightly. Instead she recalls her parents’ fifties bungalow: her old bedroom with the stained hand basin in the corner and the pyrocanthus scratching at the window; the cramped porch where her father used to smoke before he took himself on a golfing holiday to Singapore and never came back. Her mother blamed Rachel, the child who had made her tedious. Rachel pictures her now, slicing carrots in the kitchen, fist gripping the knife, hammering it down on the red formica worktop, never looking her daughter in the eye, never asking the right question.
‘I like the snow,’ she says, counting Ivan’s ten toes with her fingers, the ten days that Lucas will be away, each with its five separate parts: sleeping, feeding, washing, shopping, reading. Truly, when she parcels it up like that it’s not so bad. ‘And anyway, we can’t afford the flights. Though if you see any Pampers in Lviv… the sixteen to twenty-four pound size?’