‘How far gone?’
She shifted her weight so that her still-flat abdomen brushed against the edge of the sink. ‘Thirteen weeks.’
‘Well you can’t take a baby out there, whatever they’re calling it. Your husband has to concentrate on his job. You’ll have to stay here.’
Rachel hated the way her mother said ‘your husband’. She kept her hands in the washing up bowl, pushing them down so that her palms pressed flat against the base, the warm water her only comfort as its soapy meniscus clung to her forearms. Her mother’s irritation would expand, she knew, in the silence.
‘I’m going to have the baby in London,’ she said. ‘St Thomas’s. I’ve already had two scans. Lucas will come back for the birth. It won’t be a problem. Then we can fly out together.’
Her mother hadn’t moved, despite the fact that the dining table was still only half-cleared and the turkey carcass was waiting to be stripped and the Christmas place mats needed wiping.
‘But you’re not being sensible or responsible. You’ll be nursing the baby. You won’t get any sleep. The baby will need immunisations – polio, whooping cough, all of that. I’ll have to clear out your old bedroom. Honestly, Rachel! You’ve no idea about what you put me through. You never have.’
‘Mum,’ said Rachel, suddenly angry. ‘I’m going to Kiev and I’m going to love this baby. I’m not like you or Dad.’ She took a quick breath, then half turned as if to snatch the words back, but it was too late for that.
Her mother stepped up close.
‘I can’t help you, out there,’ she said, gripping the gravy boat with its residue of whitish fat.
Rachel took her time with the last plate. ‘Don’t worry,’ she muttered. ‘I won’t ask you.’
While Vee and Lucas go through to the living room and out on to the balcony to smoke, Rachel stays in the kitchen to give Ivan his night-time feed. Breastfeeding is more efficient, now – automatic even, and almost pain-free. Ivan pushes his shoulder up against her ribs with his dense, solid warmth. His hand rests proprietorially. His eyes roll back and his lids
droop.
As she holds him, her eyes drift to the Christmas card from Lucas’s mother. The picture is a painting by one of those old Dutch masters – Brueghel or Van something – a skating scene.
Ivan doesn’t know about Christmas, thinks Rachel. She looks down at the baby who came out of her, who is now so completely and utterly separate in his difference, in his vision of the world and everything he will ever experience or feel or understand. When she was a teenager, she used to lie on her bed beneath the window and look up at the sky through a frame she made with her fingers. Sometimes the sky was grey. Sometimes it was blue, or black. But she didn’t think you could tell, just by looking, whether it was ice cold and freezing, or hot and burning. You might be a girl in Eastleigh or a penguin in Antarctica or her dad with a new wife in Singapore, or maybe the sky wasn’t blue at all in someone else’s head, but red, or yellow or some other colour she couldn’t even imagine. No one could be sure. No one could see what she saw.
Now her baby must live in his own version of the world, just as she does. The thought is unbearable to her, and she wants to share something with him, help him feel less alone, even if it is the tired tropes of Christmas trees and carol singers and glowing log fires in pictures on cards, so she starts to sing, hesitantly, rocking him in her arms.
She can’t remember the next line, so she tries something else.
Again the words are swallowed by the louder voice in her head, or maybe she never really knew the words at all, but instead sang them without thinking from a dog-eared hymn book in the school hall, rocking back on her heels, cheeks flushed red as she bellowed the last two lines.
Rachel and Ivan are both dozing off when the doorbell rings. The sound makes Ivan’s arms fly out and his newly erupted tooth bites into her breast. She hears Lucas open the door and say goodbye to Vee, then other voices murmur. Perhaps it is Zoya, she thinks, bringing news of a resignation or a scandal with that fierce pout of hers. However, next she hears some rapid Russian, and a boy’s voice speaking in halting English.
After a minute or two the front door closes and Lucas walks down the hallway.
‘Hey,’ he says, as he sits down and peels off the fingerless gloves he wears for smoking on the balcony. ‘It’s cold out there. Vee asked me to say goodbye – she didn’t want to wake Ivan. Happy Christmas.’
‘Who was at the door?’ asks Rachel.
‘The dezhornaya,’ says Lucas. ‘She doesn’t seem to realise that it’s past midnight, or that it’s Christmas in some parts of the world, or that I speak Russian. She brought that sulky-looking boy from upstairs with her to translate.’
Rachel cradles Ivan’s head with one hand as she rummages under her shirt for the clip on her bra strap. ‘I met her – the other day. We had a bit of a confrontation.’
Lucas looks alarmed.
‘Were you okay?’
Rachel doesn’t know how to answer this question. The old woman caught her trespassing in her cubicle. Rachel spilled her seeds all over the floor. The old woman cried, Rachel ran up the stairs with Ivan, then later the abandoned pushchair had appeared by the front door, a little dented, but otherwise still serviceable.
She nods.
‘Well, anyway,’ says Lucas. ‘She says she needs to come in next week to do something with the windows. The boy didn’t explain it very well – apparently it’s a condition of our rental.’
Rachel remembers the note left outside on the mat, under the dirty nappy. Close windows!
‘I might be out. The survey…’
‘She said she’d only come up when you are in.’ Lucas peers over the table piled with dishes, sees Rachel’s exposed breast, Ivan’s saliva still glistening and a milky dribble on his lips. ‘Come on, Rach, I’m knackered. You’re knackered. Let’s both go to bed.’
Zoya sits on the back seat of the Zhiguli. Ice is forming on the windows in two-dimensional fronds, strange pinnae unfurling across the glass. It is cold outside, colder than usual, a bitter, frozen, silent cold that will kill the homeless and the drunks caught out tonight, but her own breath swirls warmly around her face; she’s been cleaning vigorously for the past half hour.
She finishes her scrubbing and rests for a moment. This is where Lucas’s wife sits, she thinks. Rachel sits here with her baby on her knee and stares at the back of her head. Zoya breathes in through her nose, and sighs. The interior still stinks of fecal matter, layered now with the astringency of the lemon Jif she has used on the plastic seats. She wonders if she should leave the windows open, just a crack, to air it overnight, but car thieves are everywhere and while they’d steal the Zhiguli without such assistance, she doesn’t want to make their job easier. Besides, she thinks, the windows will have frozen solid by now. She ought to get out before the door freezes, too, but she lingers, despite the smell. It is a space she knows intimately, like any driver, yet without the engine running its silence seems to wrap her in something like comfort. Outside, the road is empty, inhospitable; a street light flickers weakly as the cold descends.
Up in Zoya’s apartment, her grandfather is sleeping at last. If she hadn’t brought the car home with her the previous week she would never have been able to drive him to the clinic when his temperature started raging, when his lips turned black and when, stretched out on the back seat of the Zhiguli with his thin legs folded up and his head against the door, his insides had started pouring out in a hot, steaming torrent.