‘We probably shouldn’t pick things here,’ Rachel says nervously.
Mykola laughs and shakes the flowers for Ivan’s amusement. ‘Why do you think all these people come?’ He gestures towards a woman with a headscarf tied at the back of her head. She is crouched low in the middle of a flower bed. Rachel shades her eyes with her hand and sees that the woman is in fact digging with a spoon around the base of a scrappy-looking corm that has only recently emerged from the snow. Where are the gardeners? Where are the babushkas shouting nyet? The woman discards the spoon and starts to dig with her fingers, feeling around the corm’s roots and then prising it out with a grunt. She wraps it in a sheet of newspaper, before pushing herself slowly back up to her feet.
‘There’s plenty to go round,’ says Mykola. ‘Maybe in a year, two years, the flowers will be gone but in Ukraina we grow things and their descendants will live on – though perhaps not here.’
Rachel thinks of Elena, with her seeds and her pockets of compost and the earth beneath her fingernails.
‘Did you follow me here?’ she asks suddenly, surprising herself.
Mykola stops smiling.
‘I saw you get on the bus,’ he says. ‘I come here often. Sometimes, things happen that way.’
Ivan whimpers. She looks down, sees that he is fidgety and starts to push him again, slowly, with Mykola walking beside her. He is still holding the spray of lilac that she won’t accept and she knows she has upset this man with whom she has spoken only once before. Or twice, if she counts what she still thinks was a dream of him at the film studio. She isn’t afraid, though – not yet. There are plenty of people around, strollers, lovers, young men lounging on benches, legs splayed, and old women wielding pruning knives in the bushes.
‘Elena,’ she says, ‘our dezhornaya – she spat at the man who delivered the washing machine. Do you know her?’
Mykola doesn’t answer straight away.
‘Elena Vasilyevna.’ When he does speak, he says her name as if it is something he hasn’t spoken for a long time. ‘You must not approach her. You must not let her touch your child.’
‘Oh, but she is much kinder than she seems!’ exclaims Rachel. ‘At first I thought she was a dreadful old witch – she was so cross and unfriendly and the spitting is disgusting – but really she’s just lonely, and she’s helped me with the flat, and—’
‘You invite her into your apartment.’ Mykola interrupts her sharply. He is not asking a question. He stops walking, so that she must stop too. ‘You must not let her in. You are a beautiful mother, remember? Your child is your gift to the world. I have allowed much, too much and this I cannot overlook. Promise me – do not let her in.’
Now Rachel is afraid. Mykola doesn’t touch her; he is standing a clear two yards away from her, but she sees the anger in his eyes, feels it in the distance he maintains so carefully between them. She hasn’t told him about the basement, she remembers. Yet he knows that they haven’t installed the washing machine in the apartment. In which case, he must know it has been moved downstairs.
‘I will be honest with you,’ he says. ‘I noticed you some months ago in the restaurant where you ate with your husband and your friends. You were nursing your baby. You wore a platok – a veil.’
He sweeps his hands across his shoulders, and Rachel realises he is talking about the shawl she wears when breastfeeding in public. You were in the corner, by the bathroom, she thinks. You heard me crying. She glances sideways and takes in the wide path to her right that leads back towards the entrance. There are people about, though they might not help her. Her heart is racing. Her legs feel heavy, as if a low swell of water is pressing against her calves.
‘The veil protects, you see. Our Most Holy Lady holds out her veil and shelters her people beneath.’ Mykola holds out his arms. ‘But who protects her? Who protects our Blessed Mother?’
‘Please leave me alone,’ Rachel murmurs, gripping the pushchair’s handles. ‘I don’t know what you want. I am not a blessed mother. Just leave me alone.’
Mykola remains still for a few seconds. Then he nods once and walks away, down the hill towards the gold domes of the church. When Rachel tugs the pushchair round to move in the opposite direction, she sees he has laid the lilac branch carefully across Ivan’s lap.
Chapter 18
‘ZOYA,’ SAYS RACHEL, the next morning, when she has checked to make sure they are alone in the basement. ‘What do you know about the man who gave me the washing machine?’
Zoya is folding sheets but she’s in a hurry, swinging her arms out and back in and flapping the green polycotton into submission.
‘Gangster,’ she says, without missing a beat. ‘Bad money. Black market. Corruption. Extortion. Sometimes violence.’
The words snap like flicked tea towels. They are frightening words, but also distant, make-believe. They don’t explain why a virtual stranger in a cashmere coat is following Rachel.
‘He came to the Botanical Gardens,’ she persists. ‘He might have been at the film studios. He said strange things about me being a mother.’
Zoya shakes her head.
‘Probably you are imagining it. You are -’ she concentrates, searching for the right expression, ‘tightly strung.’
‘No,’ says Rachel, firmly. ‘He sent me the washing machine, remember? And yesterday he actually followed me to the Botanical Gardens. I think he’s spying on me. He warned me to stay away from Elena.’
‘Elena Vasilyevna?’
‘Yes, Elena,’ repeats Rachel. ‘Why would he do that? How does he know her?’
Zoya drops the folded sheet into the laundry basket on the floor, but her face is a mask in the dim light and for a few moments the only sounds are the sighs and the soft clunks from the pipes that lead to and from the boilers.
‘I will try to find out something. Do not tell Lucas. He would not handle it well.’
‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘He would be a nightmare.’
‘Opposites attract!’ laughed Lucas’s mother when Lucas and Rachel announced their engagement. And it was true, in a way, for both were curious about the other. Sometimes, though, in the first weeks of their marriage, Rachel felt herself peering into the cracks between them, fearing what she could not see.
Once they had a fight about a lottery. They had gone to Spain for their honeymoon. Not the package version, but somewhere Lucas called ‘undiscovered Spain’, the north-west corner, because Rachel had expressed a wish to visit the end of the world and he had a yen to indulge her. The fog hadn’t lifted since their arrival. They had stopped for breakfast in a café on the outskirts of Vigo, where the streets stank of cooking oil and diesel.
‘Christ,’ said Lucas, folding the copy of El País he was attempting to read and stabbing at an article with his finger. ‘People here go crazy for the lottery. “El Gordo”, they call it. The Fat One!’ He leaned back and stretched his legs out under the table, which wobbled and made Rachel’s pen jump across the postcard she was writing.
She looked up. ‘Pardon?’
‘The lottery. It’s plastered all over the place – posters on the windows, ads on beermats. A throwback to Franco, maybe. It gives people a little hope, stops them thinking about the big stuff.’
Rachel nodded. Nodding was becoming a habit.
‘There’s an old boy here who won a million pesetas,’ continued Lucas. ‘He died of a heart attack the next day. Poor bastard! Never even got the chance to buy a decent bottle of Cava.’
‘Oh, that’s awful!’ murmured Rachel, staring out past the peeling posters on the window to the ghostly cranes of a storage depot and longing for a sun-drenched beach. ‘I’d never buy a lottery ticket.’