Without detaching Ivan she stretches out her arm and gropes under the bed for the drawer. Out it slides, smooth on its castors and she is ready to weep with relief. The nappies sit exactly as she placed them: one hundred and twenty-six Pampers in twelve neat piles; four full packs she lugged over from England. Lucas has bought lots of cheap nappies, rigid and scratchy, imported from Latvia or Poland but they’re not as white or as soft or as absorbent and their tapes don’t stick and she suspects that, even now, a seepage of Ivan’s runny yellow faeces is flowering up his back. She’ll eke out the Pampers as she’ll eke out her reading: one nappy per night. Lucas won’t be allowed near them. He can change Ivan with the cheap ones.
From the hallway beyond the door she hears footsteps. With a swift tap she rolls the drawer back under the bed, then wipes the sticky milk from her stomach and pulls her shirt across her chest. A soft knock, and Lucas’s face appears.
‘Asleep?’ he mouths. Rachel nods. Her husband slides into the room, closing the door behind him with exaggerated care. He is holding something in his hand. Dark green, rectangular, covered in shiny cellophane: a box of After Eights.
‘Vee brought them,’ he whispers, balancing the box on top of Jurassic Park. ‘For you. Can they come in and have a look?’
Rachel eyes the chocolates with suspicion.
‘You didn’t tell them, did you?’
‘Tell them what?’ asks Lucas, staring her down, not blinking in the way he always does when he’s guilty. Of course he’s told them. He’s always telling people how when she was eight she tucked love notes inside the little waxed envelopes and hid them all around her parents’ house in Swansea before convincing herself that she was having a baby. He thinks it is funny, and charming; at their wedding reception he turned it into his story, the story of how he knew she was the one he wanted to marry. ‘Christ, Rach! What’s your problem? It’s just a box of chocolates! People want to meet you, they want to get to know you!’ He sighs, walks over to the window. ‘Look, I know you’ve had a tough time – you’re exhausted. But what else should I say? Just tell me what you want me to say.’
Rachel stares at Lucas’s back, and strokes the plaster on Ivan’s thigh that covers the site of the immunisations he had at the clinic near Clapham Junction only two days before. In those weeks alone after the birth, the fact of her husband had wavered. She would wake in the night when her son moved or murmured, unable to remember how she had arrived in that empty bed in the ground-floor flat with the trains rumbling and the wild, abandoned whoops of the sirens.
‘You’re still going out then?’ she asks, removing Ivan from her breast with a scoop of her little finger. In her head the question seemed conciliatory, disinterested, but these aren’t the sounds that come out of her mouth.
‘Yes, I’m still going out. You could come too, bring Ivan – Zoya could give us a lift in the car. No one would mind.’
‘Or you could stay in. I’ve only just arrived.’
‘This is my job, Rach,’ says Lucas, quietly. ‘This is why we’re here.’
‘Right,’ mutters Rachel. She doesn’t look up until he’s gone.
Once upon a time, Rachel and Lucas told each other a story.
‘We are going to live in garret,’ said Rachel, as the wind outside the tent whipped across the guy ropes and pummelled the flysheet. ‘In a crumbly old building with mice scratching in the eaves. I will make soup and sing at the window.’
‘And I will pull on my felt boots and go out to bring the news to the people and come home with black bread and bacon. It will be hard,’ said Lucas.
‘We will be cold,’ agreed Rachel, ‘but I’ll learn to knit. And we’ll have a stove that I’ll feed with kindling—’
‘Kindling!’ Lucas roared with laughter and pulled the sleeping bag up closer over their heads. ‘What sort of a word is kindling?’
‘Well,’ said Rachel, undeterred. ‘It’s a fairytale word. It goes with woodcutters and forests and witches.’
‘So I’m the woodcutter, hmm?’ Lucas put his hand up her fleece. ‘In that case, Princess Snow White, I happen to know you’re nothing but a peasant underneath that prim exterior… a grubby little Cossack!’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel, as he rolled her over. ‘A Cossack. That’s exactly what I am.’
Rachel wakes a little after three a.m. and listens to the click as the front door closes. She doesn’t move. Ivan is asleep in his new cot at the end of the bed; it took her two hours to settle him after his midnight feed. By the time her husband slides between the clingy nylon sheets her body is rigid with tension.
‘Are you awake?’ whispers Lucas. His hand brushes her shoulder. A nick of his dry skin catches on her t-shirt. ‘Rach?’
Rachel says nothing, her thoughts pinning her down. If she responds, he’ll want to have sex. They haven’t made love properly since Ivan was born. She was too sore from the stitches, too tired. Then he flew back to Kiev. Anyway, sex might wake Ivan. This is what she tells herself. This is the story she’ll tell him.
Lucas, however, is drunk and alcohol makes him persistent.
‘You’re all warm,’ he murmurs, nuzzling his chin against her cheek, moving his hand down her breastbone towards her stretchmarked belly. At this she flinches, turns away from him, fingernails digging into her palms.
‘I love you, Rach. I’ve missed you.’ His moist lips wheedle. Soft words. She’s got to decide. Her body is recoiling, yet her mind still toys with a different version of herself – a hazy, generous version, intent on pleasure, spreading her legs. Let go, Rachel. She knows it shouldn’t feel like being someone else, turning around, unbending, letting his fingers circle her breasts. Maybe she can do this; it’s what couples do and they are a couple. Outside, dogs are barking. It’s only natural – don’t overthink it. Or think yourself into it.
As Lucas pushes on she shuts her eyes and tries to relax, tries to block out the squeaking noise she hears, not from their bed but wheeling somewhere up above their heads. It’s the same noise she heard earlier, in the kitchen. Back and forth it rolls. Up and down. Round and round and round.
Chapter 2
LUCAS AND RACHEL were supposed to conquer Eastern Europe. So said the best man at their New Forest wedding, the messages in the leaving cards from colleagues and the friends they’d accumulated along the way. Lucas’s mother, a twice-divorced Reader in Renaissance studies at a northern university, teased her youngest son about his pale-faced bride who couldn’t possibly imagine what she was getting herself into. Rachel’s mother, on the other hand, accepted Lucas as a fait accompli, seemingly relieved that her secretive daughter with her silent, strangled rebellions was now off her hands.
Lucas, went the story, was a golden-haired adventurer in pursuit of the exotic, the Slavic, the surreal. Rachel, the soft-chinned picture researcher, was swept up in his wake. She wasn’t a Romanian spymaster’s daughter or a dissident-cum-catwalk model or an almond-eyed soloist from the St Petersburg conservatoire, though this was never discussed openly among the junior sub-editors and fledgling lawyers with whom the couple mingled back in London. She liked Cornwall, and expeditions to the National Portrait Gallery, and drinking frothy coffee in cafés along Northcote Road. No one considered that she might long for somewhere else. Running away was what her father had done, and he was a feckless deceitful bastard in anyone’s eyes; most especially, Rachel’s mother’s.
Then one night, a little drunk, Rachel tried to catch a pigeon in Old Compton Street, scooting along with her hands sweeping forward, swearing she’d pluck it and bake it in a pie. Lucas, who felt he was on the cusp of something and might otherwise, at some not-too-distant moment, have ditched her, made a mental note, along with the After Eights story and the Cossack in the sleeping bag and other minor adventures he’d committed to memory. He confessed to his debts, raised a glass to the future and eleven months later, they were married. When he told everyone his new wife was pregnant, eyebrows were raised, but not for long. She’d never made much of an impression.