‘Then consider yourself fortunate,’ he says, in precise English. ‘My wife wished only to help you. We did not expect an insult in return.’ And with that the couple move away.
Rachel gets up, too, a low mood upon her, exposed and ashamed by her outburst. She wants to be at home now, she wants to read her pages and she wants to hang her washing out in the basement in straight lines, tightly pegged, as tight as she can possibly stretch the towels and the vests and the sheets. She picks up the dropped slipper and rushes away from the park, out through the gates, across Lavrska Street and down the lane towards the tower blocks on Staronavodnitska. Building Number Four still broods there like a standing stone. She looks up, as she always does when she passes into its shadow. As she raises her head someone throws something from one of the balconies. Whatever has been thrown falls clumsily, straight at first, then wheeling and unfolding as it approaches the ground. Rachel sees it is a piece of cardboard or packaging of some kind. She swallows down the bile that has risen in her throat and hurries inside, wishing that Elena was here to shout and summon the lift in order to bang on the door of the offending apartment.
When Rachel walks across the foyer there’s a different old woman sitting in her cubicle.
‘Gdye Elena Vasilyevna?’ she asks. Where is she?
The woman shrugs and scowls at the pushchair’s dirty wheels.
Lucas marches along Khreschatyk, too much energy in his legs. There’s a pink flush below his cheekbones and he wants all the strollers around him to get out of his way. This city is too much, sometimes – the queues at the kiosks, the endless holidays, the wide blank faces. Take Zoya, who didn’t show up at the War Memorial today. He wants to find her, to tell her straight that he is going to hire someone else, that he’ll be paying someone else to do the job instead of her. She thinks she’s so good he won’t fire her, and that’s his problem, as usual, because he does need her. Back at the office he took a call from Sorin. There’s an obstruction with some of the permissions he needs for his film feature. Lucas could go ahead anyway, but he doesn’t want to upset the director at this point in production – he needs to be invited to the premiere, now scheduled for July.
He passes a woman pulling along a grizzling child and thinks of Rachel, which doesn’t help. Her silences, her deliberateness, her superstitions depress him. When she was pregnant, he loved her softness, her needs. Now, everything is weighted and weighed – a touch, a caress – nothing is gifted to him, nothing is free. He needs to act. He needs to take control of their lives and the emptiness he feels where there used to be attention and ardour. All the same, he wishes Rachel would decide to go back to England without his urging. Nothing permanent – not yet. He’d miss Ivan, but a break would allow them both to breathe. There’s the cost of the flight, though if she stayed with her mother it needn’t be too expensive.
He’ll try to steer her round over dinner.
In Rachel’s dream she neither flies nor falls. Instead she sits on a chair in the middle of the living room, looking out beyond the balcony to the white gauze of the sky. In her dream everything is still. She sits still; her bones inside her skin rest lightly, her feet skim the surface of the parquet.
When she wakes she is disoriented. The furniture spins around her with a speed she cannot match. She sits up and Jurassic Park slides off the bed to the floor. She must have fallen asleep while counting so she’ll have to start again later. Ivan isn’t in his cot and now she hears noises – the opening of a cupboard, the judder of a tap. Lucas is home. She looks at her watch. Seven-thirty.
Her husband is standing at the kitchen counter with his back to her when she reaches the doorway. He is hacking at a pimply-skinned chicken.
‘Coq au vin,’ he says, with a wave of his knife. ‘I wanted to do chicken Kiev, but I couldn’t find a recipe.’ On the table sits a bottle of plastic-topped wine and some vegetables – carrots, onions – along with a sizeable heap of peelings. Ivan is sitting on the floor underneath waving a thin coil of potato skin. Rachel scoops him up, presses her lips against his hair and stares at the mess, still dazed from her nap. Back in London Lucas sometimes made dishes like lasagne or shepherd’s pie. He always wanted her to guess the secret ingredient he’d added – fennel, or coriander or something just as unfamiliar.
‘How did things go at the War Memorial?’ she asks. ‘Did you get what you needed?’
Lucas grunts dismissively. ‘There was no story. Just the usual reminiscences, rose-tinted recollections of comrades. Even the protests were half-hearted. People don’t want to remember the truth. There’s no mileage for me in that kind of self-delusion.’
Rachel thinks of the set faces on the trolleybus, the sagging shoulders and shuffling in the queues and feels a ripple of affinity with the city’s pensioners.
‘Elena has moved,’ she says. ‘The caretaker – she’s rented out her house to Suzie and Rob. She’s not working here anymore.’
‘So I heard. Funny to think of her as the landlady for those two. You did pretty well to get on the right side of her. She always looked like she wanted to murder me.’ He turns around. ‘Dinner will be a good hour or so. If you stick Ivan in the bath I’ll bring you a beer. I won’t do any more work tonight. We should talk.’ He pulls a long face for his son, then smiles, and Rachel sees that this costs him, which makes her both sorry and wary.
‘Okay,’ she says. Then, when she’s sitting on the loo seat with her feet on the edge of the bath and Ivan is kicking his legs in the yellowish water and shrieking with delight at the sound of his own echo bouncing off the tiles, she chews her lip and wonders what Lucas has planned.
Sure enough, when Ivan is asleep and the chicken has been eaten, Lucas asks her to come out onto the balcony while he has a smoke.
‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ he says. ‘Come and talk to me. Look at the stars.’
‘You know I don’t like the balcony,’ replies Rachel, trying to keep her voice even. But Lucas, who has already deviated from the script he has rehearsed, can’t leave it there.
‘I’m not asking you to take Ivan outside. Just us two. For five minutes.’
Rachel doesn’t move, doesn’t uncross her legs. This is what happens when you fall asleep, she thinks. There are consequences when you don’t read your pages.
Lucas scrapes back his chair, gets up, paces down the hall to the living room, then returns to the kitchen. ‘Look,’ he says, his voice tight. ‘I get the fact that the height gives you vertigo. Never mind that the balcony is perfect for some fresh air and sunshine and that maybe it would be nice to sit on a couple of chairs and drink a beer and not have to leave you to go out by myself for a smoke – I get that you don’t want to.’
Rachel stands up now. She has to do something, so she puts the kettle on the stove, tilting her head as she tries to settle the ringing sound behind her left ear.
Lucas ploughs on. ‘But what I don’t want is for Ivan to grow up with your – issues.’ He sucks in some air, as if drawing on a cigarette before blowing out the next words in a rush. ‘I don’t want him to be afraid of heights. I don’t want him counting shops or lampposts under his breath and I don’t want him getting a headache if something isn’t in a neat pile. I want him to be normal and healthy and happy. Why don’t you just do it? Why don’t you make yourself stand on the balcony? Fetch Ivan, do what any new-agey counsellor would tell you and take him out there, for all our sakes, Rach! I mean, what exactly do you think is going to happen if you do?’
Rachel’s fingers grip the kettle handle. Ivan, she tells herself, is safe in his cot in the bedroom; she remembers closing the door. A vision of her mother’s hardboiled egg slicer rises unbidden in her mind. You place the naked, glistening egg in the little hollow and push down the handle and the row of fine wires presses into the whiteness and all the way through. What you hope for is a perfect cross-section – no grey rings – just white and sunny yellow, still slightly warm, the fanned segments cradled by a leaf or two of lettuce, a dab of salad cream.