Rachel leaves the kettle in the sink. She wasn’t expecting this. She steps back to the bedroom and stands in the doorway.
‘Why?’
‘Some politician said it was incendiary, an incitement, so no licences would be issued. Then the backers started pulling out. Vee knew it was going down the pan but she fucking lied to me. She’s just published a piece in The Washington Post. She must have been working on it for a week or two at least. Maybe longer. Maybe from the start.’ Lucas’s voice rises like a child’s. ‘She’s gone for the corruption angle. She even mentions me: “A naive English freelancer” like she’s writing my epitaph…’
‘Lucas…’
‘She played me,’ he says, groaning and rolling on to his back. ‘Lukyanenko must have known. I can’t stay here now. I can’t work here. I need to get out. This place has been a disaster. I’ve not made any money, I’ve got no credentials, I’m sleeping on the sofa…’ He twists his head to look up at her, but he is facing the wrong way and Rachel realises it must seem as if she is towering over him.
‘Shh,’ she says, stooping to pick up the vodka bottle. Lucas flails and grasps her wrist. His eyes struggle to focus, he stinks of cigarettes and alcohol and she recoils a little, yet he doesn’t let go. Hold on then, she wills him. Hold on. He is hiding nothing from her, though the day has been full of betrayaclass="underline" Vee, but also Stepan, and Mykola with his terrible words about Elena. Zoya has always insisted that Rachel and Lucas don’t belong in this city, with these people. Lucas, on the other hand, knew Rachel before she became a mother. He had loved her when she was still a girl.
‘Shhh,’ she whispers, softer now. There is a kind of release in solace, in the comfort of the familiar, even if that comfort is more like the caress of a mother to her child. Lucas is willing, and soon he is eager. She is cautious at first, but then she unzips his trousers and holds him in her hand and she knows she could do anything at this moment – anything – and he would acquiesce. When she moves down to brush her lips against his skin, faces appear: Mykola in his white shirt, staring through the rear window; Zoya at the edge of the birch trees, watching her when she doesn’t think Rachel can see her; Elena; Stepan; her mother; even Lucas himself, until finally she blinks away these spectres, blocks her ears to their voices and, for a few charged seconds, has no memory at all.
Chapter 26
THE FIRST TIME Rachel kissed a boy, she felt the strangeness within her – her lips felt different, her tongue was not her own. She was changed by it, she thought. It wasn’t like kissing a doll, or the mirror, or the back of her hand, even when she’d licked it. The first time she slept with Lucas, she felt different again. His stubble chafed her skin and he made her insides burn.
How many times can that happen, Rachel wonders. Once, or twice, or hundreds and thousands of times? You feel something, you remember the feeling and it becomes a story. Yet the story changes; all the time, it changes. The end, as it approaches, is never really the end.
Once Lucas is sober, once the wound of Vee’s betrayal is found not to be fatal, he tells Rachel it makes sense to stay in Kiev until they have used up the year’s rental on the apartment. It takes him a few days to recover his equilibrium, but money must be earned, there are news bulletins to file, political in-fighting to comment on and a spike in interest from British news desks about a burgeoning doomsday cult that is rumoured to be brainwashing children in the oblasts south of the city. Enough to keep a freelance journalist busy through the dog days of July and August.
Zoya no longer translates for Lucas, though she still drives them occasionally, when the mood takes her, when she’s not working on her own stories or poking at the margins of Mykola Sirko’s business affairs, trying to find a weak link or a disgruntled official who might slip her a lead. At night Zoya stays with Elena in the flat on the second floor and Rachel rarely sees the old caretaker any more. Indeed, Rachel has concluded that Elena is avoiding her. The thought troubles her as she does her laundry in the basement by herself, though she doesn’t go looking for Elena. No more Simplemente Maria, no more biscuits or extravagantly mimed enquiries about whether Ivan is eating properly or sleeping well. Of course she would ask Elena in if she came knocking on the door, but Elena doesn’t.
Lucas notices a change in his wife. When he brings up the subject of what they will do when they go back to London she doesn’t give him the cold shoulder, but talks of playgroups and getting in touch with a couple of estate agents. He can barely recall the girl he once knew, or what he once saw within her – something hidden that stirred him and made him wonder. Motherhood has changed her, he decides. She seems more practical now that the difficult post-birth months are over. She tries new recipes – cooks proper meals rather than chewy pasta added to whatever she can find at the market. She visits Suzie to drink coffee and hear the latest about the house along the lane in Tsarskoye Selo, including how Rob wants to buy it outright from Elena before the refurbishment is complete.
At the end of July Lucas suggests they fly down to Yalta for a weekend. To the seaside, as he puts it – their first holiday as a family. It is easy to arrange. They stay in a sanatorium built for communist party chiefs. Beneath the modernist chandeliers white-uniformed staff trained in balneotherapy and calisthenics feed Ivan soupy kasha flavoured with cherries and guide his limbs into geometrical shapes. The sea reminds Lucas of Brighton, while the tunnel down to the beach is like a set-piece from Dr No. One night he and Rachel make love on the unforgiving mattress of the big walnut bed and it occurs to him that if his wife keeps her eyes closed it must be because she is taking pleasure for herself. He can give her that, he thinks. They can work on that. He pushes Vee out of his mind – it isn’t hard, now that she’s been offered a job in DC and has flown over to meet her new boss. Despite his set-backs, he feels lighter, more optimistic. He has applied for a job in Alma-Ata. Another starter post, but this one comes with a house and the prospect of some TV work at last. He won’t tell Rachel just yet. The interview is at Bush House on the fifth of September. They’ll leave for London three days before.
When Lucas takes Ivan and wades into the Black Sea Rachel picks up a pebble, smooth and grey: a souvenir for their son of a place he will never remember.
‘Take a photograph!’ Lucas shouts, exultant, as he dips Ivan’s legs into the lapping waves.
Rachel clicks the shutter on her little Instamatic. She won’t tell her husband that she has already blessed their son’s feet in the stream at Zoya’s grandfather’s hut. She lets the foam splash over her bare toes and scrunches them into the shingle.
Back at the apartment block on Staronavodnitksa Street, Elena steps out of the lift. The doors clank shut behind her as she shuffles across the thirteenth floor landing, one hand gripping a brown Jiffy envelope, the other hand fumbling in her pocket. Her joints are stiff this evening. Her fingers won’t respond as they should, but she manages to grasp the key Lucas gave her and push it into the lock.
As the door swings open, she pauses, catching her breath. No one is at home. Light from the living room window floods the hallway and she feels its warmth on her face. She should have made this journey before, but she couldn’t face the young mother, Rachel. She couldn’t face her own shame.
She slips off her shoes before making her way to the bedroom. The curtains are drawn; there is no air in the flat, but she won’t stay for long. As she bends down, wincing, and rolls the drawer out from beneath the bed, a light brown cockroach flees beneath the wardrobe. The padded envelope looks odd amongst the nappies. It can’t be helped. The drawer is the only place where that husband of Rachel’s won’t rummage.