‘I know,’ I said, very quietly, almost in a whisper, as if the very mention of his name might summon the beast back from the afterlife. A snapshot of reminiscence exploded in my memory. I was seventeen years old again, freezing cold, dragging a body towards the banks of the Neva, ready to throw it into the depths. There was blood on the ground from the bullet wounds. A feeling in the air that the monster might yet spring back to life and kill us all. The room began to spin a little as the sensations of that evening returned to me and I trembled. This was not something I liked to think about. It was not something I ever allowed myself to remember.
‘He has a very calming tone,’ she replied, not acknowledging what I had said, not needing to. ‘He puts me at my ease. I was afraid he’d be like Dr Hooper, but he isn’t. He seems to genuinely care.’
‘And did you talk about the nightmares?’ I asked.
‘Today we did,’ she said, nodding. ‘He began by asking me why I had come to see him in the first place. Do you know, I never even realized that last time he hadn’t asked me that? You don’t mind me telling you all of this, do you, Georgy?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, attempting a smile. ‘I do want to know, but… only if you want to tell me. If he helps you, that’s all that’s important to me. You don’t have to feel you have to tell me everything.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose there are some things that would sound odd if I repeated them to you out of context. Things that made sense in the moment, if you know what I mean. But anyway, I told him how I had been waking in the night so much recently, about the terrible dreams, about how they had just come upon me out of nowhere. It’s ridiculous really, after all these years, that such memories should resurface.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Not a lot. He asked me to describe them to him and I did. Some of them, anyway. There are others that I don’t think I can trust him with yet. And then we started to talk about a lot of different things. We talked about you.’
‘About me?’
‘Yes.’
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ask this question, but there was no way around it. ‘What did he want to know about me?’ I asked.
‘He just asked me to describe you, that was all. The type of man you are.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘The truth, of course. How kind you are. How thoughtful. How loving.’ She hesitated for a moment and leaned forward a little. ‘How you have taken care of me all these years. And how forgiving you are.’
I looked at her and could feel the tears begin to build behind my eyes. I wasn’t angry now; I was feeling hurt again. Betrayed. I sought the correct words. I didn’t want to attack. ‘And you told him about… did you tell him?’
She nodded. ‘About Henry? Yes. I did.’
I sighed and looked away. Even now, almost a year later, the name was enough to shatter my mood and my confidence. I could still hardly believe that it had happened, that after so many years together she could betray me with another man.
Arina introduced Zoya and me to Ralph at the end of summer. I hadn’t known what to expect – it was the first time she had ever brought a boy home, after all – and the truth was that I rather dreaded the prospect of meeting him. It wasn’t just that it forced me to acknowledge the fact that my daughter was approaching adulthood; there was also the matter of facing up to my own increasing age. In my foolishness, I still thought of my life as being spread out before me like a flowerbed in springtime, a row of tulips about to burst into brilliant life, when really it was more like rose plants in autumn, when the leaves begin to blacken and wither and the decay of winter is all that remains of their lives. Lost among the filing systems of the British Library, I was quiet throughout the day as this sobering thought settled upon my brain, and when Miss Llewellyn asked me whether I was feeling all right, I could only pass off my gloom with an embarrassed smile and an honest explanation.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have a rather unusual evening ahead of me, that’s all.’
‘Oh?’ she said, her curiosity piqued. ‘That sounds interesting. Going somewhere special?’
‘Sadly, no. My wife has invited my daughter’s young man to dinner. It’s the first time I’ve had to sit through such an ordeal and I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘I brought my bloke Billy to meet my parents a couple of months ago,’ she said, shivering a little at the memory of it and wrapping her cardiganed arms around herself. ‘It ended in the most terrible fight. My father threw him out of the house. Said he’d never speak to me again if I kept going with him.’
‘Really?’ I asked, hoping that my evening would not end in quite so dramatic a fashion. ‘He didn’t care for him then?’
She rolled her eyes as if the scene itself was too awful to describe. ‘It was a lot of nonsense really,’ she said. ‘Billy said something he shouldn’t have said, then my dad said something even worse. He likes to think of himself as a revolutionary, does my Billy, and Dad won’t have any truck with that type of thing. A real old British Empire type, you know the sort. You should have heard the way they shouted at each other when the poor old King was brought into the conversation, God bless his soul. I thought the police would be called out over it! How old is your daughter anyway, Mr Jachmenev, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘She’s just turned nineteen.’
‘Well then, this is just the start of it, I imagine. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more dinners to look forward to in the future. You’ll see. This bloke will be the first of dozens.’
This suggestion didn’t offer me quite the relief that she had intended and I returned home a little later than usual that evening, having stopped at a local church to light a candle – for as long as I live – for it was August the twelfth and I had a promise to fulfil.
‘Georgy,’ said Zoya, turning around to stare at me as I walked through the door, her face flushed with anxiety. ‘What kept you? I expected you half an hour ago.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, noticing how much effort she had gone to with both her dress and her appearance. ‘You’re looking well,’ I added, mildly irritated that she had gone to so much trouble for a boy we didn’t even know.
‘Well don’t sound so surprised,’ she replied with an insulted laugh. ‘I do try to make an effort every now and then, you know.’
I smiled and kissed her. For years, phrases like this would have been brushed off as teasing and affectionate. Now there was an undercurrent of tension, a feeling that whatever we had managed to bury between us was not forgiven at all, and that the wrong word uttered at the wrong moment might, like with Miss Llewellyn’s boyfriend and father, lead to the most calamitous dispute.
‘Are you having a bath?’ she asked me.
‘Do I need one?’
‘You have been working all day,’ she replied quietly, biting her lip a little.
‘Then I suppose I’d better,’ I sighed, throwing my briefcase down where I knew she would be forced to pick it up and put it out of sight once I had gone. ‘I won’t be long. What time is he expected at, anyway?’
‘Not till eight. Arina said they were going to have a drink after work but they’d be along after that.’
‘He’s a drinker, then,’ I said, frowning.
‘A drink, I said,’ replied Zoya. ‘Give him a chance, Georgy. You never know, you might like him.’