I doubted it, but lying in the bath a few minutes later, enjoying the peace and relaxation of the warm soapy water, I continued to ponder the unsettling fact that Arina had reached the age where her thoughts had turned to the opposite sex. It didn’t seem like any time at all since she was a little girl. Or, for that matter, since she was a baby. Indeed, it felt like only a few short years since Zoya and I had suffered and despaired at the thought that we would never be blessed with a child of our own. My life, I realized, was slipping away. I was fifty-four years old now; how had that happened? Wasn’t it only a few months since I had arrived at the Winter Palace and marched along gilded corridors behind Count Charnetsky for my first meeting with the Tsar? Surely it was earlier this year when I stole a moment for myself on board the Standart as the Imperial Family listened to a performance by the St Petersburg String Quartet?
No, I thought, shaking my head at my own foolishness and allowing my body to slip deeper into the bath. No, it wasn’t. That all happened years ago. Decades.
Those days belonged to another lifetime entirely, an existence which was never spoken of any more. I closed my eyes and allowed my head to sink beneath the surface of the water. Holding my breath, the echo of the past filled my ears and memory and I was lost once again inside those terrible, wonderful years between 1915 and 1918, when the drama of our country played out before me. Removed from the world, I could feel once again the sharp bite of the winter air along the banks of the Neva as it nipped at my nose and made me gasp in shock, could picture the faces of the Tsar and Tsaritsa as clearly as if they were standing before me. And the scent of Anastasia’s perfume filled my senses as if in a dream, followed by a blurred picture of the young girl with whom I had fallen in love.
‘Georgy,’ said Zoya, tapping on the door and looking inside, her presence immediately making me spring upwards once again, gasping for air as I ran the wet hair away from my forehead and eyes with my hands. ‘Georgy, they’ll be here soon.’ She hesitated, perhaps unsettled by an unexpected expression of regret and sorrow upon my face. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘It’s not nothing. You’re crying.’
‘It’s bathwater,’ I corrected her, wondering whether it was possible that in fact the suds had mixed with my tears without my even noticing.
‘Your eyes look red.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I repeated. ‘I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’
‘What?’ she asked me, a note of anxiety in her voice as if she was afraid to hear the answer.
‘Nothing important,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Just someone I used to know, that’s all. Someone who died a long time ago.’
There were moments when I hated her for what she had done. I never thought that I could have it in me to feel anything other than love for Zoya, but there were times, lying awake in bed beside her, my body feeling as if it would evaporate if I touched her, when I wanted to scream aloud in my frustration and hurt.
When it was over, when we were trying to repair our fractured lives, I dared to ask her why it had happened at all.
‘I don’t know, Georgy,’ she said, sighing, as if it was unkind of me even to want an answer.
‘You don’t know,’ I repeated, spitting out the words.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well then. What am I supposed to say to that?’
‘I never loved him, if that matters at all.’
‘It makes it worse,’ I said, not knowing whether this was true or not, but wanting to hurt her. ‘What was it all for, after all, if you never loved him? At least that would have been something.’
‘He didn’t know me,’ she said quietly. ‘That made him different.’
‘Know you?’ I asked, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My sins. He didn’t know my sins.’
‘Don’t,’ I shouted, lunging towards her, my fury rising. ‘Do not use that to justify what you have done.’
‘Oh I’m not, Georgy, I’m not,’ she said, shaking her head and crying now. ‘It was just… how can I explain something to you that I don’t understand myself? Are you going to leave me?’
‘I would like nothing more,’ I told her; a lie, of course. ‘I would never have done this to you. Ever.’
‘I know that.’
‘Do you think that I’m not tempted? Do you think that I never look at women and want to make them mine?’
She hesitated, but finally shook her head. ‘No, Georgy. I don’t think you ever do. I don’t believe you are ever tempted.’
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but how could I, after all? She was right.
‘That is what makes you you,’ she insisted. ‘You are kind and decent, and I…’ She paused and when she spoke again, enunciating every word, I had never heard her sound so determined. ‘I am not.’
We stood in silence for a long time and a thought occurred to me, one so monstrous that I could not even believe that I was suggesting it.
‘Zoya,’ I said, ‘did you do it so that I would leave you?’ She looked at me and swallowed, turning away, saying nothing. ‘Did you think that if I left you, it would be a punishment of sorts? That you deserve to be punished?’
Silence.
‘My God,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You still think it was your fault, don’t you? You still want to die.’
The front door opened at precisely eight o’clock and Arina stepped in first, a shy smile upon her face, the expression she had always worn as a child when she had done something mischievous but wanted her escapade to be discovered. She stepped over to Zoya and me and kissed us both, as she always did, and then, emerging from the dark shadows of the hallway stepped a young man, hat in hand, his cheeks a little flushed, clearly anxious to make a good impression. Despite myself, I found his nervousness endearing and had to concentrate in order to stop myself from smiling. It must have been a day for memories, for his disquiet reminded me of my nervousness when I was first introduced to Zoya’s father.
‘Masha, Pasha,’ said Arina, indicating the young man, as if we couldn’t see him standing there before us in all his awkwardness, ‘this is Ralph Adler.’
‘Good evening, Mr Jachmenev,’ he said immediately, extending a hand for me to shake and stumbling over my name, although it sounded as if he had prepared his opening gambit many times before delivering it. ‘It’s a great honour to meet you. And Mrs Jachmenev, I’d like to thank you very much for the great honour of inviting me to your home.’
‘Well, you’re very welcome, Ralph,’ she said, smiling too. ‘We’re delighted to meet you at last. Arina has told us a lot about you. Won’t you come in and sit down?’
Arina and Ralph took their seats at the table and I sat opposite Ralph as Zoya finished preparing the food, which gave me an opportunity to examine him in more detail. He was of average height and build, with a mop of shocking-red hair, a fact which surprised me, but he was not a bad-looking boy, I supposed. As far as boys went.
‘You’re older than I expected you to be,’ I said, wondering immediately whether Arina was only the latest in a series of girlfriends he had seduced.
‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Ralph quickly. ‘Still a young man, I hope.’
‘Of course you are,’ said Zoya. ‘Try being fifty-four.’
‘Arina’s only nineteen,’ I said.
‘Five years then,’ he replied, as if this difference in age was neither here nor there, and cutting me off from offering any further observation on it. Every time he spoke he looked across at Arina for approval, and when she smiled, he smiled too. When she spoke, he watched her, and his lips parted slightly. I felt there was a part of him that wanted to lean towards me and explain, in an entirely academic fashion, that he really couldn’t believe his luck that someone like her was interested in someone like him at all. I recognized the mixture of passions in his eyes: admiration, desire, fascination, love. I was pleased for my daughter, unsurprised that she could inspire such emotions, but it made me a little sad, too.