‘I am so sorry,’ Lydia murmured, which to her was inadequate.
He went on as if she had not spoken. ‘Hunger, or rather fear of hunger, is something that never really leaves you. Even toddlers learnt to hoard food. When the war ended and the Germans left Ukraine, I was sent to another orphanage in Verkhnedneprovsk. It was a little better than before, but not much, and I was given a rudimentary education, aimed at making me a good Soviet citizen. I had been there two years when Olga Nahmova came to claim me.
‘I had to take her word for it that she was my mother. She told me we had been separated when a bomb went off at a railway station on the way to Minsk. My father was killed and she was badly injured and not expected to live. But she survived and was in Minsk when the Germans invaded Russia. She was evacuated to the east along with the other patients and recovered, if you can call it a recovery. She was deeply scarred by it.
‘She brought me to Petrovsk, expecting to find friends here, but the war had scattered them. I don’t know how we lived. We had nothing – no money, no clothes. The land wasn’t being farmed and the tractor factory was ruined by bombs. We squatted here and my mother did whatever work she could find to keep us from starving and to send me to school. All we had to eat was bread, soup and potatoes, and little enough of that. She would clean lavatories, carry bricks, hoe the fields when the kolkhoz started up again, anything to keep us from starving. She cultivated the bit of land around the house and grew vegetables and flowers which she sold in Petrovsk. She would buy things off the peasants who needed money to buy food, and sell them for a profit.
‘I had to help her. She was as hard a taskmaster as the orphanage had been and she was excessively possessive. I could not go out and play with my friends, I had to stay by her side, and if I was even a few minutes late home from school, she would be out searching for me. I supposed it was because she had lost me once and was afraid it might happen again. After she told me who I really was, I wondered if it was because she worried that someone might tell me the truth.’
‘Who could have done?’ Sophie asked.
‘Ivan Ivanovich, for one. He befriended me.’
‘He knew me and my parents and brother.’
‘I didn’t know that. He never said.’ He paused to drain the vodka in his glass and open another bottle. He filled Alex’s glass and offered some to Lydia but she shook her head, more interested in his story than in drinking. The more he talked, the more she could see a family resemblance, a fleeting gesture, a slight movement of the head; the way he used his hands.
‘But you must have done well at school,’ she said. ‘You went to university.’
‘Yes. Stalin wanted engineers and technicians and we were encouraged to study and apply for a place. I got on by working hard and keeping out of trouble. If the authorities had known who my true mother was, I would never have got in, so I owe my adoptive mother that debt. After I graduated as an engineer and mathematician, I was given a job in Leonid Orlov’s factory. I married Sophie a year ago. Most of the time we live in our apartment in Kiev, but Leonid Orlov allows us to use the dacha for vacations. He is a very influential man and I owe him a lot.’
‘So do I,’ Lydia said, with feeling. ‘And Alex.’ She turned to smile at him as she spoke. He was not saying anything, simply letting them talk.
‘He came here,’ Yuri went on. ‘Years ago. My mother was terrified of him. She was worse for weeks after he came, jumping at every sudden sound and running to hide. She wasn’t quite right in the head, you understand. It was the result of her injuries in the explosion.’
‘Did you know Kirilhor once belonged to our family?’ Lydia asked him.
‘No. My mother told me I had been born here and she often spoke of her time here before my father died as very happy. I had no idea of the truth. Even last year, when she was dying and told me she was not my real mother, she said my real mother had given me away so that she could go back to England. The authorities would not have allowed her to take a Russian child out of the country. These letters…’ he tapped the pile which he had put on the arm of his chair ‘… tell a very different story. It is very confusing. I ask myself which is the truth.’
‘What I wrote is the truth,’ Lydia said. ‘I grieved for you all the years I have been parted from you and could not find you. It is because of Alex’s promise to me we are reunited now. You have a half-brother and sister. Perhaps, one day, when travel between our countries becomes easier, you will meet them.’
‘Tell me about your life, how it is in England.’
It was so late when Lydia finished talking they were invited to stay the night. Yuri seemed to have accepted the truth at last, and as the evening wore on and the vodka relaxed him, they were able to talk more easily. Lydia showed him her photographs, all the ones that had been tucked away in the brown envelope and others of Bobby and Tatty and Upstone Hall. Sophie was excited to think that her husband’s grandfather had been a count, known to the tsar. The years of Communism had not extinguished a curiosity about that ill-fated man.
‘Satisfied?’ Alex asked her, as they boarded the plane back to Moscow the next day.
‘Yes, oh, yes, my darling. Thank you. Thank you.’
‘And now that’s all out of the way and you have your son back where he belongs as part of your family, what about me?’
‘You?’
‘Yes, you know what I mean. I want to be part of the family too. Bobby and Tatty have met me, they’re not blind, they can see how we feel for each other and we’ve wasted too much of our lives already…’
‘We couldn’t help that.’
‘No, but we can make up for it now. So how about naming the day?’
‘When we get home. I promise.’
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
Bobby and Tatty were at home when they returned, anxious to hear their adventures, and it took ages to tell everything and look at the pictures they had taken, which she had put into an album. Here she was with Leo and Katya sitting round their dining table. Here was Alex, walking beside her in the forest at Kirilhor, which was taken by Yuri just before they left. Here she was talking to Ivan Ivanovich, Yuri and Sophie. Yuri cutting logs with Ivan. Here was the son she had lost who was lost no longer, and the best of it was he now knew and acknowledged she was his mother. Now she could forgive Olga and be grateful to her for bringing him up and keeping him out of the orphanage. Tatty and Bobby crowded round to look over her shoulder while she explained each one.
‘I knew about the envelope in the trunk,’ Tatty told her mother. ‘I found it by accident.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘It seemed too private. But I was curious about the young man in the white tie and tails.’
‘Alex.’
‘Yes, so I realised.’ She laughed and looked at Alex.
Alex took the album from Lydia and set it aside. Taking a small box from his pocket he opened it. ‘Lydia Conway, I love you,’ he said. ‘And I cannot see any reason why we cannot spend the rest of our lives together. Please say you will marry me.’
Seeing the diamond and ruby ring he was holding and which he had every intention of slipping onto her finger, she looked from him to her children who were grinning broadly. ‘You knew about this?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you approve?’
‘Oh, Mum, you don’t have to ask us,’ Tatty said. ‘But yes, we approve.’
‘So?’ Alex said to her, looking anxious in spite of their assurances. ‘What do you say?’
She laughed through a veil of tears. ‘Yes, Alex, yes.’