‘I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday, Inna. How you don’t like living alone.’
Inna cocked her head to one side expectantly but said nothing.
‘I’ve been thinking … I have a problem … I have a nice flat but … I need …’
‘Aha?’
Did a small smile steal across her face, before she composed it into a look of concern? Some words from our previous conversation popped into my head: gobalki kosabki solatki. I had no idea what they were, but they sounded rather tasty — a step up from a lukewarm takeaway curry from Shazaad’s. In stage drama, this is the point at which the gent falls to one knee and kisses the hand of the lady before slipping a ring on to it, but now I simply grabbed her hand and said, ‘Why don’t you move in with me, Inna?’
Her lips pursed flirtatiously. ‘You want to make sex wit me, Mister Bertie?’
I wondered for one ghastly moment whether she really meant it. Although I had not given up hope that someday I would once again become an object of desire, this was not at all what I had in mind.
‘No, Inna, no. Truly, nothing could be further from my thoughts. I just want you to make globalki sobachki and slutki for me.’
‘Aha! I understand, Mister Bertie.’ She winked. ‘You homosexy no problem for me, okay.’
‘No, it’s not that, Inna. I’m not denying that I am homosexual.’ I was not going to be outshone in political correctness by George bloody Clooney. ‘But I’m not confirming it either. Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither. Though by the bloody grin on your face you seem to say so. That’s Shakespeare for you.’ I have long been intrigued by the question of the Immortal Bard’s sexuality, but this did not seem to be the best time to discuss it. ‘All I want is for you to act like my mother. That’s not too difficult, is it?’ Then a sudden prudence seized me: usually motherhood is for life. ‘Just on a trial basis,’ I added.
She may not have heard that last bit, for she was already crossing herself and declaring, ‘Aha, you poor mama! No one can be like her! God save her soul, she is already wit Lenin and Khrushchev and all Soviet saints in heaven!’
I felt a prick of apprehension. Maybe all old ladies are not so alike after all. Inna did seem to lurch wildly between conflicting ideologies, whereas Mother had been unshakeable in her beliefs. Then again, did it matter what she believed, so long as she was still cool with the gabolki kasobki and salotki? And would say the right things to Mrs Penny?
‘I know, Inna. But if you could just pretend …’
Inna arched her eyebrows. Dimples puckered her cheeks. The thought of being desired again, even if for the wrong reasons, had brought out the flirt in her.
‘If you say so, Mister Bertie.’
Curious about what I had let myself in for, I asked, ‘Tell me about yourself, Inna. Where are you from? When did you come to England?’
‘We come in 1992. Husband got research job. Bacteriophage. Wit Doctor Soothill. Very good man. You know him?’
‘I can’t say I do. And you …?’
‘In Ukraina I was nurse. But to work in here I got to learn English.’
Thank heavens for that, then. I said, ‘Mother’s last husband, Lucky Lukashenko, was from Ukraine. From Lviv, right in the west. She probably told you.’
‘Hah! Lviv is Galicia, not real Ukraina.’ She spat into her phlegm receptacle. ‘Galicia only 1939 got in Ukraina. Before was wit Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, Avstria. All Catholiki. Real Ukraina Orthodox true faith.’
She crossed herself. Behind the diamanté glasses, her fire-coal eyes blazed with ardour. I had heard Lucky Lukashenko going on in a similar vein about the non-Ukrainianness of the population of the east who, he claimed, were all transplanted Russians, people of low culture and criminal tendencies. So I already had some inkling of how touchy these Slavs could be.
‘I born Moldova, but live Odessa,’ she added.
‘Odessa? Really?’
All of a sudden she took on a more exotic air, redolent of champagne and caviar, of grand bougainvillea-draped villas and leafy boulevards haunted by Pushkin and Eisenstein.
‘Ah! Odessa. Most beautiful city in world. Beautiful street. Beautiful monument. Beautiful harbour. Beautiful sea. Beautiful moon. Beautiful people all time laughing, making joke, eating slatki, drinking shampanskoye, falling in love.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You ever been in love, Mister Bertie? Wit lady, I mean, not wit man?’
‘Actually, I was married once.’ Okay, so I was letting the side down by not sticking up for gay love, but frankly her obsession was getting tiresome.
‘You mama ev told me. Very bad woman. Ectress.’ She wrinkled her nose, as though the very idea carried a noxious whiff. ‘No wonder you gone homosexy.’
Stephanie, my ex, had sniffily described Mother as an interfering over-protective drama queen, and Mother always referred to her in a voice loaded with sarcasm as ‘your darling wife’. Stephanie had never forgiven me for Meredith’s death, and I had never forgiven myself. After my divorce and breakdown, Mother and I had settled into a companionable domesticity, a bit like marriage without the sex, which took place, if at all, off piste. I was the man in her life, and she was the woman in mine. When I had relationships with other women, I didn’t bring them home. And by then I think she was past bringing men home — or if she did, she was discreet. I wondered about Inna’s love life.
‘So you lived with Dovik in Odessa?’
‘Odessa, Georgia, Krim, Kharkiv. All one great Soviet Union. But in Great Patriotic War many Jews killed in Odessa.’ She crossed herself again. ‘Only my Dovik got away. Now I living Hempstead. One day I will tell you my story.’
The beautiful ward sister, coming up to change Inna’s phlegm bowl, recognised me and offered condolences. ‘She was a lovely lady, your mother. And a perfect patient. No fuss.’
No fuss. I remembered Mother’s last words and the terrible whisperings behind the curtain before I was admitted to witness her death. Tears stung my eyes.
‘I don’t know how I’ll get on without her.’
‘Still, it’s nice you’ve made a new friend. Mrs Alfandari doesn’t get many visitors. Do you, sweetheart?’
Alfandari — what kind of a name was that? It sounded Italian or Middle Eastern, not Ukrainian. Who was this woman I had just invited into my life?
‘Yes, Mister Bertie has invited me go live wit him. I will mekkit golabki kobaski slatki.’
Inna smiled, and for the first time I noticed the black edges of her teeth. Mother’s were even and pearly white — though of course they were not her own. I was already having second thoughts about my invitation when the beautiful nurse beamed, ‘Oh, that’s so lovely. You’ll have to give us the details for our discharge procedure.’
She smiled, and my doubts vanished as it struck me that in all my fifty-two years I had never been out with a black woman. Now they suddenly seemed to be cropping up everywhere. There was that astonishingly pretty girl in Luigi’s the other morning, and now this beautiful nurse. Without Mother’s officious appraisal to greet them at the door, I could even invite them to the flat. A cloud shifted and a shaft of sunlight struck my heart. Before me a whole new world of possibilities was opening up.
The storm clouds had completely disappeared by the time I cycled home. The sky was borage blue with scraps of cirrus driven along by a blustery wind that set the daffodils in all the window boxes and forecourts dancing.
‘When daffodils begin to peer,’ I sang as my wheels spun along merrily, ‘With heigh! The doxy over the dale …’
It was Autolycus’s song in The Winter’s Tale, which I’d sung at the New Vic in Newcastle, directed by the great Peter Cheeseman. That was back in 1997. Before the Prozac. Before Meredith’s death and the break-up with Stephanie. In those days, I still had hair. I wasn’t quite George Clooney, but I was on my way.