Tonya does not dare approach. Olenka is still standing by, hovering like a sandfly.
‘Did the Countess Burzinova tell you?’ Tonya says, dimly.
‘She advised me to have Olenka follow you this morning. You have been indiscreet indeed, child. But it’s obviously over now.’ The words are brandished like rapiers. ‘Shall we send your – this despicable person – some money, to make sure he leaves well enough alone? Write a letter, perhaps, to inform him of this development?’
‘He won’t take your money,’ Tonya says, and before she can stop herself: ‘I am going to him. I am leaving.’
She hardly believes she has said it, but she has, and now she cannot unsay it. Cannot undo it. She feels queasy, quite peculiar, but she’s been feeling worse and worse recently. Her appetite has been wretched, though of course the offerings have been meagre. Shortages, as people say. The room spins, sparks a little. She has forgotten how quiet it can be when nobody speaks, when one cannot hear the gunfire from outside.
She starts again: ‘I am leaving Dmitry.’
‘Oh, my dear.’ Anastasia’s upper lip furls.
Tonya’s cheekbones twinge with nausea. ‘I am not coming back.’
‘How dare you speak to me like this. Leave me at once!’ thunders the old woman, with new fury. Her eyes appear to part company, the good one glaring at Tonya, the bad one shrinking away. ‘Olenka, get this girl out of my—Tonya, what’s the matter with you? Tonya!’
Tonya’s field of vision begins to curl inwards. The world blackens. She is going to faint. She saw Mama faint many times, in the early months.
Pregnancy it is.
Tonya watches from the bed as the doctor rearranges the items in his vinyl-lined bag. Hollow tubes. A stethoscope. What appear to be devices of torture. There is a throb in her temple, but no feeling in her body. When she looks down at her hands, they might as well be someone else’s. She thinks of asking if there is a way to confirm her pregnancy, or if there is something she should do or not, but Dmitry’s presence at the foot of the bed silences her.
‘What time is it now?’ she asks thickly.
‘Just past six,’ Dmitry answers.
‘Women are prone to such spells,’ says the doctor. ‘You must look after her,’ he instructs Dmitry, with a tut.
Dmitry kisses Tonya’s hand. His mouth on her skin is cold.
The doctor says to Dmitry that he will look in on Anastasia before he departs. He is as slow-moving as tar. Tonya waits until the doors click shut behind the two men. Alone at last. She gets out of bed. Her slippers slap against the floor. There is no time to pack, to prepare. She will just have to go as she is.
She has chosen.
She knows what kind of father Dmitry would make. He would buy the most expensive pram in the city, would order bonnets and ribbons from Paris, handcrafted wooden toys from Germany, baby bath soap from England. She knows, because he pampers her in this very way, as if she is a statuette, one that he must take down from its shelf, and brush off daily. At teatime.
But he could also drop her at any moment. Crack her open.
She ties her hair back with a ribbon, wraps her thickest shawl around her neck. She pauses, listens, and then she moves the door handle. Again, and then once more. The shawl begins to feel tight, even sweaty. She braces her body against the frame and pulls, then pushes. If she were more familiar with curses, the classy kind that Dmitry uses when he reads the papers or the colourful kind that Valentin speaks right into her ear, she would try them now.
Instead she sinks to the floor and puts her head between her knees.
The door is locked.
Tonya sleeps only an hour or two during the night, but it is long enough for one of her nightmares. When she wakes up she is choking on her own saliva. She lights a candle and sees a smear in the sheets and thinks despairingly that this is it, this will be her sad, small bundle of almost-baby, but it doesn’t come from between her legs. It comes from her arms. She tore into her own skin in slumber with her nails. She turns on her side and cries, and when she is fully conscious again, it is already morning.
Olenka enters with a tray and a newspaper. Tonya looks blearily at the headlines. Tsar Nicholas II has just abdicated the throne. The three-hundred-year dynasty of the Romanovs is ended. The people of Russia have been set free. Olenka curtseys, coughs, and goes out again, locking Tonya in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Valentin
Petrograd (St Petersburg), March 1917
As the light breaks over the river, it is a morning unlike any other. The stone eagles of the Romanovs lie smashed on the ground, and the red flags of revolution are visible through the plumes of smoke that fill the air. It is everything Valentin has wanted, has worked for, has dreamt of. And yet it is not enough.
His eyes sting as if he spent the night buried in sand. He looks again over the bridge, but he is seeing double, likely from sleeplessness.
Double of everything and everyone. And none of Tonya.
While waiting for her last night, he tried to compose in his head. Comrades, as the Imperial regime recedes into oblivion we are left with a void. A void that stretches from here where I stand to the Winter Palace – and someone will rise to fill that emptiness! Will that someone be us? Will it be you?
But there is nothing that can fill this emptiness.
He is not sure how, but he begins to leave the Liteyny Bridge behind. He wants to smoke, but he cannot bear to breathe.
Valentin knows where Tonya lives, in one of the many wealthy enclaves along the Fontanka, rows of corniced mansions whose reflections shimmer in the river like a mirage. Maybe a mirage is all she ever was, because he can’t believe she came this far, every day, so many days, just to see him.
The street sweepers are the only ones out at this early hour, and they look at him as if he is litter, as if they might brush him away too. Valentin has never been inside the house, but he’s seen it from across the water, pastel-pink and proud-looking. It was built not too long ago, replacing an original structure, according to Tonya. She has said the house is like a museum. It has several libraries. It has bedrooms devoid of people, full of furniture. It has galleries for displaying the knick-knacks, trifles, novelties, from her husband’s travels.
The bourgeois do love to own things.
There is only one balcony, curving around the central window on the second floor. Behind it, there is a shadow of movement, and quickly Valentin turns away, pulls up his collar. He’ll go around back. Every house like this has a front door, an entryway for family and guests, people with calling cards, and another separate, sordid entrance, for everyone else.
A maidservant opens the back door. She has a frown that looks permanent and deep lines etched into her forehead, disappearing into her white cap. ‘Delivery?’ she says.
‘I have a message for your mistress,’ Valentin says. Barynya. These affectations should be outlawed. ‘Antonina Lulikova. Or is it possible she might see me?’
‘I doubt it. Who are you?’
‘My name is Valentin Andreyev.’
‘Wait here.’
The small courtyard behind the house is very still. He turns the corner, lights a cigarette, tries to inhale normally. When he first laid eyes on Tonya, he had that shameful, secret, sinking feeling he gets when he looks through the gates of the Winter Palace; the feeling that all he wants is to keep looking. The feeling that, no matter how loudly he proclaims otherwise, he will never be equal to what lies before him.
When will that feeling end?
‘Is someone there?’
Valentin ducks back into the yard. A different maid steps past the threshold, this one in a plain black gown and no cap. She is ageless in a bad way, and she keeps her hands behind her back. This must be Olenka, the lady-in-waiting, the one beholden to Tonya’s invalid mother-in-law. She is the kind of person who will be hardest to liberate, when the real revolution comes; who has been in servitude so long she won’t know how to look up even when there’s no one holding her down.