‘Hello there,’ he says, turning to me. He has a smile like a torchlight.
‘I enjoyed your reading so much, Mr Ivanov,’ I say, finding my voice. Maybe enjoy isn’t the right word, but he nods. ‘Your story is inspirational.’
I’d planned in advance to say this, but only after saying it do I realise how much I mean it.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘My name is Rosemary White. Rosie. I saw your advert in Oxford. I’m a postgraduate there.’ I cough. ‘You’re looking for a research assistant, for the summer?’
‘I am,’ he says pleasantly. ‘Someone who can join me in Moscow.’
I loosen my hold on my handbag. ‘I’d be interested to apply, if the position’s still open.’
‘It most certainly is.’
‘I don’t have much experience in your field, but I’m fluent in Russian and English—’
‘I’ll be in Oxford on Thursday,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we meet up? I’d be happy to tell you more about it.’
‘Absolutely, thank you. Only I’m leaving tomorrow for Yorkshire to visit my fiancé’s grandmother. She lives alone. We visit once a month.’ I’m not sure why I’m spewing information like this. ‘I’ll be back by the weekend.’
‘This weekend, then,’ he says. His voice is mild. All around us is nothing but people talking and bantering, a pleasing hum, but there is something in Alexey’s eyes that suddenly makes me want to brace against a biting wind. Maybe the excerpt he just read out, the details of the White Sea, those barren roads, those long winters, is still too fresh in my mind. Maybe it’s all people ever see, when they look at him.
It’s past my mother’s bedtime by the time I make it back to her apartment, but there’s a sound coming from her room, a low moan.
I knock on her door. ‘Mum? You awake?’
Another half-smothered noise.
I push the door open. Mum’s bedroom is filthy and gloomy, and she matches it perfectly. Unwashed, unmoving, she is sitting up in bed, slouched against her pillows, the musky scent of vodka rolling off her in waves. I drop in on her at least once a month, stay with her a night or two here in London. I’ve been visiting more frequently of late, but if anything, she seems to recognise me less. Mum carried on drinking even after the doctors said her liver was bound to fail, was failing, had failed. She’s drunk right now.
‘I was at a talk,’ I say. ‘Have you been waiting up?’
Her jaundiced eyes dart around the room before finding me right in front of her.
‘Well, goodnight then.’ I set the dosette boxes on her bedside table upright and wipe my hands on my slacks. ‘Do you want me to wake you in the morning?’ I pause. ‘I’m going up first thing to York, remember?’
She sucks in her bony cheeks and starts to grasp at her sheets for support. She wants me to come closer. I seat myself gingerly at the foot of the bed.
‘Raisa,’ she mumbles.
Raisa. My birth name. By now it feels more like a physical thing I left behind in Russia, along with my clothes, my books, everything else that made me, me. My mother is the only one who uses it.
When she dies, she’ll take it with her.
‘I know what you’re planning.’ Her breaths are staggered.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do.’ Her gaze locks on mine, but she can’t maintain it. ‘You’ve been trying to get to Moscow.’
‘How do you—’
‘I’ve overheard you on the telephone with the embassy. Why do they keep denying you? Is it because of what you study?’ She tries to laugh. ‘I hope they never let you through.’
‘It’s because of the hash you made of the paperwork when we moved here,’ I say, bristling. ‘I’ve always wanted to return just once, to see it. I thought it’d be best to go before Richard and I get married. Get it done with.’
‘You’re lying, Raisochka. You’re going to look for that man.’
She must be drunker than she’s ever been, to mention that man. Fourteen years ago, as our rickety Aeroflot jet took off into a deep-crimson skyline, London-bound, I dared to ask her about him. Mum only stared straight ahead. That was her answer: There wasn’t any that man. I dreamt it. I might have dreamt all of it.
‘If you go away now, I won’t be here when you get back,’ she says.
‘Mum, please don’t talk like that. And if you would just let us—’
‘You mean let him. Him with his proper money. Thinks he’s better than me.’
‘What? Are you talking about Richard? Richard doesn’t think—’
‘The dolls.’ Her pupils dilate. ‘What do you plan to do with my dolls, may I ask, once I’m dead?’
I open my mouth and snap it shut. The vodka’s definitely talking now. Dolls? I’ve never once considered what I’ll do with her collection of old bisque porcelain dolls. They’re like an army of the undead, with their stiff faces, unseeing eyes. Luckily they’re stored on a shelf in the living room, or they’d be witness to this very conversation. To my wavering.
After she’s downed a few, Mum often sits and speaks to them.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, but she’s already nodded off.
At half eight in the morning, Mum is still asleep. Her face is slimy with sweat, but she appears so relaxed, so restful, that she might well have died overnight. I touch her wrist for her pulse, faint as a stain, and then reach over to her bedside table to fix the dosette boxes – she always knocks them over, groping for something to throw back – but the surface has been cleared. No boxes. No crumpled bills, either, and no bottles. All that lies there now is a leather-bound notebook.
It is open to a page as yellow as my mother.
I feel a burst of nerves as I lean over. The cursive Cyrillic writing is a tight, indecipherable scrawl. Handwritten font is nothing like the block letters of published Russian books or street signs. I am able to make out the first few lines:
A Note for the Reader
These stories should not be read in order.
‘Raisa?’
‘Mum,’ I say, with a jolt. ‘I was just looking at—what is this? You wrote down your stories?’
She claws for me, and I take her hand.
‘I …’ Something, maybe the bile from her liver, is so high in my mother’s throat that it cuts off her voice. ‘I … for you, Raisochka. Take with you. Read, please. Promise me.’
‘I promise. Let me get you some water, Mum.’ I try to pull away, but she’s the one holding my hand now. My palm against hers feels sticky.
‘I … sorry …’
I want to say sorry too. I’m sorry that I’m the one who ended up here with her. I’m sorry that she wasn’t able to leave me behind, because if she had, maybe she could have left that man behind too. But I’ve had too much practice not saying things aloud. I learnt that from Mum herself. I can’t unlearn it now. Everything that has ever gone unsaid hangs in the air between us, as thick as the smell of decay that emanates from the strange, small notebook.
Or perhaps from what is left of my mother.
‘Promise,’ she says again.
‘I promise.’
‘I love you, little sun.’ Her eyes close to a sliver. ‘Sleepy …’
‘Mum … ?’
She lets go of my hand, still murmuring to herself.
As the train pulls out of King’s Cross I rest my forehead against the glass. Richard is already in York. It’ll be a decent drive out to where his grandmother lives, in a cottage that sits, or floats, in the nothingness of the northern moors. It is where Richard and I will marry in autumn. Mum has never been there, but she’d love how it looks rugged and angry one day, winsome and windswept the next. Like a landscape from her stories.
I’ve got her notebook in my handbag now. I’ll keep my promise. But I’ve always hated her stories.