Little White Lies (14 page)

An hour later, she got up from her seat. One drink had turned into two, then three, then four . . . it was time to stop. She looked across at Tatiana. Her hair had come completely free of its ponytail, falling in long, looping curls across her face. Her lipstick, too, had smeared; there were more traces of it on the face of the man sitting next to her. Lyudmila had already forgotten his name. There were three men with Martin. Businessmen.
Biznesmenov
– one of those new Russian words that had crept in via black-market American TV shows. Martin was eager enough but he seemed out of his depth.
Chelovek – glupets! Nothing so foolish as a man
. It was one of her mother’s favourite sayings. If Martin thought she’d been taken in
in any way
by his tales of success then he was even more foolish than he looked. That wasn’t the reason she’d agreed to meet him that night.

‘Tatí.’ She hissed at the now-drunk Tatiana. ‘Get up. Come with me to the bathroom.’

Tatiana looked up, slightly befuddled. ‘Now?’

‘Now.’ Lyudmila’s voice brooked no argument. Martin looked up the length of her legs and his eyes immediately glazed over. ‘Come on.’

‘Okay, okay. I’m
coming
.’ She detached herself with some difficulty from Dirk – or whatever his name was – and stumbled into the toilets after Lyudmila. ‘This is so much
fun
,’ she trilled happily over the partition between them. Lyudmila zipped up her skirt and flushed the toilet. She stood outside Tatiana’s cubicle until she heard her do the same. Down the long mirror a couple of local girls stood looking haughtily at them. Lyudmila ignored them and calmly reapplied her lipstick. ‘Don’t you think so?’ Tatiana asked, fluffing out her hair in the mirror.

‘
Nyet
. It’s boring.
They’re
boring.’

‘So . . . what are we doing here?’ Tatiana asked, looking at her uncertainly.

‘You’ll see.’

She didn’t even tell Tatiana what she
was
up to. During the day she practised her volleyball strokes alongside everyone else, or joined in the activities at the beach. On their third day, the day of the semi-final match between the Joseph Stalin Gymnasium of Krylatskoe and the Josip Broz Tito Gymnasium Split, she excelled, driven by some invisible inner force that saw her take most of the winning shots. Afterwards, accepting congratulations from her teammates and teachers, she caught Tatiana’s eye. There was a new wariness in her friend that she hadn’t seen before, as though Tatiana were trying to work out what it was that Lyudmila was thinking. What
was
she thinking? Sitting in the bar on the Riva with the Englishman and his friends had offered her a glimpse of a different sort of life – champagne, cigars, beautiful clothes, older, wealthy men who could buy her things . . . Split was hardly Paris or London; she wasn’t stupid. Martin was no Jean-Paul Belmondo and he looked and sounded nothing like Gregory Peck. She thought about the tiny, two-roomed apartment back home in Moscow, her mother’s tired and drawn face, her father’s distant, preoccupied gaze; the bored, indifferent look of her teachers, the bleak greyness that stretched all around . . . she felt her very skin shrinking away from it. She wanted something different, something better. She listened to Martin’s ramblings about the lucrative Eastern bloc and their taste for whisky which he, Martin Donaldson could provide, with half an ear, one eye on the clock above the door, the other on some distant point in the future when she wouldn’t have to put up with the incoherent fantasies of a middle-aged sales rep.

On the fourth night, she made up her mind. It was Thursday. In another couple of days, the team would be heading home. The final match was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. There would be a party that evening for all the students and teachers who’d taken part in the tournament – the perfect moment at which to slip away. Their teachers would all be too busy with their new-found friends and the free booze that was laid on each night to pay much attention to the teenagers they’d brought along. Especially if they won the final match. She drew long and hard on her cigarette. Leaving. It was the toughest decision she’d ever had to make.

Afterwards, she would remember that hour as the longest of her life. She’d walked out of the hostel without saying a word to anyone, not even Tatiana. She’d taken only half her clothing, leaving a remaining jumble of jeans and T-shirts on her bed so as not to arouse suspicion. She headed for the main road leading out of Split, where she’d seen the huge lorries with their foreign licence plates heading north towards Germany and Italy. She didn’t care where she ended up, so long as it was outside the Communist bloc. In her back pocket was her Russian passport and a small bundle of useless roubles – and an English ten-pound note Martin had given her. She’d wanted to hold and feel the contraband currency in her hands and he’d readily obliged. She had no idea what it was worth – a meal? A night in a hotel? Or neither. No matter. There was only one way to find out. It didn’t occur to her to be afraid. With her tight, cut-off shorts and T-shirt and her long, wavy blonde hair falling over her shoulders, she knew it would only be a matter of hours, if not minutes, before she found a lorry driver willing to smuggle her across the border. She’d seen the way they all looked at her, honking their horns as she and Tatiana strolled towards the bus stop. She had Martin’s name and address; as soon as she was safely in England she’d call him. He’d promised her all sorts of things – little did he know just how soon he’d be called upon to make good. Fifteen minutes after leaving the hostel she clambered into the cabin of a truck heading for the West. Giuseppe Zanotti was a middle-aged, balding, paunchy father-of-six who was on his way back home. His headlights picked out the statuesque blonde in her tight shorts standing just off to one side of a traffic light and he almost lost control of his vehicle. He was on his way back to Trieste with a truck full of
slivovitz
, the local plum brandy that his countrymen loved, which he’d exchanged for the usual consignment of Western goods that the Yugoslavs couldn’t get enough of – perfumes, jeans, imported cigarettes – whatever the businessmen who employed him thought would sell. He didn’t care what was in the truck. For the past ten years he’d been driving the thousand-odd kilometres down the coastal road from his home city towards the pretty Yugoslav towns of Brgat and Dubrovnik. It was a pleasant journey. He knew the towns and villages along the route off by heart – Rijeka, Crikvenica, Senj, then further down, Zadar, Sibenik, Split. But the evening he stopped to pick up a young Russian teenager on the run from a father who beat her every chance he could was the first time he’d ever knowingly broken the law. She was so sweet and pretty, dammit . . . he clenched his fists when he thought of what she’d been through. She was tough, though. Seventeen years old and making a new life for herself. You had to admire her. His own daughter, Giuliana, was eighteen and bright enough but she had none of the Russian teenager’s gutsy determination. She chatted to him in her husky, broken English – she didn’t know a word of Italian and he knew no Russian – but between them, on the twelve-hour-long ride through the night, they somehow managed to fathom each other out.

He stopped the truck just outside the border crossing as they’d planned and she got out of the cabin. He made a space for her in the rear, amidst the crates of
slivovitz
and the boxes of soft, furry peaches that he’d picked up for a quarter of the price in Hvar. His wife and two eldest daughters would do the canning – they’d sell the jars in the months coming up to Christmas to supplement his salary. It was an arrangement that had been in place for years and one of its unforeseen advantages was that he knew most of the border guards who manned the checkpoint between Plavje and Trieste proper.

‘
Dobra vecer
!’ he called out cheerily as he approached the checkpoint. ‘
Kako je stari
?’

‘Ah . . . Giuseppe.
Come va
?’ Zoltan, a middle-aged guard with a handlebar moustache whom he’d known for the past few years, grinned up at him. ‘What you taking back tonight?’

‘Oh, the usual.
Slivovitz
, peaches . . . couple of boxes of pears.’ He reached down and pulled up a plastic bag from the floor beside him. ‘And these, of course.’ He handed the bag down to Zoltan.

‘Ah.
Grazie
, my friend,
grazie
.’ Zoltan peered inside at the box of cigars and two bottles of perfume for his wife and daughter. He slapped the side of the truck. ‘
Sve najbolje moi prijatelju
.
Dobra vecer
.’

‘
Arrivederci
,’ Giuseppe called, starting up the engine. He gave the Yugoslav a half salute as he was waved through the barriers. He drove carefully onto the freeway that led to the city of Trieste and then put his foot down, putting as much distance between himself and the border post as quickly as possible. He drove directly into the centre of the city – deserted, now that it was nearly midnight – and pulled into the forecourt of a small petrol station. He killed the engine and ran around to the back of the truck.

‘You okay?’ he called out anxiously as he opened the rear doors. ‘
Tutto bene
?’

Lyudmila’s blonde head appeared above a stack of boxes. She grinned at him. ‘
Da
. Is good.’ She stood up, her head nearly touching the roof, and clambered unsteadily towards him. He gave her a hand and she jumped easily downwards. She was at least a couple of heads taller than him and he could only look up at her helplessly.

‘Where you go now?’ he asked finally.

She looked across the deserted forecourt. She shrugged. ‘I find hotel. No problem.’

He hesitated, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a thick wad of lire. ‘Here,’ he said, peeling off several thousand. ‘Take. No good have no money. Take,’ he urged her. ‘Take.’

She looked down at him and at the notes in his hand, an unreadable expression in her young face. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly, stuffing the notes into the back pocket of her shorts. He scratched his head. Aside from the small bag that couldn’t have held much more than a toothbrush and a spare T-shirt, she had nothing. How would she manage? She seemed to understand his unspoken question. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, flicking her thick blonde hair over her shoulder. ‘I go.’

‘Where? Where you go?’

She shrugged and smiled. Her limited English didn’t allow her to say much. ‘Is okay.’ She turned and began walking towards the main road. It was his last glimpse of her. Those remarkable long, tanned legs, the frayed denim shorts and the thick curtain of heavy blonde hair . . . she was quickly swallowed up by the night.

She ran her finger down the long length of the sideboard, checking it for dust. In half an hour’s time, her employer would do exactly the same. And if there were a speck to be found, Lady Bryce-Brudenell would find it. Lyudmila inspected her finger anxiously. It was
clean
, not even the faintest smidgen of dust. She nodded to herself. If there was one thing the teenager from Krylatskoe knew how to do, it was
clean
. Elsa had taught her well. She pulled a quick, disappointed face. She was a cleaner. It wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined when she stepped off the train that had carried her from the continent to London’s Victoria station but . . . shit happens. Things don’t always pan out the way you expect. Working for Lady Bryce-Brudenell, however fussy she was, beat working in (respectively) the seedy Blue Spot Café on Great Peter Street, behind the bar at the Lamb and Flag just off Piccadilly, handing out leaflets outside King’s Cross station and, very briefly, collecting ten pence each from unsuspecting sunbathers who’d dared sit down on one of the wooden deck chairs in Hyde Park. At least here, in the family’s large, somewhat gloomy flat in Chelsea that they occupied during the week, she had her own room with plenty of hot water and thick, fluffy towels, the likes of which she’d never seen. Her room was at the top of the third flight of stairs with its own en suite bathroom and (tiny) kitchenette. Lady Bryce-Brudenell had opened the door to it saying, ‘It’s a bit on the small side, but I think you’ll find it cosy enough.’ She’d had to look up ‘cosy’ in the dictionary (
uyutnyi
) but the comment still made her smile. A bit on the
small
side? Clearly Janet Bryce-Brudenell had never been to Krylatskoe.

She plumped up the cushions on the two sofas, straightened the thick, oriental rug and quickly wiped the coffee table. She made sure all the magazines were neatly stacked away and that the flowers in the vases were still fresh. One last tweak of the heavy damask curtains and the living room was done. She still had the dining room and the hallway to do before her employer came home but it was only halfway through the morning. Lady Bryce-Brudenell wouldn’t be back from her twice-weekly bridge session until at least noon. Plenty of time.

She wandered into the kitchen and pushed open the back door. It was damp outside, the sort of cold, grey English weather that reminded her of home. She shut the door behind her and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled and burned its way pleasurably down into her lungs. A red-breasted robin fluttered into view, landing delicately on the dewy grass, beak dipping and darting before fixing her, an unfamiliar presence, with a careful, beady eye. They remained there together for a few moments, she finishing her cigarette with languid, unhurried grace, the bird pecking around for a worm or some morsel that wasn’t a cigarette butt but something useful, perhaps even edible. From behind the closed door she could hear the tinny, persistent shrill of the transistor radio. Dionne Warwick’s voice swelled mournfully.
I’ll never fall in love again
. She inhaled deeply, drawing the smoke down into her lungs. She preferred the chirpier, more upbeat sound of bands like the Beatles and the Jackson Five.
It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night
and
ABC
and
I Want You Back
. That sort of stuff. She didn’t care for these lonely-hearts ballads. They put her in a bad mood.