The Kirilov Star (25 page)

‘Not yet. Later perhaps. I’ll clear up these bits first, maybe make a bonfire. The ash will be good for the garden.’

‘It’ll spit!’ Yuri said, laughing. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’

Back at Kirilhor, he put the logs down by the hearth in the kitchen and took off his outdoor clothes before joining his mother in the living room. She was cowed on the floor in a corner of the large room, her shoulders hunched into a ragged shawl, her eyes flashing hate at a man who stood watching her as if unsure what to do, a man in a business suit and a clean shirt. ‘Yurochka, thank goodness you are here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what this man wants, but he won’t go away. Tell him to go away, tell him we don’t want whatever it is he’s selling.’

Alex held his hand out to the boy. ‘I am Alexei Petrovich Simenov. I am sorry if I have disturbed your mother. I assume the lady is your mother?’

‘Of course she is,’ Yuri said, shaking the hand. His grip was firm. ‘What do you want with her?’

‘Nothing,’ Alex assured him. ‘And I’m not selling anything.’ He noticed Olga’s eyes flashing dangerously and thought quickly. ‘I am sightseeing.’

‘In Petrovsk?’ Yuri laughed. ‘What is there to see in a dump like this?’

‘Kirilhor,’ Alex answered. ‘It has an interesting history. Did you know that?’

‘I know it once belonged to a count, but he’s long dead, and all his kind. And good riddance too. If he were alive now, I would spit on him. You aren’t anything to do with him, are you? You haven’t come to claim your inheritance?’ And he laughed again.

‘No, I have no claim on Kirilhor.’ Alex wondered if they paid rent for living there, and if so, to whom. Perhaps they were simply squatting. ‘But I know someone who lived here as a child before the Revolution. Her father was Count Kirilov. He died during the Civil War, along with his wife and son. Lydia was the only one who survived and went to England. She returned in 1938 with her husband, Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov. She remembers it with fondness. I wanted to see the place and perhaps take a photograph to show her.’

Olga was undoubtedly disturbed and the mention of Kolya’s name roused her to a furious response. ‘Get out!’ she yelled, scrambling to her feet. Grabbing a knife from the table she came at Alex brandishing it. ‘Get out and leave us alone. We don’t care that …’ she clicked bony fingers at him ‘… for a stiff-necked aristocrat, do we, Yurochka?’

Yuri shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Alex, taking Olga’s hand and gently removing the knife from her fingers. ‘My mother is not well. She was wounded in the head at the beginning of the war and has never fully
recovered. It is best you leave us. I shall have to calm her down. You understand?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Alex said, and took his leave.

He made his way along the forest track until he came to where Ivan was tending a bonfire; he was almost obscured by thick smoke. The whole forest smelt of pine resin. Seeing Alex he threw the branch he had in his hand on the fire and came towards him. ‘You went to Kirilhor, my friend?’

‘Yes,’ he said turning away because the smoke was making his eyes water. ‘The woman’s mad.’

‘I told you that, didn’t I? What did you say? What did she say?’

Alex recounted their conversation word for word. ‘Now I’m in a quandary,’ he finished. ‘What shall I do?’

‘I should go away and forget you ever came here. The boy will be all right. He’s clever; he’ll grow into a fine man and make his mother proud of him.’

Alex gave a humourless grunt of laughter. ‘Which mother?’

Ivan chuckled. ‘Both of them.’

‘Should I tell her? Lydia, I mean.’

‘You must make up your own mind about that, young man, but if I were you I’d say nothing. It will break her heart.’

Alex left him and made his way back to the hotel, booked out and took the train back to Moscow. He knew he ought not to go back there but he needed to tell Leo what had happened and ask his advice.

Leo’s advice was the same as Ivan’s, even though he had never known Lydia. ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘how were you going to tell her? You are here, in Moscow, where you have no business to be, and the lady is in England. A letter? Not
advisable, everything is censored. You are banned from the cities, but that doesn’t mean you can go where you like. I stayed around to make sure no one followed you onto the train to Kirilhor, but you can be sure someone will pick up your trail before long.’

‘I know.’ Alex was drowning in despondency. He had not felt so down since he had been taken prisoner outside Minsk. All his longing centred on Upstone Hall and Lydia, even though he realised, deep inside him, that returning there was an unrealistic dream. Too many years had passed since that tearful parting in Moscow, even though it was the memory of that which had kept him alive when he could so easily have succumbed to cold and hunger and cruelty, as many another had done. And with no good news to take back to her …

‘Cheer up, my friend,’ Leo said. ‘You were taken at Potsdam, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s in the Russian zone; the authorities won’t stop you going back to where you came from and you never know, you might be welcomed with open arms. Even if you’re not, you’ll be nearer the West. More chance of hopping over the border.’

This was subversive advice from someone who lived in the Soviet Union, but it sounded like sense and Alex was too tired to argue. ‘I don’t like abandoning the boy,’ he said.

‘I’ll keep an eye on his progress. If he shows promise, I’ll see he gets to university or technical college.’

‘Why should you do that?’ Alex asked in surprise. ‘You don’t even know him.’

‘For our friendship’s sake and because Russia needs
educated men. Too many were lost in Stalin’s purges.’

Alex couldn’t stay in Moscow a moment longer. He took his friend’s advice, bidding him and his wife goodbye, choking back tears.

Potsdam was not where he wanted to be. Leo had been right; even as a free man, he could not return to England. Freedom was relative and he would still be inside the Russian zone, stuck until he could think of a way to cross to the West. And it soon became obvious to him that the nearer he came to the border, the more roadblocks and checks there were. Every time the train rushed over a crossing, he could see them from the window. And there were wide swathes of a kind of ploughed-up no-man’s-land between one side and the other, designed to allow no cover for anyone trying to cross.

Arriving in Potsdam he discovered Else had married in his absence and had two children. She was not pleased to see him and anxious enough to be rid of him to persuade her husband to show him where there was a weakness in the rows and rows of barbed wire that separated East from West. He was guided to the spot at the dead of night and quietly abandoned.

He took a deep breath and dashed across, ready to start dodging if the bullets came, but strangely no one saw him. Once on the other side, he trudged westwards, his senses keyed to every rustle in the undergrowth at the side of the road, every drip-drip of water from hedges, every barking dog, ready to dive into a ditch if anyone came along the road. In a mile or so he came to a crossroads and another of the ubiquitous border posts, but this time it was manned by American soldiers. They stopped him, guns at the ready.

‘Take me to the British,’ he said.

‘You’re a Limey?’ one asked in surprise.

‘Yes.’

The sergeant detailed one of his men to take him to their CO, where he explained who he was and how he came to be in the East. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ the man said. ‘That’s some story.’

Here he was entertained royally with the best meal he had had in years, a couple of glasses of lager and a fat cigar. Later, in their officers’ mess, he had been quizzed again, this time out of curiosity. Most wanted to know what life was like in the Communist East and how he had endured the concentration camp and the gulag. It was dawn when they found him a bed and he collapsed exhausted into it.

Later that day, a gum-chewing driver and a lieutenant with a pistol in a holster took him by jeep to Bonn, the capital of West Germany, where he was left with an aide to the British ambassador. Here he was debriefed thoroughly and given accommodation, while they verified his identity. Two days later he was on a plane heading for London.

The interrogation and the debriefings at the Foreign Office went on for several days, even though they must have been sent the notes of his interrogation in Bonn. When they were satisfied he was who he said he was, he was asked what he intended to do. It was a question he could not readily answer. A quick look at the telephone book had confirmed that Sir Edward Stoneleigh still lived at Upstone Hall and he had been tempted to ring him but decided not to; if he went there he would have to see Lydia, and how could he go there and not tell her he had seen Yuri?

‘I need work,’ he said. ‘And somewhere to live.’

‘You have a job here and all your back pay – years of it.’

‘Thank you, but I’ve had enough of the diplomatic corps. I need to be out of doors, leading the simple life.’

He recognised he was not the man he had been, nor ever would be again. What he had been through would colour the rest of his days. The man of decisive action had been too long inured to obeying orders instantly, to half expecting the blows raining on his shoulders for no reason except the guard was in a bad mood, or one of his fellow prisoners suspected him of stealing his food. After years and years of communal living, of not being able to call his soul his own, he needed solitude. He bought a smallholding in Northacre Green, a small village near East Dereham in Norfolk, where he grew vegetables and reared a few pigs and chickens and kept himself to himself.

Sir Edward Stoneleigh’s obituary in
T
he Daily Telegraph
had caught his attention and dragged him, unwillingly, back into the real world.

Robert was working on the deck of the
Merry
Maid
, lovingly polishing the brass work, when Alex found him. ‘Hallo, Rob,’ he said quietly.

Robert whipped round. ‘God God, Alex Peters! It is you, isn’t it? You’re as thin as a rake.’

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘We thought you were dead. Sir Edward heard it through the embassy. Where the devil have you been?’

‘Here and there. In a German POW camp and then Siberia. It’s a very long story.’

‘Come aboard and tell me about it.’

Alex walked up the gangplank and jumped on deck. After shaking hands, Robert led the way down to the cabin. It was clean but untidy. ‘Don’t mind the mess. I’ve been too
busy on deck to clean up.’ He filled a kettle and lit the gas ring. ‘When did you get back?’

‘About six months ago.’

Robert whistled. ‘Why have you waited so long to contact us? Why didn’t you come to the house? Sir Edward died, you know, two months ago now. Poor Lydia was devastated. You did know we had married?’

‘Yes. It’s why I didn’t go. Thought it best.’

‘Appreciate that, old man.’

Alex smiled. They seemed to be talking in a kind of shorthand but it conveyed their meaning perfectly. He watched Robert put a tea bag in each of two mugs and pour the boiling water on them. He stirred them thoughtfully. Alex could almost hear his brain ticking over.

‘We have two children: Bobby, who’s twelve, and Tatyana, who’s ten.’ He sniffed at the bottle of milk, decided it hadn’t gone off and added some to the mugs. Alex could not get used to drinking tea with milk in it. He watched Rob dip a teaspoon into an open bag of sugar and put some in his tea. He followed suit.

‘I know that too. I congratulate you.’

‘Thank you.’ He looked at Alex over the rim of his mug. ‘Come on, out with the story.’

So Alex told it yet again, while the other drank his tea and listened in silence, until he came to his return to Moscow, a free man. ‘If you can call it freedom,’ he added.

‘How did you get out of Russia and back here?’ Robert asked. ‘It could not have been easy.’

‘That’s another story and, in a way, is why I’m here. I went to Balfour Place, thinking that perhaps you stayed there without Lydia sometimes. The janitor told me where to find you.’

‘Wondering when you were coming to that.’

‘I need your advice.’

‘Go on.’

Alex told him about finding Yuri and both his and Olga’s reaction. ‘I’d like your advice on what to do about it,’ he said. ‘Should Lydia be told or not?’

‘That’s a tough one,’ Robert said, looking thoughtful, while Alex waited, understanding the man’s hesitation. ‘If the boy is so anti the West and Olga hasn’t told him about Lydia, should we upset her all over again? Is that what you’re asking me?’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘Then I would say, no, don’t tell her. Sir Edward tried to locate Yuri soon after the war ended, but failed. She has accepted the boy is lost. Think of the emotional upheaval for everyone, not least Bobby and Tatty. And all for what? It won’t reunite Lydia with Yuri, will it?’

‘No. You’re right.’ He drained his mug. ‘Does Lydia come on the boat with you?’

‘No, she looked it over when I first bought it, but she hates the sea. We had a rough crossing coming back from Russia and she’s never forgotten it. This is my private passion.’

‘Doesn’t she mind?’

‘Not at all. She knows how much I miss the sea since I came out of the service.’

Alex stood up to leave. ‘Good luck with it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I shan’t trouble you again. If, at any time in the future, you want to tell Lydia what I have told you, then that’s up to you.’

They shook hands and Alex went up on deck and
jumped down onto the towpath. He took a huge breath of air before striding off towards the city and the railway station. He was exhausted. The encounter had taken more out of him than he would have believed possible. What was more, he had condemned himself never to see Lydia again. He knew Robert would not breathe a word.

‘Mum, stop fussing. You look gorgeous.’ Tatty was sitting on her mother’s bed watching her dress.

Lydia stopped twisting herself in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom and smiled at her daughter in its reflection. If anyone looked gorgeous it was Tatty in a lilac print frock patterned all over with tiny white flowers. She had skilfully used a little make-up, blusher and eyebrow pencil and a pale-pink lipstick. Long-legged, enviably slim, full of vitality and so popular there was always a crowd of friends of both sexes visiting Upstone Hall during school holidays. Lydia supposed that one day there would be a special young man and a wedding and she didn’t know how she would feel about that. Tatty always laughed at that idea. ‘I’m not going to get married, Mum, I’ll be too busy enjoying myself.’

Lydia made no comment; she had heard it all before. ‘I can’t believe Bobby is old enough to leave school,’ she said. ‘Where have the years gone? It only seems five minutes since he was a baby.’

‘All mothers say that,’ Tatty said, standing up. ‘Just don’t say it in his hearing, that’s all. Are you ready?’

They were going to Bobby’s last end-of-year prize-giving. He was to receive two prizes and his A-level results from Mr Lockhart, the headmaster, though he already knew what they were. Three straight As in English, European history and politics. How proud she and Robert were of him! And of Tatty too. She had done well in her O levels, which just went to show, Lydia mused, what her daughter was capable of if only she would put her mind to it.

‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’ She slipped into her high-heeled sandals, picked up her clutch bag and took a last look in the mirror. What faced her was a middle-aged woman, whose waist was beginning ever so slightly to thicken and whose hair was growing grey, but she flattered herself she had kept the wrinkles at bay and her skin was still smooth. In the navy linen suit and ruffled white blouse she had chosen to wear she didn’t look half bad.

They found Robert in the drawing room. ‘Smashing,’ Robert said, looking Lydia up and down. He turned to Tatty. ‘As for you, young lady, you will have every young buck falling at your feet.’

‘Young buck!’ Tatty laughed. ‘No one uses words like that nowadays.’

‘Why not, if it expresses what I mean?’ He was grinning with paternal pride. ‘We ought to go, we mustn’t be late.’

They accomplished the journey in less than an hour in what had been Sir Edward’s Bentley. It was getting on in years but it still went well, kept in good repair by Andy at the garage. Lydia rarely drove it, preferring her own little car, but Robert used it to get backwards and forwards to the
Merry Maid
, which was moored at Ipswich.

He had a nine-to-five desk job at the Admiralty which kept him in London during the week, but he came home to Upstone Hall every Friday night. Sometimes he stayed with her until Monday morning, but sometimes he went sailing. Lydia, who had never forgotten that dreadful wartime voyage from Russia to Scotland, did not share his enthusiasm and did not go with him. Bobby and Tatty had been once or twice but they were so busy with their own friends and social engagements it did not happen often. When she asked him who was crewing for him, he said, ‘A friend I met at the Admiralty, you wouldn’t know them.’

If she wondered why she had never met this crewman, she did not voice it. And if he chose to spend his time away from her, who could blame him? It was her fault, she knew that. She had not loved him as she ought, certainly not as well as he deserved. She hadn’t exactly kept him at arm’s length, but neither had she cleaved to him, sharing his highs and lows as, in the beginning, he had tried to share hers. She was carrying too much emotional baggage and didn’t seem able to let go of it.

The school assembly hall was packed with parents and siblings come to watch their sons and brothers line up to receive their accolades, smart in their school uniforms, their hair slicked down and their ties straight. Cameras were flashing everywhere and Tatty took a picture when it was Bobby’s turn. Afterwards there was tea in the marquee put up on the green in front of the school, a word with the head and then home again.

‘Phew! I’m glad that’s over,’ Bobby said as he climbed into the back seat beside Tatty.

‘I thought it was a lovely afternoon,’ Lydia said. ‘And
the head was very complimentary about your results.’

‘I worked damned hard for them,’ he said, over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t want to let Grandpa down.’

‘Grandpa’, Lydia noted, not ‘Father’, and looked sharply at Robert, but he was looking straight ahead, watching the road. Bobby could not have failed to notice that his father had rarely been at home during his childhood and even now, when he could have been at home more, he was more often sailing his yacht. Grandpa was the male adult to whom he had always turned.

As soon as they arrived home, Bobby changed out of his school uniform and into jeans and T-shirt. ‘You can send this lot to the charity shop,’ he said, bringing his flannels, blazer and white shirt down to the kitchen and dumping them on the table. ‘I shan’t need them again.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that. Take them off the table, I want to prepare dinner.’

He scooped the clothes up, took them into the laundry room next to the kitchen and dropped them on the brick floor. Lydia sighed in exasperation. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I think I’ll have a wander outside, see if anything’s changed while I’ve been gone. What time’s dinner?’

Lydia laughed. ‘Nothing’s changed. And dinner is at seven.’

‘OK. I’ll be back. I might even bring you a nice fat trout.’ And he was gone out of the back door, whistling tunelessly.

Her son loved Upstone Hall and its surrounds as much as she did. As soon as he arrived home at the end of every term, he would go out and walk round the grounds. It was a sort of proprietorial beating of the bounds. One day, she supposed, it would be his and Balfour Place would be
Tatty’s. She put a chicken into the oven to roast, prepared the vegetables and then went out to find him. He was in a rowing boat on the lake. Seeing his mother, he wound in his line and rowed back to shore.

‘Have you caught anything?’ she asked.

‘Not a thing.’ He shipped the oars, jumped out of the boat and tied it up. ‘I wasn’t really paying attention.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Something on your mind? You’re not worrying about going to university, are you?’

He picked up his rod and line and walked beside her. ‘No, of course not. I was just wondering if I could have a party, you know, to celebrate the end of school. Most of my friends will be scattered all over the place next year and I thought it would make a good send-off. You’ll let me, won’t you?’

‘How many?’ she asked warily.

‘Oh, about fifty, perhaps a few more,’ he said airily. ‘There’s plenty of room, isn’t there? And we won’t make a mess.’

She laughed. ‘Fifty young men not make a mess! Impossible.’

‘Oh, go on, say yes.’

‘I’ll have to ask your father.’

‘He won’t care. He’s never here anyway.’

‘Bobby, don’t speak about him like that.’

‘It’s true. He’s obsessed with that boat.’

‘He loves the sea, Bobby, and there isn’t any sea about here, is there? I don’t begrudge him.’

‘So what about the party?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘You always used to say that when we were little, as if that would be enough to shut us up.’

She laughed, taking his arm. ‘It didn’t work, did it?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want me to mention it?’

‘Yes, please. It’ll be better coming from you.’

‘Bobby wants a party for his friends from school,’ Lydia said to Robert next morning at breakfast. Tatty and Bobby were still in bed.

Robert looked up from the newspaper he was reading. ‘Why not? That’s the usual thing, isn’t it? Do you mind?’

‘No. We used to have lovely parties here when I was young. I remember my twenty-first. Everyone came, old and young, all dressed up to the nines. It was when Papa had the Kirilov Star made into a pendant for me. We danced the night away.’

‘I am sure it was a glittering occasion,’ he said, laconically. ‘But young people nowadays don’t want that kind of do. They want music by the Beatles and dancing the rock and roll and the twist.’

She should not have said that about her party; it was before she met Robert, before she met Kolya even, but Alex had been there. And as usual Robert had detected the note of wistfulness in her voice. ‘We can manage that, can’t we?’ she said brightly. ‘He says they won’t make a mess.’

He gave a grunt of a laugh. ‘Believe that if you like.’

‘I was thinking we should leave them to it,’ she began tentatively. ‘That’s what most parents do nowadays. Bobby’s very responsible and we’ll only be in the way if we stay around. We could go to a show and stay the night at Balfour Place.’

‘No,’ he said, somewhat sharply, then moderated his tone. ‘I mean, it’s no change for me, is it? I’m there all week.’

‘Yes, silly of me. What about a run up to the Dales? We could tour around, have bed and breakfast, walk a bit.’

‘OK, you see to it.’ He folded the paper, laid it beside his plate and stood up. ‘I’ll be off now. There’s a spare part I need to get for the
Merry Maid
and then I’ve got to fix it. I’ll probably stay on the boat tonight.’ He had told her of that the day before, and though she had been disappointed, it came as no surprise. Their relationship was one born of mutual respect, parenthood, habit, a kind of fond contentment with no great highs and lows. It was not enough to keep him at home. He bent to kiss her. ‘See you Friday.’

She went to the door to see him drive away as she always did, then turned back indoors. Bobby was just coming downstairs wearing jeans and a sloppy jumper. ‘Dad just gone?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Did you ask him about the party?’

‘Yes. He said you could organise it yourself.’

‘Great.’

‘But I want to know who’s coming, how many, and I want it all over by two a. m.’

‘Yes, Mum.’ He was grinning from ear to ear.

‘Your father and I are going to have a weekend away and leave you to it, so no funny business.’

‘Funny business, Mum?’ he queried, adopting an air of innocence. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Oh, yes you do.’ She turned from him and went into the kitchen, feeling somehow unsettled. It was as if this milestone in her son’s life was a turning point in her own and yet she could not see how that could be. Tatty came down in her dressing gown, rubbing sleep from her eyes,
and Lydia left them helping themselves to breakfast and went up to her room, where she sat on the edge of her unmade bed and contemplated her reflection in the mirror on her wardrobe door. She was forty-five years old, there was grey in her hair, and yet inside she felt no older than the twenty-one-year-old who had danced with Alex, ignorant of what lay ahead. How happy she had been. And how foolish.

Suddenly making up her mind, she made the bed, put a light jacket over her cotton dress and left the house. She picked up some stale bread from the kitchen and walked down to the lake, where she stood breaking it up and throwing it to the mallards. In her mind she was the
four-year
-old refugee again – lost, bewildered, afraid. As clearly as if it had been yesterday, she heard Alex speaking in his half-broken voice.
‘Try not to be sad.’

‘I cannot help it.’

‘No, I suppose not. But you are a great deal better off than a lot of Russian émigrés. They are finding life in England hard, not speaking English and needing to work. Be thankful.’

Be thankful. Yes, she had a lot to be thankful for. She threw the last of the crumbs and turned back to the house. There it was, four-square and solid, her home, and though the grounds were only half the size they had once been, it was still surrounded by a small park and manicured lawns. It was hers. Thanks to Sir Edward she was wealthy and need never feel cold or hunger or cruelty, though she was well aware they existed. She had always done her best to mitigate some of that, giving generously to charity, helping in more practical ways when she could, especially those refugees from the other side of the Iron Curtain who
needed something to get them started in Britain and help with learning the language. Alex’s words, uttered to a traumatised four-year-old had sunk deep. Everything he had ever said to her was etched in her memory. ‘
You are not alone
,’ whispered while she queued at Kiev station.
‘Sweetheart, you need me, and while you need me, I shall be at your disposal.
’ That in Minsk. And at that heartbreaking parting in Moscow. ‘
I will come back to you, you see, and I might even have Yuri with me
.’

Other memories crowded in on her, more bitter-sweet: a feeling of loneliness – no, not so much loneliness as isolation; her adopted parents, one of whom had loved her more than the other; her first day at school and at college; Kolya, whom she did not want to remember, and Bob, who had been her prop when she needed one most; Yuri lying content in her arms, a chubby, dark-haired baby with surprisingly blue eyes, who had been learning to recognise her and smile a toothless smile. She had never seen his first tooth, never watched his first tottering steps, never sent him off to school with a satchel over his shoulder. He would have finished his education by now, a young man, making his way in the world. She refused to believe he had not survived the war.

And then there was Alex in white tie and tails dancing a waltz with her at the ball to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, even then binding her to him with silken threads which neither time, nor distance, nor death itself could ever sever; Alex in that dreadful uniform, grim with responsibility, torn between love and duty; Alex the lover. That most of all. Oh, how she still missed him!

What had happened to him after she left him in Moscow? What was he doing going back to Minsk when it was being
attacked by the Germans? Had he wanted to die? Where had they buried him? Who was the man she had seen standing by the yew tree in the churchyard the day of her father’s funeral? She was still plagued by questions, none of which could be answered.