The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  ‘Is it that long?’ Dmitri asked, then instantly realised from her hurt expression that it had been the wrong thing to say. ‘I only meant that it feels so fresh and new. I like being with you, Rosa. We have fun.’

  ‘But you are married. Thank you for letting me know at last.’

  On the way home, he could tell she was trying to shake off her bad mood, telling him some anecdote about the brother of a girl at the café, but he wasn’t listening. He was bitterly disappointed that Anna Tschaikovsky was not Anastasia. It meant he had hit another dead end.

  That night, after they made love, Rosa whispered, ‘I love you.’ Dmitri froze, unable to say it back, even casually. Instead he tilted her face to his and kissed her tenderly, hoping that would do.

  Afterwards, he lay awake, thinking of Tatiana: her voice, her smile, the way she moved. She still filled his heart so completely there was no room to love anyone else. He didn’t want to lose Rosa, who brought joy and laughter and womanly comfort, but it would be a lie to tell her he loved her.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Lake Akanabee, New York State, end of September 2016

  In the days after reading Tom’s letter, Kitty tipped into a depression. She could feel it happening and didn’t try to resist because it felt as though it had been brewing for a while. Besides, it matched the climate. Although the days were still warm, she could sense the end of summer, with a sharp breeze in the evening and random leaves turning golden-brown and floating down from the trees. It made her realise that her days there were running out, with just over two weeks left before her flight home.

  The contents of Tom’s letter swirled around her head as she worked in the garden she had created. Would it have helped if she had let him comfort her after her parents died? She had chosen the only route that felt manageable: keeping busy. The enormity of the loss had simply been too much to bear. Now her parents filled her thoughts as she dug the soil.

  Her dad had been a quiet, undemonstrative man, with a character that was steady and true. She loved the fact that he had treated her the way he would have treated a son: sending her up ladders to help with the guttering, teaching her carpentry skills, assuming she could change a plug from an early age. She could tell when he was proud of her by a secret smile and a faraway look in his eyes. Although they seldom talked about emotions, she always felt he was her ally. A memory came to her of a night before a school exam when she had a classic full-scale panic attack that made her tremble and retch convulsively. Her dad had taken her by the hand and led her out to the back garden, where he set out two deckchairs. They sat side by side in the darkness while he identified the constellations above them – Ursa Major and Minor, Andromeda and Pegasus – until she was calm enough to go to sleep.

  Her relationship with her mum had been far more volatile. All the pressure she put on Kitty to succeed had meant they were not close during the difficult teenage years. Her mum fussed too much over Kitty’s health, her finances, and her fashion choices, as well as her exam results. After she left home, there were times when Kitty let the answer machine pick up any calls because she couldn’t face her mother’s critical onslaught. Even now, looking back, she felt cross about the pressure she had been under, although she recognised it had been motivated by love.

  ‘You needed pushing,’ she heard her mother saying. ‘You and your dad. If you had it your way, you’d both sit around all day whittling pieces of wood.’

  She’d been critical of Kitty’s teenage boyfriends but took to Tom straight away, even though he was a struggling musician, which wasn’t her idea of a respectable career. She let him tease her about her exacting standards in a way that no one else got away with. ‘Now, Elizabeth,’ he’d smile, ‘are you sure that flower arrangement is perfectly symmetrical? Shouldn’t the salt cellar be a few millimetres to the left?’ Tom was the only person able to make her laugh at herself; Kitty remembered the pretty sound of her laugh.

  What would you advise me to do, Mum? she asked in her head, and knew straight away that her mother would tell her to go back to Tom and work things out. ‘I won’t have a divorcee in my family,’ she would have said. ‘The shame of it!’

  They’d only been in their fifties when they died, after a coach careered through the central reservation of a Spanish motorway. A postcard had arrived a week later, full of holiday joie de vivre; her dad writing about his guilt when picking a lobster from the tank in a restaurant, and her mum commenting that its colour when cooked matched her dad’s sunburn. By that time, Tom was helping her to organise their funeral. All those awful decisions to be made: What clothes do you want to wear to be cremated, Mum? Tom, bless him, had taken care of the legalities of the estate, of clearing and selling the family home where Kitty had grown up, while she – what exactly had she done? She couldn’t remember now, except that as soon as the money came through she bought the Tottenham house and launched herself into a year of keeping busy.

  She found herself chatting to her parents in her head while she worked on the cabin. Sometimes she even spoke out loud. Why did no one tell me about Dmitri, Mum? Did you ever meet your grandfather? Did Marta tell you about him? What was he like? There was no one to answer that now. Death was too final; she’d missed her chance.

  Kitty had run out of plants so she made a trip to the garden centre for more, and on the way back she stopped at the vacation park coffeehouse. Tom knew she had received his parcel and would be waiting for a reply but she wasn’t sure what to say. Perhaps the words would come to her.

  She charged her laptop but instead of going straight to her email folder, she found herself looking up Karren Bayliss on Facebook. The only reason she hadn’t done so before was because she hadn’t known the surname, and now she did, she was astounded. The image on Tom’s phone hadn’t been very clear but she realised Karren looked for all the world like an inflatable sex doll: her profile picture showed huge breasts on display in a low-cut top like plump cuts on a butcher’s slab; brown hair with blonde tiger stripes painted through it; inches-long black eyelashes; swollen lips and a fake tan the colour of butterscotch. It was impossible to think of a physical type less like her. What had he been thinking of?

  Kitty almost felt like sending him a sarcastic email about his lack of taste, but that wasn’t the way forward. She glanced through her inbox and replied to a few friends. There was a message from Random House in New York apologising for the delay in answering her query due to staff holidays. Kitty remembered that Dmitri’s Berlin publisher was a company called Slowo; the name appeared on the copyright page of his books. She googled Slowo and found they had been started in Berlin in 1920 by a man named Joseph Gessen, and that they also published Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov, as well as producing a Russian-language newspaper for émigrés known as Rul. There had recently been an exhibition about immigrant publishers in Berlin and she was able to find Dmitri’s name in a list of authors, along with a short biography saying that he was a journalist for Rul. How strange that both she and her great-grandfather had the same profession; perhaps it was in their genes.

  It took some searching but Kitty eventually found an article by Dmitri in the Rul archives. It was in Russian but she used Google translate and was able to make out from the stilted text that Dmitri had interviewed Princess Irene of Hesse shortly after she went to visit a girl called Anna Tschaikovsky, who was claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. This puzzled Kitty: the article was written in 1923, and the Romanovs had been murdered in 1918. How could an imposter hope to deceive family members only five years later? She googled Anna Tschaikovsky next and found several long articles about her. It seemed the remaining Romanov family had been split into two camps, with some believing the claimant while others were adamant she was not Anastasia. In photos she looked plausibly similar.

  Of course, Kitty remembered, in 1923 the world didn’t yet know about the fate of the Romanovs. It was the following year when White Army investigator Nicholas Sokolov published his report concluding that the family had
all been killed in the Ipatiev House. He had found witnesses who told of the blood-soaked basement scarred by bullet holes and frenzied knife thrusts, and had taken photographs of personal possessions found in a burnt-out mineshaft. Even after that, rumours persisted that one or more of the children had escaped. Anna Tschaikovsky maintained her story and it led to lawsuits that were only settled after her death when a DNA sample found she had been a Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanzkowska. Why did so many people believe in her? Kitty imagined it was because the truth – that all the royal children were slaughtered – was too horrific to contemplate.

  In his article, Dmitri seemed sure that Anna Tschaikovsky was not Anastasia, and he speculated on the reasons why the poor woman lingering in a Berlin hospital bed might keep up such a bizarre pretence. He suggested that maybe something terrible had happened in her previous life, and she was sublimating the memory by assuming a new identity. The psyche was so deep and mysterious that he guessed she had come to believe the story herself. ‘People can persuade themselves of virtually anything,’ he wrote, ‘as we have learned through the writings of Messrs Freud and Jung.’

  Kitty’s thoughts turned to Tom again. Would she have been more upset if he had chosen a mistress who resembled her? Wouldn’t that mean he was trying to replace her? What was he doing choosing someone who clearly offered sex on a plate?

  The word ‘obvious’ came into her head. The counsellor had told Tom he wanted to be found out when he left his phone in the hall. He chose someone who looked like an obvious sex object. He was trying to get Kitty’s attention, to make her sit up and take notice. Well, she thought, he had certainly done that. If she emailed him now, sarcasm would almost certainly slip into her tone.

  What did other couples do in their position? Have a huge fight to clear the air? Arguing and confrontation had never been her style. Perhaps it was something to do with being an only child. She hated to feel out of control, but at the same time she realised that bottling things up could make them worse. It was her avoidance of emotional issues Tom was talking about in his letter. Maybe if she was able to tell him how she felt about Karren Bayliss, they could start an honest conversation – but she couldn’t think how to begin.

  ‘Dear Tom, How could you?’ That wasn’t her style. She’d leave it for another day, when she had decided on the words.

  That evening she looked through Dmitri’s novels. The first one, published in 1924, had no dedication, but Exile was ‘For Nicholas’, and The Boot that Kicked was ‘For Marta’, her grandmother. The last two novels, published in America in the 40s, were ‘For Rosa’ but in the acknowledgements pages he thanked Alfred A. Knopf for having faith in him, he thanked his family for their support and he thanked Irena Markova, his English translator, for her talent. She flicked back to his first novel and thought what a shame that Irena Markova had not translated that one, because it was such a clunky read. Even in a poor translation the description of first love was overpowering. Dmitri described the sense of completion that comes from having another brain to bounce ideas off, the secret joy of watching another person across a crowded room and knowing exactly what they are thinking at that precise moment, the miracle of a partner who knows you better than you know yourself.

  One phrase stuck in her mind: Mikhail talks of his great fondness for Valerina’s ‘intimate imperfections’ – a tiny mole behind her ear, the way she nibbled the corners of her nails when nervous. An image sprang into Kitty’s head of Tom trying to hide the bulge at his waistline by pulling his shirt out an inch or two in a blouson style; he’d suck in his belly while examining the effect in the mirror, unaware she was watching. That made her smile. And then she thought of him singing along to 90s pop songs in an off-key falsetto. Her face broke into a grin. There was no doubt she still loved him.

  Could they save their marriage? With all her heart she hoped so.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Berlin, 1924

  When Dmitri first moved to Berlin it had been a cheap city in which to live, but in 1923 prices began to rise stratospherically as hyperinflation was triggered by the government’s decision to print more money. A loaf of bread that had cost 163 marks in 1922 was selling for 200 million marks by November 1923, and wages could not keep pace. Dmitri was forced to ask his family in Constantinople to wire money, which he found humiliating. He would have left Germany entirely, but for the fact that a Berlin publishing company had offered to publish his novel.

  Burtsev, the editor of Rul, had passed his manuscript to the Slowo publishing house, which was part of the same company. Much to Dmitri’s astonishment, it was accepted and in spring 1924 Interminable Love was published to moderate acclaim. Dmitri was invited to give a reading at Rodina’s bookshop, and many Russian émigré papers ran favourable reviews. A friend of the owner of Rodina’s asked for permission to translate it into German, and another woman wrote asking if she might do the English translation. Dmitri was reluctant, because he felt it was a quintessentially Russian novel that would be impossible to translate, but he needed the money and so he agreed.

  Throughout, he felt ambivalent about the publishing process. He found it embarrassing to have the intimate feelings of his characters – which were in essence his own – exposed to the public. He would have preferred to remain anonymous but Rosa was overjoyed by his success. She recommended his novel to all the customers in her café, and often wandered into bookshops to move it to a more prominent position.

  When the German edition of Interminable Love was published, he gave her a copy but if she read it she never told him. Putting himself in her position, it would be hard to read about his love for another woman. She must guess it was about Tatiana. Perhaps she decided not to read it after all, but still she helped promote it and most people who knew them assumed it was about Rosa.

  They began to be invited to literary salons and Rosa was intellectually out of her depth in the conversations about art and literature but everyone liked her for her open, friendly nature and admired her off-beat dress sense. She bought her clothes in flea markets and deliberately chose mismatching colours such as lime green and purple, hot pink and orange, when throwing outfits together: Dmitri described her look as like ‘an explosion in a garment factory’. There was no artifice about her and that was refreshing in a town where so many people were hiding their true natures, especially amongst the Russian community.

  Soon Rosa had many more friends in Berlin’s literary set than Dmitri did, and she invited them back to their apartment to drink schnapps and listen to poetry being read aloud. He watched her sometimes and marvelled at her ability to remember the names of friends’ children and the fine details of their lives. She complimented people on their writing and laughed at their witticisms, making them feel good about themselves. Perhaps that was the key to her social success.

  At a salon one evening in summer 1924 Burtsev told Dmitri that the Ekaterinburg prosecutor Nicholas Sokolov had finally published his report into the fate of the Romanovs.

  ‘It seems Sokolov escaped the Red Army by fleeing through Siberia with a box of the items he found in the Ekaterinburg mineshaft,’ the editor explained. ‘During the intervening years, he has interviewed émigrés and Romanov family members, making copious notes, until he felt ready to present his findings to the world.’

  Dmitri’s hands were shaking. He put his glass on a nearby piano. ‘And his conclusion, no doubt, is that they all perished.’

  ‘That’s his opinion.’

  ‘And yet, I do not believe he has found the bodies, has he?’

  ‘He makes the rather grisly claim that they were hacked to pieces, dissolved in sulphuric acid and then thrown onto a fire.’ Burtsev screwed up his face in disgust, and Dmitri felt sick to the pit of his stomach. He leaned on the piano so as not to collapse.

  ‘Do you have a copy of the report?’

  ‘I will bring it to your apartment tomorrow.’

  The report contained photographs of the items Sokolov had brough
t out of Russia in his infamous box. Dmitri knew about some of them from the 1919 press reports, but he pored over the images looking for a clue as to whether Tatiana’s remains were in the mineshaft. There was the Tsar’s belt buckle; a pearl earring of the type that Tsarina Alexandra always wore; some shoe buckles from the grand duchesses’ shoes – but not the type Tatiana had been wearing when last he saw her, Dmitri was sure of that; the eyeglasses and false teeth of the family’s doctor, who had died with them; some icons; a jewelled badge; and that grotesque severed human finger. The body of a dog had been found at the bottom of the well, and Dmitri shuddered to think it could be Ortipo’s.

  Rosa arrived while Dmitri and Burtsev were talking about the report, and began preparing a meal. Dmitri could tell she was straining to hear what was being said but he did not include her in the conversation. It was nothing to do with her.

  Burtsev asked if Dmitri would write an article about the Sokolov report, and he agreed. He already knew what he would write: that without any bodies, there could be no definitive proof the Romanovs were dead; that it was still possible the adults had been killed and the children imprisoned somewhere. News was beginning to filter out of Russia about the prison camps established by the Bolsheviks: horrific places, where inmates were routinely beaten, starved and tortured. He hoped Tatiana and her siblings were not being held in such a place, but that they were together, under house arrest in decent accommodation. When the government was overthrown and the exiles returned to their homeland, the Romanov children would be found and liberated.

  His article was published a few months later, and Rosa read it but made no comment.

  One evening in November 1924, Dmitri and Rosa went to Eldorado nightclub with some Russian friends. While Rosa danced in her inimitable style, Dmitri chatted to his comrades about the Russian writers who were returning to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as it was now known, tempted back by overtures from the Communist government. Alexei Tolstoy had just announced his departure for Moscow, Andrei Bely had already returned and Boris Pasternak, a supporter of the regime, had never left.