The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  ‘Never! Money had no importance for him.’ Hana laughed. ‘He was a wise man.’

  ‘Do you think the story would be worth a lot of money now?’ Erika asked Kitty.

  ‘Probably,’ she agreed, ‘but Hana and I have been discussing it and I’m not sure either of us wants to be in the media spotlight.’

  ‘But you are a journalist, are you not?’ Erika asked.

  Kitty liked these honest, down-to-earth women and in answer to their questions she told them about her decision to change career and work as a carpenter. ‘There are plenty of journalists in the world, talented writers with drive and ambition, and I’m just not one of them. But I’m proud of the work I did on Dmitri’s cabin this summer,’ she finished. ‘If you ever want to borrow it for a holiday, you’d be more than welcome.’

  ‘What a lovely idea.’ Hana put her arm round Erika and gave her a squeeze.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Lake Akanabee, New York State, December 1968

  Dmitri and Tatiana chuckled when they read in December 1968 of the marriage of Anna Tschaikovsky, the woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, to an American genealogist called Jack Manahan, who was twenty years her junior. She had made an entire career of her claims and had many influential supporters, although she had never been accepted by the living Romanov family members. Now Jack Manahan announced himself as the new ‘Grand Duke in waiting’ from their home in Virginia, a claim met with scorn by the Romanovs.

  ‘Don’t you want to go and visit your sister now that she is in America?’ Dmitri teased.

  ‘Goodness! Whatever for? She looks nothing like Anastasia, and she sounds rather a disturbed creature.’

  ‘No one would believe us if we announced that you are Grand Duchess Tatiana. It would be very hard to prove, although to me you look the same as the first day I set eyes on you.’

  Tatiana had celebrated her seventieth birthday the previous year. She was still slender, with glorious cheekbones and the same intelligent grey eyes ringed with violet she’d had as a girl. She was careful to wear a straw hat to keep the sun off her pale skin and was not nearly as lined as Dmitri. At the age of seventy-seven, his cheeks hung in folds and his forehead was scored by deep furrows.

  Tatiana leaned over to trace his wrinkles and frown lines with a finger. ‘I think I have been the cause of most of these,’ she smiled. ‘We didn’t choose the easiest paths in life.’

  ‘Do you ever think about leaving a record of the truth for future historians to find long after we are gone?’ Dmitri asked. ‘I would like my children to understand why I was unfaithful to their mother, even if they don’t forgive me.’

  ‘You can write it if you like. I don’t care what is said when I am gone.’

  ‘Why don’t we write it together?’ Dmitri suggested. ‘Starting from 1914 when you floated like an angel into the hospital ward where I lay with my wounded leg and we talked about dogs and then books.’

  ‘There are so many horrendous memories that would have to be included alongside the beautiful ones, I fear it might upset us to revisit them.’

  ‘It’s all such a long time ago,’ Dmitri said. ‘I think I can cope if you can.’

  And so they began reconstructing their joint story. Dmitri wrote the first draft in Russian – he still couldn’t express himself as poetically as he wished in English – then Tatiana translated it, adding in her own perspectives. He knew most of her story already – she had even confided in him about the horrors she had endured at the hands of Anton – but now they looked back they could see how quirks of fate had played with them.

  If only one of the many attempts to rescue the Romanovs had been successful, he and she could have led a life together in exile. They could have had children together. If Alexei hadn’t been ill in April 1918 and Vasily Yakovlev had managed to get them to Omsk; or if Armistead had arrived on the 13th of July 1918 and spirited them away … These things didn’t bear thinking about. There was no purpose in regret.

  They realised they had missed each other by days after the murder of her family. When the Czechs entered Ekaterinburg in late July and Vaclav tried to find Dmitri, he was away in Verkhoturye, hunting for the Romanovs. If only Vaclav had gone to see Sir Thomas Preston, the British ambassador, he would have told him. ‘I should have suggested that,’ Tatiana sighed. ‘I wasn’t thinking clearly.’

  When she received the letter from Dmitri’s mother saying he had died at Tsaritsyn in 1919, she should have stayed in touch, or asked to be put in contact with his sisters, then they could have been reunited the following year when he arrived in Constantinople.

  ‘All that time we wasted …’ Dmitri mused. ‘And yet we have each other now, and somehow this is enough happiness for one lifetime.’

  ‘Let’s not pretend that you weren’t happy with Rosa too,’ Tatiana smiled. ‘I regret I never met her. She was a remarkable woman.’

  ‘And Vaclav was a hero. I’m still amazed that he took such good care of you and asked nothing in return.’

  ‘It’s true. He was a gentleman who never tried to come into my bed until I invited him. We were both lucky in the people who rescued us – although I’m not sure they were quite so lucky.’

  Both Rosa and Vaclav featured in the book they wrote together. Chapter by chapter they drafted, translated and polished, reading and commenting on each other’s work. It got to the stage that when Dmitri reread it and found a phrase he admired, he could no longer remember whether it was his or Tatiana’s, so intertwined were their words.

  They spent all summer at the cabin and came at weekends in winter too, but they repaired to Tatiana’s Albany house during the height of bug season in May and June and during the coldest weather, when the lake was frozen and the damp ate into Dmitri’s elderly bones, making his leg injuries ache more than fifty years after they were inflicted. They transported their typewriter and the growing stack of pages to and fro in Dmitri’s new Pontiac motorcar, which had room in the back for Trina, the Borzoi.

  ‘Where should we end our story?’ Tatiana asked one day. ‘I think it should stop with me finding you at the Café Slavia in Prague.’

  ‘But then it will not answer my children’s questions …’ Dmitri mused. ‘I want them to understand that there was never any question of me leaving their mother, and that you agreed. I want them to know how sorry I am about the way they found out about you, and how much I miss being part of their lives.’

  ‘Marta might not like you writing for publication that she is no longer communicating with you,’ Tatiana said. ‘It paints her in a bad light.’

  Dmitri pondered that. ‘Why don’t I send both her and Nicholas a copy of the manuscript, saying that I will be happy to cut anything they don’t want published? I hope they will be tempted to read it knowing it concerns their lives.’

  They agreed on this plan and had two Xerox copies made. One was posted to Nicholas in California and Dmitri drove to Marta’s house in Albany to deliver the other, only to have the door answered by a stranger.

  ‘They moved to England years ago now,’ the woman said. ‘I had a forwarding address but I think they’ve moved on.’

  Dmitri called Nicholas’s house in California and spoke to Pattie, who told him that Marta and Stanley lived in a suburb of London, where he sold insurance since the cutlery company had gone bankrupt. She gave him the new address.

  ‘How old is my grandchild now?’ he asked.

  ‘Elizabeth is nine. Marta absolutely dotes on her.’

  ‘I thought she’d be older. Didn’t Marta get pregnant soon after Rosa died in 1955?’

  ‘She did but she lost that baby, and several more, before Elizabeth was born. It’s not been easy for her.’

  ‘I’m so sad to hear that,’ Dmitri sighed. If only she had turned to him; but he was the last person she would have wanted to talk to. ‘How is Nicholas?’ he asked. ‘Has he read my book?’

  There was a long pause. ‘I’m afraid that Nicholas and I are separated. I had t
o kick him out when his alcoholism got out of control. He lives in an apartment near the beach so I took your parcel to him but I doubt he’s read it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry …’ Dmitri was stricken. ‘I wish I had known. Is there anything I can do? I could pay for him to go to a clinic.’

  ‘I tried that, but he won’t go. He’s not interested in stopping. I know he loves me and I love him too. I’ve told him he can come home if he gives up drinking but he simply can’t do it. He manages one day, two at most, then the least little thing sends him back to the bourbon. I’m sorry, Dmitri, but I think he’s beyond hope.’

  ‘I’m coming out. I’ll fly there next week.’

  Pattie gave a big sigh. ‘I doubt it will make a difference, but you can stay here if you want to try.’

  Dmitri flew to Santa Barbara in March 1970 and was met at the airport by his daughter-in-law. She drove him to Nicholas’s apartment in a rundown block with some rusty old motorcycles out front. He knocked on the door but when Nicholas opened it and saw his father he slammed it shut again. All Dmitri noticed was that he had long straggly hair and an unkempt beard.

  It was difficult with his arthritic joints but Dmitri slid down to sit on the floor in the corridor outside and called through the door.

  ‘I used to drink too much, Nicholas. Way too much. It was your mother who saved me – first of all by motivating me to write novels, and then by giving me children and forcing me to look to the future. Pattie is a good woman. Please let her help you, the way your mum helped me.’

  He waited but there was no sound from within. He wasn’t sure if Nicholas was listening.

  ‘I miss your mother every day. I’m sure you do too. But imagine what she would say if she could see you now, son. Try to pull yourself together for her sake.’

  No reply. He sat there for hours, calling through the door. He’d come all this way and there was no point in giving up, although he supposed he would have to go back to Pattie’s at nightfall. He was too old to spend the night outside. Suddenly the door opened and Nicholas glared at him. ‘Will you not leave me in peace?’ he asked, bleary-eyed and exhausted-looking. ‘I don’t care about your book, or Tatiana, or any of it. Publish what you want. You don’t need my approval.’

  He was shoeless, his shirt hanging open, and he smelled rank, as if he hadn’t bathed for a long time. Worse than that was his nose: it was bulbous and red, etched with purple spider veins, a true drinker’s nose. Dmitri remembered such noses on the men back in Russia who drank vast quantities of home-made vodka and usually died young after passing out in the snow or choking on their own vomit.

  ‘Son, you’re ill. Please let me take you to a doctor.’

  ‘It’s too late, Dad. You can’t wave your money around and make this go away. Unfortunately I inherited the melancholy gene from you rather than the happy gene from Mum and I don’t want to go through life like this. The drink is merely a means to an end.’

  Dmitri protested: ‘You’re only forty-four years old. Your whole life is in front of you. You can do anything you want. Anything!’

  ‘Good. Because what I want is to drink myself to death.’ He tried to close the door but Dmitri stuck his arm in the way.

  ‘Come for a drink with me then. Let me buy you a beer at your local bar.’

  Nicholas shrugged and agreed to that. He slid his feet into some battered beach shoes but didn’t bother to fasten his shirt or comb his hair. Dmitri’s joints were aching from sitting on the ground and he limped heavily as they walked down the road to a dingy bar with a Budweiser sign out front. Dmitri ordered two beers and let Nicholas have a bourbon chaser then they sat in a booth and talked man to man for the first time in their lives.

  ‘I never felt you were really there, Dad,’ Nicholas told him. ‘Your head was always somewhere else. I certainly never got the feeling that you loved Marta and me. We were an irritation to you, a duty. I suppose when I found out you’d had another woman all that time, it finally made sense: Oh, that’s why he was like that. It wasn’t because of me. In a way it was comforting. I know Marta was furious for what you did to Mom but I don’t have any anger. I just feel like you’re a stranger.’

  While he spoke, tears rolled down Dmitri’s cheek. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at them. ‘I know I failed as a father. I always hoped you’d turn out fine because you had such a wonderful mother but maybe you needed me too.’

  ‘I don’t know what caused this thing I have: alcoholism, depression, call it what you will. I’m not sure it would have been any different if you’d been the perfect parent. There’s no use you blaming yourself. I’ve screwed up all by myself.’

  ‘What can be done to make you want to live?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Nicholas said firmly. ‘Some things are unfixable.’

  ‘Will you not try? If I find the name of the top expert in California and pay for a consultation, will you at least see him? Maybe there’s a pill you can take, or electric shock therapy, or surgery. I climbed out of the kind of morass you are in, so I know it’s possible. Please try, son.’

  At last Nicholas agreed. With Pattie’s help, Dmitri found an expert and paid for a course of detoxification treatment. He left feeling optimistic, but when he telephoned on his return to Albany, Pattie told him that Nicholas had not even attended the first appointment.

  There was more bad news. Two weeks after his return, a lawyer’s letter arrived from England saying that Marta would sue him for defamation if he published the book.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ he told Tatiana. ‘We’ll have to forget it.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to Alfred?’ she suggested. ‘When are you next seeing him?’

  Dmitri still had occasional lunches with Alfred A. Knopf in New York City. His company had merged with Random House and he had semi-retired but he still dabbled in editorial matters and kept in touch with his favourite authors. When Dmitri met him that spring, at Barbetta, their usual Italian restaurant, he mused that his publisher had barely changed from the day they first met. The moustache and hair were white rather than jet black, and his waist was a little thicker, but the lively eyes and the gregarious character were unchanged.

  Dmitri handed over the manuscript. ‘Prepare to be surprised when you read it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want an advance but my only stipulation is that it mustn’t be published in my children’s lifetimes. Marta might live another fifty years, so perhaps it could be pencilled for publication in 2020. Is it possible to arrange that?’

  ‘It’s out of the ordinary but I don’t see why not. I could leave it in the archives flagged with a note for someone to revisit it in 2020.’

  A week later he telephoned, having read the manuscript.

  ‘Are you kidding me? We’ve been friends for thirty-five years and you never told me you’re married to one of the goddamn Romanov royal family? Well, I’ll be damned. Is there no chance I can persuade you to publish now? I’m sure our lawyers could see off your daughter’s objections.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to upset her any more than I have already. But thanks, Alfred.’

  He wrote to Nicholas and Marta telling them both he had decided not to publish, and was pleased to receive a postcard from Nicholas. It had a picture on the front of some kids playing volleyball on a beach and it read ‘Thanks for coming over to see me, Dad.’ That was all, but it was nice.

  Six months later, Nicholas died of cirrhosis of the liver. Pattie wrote to tell Dmitri since there was no phone at the cabin and she’d been unable to reach him at the house in Albany. At last his boy was at peace, after a tortured life. Dmitri flew to California for the funeral hoping that Marta might be there and that he’d have a chance to talk with her. Perhaps there could still be a rapprochement at this sad time. His hopes were dashed when she didn’t show up.

  ‘Since Rosa died Marta has never been able to deal with anything emotionally challenging,’ Pattie told him. ‘She pulls down the shutters and pretends nothing is wrong. I’m sorry to say it
but I don’t think she’ll ever change.’

  ‘Is she happy?’ Dmitri asked.

  Pattie shrugged. ‘I don’t think her marriage is perfect. She once told me that Stanley has a wandering eye. I guess that makes it even harder for her to forgive you. But she adores her daughter. Elizabeth is the centre of her life.’

  When he got back to Albany, Dmitri rewrote his will, leaving enough for Tatiana, should she outlive him, and the remainder of his estate to whichever of his descendants came forward to claim it. Perhaps his little granddaughter would come to find him one day. He surely hoped so.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Lake Akanabee, New York State, February 1975

  Dmitri celebrated his eightieth birthday at the cabin with Tatiana. She made his favourite Russian Pashka, a dessert similar to the Americans’ cheesecake, and stuck a candle in the top that dripped wax down the side while he struggled to find the breath to blow it out. They lived very simply now, eating vegetables she had grown in the garden around the cabin and the occasional fish he caught from the end of the dock (although in truth he never had much patience for fishing). They still commuted between there and the Albany cottage but spent most of their time at the lake, keeping the stove stocked with firewood on the cold days and talking, always talking.

  They joked that if they were to live another twenty years, they would never run out of conversation. They discussed religion and philosophy and tried to agree upon the ideal political system; they fretted over news reports of the Vietnam War, worried about whether America was right to get involved; they talked about books and music and remembered theatrical productions they had seen back in St Petersburg before the First World War; they talked about people they had known, and they speculated on what Tatiana’s brother and sisters might have been like had they lived. Each expressed whatever was on his or her mind at the moment and it flowed back and forth in a fast-moving current of companionship. If they woke at night when the wind blew hard outside and rain hammered on the cabin’s tin roof, they resumed the conversation they’d been having earlier.