‘How will they make certain? I have no proof. There was an old man. But no one understands me. It was all a misunderstanding.’
The woman was screaming again, pointing at her, skewing her thoughts, saying horrible things. She knew they were horrible.
‘I don’t want anything bad to happen to the baby. That poor mite.’ Tessa was blubbering. She reached in her bag for a tissue and her passport fell out. Small, red, insignificant, but for a moment everyone in the room stared at it in silence. She picked it up hastily, aware of the flicker of envy in the woman’s eyes.
‘Don’t worry. We will sort it out.’ Jan patted her on the shoulder, drew the officer off to the side again.
Tessa stood there, wishing she could sit down, wishing she could speak logically, coolly, for herself. For the first time in her life she had the distinct knowledge of what it might mean to be robbed of the power of language. She felt the woman’s eyes on her bag again. Yes, that too. What if, on top of all, she didn’t possess that small document which gave one a place in the world, a status and identity which went far beyond any individual attributes or even wealth?
‘Do you want to press charges?’ Jan was at her side again.
‘Charges? For what?’
He shrugged. ‘For… how do you say … bearing false witness. Accusing you wrongly. Her name, by the way, is Prohasky.’
‘No. No. Of course not. I just… I just want Amy, the baby I mean, to be safe.’
He nodded. ‘I think you will need to sign some forms. Upstairs.’ He left her again and despite herself she looked up to meet the woman’s eyes.
She was silent now, her expression dejected. Perhaps she knew she had lost, Tessa thought. She wanted to tell her it wasn’t a loss. She wanted to take her aside and say that her little girl was beautiful, precious. But she already knew that. She had come for Amy, after all. Maybe she really had convinced herself that Tessa had stolen the child away. Maybe she had willfully forgotten her own act, just as Tessa had begun for a moment to believe that she had no clear grasp of where the truth lay.
‘Come,’ Jan led her towards the door. ‘They only want you to sign some papers saying this was the woman you saw in the church and who handed you the baby.’
Tessa looked back one more time. She wished there was a way of communicating what she felt to the woman. A way of telling her that the loss was all Tessa’s. But she had begun to shriek at her again, her voice so resonant against the stone walls that for a long time after the door of the room had closed behind them, Tessa could hear her curses.
They sat in a near-by café, all white table-cloths and women curling amongst ferns in pastel posters.
‘I’m sorry to have put you through all this. To be taking so much of your time,’ Tessa was apologizing.
‘It is not a problem. You are distressed.’
‘I really didn’t steal the child, you know. I think, well, maybe her mother changed her mind. She couldn’t bear giving her away.’
‘Or perhaps she changed her mind for the sake of the police. We buy and sell most things now. But we have not yet reached the point of buying and selling babies. That is still illegal.’
Tessa looked at him askance. ‘I’m so worried. What will happen to her? And the baby? I feel responsible somehow.’
‘Why?’ Jan examined her with his intent clarity. ‘You think you provoked her into doing something stupid? By the very fact that you happened to be in the church at that time. And because you are rich and fortunate.’
‘I’m not…’
‘In her eyes.’
‘Perhaps. But what will they do to her? They won’t keep her under arrest, will they?’
‘I do not think so. It is too complicated and these days we prefer fewer complications. You have not pressed charges. They will probably just let her go. Or send her back to her country.’
‘How terrible!’ Tessa scrunched up her paper napkin. ‘I would have happily adopted that baby, you know.’ She paused. ‘Do you think the woman will do the same thing again. Try to get rid of her?’
‘You would adopt her?’ Jan repeated inanely. ‘Why? Because you feel responsible?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She looked up at the window. There was a man gazing in. He had a pale slightly crooked face with vast eyes. He looked hungry.
‘You English. You have such a complicated sense of morality. I told you before. I do not understand it. Myself, I don’t think this woman is your responsibility.’
‘No. Perhaps not. But the child…’
‘You know, Tessa,’ he suddenly turned a fatherly air on her, ‘it is not nothing to adopt a child. It is not a matter of impulse. Or even perhaps morality.’
‘I know.’ Her smile wavered, uncertain of itself. ‘It is something I have thought about before.’
‘I see.’ He was gazing at her in a way which made her uncomfortable.
Tessa began to gather her things, thanked him again for his kindness. She left quickly. She had the distinct impression that if she said anymore, he would soon reach the certain decision that she had indeed tried to steal poor little Amy.
It was growing dark, the sky a low charcoal mass. People bustled homeward. She would go home, too, Tessa thought, if she had a home to go to here. She didn’t want to see Ted. Not now. She didn’t have the energy for him.
Suddenly she missed Stephen, the Stephen of the old days, whom she could have recounted her story to and who would have trusted her implicitly. And comforted her. He might not be good at other things, Stephen. But he was good at comforting.
Yet what would he have done if she had come home with Amy? That’s what she ought to have done, of course. On that very first day. Straight from the church where Amy had been handed to her. For she had been handed to her. Abandoned and paid for. She could have taken the child back to the hotel, found a large hamper, given her a sleeping pill and caught the first train home. They didn’t have those screening machines on trains, did they?
But she could no sooner have done that than she could have handed her own child over the way that wild woman had done, Tessa acknowledged. She didn’t know how to break the law. It wasn’t a question of rules particularly, she had simply never been driven to it. Nor was she any good at the irrational, the turbulent unthinking gesture. Never had been. Maybe she was just too English, too middle class, too scared for that.
Once, though, after her miscarriage, she had felt it, everything slipping out of control, her life flowing away with her blood, her baby. She had wept unstoppably. Terrible visions had taken her over: her own body floating Ophelia-like in a stream trailing a dead baby by an umbilical cord. She didn’t like to think of it anymore. She could easily then have slipped under the surface of the bath water or taken the kitchen knife to her wrists. Stephen must have known that. He hadn’t let her out of his sight. He had comforted her. He had been sweet then, had even eventually rung her mother to have her come and stay, had brought home that large and clumsy-footed bundle whom they had named, Paws.
But his explanation for everything was hormones. It was the hormones, he said, their disappearance, which were responsible for her state. Yet the knowledge that there was some secret invisible substance to blame for things made them none the easier to bear.
Tessa looked up from the slush on the pavement and stopped her steps. The windowless bulk of St Cyril’s loomed before her. Had she intended to come here? Her feet must have, she conceded. With a shiver, she walked up the short flight of stairs and pushed open the heavy door.
Incense wafted into her nostrils, more intense than it had been on that first visit. An elderly man with a long full beard and a cassock nodded at her, then returned to his arranging of chairs. Perhaps there had been a service. But now everyone was gone and once again she had the impression of a vast echoing chamber where she could hear her own breathing returned to her from the distant dome. On tiptoe she walked down the nave and found a chair half-hidden behind columns. She perched on it and gazed towards the sanc
tuary.
This is where she had sat when Amy had been thrust into her arms. Tessa relived the scene: the voice hailing her from behind, the money handed over and then the child passed in return, left there in Tessa’s arms. A sob shook her. She hastened to muffle it with her hand, caught the patriarch looking at her. She tried to give him an even glance. He nodded and disappeared through one of the openings in the iconostasis.
She would have liked to pray but she didn’t know quite how to anymore. It had been so long since she imagined a god. Then he had resembled Santa Claus with a slightly less ruddy face. She could address some invisible force, perhaps, some universal fixer who might so arrange chance as to bring Amy back to her. Or if not that, at least make her well and sound and not too terribly unhappy.
A loud creak at the door obliterated her thoughts. She sat up straighter. A man had come into the church. He looked round furtively, then walked in her direction. Tessa averted her eyes, heard only the echo of footsteps on stone. They stopped beside her. A chair scraped. A halting voice began to murmur. English. Broken. Ungrammatical. Addressing her.
‘Lady. You good lady. I watch. Watch today. Watch other day.’
Tessa looked up into a bony dark face, the eyes too large beneath the straggle of overlong hair. She had seen that face somewhere. But it was the voice that mesmerized her.
‘You want baby, lady. My cousin, she no want baby. Want baby have good home. West home. She talk lie for police. We give baby you, good lady. For money.’ He held up five long, skinny fingers. ‘Five thousand. Dollar. Okay lady? Need money.’
Tessa stared at him speechlessly, sniffed stale breath, sweat, felt her arm gripped. She pulled back, suddenly afraid of that skeletal face with its long slash of a mouth.
‘Okay lady?’ He gripped her harder. ‘You want baby. You bring money. Cash money. When?’
Suddenly he veered round, his face as alert as a startled night creature’s. He dropped her arm. From the front of the church, Tessa saw the priest emerge.
‘Okay, address,’ he muttered. He thrust a piece of grubby paper at her. ‘You come.’
Before she could say anything, he was at the front of the church, crossing himself, nodding at the priest. And then she heard the creak of the door.
The piece of paper lay crumpled in her hand. It was warm. She smoothed it out and gazed at large, childlike printing.
‘Amy,’ she thought. ‘Amy.’
-16-
__________
‘Stephen. My apologies. I am so late,’ Jan Martin closed the door of his office behind him and strode over to embrace Stephen.
‘Have you been with Simone?’
‘Mo, no, nothing quite so amusing. I have been with the police. But I’ll tell you about that later. We have so much to get through.’ He gestured towards his desk which was covered in sheets of paper bearing his small neat writing. ‘And so little time. I promised to help Eva with her maths this evening and later, there is Simone…’ He raked his hand through his hair and didn’t offer his customary smile.
Stephen was struck by how fraught his friend looked. His face was peaked, his eyes red-rimmed as if he hadn’t slept for days. His shirt needed a wash. It occurred to him that Jan might not have gone home last night after their dinner with Simone, indeed perhaps no longer had a home worth going to. He hadn’t yet seen where Jan now lived. He wondered whether there was a new woman in his life.
‘Should we give it a miss, Jan? We can take some time off from the Congress in the morning. Turn up only for the round table.’
‘Play truant, as you say. Is that permitted, for the convener? Yes. Why not, just after the opening words. An excellent idea.’ His face lit. ‘But we could make a start. You have given me a whole banquetful of new problems. No, no, don’t look unhappy. They are exciting problems.’
‘I’ll postpone my departure for a day or two.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘By the way, I took the liberty of using your phone for a few calls abroad. I had to speak to the lawyers, the office.’
Stephen rifled through his case for some papers and looked out the window for a moment. He could feel Jan’s eyes on his back.
‘Any news about our beautiful Russian thief?’ he asked softly.
‘I got hold of her friend, Natalya, at last. She claims she was away on holiday and was as surprised as I was to find Ariane gone on her return. She’s worried. She thinks Ariane is trying to keep one step ahead of her brother’s Mafia pursuers.’ Stephen straightened his tie nervously. ‘I don’t know anymore, Jan. Maybe I’ve just imagined the whole thing.’
‘I’ve never known you to be a fantasist.’ Jan looked at him shrewdly.
‘But Ariane… It’s not like her.’
‘Except perhaps about women.’ Jan’s smile teased. ‘Ariane, from my short encounter with her, struck me as above all what we now call an excellent business woman.’
‘Maybe,’ Stephen felt the gloom, which in these last days seemed to wait for him around every corner, descend on him again. ‘The trouble is only time will tell.’
‘And that is what we have least of. So we had better make ourselves busy. Come, I have made a schedule. Today we can concentrate on the basic equipment the Institute will need even to begin to replicate your research so far. Then tomorrow we can work on the technical side, look into the specific chromium compounds your protein can mop up. Which will only leave the plans for the trials. Luckily we have no shortage of rats. Or of cancer patients.’ A frown creased his brow. He shook it away with an effort.
‘I guess we’ll want to wrap the protein in a liposome to inject it?’
Stephen nodded. ‘And we’ll have to monitor the level of chromium toxicity in the rats carefully.’
Work took them over, pages of lists, until Stephen, glancing at his watch, protested that it really was time for Eva.
‘Yes, yes.’ Jan leapt up guiltily. ‘Now let me see. Somewhere here I have a fresh shirt, even perhaps a tie.’ He pulled open a cabinet drawer and gave Stephen a wry glance. ‘The joys of bachelor life, eh Stephen. Simone, who remembers me as a glowing youth will not be too pleased if I appear as an old tramp. Perhaps a shave is necessary, too.’ He brought a razor out of his desk.
Stephen watched him change. ‘And Simone, how do you find her?’
‘Simone is a pleasure. A special woman. A great lady.’
Something in his tone made Stephen look at him queerly. ‘Were you and she ever…?’ he faltered, flushed. ‘I knew you’d met in ‘68, but I didn’t suspect…’
‘Briefly. Too briefly. No, don’t be embarrassed, Stephen. It’s so long ago now. A different life. And it was a good moment, I think for both of us. Though I had no idea that Simone had kept her eye on me for all those years in between, or indeed originally mentioned me to you. Ah, the Byzantine complexity of those old secret networks.’
They were silent for a moment, brooding over the past. Jan shaved. When he finished, he looked at Stephen with a plea in his face. ‘You will come home with me now, Stephen, yes? To keep Hanka company while I see to Eva.’
‘Of course, if you like.’
They walked up the dimly-lit hill, past the old TB hospital with its tree-lined garden, past what had once been their favourite tavern. Jan was quiet. Stephen knew these brooding moments in him and waited for them to pass. He thought instead of the times they had met in that shabby, but cosy, bare-tabled bar over the years, times when it would probably have been better for Jan not to be seen with a foreigner, others when it didn’t matter. Now, the front part of the place had been subjected to an overhaul and looked like a ghastly replica of some early sixties Scandinavian bar. He knew this modernisation should please him. At home, he hardly belonged to the heritage buffs. But he wasn’t sure.
Jan’s thoughts seemed to be following a similar track. ‘You can help me with a problem, Stephen. A problem of transitions. There is a scientist I wish to invite on the new team. Josef Teige. He is a very good biochemist. The problem i
s he was a Party Member and he was demoted after ‘89, just as I was promoted. I do not think that to be a communist makes you necessarily a bad scientist. Nor was he a particularly bad communist, just an old one. Though as you know we also had a lot of bad scientists who were really apparatchiks dressed as scientists. Anyhow, the problem is that if I invite Teige, the other members of the team may object. So what should I do?’
‘If he’s really good, have him.’
‘This is what I think, too. Otherwise we just perpetuate endlessly the crime of recrimination.’ He laughed suddenly. The sound echoed through the empty streets. ‘Change is so difficult, Stephen. We think we must replace everything. But not everything can be replaced. Men’s hands are always just a little bit dirty. There are no clean sweeps.’
Stephen smiled.
‘I am mixing up your language. To tell you the truth, I am a little tired. Seeing Simone both excited and distressed me. All those years. Wasted. But I must not say that. There is my Eva. She is turning into a beautiful woman, my daughter, no? Soon I will have to become a jealous father.’
‘Very beautiful,’ Stephen murmured. He wanted to say that she had reminded him of Sonya, but he bit his lip at the inappropriateness of it.
A car drove past, its tires squelching through slush. They skirted the Dvořák house, lit up more brightly than its neighbours, its garden trimmed and tidied for tourist eyes.
‘It is the ultimate irony in a man’s life,’ Jan’s voice was suddenly strained. ‘To have to face the fact that men like yourself, rogues, will seduce your daughter. Maybe that is one of biology’s little acts of vengeance. Just wait. You will see.’
Stephen mused uncomfortably over the fact that he might never see and wondered again where Tessa had taken herself.
As they climbed the stairs to the apartment, Jan gripped Stephen’s arm and turned a taut face to him.
The Things We Do For Love Page 27
