Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  The ambassador sat back and rocked forward, patting his pocket as if searching for something – a sure sign of an ex-smoker. Tom knew the feeling. He wanted a cigarette too. And a drink. It was two days since he’d had either.

  ‘I just wanted her found,’ Tom said.

  The ambassador was out of his chair before Mary could move.

  Then she was moving too and came to stand very close beside Sir Edward, but not quite touching. She’d fallen into a fighting stance without even thinking about it and her gaze was on Tom. It said: Don’t move. And Tom did what he was told.

  ‘You know nothing about me,’ Sir Edward said. ‘Nothing about my marriage. Nothing about Anna’s life before we met. Nothing about how we started. You have no idea how much Alex means to me …’

  ‘Sir,’ Mary said.

  Sir Edward sat with as much gravity as he could manage.

  ‘Get this idiot out of here,’ he said. ‘Arrange with London to send him back early. Meanwhile, he’s to keep to his flat and write that damn report. At the end of which, he goes home and good riddance. Take back his embassy pass. Have his post delivered to the foreigners’ block. Make sure I don’t see him here again.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Mary promised.

  45

  Talking to Owls

  Sometimes you lose a piece of yourself. Sometimes someone steals it. She couldn’t take back what was taken. But she could still take what had taken it. Wax Angel’s logic wasn’t the world’s. The world’s logic was safe and cowering and servile. She couldn’t expect everybody to be as clear-eyed as she was.

  The bus driver was reluctant to let her on board. Even more so when he realized she didn’t have the money for a ticket. So she told him she’d fought in the Great Patriotic War so that little brats like him would have a future and if she’d known she would be treated like this, she wouldn’t have bothered. He asked – very rudely, she thought – what she’d done in the war. Cooked, cleaned, encouraged the troops from the safety of a mattress?

  She told him she’d been a sniper in Stalingrad.

  She’d shot five German officers in four days, one of them a colonel.

  While his own father or grandfather had probably been thieving from the shops or complaining that he couldn’t march because his feet hurt, she’d been eating rats in ruined factories, wrapped in sacks for camouflage and to keep warm, and she’d been happy to do it, grateful for the opportunity.

  The little shit would still have made her get off, but by now everyone over sixty was nodding and looking serious; some were watery-eyed and the driver had more sense than to push it. He’d let her travel to the next town and when she shambled down the aisle to disembark at the concrete block that passed for its coach station, an old man in a nice coat who was going further stood up and stopped her.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  He tried to push fifty roubles into her hand.

  When she shook her head, he insisted.

  She’d looked at him.

  ‘I was there.’

  He was too. She could see it in his eyes.

  He didn’t seem surprised when she kissed his cheek. Simply put his hand up to touch the spot. It was fine, kissing his cheek like that. Quite possibly they’d known each other at some time.

  The next bus driver had looked at her doubtfully but she’d told him she was on her way to see her grandchildren and waved the fifty-rouble note at him. He couldn’t change it but he let her get on the bus anyway. You were hardly going to refuse someone travelling with a fifty-rouble note, were you?

  It took her longer than she had thought it would to travel the distance.

  All of it she did by bus, except for the last stretch where she begged a ride with a lorry delivering fridges. They were large and smart and white. Odd, really. In her memory, fridges were tallow yellow.

  The driver assured her that these ones even worked. Mostly.

  The last few miles were the most complicated. She was tired and hungry and felt as if she’d been travelling for days. It didn’t help that she got lost, which forced her to retrace her steps back to a wretched small-town bus station. She got the right coach this time though, one that delivered her to the village where she got the lift with the lorry. The driver gave her coffee and shared his packed lunch, and though he opened the windows when she began to sweat a little under her rags, he did it casually, as if he simply needed air. She liked him.

  Even if he did lie about his fridges.

  She liked the crows by the roadside too. She’d always liked crows. They were so uncomplicated. They never minded what colour uniform anyone wore. Sometimes, they’d start trying to eat people before they were dead, but they were always apologetic when that happened. And they’d flap away like sharp black knives and wait until their meals were ready.

  In the end, Wax Angel decided that it would be a good idea to rest so she curled up in the hollow of some tree roots a mile from where she needed to be, wrapped her rags around her so tightly they looked like leaves or feathers and fell asleep. A bear shuffled out of the trees in the hours that followed, stopped to sniff her, nudged her once or twice and went on his way.

  A squirrel settled in the oak above without really noticing she was there. An owl came later and Wax Angel’s sleep was filled with dreams of her husband and memories of childhood walks in the woods behind the dacha at sunset.

  At dawn, she woke to thin sunshine through the firs and the huge-eyed, half-blind gaze of an owl up past its bedtime. It blinked once as it looked at her and flew away, quickly lost in the trees. Sighing, the old woman dipped into her pocket for a tiny angel, which she gave owl’s eyes and placed where she’d slept. When it came to collecting debts, it was always best to have paid your own.

  Then, with her back against a different tree, she reached again into her pocket, for a sharpening stone and a knife, spat once on the blade and again on the stone and began to get the best edge she could. There was something she needed to do. It was so long overdue she’d stopped imagining she’d ever do it. But there were circles to square and ends to tie, and all the other things her husband used to say, when he was still her husband and she was still somebody’s wife.

  They’d had a daughter. She’d died young.

  Very young. But not before having a daughter of her own.

  Her husband had brought up the grandchild and done a good job of it.

  And even if he’d lost his own wife to the camps, and taken so long to find her she could no longer bear to be with him, or anyone really, girls needed mothers and Sveta should have had a mother of her own, instead of fading photographs of a beautiful blonde girl who killed herself before she was out of her teens.

  It was noon before the sun rose high enough above the firs to glint off the blade Wax Angel had sharpened until it could cut cold air. The sun’s position reminded her to eat, although she had to scrape a lot of snow away from a lot of tree trunks before she found anything worth eating. When that was done, she pushed herself to her feet, looked for signs of life and saw only the tracks of a bear. There would be men later, close to where she needed to go. There were always men. They always overestimated their abilities.

  They always underestimated hers.

  She was right about that. There were men, and they did overestimate their abilities. She slipped between the trees, silent and fluttering, and not one of them saw her coming. Not one of them lived to tell the tale after she’d gone.

  46

  At the Hotel National

  ‘Tom!’

  He was outside the arrival doors at Sheremetyevo T2 and looking, in vain, for a familiar face in a crowd of tourists just disembarked from Aeroflot flight 298 from London when he heard Caro calling his name.

  Turning, he saw her lugging her huge pigskin case, which he took from her without thinking. They kissed each other’s cheeks, briefly, perfunctorily. The way strangers kiss.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Caro asked.

  More to the point, Tom thought, what ar
e you doing here? All he said, though, was, ‘Meeting your flight, obviously.’

  ‘You didn’t call to say you got my message.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve only just found the bloody thing …’ Holding up his hand in apology, Tom said, ‘I got back to my flat late last night and only noticed the message in my pigeonhole this morning. I came straight out.’

  ‘I called your concierge.’

  ‘My concierge?’

  ‘Whoever answers your central telephone.’

  ‘She spoke English?’

  ‘Perfect English.’

  ‘Still using this, I see.’ He nodded at the suitcase Caro had owned long before they ever met. It was battered, built round a wooden frame and wilfully old-fashioned. It was my great aunt’s, she’d said crossly, the one time he had suggested replacing it.

  ‘I like it.’

  Tom smiled despite himself. ‘I know.’

  ‘The taxi sign says that way.’

  ‘I have a car waiting,’ Tom said.

  His wife looked as she always did: elegant and polished and beautiful. Tourists on their way out of Sheremetyevo glanced across instinctively, the women to examine her Jaeger coat, the men the figure it covered. Her expression as she clocked Tom’s unshaven state was unreadable.

  ‘Caro, what are you doing in Moscow?’

  She hesitated, only for a second. ‘I’ve brought the forms.’

  ‘Your father already sent me a set.’

  ‘He said you’d probably torn them up. He arranged my flight. The Foreign Office expedited my visa.’ Of course they did. Papa had contacts. His son-in-law’s lack of them was one of the things he’d always disliked about Tom. That and getting his daughter pregnant. ‘Also, I thought you might show me round.’

  ‘You thought I might …?’

  ‘Moscow’s one of the few places I’ve never been. It was Mummy’s suggestion. She thought we could talk about Charlie, sort out who has him for holidays and half-terms, who pays what. She thought we should try to be civilized about it. You want to know why I’m here? That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to be civilized.’

  ‘Caro …’

  ‘I know you don’t like them. Okay? I know. But we could. You know. Be civilized about it.’

  ‘I have to leave Moscow first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s rotten.’

  ‘I’m not being horrid. What hotel did Intourist assign you?’

  ‘The National.’

  Of course … What else?

  ‘The car’s out here.’

  A huge car park sprawled in front of Sheremetyevo’s concrete and glass building. Flagpoles fat enough to be missiles jutted from the tarmac, and grass beds marked the edges of the parking area. This being Moscow, there were more spaces than cars and the gaps made the car park look bigger than it was.

  ‘Over there,’ Tom said.

  The stallholder from the market by the flyover who’d taken Tom to the embassy was already climbing from his vehicle. Only instead of his filthy Niva half-truck, this time he drove a black Volga with chrome bumpers and fins so exaggerated they belonged in a fifties film. Grinning at the sight of Caro, the man snapped out a ragged salute. ‘Nice,’ he said. Luckily, he said it in Russian.

  ‘The National,’ Tom told him.

  The back seat was so worn its leatherette had cracked to reveal canvas beneath, and someone had patched the footwell with squares of office carpet. An acrylic vase glued to the dashboard held a faded plastic rose.

  ‘It’s not the Merc, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Sold it,’ said Caro. ‘I drive a Mini these days.’

  Tom was too shocked to reply.

  ‘Solidarity,’ Caro said, a word he’d never thought to hear from her lips. Catching his look, she hesitated on the edge of saying more, then said it anyway, her eyes misting. ‘I bought a white one first. The garage were kind. They let me change it.’

  ‘Caro …’

  She flapped her hands in front of her face in a way that was quite unlike her, dismissing the tears that threatened to fall, dismissing the sentiment, dismissing everything except a need to stare straight ahead without blinking.

  Dear God, how hard must that have been? Tom thought of her coming down in the morning and seeing a white Mini where Becca used to park. Because he’d bet she’d parked there too. How long did Caro last before she begged the garage to take it back?

  He wouldn’t have lasted a day.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a minute later when the threat of tears was behind her and they were on one of those twisting and chaotic under-signposted and over-complicated new routes out of Sheremetyevo and back to the city.

  ‘Caro, it doesn’t matter.’

  Her silence said it did.

  He thought of the two-seater 300SL, her family home outside Winchester and the softly rolling hills beyond, the roads that were so familiar she drove them from instinct, taking corners faster than was safe for anyone not born knowing the bends. She’d grown up there. Well, in the holidays. The rest of the year she’d boarded.

  She rode her pony through the woods. Kissed her first boy against the witch tree. Went up Chalk Hunt a virgin and came down something else, something very else according to her mother when she found out.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Caro asked.

  ‘The witch tree.’

  She smiled sadly.

  ‘Turn of the century,’ he told her, as they approached the hotel. ‘Shelled during the Revolution. Lenin ran his government out of here briefly. Very briefly. It was derelict by the thirties, renovated in the forties. Most of its furniture was stolen from pre-Revolutionary mansions. Some of it belonged to the Tsar.’

  ‘You should have been a history master.’

  ‘Might have been happier.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tom said.

  ‘Don’t be. That’s probably the truth of it.’

  He went in with Caro to explain, in Russian, that he was her husband and worked at the embassy, but she lived in England where their son was … This was enough for the girl at the desk to let them through. Getting past the deshurnaya by the lift on Caro’s floor was harder.

  ‘Your pass books?’

  This one was younger than most of the women who kept the keys for the doors of the hotel floors they guarded, but no less hard-eyed. She took the pass book Caro had been given in reception and satisfied herself that Caro was a legitimate guest.

  ‘And yours?’

  Lacking his embassy pass, Tom offered his military pass instead, adding his passport when the woman scowled.

  ‘Propusk,’ she demanded.

  Tom shook his head, switching to Russian to repeat what he’d said downstairs. Caro was his wife. Their boy was back home.

  When the woman waved her finger, Tom produced his wallet, dug into one of its side pockets and pulled out a snapshot taken when they had just begun. He wore a black biker’s jacket over a white T-shirt, Caro a pair of 501s and his blue jersey.

  ‘That’s us,’ he said.

  Taking it by the edges, the woman peered at it suspiciously.

  ‘This is our son.’ Tom offered her a photograph of Charlie taken when he was four. He sat, small and serious, in the bucket seat of a rusting Massey Ferguson, red gumboots dangling. He looked uncannily like a Soviet poster of a young pioneer.

  When Tom looked across at her, Caro was biting her lip.

  ‘You work at your embassy?’ the woman asked.

  ‘For my sins,’ Tom said.

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Lives at home.’

  The deshurnaya watched impassively as Tom returned the tiny photographs to his wallet. She didn’t say he could go to Caro’s room but she didn’t stop him either …

  ‘Where are the forms?’ Tom asked the moment they were through the door.

  Her body stiffened. ‘In my case.’

  ‘Would you mind if I signed them now?’

  She did a double take, and Tom sh
rugged apologetically. He wasn’t sure why, they were her forms after all. ‘I’d like to get it over with.’

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she said at last.

  The petition for divorce was handwritten in all the right boxes, signed by Caro but not yet dated. They had one child according to this.

  Name: Charles William Augustus.

  Age: 7.

  DOB: 18.11.78.

  Their wedding certificate was attached to the form. They’d married in the village church – Caro’s choice. They’d had a bishop do it. That choice – her mother’s.

  Tom had the Mont Blanc she’d given him one Christmas in his jacket, in the little leather case she’d bought at the same time; she said nothing as he unscrewed its lid, tapped the barrel and ran the nib over a scrap of hotel paper. Having checked his pen had ink, Tom signed, before adding the date. When he looked up, Caro was crying, silent tears dripping from her chin.

  ‘Caro …’

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  She left her own room, abandoning Tom to silence and the newly signed forms. His signature on the wedding certificate was much the same. Hers was smaller and neater and more childish than he remembered.

  Caro’s teacup was empty and Tom’s still upside down on its saucer when he found her in the tea rooms. She’d chosen a table in a corner, behind a pillar and almost out of sight. ‘I’ll order another pot.’

  ‘This is fine.’

  She ordered a fresh pot anyway.

  ‘I thought …’ She stopped. ‘I thought, if you didn’t mind, you could write to Charlie at school and say Mummy came to see me. We had tea and went for a walk. That sort of thing. It might help,’ she added quickly, ‘if he knows we’re friends.’

  ‘He’s having trouble?’

  ‘Unsettled. That’s what Matron said.’

  She sat back and sipped her tea, thoughts playing across her face like notes of an unheard piece of music.

  ‘You remember Liz Sheridan?’ she said suddenly.