Making Enemies (33 page)

‘He was one of the great men of our country. He gave us our language and our past. A mythical past perhaps, but something from which we can take strength. Before that, we had no roots, nothing to link us with a history we could proclaim, only generations of peasants working the land. Not very inspiring. With those stories he told us who we were. It was a moral liberation.’

Her pride in her country and her eagerness to tell me its history reminded me of our night walks around a winter-dark Helsinki, but the sense of elation I had experienced so strongly then was missing now.

‘What is it?’ Tanya asked. ‘Why are you so silent?’

I could restrain myself no longer. ‘Tell me about Matti Sigrin.’

I regretted it the moment I said his name but it was too late. I had spoken the words I should have buried for ever.

‘He was someone I knew once.’ She let go of my arm and walked on beside me. ‘An old friend. You have old friends, don’t you?’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘Oh, Danny.’

She threw her head back, drawing her hair tight against her skull with both hands and slowly pulling backwards until her hair was released and it fell over her face again.

I heard the beating of my own heart, I felt the pressure of jealousy and anger about a past which I had no right to ask about. She was giving me a last chance to stop before it was too late, time to change my mind, but I ignored her.

‘Tell me,’ I said, careless of the damage I was doing.

The expression on her face changed but at that moment I did not understand the reason why. ‘Matti Sigrin was once my teacher. Then he was my lover. Then he was neither my teacher nor my lover. That is all I want to tell you, but it will not be enough, will it?’

She had folded her arms and was holding her elbows tightly.

‘We met in my first week at university. I was very young, little more than eighteen. I had never met anyone like him before. He was so much more certain about everything than the boys I knew because he was so much older. For a time he obsessed me – I would have done anything for him, married him, lived with him, gone to the ends of the earth for him. But slowly, perhaps with his help, I grew up. I saw myself more clearly, I saw him more clearly too. He was no longer a god I worshipped but a man who was good but not that good, who could disguise his selfishness so cleverly but who was selfish. I knew he had a wife and children but I had never thought about them, only about myself and him. Then one day I saw them together, laughing and happy, eating in a restaurant, and I knew that I was the one deceived, and the truth was that I had deceived myself. It was a very painful moment. I went back to my room and cried. I tried to stop seeing him, but he was persuasive, clever. He told me he loved me. He wanted me to take him back. I hated myself for it but I did.’

There were tears in her eyes now and her face was drawn. I wanted to stop her but I knew that if I tried, she would push me away. I had to wait until she had told me everything.

‘When a love affair ends, why do you think you will never fall in love again? I was afraid of being unloved, that is why I took him back and stayed with him until the war broke out, when I left Helsinki to look after the wounded soldiers at the front. That was my chance to leave him and I took it. He wrote to me again
and again, he told me how much he needed me, he promised to leave his wife if only I would return to him. I never answered his letters.’

She wiped her eyes but the tears kept falling.

‘The years went by. The letters stopped. I had almost forgotten about him. Then last summer I met him again. He had aged. His hair which once had been blond and thick was grey and thinning now. The laughter that I had once loved so much was gone. In the years we had been apart he had lost so much. His wife had left him, one of his sons had been killed in Karelia, the other had gone to live in America. I was all he had left, his memories of our happiness together. We went to the island together. I felt sorry for him. That was all.

‘One evening, a week after you had left Helsinki, Matti came round to my apartment to beg me to come back to him. I told him it was impossible. I said I had found the love that I always wanted. I was happy. My life was closed to him now. He wouldn’t accept that at first. Then I told him that the marks he had made on me, which once had been so strong, were now barely visible. Soon there would be nothing left at all. That was when he accepted that I was telling the truth.’

She took my hand.

‘That was the moment when I wanted you most. I had made a declaration of my love for you, but to another man. Now I wanted to make the same declaration to you. But you were not there. I was very sad. I wondered where you were, what you were doing, whom you were with. I wanted so much to tell you, not everything I have told you now, but enough for you to know that I am yours and no one else’s, and I always will be.’

She had told me so much but not the secrets I wanted to know. Had she taken off her clothes and swum naked in the sea? Had he watched her in the half-light, water falling off her soft brown skin like diamonds? Had he reached for her hand in the cold of the night and had she let him into her bed because she felt sorry for him? Whatever Tanya said the questions remained, the ghosts of an imagined past haunting me, destroying the present and my happiness. My obsession was forcing me to make an enemy of the woman I loved.

*

The telephone rang.

‘May I speak to Mr Stevens?’ It was a woman’s voice, hesitant and deeply accented.

‘Speaking.’

‘I am Ruth Marchenko. You are Goffrey’s son?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have found you. Good.’ It sounded as if she was reading from a badly written script. ‘I would like to arrange a meeting with you.’

‘With my father.’

‘No, first I wish to see you, please.’

‘When do you suggest?’

‘I have not much time. This morning?’

‘Very well. Where?’

She gave me an address. ‘There is a garden opposite. Please meet me there in half an hour.’

‘How will I recognise you?’

She laughed at that. ‘I have grey hair,’ she said. ‘I am small and I am Russian.’

She was right. I recognized her at once. She was a small woman, her long grey hair drawn back from her face in a bun. She wore glasses and a shapeless cotton dress.

‘There is a bench,’ she said. ‘Let us sit and talk for a moment.’ She looked nervously around her.

‘Were you followed?’ I asked.

‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘They will want to make sure I speak to you.’

She tried to make light of it but I could see in her expression that she was afraid.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I asked myself the question you asked me. How will I know you are Geoffrey’s son? But there is no question, is there? You look so like him.’

Her skin was fair and unlined and she had dazzling blue eyes. There was a kind of simplicity in her expression, a lack of guile, that I took to instantly. She was not a beautiful woman. But there was something about her, a vigour that was enchanting. I wondered what my father had thought of her all those years ago, whether he too had felt the power of her attraction.

‘Has your father arrived in Helsinki?’

‘Yes.’

‘We have arranged to meet. Perhaps he has told you that.’

‘Yes,’ I lied. There was no point in telling her that my father didn’t even know of my presence in Helsinki.

‘This is the address.’ She took a piece of paper from her handbag. ‘Please ask him to be there tonight.’

That was twenty-four hours sooner than Monty had anticipated. I had very little time in which to change my father’s mind and at that moment I had no idea where he was.

‘What time?’

‘Nine o’clock.’ She stood up. ‘Thank you.’

‘I have some questions,’ I said.

‘I can say nothing.’ Once more I saw the fear in her eyes and the furtive look over my shoulder. ‘You must know that.’

‘Why do you want to meet my father?’

‘Please. I cannot stay.’

She tried to walk away but I held her by the wrist.

‘Five minutes,’ I said. ‘That’s all the time I need.’

‘I cannot say anything in five minutes.’

‘Then answer my question.’

She stared at me. ‘If you are here to stop him seeing me, then you must break the promises you have made. Your father will come to no harm. I promise that. But I must see him. I cannot tell you why but we must meet. You must let that happen.’

‘Will you be alone tonight?’ She had started to walk away. ‘Will there be others with you when you meet my father?’

‘In our country,’ she said quietly, standing close to me, ‘we are never alone. But we are used to that. Tell your father not to be afraid. He will come to no harm. I give you my promise. But please, bring him to me tonight. I am sorry. I have no more time now. You look so like Geoffrey. I could never have mistaken you for someone else.’

*

Through binoculars, I watched the main steps leading up to the glass doors of the science labs. For an hour or more there had been no movement, except for a woman carrying a bowl of flowers down to a waiting delivery van. Now there was a flurry of activity as the doors burst open and the delegates emerged from the lecture hall and began to disperse for the day. After twenty minutes I caught sight of my father. He lingered on the top steps for a time, talking and laughing, then linked arms with an elderly white-haired man
and together they walked down the steps to the street. I saw him stop, take out a pocketbook, write something in it, nod to his acquaintance, shake hands and set off towards the centre of Helsinki.

I caught up with him within a couple of minutes.

‘Father.’

‘Good God! What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve been speaking to a friend of yours. Someone from your past who’s looking forward to seeing you. Ruth Marchenko.’

‘How do you know about her?’ He looked shocked.

‘Monty Lybrand gave me an introduction.’

‘Are you working for Monty now?’

I could have been talking to a stranger. My father had not shaken my hand or greeted me in any way. He looked as if he had been trapped and was frantically searching for a means of escape.

This was a situation beyond his experience and he had no idea how to cope with it. I felt a moment’s sympathy for him. I must have been the last person he was expecting to meet in Helsinki.

‘We can’t stand here in the street,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere where we can have a drink.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Ruth says your meeting’s fixed for nine tonight. She’s given me the address.’

‘Let’s get a drink.’

I led my father silently through the crowds to the Esplanadie. We sat at a table in the open air and drank beer. In the bandstand naval musicians from one of the visiting Soviet warships were playing Russian folk songs. A young sailor with a wonderfully deep voice was singing of disappointed love. At the front of the audience two young girls held flowers and gazed up at the singer. It was early evening and the heat of the afternoon had not yet dispersed. My father removed his jacket and loosened his tie. There were beads of sweat on his brow.

‘What does Monty know about Marchenko?’

There was an anger in his voice which told me he’d been shaken not just by my presence but by Monty’s involvement in all this.

‘He said your reason for coming to Helsinki was to meet her.’

‘How does he know that?’

‘He’s paid to know things people don’t want him to know. He doesn’t tell me where he gets his information from.’

‘Has he sent you to spy on me?’ he asked bitterly.

‘I’m here to help you.’

‘I don’t need help. Yours or anyone else’s. God knows what you’re doing here but I wish you weren’t.’

All his years of enmity towards me, of disappointed hopes, of breakdowns and false starts in our relationship were brought together in that single sentence. He told me what both of us had known for so long but never dared say to each other. I was not the son he wanted, nor he the father I needed; he did not know me nor I him. We were strangers to each other and would most likely remain so. It was a frightening admission of the truth that we had always avoided. The summer air cooled suddenly around me and I shivered.

There was a burst of clapping as the Russian sailor ended his song. He bowed shyly to his audience. The two girls ran forward and gave him their flowers, kissing him as he bent down to take them. The young sailor looked embarrassed and uncertain, the colour in his cheeks rose and he hurried off the dais. There was laughter and more clapping, and calls for him to return to sing again. The sounds of people around us enjoying themselves defused the awful moment.

How our lives are balanced on chance. If the song had not ended when it did, what might we have said or done that we regretted later? We had confronted each other for a moment but we had drawn back from open hostility. We remained trapped, as we always had been, in a long cold war.

‘Tell me about Marchenko,’ I said.

‘Why?’

I chose to ignore the aggression in his voice as he struggled to build his defence.

‘Why are you meeting her here?’

‘She said she was going to be at this conference and suggested we meet.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘We haven’t seen each other for years.’

‘What’s the meeting about?’

‘You can tell Monty it’s a reunion. A meeting of old friends. Nothing more sinister than that.’

I went to get him another drink. When I returned he said, ‘I met Ruth Marchenko years ago, in the Netherlands. We were working in the same field. We corresponded a bit over the years, then the war came and I heard nothing more from her. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, she got in touch again.’

‘You can’t believe Marchenko made contact out of the goodness of her heart,’ I said, trying to keep my temper. ‘Nor is she here on
her own. You may not be able to see her puppetmasters but they follow her wherever she goes. I don’t know of anyone who’d accept this meeting as simply a reunion between old friends.’

Except you, was the implication. I wondered if he could hear what I hadn’t said.

‘Ruth would never get involved with people like that.’