The House of Special Purpose (13 page)

In the late autumn of 1970, however, shortly after my seventy-first birthday, I was seated at my usual desk one afternoon when I saw a woman – some thirty years my junior – I guessed, standing by one of the bookshelves, pretending to examine the titles when it was perfectly clear that she had no interest in them at all, but was intent on watching me. I didn’t think too much of it at the time; she was probably lost in her own thoughts, I decided, and unaware that she was staring in my direction. I went back to my book and thought no more about it.

I noticed her again the following afternoon, however, when she sat at a desk three seats along from my own and I caught her glancing at me when she thought that I wasn’t paying attention, and I confess, I began to find the experience both unsettling and annoying. Had I been a younger man, perhaps I would have thought that the woman was in some way attracted to me, but there was no possibility of that in this instance. I had entered my eighth decade, after all. What little hair remained on my head exposed a bumpy, speckled skull beneath. My teeth were my own, and remained passably white, but they added nothing to my smile, as they might have done when I was a younger man. And while my mobility had not been too badly impaired by ageing, I nevertheless had begun to employ the services of a fine Malacca cane, the better to ensure a steady balance as I walked to and from the library every day. In short, I was no matinée idol and certainly not a figure of desire for a woman half my age.

I considered moving seats, but decided against it. I had been sitting in that same place every afternoon for the previous five years, after all. The light was good, which assisted my reading, as my eyesight was not quite as perceptive as it had once been. Also, it was peaceful there, for I was surrounded by bookshelves that contained such unpopular subjects that few people ever disturbed
me. Why should I move? Let her move, I decided. This is my place.

She left shortly after that, but not before hesitating as she passed me, as if there was something she wanted to say, but then thought better of it and moved on.

‘You seem distracted,’ Zoya said to me that night as we were preparing for bed. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, smiling at her, unwilling to go into the problem in any detail with her lest she thought I was imagining things and losing my mind. ‘It’s nothing. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.’

Still, I lay awake that night, fretting about what this woman wanted with me. Thirty years before, even twenty, such a visitation would have filled me with paranoid fantasies about who had sent her to spy on me, what they wanted, whether they were looking for Zoya too, but this was 1970. Those days had long since passed. I could think of no sensible reason for her interest in me and began to worry that she was not in fact the same woman I had seen before, or that I had imagined her entirely and senility was setting in.

That worry was put to rest the following day when I arrived at the library shortly after lunchtime, only to see the lady standing outside next to the great stone lions, wrapped up tightly in a dark, heavy overcoat, and she tensed noticeably when she saw me walking along the street towards her.

In return, I frowned and felt immediately nervous. I knew that she was going to speak to me, but thought that if I simply walked past her without an acknowledgement, then she might leave me in peace. For by now, I knew exactly who she was. It was perfectly obvious. I had never laid eyes on her before she started coming to the library – I hadn’t wanted to – but now here she was, confronting me, which was a presumption in itself.

Walk on
, I told myself.
Ignore her, Georgy. Say nothing
.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ she said as I approached her and I lifted my gloved hand a little in the air and gave her a half-smile and nod
as I passed by, realizing as I did so that I truly had become old. This was the action of an elderly man, a royal personage passing by in a gilded carriage. It put me in mind of the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich offering a benediction to the gathered crowd as he paraded his horse through the streets of Kashin, ignorant of the dangers that lay ahead. ‘Mr Jachmenev, I’m sorry, could I have a word—’

‘I have to go inside,’ I said, muttering the words quickly as I hurried on, determined not to allow any contemporary Kolek to take aim at me. ‘I have a lot of work to do today, I’m afraid.’

‘It won’t take long,’ she said, and I could see her eyes welling up with tears as she stepped in front of me, blocking my way. She was nervous too, that was obvious from her expression, and the way her hands trembled could not entirely be ascribed to the cold weather. ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I had to. I just had to.’

‘No,’ I muttered under my breath, shaking my head, unwilling to look at her. ‘No, please …’

‘Mr Jachmenev, if you tell me to go, then I’ll do as you say and I promise I’ll leave you in peace, but all I’m asking for is a few minutes of your time. Perhaps you’d let me buy you a cup of tea, that’s all. I know I have no right to ask anything of you, I know that, but please. I beg of you. If you can find it in your heart …’

Her words trailed off as the tears came and I was forced to look at her now, feeling the great ache in my heart, that terrible pain that came upon me at the most unexpected moments of the day, times when I wasn’t even thinking about what had happened. Moments when I hated her so much that I wanted to find her myself, to wrap my ancient hands around her throat and watch her expression as I squeezed the life out of her.

But now she had found me. And here she was, offering to buy me a cup of tea.

‘Please, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said and I opened my mouth to answer her, but heard nothing but a great cry of anger emerge from within, a mere fragment of the pain and suffering that she
had caused me and that was twisted around my soul as tightly as any of my great secrets or torments.

We had waited so long to have a child. We had suffered so many disappointments. And then one day, there she was. Our healthy Arina, who it was impossible not to love.

When she was first born, Zoya and I would lay her down on the centre of our bed and sit on either side of her, smiling like people who had been touched by the moon. We’d place her feet in the palms of our hands, marvelling at how happy she was, astonished that we had finally been blessed in this way.

‘It means
peace
,’ we said when anyone asked us why we had chosen her name, and that was what she brought to us: peace, the satisfaction of parenthood. When she cried, we thought it shocking that someone so small could produce so musical a sound. For me, returning every day from the library, I could barely stop myself from breaking into a run as I walked along the street, so anxious was I to arrive home and see the look on her face when I stepped through the door, that expression that told me that she might have forgotten about me over the previous eight hours, but here I was, and she remembered me, and how good it was to see me again.

Growing up, she was no more or less difficult than any other child; she did well at school, neither excelling at her studies nor giving cause for concern. She married young – too young, I had thought at the time – but the marriage was a happy one. Whether or not she faced similar difficulties to the ones her mother and I had faced I do not know, but it was seven years before she sat down before us, taking our hands in hers, to tell us that we were to become grandparents. Michael was born and his presence in a room was a constant joy. One evening over dinner, she mentioned that she would like to give him a younger brother or sister. Not immediately, but soon. And we were thrilled by the news, for we liked the idea of a house filled with visiting grandchildren.

And then she died.

Arina was thirty-six when she was taken from us. She worked as a teacher in a school near Battersea Park and late one afternoon, as she was walking home along the Albert Bridge Road, the wind took her hat and she ran out into the path of oncoming traffic without looking left or right and was hit by a car. As difficult as it is to admit, it was entirely her fault. There was no possibility that the car could have avoided her. Of course we had taught her to take care when running on to roads, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know that, but which of us does not get caught up in a moment and forget the things we have been taught? Arina’s hat was blown off her head; she wanted it back. It was a simple thing that happened. And she died of it.

The first that Zoya or I knew of the accident was later that evening, when there was an unexpected knock on our front door. I opened it to see a pale young man standing outside, a man I half recognized but could not immediately place. He wore an anxious expression on his face, almost frightened, and was holding a brown cloth cap in his hands, which he passed between his fingers constantly. I didn’t know why, but it was something I focussed on increasingly as he talked. His hands were quite bony, the skin almost transparent, not dissimilar to how my own hands had aged, although I was forty years older than him. I watched them as he talked, perhaps to keep myself steady, for there was something in his expression that suggested I would not like what he had come here to say.

‘Mr Jachmenev?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know if you remember me, sir. I’m David Frasier.’

I stared at him and hesitated, uncertain who he was, but Zoya appeared behind me before I had a chance to embarrass myself.

‘David,’ she said. ‘What on earth brings you over here this evening? Georgy, you remember Ralph’s friend, don’t you? From the wedding?’

‘Of course, of course,’ I said, recalling him now. Drunk, he had attempted to perform the Hopak dance, arms folded, kicking his feet out while trying to keep his body upright. He thought it was a symbol of unity, a mark of respect to his hosts, and I didn’t like to tell him that it was little more than an exercise to warm the body before battle.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ he said, his face betraying his anxiety. ‘Mrs Jachmenev. Ralph sent me round. He asked me to get you.’

‘To get us?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean,
to get us
? What have we done to him?’

‘Ralph did?’ asked Zoya, ignoring me, the smile fading from her face a little. ‘Why? What’s happened? Is it Michael? Arina?’

‘There’s been an accident,’ he said quickly. ‘Now hopefully it’s not too serious. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, I’m afraid. It’s Arina. She was on her way back from school. A car hit her.’

It occurred to me that he was talking in short, staccato-like sentences and I wondered whether it was his natural mode of speech. His diction was like gunfire. That’s what I was thinking of as he spoke. Gunfire. Soldiers on the Front. Lines of boys, English, German, French, Russian, side by side, shooting at everything that stood before them, taking each other’s lives without realizing their victims were young men just like them, whose return home was anxiously awaited by sleepless parents. The images floated through my mind. Violence. I focussed entirely on this. I didn’t want to listen to what he was saying. I didn’t want to hear the words that this man, this fellow who claimed he had been sent to get us, this boy who dared to suggest that he knew my daughter, was uttering. If I don’t listen, I thought, then it won’t have happened. If I don’t listen. If I think of something else entirely.

‘Where?’ Zoya asked. ‘When did it happen?’

‘A couple of hours ago,’ he said, and I couldn’t help but hear him now. ‘Somewhere near Battersea, I think. She’s been taken to hospital. I think she’s all right. I don’t think it’s too serious. But I’ve got Ralph’s car outside. He asked me to collect you.’

Zoya pushed past him and out of the door, running up the steps towards the car, as if she would have happily left for the hospital without either of us, ignoring the fact that we needed Mr Frasier to drive us there. I stayed where I was, feeling a certain numbness in my legs and a giddiness in my stomach, and the room began to sway a little.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ said the young man, stepping towards me with one hand outstretched as if he might need to act as my balance. ‘Mr Jachmenev, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, boy,’ I snapped, turning and making for the door too. ‘Come on. If you’re to take us there, then for pity’s sake let’s go.’

The drive was a difficult one. The traffic was heavy and it took us almost forty minutes to make our way from our Holborn flat to the hospital. Throughout the journey, Zoya peppered the young man with questions, while I sat in the back of the car, silent as a mouse, listening, refusing to speak.

‘You think she’s all right?’ Zoya asked. ‘Why do you think that? Did Ralph say that?’

‘I think so,’ he said, sounding more and more as if he wished he was somewhere else entirely. ‘He phoned me at work. I’m not far from the hospital, you see. He told me where he was, asked me to meet him at the reception desk immediately and to take my car and to come and find you both.’

‘But what did he say?’ asked Zoya, a note of aggression entering her tone. ‘Tell me exactly. Did he say she was going to be all right?’

‘He said she’d been in an accident. I asked whether she was all right and he sort of snapped at me. He said
Yes, yes, she’ll be fine, but you’ve got to fetch her parents for me right away
.’

‘He said she’d be fine?’

‘I think so,’ said Mr Frasier. I could hear the note of panic in his voice. He didn’t want to say anything that he thought he shouldn’t say. He didn’t want to give false information. Offer hope where there was none. Suggest that we prepare ourselves when there was no need. But he had something that we had not
and I could tell from his voice what it meant. He had seen Ralph. He had seen the look on Ralph’s face when he’d collected the keys for the car.

Arriving at the hospital, we ran towards the reception desk and were immediately directed along a short corridor and up a flight of stairs. Looking left and right at the top we heard a voice calling our names –
Grandma! Grandpa!
– and then young feet, our Michael, only nine years old, running towards us, arms outstretched, his face bleached with tears.