The Kirilov Star (13 page)

Sir Edward would not dislike it any more than he would, Alex decided, but for different reasons. But it would not stop him trying to rescue her from her own folly.

‘Push, for goodness’ sake,’ Olga said. ‘It’ll never be born if you don’t do something to help yourself.’

Lydia grunted through the pain and tried to do as she was told. It was Good Friday, a day of suffering and mourning in the Christian calendar, but she did not think anyone in Russia commemorated the fact, unless it was secretly. She should have been eagerly looking forward to the birth of her child, buying baby clothes, shawls, nappies, a cot and a pram, deciding on names. But it hadn’t been like that. The moment she realised a baby was on the way, she knew her hope of returning to England in the foreseeable future had faded to nothing. She didn’t want this child. She had hated the lump growing inside her all through the months of pregnancy. The bump was a symbol of her folly and there was no going back, no undoing what had been done. She felt trapped.

To make matters worse, the love she thought Kolya had for her had turned out to be nothing more than a delusion.
His political loyalties seemed to change with the wind and she never knew what he really thought or believed; he never confided in her and more recently hardly troubled to talk to her at all. The day, soon after they arrived, she had overheard him discussing her with Grigori had been a real shock and very frightening. She had come upon them in the coach house pulling the old carriage apart. Battered and broken it had stood gathering dust and woodworm ever since that fateful day when her parents had sent her to Yalta. Someone must have returned it; she supposed it had been Grigori. It was of no use to anyone; its wheels and shafts had already been plundered for firewood. She wondered what they were looking for and had stood in the shadows watching. They evidently had not seen her.

‘Do you think I haven’t looked there before?’ Grigori said, watching Kolya throw the cushions off the seats. They had been nibbled by mice and the stuffing was bursting out of them. He pulled them apart, throwing the wadding behind him and coughing on the dust that flew out. ‘There’s nothing there, I tell you,’ Grigori went on. ‘Everything they had on them when they were arrested was confiscated. There was only a tiny diamond and one small ruby.’

‘You can’t persuade me that was all they had. They’d have hidden the rest somewhere and they wouldn’t have given the most valuable pieces to the children. The Kirilov Star was only the tip of the iceberg. There’s more hidden here somewhere. What about the droshky?’

‘The same. It’s all been searched. More than once. Every inch of the house too. If there had been any valuables left here during the Civil War, they’d have been found years ago.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Kolya said. ‘Bits of the Romanov
jewels are still turning up in odd places: down wells, in chimneys, buried in gardens. I believe it’s the same with the Kirilov treasures.’

So Kolya was on a treasure hunt. It was then she realised with a dreadful shock that he had been using her to come and look for wealth. He had no feelings for her at all, nor any loyalty except to himself. He had no interest in kulak uprisings or the Communist Party. It was all a sham. Everything about him was a sham. The realisation had made her feel sick, more sick than her pregnancy ever had.

‘I’m not happy about you being here,’ Grigori had gone on. ‘You’ve been searching for days now and found nothing. I thought you knew where to look. Doesn’t that wife of yours know what happened to it?’

‘No, she was too young to remember.’

‘You could try jogging her memory. And if that doesn’t work, the best thing you can do is get rid of her. Having her here is putting us all in danger, you included.’

Lydia had put her hand to her mouth to stop herself crying out and betraying her presence. Were they considering murdering her? No, not even Kolya would stoop so low. But if they did, no one would ever know. They could bury her body in the forest and she would sink into oblivion, unmourned, not even by Sir Edward who had answered none of her letters. But who could blame him? She must be a dreadful disappointment to him and she was filled with shame.

‘I’ll try and get something out of her,’ Kolya had said. ‘If that doesn’t work, you can denounce her to the NKVD, but not until after I’m safely away.’

Lydia had crept silently away and gone back to her attic
room where she sat on the bed, shaking with fright. She really was on her own.

The following day had been the beginning of day after day of interrogation by Kolya. It began slowly, with loving words and gentle hints, but when she told him she didn’t remember, he had pressed her more forcefully, and when that hadn’t worked, with shouts and threats. She had decided it might be better to pretend to remember odd little things, places the jewels might have been hidden. He would rush off searching wherever she had suggested: cupboards, drawers, nooks and crannies in the old house, outbuildings, troughs, water butts, up in the attics among the accumulated rubbish, but when he found nothing, he came back and the questions started again. She became good at acting a part, forgetting and then accidentally letting something slip, a faint memory which might be a clue. She felt relatively safe while he still thought there was something to be found, but sooner or later, he would give up and then she would be in mortal danger.

When she told him she was pregnant he had laughed, but it was not a happy laugh. She had no idea where he was now; she had been left to the ministrations of Olga because they dare not call in a doctor or a midwife for fear of being arrested. A surge of pain filled her body and she pushed for all she was worth, anxious to rid herself of this lump which had caused her so much grief.

‘It’s coming,’ Olga cried triumphantly. ‘I can see the head. One more push and you will have your baby.’

It took more than one, but suddenly it slid out into Olga’s waiting hands. Lydia sank back in exhaustion and shut her eyes, but the wail of an infant made her open them again. Olga was wiping mucous from the baby’s face. ‘It’s a boy,’
she said, wrapping him in a towel and putting him into Lydia’s arms. ‘Here, hold him while I see to the afterbirth.’

Lydia wasn’t sure she wanted to look at him, but his thin wailing touched a chord she could not deny and she found herself gazing down at a little screwed-up face, bright pink and squalling, as if he had not wanted to come into this contentious world and wished he had never left the dark warmth of her womb. This was her son whom they had decided, after much debate, to call Yuri. Suddenly, it did not matter who had fathered him, he was hers, hers to love, to cherish and protect. Her hate fled as she held him to her breast, helping him to find the nipple. The sharp pain of it as he pulled was exquisite pleasure and she wept with love and tenderness.

Olga took him away to wash him and dress him in the garments they had managed to buy from the
Isnab
. Lydia watched, wanting to do it herself, but feeling too weak. She didn’t like the way Olga took charge of him, crooning to him and talking softly to him as she wrapped him in the shawl she had knitted from the pulled-out wool of old jumpers she had bought in the market. Grigori allowed her to shop in Petrovsk now she was dressed in the same way as all the other women. But she had been warned not to talk about herself. This was not considered strange; people simply did not speak freely about themselves for fear of saying something which might be construed by their listeners as subversive, something for which they could be denounced, arrested and imprisoned.

‘My little Yurochka,’ Olga murmured. ‘Your papa is going to be so proud of you. Another little one to grow up to be a good little Communist, eh,
golubchick
?’

Lydia was about to protest at that, but decided against
it. It would cause dissent, something she had been careful to avoid over the months of her pregnancy, and it did not matter, considering she would take him out of Russia at the first opportunity. She decided that if she pretended to settle down, to be content, they would allow her more freedom and Kolya would give her more money. Food and fuel and the everyday things they needed were so exorbitantly expensive, she had been able to save very little from what he had given her. It would be a great wrench but she would have to sell the Kirilov Star. It could not be done in Petrovsk, which was too small a community, but in Kiev there would be places where things like that were bought and sold, so her first step must be to save enough for the train fare to Kiev. And she must steal her passport and papers from Kolya. But first she would have to regain her strength and make sure Yuri was healthy, and not, by a single word or deed, let anyone know what she was planning.

Her love for her son grew day by day and her dearest wish was to get him safely to England. If she were no longer welcome at Balfour Place or Upstone Hall, she would have to find some way of supporting herself and him. She did not like the way Olga tried to take over looking after him, changing his nappy and tickling him to make him chuckle. And Kolya encouraged her, laughing when Lydia protested. ‘You should be glad Olga is so fond of the child. She could denounce us both if she chose. And it helps you, doesn’t it? You are hopeless when it comes to managing.’ This was said because she always told him she was no good at bargaining and had to pay more for goods than she really had, in order to squirrel a few kopeks away. Even so, saving enough to leave was taking longer than she had hoped. Her milk soon dried up and she had to buy milk for Yuri, which meant
walking some distance to a collective farm, standing in line for hours and then paying through the nose for it.

The day Kolya found her little hoard in a purse in her underwear drawer was the most miserable of her life and she was left drowning in despair, quite apart from the humiliation of the slap he gave her which left a red mark on her cheek. ‘What do you think you were going to do with it?’ he demanded, throwing the contents of the purse across the bed in fury.

‘I saved it for emergencies,’ she said, praying he would believe her and let her keep it. ‘I don’t like being without any money at all.’

He laughed. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do. You’ve never had to go without a thing. Rich, bourgeoise, cosseted all your life, now it’s time to learn what it’s like to be poor.’

He didn’t give it back, but put it in his pocket, deaf to her entreaties that Yuri’s milk cost so much. And from then on, he kept her even more short of money and gave Olga the task of buying Yuri’s milk. Lydia became a kind of drudge for the rest of the household, and though she silently raged against it, she decided submissiveness was the only way she would be given the freedom she needed to move about.

In order to have time with her son, she would carry him into the forest when Olga was at work at the factory, and walk about where it was cool, a welcome relief from the heat of the sun. ‘I’ll have us out of here, my darling, but we have to be patient,’ she murmured over and over again.

Sometimes she would go and sit with Ivan in his crude hut and make plans for her escape. But Ivan, who knew the way the Soviet system worked, advised caution. If she were arrested, they would take her son from her, and she would be sent to a prison camp in Siberia for years, that is if they
didn’t decide to execute her. ‘They don’t need much of an excuse to do that,’ he said.

‘Do you think there’ll be a war?’ she asked. There had been talk among the residents of Kirilhor and reports in the newspapers Grigori brought into the house. Hitler was spreading his tentacles. German troops had occupied Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia, which became German protectorates, and marched into Austria, which had been declared part of the Reich. Slovakia, too, had been put under German protection. Countries and principalities all over Europe were making non-aggression pacts in the hope of averting disaster. The USSR had proposed a defensive alliance with Britain which would make them strange allies, but might help those Britons living and working in Russia. Lydia hoped so.

Ivan shrugged. ‘Who knows? It might be wise to go while you can, but be careful. Tell no one. I wish I could help you, but I have nothing, no money, no land, no family …’

‘Come with me, then.’

‘No. This is my home, I have no other, but it is different for you. You stopped belonging here in 1920.’ He sighed. ‘How long ago that was, and yet how close in our memories.’

‘Yes, I shall never forget,’ she said, standing up to go back to the house. ‘I think I must steal the money. It is the only way.’

She was in for another shock when she returned home and climbed the stairs to her room. Kolya and Olga were in bed together, both as naked as the day they were born. She gave a strangled cry and fled downstairs and out of the house, wanting to run, anywhere away from that haunted place. She looked wildly about her, uncertain which way
to go, and ran into the old stables. It had been years since there had been horses there, but the place still smelt of the animals and there were a few wisps of straw and hay about and odd bits of harness. Here she crouched in a corner, hugging her child to her and weeping all over his colourful shawl.

Kolya found her there and, pulling her to her feet, dragged her back to the kitchen. Here Olga took Yuri from her and set about giving him the milky gruel he was being weaned on. Lydia’s fury was so great it dried her tears and she set about pummelling Kolya with her fists. ‘I knew you were a liar,’ she shouted between thumps. ‘But I never realised you were also an adulterer. I hate you! I hate you!’

He laughed, grabbing her hands and holding them to her sides. ‘Good, because I can’t say I have any use for your affection. Terrible disappointment you’ve turned out to be.’

‘Because I lost the Star and cannot tell you the hiding place of the jewels! Well, I’m sorry about that, but you should ask Grigori Stefanovich what happened to them. I bet he knows. Give me back my money and my papers and let me go home.’ She was calmer now; the storm had passed and left her cold. Very cold.

‘You can go wherever you like,’ he said, ‘but if you think I’m going to help you, you are mistaken. I’ve got plans of my own.’

‘To go back to England?’

‘No, to Minsk. Olga has been given a job in a munitions factory. I’m going with her.’