The Kirilov Star (26 page)

She went back to the house to hear Bobby and Tatty arguing hotly because Tatty wanted to invite some of her friends to his party and he was against it. ‘You’ll have your own party when the time comes; do you think I’ll want to muscle my friends in on that?’

Lydia acted as mediator, as she always did, telling Bobby he should invite some of Tatty’s friends so that she did not feel out of it, then decided to go and look round the shops in Norwich. Doing that might banish the nostalgia.

She was halfway there when she ran out of petrol. ‘Of all the stupid things to do,’ she muttered, switching off the engine and getting out of the car to find herself in a country lane which did not even have road markings. When and why she had turned off the main road she could not remember. Neither could she remember when she had last seen a signpost.

She began to walk. It started to rain, big drops that soon soaked her light summer jacket and dress and plastered her hair to her face. ‘Serve you right,’ she muttered, stopping to look over a five-bar gate. There was a yard and a cottage and a dog that barked ferociously, but she could also see a telephone line. Taking a deep breath, she opened the gate and made her way towards the cottage, thankful, when she approached, to see the dog was chained. She had almost reached the door when it was opened and he stood in its frame.

‘So you found me,’ he said.

She could not move, could not speak. Her heart was pounding and her legs felt like rubber. All she could do was stare at him.

He reached out, took her arm and gently pulled her inside. ‘Come in, Lidushka, you look like a drowned rat.’

His use of the diminutive of her name sent her flying back to Moscow and yet it served to wake her out of the strange dream she seemed to be having. ‘But you’re supposed to be dead.’ It came out as a croak.

‘Am I? Now, I never knew that. I don’t feel a bit dead. Feel me.’ He took her hands in both his and put them either side of his face. ‘Is that substantial enough for you?’

‘Alex! Oh my God, Alex.’ And she burst into tears.

He took her in his arms to comfort her. ‘My poor darling,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘It was a shock, wasn’t it?’

She leant back and looked up into his face. It was his face, no doubt about that, but it was thinner, the cheeks sunken, the eyes somehow darker as if they could not quite shake off the terrors he had seen. His hair was streaked with white and hadn’t been cut for some time. ‘But what happened? How did you come to be living here? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive? And so close.’

He sat her down beside the kitchen fire and, taking a towel from a clothes horse, stood over her and began rubbing her hair dry. It was an intimate thing to do, but so natural she didn’t question it. ‘Would it have helped to know?’ he asked. ‘You had made a new life for yourself. You had a new family. I was history.’

‘Alex, you were never history, you could not be.’ She pulled away to look up at him. ‘You are part of me, of what I was, of the woman I am, and, as far as I was concerned,
that part died on the day Papa told me you had been killed. I mourned for you, Alex.’

‘It is gratifying to know that,’ he said wryly.

‘How can you be so calm about it?’

‘You think I am calm? How little you know.’

‘Then tell me. Tell me how you feel, tell me everything.’

He put down the towel. ‘Later perhaps. First things first. How did you come to be standing on my doorstep in the pouring rain?’

‘I ran out of petrol down the road. I was on my way to Norwich. I must have been daydreaming. I can’t remember turning off the main Norwich road, nor even why I should. It was as if fate was taking a hand.’

‘It often does. Is your car locked?’

‘Yes, I pushed it off the road and started to walk, looking for a phone box. I saw your phone line and came to ask if someone would ring a garage for me. I didn’t know I’d be confronted by a ghost.’

‘Petrol’s no problem. I’ve got a can of it in the shed. I think you’d better take those wet clothes off. I can find you something to wear while they dry. And while you’re doing that, I’ll fetch your car and rustle up some lunch.’

‘But …’

‘But what? You think you shouldn’t be here? You think you should be on your way, soaking wet? How foolish is that?’ He turned to face her. ‘And you do want to know what happened to me, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’ She was shivering but whether it was from shock or her wetting she couldn’t be sure.

‘Then give me your car keys and then come with me.’

He put the keys on the table, led the way upstairs, went into his bedroom, and came out again carrying a pair of
trousers, a belt and a shirt which he put into her arms, then opened another door. ‘Here’s the bathroom. There’s plenty of hot water. Take your time. Come down when you’re ready.’

She ran a bath, stripped off and lay in the warm water, unable to believe what was happening to her. Alex was alive. Alex was here. Alex, whom she had never ceased to love and never would no matter how many years passed, had held her in his arms again. Oh, the joy of it! Husband, children, home all faded into insignificance beside that stupendous fact.

She dried herself and dressed. In spite of Alex’s thinness the trousers were far too big. She pulled them into her waist with the belt and rolled the legs up above her ankles. The shirt hung loosely, its sleeves also rolled up. She smiled at her reflection and went down to join him in the kitchen.

Hearing her come in, he turned from stirring something on the stove and laughed. ‘You look very sexy like that.’

‘Do I?’

‘Not that you weren’t always sexy. The years have dealt kindly with you.’ He had laid the kitchen table with cutlery and a bowl of salad and beckoned her to take her place.

‘Thank you. I’ve been lucky.’

He put a dish of spaghetti bolognese on the table and stuck two serving spoons in it, then sat down opposite her. ‘Help yourself.’

‘This is unreal,’ she said. She had no appetite, but as he had taken the trouble to cook for her, she put a small helping on her plate. ‘I can’t believe it. There was I seeing Robert off, thinking about the party my son wants to have and wondering whether letting him organise it himself might end in disaster, forgetting to fill the car with petrol
before setting off, forgetting it was Sunday and half the shops would be shut, and then taking a wrong turn on a road I know like the back of my hand and here you are. It’s as if you were waiting for me.’

‘Perhaps I was,’ he said softly.

‘Tell me what happened to you,’ she said. ‘Everything. What were you doing in Minsk? Why did everyone say you were dead?’

‘I was looking for Yuri, among other things.’

‘Oh. Papa tried to find out where he was as soon as the war ended, but it had been too long. He said orphanages often changed children’s names when they took them in, always supposing they knew Yuri’s name in the first place. He couldn’t tell them, could he?’

‘No.’ He paused. Should he or shouldn’t he tell her? He had given no undertaking to Robert not to tell her himself. ‘I’m truly sorry.’

‘Not your fault. Go on. You were in Minsk. Then what?’

He told her while the food grew cold on their plates. He told her about the heroism of the ordinary Russian soldier in spite of the incompetence of most of their superiors; he told her of the German advance and being a prisoner in a concentration camp, of his life with Else in Germany and the betrayal that led to his years in Siberia. He spared her the more gruesome details, but what he did tell her was horrific enough to shock her, and he left out his visit to Kirilhor and ended with his escape from Germany and eventual return to England.

‘All that time,’ she said. ‘All that suffering and here was I safe in my own little corner of England. The war we experienced here was nothing compared to that, nor
the austerity that followed. The only thing I had to be sad about was leaving you and Yuri in Russia, and that broke my heart, and then the loss of my mother and then my father.’ She paused. ‘It was you in the churchyard, wasn’t it? On the day of Papa’s funeral.’

‘Yes, I saw the notice of his death in the newspaper and wanted to pay my respects.’

‘I thought I’d seen a ghost.’

‘I’m sorry if I upset you, especially at that sad time. I didn’t mean you to see me.’

‘Why not? Why didn’t you join us? Why just creep away?’

‘I would have been out of place. And turning up suddenly would have distracted everyone from the purpose of the day, to mourn a truly good man.’

‘You could have written.’

‘I did consider it, but as I said, I had – have – no place in your life, not anymore.’

‘Alex, how can you say that? We have found each other again …’

‘Does that make a difference?’

‘You know it does.’

‘No, I don’t know. You tell me.’

She watched him filling a percolator, spooning coffee into the top if it and putting it on the stove. Then he took two mugs from a shelf, sugar from a cupboard and milk from the fridge. His movements were deliberate, controlled. He did not seem to be nearly as churned up as she was. ‘I thought you were dead and I learnt to live with that. I had to. I married Robert …’

‘Are you saying you would not have done that if you had known I was alive?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I loved him. I
did
love him.’ She told him about that journey from Murmansk and how good Robert had been to her, about Bobby and Tatty and how happy she had always been at Upstone Hall, though he knew that already. She told him about Margaret’s dreadful death and Sir Edward’s stroke and how Robert had supported her through it all.

‘Nothing has changed, Lidushka,’ he said gently.

She looked into his eyes, trying to read what was in them. There was evidence of deep suffering, of a stoicism she could never emulate. ‘Do you mean you are going to see me off and retreat into your own little world again, while I go to mine, and that’s the end of it?’

He poured out two mugs of coffee, added a little milk to each and put one in front of her, pushing the sugar bowl towards her. ‘It’s what ought to happen.’

She shook her head, not only to indicate she didn’t want the sugar, but in an effort to clear her brain, to think straight. ‘I can’t, Alex, nor can I believe that’s what you want. Have your experiences made you so cold you are unable to feel anymore? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘No, it is not what I’m telling you.’ He took her hand and hauled her to her feet so that she was facing him, standing so close his warmth surrounded her like a comforting blanket. He put her hand over his heart and held it there. She felt it beating, a little erratically but nonetheless strongly. ‘Do you think that belongs to a man unable to feel?’

‘No.’

‘It was thinking of you that kept it going when other men succumbed to the conditions. When I was cold and hungry and exhausted, reduced to little more than a skeleton, that heart beat for you. It still does …’

‘Oh, Alex!’ She flung herself into his arms. ‘Tell me I’m not dreaming and I won’t wake up any moment and find myself in bed in Upstone Hall.’

‘If you are dreaming, then so am I,’ he said and kissed her gently on her closed lips. ‘And a pleasant dream it is, one I’ve had many and many a time.’

‘Then you won’t send me away, will you? Not yet.’

‘I won’t send you away.’ He kissed her forehead, then her cheeks one by one and then her lips. The pressure of his mouth on hers was exquisite torture and she clung to him, kissing him back all over his face. He could not stand against that onslaught.

He took her hand and almost ran with her up the stairs to his bed, where they made love in a frenzy of reawakened passion. It was glorious and frightening in its strength. Nothing could have stopped it. And when it was over, she slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

He lay beside her, his head propped on one arm and looked down at her. Their meeting and its likely consequence had an inevitability about it, for which fate, chance, destiny, call it what you will, had been responsible, not he. He had been living and working, going about his daily life half-alive, knowing there was something missing but unable to do anything about it. And when she turned up on his doorstep, he had not even been surprised. In spite of the years, she was still beautiful, still the lovely girl of twenty-one he had fallen in love with, but more than that, her maturity had brought out more of the woman. Her figure was slightly thicker, her hair was less luxuriant; there was even a grey hair or two, but she could still make love with the unbridled passion of youth. He would not
have given back a moment of that for a king’s ransom.

She stirred, opened her eyes sleepily and reached out for him again. This time their lovemaking was slower, more relaxed, tender and yet still passionate. Guilt did not come into it, nor thoughts of the future. This was here and now and they were as much in love as ever they had been. His eyes had come alive again in the last few hours. He was more like the Alex she had known. But it had to end, if only because they were hungry and thirsty and it was growing dusk. He padded, naked, to the bathroom. She watched him go. How thin he was; there was hardly enough flesh on him to cover his ribs. But the muscles of his arms and thighs were strong; a man used to hard, physical work. Oh, how she loved him!

She did not think of Robert and home until they were once more in the kitchen and she was wearing her own clothes again and he had dressed in jeans and jumper. He had made fresh coffee and they sat opposite each other to drink it.

‘What now?’ she asked, holding her mug in both hands.

‘It’s up to you. Will you tell Robert?’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘That’s for you to decide, but I’d say no, not unless you intend to leave him.’

‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that. It would break his heart. And there’s the children …’

‘Then you know the answer.’

‘I suppose so.’ There was hopelessness in her voice. ‘I hate secrets and I can’t bear the thought of deceiving him, but neither can I bear saying goodbye to you again …’

‘Then we won’t say goodbye. You know where I am
now. If you need me, I am here. I’ll give you my phone number, but you don’t need to ring. Just turn up.’