If Only You Knew Read online

  IF ONLY YOU KNEW

  Born in 1966 and brought up in Gloucestershire, Alice Jolly now lives in Brussels with her husband and son. She is the author of What the Eye Doesn’t See.

  In loving memory of our daughter

  Laura Catherine Kinsella

  who died before birth

  19 May 2005

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to: Stephen Kinsella, Amanda Holmes, Simon Pettifar, Clare Andrews, Susannah Rickards, Gregory Feifer, Igor Panich, Masha Macrae, Nikolay Khalip, Anna Jaquiery, Sam Mitchell, Lucy Hodgson, John Boyle, John Hellon, Vincent Eaton, Loretta Stanley, Jeremy Duns, Andrea Rees, Jeannette Cook, John Lash, Dr Andy Harrison, Miles Warde, everyone at Vindi’s nursery, Victoria Hobbs of A M Heath, Kate Lyall Grant and Tara Wigley of Simon & Schuster.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  Tsaritsyno, Moscow

  The No Name Café, Moscow

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  The No Name Café, Moscow

  Teatral’naia Ploshchad’, Moscow

  Marsh End House, Malthouse, Norfolk

  Marsh End House, Malthouse, Norfolk

  The No Name Café, Moscow

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  The Hotel Universitet, Moscow

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  Marsh End House, Malthouse, Norfolk

  Leningrad Station, Moscow

  Ulitsa Spasskaia, Malakhovka

  Liusinovskaia Bol’shaia, Moscow

  Sibirskii Pereulok 1/8, Moscow

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  Copyright

  12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva

  September 1991

  His fountain pen, a pad of paper, a green toothbrush with splayed bristles, a folded linen handkerchief, three Metro tokens and his watch, which still ticks. He said to me once that our fear is not that death will be momentous, but that it will be trivial. I pick up each object in turn, unfold the handkerchief, flick through the blank pages of the pad.

  I should have known that a man with a talent for being present would have a talent for being absent as well. A suitcase and twelve cardboard boxes – that’s all he left. The boxes are sealed with plastic tape and have been used many times before. Instructions have been written on them in Cyrillic script and then scribbled out.

  Of course, I should look through these boxes. Those endless blue notebooks must be somewhere, and there’ll be other letters and documents. He wouldn’t mind me looking. In fact, he’d encourage it. I can almost hear his voice, that gentle American drawl – Yeah, sure, go through it all as much as you want.

  He wouldn’t say – See it all exactly as it is, but that’s what he’d mean, because that was always his creed. And for a while I tried to make it mine as well, but now he’s gone I can’t believe in that any more. He had his secrets but he can keep them now. I have my picture of him and I don’t want it blurred. I’ve learnt my lesson: no more meddling with the past.

  I pick up those few scattered items and start to push them back into his case, but his smell draws me in. Straw, perhaps? And smoke, and the grime of Moscow, and rough-scented soap. I move aside two towels and a bedsheet. Underneath I see a square of golden-coloured wool – his coat. And beside it, his shoes. I watch my hands lift them, as one might lift a newborn baby, and place them on the tiled floor. They stand there, floodlit by cool evening light. The tongues of those shoes still speak of the high arch of his foot, and the sole is still attached to the leather all around, its hold unweakened. On one toe is a splodge of white paint, which he never quite scratched off, and the laces are brown, because he could find no black in Moscow. My fingers touch the deep-squeezed creases which would once have marked the ball of his foot. Those creases laugh like the lines at the side of his eyes.

  I mourn for him, and I mourn for the person I became when I was with him.

  I pick at the plastic tape on one of the boxes. Then I fetch a carving knife and wriggle the tip of it in under the tape. Pulling up one cardboard flap, I find a grey plastic filing tray which used to lie on his desk, and a sea-shell paperweight. Then I stop: next to it is a tiny glass bottle with a rubber skin across its neck. Beside the bottle is an empty syringe, the needle removed. I remember it lying on the edge of the sink, between the taps, next to his razor and his wristwatch.

  I’m melting like wax. Soon there’ll be nothing left, just a pile of clothes, with an acrid twist of smoke rising from them, and a singed mass of hair. My name is Eva Curren. I am thirty years old and I live in Geneva. I’m going to leave here soon. Just shake up the world and pick out a city. Hope that when you arrive you won’t find yourself there.

  I lay the knife down, go to the fridge and take out a bottle of vodka. I pour a glass and drink it, feeling it burn down my throat. Then I pour another and drink that as well. The telephone rings. I wait until it cuts into silence, then unplug it. Sitting at the table near the window, I rest my head on its cool surface. Below, in the communal gardens, the branches of trees spread wide, their leaves flickering orange at the edges. Beyond the garden is a main road, and then the lake, silver-grey, fading into the mist. It’s beginning to rain – fine, light rain – which dances sideways in the wind. The day is closing down.

  I go back to his suitcase and take out his pen. In a plastic bag I find a bottle of ink. The pen is slim and green. I know exactly how it fitted into his hand, gripped between those fingers which were not as elegant as I wanted them to be. Write it all down, that’s what he advised. The gold nib of his pen hangs over the expanse of the paper. In my head I try to form words, but I’m unnerved by the sound of my own voice. Its cadences are unfamiliar; it may stutter and evade, or swerve out of control, suddenly rant and rave.

  My hand stretches out to open the bottle of ink and unscrew the barrel of the pen. I pull the plunger up and the pen fills. I write my name and then, with a flourish, Memories. But even that is wrong. Memories are gentle, sepia-tinted, long ago. This story happened less than a year ago, and remains more vivid than today. The gold nib of his pen goes down on to the paper and remains there, gathering ink. What was it he said? Once a feeling becomes a word, then we are released from its grip.

  10/38 Kutuzovskii Prospyekt, Moscow

  November 1990

  It begins with a party – Maya’s party. Except that I don’t even know that it is her party. It’s just a place I’ve come to late on a November Moscow night, and I’m tired, and a little drunk, and I didn’t even want to come. And as soon as I arrive, I hear that voice – deep and slurring, a mix of accents, some words oddly elongated and others cut too short. For a moment it stops the blood in my veins but then I decide not to hear it.

  Instead I do my Party Girl act. I chat to a man from the Japanese Embassy, and manage a joke or two with a bulging salesman from Leicester, who provides me with a great many details about street furniture, whatever that is. I’m introduced to a woman called Valia, or Svetlana, or something like that. She’s six foot tall and thin as string. She wears a backless top, a mini-skirt and ankle boots with high heels. We talk about nothing. A blonde American
called Estelle pours some clove-tasting liqueur into my glass and blows cigarette smoke into my face. She tells me about a German banker who was gunned down in the lobby of his building. Hallways and stairwells, they’re the most dangerous places. Blah-blah. I’ve lived abroad enough to understand what’s going on here. The only thing these people have in common is that they don’t have anything in common, and so they work hard to make it seem as though that isn’t the case.

  And none of them notice that my Party Girl act lacks conviction. I’m new in this city, I belong with Rob, and he’s popular, or at least respected. He’s part of this city in the way that most of the people here aren’t. He speaks Russian fluently, doubtless even using the subjunctive correctly. Together we’re a charming young couple. The tiny world of Moscow expatriates needs more people like us. But I’m left feeling angry that people are so easily conned.

  I move over to a table where food is piled on plates. There’s the traditional zakuski – gherkins, cold meat, hard-boiled eggs, salted fish. But also food I haven’t seen since I arrived in Moscow – smoked salmon, chicken legs and French pastries. I start eating and can’t stop. The person who bought this food isn’t shopping in the places where Rob and I go. I move towards the window and stare out. I’d rather be out there, beyond the double-thickness windows, part of the silent city. The distant lights of cars move along the Kutuzovskii Prospyekt. A blurred line of black indicates where the Moskva river flows and nearby the outline of one of the Seven Sisters Skyscrapers rises from the frozen mist. No neon, no advertisements, hardly any cars. Most people find the silence of this city chilling but I enjoy it.

  I turn back to the room and my eyes travel over parquet floors and double doors. This apartment is three or four times the size of any other Moscow flat I’ve been in. Pictures, which have the look of Chagall or Kandinskii, cover the walls. Could they even be originals? In the hall, a bust of Lenin wears a rakish trilby hat, while behind him, pale blue wallpaper with gold stars peels at the seams.

  When I first stepped into these rooms it felt like stepping back into the grandeur of pre-Revolutionary Russia, but now I notice that the chandeliers are plastic, and their wires loop across the ceiling. They don’t appear to work and so the rooms are inadequately lit by lamps wedged in corners. Pipework stands out from the walls and is discoloured by rust. A marble fireplace contains an electric heater.

  Then I hear that voice again. Yes, I suppose Maya would live in this kind of flat. There was always something purposefully antique about her. The clove liqueur has gone to my head, and my eyelids scrape over my eyes. I want to go home but, when I look around for Rob, he’s deep in conversation with Bill and Sarah. We had supper with them earlier, and they brought us to this party. As usual, the conversation is all politics. Will Gorbachev implement the Five Hundred Day Plan? The Soviet Union and the command economy can’t last much longer. The Republics are running their own economies now. Will there be rationing, a famine, a coup? Bill is Rob’s American boss and Sarah is his wife. They’ve been in Moscow five years but their trainers still glisten white, as do their teeth. They appear the perfect couple but Rob tells me that Sarah has threatened divorce if they’re not out of here by the summer.

  I’m about to go over to them when I hear those familiar cadences again, mixed with the rumble of other voices. What on earth is Maya doing here? But then I remember. She was born in Russia, she told me that when I was six years old. Maya Pototska. Even the name had the power to enchant. It filled my childish ears with sleighs, fur coats, forests of silver birch and roaming wolves.

  I stand in the hallway, uncertain, but I can’t go to her, so I push through the nearest set of double doors, and find myself in a dark corridor. All along it, hardback books are piled up on the floor, rising to waist-height. I bend to peer at the titles and see that they’re all art books. They would be, of course.

  I open a door onto a room where a lamp throws slanting light across a desk covered with papers. A bed by the window hasn’t been made, and here one whole wall is filled by bookcases. Canvases are propped against the wall and the desk. I step forward into the room then stop, because I’m not alone. A man is standing near the bookcase with his back to me. He turns and, without knowing why, I shut the door behind me.

  The man is tall and thin, and he stands straight, his head held high. He has a hawk-like nose and hair which is thick and grey, but might once have been blond. A nervous flutter runs through his hands as they idle through the pages of a book. He turns to replace it on a shelf. Everything about him is neat and proper, except that he has brown laces in his black shoes. His clothes – a grey polo-neck jumper worn under a sharply cut dark suit – are stylish, but it’s clear he’s had them for years. For some reason, he makes me think of the way in which people who are very old, or desperately sick, are sometimes meticulously well-dressed.

  I stand staring at him, and he at me. I’m sure I’ve seen him before. The back of a grey-golden head retreating down an evening street, the reflection of his face in the shifting windows of the Metro. And he’s seen me before, I’m sure, but we’ve both taken care not to notice. Now I’ve no choice but to look at him. And really there’s nothing exceptional to see. He’s just an old man, but for some reason I keep on staring and he doesn’t look away. The moment has no drama, no tension. I just think, Oh yes, it’s you, of course. Even now I know – and he does too. Already we’re haunted by the future.

  A shriek sounds in the next room. Of course, I remember, this is meant to be a party, isn’t it? So I should introduce myself and start up a conversation. I step forward, trying to turn myself into the Party Girl. But before I’ve even started I see from his eyes that he’s not going to believe in any of that. I turn, stumbling, back to the door and pull at the handle. It doesn’t open. I tug at it, once, twice. With a jerk the door swings back and I step out into the corridor, then close the door behind me.

  I must find Rob, and my coat. Perhaps I should tell him about Maya. But he wouldn’t even remember, he never remembers anything. That voice ricochets out from the sitting room. In the hall, piles of coats have fallen from their overloaded hooks. Boots and shoes stand in puddles of water. The bulging Leicester salesman drops his glasses and scrabbles for them on the floor. What was in that clove liqueur? People are jostling, they push against me and I nearly fall. A foot in a high-heel shoe hovers over my toe and I step into the sitting room.

  A woman lounges on a blue-green sofa, the size of a small boat. It’s crammed with cushions and a Chinese shawl is draped over the back of it. As she turns towards me, her over-large eyes blink wide and she stops talking halfway through a sentence. Her hand, draped in a heavy gold bracelet, moves in a slow circle through the air. I don’t need to say anything because she already knows. I move towards her across the acres of parquet. ‘Oh my Go-o-d.’ She pushes herself upright, swings her legs down onto the floor, and stares up at me. I remember how, when I was a child, those eyes always reminded me of a doll I had. You tipped the doll back and its eyes shut, then you held it upright and they clicked open again.

  ‘You used to know –’ I speak in a rush, suddenly feeling too hot.

  ‘Eva. Yes, of course, of course. You’re Theo’s daughter.’ Maya’s plucked and pencilled eyebrows move upwards and she swallows. Those eyes click open and shut. She looks as though she’s received bad news. ‘You look so ve-e-ry like him.’ That slurring voice seems trapped in her throat. She stretches out a hand, speckled and knotted with veins. She wears a gold ring in the shape of a snake, which winds around her finger and has a tiny red stone for an eye. Her touch feels like the dead. ‘My long lost goddaughter. Do sit down. Ple-e-ase, sit down.’

  The sofa is over-stuffed and tips me towards her.

  ‘Whatever are you doing here?’ Maya wrinkles up her nose, drawing in deep breaths. ‘You can’t have been here long. You don’t have the sme-e-ll of it yet.’

  I laugh for a moment then stop. I point out Rob and tell her, in a gabble, that he works for
the Democracy Foundation. Maya gestures towards a man with silver hair standing in the hall – her husband, Harvey. He works for an oil company which is hoping to set up a joint venture in Kazakhstan. Maya asks how I am, and I say that I’m fine, really fine. And both of us know that this is all distraction.

  A door slams, and someone turns up the music. Maya has a walking stick propped against her knee. Her black hair is still long and thick but her face is deeply lined and her eyes are overly bright and ringed by badly applied eye-liner. Her jewel-coloured velvet clothes, cameo brooch and string of jade are as consciously antique as the décor of the flat. I feel as though a long cigarette-holder should be drooping from her hand.

  ‘So, have you se-e-en your father?’

  This feels like a question asked in a foreign language.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? What never? Oh well, I suppose not. It’s just, I always thought that if he’d got in touch with anybody …’ She shakes her head and shrugs, raises a hand in despair. ‘How sad. How ve-e-ry sad. Will you have a drink?’ Before I can say anything she’s poured vodka in with the clove liqueur.

  ‘You know, I’ve always missed him.’ She looks at me again as though unable to believe in my existence. And as she raises her hand to smooth her hair, I see her as she used to be – the fairy godmother. She lent me her gold high-heeled shoes and I tottered on them through the corridors of Marsh End House. And she painted my nails in pink polish and later I had to pick it off so my mother wouldn’t see. In the evenings she used to sit out on the lawn with Rob’s mother, Amelia, the two of them surrounded by a blue haze of cigarette smoke. And Amelia wearing that Paisley shawl – red and gold and orange in a pattern like question marks.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t remember much about him?’ Maya says.

  I think of my bedroom at Marsh End House, that china night-light on the chest of drawers. He used to sit beside that light reading to me. It was the shape of a toadstool, and the spots were holes through which the light shone. He’d always read the story of Bluebeard from Grimm’s Fairytales and I’d look at the pictures in the book. A castle with fountains, and peacocks, and chandeliers. A perfect world – but still the bride always wanted to look in that one locked room. My father’s hands turned the pages, moving through the dappled light.