If Only You Knew Read online

  Maya is talking about him – how gifted he was, his paintings, his parties. He often used to come and stay at her flat in London. The man she’s describing isn’t my father. Such a brilliant talent, she says, at the peak of his career. I want to tell her that that isn’t right. My father never sent us any money. Only his early paintings were any good. That’s all my mother has ever said about him. Inside my head a kaleidoscope turns so that all the patterns and colours merge. ‘But then why did he leave? Why did that happen?’ I hear myself say those words and wonder where they’ve come from.

  Maya is trying to pour vodka into her glass. A gust of laughter blows through from the next room. As she looks across at me, her eyes open wide. She starts to ask a question but no words come. The glass slips from her hand and cracks onto the floor. Pieces of it skid across the parquet. I bend down, thinking that I should pick up the larger pieces, but as I do so my head jerks forward as though I’m suffering from vertigo. For a moment I have the impression that I’m on the edge of a cliff with a 300-foot drop below.

  I feel Maya’s hand grip my arm. ‘Leave it, dear. Just le-e-ave it. It re-e-ally doesn’t matter.’ She’s wiping vodka from her blouse with a handkerchief. I feel the muscles in my chest start to tighten. Maya’s voice is suddenly loud. ‘You know, I went away. The winter before he left.’ I look down again at the pieces of broken glass, and as I do so, feet appear. Black shoes with brown laces. They come closer then step away, moving with delicate precision, as though the act of walking is a well-rehearsed dance.

  ‘Ah, Estelle, there you are. You must meet Eva.’

  The American woman with the lethal liqueur is suddenly upon us. Ignoring me, she bends over the arm of the sofa and, laying a hand on Maya’s shoulder, she kisses her. She’s pink and flouncy, wears too much gold jewellery, has nails painted the colour of blood.

  ‘I must go,’ I say.

  But Maya keeps her hand on my arm. ‘No, no. Stay a while.’ She turns back to Estelle. ‘I used to know Eva’s father – many years ago. I remember what he used to say – Maya, you’re so ve-e-ry beautiful, but you will kill yourself with comfort.’

  I stare at my hands, feeling pain swelling in my chest. A smell of pine needles gathers around me. The man with black-brown shoes is standing close to Valia, or Svetlana, or whatever her name is. His hand rests on her shoulder, and he’s kneading the skin near to her prominent collar-bone. As I watch I feel his touch, that thumb pressing into my own skin.

  ‘Is he a doctor?’ Maya and Estelle are talking about the shoe man.

  ‘Yes, part of some team advising on hospitals,’ Maya says. ‘I knew his family in my childhood.’

  ‘So he’s Russian?’

  ‘Well, American really.’

  I’m shivering despite the heat of the flat. ‘I must go.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t go.’

  My throat is closing up and I’m gasping for breath. The scent of pine needles is heavy around me. I know what will happen if I don’t go. I can’t see Rob anywhere. People are gathering around Maya, coming to say goodbye. I feel the room growing dark and stand up unsteadily. My lungs are shrinking, growing shallow. I begin to see the image of a white-faced child. Maya still holds my fingers in her chilly hand. ‘You must come back some other time.’

  The floor is slippery under my feet. In the hall I sort through coats lying on chairs but mine doesn’t seem to be there. Not another coat lost. I lose them all the time, sometimes two or three in one winter. I go back towards the sitting room, looking for Rob. The flat is lurching forward – the floors tip, the doors swing. I cling to a chair to keep my balance. The child is pressing into my mind. I see her thin face, and curly hair, just like mine. The lights plunge, the party guests laugh. People reach out but I fight my way through their hands.

  I need to get to a window, I need air. My fingers grasp at a metal catch. I pull open the inner window and pieces of cotton wadding crammed into the frame drop down on to the sill. The outer window opens and cold air bursts into the room, carrying with it frozen shards of ice. The curtains blow back, bulging and billowing, their silken surface dragging against my cheek. Rob’s hand closes around my arm. ‘It’s asthma,’ he says. ‘She’ll be all right.’

  My fingers claw at my throat. The curtain, flapping in the wind, catches in my mouth, and coats my tongue with dust. My windpipe has shrunk to the diameter of a drinking straw. Papers from the desk rise like a flock of birds and glide around the room. Above me, a light-shade swings, making shadows dash up the walls. I see Rob’s hand struggling with the window catch. Then suddenly, a thick line of blood is moving down his wrist. A voice shouts, ‘Is there a doctor here?’ The man with the black-brown shoes is suddenly close. Maya’s voice dances in my head. I always thought that if he’d got in touch with anybody it would be you.

  The child stands on a path glittering with frost. Above her, moonlight breaks through the gaps in the trees, covering the ground with stripes of pale light. Ahead of her, a half-broken door opens in a brick and flint wall, thick with ivy. The child’s eyes are fixed on that door. She’s wearing a cloak of black satin which comes down to her knees and is tied at the neck with a ribbon. Her red tights crinkle at the ankles and her red patent-leather shoes have criss-cross stitching over the toes. The shoes are too big so there’s a gap between the leather and the side of her foot, and the bar strap is pulled tight.

  The child hears distant sounds – a shout, laughter, the hiss of fireworks. Her mother’s voice still echoes in her head – You must go to bed. You must go to bed. The path ahead of her is enclosed in a tunnel of pine trees. It’s edged by a zig-zag line of bricks, and to either side the earth is sandy. She turns and looks back. In the distance a bright light flickers, as though a torch is burning. The silhouette of a woman hesitates at the entrance to the path.

  The child walks forward to the broken door. A moment ago a figure stood here, a man dressed in a blue frockcoat and a black three-cornered hat. A tall-tall man, he glittered like the frost on the path. But he has gone now, hurrying through the door, his shadow sliding-winding-riding down the frame, smooth as liquid. She moves forward and lays her hand on the wood of the door, feeling the place where the shadow was. She must go with him now. If she doesn’t, then she never will.

  A voice calls to her, the sound spiralling upwards through the night. She wants to step through that doorway, but her red shoes will not move. She must never go through that doorway. Never-ever-tether. The voice wraps around her and pulls her forward. She stands with her hand resting on the rotten wood, uncertain, amid the cold leaves.

  She’ll be all right. Asthma. Yes, asthma. It’s Maya and Rob. Their voices are distant. Let me help you with that. Bandages? In the kitchen. I’m propped up in bed, lying under a duvet. My breath wheezes in my lungs and my eyelids droop. The kaleidoscope colours are changing again and again. Those voices – No, no, he’ll look after her, you need that strapped up.

  A shadow above me fills the ceiling. Something rustles and the shadow moves, yawning open like the jaws of an animal. I open my mouth to call for Rob, then turn my head and find the shoe man standing near me. He pulls up a chair and sits down. I try to speak, but don’t have enough air.

  ‘Perhaps I can help,’ he says. He stands up, takes off his jacket and puts it on the back of the chair, then he rolls up his sleeves. His movements are slow and deliberate. ‘No, no, really,’ I gasp. ‘I’m quite all right.’ He takes the pillows off the bed and tells me to turn over. Then I’m lying on my front and he’s moved my arms up beside my head, and my jumper and T-shirt slide upwards. His hands are warm as they press down on either side of my spine. The skin of his fingers is rough, his touch certain. ‘You need to breathe as deeply as you can,’ he tells me.

  His fingers pluck at the muscles to the sides of my spine as though he’s playing a harp. Then he’s still, and I can hear his breathing above me. For a long time he’s motionless but his hands still press into me. Then he moves his fingers with a twist. There. He
pulls twice at one particular muscle and pain fires into my neck and arms. His fingers massage that muscle, pressing into it. Again a surge of pain, and a sudden image of that child standing on the path. Then my body unknots and my lungs expand, filling with acres of air. His hand comes close to my face as he pulls up the duvet.

  He asks me, then, when I was born. It’s such an odd question that for a moment I can’t think of the answer. Then he says, ‘The sixth of March, perhaps?’ The eighth, I tell him. He nods his head, as though thinking something through. Then he tells me that his birthday is the tenth of March. He asks what year. 1961. He was born thirty-five years before me – 1926. I can’t think what all this is about but it bothers me that his guess was accurate.

  He asks me what I’m doing in Moscow and I’m about to start on some long story about the political situation, and Rob, and his work. But instead I say, ‘Well, it was an accident to do with bacon and eggs.’ He tells me that he doesn’t believe in accidents. Everything, he says, happens for a reason. If I didn’t feel so tired I’d argue about that.

  We talk about how neither of us will be in Moscow for long. Rob’s contract may get renewed in March, or it may not. The shoe man says that each day he thinks he’ll leave but he never does. Then he says perhaps he just stays in Moscow because it’s an easy place to seduce women. And at this point I should think, This guy is a creep and I should get out of here. But instead I’m charmed by his candour.

  Then he says, ‘So tell me about yourself,’ and I can’t think of anything to say, nothing at all. ‘Well, I teach English, that’s what I do,’ I say eventually. But really I’m just one of those cardboard dolls which little girls have, and they make them into all sorts of different people – a nurse, or a secretary or a Party Girl – just by putting a paper costume in front of them and folding over the tabs.

  And now we’re talking and talking and I can’t remember all he says. But I’m stealing words from the tip of his tongue, and he from mine. And I can tell him anything because he knows it all already. And I want us to go on talking like this for ever. But the rubber thump of a walking stick sounds in the corridor, and a tall figure wavers at the door. Inside my head, I plead, Make her go away. But she stays, without speaking, and I feel her invisible eyes seeing too much. Make her go, make her go. Her shape fades, and we’ve got just a little more time.

  So I tell him then about Maya, and how she was a friend of my father’s, and how he went away when I was six and never came back. And I tell him about the child on the moonlit path – although I’ve never talked to anyone about that. And all the time he sits beside me, while I lie in bed. And it feels just right like that. And he says to me, ‘So that image – is it something you remember?’ No, it’s not a memory, I’m sure of that. He says that it must have been, but I know it wasn’t.

  Then he tells me that I need to find out about my father because otherwise I’ll never know who the person behind the cardboard cut-outs is. And I’ve heard all that before, and I don’t believe it, but I behave as though I’m taking it seriously. Then Rob appears at the door, asking if I’m all right. His hand is thick with bandage. I know that I’ve got to go home, but I don’t want to. I say to Rob not to worry, and could he find my coat?

  I watch the shadow of the shoe man’s hands as he buttons up the sleeves of his shirt. He says that on Thursday next week he’s going to Tsaritsyno. I don’t know where that is, so he tells me it’s a ruined palace out in the suburbs. It’s a good place to walk, he says, and by then the snow will surely have come. I could meet him at a café which doesn’t have a name but it’s in Malaia Bronnaia Ulitsa, the north side of the Patriarch’s Ponds. I didn’t think there were any cafés in Moscow, but I say, ‘Thank you.’ And then, ‘Thanks for your advice.’ And he says, ‘Oh, you really shouldn’t listen to me, my dear, I’m probably just talking about myself.’

  Then he moves towards the door and I realize that I don’t know his name. ‘Sorry, sorry – I didn’t catch your name?’ He turns back to me. ‘Jack Flame,’ he says. ‘That must be made up,’ I say. And he says, ‘Yes, it is. It’s a name I’ve tried to lose many times but it follows me.’ He walks to the door and light from the corridor touches the side of his face. Then he turns back into the room and says, ‘You know, I wouldn’t be too sure it never happened. The past can be unpredictable.’

  30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow

  November 1990

  At the time, I was sure that Rob and I were happy in Moscow. Now I don’t know. Perhaps we didn’t even understand what happiness was? We lived near the Byelorusskaia Station in a block apparently reserved for railway workers, although I never met anyone there who had any connection with trains. Our flat had been broken into so many times that Rob had made the landlord fit a steel door. I never thought that the flat was bugged but Rob was convinced it was.

  For Rob and me, the living-together experience was new, and we didn’t know how to do it. We felt like children playing house, and being in Moscow only added to our uncertainty. Usually when you live in a foreign place you try, by degrees, to understand it. In Moscow there wasn’t any point in trying. One day the city happened, the next day it happened again; you couldn’t draw any conclusion from anything.

  In the evenings Rob would arrive back – always after eight o’clock – and I’d say, So how are you? I’m fine, he’d reply, and you? I’m fine, and how are you? Fine, fine, he’d reply, and you? And so we’d go on until he got bored, and kissed me, and told me to shut up. Then we’d stand together in our lime-green kitchen wondering how to make supper, and we’d invent handy household hints. How to open a tin with a blunt, left-handed tin-opener. Twenty imaginative things to do with half a pot of sour cream, two pork chops and three carrots.

  And that’s how it was until Maya’s party and that card from my mother, which arrived a week later. Rob gave it to me when he came home from work. It had come that morning, he said, but he’d only just remembered. My mother buys her cards from church bazaars or charity shops and they’re usually photographs of ducklings, or fluffy cats with red bows. This one had three puppies in a basket, with sad eyes and drooping ears. I read it and then laid it aside, purposefully taking no interest, then sat down to do some marking. Rob reached out to put the kettle on, picked up the card, and read it. ‘I take it that the stuff about your self-respect can be translated as You’re living in sin, you nasty slut, and you should get married.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much the size of it.’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard of worse ideas.’

  I allowed one of my books to slide off the table and then spent too long picking it up. When I emerged, Rob was looking at me with raised eyebrows.

  ‘And God ordained Holy Matrimony in order that no one should have to sleep on a lumpy sofa?’ I said. This was a reference to the night I’d arrived in Moscow, when the situation between Rob and me was unclear, and he’d offered to sleep on the sofa. I’d told him the sofa looked as lumpy as the Lake District and so we’d finished up in the same bed. That was the only conversation we’d ever had about our relationship.

  ‘Well, the sofa is one question but, seriously, we should think.’ Rob was making mugs of tea with the last of the tea bags I’d brought over from England. ‘I mean, these visa issues aren’t going to get any easier. When we move somewhere else it’ll be just the same problem.’

  A coin was lying on the table and I picked it up, turning it from heads to tails, then back again. Was marriage about visas? Was it decided over pork chops and the unwashed breakfast pots? I couldn’t imagine being married to anyone other than Rob, but still the thought filled me with panic. Is this it then? Is this what it’s going to be? I’d loved other men more than I loved Rob, but it had always been the same pattern – two weeks of passion, followed by two years of despair. I held my mother’s postcard over the bin. The puppies whinged and whimpered. With their sad eyes and drooping ears, they pleaded with me not to abandon them. So I propped them on the windowsill with the other two card
s she’d sent.

  I thought of her, sitting in her sewing room at Marsh End House, the night before I left, her expression uncertain. What attitude should she take to my departure? Of course, she was thrilled that I was going to be with Rob – but Moscow? Eva, I’m just not sure it’s a good idea, she had said. You know how you are. Remember what Doctor Evans said. Blah-blah. And have you got a good pair of gloves? You can’t go to Moscow without proper gloves.

  Rob started to chop up the carrots and asked if I’d rung her.

  ‘No. I don’t like to deprive her of an opportunity to worry.’

  The knife went down through the carrots and Rob sighed and shook his head. For me, one of the advantages of Moscow was that it was difficult for my mother to ring me, and almost impossible for me to make an international call, unless I went to Rob’s office. I picked up the coin again. Heads, tails. Rob’s hand was still tied up in that bandage. He’d never said anything much about that evening at Maya’s, and I was grateful for that, but now the thought came to me – would I have answered yes if he’d asked me before Maya’s party? I watched a fat cockroach emerge from a crack beside the door and scurry across the brown tiled floor. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I was trying to remember how my parents ever knew Maya.’

  Rob was busy with the pork chops. ‘Um … I don’t really remember. I think perhaps her father used to rent one of the flats in that big house next door.’

  ‘Which big house?’

  ‘You know, Wyvelston Hall. They pulled it down to make the caravan park. The lake and the boathouse were part of it.’