Bomb Grade

chapter 15

C harlie didn’t know what to do. Or say. It would have been wrong to try to kiss her, which was his first impulse. And to offer to shake hands seemed ridiculous. Which it would have been. So he just stood at the apartment door, waiting for Natalia to do or say something.

Natalia didn’t know what to do or say either and stood on the other side of the threshold, looking to Charlie for the first move. Which didn’t come. Finally, unspeaking, she stood aside. Charlie went in but stopped immediately inside.

‘At the very end,’ she said. She wished she hadn’t been thick-voiced.

He walked down the small corridor but halted again directly outside the door. ‘You’d better go in first,’ he said, like a courteous visitor outside a sick room.

Natalia did, calling Sasha’s name as she entered. The child squatted rubber-legged by the window, tending her wooden farmyard. She looked up, blank-faced, at Charlie’s entry.

‘This was my friend, from a long time ago,’ announced Natalia. Charlie’s Russian was good enough now: Was my friend.

‘Hello,’ said Sasha and smiled, looking at the gift-wrapped package in Charlie’s hand.

Charlie hadn’t known how to prepare for Natalia but he’d imagined he would be ready for Sasha. But he wasn’t, not at all. She was dark, like Natalia, the hair frothing in natural curls to her shoulders, and chubby-cheeked, although she wasn’t fat. The eyes were blue, again like Natalia, but the nose was bobbed, upturned at the tip, which was like neither of them, but she did have Natalia’s freckles. In the photograph she’d been a baby and babies to Charlie all looked the same: now she was a tiny, real thing, a person in miniature. The dress was red-checked, with bows on the bodice, and there were patent shoes with white socks and Charlie thought she was the most perfect, fragile, prettiest creature he’d ever seen. Mine, he thought, his throat clogged. Not a creature! I’m looking at my own daughter, baby, child, girl: someone I made. Mine. Part of me. He coughed to say more clearly: ‘It’s for you.’ He’d relied entirely upon Fiona, who’d recommended the doll and even chosen the paper to wrap it in. She would obviously have told Bowyer, and Charlie was curious what had been relayed to London.

Sasha hesitated, looking to Natalia for permission. Natalia nodded and said, ‘All right.’ The child stopped smiling as she came up to Charlie, solemnly accepted the gift and said: ‘Why?’

Charlie blinked, nonplussed. ‘I thought you’d like it.’ Christ, his feet ached. Everything ached: feet, body, head, everything. He felt lost.

‘Why?’

‘I thought you’d like a baby to look after’ This was terrible! He was floundering, about to go under.

Sasha looked uncertainly back to her mother. Natalia said: ‘Why don’t you open it?’

Sasha did, with difficulty, because Fiona had been liberal with the tape and the child began by trying to unpick it: eventually, exasperated, she tore at the paper. For several moments she held the doll at arm’s length, seriously examining it, before finally smiling.

‘She has dark hair, like you,’ said Charlie. How did you speak – what did you say – to a child! His child. His baby. His daughter. His own daughter. Mine.

‘What’s her name?’

‘You give her one.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s yours.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you to have her. Look after her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I do.’ Child logic for a child.

Sasha continued to consider the offer gravely, looking first between the doll and Charlie and then to Natalia, who nodded permission again. ‘Anna,’ the child declared.

‘That’s good,’ said Charlie, not quite sure what he was approving. ‘Anna’s yours now. Look after her.’

‘Sasha!’ prompted Natalia.

‘Thank you,’ said Sasha. She waited, for another nod that the thanks were sufficient, before returning to the window. There she set the doll on the chair so it overlooked the still-life farmyard and said something to it that Charlie didn’t hear.

Conscious of the child’s early hesitation, Charlie said to Natalia: ‘I hope that was all right. Something from someone she doesn’t know. I didn’t think…’

‘It’s all right,’ said Natalia, clearer-voiced. She appeared to become aware they were both still standing. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Charlie was uncertain, she recognized. It surprised her because she didn’t remember him confused about anything. She wasn’t, Natalia decided, positively. There was a feeling: nothing more – nothing worse – than discomfort, unease at the oddity of something difficult to believe. It would have been unnatural if there hadn’t been something at their meeting as bizarrely as this, neither knowing what to do or what to say with their child – the child he’d never seen, a complete stranger – playing innocently between them. But she was quite sure that was all it was, a perfectly acceptable reaction to the peculiarity of the situation. He was heavier, although not by much, and he’d tried very hard. The sports jacket was new and the trousers had a crease where a crease was supposed to be. Only the footwear was the same and he’d shuffled several times as if he were embarrassed he hadn’t done something about that as well.

There was a chair just inside the door, separate from most of the other furniture, and Charlie chose that. Natalia sat, too, on the window-fronting couch close to where Sasha was playing. It put them practically as far away from each other as it was possible to get, virtually on opposite sides of the room. Charlie pulled his feet under the chair, as if to hide them.

It could not have been long, just seconds, but to Charlie the silence seemed interminable. Again it was Natalia who broke it, although with near-cliche. ‘Would you like something… a drink…?’

‘No. I’m fine.’ Hurriedly he added: ‘Thank you.’ He would have liked a drink – liked several drinks – but didn’t want her leaving the room, her doing anything but sitting there, opposite him; their being together. He didn’t know what to expect or how today was going to end but for as long as it lasted he just wanted her with him, doing nothing else, thinking about nothing else. Just there. Speak! he told himself: say something. Sasha was the reason for his being there, the swaying bridge between them. He babbled: ‘She’s very pretty… beautiful… like…’ He brought himself up short before adding ‘like you’, which would have sounded crass. There was a similarity which Natalia must have recognized, so the remark would not have been too out of place. Today Natalia wore a loose, long sweater and a skirt and her hair was looser than at the formal meeting, although still bunched at the neck. She’d been irritated, sometimes genuinely so, when he’d called her beautiful, complaining her features were too heavy and her nose too pronounced, but Charlie thought she was beautiful. The freckles – the freckles Sasha also had – were more obvious today so she must have worn more make-up than he’d thought before, to cover them.

‘Yes.’ It was an acceptance of an obvious fact, not a mother’s conceit. He seemed enraptured with her, which was understandable, too. More worrying than understandable.

Unthinkingly they’d reverted to English. Briefly Sasha looked up, frowning, but then started playing again. It was as if the language was familiar to her, Charlie thought.

‘You must be very proud.’ Banality piled on banality: the way strangers talked, anxious to get away from each other.

‘I am.’

‘It’s marvellous… incredible… being able to see her.’ Edith had been devastated at not being able to have children: the guilt she’d felt – which Charlie could never understand, because it wasn’t her fault: not anybody’s fault – had been an obstacle in their marriage in the beginning. He suspected she’d never fully believed it wasn’t important to him and that he didn’t blame her or think she’d failed him in some way. But it really hadn’t mattered to Charlie: it was something that couldn’t be, and with the job he’d done it was probably better that it couldn’t. Which was what he and Edith had decided when they’d discussed adoption. And by the time he’d met Natalia he’d so accepted the fact of childlessness that the idea of Natalia becoming pregnant had never once occurred to him. Or to her, he didn’t think. Certainly they’d never talked about it.

‘She’s mine, Charlie!’ declared Natalia, warningly. ‘All mine! Legally.’ The bubbling discomfort was still there – growing if anything – but easier to appreciate now. She wasn’t going to tolerate any threat to the unthreatenable, to herself or Sasha. He had to accept that. Properly acknowledge it.

‘I know.’

Not enough. Too glib. ‘I mean it! There isn’t any way you can interfere. Upset anything.’

‘Why should I do that? Do anything? Want to. Don’t be silly…’ He shouldn’t have called her silly, but it was too late now. And it was ridiculous for her to regard him as a danger. God, how much he wanted to interfere and upset, although not in the way Natalia meant! Interfere and upset their lives by becoming part of their lives, caring for them, protecting them, so that Natalia would stop worrying any more about danger.

‘Your solemn promise!’

‘My solemn promise,’

‘Don’t ever break it!’ The hissed demand, heavy with all his broken undertakings and commitments of the past, hung between them like a curtain. Natalia flushed, visibly, with what Charlie inferred to be anger.

‘I came,’ announced Charlie, seizing the opening, in a hurry to tell her and start putting things back as they had been between them and he wanted them to be again. ‘Virtually to this very place…!’ He pointed beyond her, beyond the window. ‘I got the photograph. And was sure I recognized the background out there, on Leninskaya. Close to the Gagarin monument. I came and I waited…!’ He looked briefly towards Sasha. ‘It was her birthday, wasn’t it! That’s what I was supposed to understand: that I was to be there on her birthday – August the eighth.’

He had to be lying: cheating her like he’d cheated her so many times and in so many ways before! She knew he hadn’t been there, because she had. And not just that first year, when she’d prayed he’d turn up. The following year as well, on the same date and at the same place, and she’d lingered there for hours.

‘Don’t, Charlie! I know it’s not true. It was August the eighth. And it was the Gagarin obelisk. But you never came. I waited. For hours. But you never came.’

‘I did!’ implored Charlie, so vehemently that Sasha looked up at him, startled, and uttered a nervous whimper.

‘It’s all right,’ soothed Natalia, stretching out an arm towards the girl. ‘Play some more, darling.’

Charlie burned with embarrassment at frightening the child and with frustration at Natalia’s dogmatic, unmovable disbelief. He took all the fervency out of his voice and quietly, reasonably, said: ‘Natalia, listen to me! Please listen! I did come. And when you didn’t arrive I decided I’d misunderstood. So I came on other days… four or five other days in case I’d got the date wrong, which I knew I hadn’t. And I went to the old apartment and tried to find you but they said they didn’t know where you were. And then I decided you hadn’t tried to contact me after all: that you hated me and that the photograph was to let me know just how deep that hate was…’ It was a different type of nagging foot pain now, the sort that came when he made a mistake and didn’t know what it was. Which was what it should be because somewhere, somehow, there had been one of the worst mistakes he’d ever suffered in his life and he couldn’t work out how or why it had happened.

Natalia sat shaking her head, not in denial or refusal but in matching incomprehension. ‘None of it makes sense. You got it right: what I meant by the picture! Her birthday…’

‘No!’ stopped Charlie, softly. ‘Oh no…!’

Natalia sat slightly open-mouthed, bewildered.

‘What’s today’s date?’ demanded Charlie, flat-voiced in the gouging, bitter relief that he knew what the mistake was. Why! Why hadn’t he remembered her belief in a God?

‘The twentieth,’ she said, her face clouded, still bewildered. ‘October the twentieth.’

Charlie nodded. ‘That’s my date too: because you’ve adjusted. Automatically.’ He smiled sadly towards the playing child. ‘Is she christened, Natalia?’

‘Of course…’ started the woman, then stopped, finally realizing. In a whisper, she finished: ‘Oh my God, yes.’ Her fault! Her terrible, stupid, ridiculous mistake – after being sure she’d planned how to find him so cleverly and so carefully and had got through to him – that had ruined so much that might have been. Because he had come to her.

‘Eleven days,’ murmured Charlie, disbelievingly. ‘We missed each other by eleven days.’ The difference between the Gregorian calendar by which the West worked and the Julian calculations of the year’s length that Russia followed: followed particularly in its orthodox church ceremonies in recognizing births, deaths and marriages. And he’d missed it! He’d ponced around thinking he was so bloody smart, Jack the Lad who always got everything right, and he hadn’t had the nous to calculate the difference, to be by the space-shot monument on both dates. Charlie couldn’t believe it: he really couldn’t believe he’d overlooked something so simple and so obvious.

‘My fault…’ they each began at the same time, and then stopped. For the first time Natalia smiled.

‘Both our faults,’ said Charlie, actually laughing, his spirits in flight. ‘But it doesn’t matter, darling, not any more. We’ve made it, finally!’

Natalia’s smile faltered, then died. ‘Things are different, Charlie.’

Charlie sat, emptied, as Natalia talked, haltingly and at times changing her mind in mid-sentence to start again. While she was talking, Sasha tired of farming and clambered on to her mother’s lap. Now Natalia sat with both arms wrapped protectively around the child, who’d left Charlie’s doll on the chair but still clutched the wooden model of a cow from her farmyard set.

‘But you’re not married!’ Charlie wondered who the man was: he thought she’d been about to tell him several times but changed her mind with those mid-sentence breaks.

‘He’s asked me.’ Seeing Charlie look around the apartment Natalia said: ‘No, he doesn’t live here.’ The unsaid ‘not yet’ hung in the air.

‘Are you going to? Marry him?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

Charlie felt a pop of hope. ‘Don’t you love him?’

Natalia hesitated, wanting the words to be right. Then, holding Charlie’s eyes, she said: ‘Yes, I love him. I love him very much.’

Charlie’s mind blanked, momentarily, no more words to say or thoughts to think. Sasha stirred, on Natalia’s lap, snuggling tiredly into her chest. Looking at the child Charlie said: ‘Does he know about Sasha?’

Natalia’s hold tightened, perceptibly. ‘My husband is registered as the father. The dates just worked. He’s dead now.’

The drunken womanizer from whom she’d been separated for years, remembered Charlie. With it came a more current thought. There really wasn’t any proof or trace of his being Sasha’s father. Abruptly aware of her consternation, Charlie said: ‘I didn’t mean anything, by that! Nothing… nothing difficult. Believe me!’ From the look on Natalia’s face, Charlie wasn’t sure that she did.

‘He loves Sasha,’ she said. ‘He’s very good to her.’

With an umbilical intuition between mother and daughter Sasha held the wooden animal out towards Charlie and said: ‘Ley’s.’

‘Leys?’ Charlie supposed it could be the Russian word for ‘cow’.

‘That’s the closest she can get to his name.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Charlie, directly.

‘Aleksai Semenovich,’ she said. ‘Aleksai Semenovich Popov.’

‘My boy negotiated all this?’ demanded Fitzjohn.

‘It’s classified, you understand,’ said the FBI Director. Covering himself against the thought of indiscretion, Fenby smiled and said: ‘I checked your security clearance.’ Which was true.

‘It’s on his records, though?’

‘Bold and clear,’ assured Fenby. That was true, too. The stupid son-of-a-bitch didn’t deserve it. If it hadn’t been for his too-important family connections, he’d have hauled Kestler out of Moscow – even if he’d made the mistake of putting him there in the first place – and posted him somewhere like Montana or North Dakota, snowed in where he couldn’t do any more damage. He was profoundly grateful for Peter Johnson’s warning. He could move quickly now, if he had to.

They were at the Four Seasons again, Fenby’s parade ground. The House Speaker waited while their plates were cleared and said: ‘What about the physical danger, sir?’

‘Strictly involved in the planning,’ said Fenby, in further assurance. ‘No physical involvement whatsoever.’

Fitzjohn stirred the ice around his bourbon with its cocktail straw, gazing down into the drink. ‘Jamie’s part will be made known, though? When it’s over?’

‘Of course.’

‘Obliged to you, sir. Greatly obliged.’

At that moment, five thousand miles away in Moscow, the telephone rang in the apartment in which Natalia was now alone, except for Sasha.

‘There’s been a message from Oskin,’ reported Aleksai Popov. ‘He wants to come to Moscow to discuss his re-assignment.’ It was the code they had arranged in the Kirov restaurant to announce a date for the robbery.

As Natalia replaced the receiver, Sasha said: ‘Why are you crying, Mummy?’

‘I’m not crying,’ said Natalia. ‘Your hair flicked in my eye.’