Moskva

46 At the Hotel National

‘Tom!’

He was outside the arrival doors at Sheremetyevo T2 and looking, in vain, for a familiar face in a crowd of tourists just disembarked from Aeroflot flight 298 from London when he heard Caro calling his name.

Turning, he saw her lugging her huge pigskin case, which he took from her without thinking. They kissed each other’s cheeks, briefly, perfunctorily. The way strangers kiss.

‘What are you doing here?’ Caro asked.

More to the point, Tom thought, what are you doing here? All he said, though, was, ‘Meeting your flight, obviously.’

‘You didn’t call to say you got my message.’

‘That’s because I’ve only just found the bloody thing…’ Holding up his hand in apology, Tom said, ‘I got back to my flat late last night and only noticed the message in my pigeonhole this morning. I came straight out.’

‘I called your concierge.’

‘My concierge?’

‘Whoever answers your central telephone.’

‘She spoke English?’

‘Perfect English.’

‘Still using this, I see.’ He nodded at the suitcase Caro had owned long before they ever met. It was battered, built round a wooden frame and wilfully old-fashioned. It was my great aunt’s, she’d said crossly, the one time he had suggested replacing it.

‘I like it.’

Tom smiled despite himself. ‘I know.’

‘The taxi sign says that way.’

‘I have a car waiting,’ Tom said.

His wife looked as she always did: elegant and polished and beautiful. Tourists on their way out of Sheremetyevo glanced across instinctively, the women to examine her Jaeger coat, the men the figure it covered. Her expression as she clocked Tom’s unshaven state was unreadable.

‘Caro, what are you doing in Moscow?’

She hesitated, only for a second. ‘I’ve brought the forms.’

‘Your father already sent me a set.’

‘He said you’d probably torn them up. He arranged my flight. The Foreign Office expedited my visa.’ Of course they did. Papa had contacts. His son-in-law’s lack of them was one of the things he’d always disliked about Tom. That and getting his daughter pregnant. ‘Also, I thought you might show me round.’

‘You thought I might…?’

‘Moscow’s one of the few places I’ve never been. It was Mummy’s suggestion. She thought we could talk about Charlie, sort out who has him for holidays and half-terms, who pays what. She thought we should try to be civilized about it. You want to know why I’m here? That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to be civilized.’

‘Caro…’

‘I know you don’t like them. Okay? I know. But we could. You know. Be civilized about it.’

‘I have to leave Moscow first thing tomorrow.’

‘That’s rotten.’

‘I’m not being horrid. What hotel did Intourist assign you?’

‘The National.’

Of course… What else?

‘The car’s out here.’

A huge car park sprawled in front of Sheremetyevo’s concrete and glass building. Flagpoles fat enough to be missiles jutted from the tarmac, and grass beds marked the edges of the parking area. This being Moscow, there were more spaces than cars and the gaps made the car park look bigger than it was.

‘Over there,’ Tom said.

The stallholder from the market by the flyover who’d taken Tom to the embassy was already climbing from his vehicle. Only instead of his filthy Niva half-truck, this time he drove a black Volga with chrome bumpers and fins so exaggerated they belonged in a fifties film. Grinning at the sight of Caro, the man snapped out a ragged salute. ‘Nice,’ he said. Luckily, he said it in Russian.

‘The National,’ Tom told him.

The back seat was so worn its leatherette had cracked to reveal canvas beneath, and someone had patched the footwell with squares of office carpet. An acrylic vase glued to the dashboard held a faded plastic rose.

‘It’s not the Merc, I’m afraid.’

‘Sold it,’ said Caro. ‘I drive a Mini these days.’

Tom was too shocked to reply.

‘Solidarity,’ Caro said, a word he’d never thought to hear from her lips. Catching his look, she hesitated on the edge of saying more, then said it anyway, her eyes misting. ‘I bought a white one first. The garage were kind. They let me change it.’

‘Caro…’

She flapped her hands in front of her face in a way that was quite unlike her, dismissing the tears that threatened to fall, dismissing the sentiment, dismissing everything except a need to stare straight ahead without blinking.

Dear God, how hard must that have been? Tom thought of her coming down in the morning and seeing a white Mini where Becca used to park. Because he’d bet she’d parked there too. How long did Caro last before she begged the garage to take it back?

He wouldn’t have lasted a day.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a minute later when the threat of tears was behind her and they were on one of those twisting and chaotic under-signposted and over-complicated new routes out of Sheremetyevo and back to the city.

‘Caro, it doesn’t matter.’

Her silence said it did.

He thought of the two-seater 300SL, her family home outside Winchester and the softly rolling hills beyond, the roads that were so familiar she drove them from instinct, taking corners faster than was safe for anyone not born knowing the bends. She’d grown up there. Well, in the holidays. The rest of the year she’d boarded.

She rode her pony through the woods. Kissed her first boy against the witch tree. Went up Chalk Hunt a virgin and came down something else, something very else according to her mother when she found out.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Caro asked.

‘The witch tree.’

She smiled sadly.

‘Turn of the century,’ he told her, as they approached the hotel. ‘Shelled during the Revolution. Lenin ran his government out of here briefly. Very briefly. It was derelict by the thirties, renovated in the forties. Most of its furniture was stolen from pre-Revolutionary mansions. Some of it belonged to the Tsar.’

‘You should have been a history master.’

‘Might have been happier.’

She looked at him.

‘Sorry,’ Tom said.

‘Don’t be. That’s probably the truth of it.’

He went in with Caro to explain, in Russian, that he was her husband and worked at the embassy, but she lived in England where their son was… This was enough for the girl at the desk to let them through. Getting past the deshurnaya by the lift on Caro’s floor was harder.

‘Your pass books?’

This one was younger than most of the women who kept the keys for the doors of the hotel floors they guarded, but no less hard-eyed. She took the pass book Caro had been given in reception and satisfied herself that Caro was a legitimate guest.

‘And yours?’

Lacking his embassy pass, Tom offered his military pass instead, adding his passport when the woman scowled.

‘Propusk,’ she demanded.

Tom shook his head, switching to Russian to repeat what he’d said downstairs. Caro was his wife. Their boy was back home.

When the woman waved her finger, Tom produced his wallet, dug into one of its side pockets and pulled out a snapshot taken when they had just begun. He wore a black biker’s jacket over a white T-shirt, Caro a pair of 501s and his blue jersey.

‘That’s us,’ he said.

Taking it by the edges, the woman peered at it suspiciously.

‘This is our son.’ Tom offered her a photograph of Charlie taken when he was four. He sat, small and serious, in the bucket seat of a rusting Massey Ferguson, red gumboots dangling. He looked uncannily like a Soviet poster of a young pioneer.

When Tom looked across at her, Caro was biting her lip.

‘You work at your embassy?’ the woman asked.

‘For my sins,’ Tom said.

‘Your wife?’

‘Lives at home.’

The deshurnaya watched impassively as Tom returned the tiny photographs to his wallet. She didn’t say he could go to Caro’s room but she didn’t stop him either…

‘Where are the forms?’ Tom asked the moment they were through the door.

Her body stiffened. ‘In my case.’

‘Would you mind if I signed them now?’

She did a double take, and Tom shrugged apologetically. He wasn’t sure why, they were her forms after all. ‘I’d like to get it over with.’

‘You’ve changed,’ she said at last.

The petition for divorce was handwritten in all the right boxes, signed by Caro but not yet dated. They had one child according to this.

Their wedding certificate was attached to the form. They’d married in the village church – Caro’s choice. They’d had a bishop do it. That choice – her mother’s.

Tom had the Mont Blanc she’d given him one Christmas in his jacket, in the little leather case she’d bought at the same time; she said nothing as he unscrewed its lid, tapped the barrel and ran the nib over a scrap of hotel paper. Having checked his pen had ink, Tom signed, before adding the date. When he looked up, Caro was crying, silent tears dripping from her chin.

‘Caro…’

It was the wrong thing to say.

She left her own room, abandoning Tom to silence and the newly signed forms. His signature on the wedding certificate was much the same. Hers was smaller and neater and more childish than he remembered.

Caro’s teacup was empty and Tom’s still upside down on its saucer when he found her in the tea rooms. She’d chosen a table in a corner, behind a pillar and almost out of sight. ‘I’ll order another pot.’

‘This is fine.’

She ordered a fresh pot anyway.

‘I thought…’ She stopped. ‘I thought, if you didn’t mind, you could write to Charlie at school and say Mummy came to see me. We had tea and went for a walk. That sort of thing. It might help,’ she added quickly, ‘if he knows we’re friends.’

‘He’s having trouble?’

‘Unsettled. That’s what Matron said.’

She sat back and sipped her tea, thoughts playing across her face like notes of an unheard piece of music.

‘You remember Liz Sheridan?’ she said suddenly.

‘Vaguely.’

‘She said she thought I should know…’ The tightness in Caro’s voice suggested she didn’t believe her motives were that simple. ‘She’d overheard his housemaster say…’ Caro’s mouth collapsed in misery. ‘That there was nothing wrong with Charlie that having different parents couldn’t cure.’

‘God. I’m sorry, Caro.’

‘For what?’

‘Everything.’

Pushing herself out of her chair, she took the seat next to him.

Instinctively, Tom’s arm went round her, her head came to rest on his shoulder and he stroked her hair as she cried. Silently at first, then swallowed sobs that shook her body and soaked his shirt. She sniffled and snuffled and gulped her way out of the tears. And Tom’s hand, which had been stroking her hair, held her tight until a waitress came to clear their table and Caro retook her original seat as if nothing had happened.

‘I miss her,’ Caro said, once the waitress was gone.

‘I know.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ Tom said, his certainty surprising both of them.

Her hand reached across to grip his wrist. ‘You don’t mind me asking you to write to Charlie? I was worried you’d be cross.’

‘You think it will help?’

‘It would show him we’re not enemies. It would show the school.’

‘I’ll do it tonight.’

She half stood, leaning across the table to kiss his cheek and seal his promise. She smelled, as she’d always done, of Dior and sandalwood soap and hairspray. But though she smelled like the woman he remembered, Tom knew she was already somebody else.

Later, in the bar, they talked about supper without actually eating any, and drank a bottle of Soviet Riesling and decided it wasn’t worth ordering another and left it at that. At the lift, Caro reached out and put her hand on Tom’s wrist.

He could nod goodnight, extract his arm and peck her on the cheek, pretend her fingers had never reached for him. Instead, he looked at her and the gloom had softened the lines on her face, as it undoubtedly had his, and he realized that the strangeness of the day had sanded the brittle edges between them, for the moment anyway.

Tom had no real desire to go back to Sad Sam, and there were things he needed to say. Things it was important for Caro to hear.

‘This means nothing,’ she said.

He nodded.

Undressing, Caro hesitated only once, when she saw the two plasters crisscrossing Tom’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Someone shot me. With a crossbow.’

She sighed, looked at him and moved in for a proper kiss.

The sex was slow and quiet. They stood in the window with the curtains drawn back, the room lights off, snow falling in fat flakes past their window and Manezhka Square spread out below them. Her body was as perfect as ever. She let him raise her foot on to a stool and slide into her, her breasts lifting in time with his thrusts. She had cried the very first time they made love, and she cried this time. Tom had no more idea why she’d cried then than now and knew that was his failure, not hers.

Before they slept, when all Tom really wanted was sleep, when his happiness was losing out to loneliness and he’d decided he didn’t need to say the things he’d thought he needed to say, she asked about Alex. He couldn’t even remember mentioning Alex. But apparently he had, the night she telephoned after he’d called Charlie.

‘Tell me,’ Caro ordered.

So Tom did.

From Alex cadging a cigarette on the balcony at the party, and what he’d said about cutting her wrists, through to his being arrested as he tried to board Yelena’s train and Sir Edward’s fury afterwards. Then, because he’d started being honest and didn’t know how to stop, he told her about Northern Ireland, about what he really did for military intelligence, about the people he pretended to be.

He touched her fingers to bullet scars in his leg and back, and they both understood what her not knowing said about when they’d last seen each other naked. And she lay, very still and very quiet, as he told her about being hunted across the hills above Crossmaglen and why he really hated multi-storey car parks. What she said when he was finished was not what he expected her to say.

‘Did it ever occur to you that Becca’s death might have been accidental? That she might genuinely have dozed off and hit a tree? That her being pregnant could have had nothing to do with it, that she simply hadn’t told us yet?’

‘Caro. How do you –’

‘How do you think I know? I demanded a copy of the report. Tom, I don’t need protecting. Rebecca was mine too. She could have been waiting for the right time to tell us. She might have had a clinic fixed. Ten weeks is early days.’

‘It wasn’t her boyfriend.’

‘I know, I asked him.’

‘I bet you didn’t kick the living shit out of him first.’

‘Charlie says Becca talks to him. He wakes up and she’s on the end of his bed. They have to keep their voices down so as not to wake the other boys.’

‘Dreams,’ Tom said.

‘You don’t think…’

‘That it’s somehow true? No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’

‘He says he thinks about her all the time.’

‘I know.’

‘How can you possibly –’

‘Because I do too. And if I do, you two must.’ Tom thought about it a little more. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like the idea of Becca talking to Charlie. If you talk to him, and it seems appropriate, please tell him to send my love.’

‘You’ve changed.’

‘After something like that, how can anyone stay the same?’

‘Becca told me once that she didn’t believe in time. Days were dams that failed, hours sticks thrown into the water to measure its speed. Minutes little better than seconds, dust on life’s surface, swept away before we could notice.’

‘Caro, what happened?’

‘To Becca? I don’t know.’ She buried her head in Tom’s shoulder while he pretended not to feel her tears. ‘Who knows? A stupid argument with… A party he didn’t go to. It could have been a one-night stand.’

‘She didn’t drink.’

‘You can have them without drinking.’

‘It helps,’ Tom said, feeling her withdraw slightly, and then her hand reached for his and gripped it tight.

He said, ‘I worry that…’

‘I have to believe she’d have told us if that had happened.’

‘Told you…’

‘Told one of us,’ Caro said, smoothing the creases from Tom’s face and kissing his neck as if the bad years had never been. Tom wanted to ask – so badly that he framed the words in three different ways, and held them all back because none were right – if the tenderness behind her kiss meant I remember you or goodbye.

‘Go back to Alex,’ Caro said.

So he described searching her room, his voice breaking as he told Caro about taking Alex’s Smash Hits, Jackies and NMEs from her bedside cupboard, then carefully replacing them. How he’d found the postcard, D and five kisses. How Davie Wong turned out to be a dead end, in not being her boyfriend, but how he’d given Tom an address for the party. How Alex had been long gone, but what remained of the boyfriend was there, tied with wire and quite possibly burned alive…

‘Tom,’ Caro sounded scared. ‘Who are these people?’

‘Monsters,’ Tom told her.

She hugged him tighter. ‘Don’t be so blasé about it.’

‘I’m not. But monsters are what I do.’

Sighing, Caro said, ‘I think I preferred it when I thought you were wasting your time with computers, microfiche and old books…’

He told her about being shot by Vladimir Vedenin with a crossbow. How he’d been moved from hospital to hospital, until the commissar had extracted him and had him put, under guard, in a hospital for senior KGB officers. Tom even told her about making Vladimir Vedenin drive across the ice. That surprised him.

He hadn’t intended to tell her that.

‘He died?’

‘He drowned.’

‘Do you regret it?’

She listened in silence as Tom told her why not. His points weren’t always in order. He doubted that many of them were very clear. He ended with what he’d been trying not to remember, what he’d originally thought the ultimate dead end, the reason he’d gone back to the supposed cult house.

The dead children in the cellar.

Then it was his turn to cry.

She held his head against her breasts, and when he was done, she asked if there was anything else. So he told her about Beziki’s suicide. The way Beziki had spun the revolver’s cylinder before he fired, the photographs of a boy being tortured to death in Berlin, and the sins of the fathers being visited on their children.

About the dead girl dumped in front of the House of Lions. How badly that had shaken the commissar. How badly that had shaken him.

About attending her autopsy.

‘This is about Becca, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it’s about Becca.’ Tom reached down to find her hand, holding it tight. ‘Well, it started out being about her. Now…’

Caro nodded. He didn’t need to say it.

Now it was about Alex.

‘You know what you haven’t told me?’ Caro said first thing next morning, when they woke to daylight streaming through curtains they’d left undrawn. ‘Why it is that you can’t spend the next few days with me in Moscow.’

So he told her what he’d told no one else.

About the deal he’d made with General Dennisov on the observation platform of the train. What the general had promised to let Kyukov do to Alex if Tom didn’t give him the photographs.

‘He has her then? Definitely?’

‘So he says. He brought me a photograph of his own…’

Slipping from her bed, Tom took his jacket from the back of the chair and dug into a side pocket, finding what he wanted.

‘It’s not pretty,’ he said.

Alex knelt naked on a recent issue of Pravda, her wrists tied behind her back, her head bowed and her hair fallen forward, but not enough to hide her tears.

‘She looks like me,’ Caro said.

‘No, she doesn’t…’

‘Yes, she does. At the beginning. Before I lost weight, before I started having my hair dyed.’ Leaning forward, she kissed Tom gently. ‘My poor boy. Who else knows about this deal?’

‘No one else,’ Tom said. ‘Only you.’