The House of Special Purpose

1970

FOR THE FIRST YEAR after my retirement, I deliberately chose not to go anywhere near the library at the British Museum. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to be there; on the contrary, after spending my entire adult life closeted within the erudite comfort of that peaceful chamber, there was almost nowhere that I felt quite so content. No, the reason I chose to avoid it was because I did not wish to become one of those men who cannot accept that his working life has come to an end and that the daily routine of employment, which provides order and discipline in our lives, has been replaced by the utter confusion – or what Lamb chose to call ‘the deliverance’ – of the superannuated man.

I could recall only too well the Friday evening in 1959 when a small party was thrown in honour of Mr Trevors, who had reached the age of sixty-five and was completing his last week of work at the library. Drinks and food were served, speeches were made, dozens of people showed up to wish him well with whatever was to follow. We offered the usual clichés that the world was now his oyster and felt no shame at our duplicity. The atmosphere was intended to be light and cheerful, but my former employer grew increasingly morose as the night wore on and wondered aloud, to the embarrassment of his guests, how he would fill his days after this.

‘I’m alone in the world,’ he told us with a wretched smile, pools of tears forming in his eyes as we all looked away, hoping that someone else would offer him comfort. ‘What do I have if I don’t have my work? An empty house. No Dorothy, no Mary,’ he added quietly, referring to the family who should have been a consolation to him in his dotage but who had been taken from him. ‘This job was my only reason for getting up in the mornings.’

The following Monday morning, he arrived at the library as usual, precisely on time, shirt and tie in perfect order, and insisted on helping us with the more menial tasks that he had never concerned himself with in the past. None of us knew quite what to do – he still maintained an air of authority in our minds, after all, having been our employer for so long – and so did nothing to impede him. But then, to our discomfort, he came in the day after that too, and the following day. On the Thursday morning, one of the directors of the museum took him aside for a quiet word and told him that he had to remember that the rest of us were there to work, that we were paid to work, and couldn’t engage in conversation all day long. Go home and enjoy your retirement, he was told cheerfully. Put your feet up and do all those things that you could never do when you were stuck in here every day! The poor man did exactly that. He went home and hanged himself that very evening.

Of course, as I considered my own retirement I had no intention of allowing anything like that to happen to me. For one thing, Zoya and I were lucky enough to be in good health. We had each other, as well as our nine-year-old grandson Michael to keep us young. There was certainly no question of me succumbing to depression or a feeling of uselessness. But nevertheless, a year after my retirement began, I started to feel a longing, not to go back to my old employment but to revisit the atmosphere of scholarship which I so missed. To read more. To learn about those subjects of which I remained ignorant. After all, throughout my working life I had been surrounded by books but had rarely had the opportunity to study any of them. And so I decided to return to the tranquillity of the library for a few hours every afternoon, making sure not to cause any trouble for my former colleagues, usually hiding away from their view, in fact, so that they would feel no obligation to talk to me. And I felt content with this arrangement, happy to spend whatever years I had left engaged upon the act of self-education.

In the late autumn of 1970, however, shortly after my seventy-first birthday, I was seated at my usual desk one afternoon when I saw a woman – some thirty years my junior – I guessed, standing by one of the bookshelves, pretending to examine the titles when it was perfectly clear that she had no interest in them at all, but was intent on watching me. I didn’t think too much of it at the time; she was probably lost in her own thoughts, I decided, and unaware that she was staring in my direction. I went back to my book and thought no more about it.

I noticed her again the following afternoon, however, when she sat at a desk three seats along from my own and I caught her glancing at me when she thought that I wasn’t paying attention, and I confess, I began to find the experience both unsettling and annoying. Had I been a younger man, perhaps I would have thought that the woman was in some way attracted to me, but there was no possibility of that in this instance. I had entered my eighth decade, after all. What little hair remained on my head exposed a bumpy, speckled skull beneath. My teeth were my own, and remained passably white, but they added nothing to my smile, as they might have done when I was a younger man. And while my mobility had not been too badly impaired by ageing, I nevertheless had begun to employ the services of a fine Malacca cane, the better to ensure a steady balance as I walked to and from the library every day. In short, I was no matinée idol and certainly not a figure of desire for a woman half my age.

I considered moving seats, but decided against it. I had been sitting in that same place every afternoon for the previous five years, after all. The light was good, which assisted my reading, as my eyesight was not quite as perceptive as it had once been. Also, it was peaceful there, for I was surrounded by bookshelves that contained such unpopular subjects that few people ever disturbed me. Why should I move? Let her move, I decided. This is my place.

She left shortly after that, but not before hesitating as she passed me, as if there was something she wanted to say, but then thought better of it and moved on.

‘You seem distracted,’ Zoya said to me that night as we were preparing for bed. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, smiling at her, unwilling to go into the problem in any detail with her lest she thought I was imagining things and losing my mind. ‘It’s nothing. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.’

Still, I lay awake that night, fretting about what this woman wanted with me. Thirty years before, even twenty, such a visitation would have filled me with paranoid fantasies about who had sent her to spy on me, what they wanted, whether they were looking for Zoya too, but this was 1970. Those days had long since passed. I could think of no sensible reason for her interest in me and began to worry that she was not in fact the same woman I had seen before, or that I had imagined her entirely and senility was setting in.

That worry was put to rest the following day when I arrived at the library shortly after lunchtime, only to see the lady standing outside next to the great stone lions, wrapped up tightly in a dark, heavy overcoat, and she tensed noticeably when she saw me walking along the street towards her.

In return, I frowned and felt immediately nervous. I knew that she was going to speak to me, but thought that if I simply walked past her without an acknowledgement, then she might leave me in peace. For by now, I knew exactly who she was. It was perfectly obvious. I had never laid eyes on her before she started coming to the library – I hadn’t wanted to – but now here she was, confronting me, which was a presumption in itself.

Walk on, I told myself. Ignore her, Georgy. Say nothing.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ she said as I approached her and I lifted my gloved hand a little in the air and gave her a half-smile and nod as I passed by, realizing as I did so that I truly had become old. This was the action of an elderly man, a royal personage passing by in a gilded carriage. It put me in mind of the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich offering a benediction to the gathered crowd as he paraded his horse through the streets of Kashin, ignorant of the dangers that lay ahead. ‘Mr Jachmenev, I’m sorry, could I have a word—’

‘I have to go inside,’ I said, muttering the words quickly as I hurried on, determined not to allow any contemporary Kolek to take aim at me. ‘I have a lot of work to do today, I’m afraid.’

‘It won’t take long,’ she said, and I could see her eyes welling up with tears as she stepped in front of me, blocking my way. She was nervous too, that was obvious from her expression, and the way her hands trembled could not entirely be ascribed to the cold weather. ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I had to. I just had to.’

‘No,’ I muttered under my breath, shaking my head, unwilling to look at her. ‘No, please…’

‘Mr Jachmenev, if you tell me to go, then I’ll do as you say and I promise I’ll leave you in peace, but all I’m asking for is a few minutes of your time. Perhaps you’d let me buy you a cup of tea, that’s all. I know I have no right to ask anything of you, I know that, but please. I beg of you. If you can find it in your heart…’

Her words trailed off as the tears came and I was forced to look at her now, feeling the great ache in my heart, that terrible pain that came upon me at the most unexpected moments of the day, times when I wasn’t even thinking about what had happened. Moments when I hated her so much that I wanted to find her myself, to wrap my ancient hands around her throat and watch her expression as I squeezed the life out of her.

But now she had found me. And here she was, offering to buy me a cup of tea.

‘Please, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said and I opened my mouth to answer her, but heard nothing but a great cry of anger emerge from within, a mere fragment of the pain and suffering that she had caused me and that was twisted around my soul as tightly as any of my great secrets or torments.

We had waited so long to have a child. We had suffered so many disappointments. And then one day, there she was. Our healthy Arina, who it was impossible not to love.

When she was first born, Zoya and I would lay her down on the centre of our bed and sit on either side of her, smiling like people who had been touched by the moon. We’d place her feet in the palms of our hands, marvelling at how happy she was, astonished that we had finally been blessed in this way.

‘It means peace,’ we said when anyone asked us why we had chosen her name, and that was what she brought to us: peace, the satisfaction of parenthood. When she cried, we thought it shocking that someone so small could produce so musical a sound. For me, returning every day from the library, I could barely stop myself from breaking into a run as I walked along the street, so anxious was I to arrive home and see the look on her face when I stepped through the door, that expression that told me that she might have forgotten about me over the previous eight hours, but here I was, and she remembered me, and how good it was to see me again.

Growing up, she was no more or less difficult than any other child; she did well at school, neither excelling at her studies nor giving cause for concern. She married young – too young, I had thought at the time – but the marriage was a happy one. Whether or not she faced similar difficulties to the ones her mother and I had faced I do not know, but it was seven years before she sat down before us, taking our hands in hers, to tell us that we were to become grandparents. Michael was born and his presence in a room was a constant joy. One evening over dinner, she mentioned that she would like to give him a younger brother or sister. Not immediately, but soon. And we were thrilled by the news, for we liked the idea of a house filled with visiting grandchildren.

And then she died.

Arina was thirty-six when she was taken from us. She worked as a teacher in a school near Battersea Park and late one afternoon, as she was walking home along the Albert Bridge Road, the wind took her hat and she ran out into the path of oncoming traffic without looking left or right and was hit by a car. As difficult as it is to admit, it was entirely her fault. There was no possibility that the car could have avoided her. Of course we had taught her to take care when running on to roads, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know that, but which of us does not get caught up in a moment and forget the things we have been taught? Arina’s hat was blown off her head; she wanted it back. It was a simple thing that happened. And she died of it.

The first that Zoya or I knew of the accident was later that evening, when there was an unexpected knock on our front door. I opened it to see a pale young man standing outside, a man I half recognized but could not immediately place. He wore an anxious expression on his face, almost frightened, and was holding a brown cloth cap in his hands, which he passed between his fingers constantly. I didn’t know why, but it was something I focussed on increasingly as he talked. His hands were quite bony, the skin almost transparent, not dissimilar to how my own hands had aged, although I was forty years older than him. I watched them as he talked, perhaps to keep myself steady, for there was something in his expression that suggested I would not like what he had come here to say.

‘Mr Jachmenev?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know if you remember me, sir. I’m David Frasier.’

I stared at him and hesitated, uncertain who he was, but Zoya appeared behind me before I had a chance to embarrass myself.

‘David,’ she said. ‘What on earth brings you over here this evening? Georgy, you remember Ralph’s friend, don’t you? From the wedding?’

‘Of course, of course,’ I said, recalling him now. Drunk, he had attempted to perform the Hopak dance, arms folded, kicking his feet out while trying to keep his body upright. He thought it was a symbol of unity, a mark of respect to his hosts, and I didn’t like to tell him that it was little more than an exercise to warm the body before battle.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ he said, his face betraying his anxiety. ‘Mrs Jachmenev. Ralph sent me round. He asked me to get you.’

‘To get us?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean, to get us? What have we done to him?’

‘Ralph did?’ asked Zoya, ignoring me, the smile fading from her face a little. ‘Why? What’s happened? Is it Michael? Arina?’

‘There’s been an accident,’ he said quickly. ‘Now hopefully it’s not too serious. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, I’m afraid. It’s Arina. She was on her way back from school. A car hit her.’

It occurred to me that he was talking in short, staccato-like sentences and I wondered whether it was his natural mode of speech. His diction was like gunfire. That’s what I was thinking of as he spoke. Gunfire. Soldiers on the Front. Lines of boys, English, German, French, Russian, side by side, shooting at everything that stood before them, taking each other’s lives without realizing their victims were young men just like them, whose return home was anxiously awaited by sleepless parents. The images floated through my mind. Violence. I focussed entirely on this. I didn’t want to listen to what he was saying. I didn’t want to hear the words that this man, this fellow who claimed he had been sent to get us, this boy who dared to suggest that he knew my daughter, was uttering. If I don’t listen, I thought, then it won’t have happened. If I don’t listen. If I think of something else entirely.

‘Where?’ Zoya asked. ‘When did it happen?’

‘A couple of hours ago,’ he said, and I couldn’t help but hear him now. ‘Somewhere near Battersea, I think. She’s been taken to hospital. I think she’s all right. I don’t think it’s too serious. But I’ve got Ralph’s car outside. He asked me to collect you.’

Zoya pushed past him and out of the door, running up the steps towards the car, as if she would have happily left for the hospital without either of us, ignoring the fact that we needed Mr Frasier to drive us there. I stayed where I was, feeling a certain numbness in my legs and a giddiness in my stomach, and the room began to sway a little.

‘Mr Jachmenev,’ said the young man, stepping towards me with one hand outstretched as if he might need to act as my balance. ‘Mr Jachmenev, are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, boy,’ I snapped, turning and making for the door too. ‘Come on. If you’re to take us there, then for pity’s sake let’s go.’

The drive was a difficult one. The traffic was heavy and it took us almost forty minutes to make our way from our Holborn flat to the hospital. Throughout the journey, Zoya peppered the young man with questions, while I sat in the back of the car, silent as a mouse, listening, refusing to speak.

‘You think she’s all right?’ Zoya asked. ‘Why do you think that? Did Ralph say that?’

‘I think so,’ he said, sounding more and more as if he wished he was somewhere else entirely. ‘He phoned me at work. I’m not far from the hospital, you see. He told me where he was, asked me to meet him at the reception desk immediately and to take my car and to come and find you both.’

‘But what did he say?’ asked Zoya, a note of aggression entering her tone. ‘Tell me exactly. Did he say she was going to be all right?’

‘He said she’d been in an accident. I asked whether she was all right and he sort of snapped at me. He said Yes, yes, she’ll be fine, but you’ve got to fetch her parents for me right away.’

‘He said she’d be fine?’

‘I think so,’ said Mr Frasier. I could hear the note of panic in his voice. He didn’t want to say anything that he thought he shouldn’t say. He didn’t want to give false information. Offer hope where there was none. Suggest that we prepare ourselves when there was no need. But he had something that we had not and I could tell from his voice what it meant. He had seen Ralph. He had seen the look on Ralph’s face when he’d collected the keys for the car.

Arriving at the hospital, we ran towards the reception desk and were immediately directed along a short corridor and up a flight of stairs. Looking left and right at the top we heard a voice calling our names – Grandma! Grandpa! – and then young feet, our Michael, only nine years old, running towards us, arms outstretched, his face bleached with tears.

‘Dusha,’ said Zoya, reaching down to pick him up, and as she did so I looked further along the passageway until I saw a man with a shock of red hair deep in discussion with a doctor and I recognized him as my son-in-law, Ralph. I watched. I didn’t move. The doctor was talking. His face was serious. After a moment he extended an arm, placed his hand on Ralph’s left shoulder and pursed his lips. There was nothing left to say.

Ralph turned then, sensing the commotion behind him, and our eyes met. He stared through me, his expression telling me everything that I needed to know as he focussed on my face for a long time before recognizing me.

‘Ralph,’ said Zoya, pushing Michael aside now and running towards him, dropping her handbag on the ground as she did so – when had she even collected it, I wondered? – a hairbrush, clips, a notepad, a pen, some tissues, keys, a purse, a photograph, I remember it all, falling out and splashing across the white tiled floor as if her entire life had suddenly come apart at its centre. ‘Ralph,’ she shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders. ‘Ralph, where is she? Is she all right? Answer me, Ralph! Where is she? Where is my daughter?’

He looked at her and shook his head and in the silence that followed, Michael turned to me, his chin wobbling slightly in terror at the unexpected nature of the emotions that surrounded him. He was wearing a football shirt, the colours of his favourite team, and it occurred to me that I might take him to see a home game soon, if the weather permitted it. He would need to know that he was loved, this boy. That our family was defined by those we had lost.

Please, Mr Jachmenev, she had said and finally I agreed to accompany the woman who had been watching me at the library to Russell Square, where we sat awkwardly on a bench, side by side. It felt strange to me to be sharing such an intimate setting with a woman who wasn’t my wife. I wanted to run from the scene, to take no part in it, but I had agreed to hear her out and I would not break my word.

‘I’m not trying to compare my suffering with yours,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I understand that they’re completely different things. But please, Mr Jachmenev, you must believe me when I tell you how sorry I am. I don’t think I have the words to express the remorse that I feel.’

I was pleased by the activity that surrounded us, for the noise and hum of conversation permitted me to pay a little less than my full attention to her. In fact, as she spoke I was half listening to a young couple seated only about ten feet away from us, engaged in a heated debate about the nature of their relationship, which was, I gathered, unstable.

‘The police told me that I shouldn’t contact you,’ continued Mrs Elliott, for that was the name of the lady who had knocked down and killed my daughter on the Albert Bridge Road several months before. ‘But I had to. It just didn’t feel right to say nothing. I felt I had to find you and speak to you both and make some sort of apology. I hope I didn’t do wrong. I certainly don’t want to make things any worse for you than they already are.’

‘Speak to us both?’ I asked, picking up on that phrase as I turned to her and frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘To you and your wife, I mean.’

‘But I’m the only one here,’ I said. ‘You came to see me.’

‘Yes, I thought that was for the best,’ she replied, looking down at her hands. I could see how nervous she was by the way she kept twisting and turning a pair of gloves between her fingers, an action that put me immediately in mind of David Frasier on the evening that he had stood outside our front door in a state of anxiety. The gloves were clearly an expensive pair. Her coat, too, was of a very fine quality. I wondered who this woman was, how she had come into her money. Whether she had earned it, inherited it, married it. The police, of course, had been willing to tell me anything that I wanted to know and I think it surprised them that I wanted to know nothing. I needed to know nothing. What possible difference would knowledge have made, after all? Arina would still be dead. Nothing was going to change that.

‘I thought if I saw you first, and talked to you, and explained to you how I felt,’ she continued, ‘then perhaps you could talk to your wife and I could meet her too. To apologize to her.’

‘Ah,’ I said, nodding my head and allowing a gentle sigh to escape my lips. ‘I understand now. It’s interesting to me, Mrs Elliott, the different way that people have approached my wife and me over these last few months.’

‘Interesting?’

‘There’s a curious feeling among people that somehow it’s worse for the mother than it is for the father. That the grief is somehow more intense. People ask me constantly how Zoya is holding up, as if I am my wife’s doctor and not my daughter’s father, but I don’t believe they ever ask the same thing of her about me. I could be wrong, of course, but—’

‘No, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said quickly, shaking her head. ‘No, you misunderstand me. I didn’t mean to suggest that—’

‘And even now, you come to talk to me first, to lay the groundwork for the much more difficult campaign ahead, as you see it. Of course, I don’t think for a moment that it was easy for you to initiate this conversation. I admire you for it, if I’m honest, but it’s depressing that you think that I feel any differently about Arina’s loss than my wife does. That her death is any less painful to me.’

She nodded and opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and looked away. I said nothing for a moment, wanting her to think about what I had said. To my left, the young man was telling his companion that she needed to relax, that what did it matter, it had been a party, he had been drunk, she knew that he loved her really, and she was retaliating by calling him a series of vulgar names, each one more repugnant than the last. If her intention was to make him feel chastened, then she was failing, for he was laughing in mock-horror, an action which only exacerbated her wrath. I wondered why they felt the need for the world to overhear their quarrel. If, like film stars, their passion was only real when it had witnesses.

‘I’m a mother too, Mr Jachmenev,’ said Mrs Elliott after a few moments. ‘I suppose it’s only natural that I would immediately consider the feelings of another mother in this circumstance. But I certainly didn’t mean to diminish your suffering.’

‘You’re a parent,’ I said, countering her remark, but I softened a little nonetheless. It was easy to see how much pain this woman was in. I was in terrible pain too, but that could never be alleviated. It would be so easy for me to lessen her anguish, to assuage her conscience even by a small amount. It would be a gesture of infinite kindness and I wondered whether I was capable of it. ‘How many children do you have?’ I asked after a moment.

‘Three,’ she said, sounding pleased to be asked. Of course she was; they all want to be asked about their children. They, now, not we. ‘Two boys at university. A girl still at school.’

‘Do you mind if I ask their names?’

‘Not at all,’ she said, surprised perhaps by the friendliness of the question. ‘My eldest boy is John, that was my husband’s name. Then Daniel. And the girl is Beth.’

‘Was your husband’s name?’ I asked, turning to face her now, having picked up immediately on the tense.

‘Yes, I was widowed four years ago.’

‘He must have been quite young,’ I said, for she herself was only in her mid-forties.

‘Yes, he was. He died a week before his forty-ninth birthday. A heart attack. It was entirely unexpected.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked into the distance, lost now for a moment in her own grief and memories, and I glanced around the park, wondering how many of the people gathered there were suffering similar pain. The girl to my left was suggesting to the boy a variety of things he could do to himself, none of which sounded particularly pleasant, and he was trying to prevent her from standing up and leaving. I wished they would lower their tedious voices; they bored me intensely.

‘Can I ask you about your daughter?’ she asked me then and I felt my body grow a little more rigid at the audacity of her question. ‘Of course, if you’d rather I didn’t—’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, I don’t mind. What would you like to know?’

‘She was a teacher, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘What did she teach?’

‘English and history,’ I replied, smiling a little at how proud I had been that she had chosen such impractical subjects. ‘She had other ideas though. She planned on being a writer.’

‘Really?’ asked Mrs Elliott. ‘What did she write?’

‘Poems when she was younger,’ I said. ‘They weren’t very good, to be truthful. Then stories when she was older, which were much better. She published two, you know. One in a small anthology, the other in the Express.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she replied, shaking her head.

‘Why would you? It’s not the sort of thing that the police would tell you.’

‘No,’ she said, her jaw setting a little at my use of that terrible word.

‘She was writing a novel when she died,’ I continued. ‘She had almost finished it.’

And now I must admit my own remorse at what I was doing to this woman, for not a word of this was true. Arina had never written any poems that I knew of. Nor had she published any stories or attempted to write a novel. That was not her calling at all. It was as if by inventing this creative side to her character I was suggesting that a great potential had been extinguished too soon, that she had killed more than just a person, but also all the gifts that she might have offered the world over the course of her lifetime. ‘There was already some interest, I believe,’ I continued, lost in the embellishment of my own lie. ‘A publisher had read her stories and wanted to see more.’

‘What was it about?’ she asked me.

’How do you mean?

‘The novel that she was writing. Did you read it?’

‘Some of it,’ I said quietly. ‘It was a story of guilt. And of blame. Misplaced blame.’

‘Did she have a title for the book?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I ask what it was?’

‘The House of Special Purpose,’ I replied without any hesitation, frightened by how many truths my lie was placing before her, but Mrs Elliott said nothing, simply turned away from me now, uncomfortable with where our conversation had led us. I felt awkward too and knew that I could not continue with this charade for any longer.

‘You must understand, Mrs Elliott,’ I said, ‘that I do not blame you entirely for what happened. And I certainly don’t… I don’t hate you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Arina ran out on the road, I am told. She should have looked. It doesn’t matter, does it? None of it will bring her back. It was brave of you to come to see me, and I appreciate it. Truly, I do. But you cannot see my wife.’

‘But Mr Jachmenev—’

‘No,’ I said firmly, bringing my hand down on my knee, like a judge descending his gavel upon the courtroom desk. ‘That is how it must be, I’m afraid. I will tell Zoya that I have seen you, of course. I will let her know of your great remorse. But there can be no contact between the two of you. It would be too much for her.’

‘But maybe if I—’

‘Mrs Elliott, you’re not listening to me,’ I insisted, my temper growing a little more. ‘What you are asking for is impossible and selfish. You wish to see us both, to have our forgiveness, so that in time you may move past this terrible event and, if not forget it, then at least learn to live with it, but we will not be able to do that, and it is no concern of ours how you manage to confront your own response to this accident. Yes, Mrs Elliott, I know it was an accident. And if it is of help to you, then yes, I forgive you for what you have done. But please. Do not seek me out again. And do not try to find my wife. She could not cope with meeting you, do you understand that?’

She nodded and started to cry a little but I thought no, this is not the moment where I become the protector. If she has tears, let her shed them. If she is in pain, then let her feel it. Let her children talk to her later and tell her the things that she needs to hear in order to find her way through these dark days. She still has hers, after all.

It was time for me to go home.

‘You think it’s your fault, don’t you?’

Zoya turned to look at me, her expression a mixture of disbelief and antagonism. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘I think what’s my fault?’

‘You forget,’ I said. ‘I know you better than anyone. I can tell what you’re thinking.’

More than six months after Arina’s death and the normal routines of our lives had begun to reassert themselves, as if nothing untoward had ever happened. Our son-in-law, Ralph, had returned to work and was doing all that he could to keep his grief at bay for Michael’s sake. The boy still cried every day and spoke about his mother as if he believed that we were somehow keeping her from him; her loss, the incomprehensibility of her death, was a matter with which he could not yet come to terms. There were sixty-two years between Michael and me, and yet we might have been twins for the similitude of our emotions.

We had just returned from our son-in-law’s house, where Zoya and Ralph had argued about the boy. She wanted him to spend more nights with us, but Ralph didn’t want him to sleep outside of his own bed just yet. In the past, he had been accustomed to staying over, to sleeping in the room that had been his mother’s as she grew up, but that arrangement had come to an end immediately after her death. It wasn’t that Ralph was trying to keep Michael from us, he simply didn’t want to be without him. I understood this. I thought it entirely reasonable. For I knew what it was to want my child with me.

‘Of course it’s my fault,’ said Zoya. ‘And you blame me for it too, I know you do. If you don’t, you’re a fool.’

‘I blame you for nothing,’ I shouted, stepping towards her now and turning her around to face me. There was a hardness to her expression, a look that had hidden itself away for many years but had reappeared now, since Arina had been killed, that told me exactly what she was thinking. ‘Do you think I hold you responsible for our daughter’s death? The idea is madness. I hold you responsible for one thing only. Her life!’

‘Why are you saying this to me?’ she asked, her voice betraying how close she was to tears.

‘Because you’ve always felt it and it has overshadowed our lives. And you are wrong, Zoya, can’t you see that? You could not be more wrong to feel this way. Remember, I’ve seen how you’ve reacted every time. When Leo died—’

‘Years ago, Georgy!’

‘When we lost friends in the Blitz.’

‘Everyone lost friends then, didn’t they?’ she shouted. ‘You think I held myself responsible?’

‘And every time you miscarried. I saw it then.’

‘Georgy… please,’ she said, her voice straining. I wasn’t trying to hurt her, you understand, but it came from my heart. It needed to be said.

‘And now Arina,’ I continued. ‘Now you think that her death is because of—’

‘Stop it!’ she shouted, rushing towards me, her hands twisted into fists that beat against my chest. ‘Can’t you stop it for even a moment? Why do you think I need to be reminded of these things? Leo, the babies, our friends, our daughter… yes, they’re all gone, every one of them. What good does it do to talk of them?’

I sat down and ran my hand across my face in desperation. I loved my wife very much, but there had always been an unspoken thread of torment that had run through our lives. Her pain, her memories, were so much a part of her that she had very little room for anyone else’s; even mine.

‘There are things in life that it is impossible to ignore,’ she said after a few silent minutes, huddled in an armchair beside me, her arms wrapped around her body defensively, her face as white as the snow at Livadia. ‘There are coincidences… too many of them to justify our calling them that. I am a talisman for unhappiness, Georgy. That is what I am. I have brought nothing but misery throughout my life for the people who loved me. Nothing but pain. It’s my fault that so many of them are dead, I know this is true. Perhaps I should have died too when I was a child. Perhaps?’ she added, laughing bitterly and shaking her head. ‘What am I saying? Of course I should have. It was my destiny.’

‘But that’s madness,’ I said, sitting up and trying to take her hand in mine, but she pulled away from me, as if my very touch would set her aflame. ‘And what about me, Zoya? You’ve brought none of those things into my life.’

‘Death, no. But suffering? Misery? Anguish? You don’t think I’ve inflicted any of these things on you?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ I said, desperate to reassure her. ‘Look at us, Zoya. We’ve been married for more than fifty years. We’ve been happy. I’ve been happy.’ I stared at her, pleading with her to allow my words to soften her distress. ‘Haven’t you?’ I asked, almost afraid to hear her answer and watch our lives tumble apart around us.

She sighed, but finally nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know I have. But this thing that has happened – to Arina, I mean – it’s too much for me. It’s one too many tragedies. I can’t allow any more in my life. No more, Georgy.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I’m sixty-nine years old,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘And I’ve had enough. I don’t… Georgy, I don’t enjoy my life any more. I never have, if I am honest. I don’t want it. I don’t want any more of it. Can you understand that?’

She stood up and looked at me with such determination on her face that it scared me.

‘Zoya,’ I said, ‘what are you talking about? You can’t speak like this, it’s—’

‘Oh, I don’t mean what you think,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not this time, I promise you. I just mean that when the end comes, and it will come soon, I won’t be sorry about it. Enough is enough, Georgy, can’t you see that? Don’t you ever feel the same way? Just look at this life that I have lived, that we have lived together. Think about it. How have we even survived this long?’ She shook her head and exhaled a long sigh, as if the answer was very simple and obvious. ‘I want it to end, Georgy,’ she told me. ‘That’s all. I just want it to end.’