The Russian Concubine

12

‘What is this?’

Valentina was standing in the middle of the room, pointing a rigid finger at a cardboard box on the floor. Lydia had just come home to find the attic even stuffier than usual. The windows were closed. It smelled different too. She couldn’t work out why.

‘You,’ Valentina said loudly, ‘should be ashamed of yourself.’

Lydia shuffled uncomfortably on the carpet, her mind spinning through answers. Ashamed. Of what? Of Chang? No, not him. So here she was again, back to the lies. Which lie?

‘Mama, I…’

She stared at her mother. Two high spots of colour burned on Valentina’s pale cheeks and her eyes were very dark, her pupils huge, her lashes heavy.

‘Antoine came over,’ Valentina declared, as if it were Lydia’s fault. ‘Look.’ The pointing finger flicked again in the direction of the box. ‘Look in there.’

Lydia approached carelessly. It was a striped hatbox with a bright red bow wrapped around it. She could not imagine why on earth her mother would be cross and making a ridiculous fuss about being given a hat. She loved hats. The bigger the better.

‘Is it a small one?’ she asked as she bent to lift the lid.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘With a feather?’

‘No feathers.’

Lydia removed the lid. Inside crouched a white rabbit.

‘Sun Yat-sen.’

‘What?’

‘Sun Yat-sen.’

‘What kind of name is that for a rabbit?’ Polly exclaimed.

‘He was the father of the Republic. He opened the door to a whole new kind of life for the people of China in 1911,’ Lydia said.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Chang An Lo.’

‘While you were sewing up his foot?’

‘Afterward.’

‘You are so brave, Lydia. I’d have died before I could stick a needle into someone’s flesh.’

‘No, you wouldn’t, Polly. You’d do it if you had to. There’s a lot of things we can do if we have to.’

‘But why not call the rabbit Flopsy or Sugar or even Lewis after Lewis Carroll? Something nice.’

‘No. Sun Yat-sen he is.’

‘But why?’

‘Because he’s opening the door to a whole new kind of life for me.’

‘Don’t be silly, Lyd. He’s only a rabbit. You’ll just sit and cuddle him, like I cuddle Toby.’

‘That’s what I mean, Polly.’

It was one-thirty in the morning. Lydia abandoned her chair at the window. He wasn’t coming.

But he might. Still he might. He could be in hiding somewhere, waiting for the night to…

No. He wasn’t coming.

Her tongue was thick and dry in her mouth. She’d been arguing with herself for hours, eyes glazed with tiredness. No amount of wanting was going to make him come. Chang An Lo, I trusted you. How could I have been so stupid?

In the pitch darkness of the room she made her way across to the sink and splashed cold water into her mouth. A low groan crawled out of her because the pain in her chest was more than she could bear. Chang An Lo had betrayed her. Just thinking the words hurt. Long ago she learned that the only person you can trust is yourself but she’d thought he was different, that they had a bond. They’d saved each other’s lives and she was so sure they had a… a connection between them. Yet it seemed that his promises were worth no more than monkey shit.

He knew that the necklace was her one chance to start again, a bright new life, in London or even in America where they said everyone was equal. A shining life. One without dark corners. Her chance to give back to her mother at least some of what the Reds had stolen from her. A grand piano with ivory keys that sang like angels and the finest mink coat, not one from Mr Liu’s, not second hand, but gleaming and new. Everything new. Everything. New.

She closed her eyes. Standing in the darkness, in bare feet and an old torn petticoat that had once belonged to someone else, she made herself accept that he was gone. And the ruby necklace with him. The shiny new life. With all its happiness. Gone.

She felt her throat tighten. Started to choke. No air inside her. Blindly she felt for the door. It caught her toe, scraped off the skin, but she pulled it open and raced down the two flights of stairs. To the back of the house. A door to the yard. She yanked at the bolt, again and again until at last it rattled free and she burst out into the cool night air. She took a mouthful of it. And another. She forced her lungs to work, to go on working, in and out. But it was hard. She tried to empty her head of the anger and despair and disappointment and fear and fury and all the wanting and needing and longing. And that was harder.

At last the panic passed. Her body was trembling, her skin prickling with sweat, but she could breathe again. And think straight. That was important, the thinking straight.

The yard was very dark, crammed into a space only a few paces wide by high walls, and it smelled of mildew and things that were old. Mrs Zarya kept discarded furniture there that slowly decayed and mingled with the piles of rusty pans and ancient shoes. She was a woman who couldn’t bring herself to throw her things away. Lydia went up to a battered old tea chest that was lying on its side on top of a broken table, with wire mesh stretched across the opening. She put her face close to the wire.

‘Sun Yat-sen,’ she whispered. ‘Are you asleep?’

A shuffling, a snuffling, and then a soft pink nose pressed against hers. She unhooked the mesh and lifted the wriggling little body into her arms, where it settled down contentedly against her ribs, its nose pushed into the crook of her elbow. She stood there, cradling the small sleepy animal. An almost forgotten Russian lullaby from her childhood drifted from her lips and she gazed up at the dozen stars glittering far above her head.

Chang An Lo was gone. She had hidden the necklace in the club and believed him when he said he would bring it to her. But the temptation had been too much for him. She’d made a mistake. She wouldn’t make one again.

She tiptoed back up the stairs. No sound this time, her feet finding their way silently through the dark house, the warm bundle still tucked into her arm and her fingertips caressing the silky fur of its long ears and bony little body, its breath like feathers on her skin. She pushed open the attic door and was surprised to see the dim glow of her mother’s candle flickering behind the bedroom curtain. She scuttled over to her own end of the room, eager to hide Sun Yat-sen out of sight, but when she ducked round her curtain she stopped dead.

‘Mama,’ she said. Nothing more.

Her mother was standing there. Her nightdress askew, she was staring wide-eyed at Lydia’s empty bed. Her hair was a wild tangle around her shoulders and silent tears were pouring down her face. Her thin arms were wrapped tightly around her body as if she were trying to hold all the parts of it together.

‘Mama?’ Lydia whispered again.

Valentina’s head turned. Her mouth fell open. ‘Lydia,’ she cried out, ‘dochenka. I thought they had taken you.’

‘Who? The police?’

‘The soldiers. They came with guns.’

Lydia’s heart was racing. ‘Here? Tonight?’

‘They tore you from your bed and you screamed and screamed and hit one in the face. He pushed a gun into your mouth and knocked your teeth out and they dragged you outside into the snow and…’

‘Mama, Mama.’ Lydia rushed to wrap an arm around her mother’s trembling shoulders and held her close. ‘Hush, Mama, it was a dream. Just a horrible dream.’

Her mother’s body was ice cold and Lydia could feel the spasms that shook it, as though something were cracking up deep inside.

‘Mama,’ she breathed into the sweat-soaked hair. ‘Look at me, I’m here, I’m safe. We’re both safe.’ She drew back her lips. ‘See, I have all my teeth.’

Valentina stared at her daughter’s mouth, her eyes struggling to make sense of the images that crowded her brain.

‘It was a nightmare, Mama. Not real. This is real.’ Lydia kissed her mother’s cheek.

Valentina shook her head, trying to banish the confusion. She touched Lydia’s hair. ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I’m here. I’m alive. We’re still together in this stinking rat hole with Mrs Zarya still counting her dollars downstairs and the Yeomans’ place still smelling of camphor oil. Nothing has changed.’ She pictured the rubies passing between Chinese hands. ‘Nothing.’

Valentina took a deep breath. Then another.

Lydia led her back to her own bed where the candle burned up the night with an uneven spitting flame. She tucked her between the sheets and gently kissed her forehead. Sun Yat-sen was still huddled against her, and his eyes, pink as a sugar mouse, were huge with alarm, so she kissed his head too, but Valentina did not even notice him.

‘I’ll leave the candle alight for you,’ Lydia murmured. It was a waste. One they could ill afford. But her mother needed it.

‘Stay.’

‘Stay?’

‘Yes. Stay with me.’ Valentina lifted the sheet.

Without a word Lydia slipped in and lay on her back, her mother on one side, her rabbit on the other. She kept very still in case Valentina changed her mind but watched the smoky shadows dance on the ceiling.

‘Your feet are like ice,’ Valentina said. She was calmer now and leaned her head against her daughter’s. ‘You know, I can’t remember the last time we were in bed together.’

‘It was when you were sick. You’d caught an ear infection and had that fever.’

‘Was it? That must be three or four years ago, the time when Constance Yeoman told you I might die.’

‘Yes.’

‘Stupid old witch. It takes more than a fever or even an army of Bolsheviks to kill me off.’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand under the sheets and Lydia held on to it.

‘Tell me about St Petersburg, Mama. About when the tsar came to visit your school.’

‘No, not again.’

‘But I haven’t heard that story since I was eleven.’

‘What a strange memory for dates you have, Lydochka.’

Lydia said nothing. The moment too fragile. Her mother’s guard could come up any minute and then she would be out of reach. Valentina sighed and hummed a snatch of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat. Lydia relaxed and felt Sun Yat-sen stretch out against her and rest his tiny chin on her breast. It tickled.

‘It was snowing,’ Valentina began. ‘Madame Irena made us all polish the floor till it gleamed like the ice on the windows and we could see our faces in it. That was instead of our French lesson. We were so excited. My fingers shook so much, I was frightened I couldn’t play. Tatyana Sharapova was sick at her desk and was sent to bed for the day.’

‘Poor Tatyana.’

‘Yes, she missed everything.’

‘But you were the one who should have been sick,’ Lydia prompted.

‘That’s right. I was the one chosen to play for him. The Father of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II. It was a great honour, the greatest honour a fifteen-year-old girl could dream of in those days. He chose us because our school was the Ekaterininsky Institute, the finest in all Russia, even finer than the ones in Kharkov or Moscow. We were the best and we knew it. Proud as princesses we were and carried our heads somewhere up near the clouds.’

‘Did he speak to you?’

‘Of course. He sat down on a big carved chair in the middle of the hall and told me to begin. I’d heard that Chopin was his favourite composer, so I played the Nocturne and poured my heart into it that day. And at the end he made no secret of the tears on his face.’

A tear trickled down Lydia’s cheek and she wasn’t sure who it belonged to.

‘We were all standing in our white capes and pinafores,’ Valentina continued, ‘and he came over to me and kissed my forehead. I remember his beard was bristly on my face and he smelled of hair wax, but the medals on his chest shone so bright I thought they’d been touched by the finger of God.’

‘Tell me what he said.’

‘He said, “Valentina Ivanova, you are a great pianist. One day you shall play the piano at court in the Winter Palace for me and the Dowager Empress, and you shall be the toast of St Petersburg.”’

A contented silence filled the room and Lydia feared her mother might stop there.

‘Did the tsar bring anyone with him?’ she asked, as if she did not know.

‘Yes, an entourage of elite courtiers. They stood over by the door and applauded when I finished.’

‘And was there anyone special among them?’

Valentina took a deep breath. ‘Yes. There was a young man.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He looked like a Viking warrior. Hair that burned brighter than the sun, it lit up the room, and shoulders that could have carried Thor’s great axe.’ Valentina laughed, a light swaying sound that made Lydia think of the sea and Viking longboats.

‘You fell in love?’

‘Yes,’ Valentina answered, her voice soft and low. ‘I fell in love the moment I set eyes on Jens Friis.’

Lydia shivered with pleasure. It blunted the sharp ache inside her. She closed her eyes and imagined her father’s big smile and his strong arms folded across his broad chest. She tried to remember it, not just imagine it. But couldn’t.

‘There was someone else there too,’ Valentina said.

Lydia snapped open her eyes. This wasn’t part of the story. It ended with her mother falling in love at first sight.

‘Someone you’ve met.’ Valentina was determined to tell more.

‘Who?’

‘Countess Natalia Serova was there. The one who had the nerve to tell you last night that you should speak Russian. But where did speaking Russian get her, I’d like to know? Nowhere. When the Red dogs started biting, she was first in line on the trains out of Russia, her jewels intact, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and didn’t even wait to learn whether her Muscovite husband was dead or alive before she wedded a French mining engineer here in Junchow. Though he’s off somewhere up north now.’

‘So she has a passport?’

‘Oh yes. A French one, by marriage. One of these days she’ll be in Paris on the Champs-Elysées, sipping champagne and parading her poodles while I rot and die in this miserable hellhole. ’

The story was spoiled. Lydia felt the moment of happiness fade. She lay still for a further minute watching the shadows dance, then said, ‘I think I’ll go back to my own bed now, if you’re all right.’

Her mother made no comment.

‘Are you all right now, Mama?’

‘I’m as all right as I’ll ever be.’

Lydia kissed her cheek and bundled the sleeping little rabbit into her arms as she slid from the bed.

‘Thank you, darling.’ Valentina’s eyes were closed, the shadows flickering over her face. ‘Thank you. Put out the candle on your way.’

Lydia drew a deep breath and blew out the light.

‘Lydia.’ The word hung in the darkness.

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t bring that vermin into my bed again.’

The next five days were hard. Everywhere Lydia went she could not stop herself from looking for Chang An Lo. Among a sea of Chinese faces, she constantly sought one with an alert way of holding his head and a livid bruise. Any movement at her shoulder made her head turn in expectation. A shout across the street or a shadow in a doorway was all it took. But at the end of five days of staring out of her classroom window in search of a dark figure lingering at the school gates, the hope died.

She had filled her head with excuses for him – that he was ill, the foot infection raging in his blood, or he was hiding out somewhere until the search died down. Or even that he had failed to retrieve the necklace at all and was too worried about loss of face to admit it. But she knew he’d have sent word, somehow. He’d have made sure she wasn’t left in the dark. He knew what the necklace meant to her. Just as she knew what it could mean to him. The image of him whipped and fettered in jail raced through her dreams at night.

And worse. Much worse. In just the same way that her father had protected her and had died for it in the snows of Russia, so now she’d been protected by Chang and he’d died for it. She saw his limp body tossed into a black and raging river, and she woke up moaning. But by daylight she knew better. The International Settlement was a hotbed of gossip and rumour, so if the jewel thief had been caught and the necklace reclaimed, she’d have heard.

He was a thief, damn it. Plain and simple. He’d taken the jewels and gone. So much for honour among thieves. So much for saving someone’s life. She was so angry with him, she wanted to scratch his eyes out and stomp on the foot she’d sewn up with such care, just to see him in pain as she was in pain. Her head was full of a harsh raw buzzing sound like the teeth of a saw biting into metal and she wasn’t sure whether that was rage or starvation. Repeatedly she was told off by Mr Theo for not paying attention in class.

‘A hundred lines, Lydia – I must not dream. Stay in and do them at break time.’

I must not dream.

I must not dream.

I must dream.

I dream.

I must

The words messed up her thoughts and took on colours of their own on the white ruled paper, so that dream seemed sometimes red and sometimes purple, swirling over the page. But not remained black as a mineshaft and she left it out all the way down the rows, making a deep drop for it, until right at the end when Mr Theo was holding out his hand for the paper. Quickly she scribbled in the missing nots. His mouth twitched with amusement, which only made the buzzing louder in her head, so she refused to look at him and stared instead at the ink stain the pen had made on her left forefinger. As black as Chang’s heart.

After school she threw off her uniform and her hat, pulled on an old dress – not the one with the bloodstains, she couldn’t bear to touch that one – and went in search of food for Sun Yat-sen. The park was the place. Any weeds that drew breath in the street were instantly torn up by hungry scavengers, but she’d found a rough bank in Victoria Park, where dandelions had taken over and remained untouched because no Chinese were allowed inside the railings. Sun Yat-sen loved the raggedy leaves and would hop in a flurry of white onto her lap while she fed them to him one by one. She worried about his food more than her own.

When she had filled her crumpled brown paper bag with leaves and grass, she headed over to the vegetable market in the Strand in the hope of picking up a few scraps under the stalls. The day was hot and humid, the pavement scorching the soles of her feet through her thin sandals, so she kept to the shade wherever she could and watched other girls twirling their dainty parasols or disappearing into La Fontaine Café for ice cream or to the Buckingham Tearoom for cool sherbets and cucumber sandwiches without crusts.

Lydia turned her head away. Averted her eyes and her thoughts. Things were not good at home at the moment. Not good at all. Valentina had not left the attic all week, not since the aborted concert, and seemed to be living on nothing but vodka and cigarettes. The musky smell of Antoine’s hair oil hung in the room but he was never there when Lydia came home, just the cushions in a mess on the floor and her mother in various stages of despair.

‘Darling,’ she’d murmured the day before, ‘it is time I joined Frau Helga’s, if she’ll have me.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Mama. Frau Helga’s is a brothel.’

‘So?’

‘It’s full of prostitutes.’

‘I tell you, little one, if no one will pay me for running my fingers over piano keys anymore, then I must earn money by putting my fingers to work elsewhere. That’s all they’re fit for now.’ She had held up her fingers, curled over like broken fans, for her daughter to inspect.

‘Mama, if you put them to work scrubbing the floor and hanging up your clothes, at least this place wouldn’t be such a pigsty.’

‘Poof!’ Valentina had dragged both hands through her wild hair and flounced back to bed, leaving Lydia reading in a chair by the window.

Sun Yat-sen was asleep bonelessly on her shoulder, his nose whispering his dreams into her ear. The book was one from the library, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and it was the third time she’d read it. Its abject misery brought her comfort. The room was a mess around her but she ignored it. She had arrived home from school yesterday to find Valentina’s clothes hurled across the floor and left there to be walked over. Signs of another row with Antoine. But this time Lydia refused to pick them up and carefully walked around them instead. It was like walking around dead bodies. And no food in the house. The few things she’d bought to eat with the watch money were long gone.

Lydia knew she should take her new dress up to Mr Liu’s, the beautiful concert frock with the low apricot satin sash. But she didn’t. Each day she told herself she’d do it tomorrow, for certain tomorrow, but the dress continued to hang on a hook on the wall while each day she grew thinner.

The Strand was emptying by the time Lydia arrived. The leaden heat had driven people off the street, but the vegetable market in the big noisy hall at the far end was busier than she’d expected this late in the day. The Strand was the main shopping area in the International Settlement, dominated by the gothic frontage of Churston Department Store where ladies bought their undergarments and gentlemen their humidors and Lydia could browse when it rained.

Today she hurried past it and into the market, in search of a stall closing down for the day, one where broken cabbage leaves or a bruised durian were being thrown into a pig bin as the floor was swept clean. But each time she spotted one, a litter of Chinese street urchins was there before her, squabbling and scrapping over the castoffs like kittens in a sack. After half an hour of patient scouting, she snatched up a corncob that a careless elbow had knocked to the floor and made a quick exit. She bundled the cob inside the paper bag along with the leaves and grass and had just stepped off the kerb to cross the road behind a swaying donkey cart when a hand snaked out and yanked the bag from her grasp.

‘Give that back,’ she shouted and grabbed for the scruff of the thief’s neck.

But the Chinese boy ducked under her arm and was off. His jet-black hair stood up like a scrubbing brush as he wove through the traffic, and though he could be no more than seven or eight years old he nipped in and out with the speed of a weasel. Diving, ducking, twisting. Lydia raced after him, barged around a corner, knocking into a juggler and sending his hoops flying, never taking her eyes off the scrubbing-brush head. Her lungs were pounding but she pushed harder, her legs stretching out in strides twice as long as the weasel’s. She was not going to let Sun Yat-sen go hungry tonight.

Abruptly the boy skidded to a halt. Twenty feet ahead, he turned and faced her. He was small, skin filthy, legs like twigs and an abscess under one eye, but he was very sure of himself. He held up the paper bag for a second, staring at her with his black unblinking eyes, and then opened his fingers and dropped the bag on the ground before backing off a dozen paces.

Only then did Lydia stop and look around. The street was quiet but not empty. A small maroon car with a dented fender was parked halfway down on her side, while two Englishmen were fiddling with a motorbike’s engine across the road. One was telling the other in a loud voice a joke about a mother-in-law and a parrot. This was an English street. It had net curtains. Not an alleyway in old Junchow. This was safe. So why did she feel unease claw its way into her mind? She approached slowly.

‘You filthy thieving devil,’ she yelled at him.

No answer.

Eyes fixed on him, she bent quickly, scooped up the bag from the ground, and held it tight to her chest, feeling the knobbly vegetable with her finger. But before she could work out what was going on, a hand came from behind, clamped over her mouth, and strong arms bundled her into the back of the small car with the dented fender. It all happened in the blink of an eye. But her own eye couldn’t blink. A knife blade was pushed against the top of the socket of her right eye and a harsh voice snarled something in Chinese.

She couldn’t open her mouth because of the hand. Her blood was thundering in her ears and her heart knocking holes in her ribs, but she kicked out a foot and connected with a shin-bone.

‘Be still.’

This voice was smoother. Spoke English. His face was smoother too. There were two men, Chinese roughnecks, one broad-faced and reeking of garlic, the other with hard eyes and small smooth features. He was the one holding the knife and twitching its blade on her eyelid.

‘You lose eye. No trouble.’ He spoke softly and she could hear the two Englishmen laughing at their stupid joke across the road.

‘Understand?’

She blinked her left eye.

The other man removed his stinking hand from her mouth.

‘What do you want?’ she breathed. ‘I have no money.’

‘Not money.’ The smooth one shook his head. ‘Where Chang An Lo?’

Lydia felt sweat slide down her back.

‘I don’t know any Chang An Lo.’

The knife point snicked open her skin. She felt her eyelid sting.

‘Where he?’

‘I don’t know. But don’t cut me again. This is the truth. He’s gone. I don’t know where.’

‘You lie.’

‘No. It’s true.’ She held up a finger. ‘Cut it off and you’ll still get the same answer. I don’t know where he is.’

The two faces hesitated and glanced at each other. It was then she saw the coiled black snake tattooed on the side of each neck. The last time she’d seen a snake it was in the alleyway in the old town and that one was black.

‘I can guess, though,’ she added and spat in his face.

The rough face spat back at her and the smooth face leaned closer.

‘Where?’

‘In jail.’

An angry frown. ‘Why jail?’

‘He stole something. From the Ulysses Club. They’ve caught him and chucked him in a cell. They’ll probably send him to prison in Tientsin, that’s what the English usually do anyway. You won’t see him again for a long time.’

A fierce exchange burst out between the two men, and then the rough one’s eyes grew wide with understanding and he screamed something at her, seized her arm, and hurled her out of the car onto the pavement. The back of her head cracked on the stone, but she barely felt it. The car drove off and the boy had vanished. Relief was so sweet, it flooded her mouth. She scrambled to her feet and was noticed for the first time by one of the Englishmen, who called out, ‘You all right, miss?’

She nodded and hurried back down the street, the brown paper bag still in her hand.