The Russian Concubine

29

There were more cars on the streets. Or maybe it was just that Lydia was noticing more. In more colours too, it seemed. So Alfred said anyway. He often talked cars, about motors with names like Lanchester and Bean, and it irritated her the way her mother always looked impressed. Once Valentina had even asked what a torque tube was, which had left Lydia open-mouthed. She stood on the pavement outside Tuson’s Tearoom, shuffling from foot to foot in an effort to keep from freezing and started counting the maroon ones that drove past.

‘Hello, young lady. Punctual, I see. Good show.’

‘Hello, Mr Parker.’

They hadn’t yet worked out a way of greeting each other. A kiss was too intimate – far too intimate – and a handshake too formal. Usually he gave her a little pat on the arm and she nodded a lot. It sort of got them through the awkward moment.

‘Let’s go in then,’ he said, bustling up to the teashop door. ‘It’s devilishly nippy out here.’

He was swathed in a woollen muffler and a heavy tweed overcoat, and as he held open the door for her she saw him glance at her own coat and she felt acutely conscious of the thinness and smallness of it and of her lack of gloves. But she liked the way the coconut mat went ding when she stepped on it, announcing her arrival.

‘Now, Lydia, what is this about?’

She was biting into her tarte au citron. Its sourness rasped her tongue. Parker’s toffee-brown eyes were looking at her closely from behind his round metal spectacles and there was a sharpness to them, an appraising awareness that wasn’t there when he was around Valentina. Lydia’s stomach gave a little lurch and she put down the tart. This could be harder than she thought.

‘Mr Parker,’ she said with careful courtesy, ‘I asked if we could meet today because,’ she took a deep breath, ‘I would like to borrow some money from you.’

‘My dear girl,’ he laughed lightly, dabbing the crumbs of his éclair from his lips with a napkin, ‘I am delighted you feel you can come to me with such a request, just like a…’ He stopped there, cleared his throat, and buffed his spectacles on his spotless handkerchief.

Like a what? A daughter. That’s what. He’d wanted to say the word but backed off at the last second. She smiled across the table at him and already he was pulling out his wallet, the one she’d stolen. Without his spectacles he looked almost attractive, though nowhere near as handsome as Antoine, and he drove a lumpy sedan, an Armstrong Siddeley, not a skittish little sports-car, but she pushed all that out of her mind. The money. Concentrate on the money.

He was leaning toward her in a confidential manner, chuck-ling. ‘What is it for? A little something for yourself? Or maybe your mother? You can tell me.’

‘It’s for a friend.’

‘Ah, a birthday gift perhaps.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Perfectly understandable. So how much would you like? Twenty dollars enough?’

‘Two hundred dollars.’

‘What!’

‘Two hundred dollars.’

He said nothing, but his bushy eyebrows drew together and his mouth tightened into a negative line. He looked as if she had insulted him.

‘Please, Mr Parker. Please. I need it for my friend.’

He picked up his cup, sipped his tea, and shifted his gaze away from her to the window, to the crowds bustling past with bags from Churston Department Store or Llewellyn’s Haberdashery, fur collars pulled up around their ears. She had a feeling he wished he were out there with them. When he turned back to her, she knew his answer before he spoke.

‘I am sorry, Lydia. But the answer to your request is no. I can’t give you that kind of money. Not unless I know who it is going to and why.’

‘Please say yes.’ Her voice was soft and her hand crept halfway toward him, leaving a track on the white tablecloth.

He shook his head.

‘It’s important to me,’ she urged.

‘Look, Lydia, why can’t you just tell me who this friend is and what the money is needed for?’

‘Because it’s…’ She was going to say dangerous, but knew that would send him and his wallet skidding out the door. ‘It’s a secret,’ she said instead.

‘Then I can’t help you.’

‘I could lie to you, tell you some story.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I’m being honest. I’ve come openly to you, the man who is soon to marry my mother, asking for your help.’ She swallowed every remaining scrap of her pride and added, ‘As your daughter. ’

For a split second she thought she had him. Something like delight flickered in his brown eyes, but then he was gone again.

‘No, absolutely not. You must understand, Lydia, that it would be my duty to refuse to hand out that kind of money to any daughter of mine unless I knew the reason for it. Money has to be earned, you know, and I work hard as a journalist to do so, therefore I…’

‘Then I’ll earn it.’

He sighed and glanced out the window again as if seeking escape. At the next table two women in feathered hats laughed shrilly when a waitress brought them buttered crumpets, and Parker began polishing his spectacles yet again. Lydia realised it was a sign of stress.

‘How,’ he asked unhappily, ‘could you possibly earn it?’

‘I could help out at the newspaper. I can fetch and carry and make tea and…’

‘No.’

‘But…’

‘No. We have plenty of people to do all those things already and anyway, your mother would be furious with me if I distracted you from your educational studies.’

‘I’ll talk to her. I can get her to…’

‘No. That’s final.’

They stared at each other. Neither willing to look away.

‘There’s another way,’ Lydia said. ‘For me to earn two hundred dollars.’

Something in the way she said it made him instantly wary. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, so that his jacket sleeves puckered and crumpled.

‘Let’s leave it there. Why don’t we just finish our cakes and talk about…,’ he searched for a subject, ‘… Christmas or the wedding.’ He gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Agreed?’

She returned his smile and withdrew her hand. ‘Certainly. The wedding is set for January, isn’t it?’

He nodded and his eyes grew bright at the thought. ‘Yes, and I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as your mother and I are.’

She picked up a sugar cube from the bowl and started to suck one corner of it. Parker didn’t look pleased, but he passed no comment.

‘It seems to me,’ she said gently, ‘that the start of a marriage is an important time. You have to learn about each other, don’t you, and get used to living together. Accept the other person’s little habits and, well, foibles.’

‘There’s some truth in that,’ he said carefully.

‘So it seems to me,’ she took a tiny bite out of the sugar and crunched it between her teeth, ‘that having a ready-made daughter around could make the situation twice as… hard.’

He sat up straight, both hands flat on the table. His expression was stern. ‘What are you implying here, Lydia?’

‘Just that it would be extremely helpful to you if that daughter promised to do exactly as you told her. No arguments. No disobedience for, shall we say, the first three months of your new and, I’m sure, wonderful, married life?’

He closed his eyes. She could see his jaw clicking and unclicking. When he opened his eyes again they did not look as happy as she’d hoped.

‘That is extortion, young lady.’

‘No. It’s a bargain.’

‘And if I don’t agree to this bargain?’

She shrugged and bit another piece off the cube.

‘Are you threatening me, Lydia?’

‘No. No, of course I’m not.’ She leaned forward and the words tumbled out. ‘All I’m doing is asking you to give me a chance, a fair chance to earn two hundred dollars. That’s all.’

He shook his head, and the sugar tasted like ash in her mouth.

‘You are a devious child, Lydia Ivanova, but this kind of unholy behaviour must cease once your mother and I are married and you become Lydia Parker. I know your poor mother would be appalled at your duplicity.’ Suddenly he rapped the table hard three times with his silver cake fork. ‘Three months. With not a word or a look out of place from you. I have your word on it?’

‘Yes.’

He opened his wallet.

In a dimly lit yard marked out with a circle of straw bales, the dog that looked like a wolf was having its throat torn out. Inch by inch. Strips of fur and flesh flew across the circle. Gobbets of blood spewed out into the eager faces of the men who edged too close, as the pale dog, the one that looked like a ghost, shook its snarling head from side to side and dragged more of the soft gullet into its jaws. One ear was hanging by a thread. Its shoulder was ripped open and dangling down in a loose scarlet flap, but its grip on the wolf-dog’s throat was a death grip and the crowd roared its approval.

Lydia took one look at the savagery taking place inside the circle of straw, one glance at the bloodlust in the eyes of the men, and then she walked over to the wall and was quietly sick. She wiped her mouth. She’d come this far and now was not the time to back out. For five days she had scoured the Russian Quarter of Junchow, walked its mean streets after school each day, seeking out Liev Popkov. The bear man. The one with the eye patch and the boots. Five days of rain and wind.

‘Vi nye znayetye gdye ya mogu naitee Liev Popkov?’ she asked again and again. ‘Do you know where I can find a man called Liev Popkov?’

They had looked at her with suspicion and narrowed northern eyes. Anyone asking questions meant trouble. ‘Nyet,’ they shrugged. ‘No.’

Until tonight. She had plucked up the courage to walk into one of the dark and dingy bars, a kabak, that stank of black tobacco and unwashed male bodies. Hers was the only female face, but she stood her ground and finally on payment of a half dollar a toothless old goat told her to try the dog yard behind the stable.

Dog yard. More like death yard.

It was where the men gathered on a Friday night to get their thrills, raw and unadulterated. Dog fighting. It put fire in their bellies and in their veins, wiping out the degradation of a week of hard, miserable labour. Here they bet on who would live and who would die, knowing that a win meant a good night’s vodka and maybe a girl as well if their luck held.

Liev Popkov was there. Lydia spotted him easily. Towering above the tight huddle of onlookers whose breath drifted in the icy air like incense around the dark yard. A lantern on the wall behind Popkov threw his broad shadow across the circle and onto the warring dogs. She couldn’t see his face clearly but his great body looked motionless and lazy, and when he did shift position it was like the slow lumbering movement of a bear.

She went over and touched his arm.

His head turned, faster than she expected. Though one eye was obscured by the patch and the lower half of his face was covered by the black beard, his single eye registered complete surprise and his mouth fell open, revealing big strong teeth. Tombstone teeth.

‘Dobriy vecher. Good evening, Liev Popkov,’ Lydia said in her carefully rehearsed Russian. ‘I want to talk to you.’

She had to shout above the roar of the crowd and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he’d heard her or even understood her, because all he did was blink silently and continue to stare at her with his one dark eye.

‘Seichas,’ she urged. ‘Now.’

He glanced over at the dogs. An artery had been severed and canine blood pumped into the icy night air. His expression gave nothing away, so she had no idea if he was winning or losing, but he effortlessly shouldered a path through the press of men around him to the back wall of the yard. It was in deep shadow and smelled of damp.

‘You speak our language,’ he growled.

‘Not well,’ she replied in Russian.

He leaned against the wall, waiting for more from her, and she had a sudden image of it crumbling under his weight. Up close he was even bigger. She had to tilt her head back to look at him. At first that was all she saw. The bigness of him. That was exactly what she wanted. He was wearing a Cossack hat of moth-eaten fur jammed over his black curls and a long padded overcoat that stank of grease and came right down to the tip of his boots. And he was chewing something. Tobacco? Dog meat? She had no idea.

‘I need your help.’ The Russian words came to her tongue more readily than she expected.

‘Pochemu?’ Why?

‘Because I am searching for someone.’

He spat whatever was in his mouth onto the yard floor. ‘You are the dyevochka who made trouble for me. With police.’ He spoke gruffly but slowly. She wasn’t sure if this was his normal way or done just for her to understand the language that was still a struggle to her. ‘Why should I help you? You of all people.’

She opened her hand. In it lay Alfred’s two hundred Chinese dollars.