The Russian Concubine

63

‘Lydia!’

Lydia was in her bedroom. She had been staring out at blackness and rain. In a chasm of loneliness for so many hours, her mind had escaped the present. She was way back on a day when her mother had danced into the attic with a small square loaf of something she called malt bread in one hand and a whole block of bright yellow butter in the other. Lydia had been so excited by the strange new smell and squidgy texture of the loaf that didn’t look a bit like bread, she had scrambled up on a chair to watch as Valentina spread great wedges of the butter on the bread. Then Valentina had fed the fruity slices piece by piece into Lydia’s open mouth. Exactly as if she were a baby bird. They had laughed so hard they cried. And now it twisted something inside her as she recalled how her mother had eaten so little of their meal herself, but licked the last scraps of butter off the knife and rolled her eyes in delicious ecstasy.

‘Lydia! Come quickly.’

Lydia’s instinct for danger was sharp. She snatched up a hairbrush as a weapon, raced onto the landing, and burst into Alfred’s bedroom. She stopped. For one unbearable moment hope reared up inside her. The room was full of people and they were all her mother. Alfred was sitting bolt upright on the edge of the double bed clutching two envelopes in one hand, the other hand twisted up in a hank of sheets as if trying to hang on to reality.

‘Lydia, look at these.’ His voice was breathless. ‘Letters.’

But Lydia couldn’t shift her gaze from the floor. Her mother’s clothes were spread out all over it, neatly arranged in matching sets.

Navy dress above navy shoes. Cream silk suit with camel blouse and tan sandals. Stockings, hats, gloves, even jewellery, placed as if she were wearing them. Empty bodies. Her mother there. But not there. A scarf each time where her face should be.

It was too much. She choked.

‘Lydia,’ Alfred said urgently, ‘Valentina has written to us.’ He wasn’t wearing his spectacles, and his face looked naked and vulnerable. Though the bedside clock showed four-twenty in the morning, he was still in yesterday’s rumpled suit, his jaw dark and in need of a shave.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I found them. Beneath her underwear in that drawer there. One for each of us.’ He abandoned the sheet and cupped the envelopes to his cheeks.

Lydia knelt down in front of him on the rug, placed her fingers lightly on his knees, and felt the shivers rippling through his body. She looked up into his face.

‘Alfred, Alfred,’ she murmured softly. Tears were flowing down his cheeks, but he was unaware of them. ‘We can’t bring her back.’

‘I know,’ he cried out. ‘But if God got His son back, why can’t I have my wife?’

My Darling Dochenka,

If you are reading this I have done the worst possible thing a mother can ever do to her child. Gone. Left you. But then I’ve never been good at doing the mother act, have I, sweetheart? It’s my wedding day today. I’m writing this because a horrible sense of foreboding has settled on me. Like a shroud. A coldness squeezes my heart. But I know that you’d laugh and toss your shining head at me and say it’s the vodka talking. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

So. I have some things to say. Important things. Chyort! You know me, darling. I don’t tell. I keep secrets. I hoard them like jewels and hug them to me. So I’ll say them quickly.

First, I love you, my golden daughter. More than my life. So if I’m already cold in the earth, don’t grieve. I’ll be happy. Because you are surviving and that’s what counts. Anyway I was never much good at life. I expect to find that the Devil and I get along just fine. And for hell’s sake, don’t cry. It’ll ruin your pretty eyes.

Now the hard part. I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just spit it out.

Your father, Jens Friis, is alive. There. It’s said.

He’s in one of Stalin’s hateful forced labour prisons in some godforsaken hellhole in Russia. Ten years he’s been there. Can you imagine it? How do I know? Liev Popkov. He came and told me the day you arrived home and found him with me in our miserable attic. That was also the day I’d said yes to Alfred’s proposal of marriage. Ironic? Ha! I wanted to die, Lydia, just die of grief. But what good could your father be to you, stuck out somewhere on the frozen steppes of Siberia and probably going to die sometime soon? None of them live forever in those barbaric death camps.

So I got you a new father. Is that so bad? I got you one who would look out for you properly. And for me. Don’t forget me. I was tired of being… empty. Thin and empty. I want so much more for you.

There. That’s said. Don’t be angry that I didn’t tell you sooner.

Now. A secret I never planned to tell. The words stick in my throat. Even now I could take this one to my grave with me. Shall I?

All right, darling, all right. I can hear you shouting at me though the worms are in my ears. You want the truth. Very well. I give you the truth, my little alley cat, but it’ll do you no good.

I’ve told you before that when I first saw your father, he was like a glorious Viking warrior, his heart beating so strong I could hear it across the room as I played the piano for Tsar Nicholas. Ten years older than I, but I swore to myself there and then that I would marry this Norse god. It took me three years, but I did it. However, nothing in life is simple, and when I was too young and silly for him to look twice at me, he had been busy at the tsar’s court in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Now this is the scorpion’s tail. He was busy having an affair. Oh yes, my Viking god was human after all. The affair was with that Russian bitch, Countess Natalia Serova, and she carried Jens’s child.

Yes. Alexei Serov is your half-brother.

Satisfied?

Even now it makes me weep, my tears blur his name. And the countess had the sense to get out of Russia before the Red storm broke over us, so she was able to take with her the child and her money and her jewels. And left her poor cuckolded husband Count Serov to die by the blade of a Bolshevik sabre.

Now you know. That is why I would not have that green-eyed bastard in my house. His eyes are his father’s eyes.

There, dochenka. I am confessed. Do what you will with my secrets. I beg you to forget them. Forget Russia and Russians. Become my dear Alfred’s proper little English miss. It is the only way forward for you. So adieu, my precious daughter. Remember my wishes – an English education, a career of your own, never to be owned by any man.

Don’t forget me.

Poof, to hell with this craziness. I refuse to die yet, so this letter will grow old and yellow wrapped up in my best pair of silk French underwear. You will never know.

I want to kiss you, darling.

So much love,

from your Mama

Mama, Mama, Mama.

A torrent of emotions hit her. She hid herself in her room and shook so hard the paper quivered in her hand, but she couldn’t stop herself crowing with delight.

Papa alive! Papa. Alive. And a brother. Right here in Junchow. Alexei. Oh Mama. You make me angry. Why didn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t we have shared it?

But she knew why. It was her mother’s warped idea of protecting her daughter. It was the survival instinct.

Mama, I know you think I’m wilful and headstrong, but I’d have listened to you. Really I would. You should have trusted me. Together we…

An image of her father leaped out of nowhere. It rose up and filled the inside of her skull. He was no longer tall, but hunched, gaunt, and white-haired. His feet in shackles and raw with festering sores. The Viking sheen she had always thought he carried so easily on his broad shoulders was gone. He was dirty all over. And cold. Shivering. She blinked, shocked. The image vanished. But in that moment before her eyelids closed, Jens Friis looked directly at her and smiled. It was the old smile, the one she remembered, the one part of him she still carried inside her.

‘Papa,’ she cried out.

By seven o’clock in the morning she’d built a shrine. A big one. In the drawing room. Alfred sat and watched her in mute stillness as she swept everything off the long walnut sideboard and draped it with her mother’s maroon and amber scarves. At each end she placed the tall candles from the dining room. In the centre, taking pride of place, she stood a photograph of Valentina. Laughing, with her head tilted to one side and an oiled-paper parasol in her hand to keep off the sun. A happy honeymoon snapshot. She looked so beautiful, fit to enchant the gods.

Possessions next. Lydia worked out what Valentina would need and positioned the items around her. Hairbrush and mirror, lipstick, compact and nail polish, her snakeskin handbag stuffed with money from Alfred’s wallet. Jewellery box, an absolute must. And right in front where Valentina could reach it easily, a crystal tumbler filled to the brim with Russian vodka.

More. She needed more.

On the right, a whole stack of sheet music and on the left, a book for her to read on Chopin’s affair with George Sand, as well as a pack of cards in case she grew bored. A bowl of fruit. A plate of marzipan sweets.

What else?

She brought in a deep brass dish and placed it on the sideboard. Then she filled it with sketchy drawings on a sheet of paper of a house, a grand piano, a passport, a car, clothes, and flowers, lit a match, and dropped it in. A whoosh of flames carried them up to her mother, and she fed the flames with cigarettes, one by one. The smell was awful. When it was all over and the smoke had cleared, Lydia sprayed the whole shrine with her mother’s perfume, squeezing the little rubber puffer over and over until the bottle was empty.

It was then that Alfred rose from the chair where he had been watching in silence and very gently, as though not wishing to disturb his wife, laid his wedding ring beside the picture of Valentina’s laughing face.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t Lydia, the little Russian dyevochka who doesn’t know her own language.’

‘Countess Serova, vashye visochyestvo, mozhno mnye pogovoryit Alexeiyem? I would like to speak to Alexei.’

‘Ah, so you are at last learning. Good. But no, you may not come in, as it is much too early for visitors.’

‘This is important.’

‘Come back later.’

‘I must see him now.’

‘Don’t be impudent, girl. We haven’t yet breakfasted.’

‘Listen to me. My father is alive.’

‘Go. Yidi! Go away immediately, child.’

‘Nyet.’

‘No. The answer is still no. How many times must I say it?’

‘Alexei, I’m asking you again. As your sister.’

‘That is unfair, Lydia.’

‘Since when has life been fair?’

They were striding through Victoria Park, heads lowered against the wind that had come howling down overnight from the wastes of Siberia and was tearing through the trees with a harsh whine. No snow yet, but Lydia could feel its teeth already. They had the place to themselves.

‘This is too much.’

‘No, Alexei, it’s not. It’s a shock. But you should respect your mother the countess for admitting the truth, even though it pained her to do so.’

‘Pained?’

‘All right, forget pained. It was like eating barbed wire for her. But she did it. She has courage.’

‘A Danish bastard is what I am. Nyezakonniy sin.’ He lengthened his stride and veered off the path, ignoring the Keep Off the Grass signs and heading for the fountain.

Lydia gave him time. His pride was in shreds, and she’d learned from Chang the importance of a man’s pride. She continued slowly along the gravel path, following its more serpentine route to the ornamental pond with the koi carp and the dragon fountain. Today the water lay still, ice already beginning to form with frayed fingers around the edges. Alexei was standing against the low railing, watching the silver and gold forms flitting like ghosts beneath the water. In his stillness and his long black coat he looked like a statue himself.

‘The son of Jens Friis,’ she said quietly. ‘Not a Danish bastard. ’

‘And who exactly was this father of ours?’ Still he watched the fish.

‘He was an engineer. A brilliant one. An inspired creator of new schemes. Tsar Nicholas and the tsarina adored him and used his plans for modernising St Petersburg’s water system.’ She paused. ‘He played the violin too. But not well.’

He turned and stared at her. ‘You remember him?’

‘Only just. I remember the sound of his laugh when he threw me up into the air and the feel of his big hands when he caught me. Hands that I knew would never drop me.’ She closed her eyes to hug the memories closer. ‘And his smile. It was my world.’

‘I am sorry to hear about your mother.’

It caught her off guard, and for a second she thought she was going to vomit down his front yet again. She flashed open her eyes and frowned at him. ‘Let’s stick to our father.’

He nodded, and there was something in those eyes of his that triggered a long-dormant memory of another pair of very serious green eyes looking into hers and a deep voice soft in her ear, telling her she must make no sound but hold on tight to his hand. She moved off around the railing, circling the whole pond, a hand trailing on the looped guardrail until she came again to where Alexei was standing, still rigid, hands in his pockets. She’d given him enough time. More than enough. The minutes were skidding by.

‘Alexei.’

He faced her. She looked into his steady eyes and tried to learn what kind of man he was, this arrogant brother of hers.

‘Help me.’

‘Lydia, you don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘I do.’

‘If I help you, I will lose my job, do you realise that? And the Kuomintang do not take kindly to traitors.’

‘Why do you do it? Why work for them?’

‘Because I hate the Communists and everything they stand for. They reduce everyone to the lowest level, they tear down all that is beautiful and creative in mankind and cripple the mind of the individual. Look at the devastation in Russia now. So, no, I have no wish to save the life of a Communist, even if he is a friend of yours. I do all in my power to help Chiang Kai-shek rid this breathtaking country of their curse and build a good strong government. And I shall continue to do so.’

‘You are so wrong, Alexei.’

He shrugged. ‘I think we must agree to differ on that point.’

His voice was once again crisp, no nonsense. He had good powers of recovery. She knew she had lost him. A cold numbness swirled inside her chest. Breathing grew hard. Her mind reached out to Chang An Lo, but all she could feel was a fragile heartbeat. The rest was as black as Liev Popkov’s beard. With a sudden urgency she reached up and gripped Alexei’s shoulder, swung him around to face her. Her hands seized his. Her fingers dug into his bones.

‘Alexei Serov Friis,’ she said fiercely, ‘I am your sister, Lydia Ivanova Friis. You cannot deny me this.’