I slouched on my bench, back against the sticky wallpaper. Everyone was moving forward but me. Twenty, and back at home in the pub which had no one discussing physics or poetry in the corner. No danger of being entertained with stories of Harriet’s latest plan. Just Bert behind the bar, his wife glowering at the end of it, and the prospect of teaching small children to fill my days.
At least when David came back, he had people nearby to visit, like Kit. Best friends at eleven, they had kept in touch lightly over the years, with none of the expectations of birthday cards and all the pleasure of meeting up again. I had no friends from school that I wanted to keep in contact with. I’m not sure whether that said more about me or them, but Kit was a friend to both of us now. And about to leave the country. I’d missed him saying where.
‘Sorry, where are you going?’ I asked.
‘Aren’t you listening?’ asked David. ‘He’s going to Moscow.’
‘Oh, how brilliant. Dostoyevsky, fairy tales, snow. You’re so lucky.’
David looked appalled. ‘What? There’s no decent food and everyone’s under surveillance. It’s a very tricky posting.’
Kit frowned. ‘It will be difficult, but very good for my prospects. So I’m told. As long as I don’t end up doing anything illegal.’
‘You should take Martha,’ said David. ‘She would attract all the trouble away from you. She can’t help it.’
I grabbed Kit’s hand in both of mine.
‘Kit, listen to him,’ I said. ‘Take me with you. You would be my saviour and I would keep you out of trouble.’
‘Ha!’ David nearly choked on his beer.
‘Drink up!’ Bert had been roused by his wife and was doing the rounds. ‘This one dead?’
‘Let’s walk down by the river,’ said David. ‘I miss seeing a nice, clean river. Do you know how many bodies have been pulled out of the Thames in the last six weeks?’
‘Is that all you do in Westminster, count the bodies?’ asked Kit.
‘It’s how we like to start our days.’
David had been a Secretary, Personal Secretary or even a Private Personal Secretary for so long now that I really couldn’t ask him again. I could have asked our parents, but I tried not to ask them anything. The slightest enquiry would end up in a lecture about how successful David was, how proud they were, and thank God for boys. I found it best to answer questions, rather than ask them, in the hope that one day they wouldn’t roll their eyes, ever so slightly, when I came into the room.
It was cold down by the river, but clear, and we held out as long as we could.
‘Better get back. It’s the hour between dog and wolf,’ Kit said.
I said, ‘What hour?’
‘Dusk,’ said Kit. ‘My grandmother always called it that. Was it connected to Odin? January is the month of the wolf, but that’s something different. Or is it French?’
‘Never mind that,’ David said. ‘We need to give you some instructions, Kit. An updated list of things not to discuss this evening with my Pa.’
‘Decimalisation,’ I said.
‘Is he still against?’ asked Kit. ‘Even Pa has stopped moaning about that.’
David tutted. ‘Still against, obviously, seeing as it’s a communist plot. See also centigrade and centimetres. Miners, they’re a no. What else?’
I said, ‘Women having a national football team. He read about that in the paper and Ma nearly called an ambulance.’
Kit said, ‘It’s OK, I’ve got this. I’ll just pretend he’s Pa.’
He offered me his arm, and I offered my other arm to David. In a line, we walked up from the river. No one was in a hurry to get back.
I knew it was my fault we needed to be more careful around Pa. Being kicked out of university, after he’d been so proud of the first girl in the family with brains. Ma said he’d caught a cold, but she looked at me like I’d broken his heart. I’d noticed that she jumped to answer the phone, but left it to ring just a little longer before she answered it, as if she was steeling herself. I stayed in bed for as long as I could. But I had no one to blame but myself, as she reminded me.
‘I feel we should be singing something,’ said Kit.
David patted Kit on the back. ‘Let’s save our voices for midnight.’
It was too late: Kit and I rearranged our arms and launched into Auld Lang Syne. By the chorus, David was with us.
1973
3
David went to bed at quarter to one, after the National Anthem, when the screen went black. Kit and I were the only ones left up, small glasses in hand. ‘Desperation sherry,’ I’d called it. My parents weren’t ones for stocking up on alcohol, just keeping a dozen bottles with an inch or two in each. Kit was stretched out on the sofa and I was on the floor, near his head so we could speak quietly. I was unsure how well we were doing with that.
I took another sip and pulled a face. Kit smiled and closed his eyes.
‘I wish I could go back to school,’ he said. ‘Your father has put me right off getting old. I’m not ready to be an adult.’
‘We could run away with the circus,’ I said.
‘Can we?’ He sighed.
‘But you have a great job. It’s all,’ I put a finger to my lips, ‘secret, and everything.’
‘Darling, don’t be ridiculous. I’m just a boring old secretary.’ He opened one eye and we both laughed.
‘And you get to go to Russia. You get paid to go there, and I will be teaching small boys to not pick their noses. Want to swap?’
Kit opened both eyes and smiled. ‘Maybe we should have got married, like you said. What were you, twelve?’
I laughed. ‘Too young to realise it was David you wanted, that’s for sure.’
‘Ah well, I grew out of him.’
‘Poor David.’ I leaned my head back against his stomach. ‘But maybe I have a chance now.’
He stroked my head. ‘You little optimist. That’s making me feel sick, though, your head on my stomach.’ He lifted my head, struggled onto his side and put the glass on the floor. ‘It’s a shame we can’t marry. It would make a lot of people very happy.’
‘People at work?’
‘Yes. They like everyone to be nicely paired off so they have control over them when they inevitably have affairs. And my poor old Ma and Pa.’ He groaned and used the sofa arm to push himself up to sitting. He placed both hands on his face and mumbled, ‘Are you sure you don’t work for the Ruskies? I haven’t been this drunk for years.’ His legs fell to the floor and I clambered up backwards to sit next to him. I put one hand to my head until I stopped feeling sick.
‘Let’s get married, then.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah.’
‘Really.’ I turned him by the shoulder to look at me. ‘A marriage of convenience. You need an understanding wife and I need to not be a teacher. And I need to go to Russia. Even if I never realised it before. This is why everything has happened. It is fate.’
‘Married.’ He was clearly having trouble focusing, and closed one eye. ‘That’s some proposal, Martha. Shall we sleep on it?’
‘OK.’
The hangover started early, before dawn, with a terrible thirst. I tried to negotiate myself back to sleep, but had to drag myself and my head, which felt detached somehow, downstairs. I drank four glasses of water, one after the other, which made me feel sick again.
I opened the back door and sat on the doorstep, clutching the fifth glass that I couldn’t quite face, but was convinced would sort me out. The cold air made me shudder, but it was working on the nausea. My body was a series of balances which I needed to respect. That I should have respected last night, before mixing champagne with gin, then sherry and every type of drink my parents had ever bought or been given.
I closed my eyes as a dream started to seep back to me: Harriet standing in the university library with her torch on, shining it on the ornate ceiling, and then straight at me. Harriet. I needed to know what had happened to her, and Jack, but I couldn�
�t ask. If I phoned anyone, the next phone bill would show Ma and Pa that I had broken the very last rule which mattered to them. I would have lied. There were phone boxes in town, of course, but someone would see me and report back: I saw your Martha . . . did you know?
My eyes throbbed. My stomach gurgled. Now I needed to go back upstairs to the toilet. I used both hands to pull myself up the door frame, picked up the glass and locked everything back up.
I slid against the wall, as if my feet were fighting the stairs, trying not to spill the water. I needed to stop drinking so much. I needed to get away. I needed to show my parents that I wasn’t the total failure they thought. But, oh God, just getting to the toilet was too much.
Back in bed, my feet icy and my head pounding, I knew that there was no way I was going to live at home and work in a school. But my choices were limited. My parents wanted to punish me, or educate me or however they’d phrase it. I might deserve it, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t fight it. I had no money to go to London myself and look for work. I would have to ask for everything.
I tried to turn onto my side, but changed my mind when the room started spinning. I thought back to what I’d said to Kit. I was only half joking. I would go. I would go for him, but I would go for me too. A million miles away from home.
That sounded good.
4
We managed to squeeze in a quick engagement drink in London before Kit left. His advice had come by letter after a few weeks: ‘Soap, shampoo, washing powder, lady items, tea towels. Learn temperatures in centigrade. And bring lots of things to read – empty the library.’ It wasn’t the most exciting advice, but I hoped that it was down to my love of books rather than an absence of anything else to do when I got there.
My copies of Dostoyevsky were first in the pile. I thought about War and Peace, again. It would keep me busy, but maybe there were more modern Russian novels that would give me a better understanding of where I was going.
Kit often referred to my stock of books as ‘the library’, yet it gave me the idea to look for some new ones. I walked down to the library in town. It was sunny but still cold, even for March. I would have to start thinking about what I wore a lot more carefully, my mother kept saying. ‘It won’t be funny when you freeze to death.’ Only, her saying that did make it sound funny.
The library wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped, although the librarian did her best. I was shown a copy of a new poetry collection, Stolen Apples by Yevtushenko, and wrote it down on my list to order from Foyles. Ideally, I would have travelled into London and browsed in person, but I still wasn’t trusted to travel alone. All the librarian’s other suggestions were Chekhov, Pasternak, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. All a bit old and classic, but I wrote them down.
I had a quick look on the shelves for awkwardly spelt names. Not for the first time, I thought back to the beautiful university library and the comprehensive knowledge of the stern librarians. My favourite, her blonde hair bobbed, always seemed to give me the very book I didn’t know I wanted, and which turned out to be crucial.
The librarian here was arguing with an elderly man over whether he was allowed to take more books out when he hadn’t paid his fine.
He waggled his finger at her. ‘I didn’t fight the Nazis just so you could stop me using the library, young woman.’
‘You didn’t fight the Nazis, Mr Blake, you went to Ireland to work on a farm.’
‘I never did,’ he said, but his voice was unsure now. ‘I was at Passchendaele.’
‘That’s the wrong war. So, this eight pence that you owe?’
The last twenty-eight years were clearly a blur for him, or longer. Maybe he’d made up so many stories about where he’d been and what he’d done in the war that he honestly couldn’t remember. Most people knew exactly what had happened and where they had been. I’d been born in 1953, but David had been born seven years earlier, in 1946, and remembered rationing. It felt a million years ago now, but it wasn’t. Our father had stayed in London, but whenever the war was mentioned he clenched his teeth. I’d never know why. He wasn’t the kind of man you could just ask.
The librarian put two more books on the table, and made me jump.
She spoke quickly, a little out of breath, one eye on Mr Blake. ‘I knew there was another. Bulgakov. However, I would check whether these are OK to take because The Master and Margarita is only published in a censored version, and The Heart of a Dog is banned.’
‘In Russia?’
‘Yes. That is where you’re going, isn’t it?’
I nodded. Everyone knew, it seemed. ‘Thanks.’
She went back to her desk. Mr Blake was by the doors, looking confused.
‘I think you’re right. I should read these now, rather than take them with me.’ I took my library card from my bag and she stamped them for me.
‘There are non-fiction books on Russia too. Geography, sociology, politics. When do you leave?’ she asked.
‘Next month,’ I said, still surprised by her interest.
‘Don’t forget to return them.’
I didn’t forget. In fact, I went back and consulted the other books she’d mentioned. I read about the economy and the politics, how the party elite was rewarded and those with an aristocratic background punished. I read about dachas, the summer chalets, which rewarded the good communists, and the many people slaughtered by Stalin on a whim, or sent to the Siberian gulags to die a little more slowly. I was almost sidetracked by a book on Rasputin, but forced myself back to Soviets.
The librarian came over to me in the history section, holding out a thin booklet.
‘I think you left this on the table the other day,’ she said. ‘It was where you were sitting.’
‘Thanks.’ I took the booklet. The Wolf Sleigh by E. V. Mann. It had seven very short stories, and a tiny paragraph inside the front cover: ‘E. V. Mann has lived in Russia for over twenty years, working as a literary translator. This debut contains modern fairy tales from the land of the bear.’ Hardly a book, I thought, but I checked to make a note of the ISBN. There wasn’t one. No publisher either, just a plain, stapled card cover.
I took it back to my table near the window, where there was a small pile of books. I sat down next to it, feeling the heat of the sun much more through the glass than I had on the walk over. I flicked through the stories. They looked interesting, but it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t a library book either. I closed it and placed my hands on top, and then slipped it into my handbag. I would read it at home and then return it. I felt the urgent spring heat and wondered when spring would arrive in Moscow.
I was accidentally learning my first Russian, and how good friends would talk ‘soul to soul’ – ‘dusha v dushu’. I wondered how I’d slip that into conversation. And how did all the mentions of the Russian soul fit in with the destruction of churches? There were pictures of an enormous cathedral on the Moskva river, white with gold cupolas, that Stalin had knocked down for a palace. When that didn’t get built, they turned the space into an outdoor swimming pool. I could track how things changed, but I found it hard to understand why. From cathedral to swimming pool. It wasn’t what I’d expected to learn. I compared pictures of Leningrad to Moscow and tried not to wish I was going to Leningrad.
By the end, I felt more prepared. Leonid Brezhnev was in charge, and things were pretty stable. People had money, if little to buy, free education and health, zero inflation, no unemployment and no crime. Supposedly. But every country cooked their statistics, and I suspected there were many people in the US who would be grateful for free medicines, as long as they didn’t have a hammer and sickle printed on them.
I had a better idea of where I was going, but less of an idea about what I was going to do there. I’d read about British diplomats and journalists, but they were all men. They’d brought their families with them. But what did their wives do if they didn’t have children to raise? I was starting to have doubts that I would fit in.
My university trunk, st
ill with my father’s initials engraved on top, was sent on to Moscow three weeks ahead. I always wondered whether I had been given his initials to save on brass plaques. It felt odd knowing that the likelihood was I’d still get to Moscow before it did. My books were inside, but no Bulgakov. Just in case. The rest of the room was taken up by bathroom and kitchen supplies, and my woollen winter coat, scarf, gloves and a pair of boots.
My suitcase held two sweaters, two skirts, one pair of jeans, my cotton dress, a jacket, a notebook and some pens, as well as a couple more books. Kit had enclosed in one of his letters a list of clothing and emphasised natural, breathable fabric. I’d shown it to Ma. She’d taken the nylon blouses back to Marks. I put two cotton ones and a T-shirt back in, and I sent a little blessing to Kit. I hated nylon, and had no money to buy my own clothes.
He didn’t have a phone yet, so we had a strangely formal engagement, letters full of endearments which made me snigger and Ma smile. I had a horrible feeling that Kit had asked for my hand, or some rubbish like that, because she was very happy about it all. I knew that Kit had had a long chat with Pa, supposedly getting his blessing but, more likely, Pa filling him in on my multiple failings and the great sin of pride. Pa had connections, ripe for extricating errant daughters from police charges, and probably knew exactly what Kit’s job was. As there was nothing outside the local paper about the protest, I suspected that he wouldn’t be telling anyone else at the office, but his sense of fairness meant he had to tell my husband-to-be. Which still sounded weird.
David knocked on my open bedroom door, and closed it behind him. He kicked the suitcase with his foot.
‘So, you’re really going ahead with this?’
‘Yep.’
He sat on my bed, and sighed. ‘Martha, I have to tell you that he’s gay.’
The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt Page 2