“Yes,” Tim concedes. “My mistake was even bigger than yours. My mistake was waaay bigger than yours. So you get to feel just fine.”
“No, we’re same,” Natalya says.
***
Natalya is in the kitchen cubing potatoes and a slab of beef whilst simultaneously frying diced dill pickles. It’s Sunday morning, and Tim’s parents are due sometime within the next two hours. Natalya hopes that they’ll come later rather than sooner. She’s running behind schedule and what’s more, the later they come, the shorter their visit will be.
She has been putting this off for weeks. It was easy enough at the beginning to claim that the boxes needed to be unpacked first, that they needed a sofa for guests to sit on before inviting the guests themselves, or that as the new stove didn’t work, she couldn’t cook... But as the weeks have gone by, her excuses have been getting flimsier, and finally, yesterday, Tim declared that his parents wouldn’t “give a shit” about the pool having been emptied. They were coming and that was that. And Natalya, who knows Tim’s various tones of voice only too well, capitulated. “It will be nice to have them over,” she lied.
It’s not that she particularly dislikes Alice and Ken – she really doesn’t. It’s simply that it’s impossible for Tim to spend a day with his parents without ending up furious about something they have said. And having no family of her own, Natalya can’t quite see the point in subjecting one’s self to that. Not repeatedly, at any rate.
“Why don’t you get Vlad to do that?” Tim asks. “Get yourself ready.”
Natalya looks up and sees him hanging on the door-frame. His hair is wet from the shower. “I am ready,” she says, then, “And I like it. And her Rassolnik is not so good as mine, you know?”
“That’s certainly true,” Tim says, even though, other than the fact that Vladlena’s is slightly more peppery (which he rather likes), he’s unable to spot the difference.
“Where are the boys?” Natalya asks. They’ve been quiet for a while now and that always makes her suspicious.
“In the garden with Vlad and some kid from next door. The three of them are running her ragged.”
“It’s good,” Natalya says. “They will be more quiet when Alice is here.”
Alice actually suggested that Boris might have “that ADHD thing” during her last visit, something Natalya has struggled to forgive her for. They’re just rowdy boys, after all.
The doorbell rings and Natalya stops stirring the frying pickles in order to look all the more outraged. “Surely not so early!” she says. “It’s only ten.”
“Nah,” Tim says. “It won’t be them yet. I’ll go. You cook.”
Natalya returns to her cookery, but as Alice’s voice rings out across the house, she sighs in dismay. “Vot tak,” she mutters. – Here we go.
“... so big!” Alice is saying as she approaches. “We couldn’t believe it, could we, Ken?”
“I checked the street name twice before I even dared press the doorbell,” he says.
“But our name’s on the doorbell,” Tim points out.
“Yeah,” Ken says vaguely. “We, um, we didn’t really see it at first.”
“Yep, dump the coats there,” Tim says, “And come through. Natalya’s cooking right now so I’ll show you around first – Mum? Mum!”
“I’m only going to say ‘hello’,” Alice calls back, and Natalya, who can hear Alice’s heels clip-clopping across the floor, braces herself. “Gosh, this room’s going to be difficult to heat in winter, isn’t it?” Alice adds, as she approaches the kitchen door.
Natalya tips the diced potatoes from the chopping board and wipes her hands on her apron then turns to greet Alice. She crosses the kitchen to head her off before she starts meddling but Alice manages to manoeuvre herself to the stove-side of the embrace even as she kisses Natalya hello. “Gosh, you need roller skates to get around in this place,” she says, already heading for the frying pan. “Russian soup again, is it?”
“Yes,” Natalya says, frowning and following her back to the stove. “You said you like it before?”
“Um,” Alice says, picking up the wooden spoon and stirring the potatoes. “These are sticking. You might want to turn them down a bit. And maybe not so much pepper as last time, huh?”
Eventually, to Natalya’s relief, Tim manages to lure both Alice and Ken from the kitchen on a tour of the house and gardens.
Alice’s comments are all expressions of surprise about the scale of the place, about the sizes of the rooms, about the length of the garden. And yet, somehow, she manages to express all of this without ever offering a compliment.
The house is so big it’s going to be difficult to heat (twice). The floors are going to take a whole day to mop (three times). Who, she wants to know, is going to do the gardening? Because let’s face it, neither Tim nor Natalya have exactly got green fingers. Nothing, not one single thing, is lovely, for example. Nothing is perfect, or beautiful. And though Tim had prepared himself to expect nothing more from her, by the fifth comment, he’s already annoyed.
Ken, for his part, offers platitudes. “Nice,” he says, repeatedly. “Very nice.” Occasionally something’s even, “Very very nice.” But Tim’s not sure his father actually sees anything these days. He seems lost inside his own head. Tim thinks he could probably show Ken around a council house and garner much the same reaction.
Once the soup is simmering and the shop-bought Beef Stroganoff is discreetly defrosting (no one need ever know), Natalya washes her hands, removes her apron, and, taking a deep breath, joins the others in the lounge.
Now Vladlena has gone, the boys are playing with two plastic Slinkys that Ken has brought, chucking them with increasing vigour down the stairs and then running back to the top to do it all again.
“I love these thing,” Natalya tells Ken. “Proper old-fashion toy.”
Ken smiles. “Certainly beats all that computer rubbish they have these days.”
“Yes. You’re right.”
“I’m not sure the boys would agree with you on that one,” Tim, who has his arms crossed, says.
Natalya walks towards Alice. She is perched on the edge of the leather sofa and is succeeding in making it look like the most uncomfortable piece of furniture that anyone ever owned. She looks, Natalya thinks, like she’s in an airport, waiting for a plane. She looks like she’s about to be interrogated, perhaps, by Judge Judy.
Natalya wonders if the sofa was a mistake. It’s a difficult one, because the room requires something outsized, something huge, something flashy. The problem is that Alice’s diminutive frame and her meek posture require something completely different. What Alice needs is a little floral armchair like the one she has at home.
What it boils down to, Natalya realises, is that Tim’s parents just don’t fit the room. She wonders if any of them do and feels suddenly like an impostor herself.
She sits down next to Alice, then, realising that she has perched on the edge in exactly the same way, she forces herself to slide back in her seat, to throw one arm casually across the back of the sofa as if she owns the place. But despite her efforts, she’s unable to make herself feel any more at home than Alice looks.
The sensation reminds her of when she was younger, when she had first arrived in London, before she had escaped from that horrible hostess club. They had made them wear ridiculously high heels, and she used be fine until she became aware of the men looking at her, until she tried to concentrate on the mechanics of putting one foot in front of another. Once that happened, she was lost. Once that happened, she felt like her body was an alien machine she had to somehow pilot across the room. She had tripped more than once. She had even tipped a whisky and soda over a client.
In Russian you can say that someone feels comfortable in their skin, and she felt the exact opposite of that back then, and she feels almost as uncomfortable right now. She feels, no more, no less, than a fake. Like the fake she really is.
She looks at Tim for reassurance, b
ut his arms are crossed, his features closed. It’s his “talking to Dad” posture. She looks at Ken, his legs splayed in a manly but ultimately unconvincing attempt at taking possession of the room.
None of them should be here, really – that’s the thing. Being self-assured in a space like this requires something that they simply don’t have. It requires, perhaps, what they call breeding. It requires something from a previous generation, something passed on in DNA.
The boys, now bored with the Slinkys, come rioting into the room, and it’s a relief, visibly, to everyone. They begin to tear around the new sofa. Alex is chasing Boris, shouting, “Ooooh! I’m a monster! Ooooooh!”
Alice relaxes a little, even as she tries to catch the boys as they fly repeatedly past her. “You’ll hurt yourselves,” she tells them. “These concrete floors are going to hurt your knees if you fall over.”
But the boys run on regardless, and as she watches them, Natalya realises that they, at least, are comfortable here. Perhaps the next generation won’t feel like frauds after all. Perhaps Natalya and Tim will have managed at least that.
Alice turns to Natalya. “They’ll hurt themselves,” she says again. “It’ll all end in tears.”
“Boys! Slow down!” Tim shouts, and they do, almost imperceptibly, slow down.
“So how have you been?” Alice asks, having to lean and stretch to pat Natalya on the knee. “Have you got over the move yet? Have you got used to the place?”
“Yes,” Natalya replies, glancing at Tim again. “We’re fine, aren’t we?” She wonders if Alice can tell, wonders if her own inability to be comfortable in her skin, to be comfortable in her room, is as visible as Alice’s incapacity to be at ease around Natalya.
When Natalya met Tim, she made up a whole story about her grandparents having come from the Russian aristocracy. She had told him that their wealth had been confiscated by Stalin. Actually, she hadn’t really made up that story, she had stolen it, wholesale, from an article she had read in a magazine. It was someone else’s story. It was a Russian violinist’s story, in fact.
She had known that it was a mistake almost as soon as she had said it but there was no going back, so she had written all the details, in Russian, in a notebook. She checked them regularly. And she has never once slipped up.
Nowadays, she has told the story so many times that she’s not entirely sure it’s untrue – it almost feels real. Sometimes it’s the years in the orphanage, it’s the mafia guys and their offer of “work” in London, it’s the years in that horrific club that feel like a nightmare.
But Alice, she fears, sees through it all. It’s a woman thing, and Alice, she senses, has always been able to tell that Natalya is not quite who she says she is.
She wonders, now, how long you have to be someone new before you’re allowed to forget the past. She wonders how long you have to live a different life before it defines you, before it washes away the stains – and the sins – of who you were before.
Alice slides back in her seat, but then shuffles forwards again. Tim and Natalya’s made-to-measure sofa certainly wasn’t made to measure for her. It’s so deep that she can’t quite work out how she’s meant to sit, especially seeing as she’s wearing a skirt. If she moves back far enough to use the backrest, her little legs jut out horizontally. If she sits on the edge, on the other hand, it compresses and tilts, seemingly trying to tip her onto the floor. In the end she links her arms around her knees and manages, just, to find a stable position. But she feels silly, somehow, perched on the edge of this lorry-length sofa. She feels silly in this room, too. It’s all too big, too self-conscious, too demonstratively wealthy. It’s impersonal and cold, and, Alice can’t help but think, all a bit nouveau-riche-Russian-bride.
Tim has given them a tour of the house, and it’s all more of the same. Alice has done her best to enthuse, but it’s difficult because in truth she simply doesn’t get the point. For who could possibly need five bedrooms? Who could need three bathrooms or a stove that heats the pan magically without getting hot itself? Who would even think of buying a kitchen tap with a pull out shower head (good for washing vegetables, apparently!) or a sofa with an iPad in the armrest, or a hi-fi you can control from your telephone? Who needs any of it?
“Name a song, Mum, any song,” Tim is saying now. He wants to show off his new gadget, a Sonos music box that he claims can play any song ever recorded.
“I don’t know,” Alice says. She’s aware that the challenge is fraught with danger, though she hasn’t yet identified quite why. “How about Old Man River?”
“Old Man River?!” Tim spits, and Alice isn’t sure why it’s a bad choice any more than she understands from whence the song popped into her head.
“Come on, Mum,” Tim says. “You can do better than that.”
“I’m not sure what you want from me,” Alice tells him.
“Something rare,” Tim tells her. “Something only you’d want to hear.”
Alice licks her lips and looks up at the ceiling and tries, as the boys run repeatedly past her, to rise to the challenge. “Oh, I know,” she says, “Something by Perez Prado.”
“Perez Prado?”
“Yes,” Alice says. “The song was, um, ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’. That’s it.”
“Now we’re talking,” Tim says, tapping away at his iPhone screen.
Alice blushes at the memory of the song, at the realisation of where this one popped up from. Incredible, the way these things can lodge in the recesses of your mind. Most days, she can’t even remember to take her shopping list to the shop, but there it is: Joe’s favourite song from fifty years ago.
She glances at Ken, but he looks back at her blankly. Actually, he’s not even looking at her. He’s looking through her. He doesn’t know the song’s significance. All is well.
When she looks back at Tim, she sees that his face has a pained expression. “It hasn’t got it,” he says, miserably. “Maybe you got the name wrong?”
“I don’t think so,” Alice says. “But never mind. Play any song by him.”
“Is that P.E.R.E.Z. then P.R.A.D.O?” Tim asks.
“Yes, that’s the one!” Alice enthuses, thinking that Tim has found it.
“Sorry, but it’s never even heard of him,” Tim says.
“Maybe it’s too old,” Alice offers. “It is very old.”
“How about Madonna?” Ken asks. It’s his own clumsy attempt at easing the mounting tension in the room.
“Don’t be daft,” Tim says. “Of course it’s got Madonna.”
Ken sniffs and with a circumspect expression, looks down at his shoes which he taps together. He thought that was what they were trying for: something that the bloody machine does have.
Alice tries desperately to think of a song that might seem rare enough that it reassures Tim whilst not being so rare that it trips him up again. The atmosphere in the room feels like her life depends on finding that perfect song, but it’s precisely that atmosphere which is making her mind go blank.
That’s the trouble with Tim these days, she thinks. His ego is so fragile, you have to look at every word you say before you let it out of your mouth just in case you say something wrong. And Alice knows that’s one particular game she’s never been very good at. She wonders how he got to be so up-tight. It must be something to do with his relationship with Natalya, because he certainly wasn’t like that when he was little.
“How about that woman who won the TV program?” Ken asks, suddenly back-in-the-room. “That mong woman.’”
Tim turns to face his father with an expression of such hatred that both Alice and Natalya fear that an actual fight is going to kick off.
“The term ‘mong,’ Dad,” Tim says, deliberately, “hasn’t been acceptable since about nineteen twenty two. And anyway, I have no idea who you mean.”
“I don’t think it was acceptable even back then,” Alice says, her own expression pained, then, to Ken, “I can’t believe you just said that.”
<
br /> “Oh come on,” Ken blusters on, unruffled and seemingly unaware. “It’s what everyone thinks. You know. The one who sang I Dreamed A–”
“Dad!” Tim shouts. “Just shut the fuck up.”
Ken raises his hands in submission. “Jesus,” he says. “I was only trying to help.”
“There’s no need to swear, Timothy,” Alice mutters.
“Just play something nice,” Natalya suggests. “Play the Wild Beast.”
“The Wild Beast?” Alice repeats, leaping at this escape route that Natalya has so generously offered from Tim’s Music Challenge Nightmare. “What’s The Wild Beast?”
“It’s The Wild Beasts,” Tim says, emphasising the S. “They’re a group Matt put me on to. And you’ll probably like it. It’s very mellow. OK. Here goes.”
The music starts to play. It is, indeed, smooth and agreeable if a little echoey in the cavernous lounge.
Ken starts to tap his hand against his knee, a visible attempt at expressing his approval even though they all know that the only music he likes is James-Last-style easy listening.
Alice opens her mouth to ask if Tim has had any news from Matt recently, but then closes it again. She’s under the impression that she is supposed to listen carefully to the music for a least a minute before she can reasonably speak again. It reminds her a little of when she was at school. Mr Withers used to put a scratched record of Tchaikovsky on the gramophone player and they had to write down what the music inspired in them. The music rarely had much effect on Alice – she’s never been a fan of classical music. But she had always enjoyed the exercise. It was a great excuse to write about anything you wanted, to say whatever was on your mind.
Alice’s shoulders are aching a little from hugging her knees so she stands and crosses to the big picture window. As she looks out at the empty pool, Boris runs to her side. “Are we going outside?” he asks.
“No,” Tim says immediately. Which is a shame, because Alice would have quite liked a short walk around the garden with Boris. “You’ve been out all morning. We’re staying in for a bit now,” he tells the boy.
The Other Son Page 14