On my way back, I have another idea. I make a detour to Hall Street, to Bob Turner’s house, where we once delivered the fat brown envelope. But the house is clearly empty, with a For Sale sign by the front gate. I peer in through the window; the net curtains are still up but I can see that there is no furniture inside. A neighbour sees me and sticks her head, bristling with curlers, round the door.
“They’ve gone away.”
“Stanislav and Valentina?”
“Oh, they went ages ago. I thought yer meant the Linakers. Left last week. Gone to Australia. Lucky sods.”
“Did you know Valentina and Stanislav?”
“Not much. Made a lot of noise, him and her romping about the house in the middle of the night. Don’t know what the lad made of it.”
“You don’t know where she’s living now?”
“Last I heard she married some old pervert.”
“A pervert? Are you sure?”
“Well, a dirty old man. That’s what Mr Turner called him—‘Valentina’s dirty old man’. ‘Appen he had a load of money—that’s what they said.”
“That’s what they said?”
The watery eyes below the curlers blink and continue to stare. I meet their gaze.
“She married my father.” The eyes blink again, and look down. “Have you tried the Ukrainian Club? ‘Appen she goes in there once in a while.”
“Thank you. That’s a good idea.”
I recognise the elderly lady on reception at the Ukrainian Club as a friend of my mother’s, Maria Kornoukhov, whom I had last seen at the funeral. We greet each other with hugs. She has not seen Valentina for several weeks. She wants to know why I am looking for her, and why she isn’t living with my father.
“Painted doll. I never liked her, you know,” she says in Ukrainian.
“Neither did I. But I thought she would care for my father.”
“Ha! She will care only for his money! Your poor mother, who saved every penny. All spent on greasepaint and see-through dresses.”
“And cars. She has three cars, you know.”
“Three cars! What folly! Who needs more than a good pair of legs? Mind you, she won’t walk far on those stab-stab shoes she wears.”
“Now she’s disappeared. We don’t know how to find her.”
She drops her voice to a whisper and puts her mouth close to my cheek.
“Have you tried the Imperial Hotel?”
The Imperial Hotel isn’t really a hotel, it’s a pub. It isn’t really Imperial, either, though the maroon dralon upholstery and mahogany panelling suggest it has pretensions. I still feel awkward going into pubs alone, but I buy a half of shandy at the bar, and take it to a corner where I can sit and observe the whole room. The clientele are mainly young, and very noisy; the men drink bottled lager, the women drink vodka chasers or white wine, and they shout across the room to each other in a relentless ear-splitting banter. They seem to be regulars, for they call to the barman by his first name and make jokes about his bald-look haircut. How do Valentina and Stanislav fit in to this place? At the far side of the lounge I notice a young man clearing glasses from the tables. He has longish curly hair and a horrible purple polyester jumper.
As he reaches my table, he looks up at me, and our eyes meet. I smile a broad friendly smile.
“Hi there, Stanislav! Great to see you! I didn’t know you worked here. Where’s your Mum? Does she work here too?”
Stanislav does not reply. He picks up my glass, which is still half full, and disappears into the room behind the bar. He does not re-emerge. After a while the barman comes up and asks me to leave.
“Why? I’m not doing any harm. I’m just enjoying a quiet drink.”
“Appen yer’ve finished yer drink.”
“I’ll get another.”
“Look, just piss off, will yer?”
“Pubs are supposed to be public, you know.” I try to muster my middle-class dignity.
“I said, piss off.”
He leans over me so close I can smell his beer-breath. His bald-look haircut suddenly doesn’t look very amusing.
“Fine. I’ll cross this hotel off my recommended list, then.”
It is dusk when I find myself out on the pavement again, but still warm from the afternoon sun. It hasn’t rained for a fortnight, and the yard at the back of the pub smells of beer and urine. I am surprised to feel that my hands are shaking as I reach for my car keys, but I am not ready to give up yet. I sneak round to the back and peep through the open scullery window. There is no sign of Stanislav or of Valentina. Inside I can hear one of the rowdy regulars calling, “Hey, Bald Ed—what was all that about?” and Bald Ed’s reply: “Oh, some old cow that was threatening the staff.” I sit down on an empty barrel and feel the tiredness sink into my bones. All the encounters of the day bang around in my head: so much aggression. I can do without it. I climb into my car and, without going back to my father’s house, drive straight home to Cambridge and to Mike.
Vera puts her finger on it straightaway.
“They are working illegally. That’s why he doesn’t want you asking questions. Of course Stanislav is probably under age to be working in a pub, too.”
(Oh, Big Sis, what a instinct you have for digging up the dodgy, the dirty, dishonest.)
“And the woman at Eric Pike’s house?”
“Obviously his wife has been having an affair while he has had an affair with Valentina.”
“How do you know all these things, Vera?”
“How do you not know them, Nadia?”
Twenty-Two
Model citizens
After they came to England in 1946, my parents were model citizens. They never broke the law—not even once. They were too scared. They agonised over filling in forms that were ambiguously worded: what if they gave the wrong answer? They feared to claim benefits: what if there was an inspection? They were too frightened to apply for passports: what if they weren’t allowed back in? Those who got up the nose of the authorities might be sent off on the long train journey from which there was no return.
So imagine my father’s panic when he receives a summons through the post to appear in court for non-payment of Vehicle Excise Duty. Crap car has been found parked on a side street without a tax disc. He is the registered keeper of the vehicle.
“You see, through this Valentina for the first time in my life I am become a criminal.”
“It’s OK, Pappa. I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”
“No no. You know nothing. People have died from misunderstanding.”
“But not in Peterborough.”
I telephone the DVLA and explain the situation. I tell the voice on the other end of the phone that my father has never driven the car, is no longer physically able to drive. I had been braced for an encounter with a distant bureaucrat, but the voice—older, female, with a touch of Yorkshire about the vowels—is gently sympathetic. Suddenly for no reason I burst into tears and find myself pouring out the whole story: the enhanced bosom, the yellow rubber gloves, the pork-cutlet driving licence.
“Oh my! Oh, I never!” coos the gentle voice. “The poor duck! Tell him he’s not to worry. I’ll just send him a little form to fill in. He only has to give the details of her name and address.”
“But that’s just it. He doesn’t know her address. We have to communicate through the solicitor.”
“Well, put the solicitor’s address. That’ll do.”
I fill the form in for my father, and he signs it.
A few days later, he rings me again. Overnight, Crap car has reappeared on the drive. It sits with two wheels on the grass, next to the rotting Roller. It has a flat rear tyre, a broken quarter light on the driver’s side, and the driver’s door is buckled and tied up with string to the door pillar, so that the driver has to get in on the passenger side and climb over the gear lever. There is no tax disc. Meanwhile, the Lada has disappeared from the garage.
“Something fishy has occurred,” says my father.
There are now two cars in the front garden, and they are parked in such a way that my father has to squeeze up against the prickly pyracantha hedge to get to his front door. The thorns catch at his coat, and sometimes scratch his face and hands.
“This is ridiculous,” I say to my father. “She must take her cars away.”
I telephone Ms Carter, and she writes to Valentina’s solicitor. Still nothing happens. I telephone a second-hand dealer, and offer them for sale at an advantageous price. He is very interested in the Roller, but backs off as soon as I tell him there are no papers. I don’t even get to mention that there are also no keys.
“But couldn’t you just tow them away, and use them for parts or scrap?”
“You need a registration document, even to scrap a car.”
Valentina’s solicitor has stopped responding to our letters. How are we to persuade Valentina to move the car, when we do not even know where she lives? Vera recommends Justin, the five-o’clock-shadow man who delivered the divorce papers to Valentina. I have never hired a private detective before. The idea seems fantastic—something people in TV thrillers do.
“My dear, you will find him quite exciting,” says Vera.
“But won’t she recognise him? Won’t she spot the black BMW outside her house?”
“Oh, I’m sure he will go undercover. Probably he has an old Ford Escort he uses for such occasions.”
I contact Justin through Ms Carter and leave a long rambling message on his answering machine, for I have no idea what I really want to say. He rings me back in a few minutes. His voice is deep and confident, with traces of the Fenland accent that he has tried to iron out. He is sure he can help me. He has contacts in the police and in the council. He takes down all the details I can give him, her variously spelled names, her date of birth (unless she has made that up too), her National Insurance number (I found it on one of the papers in the car boot), Stanislav’s name and age, all I know about Bob Turner and Eric Pike. But he seems more interested in negotiating the fee. Do I want to pay by results, or by the day? I choose to pay by results. So much for her address, so much for details of her work, more for the evidence of a lover that will stand up in court. After I put the phone down I am pleased and excited. If Justin can find this information, it will be cheap at the price.
While I am busy trying to get rid of the Rolls-Royce, my father is eulogising machinery of another kind.
The end of the war was a time of extraordinary advance and progress in the history of tractors, as swords were once more beaten into ploughshares, and a hungry world began to consider how it would feed itself. For successful agriculture, as we now know, is the only hope of the human race, and in this, tractors have a central part to play.
The Americans entered the war only after the industries and populations of Europe had already been tested almost to annihilation. American tractors, which had formerly lagged behind their European counterparts in technical excellence, now seized the centre stage. Foremost among these was the John Deere.
John Deere himself was a blacksmith from Vermont, a tall man built like an ox, who in 1837 with his own hands fashioned a steel plough which was most excellent for turning the virgin soil of the American prairies. Thus it could be said that it was the Deere tractor, more than the foolish cowboys glorified in post-war cinema, that opened up the American West.
His great genius was less as an engineer than as a businessman, for by making deals and offering finance to buyers, this former workshop operation was by the time of his death in 1886 one of the biggest companies in America.
John Deere’s famous twin-cylinder model with 376-cubic-inch diesel engine was both economical to run and easy to handle. But it was the mighty Model G which up to 1953 was exported all over the world, and played its part in the American economic dominance which characterises the post-war period.
One afternoon in early October, my father is taking a break from his great work and snoozing in the armchair in the front room, when he becomes aware of an unusual sound that seeps into his dream. It is a soft repetitive mechanical whirr—quite a pleasant sound, which he says reminds him of his old Francis Barnett struggling to get started on a dewy morning. He lies suspended between sleep and wakefulness, listening to the sound, remembering the Francis Barnett, the winding Sussex lanes, wind in his hair, fragrant blossomy hedgerows, the scent of freedom. He listens intently, with pleasure, and then he picks up another sound, so quiet it is almost inaudible, a faint susurration—voices talking in whispers.
His senses are now fully alert. Someone is in the room. Lying perfectly still, he opens one eye. Two figures are moving about near the window. As they move into his line of vision, he recognises them: Valentina and Mrs Zadchuk. Quickly he closes the eye again. He hears their movement, their whispers, and another sound: the rustle of paper. He opens the other eye. Valentina is rifling through the dresser drawer where he keeps all his letters and documents. From time to time, she pulls out a sheet and passes it to Mrs Zadchuk. Now he recognises the other sound—the whirring mechanical sound. It is not the Francis Barnett, it is the small portable photocopier.
He stiffens. He cannot help himself. He opens both eyes, and finds himself staring straight into the Cleopatra-lined syrup-coloured eyes of Valentina.
“Ha!” she says. “The corpse is come to life, Margaritka.”
Mrs Zadchuk grunts and feeds more paper into the copier. It whirrs again.
Valentina bends down and puts her face very close to my father’s.
“You think you clever clever. Soon you will be dead, Mr Clever Engineer.”
My father lets out a shriek, and what he later describes as a ‘rear end discharge’.
“Already you look like corpse—soon you will be. You carcass of dog. You walking skeleton.”
She leans over him, pinioning him to the chair with one hand on each side of his head, while Mrs Zadchuk continues to photocopy the correspondence from Ms Carter. When she has finished, she bundles together the papers, unplugs the photocopier, and stows them all in a large Tesco carrier bag.
“Come, Valenka. We have all what we need. Leave this bad-stink corpse.”
Valentina stops in the doorway and blows him a mock kiss.
“You living dead. You graveyard escapee.”
Twenty-Three
The graveyard escapee
Maybe Valentina knew, or maybe it was an inspired guess, but my father is indeed a graveyard escapee.
It happened in the summer of 1941 when the German troops swept into Ukraine and the Red Army fled eastwards, burning bridges and fields behind them. My father was in Kiev with his regiment. He was a reluctant soldier. They had shoved a bayonet into his hands and told him he had to fight for the motherland, but he didn’t want to fight—not for the motherland, not for the Soviet state, not for anybody. He wanted to sit at his desk with his slide rule and his sheets of blank paper and puzzle over the drag-lift equation. But there was no time for that—no time for anything except stab and run, shoot and run, dive for cover and run, and run and run. Eastwards, through the harvest-yellow wheat fields of Poltava, under a blazing blue sky, the army ran, to regroup finally at Stalingrad. Only the flag they followed wasn’t yellow and blue: it was scarlet with yellow.
Maybe this was why, or maybe he had just had enough, but my father didn’t go with them. He slipped away from his regiment and found a place to hide. In the old Jewish cemetery in a quiet leafy quarter of the city he lowered himself into a broken tomb, replacing the heavy stones behind him, and sheltered there, cheek to cheek with the dead. Sometimes, as he crouched in the dark, he could hear the voices of bereaved Jews wailing above his head. He stayed there in the cool, damp silence for almost a month, living on the food he had brought with him, and, when that ran out, on grubs, snails and frogs. He drank from the trickle of water that made a puddle in the earth when it rained, and contemplated his closeness to death, adjusting his eyes to the darkness.
Except that it was not complet
ely dark there was a gap between the stones through which sunlight beamed at a certain time of day, and through which, when he pressed his eye to it, he could see the world outside. He could see the gravestones, half-overgrown with pink roses, and beyond that, a cherry tree, laden with ripening fruit. He became obsessed with the tree. All day he watched the cherries ripen while he hunted in the dark underground for grubs which he wrapped in a handful of leaves or grass to make them more palatable.
There came a day—an evening—when he could bear it no longer. As dusk fell, he crept out of his hiding-place and climbed the tree, and plucked fistfuls of cherries, cramming them into his mouth. More and more, so that the juice ran down his chin. He spat the stones in all directions, till his clothes were covered in smatterings of cherry juice, like blood. It seemed he could never get enough. And then he filled his pockets and his cap, and stole back to his underground den.
But someone had seen him. Someone reported him. At daybreak, soldiers came and dragged him out and arrested him as a spy. As they grabbed him and manhandled him into the truck, the acid mass of cherries in his belly combined with the terror of arrest caused him to soil himself shamefully.
They took him to an old mental hospital on the edge of the city which was their command headquarters, and locked him in a bare room with bars over the windows, to sit in his stench and await interrogation. My father was not a brave man, not the heroic type. He knew how brutally the Germans treated captive Ukrainians. What would you or I do in that situation? My father smashed a window with his fist, and with a shard of broken glass, he cut his throat.
The Germans did not give up on him so easily. They found a doctor, an aged Ukrainian psychiatrist who had stayed behind in the hospital to look after his patients. He had never stitched together a wound since his days as a medical student. He repaired my father’s throat with rough stitches of button thread, leaving a jagged scar that caused him to cough when he ate for ever after. But he saved my father’s life. And he told the Germans that the larynx was irreparably damaged, that the man would never be able to speak under interrogation, and in any case, he was no spy but a poor lunatic—a former mental patient who had tried to harm himself before. So the Germans let him go.
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