“Don’t...” she lowered her eyelids “...don’t think because I want company that I...I’ve changed my mind about....”
“I shall not forget your feelings for me,” Mischa said. “You need not be afraid of me, Lady.”
There was a short silence.
“Thank you,” she said.
* * *
She came out of the shower feeling warm and clean, but not relaxed, to find Mischa in the process of creating a meal. In her warm red towelling robe, she paused for a moment, the tiles cool beneath her bare feet.
“What are we eating?” she asked.
“Omelette,” said Mischa. “Call me when you are two minutes from being ready.”
“All right.”
“Lady.”
She was on her way out of the kitchen when his quiet voice halted her. Her heart beat loudly for a second and then quieted. Wordlessly she turned and looked at him.
Mischa moved over to stand in front of her, lifting his large comforting hands to hold her shoulders. His eyes smiled down at her with a friendly warmth.
“Just for these few days of being neighbours, shall we try to forget everything—all the passion, the violent emotions—and try to be friendly with one another? I don’t like to see you flinching from me as though I might strike you at any moment without warning. You have nothing to fear from me—not love, not hate. I will not hurt you again. Can you believe this, try to believe this, while we are here?”
She closed her eyes, suddenly wanting to believe it more than anything in the world. For no matter how much she hated Mischa Busnetsky, she knew in a moment of blinding clarity that he would always have the power to hurt her. If only she could believe that he would never use that power—
For the first time in months Laddy felt the hard shell ease around her heart. She looked at him and swallowed. “If I believed you and you...you hurt me again...it would kill me this time,” she said, not understanding how much she was confessing to him.
“Yes,” he said softly. “So I will be very careful with you.”
She wanted to trust him like thirst in the desert. They could never be lovers, as she had once believed they would, going through time together—but Mischa had been more than a lover. He had been a friend who understood everything she thought and was....
“We could try to be friends,” Laddy said, and her heart began to beat as though she had leapt a dangerous chasm.
Mischa bent down with a gentle smile on his lips. “Hello, friend,” he said, so softly it was almost a whisper, and kissed her lightly on each cheek. Involuntarily she kissed him back, her mouth brushing the firm flesh of his cheek with a satisfied sigh. She might be a fool, but it would be worse than foolish to continue to freeze her emotions because a man who had believed he loved her had not known how to tell her that he had made a mistake. She had to forgive him, to try to become human again, so that one day she could love someone else....
When they had eaten the meal he prepared, Mischa banked the fire and they sat down together on the sofa and talked, and listened to the fire and the silence and the snow....
When he reached out to pull her gently onto his shoulder, she rested her face against the hard muscles of his chest and breathed in the scent of wool and of the man with undisguised pleasure.
“I feel as though nothing could ever hurt me again,” she murmured drowsily, hardly knowing she said it.
“Never, when I am by,” the deep voice said over her head, and she knew he was a friend and she could say anything to him.
“Will we still be friends when Marcia Miller is around?” she asked, her voice muffled against him.
She counted one beat of time, and then he said, “She is not going to be around. Why did you think she would be?”
“Aren’t you still with her?” she countered, because she couldn’t quite answer that.
“No,” said Mischa.
“She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Very,” Mischa said.
“How did you meet her?”
“Her mother organised one of my lectures. Marcia attached herself to me.”
“Did she?” For some reason Laddy found that funny. “And didn’t you have any say in the matter? Or couldn’t you turn away anyone as beautiful as her?”
“I couldn’t turn away anyone who reminded me so much of you,” Mischa said.
“Oh!” Laddy stiffened and tried to sit up, but he held her where she was.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “You asked and I told you. Is the information so dangerous?”
If it wasn’t, why was her heart beating as if she had barely escaped a fall into a bottomless chasm?
“No,” she said hesitantly, and then more strongly, “No.” She could ask him for explanations here where they were locked away from the world, where nothing mattered.
“You couldn’t turn away someone who looked like me, and yet.... “
“Yes?” he asked gently, and she heard in his voice that he wanted her to ask, he wanted to tell her, and again she drew back in fear. Again his warm arm held her. “I have finished with hurting you,” Mischa said. “What I say now can have no power to hurt you, Lady.” But she was not so sure.
“In America I tried to do what was impossible: I tried to forget you. I thought about health and good food and the rules of squash games, and I tried to forget you. I believed I could succeed, I believed I was succeeding—sometimes half a day would pass without my thinking of you, although in prison you had been with me constantly.
“Marcia Miller had hair like yours,” he said, “and your long legs, but I told myself that meant nothing. Then your letter came, sent on by the clinic. I saw your writing on the envelope and I knew that I had not forgotten you at all and that if I read the letter, I would never be free of you.
“I was already receiving fan letters because of the newspaper interviews. I put your letter with them, and when Marcia offered to answer such letters for me I thanked her.”
As he spoke she felt a painful twist deep inside and bit her lip at this proof that he could still hurt her with words.
“Free of me?” she repeated. “Is that what you wanted?”
Mischa looked at her long and steadily. “My love, I loved you so much. So much more than I thought possible, so much that the book I wrote for you was only a shadow. You could have led me to hell and I would have followed with a smile on my face.
“On the night your friend kissed you and on the morning the reporters came I realised that though I had survived the betrayal of so many friends and strangers and fellow fighters, I would not survive if you betrayed me.”
“But I would never—” She had begun to protest as though the last eight months had not been, and hearing her own words, she broke off suddenly.
“No,” he agreed. “No matter how much I accused you, how much I tried to make myself believe, I knew you would not. But—the suffering of the body heals more easily than the suffering of the mind. I was afraid to believe it, afraid to believe in your love.”
“Mischa…”
“Do you understand what it is like to be in prison?” he asked gently. “To be completely powerless, entirely at the mercy of every whim of every guard and civil servant and bureaucrat who crosses your path? Can you understand this? For ten years, since I began my battle with the Soviet state, I had had only one weapon against them—my will. My refusal to accept their falsehoods.”
“God,” she whispered.
“And then there you were, without any power of wire fences or walls or dogs, with only love to use against me. And I saw that I had no weapon at all against you, that there was nothing I would not do for you.”
“But you were wrong, weren’t you?” she said in quiet bitterness. “Your love was not as strong as you thought.” Mischa looked down into her face for a long moment as though reading what lay behind her eyes. Then he breathed deeply in decision and leaned forward to knock his pipe against the grate.
“I think it’s time
I went home,” he said. “It is late and my fire must have gone out hours ago.”
Laddy stood up and shivered as the colder air of the room beyond the fire reached her.
“It’s cold in here,” she exclaimed. “The temperature must have dropped since this afternoon.”
“Not only the temperature,” said Mischa, crossing to the window. “Look out here.”
There was nothing to see except a blinding white swirl and, whenever it momentarily ceased, white as far as the eye could reach.
“But this is Pembrokeshire,” Laddy protested, as though the snow had better disappear, and Mischa laughed at her.
“Obviously the weather should be taught better manners,” he said, pulling on the boots he had left by the fire. “But I am not sure how this should be done.” They walked to the kitchen door, and he lifted a hand to her cheek.
“No coat?” she asked.
“In my own cottage,” he said. “I did not need it this afternoon.”
“Your cottage will be freezing if the fire’s out,” she said, not understanding why suddenly she could not bear to be left alone. “Do you want to light a fire and come back here to wait until the place is warmer?”
He smiled, his dark eyes warm. “Don’t you understand that I do not want to leave at all?” he asked. “That is why it is time to go, my Lady.”
She swallowed convulsively. “Oh. Well, then I....Good night, Mischa.”
“Good night, Lady. Don’t let your fire go out. Perhaps you had better make your bed on the sofa.”
“Yes,” she said.
Snow and freezing air boiled into the room for a moment, and the wind shook the cottage like a giant hand. She heard Mischa laugh into the wind, and then the door slammed and she was alone in the cottage, safely shut away from the wind and the storm... and Mischa Busnetksy.
Chapter 19
The snow had fallen steadily all night and was still falling when she got up in the morning, though the wind had died. The thick blanket of snow transformed the countryside so that the view from the cottage windows was new and unfamiliar.
She had made up her bed on the sofa, because if she didn’t keep the fire going she would freeze, and in any case the bedroom was too cold. But she had not fallen asleep without effort. Round and round in her head she had kept hearing Mischa’s voice saying, I would not survive if you betrayed me....
Mischa arrived just as she was filling the kettle, carrying two large bundles and covered with snow from head to foot. He stood inside her door looking like the abominable snowman, and Laddy began to laugh. Suddenly her heart leapt, as though it was not snow but sunlight that he had brought into the little cottage with him.
“Now I know what they mean by ‘large as life’,” she said, trying to brush him down with a tea towel and laughing so hard she drove snow into his eyes and down his collar. “You can’t imagine what you look like!” she gurgled, as with a laughing muttered oath Mischa wrested the towel from her helpless grip.
“Put any more snow down my neck,” he growled threateningly, “and I will see what you look like when you have climbed out of a snowdrift.”
“Did you fall into a snowdrift?” she asked delightedly. “Is that what happened? And you the great expert from Siberia!”
Mischa looked at her with a threatening smile. “How would you like to be hugged by the expert from Siberia?” he asked, making a sudden advance.
Laddy leaped back with a shriek, and Mischa laughed.
“All right,” Laddy said, mustering her dignity. “Do it yourself. I’ll make the coffee. What’s this?” she demanded, stooping over one of the bundles. It was a bed sheet full of various objects, which rolled out in all directions as she opened it.
“Food,” Mischa said, stamping the last of the snow from his legs and boots. “All my supplies, in fact. The other bundle is my clothing. I am moving in.”
Laddy looked steadily down at the pile of brightly coloured packages.
“Why?” she asked.
He said, “Because the snow is not going to stop. Because the temperature is still dropping. It will be effort enough to keep one house warm. And because we might need each other.”
“I might need you, you mean,” Laddy said. “I’m sure you can handle anything. I can’t imagine a situation in which you would need me.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Mischa said.
The snow fell steadily all day, creating utter silence and a brightness that seemed to cut the little cottage off from the world. Mischa and Laddy filled cardboard boxes with coal and stacked them in the kitchen and brought in as much of the wood as they could find space for. They turned on the oven of the electric stove and opened it to warm the kitchen when they needed it, and they kept the fire well fuelled all day.
They sat on the sofa in front of the fire most of the day, playing backgammon on a set Mischa had unearthed from the back of a kitchen cupboard, or cards, or simply talking.
More than once Laddy sighed with contentment. If only the outside world could never intrude on this, she thought. If only we never had to let them in, I could be happy like this. I would never remember....If the outside world had not intruded eight months ago, Mischa might never have discovered that he was afraid of me, and I would never have had to learn to hate him.
She tried to curb these thoughts when they occurred, but she knew that somehow, when the snow melted and the world came back, she was going to discover that she had let herself in for even more hurting....
“Would you like some Ovaltine?” she asked that night when they had listened to the eleven o’clock news on her little radio and learned that all of south-western Britain lay under the same incredible blanket of snow. Ovaltine sounded so prosaic that she laughed aloud.
“That sounds as though we’ve been married twenty-five years,” she explained at Mischa’s questioning look. “But what could warm you better on a night like this?”
Mischa underlined the question with a smile. “I can think of things,” he said. “But I will take the Ovaltine, thank you.”
She hummed along with the radio as she watched for the milk to heat, and filled two large thick mugs with the creamy beverage. She laid them on a tray with a plate of cookies and the radio and boogied in time to the music as she carried the offering back into the sitting room.
Then she stopped dead and gaped.
The sofa, which had been comfortably near the fire, had been pushed back, and in its place on the floor was the double mattress from her bed, piled with blankets and comforters—and two pillows.
Mischa was adding coal to the fire, and she advanced to the edge of the mattress.
“What is this?” she asked, but her voice was not as calm as she tried to make it.
Mischa glanced around casually, as though he had not detected any trace of panic in her tone. “It is where we are going to sleep tonight,” he said. “We will need each other’s heat and all the blankets if we are not going to freeze.”
“I’m not sleeping in the same bed with you,” Laddy said bluntly.
“Why not?” Mischa asked in surprise, as though there could be no reason. This had the effect of flustering her. She dropped her eyes from his inquiring gaze.
“Because...I won’t, that’s all.”
“Yes, you will,” Mischa said flatly. “I’m not going to spend a cold night for an unintelligent whim. I’ve had enough years of cold nights to last me a lifetime.”
“I’m not—”
“You will sleep with me on the same mattress and under the same blankets,” Mischa said harshly. “If one of us were to get a chill and become ill—even only with a bad cold—what then?” He sat down on the mattress, reached for a mug and smiled up at her. “Now, let’s drink our domestic Ovaltine and go to bed. If we have been married twenty-five years, no doubt we can pass a night now and then without making love, if that is what worries you.”
It was exactly what worried her, and when he smiled at her like that she could almost forget....
She changed in the bathroom into warm flannelette pyjamas, which had long stripes emphasizing her tall thinness. Mischa looked up at her from where he crouched at the fire, stoking it.
“Do you always wear these unfeminine night things?” he asked curiously.
“Yes, I do,” she said woodenly. Mischa smiled at her again.
“If you were my woman, you would not wish to wear such a garment to bed, even when alone,” he said smilingly, as though this were an academic subject of dispassionate curiosity. “Who is your man that he inspires in you no joy in your beautiful body?”
“Guess,” she said ironically.
“The man who taught you that love was pain,” Mischa said.
“That’s right,” Laddy said brightly. “So let’s get into the bed that is going to be colder than you think, in spite of all the blankets—shall we?”
While Mischa showered and changed, she turned out the lights, with the exception of one lamp which she brought down to the floor beside the mattress. Then she crawled between the icy sheets and lay propped on an elbow, looking into the fire that was only a glow under the heap of new coals Mischa had piled on.
He came into the living room with his hair damp, wearing only the bottom half of a well-worn white tracksuit with elastic at the waist and ankles. His chest and arms, warm brown against the white, were naked.
Laddy sucked in her breath.
“Can’t you wear pyjamas like everybody else?” she asked testily. “Do you have to come to bed half naked?”
His feet were brown, bony and muscled, with fine dark hairs curling on his ankles under the white cuffs, and they gripped the floor as if they owned it.
“I do not own pyjamas,” he said. “I do not wear them. This—” he indicated the pants “—is a, what do they say, a concession to your modesty.”
“Why on earth don’t you own pyjamas?” she asked in irritated discomfort, and his face crinkled into laughter as, fists on hips, he gazed down at her, a genie out of a golden lamp.
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