by Robin Byron
Turning her gaze back to the screen of her word processor she thought again about her novel… filling the hiatus in her academic career and making use of all that knowledge of Russian history and literature, she had told herself. Initially worried that it might lower her standing among her academic peers, Marianne had started cautiously, then with increasing enthusiasm before hitting the buffers of self-doubt. What hubris, she thought, to imagine that I – French-born, American-bred, and now wed to England and an Englishman – how can I inhabit the Russian psyche, that place of such profound contradictions that even the greatest Russian authors are baffled by their own mysteries?
‘Writing from a background of impressive scholarship,’ Marianne doodled onto her screen, ‘Davenport weaves a complex story of love and betrayal…’ Then again: ‘Davenport’s impressive first novel converts her profound knowledge of early-nineteenth-century Russia into a story of suffering and survival, a redemptive tale of love and endurance…’
Hearing the front door slam, Marianne deleted the text on her screen and went downstairs to greet her husband, only to find that it was Izzy slipping past her to the kitchen.
‘Hello, darling, I wasn’t sure you were coming back for supper… As soon as Dad’s back I’ll start cooking – it won’t take long…’
‘No time,’ said her daughter, pouring milk into a bowl of cereal and beginning to munch at speed.
‘Does this mean you are going out again?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You need more than cereal, particularly…’ Deciding not to continue in that vein, she added, ‘Why don’t you let me make you an omelette or some cheese on toast – or I could make some pasta quickly…’ Izzy shook her head. As she finished her bowl and stood up, Marianne said, ‘You know, darling, we really need to have a talk…’
‘Not now, Mum,’ she replied, tearing past Marianne and up the stairs. Marianne sighed. What was it she had told herself all those years ago when she had learnt that she could never have another child? Izzy will be my cherished daughter and also my best friend. What a conceit that was. Maybe it would happen one day, but the last couple of years had not been easy and now this – a week ago – casually dropped into the conversation: ‘No thanks, Dad. Pregnancy seems to have turned me off coffee.’ Since then Izzy had avoided any discussion of the subject. At first she and Edward had wondered whether she was joking, but Marianne’s close observation of Izzy’s queasy look in the morning and unusual tiredness convinced her that it must be true.
‘You just missed Izzy,’ she said to Edward when he arrived home half an hour later.
‘That’s a shame. She’s gone out for the evening, I suppose? Has she said anything?’
‘No. I tried, but she wouldn’t talk.’
‘Do you get any feeling as to whether she’ll want to have it?’
‘No idea. I need to pin her down.’
‘Are you going to try to steer her?’
Am I? Marianne wondered. She’s seventeen and a half. It’s now the beginning of November. The baby must be due around June. If she’s lucky she might just get through her A-levels – if not, it would be a disaster. One way or another a baby at this age will seriously interfere with her life. And then there is the father. Either Andy – about whose unsuitability as a father she and Edward were in complete agreement – or some other unidentified boy. Marianne shook her head. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘If she wants a termination, she should get on with it quickly,’ said Edward. ‘That way there’s much less trauma – physical as well as psychological.’
‘You think that’s the right choice?’
‘Yes.’
‘You may be right, but I don’t feel it’s our place to encourage her to have an abortion. Anyway, if we lean one way she’s highly likely to do the opposite.’
‘Well, we must encourage her to make a decision. And soon. Then we can plan.’
After they had eaten, Edward turned on the television while Marianne glanced at the day’s newspaper. Her attention was caught by a lengthy piece about Russia and Gorbachev’s new policy of perestroika. Marianne had been a compulsive reader of articles on the politics of the Soviet Union ever since she had left the country a dozen years earlier. She longed to return for a visit but did not dare – even if she had been able to obtain a visa, which did not seem likely. She was encouraged by what she read about the attitude of the new regime. At least now, she thought, those terrible photographs must have been forgotten.
The photographs had not been without their consequences. Six months after she had returned from Moscow, a middle-aged man had turned up at their south London flat. Introducing himself as a diplomat from the Soviet embassy he asked her, in his strongly accented English, whether she had now settled back into her life in England after her ‘interesting time’ in Moscow, and enquired as to the progress of her studies in Russian literature. After the pleasantries were over Marianne said, ‘So, what exactly have you come here for?’
‘Mrs Davenport,’ the man said, ‘we would be greatly honoured if you would write an article for publication about your time in Moscow.’
‘What sort of article?’
‘We have taken the liberty of preparing a draft,’ he replied, handing her several pages of typescript. Marianne started to read. The tone was not dissimilar to the ‘confession’ she had signed in Moscow, although it avoided any suggestion of a sexual liaison. It told the story of how she had been ‘tricked’ into helping Larry Anderson, a CIA spy, to gather material and how she had been persuaded to go to Georgia with him on ‘a spying mission’ and had been severely injured in an air crash. The article was part autobiographical thriller, part mea culpa for her involvement in espionage, but most of all an attack on her American spy master and his ‘CIA bosses’. The whole concoction was laced through with such lavish praise for life in the Soviet Union that she couldn’t help laughing.
‘No respectable journal would publish this – and even if they did, no reader would believe it. It’s completely over the top.’ Sensing that he didn’t understand her, she added in Russian, ‘It’s too obvious. Crude propaganda – no one would believe it.’
The man bowed his head. ‘I understand. You do not have to follow the wording precisely. Please submit to us a re-draft.’
‘What if I don’t want to do this?’ Marianne said, though she knew perfectly well what it was all about.
The man shrugged. ‘There might be consequences. Moscow has led me to believe that you will cooperate.’
For the next few weeks Marianne agonised over whether to do what they wanted. Several times she had come close to telling Edward that she was being blackmailed but she pulled back at the last moment, remembering how she had lied to his face only six months earlier and how relieved he had been to hear her denial. As the colonel had said, it’s one thing to suspect a past indiscretion – it’s another to see the gory evidence.
She didn’t feel any great compunction about being critical of Larry and his associates who had landed her in such an invidious position, but at the same time she did not want to be too offensive. Could there be some repercussions when she travelled to America, she wondered. Some adverse consequences to her parents?
In the end the whole process had become increasingly farcical. Drafts went back and forth between her and the Soviet embassy until eventually a text was agreed and, following instructions from the embassy, she duly submitted the article to the New Statesman, who promptly rejected it. Eventually the article was accepted by a small left-leaning journal in America where it lingered and died in the obscurity it doubtless deserved.
The photographs, however, remained with the KGB.
While Marianne no longer feared the ploys of Soviet propagandists, there were other consequences of her time in Russia which were less easy to forget. Her fractured pelvis had not healed well and she still walked with a noticeable limp – her
war wound, as she called it; she knew now she would always walk with a limp and suffer recurring bouts of sciatica. Yet aside from the physical scars, her year in Moscow was now a well-ordered memory. In the security of her present life it seemed like a curious aberration; a time when she had lived dangerously – a high-octane existence bringing with it an intensity which would never be repeated. She had come close to catastrophe and nearly destroyed her marriage, but there was still some part of her which couldn’t quite wish for that year to be wiped from her past.
Perhaps that’s how soldiers feel, returning from a war, she thought, as she set off from her meeting at St John’s College towards the University Library the other side of the river. The sun had emerged suddenly after a heavy shower and was now reflecting off the wet road into Marianne’s eyes as she trudged down Trinity Street. Deciding to cut through the college, she turned into Great Court, marvelling, as she always did, how to walk through Great Gate was almost to enter another dimension; a space unreasonably large but at the same time enclosed and private – almost intimate – enhanced by the perfect positioning of the fountain with its slim ionic columns now glistening wet in the low November sun. Crossing Trinity Bridge, Marianne glanced back at the Wren Library, imagining Byron sitting in his silent marble contemplation.
‘Don’t go there – I won’t let you think like that,’ said Dorrie the following morning when she and Marianne sat over their morning coffee discussing the welfare of Marianne’s daughter. ‘You’re falling into that terrible cliché of “what did I do wrong?”; you haven’t done anything wrong. You have been an exemplary mother. No one could have been more loving and supportive than you.’
‘Perhaps too much?’
‘That’s ridiculous. Be positive. Izzy is a clever girl; whatever else she’s done, she hasn’t neglected her studies.’
Although several years younger than Marianne, Dorrie had become her closest friend. Having toyed with pursuing an academic career, Dorrie now taught English and drama at a secondary school in the city. Marianne would never forget her first sighting of Dorrie one warm afternoon in early summer as – with her flowing red hair and bare freckled arms – she tore about the stage, transporting Izzy’s class of twelve-year-olds into the mysteries of Wonderland. Marianne respected her unsentimental approach to life.
‘Have you talked to her yet?’ Dorrie asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I’ve tried but there hasn’t really been a good moment…’
‘Don’t be so feeble, Marianne. Kids respond to straight talking.’
‘And you’ve had so many children.’
‘I may not have had children, but I see them every day. You are forgetting that teenagers are my life now. I had to spend half of yesterday trying to get some year ten girl in my English class to stop snivelling over a failed love affair. We’ve had our share of pregnancies too.’
‘OK, granted; you probably do know more about it than I do – except it’s different when it’s your own child… Anyway, you’re right, of course. I must force the issue. I do worry that this will screw up her studies.’
‘Not necessarily…’
‘Fine, but…’
‘I know; you’d love her to get into the university here but that was never likely to happen – partly because she is unlikely to get the grades but mainly because she doesn’t want it. It’s all too close to home for her.’
‘Edward is furious with her for getting pregnant – though he hasn’t said anything to her.’
‘He has a point. There’s no excuse for a girl of her age and intelligence.’
‘I did, and I was a lot older than her. Our family are highly fertile – miss the pill for a couple of days and that’s it.’
Dorrie smiled. ‘I suppose if that wasn’t the case you might not have had Izzy… Anyway, how’s the novel going?’
‘Badly. What am I doing, peeping about under the feet of the giants of Russian literature?’
‘You mustn’t…’
‘It’s OK, I haven’t given up – but every time I try to work out what my characters might think or do, there’s Bezukhov, or Levin, or Pushkin’s Tatyana, answering for me.’
‘You’ll get there,’ said Dorrie, rising from the table and giving Marianne a long hug. ‘Keep at it – and speak to that daughter of yours!’
That night, as Marianne drifted into sleep, she found herself back in South America. It was the holiday she had taken with Edward to celebrate their return to Cambridge before he started at Addenbrooke’s. Izzy is with them – how old is she? Perhaps ten or eleven. Those last years of innocence before the teenage battles begin. They are visiting the multiple waterfalls at Iguazu and paddling a canoe at the bottom of one of the falls. A rainbow arches over their heads – an almost tangible roof of colour which seems to Marianne a sign of divine approbation: your lives are in my protection. Izzy’s blue eyes sparkle with wonder and Marianne feels a happiness which is painful in its intensity.
Edward smiles at her across the boat – the noise of the water is too loud for conversation – and she wonders again how she ended up with a man so kind and gentle: no virtue exhibitionist, but a truly good man. How weak it sounds to be labelled good; history swallows good men without trace. But to be good is surely the summation of all virtues; who would you rather have as a husband, she thinks, some artistic genius like Picasso – or a Burns or Byron? Surely not – Edward is a good man and I am a fortunate woman.
The following morning, being a Saturday, Marianne resolved to have a serious talk to her daughter. She listened periodically outside Izzy’s door; when she heard noises suggesting that Izzy was awake, she went in and sat on the edge of her bed. ‘How are you feeling, darling?’ she asked.
‘What’s this all about?’
‘I want to know if you’ve thought about it – I mean, what you’re going to do?’
Izzy rolled her eyes and looked askance at her mother but said nothing.
Marianne sighed. ‘About the fact that you are pregnant.’
‘I didn’t know I had to do anything. It just happens, doesn’t it? You know, the baby grows inside you – then it comes out.’
‘So does this mean that you’ve decided to have the child?’
‘Oh, I see, you’ve come to tell me to have an abortion, is that it?’
‘I haven’t come to tell you anything. I just want you to know that I’ll help you in whatever choice you make.’
‘You’d prefer that I get rid of it, wouldn’t you? I’ve rather spoilt your and Dad’s idea of a perfect daughter.’
‘Izzy, don’t play games. It’s your decision, of course, and you must think through the consequences carefully. But if you’ve decided to have the child, Dad and I will give you all the support we can.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not going to kill it if that’s what you want to know.’
Marianne paused to consider this statement and compose her thoughts. ‘That’s fine, darling – I’m glad,’ and she leant across to give Izzy a kiss on the forehead. ‘I think that’s brave but I think it’s a good decision. You’re going to have to be much more careful, though, with your health – cut out the alcohol and smoking, all kinds of smoking. What does Andy think? I mean, Andy is the father, I suppose?’
‘You suppose? Do you think I shag every boy I meet?’
‘Izzy, just tell me how Andy feels about becoming a father?’
‘Actually, Andy’s cool about it.’
‘Well, that’s good. Now come downstairs and have some breakfast, and we’ll talk about a few practical things.’
Two hours later, when Edward returned to the house, he looked enquiringly at Marianne.
‘She’s going to have it,’ Marianne said.
‘Is she…’ and for a few seconds Edward was silent, looking past Marianne, up the stairs, as if searching for ins
piration. Then a smile spread slowly across his face. ‘Do you know, I’m pleased. I didn’t think I would be, but I am. Just think, Marianne, us as grandparents, a small baby in the house – it’s really rather wonderful.’
Marianne threw her arms around his neck. ‘I’m so pleased you think like that, Ed, because I do too.’
Marianne looked across to a photograph of Izzy, taken in Moscow during that winter – her blonde curls just showing under the little fur hat, her vivid blue eyes shining out – she could easily have passed for a Russian girl – that little girl now soon to become a mother herself. Marianne felt a great swelling of optimism and hope for the future. Tears began to prick her eyes. ‘We’ll make it work, Ed,’ she said. ‘With Izzy. Together, we’ll make it all work.’
12
Marianne began to hang decorations on the tree.
‘You look as if you are actually enjoying the whole palaver of Christmas,’ said Dorrie, watching from the comfort of an armchair.
‘That’s because I am. This will be the first Christmas we’ve spent here in five years.’
It had become a routine for her and her sister Claire to go with their families to visit their parents in Vermont, but this year, with Edward’s father unwell, they were staying in Cambridge and her parents were coming over to visit them. Her mother was especially looking forward to seeing Callum again – now an eighteen-month-old toddler.
Marianne also had much in her own life to give her satisfaction. She had been thrilled to find a publisher for the novel over which she had struggled for so long, and most of the reviews had been complimentary; equally important in terms of her academic career, she had just been awarded a research fellowship at recently established Robinson College to work on the dissemination of the Russian romantic poets into Europe through English and French translations. It was a project she had long wanted to embark on; the next few years promised to be busy.