The Accomplice

  “Of course. I’ll try in the morning, when I have a gap. In any case, Xenia, even if I can’t get one why don’t you come to Woodham for the day? We can have lunch together and then bring you home in the evening. Lucia may be there, or Zita and her poor little boy. It might be more amusing for you than staying here alone all day.”

  Xenia acquiesced in the suggestion with the gratitude she always showed. The incoherent rage that had held her in its power, uncontrollably, in her first couple of weeks in London had dissipated somewhat. She still prowled the house, first thing in the morning, reading the letters in Marcus’s desk, sniffing the cosmetics on Naomi’s dressing table. She still ritually took the three coins from Marcus’s bowl. She still, occasionally, made desperate, undiscriminating raids on shops, now having to go farther to avoid those which she had already attacked. Such irresistible events were always followed by the same revulsion, the same retching, the same rapid disposal of the booty, usually in the cupboards of the house in Gayton Street, so that it was enveloped by the Loftuses’ possessions, becoming one more item on their inventory. However, these episodes were now much rarer, as the bewilderment that produced them was replaced by a sense of purpose.

  The terrible, orderless injustice of life preyed on her. She could not stop thinking of her own brief past and that of her parents: her much-loved mother who had left when she was eight; her father, punished and rejected for no more than being who he was. She thought of the barren grid of tower blocks in the middle of Siberia where she had grown up, a place without beauty, or hope. Why even her detested father should have been condemned to such a life, while Marcus and Naomi and Yevgenia lived surrounded by plenty, she could not begin to understand. She walked around the streets of Hampstead, counting the huge houses, the cars, quantifying affluence; and she watched the bag ladies in their cast-off trainers, no laces, shuffling from bin to bin, scavenging with the grim persistence of the stray dogs in Siberia.

  There was no fairness, so it was up to the individual to take what she could for herself: that much was clear. For her, taking what she could did not mean merely three 1p pieces from Marcus’s bowl, it meant taking London. She was going to stay; she was never, never going back to Russia. She had seen that here she could be free from the poverty of life in Moscow, from the fear of being returned to Novoleninsk, from the burden of her name, and from the tyranny of the security people. She had fallen into their hands (like her father, she could never bring herself to articulate even in her head the acronym, Kay Gay Bay) when she arrived in Moscow. They had seen her fear of return to Siberia and used it to trap and make use of her. She only operated at a very low level: no more than a little reporting on her classmates in the modern languages faculty. Once or twice she had been told to meet a foreign student, to make friends with him or her. Those assignments she had enjoyed; tickets to the theatre or ballet were made available, and she was paid her expenses. Her conscience did not reproach her for what she had done; nonetheless, she hated it. It was a submission to the authorities which she would have preferred not to make. She had not dared to refuse their requests and had to conceal her loathing of them under her habitual willingness. They had given her her reward, enabling her to have her passport, exit visa and hard currency without difficulty. It would be a pleasing irony if they had thereby given her the means to liberate herself for good.

  The naivest plan, of simply staying on without papers, followed by most would-be immigrants, she did not entertain. Since she was used to an all-compassing, bureaucratic state, she imagined the authorities had almost supernatural knowledge about her. However, she was convinced that what she wanted was not impossible to achieve and her evidence was the presence of Al within the family. Al was a foreigner, but he lived in London, had a job, was at home here; and he was not merely a foreigner, but a black and eccentric one. It is true that Al now appeared less disturbing than when she had first met him. Indians and Afro-Caribbeans, she had now discovered, were numerous in London. She saw them everywhere. And Al’s style of dress, his long hair, his black jeans and T shirt, were also common enough to be an alternative to the grey suit which, to her, signified respectability and power. It was her assumption, made on the basis of her Russian experience, that Marcus must have obtained permission for Al to live in the country. He must be made to do the same for her.

  The following evening Naomi reported that she had, miraculously, been successful in her attempt to obtain a returned ticket for the Sunday performance. Xenia had expected nothing less. In Moscow, although seats in the opera were not easy for ordinary people to obtain except by luck or barter, anyone with enough influence or money could always apply to the administrator, who would hand over the tickets that he retained for such a purpose with greater or less readiness, according to the status of the supplicant. Or you just went to the entrance of the Bolshoi Teatr at the beginning of the evening and bought a ticket for dollars. The face value of a ticket in Moscow was minimal, its rarity valued in other ways than by money and it never occurred to Xenia that no influence but an enormous amount of cash had been expended to ensure her company. This ignorance saved her from the regret of thinking what she might have done with the money if she had had it to spend as she liked.

  “We’ll have to find you something to wear. I’m afraid part of this bizarre ritual, which includes a picnic as well as singing, involves dressing up. We shall have to see if Rosie has something suitable that would fit you.”

  Naomi had already taken Xenia’s appearance in hand. The sight of the Russian girl so out of place at Jean’s lunch at Woodham had decided her to intervene. It was an article of her creed that outward appearance was to be ignored. (She had not heard Xenia’s disagreement with Rosie on this very subject.) A civilized person would always try to penetrate beneath the surface of another, whether it was crystalline smooth or pebble-dashed, to reach the real character beneath. Yet seeing Xenia so badly dressed, the vile combination of colours, the poor quality material, made her decide that she must be given new clothes. Her own were too large and would only look too clearly like cast offs. Rosie might be persuaded to part, with ill grace, with something from her wardrobe, although Xenia might well refuse to accept such a gift. So Naomi went to The Gap and bought two pairs of jeans, four T shirts, a sweater and a jacket.

  When they were presented to Xenia, she seemed overwhelmed by this generosity. She struggled with emotion and embarrassment to express her gratitude. She kept making promises to pay for the new clothes out of her earnings for child-minding. Naomi waved away both the thanks and the repayment and felt herself rewarded by the sight, next day, of Xenia emerging, transformed, from her bathroom which Naomi had stocked with shampoos, soap, deodorants. The skinny jeans and clinging top did not make her into anything glamorous in Naomi’s eyes; she looked like a Western teenager, both younger than the Russian Xenia and tougher. Her hair, newly washed, radiated from her head in a huge mane-like halo, surrounding her pale, unmade-up face. She had obviously been studying what she should wear and how she should wear it, even when she was enclosed in her Soviet nylon blouse and skirt. She blushed with pleasure as she skipped down the stairs towards Naomi, and smiled. Naomi was very touched; Xenia looked almost pretty, her eyes were suddenly a very attractive pale blue; the colour of the jeans and sweater had been well chosen.

  Marcus, from behind his wife’s shoulder had said, “You’re a Westerner now, Xeni.”

  Naomi turned, not having realized that he was behind her.

  “It is thanks to Naomi,” Xenia had said fervently. “These jeans are wonderful.”

  “It’s marvellous,” Naomi remarked, making for her office, “that young people like such practical clothes – jeans and boots and T shirts are their idea of finery. Working jeans, playing jeans, court jeans, it’s all you need.”

  “I cannot say thanks enough,” Xenia repeated. “I am so happy with them.”

  But jeans would not do for Glyndebourne, still less the discarded Russian skirt and cardigan. Xenia, as usu
al, seemed little concerned about her dress. She had noted something which was of far greater importance to her than the invitation to go to an opera which she had already seen once in Moscow, although she had not admitted as much. It was Marcus who had made the proposal to fulfil Naomi’s vague wish that she should be with them. Naomi, after her efforts on the telephone, took the credit and accepted the thanks and seemed to have forgotten that this time the idea was not hers. It might be that this act fell within the compass of Marcus’s general benevolence. It might rather have been that he actively wished for her company, which would give him a pleasure that going to the opera with his stepmother and wife would not normally hold for him. Xenia inclined to the second explanation. The conspiracy, into which they had entered when he had discovered her eavesdropping on Naomi and her patients, had not been strengthened or continued in any overt way. Yet Xenia was aware of the interest that she held for him. It was her belief, derived from her life in Siberia and Moscow, that the weak often exaggerate the power of the strong and the strong often do not know the extent of their power. In the past she had used this observation to give her courage for some demand that she knew in theory she had no chance of gaining, and had found that her position was better than she thought and those in power less determined to deny her than she was to gain her ends. The time would come to persuade Marcus of what he had to do and in that persuasion the attraction that he felt for her would play its part. In the meantime, she felt a contented contempt for Naomi who had so much and saw nothing, who gave so generously and understood nothing.

  16

  The problem of what Xenia should wear at Glyndebourne, a matter which concerned Xenia herself not at all, was solved by Naomi, who early one evening made a rare visit to the basement and returned half an hour later with a short plain black linen dress belonging to Rosie.

  “With a belt and some earrings it will be ravishing,” she said, laying the garment over the back of a chair for Xenia and Marcus to admire. Xenia thanked and praised and then praised and thanked once again, Naomi in person and Rosie in absentia. Naomi accepted for both of them with equal grace, failing to mention that Rosie had not been at home and that Al, with an unusual show of interest, had helped her choose something from Rosie’s wardrobe. He had declared that he was sure she would not mind, had opened cupboard doors, selected several possibilities and urged the final choice on Naomi. She had been glad of his co-operation. Kindness fully justified what she was doing, she was sure, and it was bad luck that Rosie was not there to share in the act of benevolence. Al’s help diluted her unease that Rosie might not like what was being done on her behalf.

  Naomi did not much like opera. She was tone deaf and could only recognize the most obvious and often repeated melodies, so she always greatly enjoyed Glyndebourne where the drive, the company of friends, food in the form of a messy and time-consuming picnic composed so considerable a proportion of the performance that the music, like her guilt about the dress, was diluted. Taking Xenia as well as Jean doubled the pleasure.

  Xenia accepted the dress as she accepted everything, displaying the emotions that were expected of her and suppressing her own confused resentment. She controlled impulses to screw the linen slip into a ball and thrust it into a rubbish bag, and took a perverse pleasure instead in wearing Rosie’s dress and taking Rosie’s place with Rosie’s parents and grandmother. She went through her part for the evening feeling as if she were disembodied, watching what she was doing. From the outside she fitted in as perfectly as the dress fitted her; no one looking at their group, seated at Yevgenia’s feet on a rug by the ha-ha, would have known she was an impostor, an audience of the performance of the English at the opera. Her distanced self both rejected what she saw and desired it all at once. She wanted it for herself, of right, so she could refuse it, and not have to accept and admire without choice.

  Naomi, who was wearing a trailing dress of several different tones of pink, looped up her shawl and handed Yevgenia a glass of champagne that Marcus had just poured. They had half an hour before the performance to sit in the afternoon sunshine.

  “I don’t know,” Naomi said, as she rummaged in one of her baskets, “why we don’t just order dinner rather than bringing a picnic. It would be so much easier. But, somehow, for me, the food and wine in the sunshine is the whole point of the expedition. Why else go to the country in summer if not for a picnic?”

  “I don’t know why you don’t, either,” Yevgenia said, disagreeably. “What we eat is really immaterial. It’s the music we come for.”

  And when the music began, Xenia had to agree. She had had no expectation of enjoyment from the opera, her thoughts having been entirely engaged in the wearing of Rosie’s dress and the watching of the audience. In the dark of the auditorium, isolated, the social bonds cut at last, she found herself unexpectedly moved by the performance. It was, to her surprise, sung in Russian and what she had expected to be a period of private reflection turned into intense concentration on the singing and on the characters, well known to her, Tchaikovsky’s palimpsest of Pushkin’s story, the old woman holding her secret and her power, the young girl with her helplessness and longing for love.

  When she emerged into the dark green shadows of the garden, still immersed in what she had seen, she found it difficult to resume life outside. Her silence was not remarked on; it was covered by Naomi’s flow of comment as she handed out plates and smoked salmon. The sharpness of desire, for money, for power, for love, Xenia could feel piercing her heart; its expression in music and drama concentrated her own passionate need. Suddenly conscious of her role, the necessity to conceal herself, she looked up. Naomi, her grey-brown curls falling forward over her brow, had her hands deep in a picnic basket searching for lemons lost or mislaid, talking as she did so.

  “Is it because it’s Russian or because it’s opera that there is such an extraordinary level of emotion? I try to imagine what one could say to each of them, because it’s certain they need therapy, an extended course, I should think.”

  Xenia found that Marcus was watching her; she caught his eye and her own shied away quickly to focus on the steep hill on which sheep grazed like cut out toys. Marcus was necessary to her. He was her means of entry to England. Her eyes moved back to his, held them, unsmiling for a moment, moved on.

  Yevgenia, seated on her folding chair, watched her stepson and Xenia. Her expression was thoughtful. She neither smiled nor relaxed as Xenia’s glance met hers. Xenia found she could not look away. The old woman’s comprehensive gaze held her. She could hear Marcus’s movements, caught the flicker of Naomi’s hair and scarves, while she stared at Yevgenia. She had a long face with pale, hooded eyes and creased swags of skin around the mouth and jaw, a delta of deep lines that ran into the lips. You could see that she had been a countess in the old days. Xenia gazed back. She would not be outfaced.

  “Here,” Naomi was offering a plate and they simultaneously turned to her.

  Xenia remained conscious of Yevgenia throughout the last act of the opera, in the same way that she was conscious of the fabric of Marcus’s sleeve against her bare arm. The memory of Yevgenia’s unsympathetic gaze overlaid the determination of the old Countess on the stage. She did not allow herself to speculate on what Yevgenia saw; she abandoned herself to the music. Only in the darkness of the car as they drove in silence towards Broad Woodham did she wonder what Yevgenia had understood. Yevgenia had not wanted her to come to England, did not want her to be a Chornorouky. Yevgenia was afraid of her.

  At Woodham they deposited the old woman at her house, Marcus accompanying her to the door, while Naomi went ahead to unlock the house, to turn on lights. Then they resumed their journey to London, Naomi now seated in front beside Marcus.

  “I thought Jean was in rather bad form this evening,” she remarked.

  Marcus pulled out to overtake and changed gear as the car surged forward. Xenia sank back in the seat behind, stilling herself into invisibility, watching the arrows on the dashboard blink ri
ght, then left.

  “She was quiet,” Marcus said. “But I think she enjoyed the music. It was a very fine performance this evening. The Lithuanian was superb.”

  “She was distinctly grumpy,” Naomi insisted. “I wonder if being a Pushkin story and in Russian didn’t stir painful memories.”

  “I don’t think Jean was ever a poor, dependent relative.”

  “Marcus, don’t be so literal. I mean, the Russianness of it all. What was she thinking of when she was speaking just now about how she came to England after the war? She’s never mentioned the past in all these years, then she suddenly starts talking about your mother. Do you think she’s blaming herself for your father’s divorce after all these years?”

  Xenia had wondered what Marcus had made of the conversation Naomi was referring to; perhaps he had not understood. She was still suffering from the shock of it, of understanding very well the words that were puzzling Naomi. She pulled a shawl around her arms to take away the chill that penetrated her.

  Thinking about the reworking of Pushkin’s characters, she had not been aware of how Yevgenia had begun her remarks. She only began to listen closely when she heard the smoke-hardened voice saying, “Of course, today, no one can come to live in England as I did. They simply don’t let people in.”

  Marcus had said, “You can still get in by marriage, as you did. Wives, spouses I should say, and children and dependants still come in. And a few refugees.”

  “I didn’t come in by marriage. I didn’t marry Dad until 1947. I came in as a displaced person, as a European volunteer worker under the Balt Cygnet Scheme, it was called.”

  “I don’t remember that. I thought you came in to get married.” Marcus’s voice was surprised.

  “You don’t remember the details because you didn’t know them. I did come in to get married. There was just one problem. Your father was still married to your mother, Marcus. So I had to come another way. In fact, Kenward fixed it. He found me in a refugee camp in Germany. I had been picked up fainting on the street and sent to hospital in the camp as I had nowhere to go. I had pneumonia and weighed forty-five kilos. I was one of the fat ones. I suppose that is why I survived. I had spent the war on a farm in Latvia and had some reserves. Still, it is hard to see what my attractions could have been for your father. At the time that never occurred to me, though I have often thought about it since. Whatever they were, they worked. Kenward wanted me badly enough to bring me to England, even though he could not marry me. He arranged for me to work as an auxiliary in a TB sanatorium. That’s what you imported people for, to do your dirty work. Kenward got me out of the camp and onto a list to enter the country. I was here long before he divorced your mother because divorces took so much time in those days. But you can’t do that now.”