The Accomplice

  “Can’t do what?” Her stepson now sounded faintly exasperated, as if he could not understand the purpose of her remarks.

  “Fix things, get in on influence.”

  “Well, no, probably not.”

  “Kenward would have had to come back to Germany to marry me. Would he have done it, I wonder, if the present rules had been in existence then?”

  “I’m sure he would. Your power over Dad was absolute, I’d say.”

  “I doubt it. The power of sexual attraction is in the present and in the presence. Don’t you think, Naomi? And, if I hadn’t come, your mother, Marcus, would have stayed with you.”

  “It’s no good playing ‘what if’ with the past. Meaningless.”

  “It’s the only thing to do with the past,” Yevgenia said. “All the alternative worlds, the choices you refused, the roads you didn’t take.”

  Xenia thought of her father, the vodka that used to speak before it felled him. For him the alternative worlds of his imagination were vast. What if Kerensky had defeated the October Revolution; what if Trotsky had outmanoeuvred Stalin and sent him to a camp; what if Hitler had been assassinated in 1936? But it did not matter; however he rewrote history, he ended up in the gulag. The real miracle had been that he had survived to be a teacher of languages in a Siberian technical school, that he had survived at all.

  “She’s old.” Marcus was replying to Naomi’s question. “She’s aged a lot recently. Old people think about the past.”

  No, Xenia contradicted him in her head. No, she’s not thinking about the past. She’s thinking about the future and she’s talking to me. The message was given in no friendly spirit either, of that she was sure. You’re going back, Yevgenia had been saying. I didn’t want you here and you’ll have to go back. Don’t think you can stay. How had she seen what Xenia wanted? Xenia made the obverse identification. Yevgenia had come here as a refugee forty-five years ago; she would enter instinctively into the mind of a girl from Russia, in a way that Naomi and Marcus could never do. She would know that the imperative was to stay, to keep heading away from the wastes of Siberia. Xenia cursed the old woman who had read Marcus’s interest in the web of obsessed glances in which he entangled her. She cursed herself for permitting herself to look at him. And she thought furiously, all to no purpose. He couldn’t save her, anyway. His power did not reach to visas and work permits and rights of abode. She didn’t doubt the truth of what Yevgenia had said. It was too clearly aimed and had found its target.

  The next day she was still depressed about what she had learned. The only positive thing she had heard was that she could stay if she married an Englishman. This did not seem, in itself, an impossible solution, but it was annoying that she had not known it to start with and had wasted time on Marcus. The idea of marriage was not one she found particularly agreeable: she was naturally solitary and could hardly imagine a life truly shared with another person. However, ultimately, divorce was the solution to incompatibility and, in the short run, with life in London as the prize, anyone would be tolerable, a drug addict, a cripple, a black.

  The door bell rang. She glanced at her watch. It was two thirty. Naomi’s clients changed on the hour so it was unlikely to be one of them. Marcus was at the hospital. Mrs Vokins had left before lunch. She opened the front door to find Al standing on the top step. His hair, not tied back in his customary pony tail, lay glossily over his shoulders. He was wearing a torn pink T shirt and black jeans.

  “I could hear you moving around from downstairs,” he said, “so I knew you were back from school.”

  Xenia stood aside to let him in. Al often came up in the afternoon to have coffee or tea with her; she always let him loaf around, grind coffee and boil water, making no effort to help as she did with Naomi. She would sit with him politely, watching guardedly, saying little. She never betrayed that she found his long black hair particularly effeminate and repulsive; that she disliked his casual clothes and his loose-jointed style of movement and his affectation of idleness. She knew his visits were motivated by an attraction like that suffered by Marcus, but which, unlike Marcus’s, she had never encouraged. So when she said, “Al, where do you come from?” it was the first time she had ever shown any interest in him personally.

  Al was pouring out two minute cups of thick Turkish coffee, a substance which he declared necessary to enable him to work in the afternoons. He replied with deliberate obtuseness, “Here, London. I’m a cockney. Or at least I am if the sound of Bow Bells reaches to St Mary’s Paddington.”

  Xenia had no idea of what he was talking about. “No, I mean, where were you born.”

  “Here in London.”

  She absorbed this information. Her question had been an idle one, born of a moment’s identification with him, like her a stranger in the land. “Were you? But what’s your nationality?”

  Al relented at last and explained. “I’m British, by birth and by nationality and so are my parents. If you mean what is my racial origin, which I agree is a tricky question to put tactfully, my answer only shows how complicated these things are. My family is North Indian Muslim. They must have moved to India from central Asia sometime in the fifteenth century. In terms of nationality, some of them are now Pakistani; some are Indian; some American; we are British.”

  Xenia did not allow her astonishment to show; she said, “So you’re not Indian. I thought you were,” as she adjusted her mind to this new perspective.

  When he had gone she took the two little cups from the table and carried them to the sink overlooking the paved garden at the back of the house, thoughtfully running the hot tap over them. She must stop dreaming and act decisively, she told herself. She remembered she had been through the same process before her father’s death. There had been a period of fantasy of what life would be like if he were no longer there, with his drunkenness and violence. Then the moment had come when she knew she must act to transform the imaginary into the real. Yevgenia’s words last night had been the catalyst; Al had suddenly given her hope.

  Equipped with a pen and a notebook, she left the house and strode into the High Street. She walked past the boutiques and bookshops which she had previously raided and made for the library. Her researches quickly established the truth of what Yevgenia had said. It was impossible to come to England permanently except by marriage or with money. Even to come temporarily as a student required a guarantor that she had sufficient money to pay her living expenses and her fees. She was amazed by this; she had always regarded learning as something, like the air, that came free to all those who wished for it. She walked slowly towards the Heath, considering her possibilities. Marcus was a potential guarantor, but where was the money to come from to pay her fees? She could imagine manipulating Marcus and Naomi into permitting her to live with them, to guarantee her to the authorities. But she could not see how they could afford to pay the thousands of pounds necessary or why they would be willing to do so even if they could afford it. To be a student would only give her three or four years in any case. She rejected the idea. Of the alternatives the choice was obvious: between marrying a British citizen and finding £750,000 to invest in the country only one was feasible. It was truly feasible. Xenia could see no reason why she should not marry, or arrange to marry, someone before the time came for her to leave England. She would prefer an Englishman, a real one, but it would probably have to be Al, since time was short and she had already wasted a month in reaching this point.

  The next day she did not wait for Al to ring the door bell. After lunch, when Naomi had once more ascended to her consulting room in the company of Andrew, who had got the time of his appointment right for once, she telephoned the basement flat. Al was out. She waited impatiently for his arrival, sitting at the dining-room window with her English books. She had to go out to baby-sit for the evening at six; she willed his return. Al came home just after five. She did not have to call him again because he saw her as he was about to go down the area steps; he waved and came up to the fron
t door instead.

  Xenia was careful that her attitude to him should show no sudden unwarranted warmth. She allowed him to prepare the coffee as he always had done, as if she were the visitor to his home. She did not respond more or more positively to his conversation. But she ceased to resist. Her resistance was the internal monologue that she maintained against all of them. As she smiled and acquiesced in all that went on around her, the inner eye and inner voice viewed sceptically and spoke scathingly of everyone she confronted and of their motives. In Al’s case she suspended her second voice. She treated him as she had done her father, not permitting herself to notice or criticize. She observed with interest that Al was becoming more attractive. She no longer found his black pony tail affected and effeminate.

  One evening that week, when Naomi was at her adultery group and Rosie at her evening seminar, Xenia, Al and Marcus ate dinner together. After their meal, as the two men were stowing plates in the dishwasher while Xenia was replacing food in the refrigerator, she found herself observing approvingly the contrast between Al’s height and lankiness and Marcus’s stocky, middle-aged body. It was power, of course; Al had the power to give her what she wanted and that power transformed him. It was not just that she now began to approve his appearance; she longed to see him. Their moments together during the day, coffee after lunch, a picnic on the Heath, dinner with Marcus and Naomi, were ones she looked forward to. She knew that she was making progress, that what had been casual encounters were now purposive ones on Al’s part. As for Marcus, she saw that he understood what was happening, at least to the extent that he recognized that her interest had shifted from him to Al, and accepted it. Naomi noticed nothing.

  Xenia knew that she could not hope for the same security under Rosie’s eyes, so she carefully avoided any occasion in which she would be with Al in his girlfriend’s presence. This was, on the whole, not difficult to contrive: Rosie was out at work all day, while Al worked at home. When Rosie was free she did not choose to spend time with her father and stepmother, still less with Xenia. The confrontation would come one day; Xenia preferred it to be in her own time and at a stage when she had somehow enticed or forced Al much further down the road of commitment to her, a path he perhaps did not yet know he had taken.

  Like most men, she thought, like Marcus, he wants everything, Rosie and me, Naomi and me. Then she relented towards them both; she was not a feminist and had no training in gender warfare. It was tough on poor Al who would have to choose.

  She decided that though the moment of real decision could be postponed until quite late in her stay, she must establish some intermediate tests to tell her whether she was likely to succeed in her enterprise and began with Al’s hair. She had grown used to it now and was no longer repelled by it. However, in spite of her recent exposure to London, to Western magazines and television, she could not think that long hair in a pony tail was proper for a man. She began a war against his hair, determined to get him to cut it. Her success in this would be a sign that she would succeed in her main enterprise. One lunchtime, after they had eaten their sandwiches together in the little courtyard of the basement flat, she rose and stood behind him. She took his pony tail in her hand and with two fingers scissored it at the band that held it.

  “Snip, snip.”

  Al removed her hand and pulled it over his shoulder in his. “Sneep, sneep,” he imitated her. “Do you want it as a trophy? Or do you see yourself as Delilah, bringing me to my knees?”

  Xenia slid her hand out of his, took the plates and went up the steps towards the kitchen. References to the Bible were wasted on her. Christianity was like the classics, a mist of meaningless fairy stories that for centuries painters had used as the subject matter for their art, only remembered now in order to read the paintings.

  “Snip, snip,” she would say, holding the swatch of hair in both hands; he would take her hands and kiss them.

  The time scale for her new enterprise, cutting Al’s hair and marrying him, stretched in Xenia’s mind up to the date of her return to Russia in mid-September. She was reminded one night that her plans might be disrupted by their separation. Naomi was sitting at the big dining table with piles of correspondence in front of her. Her reading glasses were perched on the end of her nose and she was talking as she tore up paper and wrote cheques and lists. Al and Xenia were watching the ten o’clock news while Marcus prepared some herbal tea for his wife.

  Naomi raised her head to remark, “We must find out when Lucia is going on holiday and whether Jean wants Xenia to go to Broad Woodham in August. Has she said anything to you about it, Marcus?”

  Marcus, pouring boiling water onto dried camomile leaves and watching Trevor Macdonald at the same time, did not respond. Al looked round at Naomi. “Is Xeni going to Jean’s?”

  “That was the original idea. Marcus and I are going to Italy in two weeks’ time and the plan was that Xenia would go to help Jean when Lucia went back to Switzerland for a month with her family. Thank you, darling.” She took her tisane and held it in both hands. “It wouldn’t be strenuous.” She was addressing herself to Xenia now. “Lucia does her shopping. There are usually errands to do everyday, but there is a cleaning woman, so it is not a question of housework or nursing. It’s really just being about, in case she falls or has an accident. And preparing meals, or opening jars and tins and things like that. Jean really manages very well and is very independent. Oh, here’s Rosie.”

  The front door opened and Rosie came in. “You weren’t downstairs, so I thought I’d find you scrounging dinner up here.”

  “He’s not scrounging, Rosie,” Naomi said. “I think he may have actually made dinner, with Xeni’s help. It’s wonderful for Marcus and me, like having a couple: a butler and housekeeper.”

  Marcus was aware that remark was not likely to please his daughter. “Have you eaten?” he asked. “Can we give you something, a drink at least?”

  “I’ll have coffee, no, is that tea? I’ll have a tisane like Naomi’s.”

  He refilled the kettle and said, “To go back to what you were saying, Mimi, Jean has mentioned nothing to me. You’ll have to ring her, or if you don’t want to ask her directly, ring Zita.”

  Naomi tore more paper and threw the pieces into her recycling bag. “Not that it matters,” she said. “Xeni can always stay on here while we’re away if Jean doesn’t want her. She won’t be lonely. Al is always around. You won’t be going away until September, will you, Rosie?” Rosie perched on the edge of the table to watch the advertisements. She took the mug proffered by her father. “We go on 5th September. God, I can’t wait.”

  On Rosie’s arrival Xenia, who had been sitting beside Al, got up and went to stand behind Naomi, on the edge of the group around the television, where she remained while Rosie drank her tisane. Finally, Rosie put down her mug and said, “Al, we must go down. There’s a load of stuff to do before tomorrow.” She led the way to the door; Al followed.

  “Are you in tomorrow afternoon?” he asked Xenia, who nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

  “You don’t mind going to Jean’s, do you, Xenia?” Naomi asked belatedly when they had gone.

  “No,” Xenia replied. “Not at all. I don’t mind. I’ll do whatever.”

  Xenia would go or stay according to Jean’s wishes, Naomi thought. On the whole, she would prefer her to go. Not that she distrusted the Russian girl for a moment, but one of her momentary flashes of unease had come over her, the suspicion that there was something more to Xenia than the biddable child she appeared to be. If Jean refused point blank, there was little to be done. She had often in the past shown independence in the face of Naomi’s attempts to organize her life for her good.

  “You’ll like it,” she said authoritatively. “It will be a nice change from Hampstead. You’ll get to see another aspect of English life. And there are young people around. What’s the name of the girl who looks after Zita Daunsey’s poor little boy? She’ll introduce vou to everybody.”

  “Yes,”
said Xenia.

  “It should mean more money,” Naomi went on. “Lucia works for so many hours a week and of course she is paid for them. I don’t know what the rate is but Jean can certainly afford to pay properly.” She leaned back from her papers and pushed her spectacles into her hair. “Jean’s money…” she said, distracted to a new subject. “Jean’s money was Russian money, wasn’t it, Marcus? I mean, your family never had any serious money.”

  “My family has been downwardly socially mobile for at least three generations,” Marcus said with relish. “The only thing I know about them is that my great-grandfather lost the bulk of whatever they had, and my grandfather finished off the rest. My father never had a bean.”

  “What was the story about Jean’s money? Her family were white Russians, but she didn’t come here until after the Second World War and then there was money here waiting for her. Such a well-organized family, I’ve always thought, to be so rich that you leave small fortunes around the world in case you should ever be a refugee.”

  “It’s quite a common arrangement, if you live in a politically unstable part of the world, to have money stashed away somewhere in case of need. Swiss banking is built on it,” Marcus commented. “Anyway, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that in Jean’s case. I don’t think I ever knew the details, but I think there was some legal process to establish that co-heirs were dead and eventually Jean got everything.”