The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “Xeni, I’m sorry about Saturday. What are you going to do? Can I see you before you go?”

  I might give him back, Xenia thought. Rosie can have him. “Of course,” she said. “I might not be returning anyway, if I can get an extension to my visa. I’ll let you know. I’m staying with Zita, so you can ring me there.”

  Al took her arm and kissed her. His fingers pressed urgently into her flesh; then he turned, picked up a service sheet from the ground where he had been sitting and ran back into the house.

  Part Seventeen

  ZITA

  30

  So, in the end, Zita, not Xenia, packed to go to Russia. Valentina’s wedding was to take place in St Petersburg in a week’s time and she had arranged for her daughter to come with Tom to join a huge party of friends from England and America staying at the Europeiski for the occasion. Tom was in a state of high excitement. His suitcase had already been packed by Lynne and he was now sitting in his wheel chair blocking Zita’s progress around her bedroom and using his American little girl voice to comment on her clothes as she laid them out on her bed. Valentina appeared to be as excited as her grandson. She phoned at least three times a day to check arrangements and to ask Zita to bring some small and essential item that could easily be fitted into her baggage.

  “Tom-Tom, move, will you.” Zita was getting out yet more shoes and putting them beside the ten pairs already lined up on the floor at the bottom of her bed.

  Xenia was not going back. Zita had always suspected that there was a powerful energy behind the docile teenager trailed around during the summer by Naomi. She had still been surprised by the demonic organization demonstrated by Xenia in the days after Yevgenia’s funeral. She had first found herself a place at London University through the UCAS clearing system and obtained the necessary financial guarantees from Zita herself. With this documentation, she had had no difficulty in obtaining a change in her visa, allowing her to stay on as a student.

  “I shall get right of residence and a British passport later,” she told Zita. She had already rented somewhere to live in London. “I’ll probably buy a flat in the end,” she went on. “I have taken this place just until all the business of the will is settled. It’s in Hampstead, because that’s the only area I know. But I shan’t buy there. It reminds me of the Lenin Hills where I lived in the obshezhitiye. I shall go somewhere near the river when I buy, Chelsea or Kensington, perhaps.”

  Zita concealed her alarm at this display of decisiveness. “What will you do with Asshe House?” she asked. “Have you made up your mind yet?” They were seated in Zita’s office, for there were legal papers to deal with. She could feel the regard of Asshe House’s facade, blank and unoccupied, obliquely, through her windows. Invisible behind the church was Yevgenia’s grave.

  “Oh, I’ll sell it. It has no sentimental value for me. Why would I want to live in the middle of a town like Woodham?”

  Why, indeed, thought Zita. “Well, that’s for later. We can put it on the market when the will is proved. Now let me take down some details for all these papers that have to be prepared. Xenia Alexandrovna Chornoroukaya. Place of birth: Novoleninsk, Siberia, Russia. Date of birth?”

  “Twenty-three, oh-two, seventy-one,” Xenia said automatically.

  “Mother’s name?”

  “Yelena Petrovna Danilova.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Twenty-one, oh-eight, forty-five.”

  “Father’s name?”

  “Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky; twelve, twelve, fifteen.”

  Zita made her notes and later, after work, took Xenia, who had already moved into her flat in Hampstead, to the station.

  She was not sorry that Xenia had acted with such rapidity to sort out her new life and to remove herself from Woodham. She had felt uncomfortable, having her in the house. She had an invisible, cat-like presence which was quite different from the untidy self-assertion imposed by Lynne. She felt embarrassed, too (though why should she, she asked herself every time), when each evening the phone rang and Xenia seized it. Whom was she expecting to call, Zita wondered. Al? Marcus? She had inherited Yevgenia’s suspicions. Then Xenia would hand the receiver to Zita, or shout to her in Tom’s room, “Zita, it’s for you. Ivo.”

  She was glad to see her go also, because she could not rid herself of the unease which she had felt from the moment she recovered consciousness after Yevgenia’s death. The explanation of what had decided Yevgenia to act as she did, that she had given to the Loftuses, was clear enough, accepted by everyone. But tiny fragments of observation still nagged her and made her wary in Xenia’s company.

  She rejected one of the pairs of shoes, low-heeled sling-backs. It was September, so what she would need in St Petersburg would be a good pair of leather boots, fur-lined, rubber-soled. She looked doubtfully at her ankle boots with their frail soles and neat laces. The only answer was to buy another pair in Russia. She got up from the floor and moved back towards the cupboard where her shoes were stacked to the ceiling.

  Tom read her mind and his Betty Boop voice said, mockingly, “I need a new pair of shoes.” He manoeuvred his chair into her path, so that his left wheel almost ran over her foot.

  “Tom, go away. You’re being a real pain. Listen to a tape or something and let me pack in peace.”

  “No tape machine.” It was the Commandatore this time.

  “Damn, I’ve packed it. You’ve got to do something.” She remembered seeing Yevgenia’s tape recorder in a carrier bag in the coat cupboard in the hall. “I’ll find you another and you can listen to Roald Dahl in your room.”

  She found the bag on the shelf above the coats. The tapes were in her office waiting to be delivered to or collected by Marcus, who had showed no interest in them at all. She extracted the recorder and flicked it open as she walked towards Tom’s room. A tape still lay in the machine. She took it out ready to replace it with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and saw that it was unmarked, apparently new, but that the spools were half wound on. With a slight frown of irritation, she put it back.

  Hearing Yevgenia’s story had been harrowing in the extreme. Sitting in her office she had listened to the accounts of Kornu, of Xan’s charm and Lai’s devotion. The death of Alek she had found unbearable, her own nightmare, or dream, of Tom’s death come true. Only the impersonal surroundings had prevented her from breaking down and she could not stop herself from crying when she began to tell Ivo what she had heard. He had listened with attention, not eating the lamb with juniper that she had cooked.

  At length he had said, “You mustn’t take it all so personally. You’re sad because Jean’s dead. You miss her. But treat her story like a novel or a film. You must detach yourself.”

  “But it’s so sad!” Zita snivelled and blew her nose. “She thought he was dead and he was alive all the time. She loved someone else anyway, but she thought he had betrayed them, and he died too. She lost her son. She killed him. Can you imagine anything worse? It’s so sad.” Her tears flowed afresh.

  “Nonsense.” Ivo was eating again. “This is really excellent, this garlic puree. Jean had a very good life. She was rich; she was loved; she had people to love. She survived, for God’s sake. Her story is just one of millions of that period; she was one of the lucky ones.”

  Zita did not want, now, to listen to more. Yet with the precision of lawyerly duty, just to finish the job, she replaced the tape and pressed the rewind button. She heard the sound of Tom’s hacking laughter and realized that he was playing a game on his computer. He had forgotten about the tape. She sat down on the second step of the stairs and pressed, Play. Yevgenia spoke this time in Russian.

  * * *

  What happened after Alek died? I hardly know, for I think I was mad. The farmer had survived, much beaten; his son and one of his granddaughters were dead. They were all buried in the cemetery attached to the church in the village with others who had been killed that day. It was a terrible job to dig even a shallow pit in that frozen
earth and there were no coffins. Alek was laid alongside the woman whose sufferings he had heard, wearing his fur coat like a barbaric princeling. Mousie was tucked under his hand. I didn’t cry out or weep. I was like an automaton.

  I haven’t allowed myself to remember this for almost fifty years. I never made up an alternative life to fill in the hole, I just erased the journey from Kornu to Berlin from my mind. I cancelled out the war years at Kornu; Xan, Lai and Alek, all went. Sometimes I would wake on the edge of remembering them, some vision of a lake, like the lake at Kornu, a dream of light through tall trees, like the forest at Kornu, would jolt me into consciousness. But I never allowed myself to recall anything, anything at all. Now it has forced its way to the light, grubbed up by Naomi’s workmen and Xenia’s arrival.

  Somewhere between that nameless place and the refugee camp where Kenward found me, I lost Lai, too. I had no purpose any longer. I did not care if I lived or died. I was, as I said, a bit mad. I remember waking once, I think we were in Berlin then, getting up to search for Alek, even though I knew that he was dead and I would never find him. I stumbled about in the dark looking for a way to dig up the ground. I scrabbled with my hands amid the rubble in the street, convinced that I could find Alek’s body and release him from his grave. Lai looked after me through all this time when I would have been very glad if a ricochet, a falling brick from a bomb-damaged building, anything, had killed me. He led me as if I were an animal on a leash that he could not let go in case it ran away. Unlike me, he still had his wits about him and he got us to where we wanted to be. I don’t know, I never knew, the stratagems he used to reach Berlin and from Berlin Hamburg in the British sector. I did not care where we went or what became of us. Lai, whom I often felt I hated, was the only person I could bear to be with.

  The war had already ended when Lai died. It was a stupid, unheroic death, some form of food poisoning that killed him. We were always desperately hungry. We ate anything, the most extraordinary things, if we ate at all. I never cared whether I ate or not and Lai had to beg me to eat what he found, and very often I would not. Partly because I wasn’t interested in food, but partly because I wanted him to have more. That wish must have been the first sign of a return to some kind of normality, the recognition of someone else’s needs. It was certainly something that he ate which I had refused, I who wanted to die, which produced violent vomiting. His death was horribly quick. I could not believe that when we had survived so much and reached the West at last Lai could be taken too. It was like the death of Alek, when I knew, but could not believe, that such a thing could happen. I had forgotten the fundamental rule of life taught me by Aunt Zoya and the Princes: Everything Gets Worse. Like Alek, he died in my arms, in fact in almost the same position. He lay on his back between my legs with his head on my chest. My arms were round him, a trail of vomited water trickling over us both.

  I’ve never mourned for Lai until now. I have never done justice to how much he did for me, or how much I loved him. I grieved for Xan and was crazed with sorrow for Alek, but when Lai went I had no time to miss him. I had to die or start to look after myself, and I found dying harder than I thought. Standing in a queue a few days later, I fainted for lack of food. I was taken to hospital and there I met Kenward. My life began again.

  Alek died; Lai died; Xan did not die. I now believe that. My lack of faith didn’t kill him, for he was alive all the time, until three years ago, in Novoleninsk in Siberia. I suppose I suspected this since I first received the letter from Xenia. The little pieces of evidence accumulated all through the summer, but I resisted them. Now, suddenly, an alternative life has turned out to have been there, running alongside mine in Woodham. Xan alive, in the camps in the forties, released in the fifties, then married, teaching, father of a child. It is all too incredible not to be true. So, if Xan was alive, perhaps Lai was innocent. Everything I have believed of them up till now is wrong.

  But none of that changes what happened to Alek. Alek died in Germany. I killed him. Nothing that Xenia can tell me can alter that.

  I have done what I can to put things right. I can ask Xan’s memory for forgiveness for my lack of belief in his existence. I can ask Lai’s memory for forgiveness for my belief in his betrayal. I can repay to Xenia everything that her grandfather left us. She is the last Chornorouky, so she must have everything.

  I told her this morning that I knew that her father must be my cousin, long thought dead. She was reluctant to believe it. She said she knew very little about her family; that her father never talked about his past, which was evidently something to be concealed. She didn’t even know anything about her grandfather, though she thought he might have been called Alexander Yegorovich. I told her that even the little she did know fitted exactly with my family. Alexander Yegorovich was indeed his name. He was my mother’s cousin and had been killed fighting in the army of General Denikin in the Caucasus in 1920. The moment of proof for me, I told her, was Tom’s birthday, when she described the special food prepared for her father’s birthday. I remember so well Xan’s birthday parties on 7th July at Kornu when we were children. We did not have caviar, of course; we had lamb for St John’s Day, and a cake, and we sang “Happy Birthday” in English. She agreed, then, that they must be the same person. I asked her about Xan, but there was little I could recognize. Is that surprising? Who from Kornu would recognize Yevgenia von Korff in Jean Loftus? He was a kind man, she said. A loving father. She had hated her mother for running away with another man and had chosen herself at the age of eight to stay with her father. He spoke English and French and German, though he had only taught her English and French. He was a gifted teacher, beloved by his students. Then, with tears in her eyes, she told me about his death. She spoke about it with difficulty. It was a horrible death. So strange to think that Xan endured the transports and the camps only to die at last, smothered by the smoke of a fire in their apartment as he lay asleep. “He did not suffer,” she kept saying.

  * * *

  Zita snapped off the tape. Her heart was beating so fast that she thought she might be sick. She put her hands over her mouth, to her cheeks, to her forehead. Her movements were unconscious ones, to calm her own distress. All the minute fragments which had made her uneasy formed themselves into a rose window in a kaleidoscope: the Commandatore’s voice saying “Xenia”; the empty tablet bottle rolling out from under the burned chair; Xenia’s surprise, which was no surprise, in Asshe House garden; the date of birth, stated automatically, twelve, twelve, fifteen.

  Xenia had made Yevgenia think she was her cousin’s child. She must have known that Yevgenia had changed her will. She had returned from her day out with Al, drugged Yevgenia, set fire to her chair.

  No, it was impossible. It was impossible to believe it; no one would believe it. Why would she have killed Yevgenia?

  So that she would not have to go back to Russia. So that Naomi and Marcus or Rosie would not change Yevgenia’s mind again. So that no evidence that Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky of Novoleninsk was not Xan Chornorouky of Kornu could have time to emerge.

  Did she kill her father? She had not spoken of him with any tone of affection on the one occasion she had mentioned him to Zita. “A drunk,” she had said. The coincidence of the smoke-filled flat in Siberia and the fire in Yevgenia’s house was too great.

  Zita’s hands clasped one another in her lap; she was washing them, waterlessly. No, that was too much. She could not believe what her mind had created. She could not bear to believe any of it. It could not be true. If it were true, what evidence could she show? She sat weighing the tape recorder in her hands, passing it from left to right. Would she fight the past or become its accomplice?

  She thought of Stevens. It’s either true, but you can’t prove it, or it’s a fantasy you have created. Ether way, it drives you mad.

  She sat, still now. This would drive her mad, she thought. This must have been how Stevens had felt about Yevgenia, about Katyn, knowing but not knowing. But she would not al
low it to obsess her; she would put it right out of her mind. Yevgenia had in the end wanted to believe that Xenia was Xan’s daughter. She wanted to repay the past. Why should Zita tamper with her wishes?

  If it’s true and you do nothing about it, you’re sharing in the crime. You’re an accomplice.

  She did not move. Stevens was right, after all. She could not live with not knowing, as she had so wisely counselled him. She would have to put that series of coincidences, dates, observations, to someone else, to begin a process of enquiry. There was only one person she could tell.

  She stood up at last and walked towards the phone in her study, glancing through the open bedroom door at Tom as she went.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1996 by Hodder and Stoughton

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

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  Copyright © Elizabeth Ironside, 1996

  The moral right of Elizabeth Ironside to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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