Christopher Jones - The Silent Oligarch

He had discharged his driver, and to stretch his back after the morning’s flight was walking across Hyde Park, happy that August and Monaco were behind him. His last four days there had been uncomfortable: he had been tetchy, Oksana sullen. He wanted to tell her what was troubling him but knew he couldn’t; she had taken his nervousness to mean that he didn’t trust her. Monaco, hot and threatening thunder, had tightened around him, and trips to Cannes and up into the hills around Grasse had failed to give release. The storms never came. He had felt relief when Oksana had boarded her flight, and no doubt she had too. Ten days were simply too many to spend in Monaco—perhaps too many, he thought, to spend with me.

The park was green, vivid, old, full of tourists. It was five o’clock but the sun was still high and Lock, in his shirtsleeves, his jacket over his shoulder, walked at an idling pace past the Reformers Tree and the Old Police House, across the Serpentine Bridge and toward Kensington Palace. He was aware of loving London for reasons that he imperfectly understood, something to do with its confidence: London never pretended to be something it was not.

He had never walked to her flat before. He continued to go slowly, eager and hesitant at once. He wondered which Marina would be there to greet him: the romantic whose broken hopes she still struggled to conceal or the cool rationalist who had understood long before him that they needed to be broken. It was this crisis in her that he loved, and it was this that made him dread seeing her: in her company he felt like either a heel or a quisling.

They had met in Moscow, early in Lock’s time there. She was a lawyer—she worked in Moscow City Hall, selling off state property to private developers—and Malin’s goddaughter. It was he that introduced them, inviting them to a small dinner at his dacha, where he made a big show of playing matchmaker, embarrassing them both. There were moments later when Lock would wonder if this had all been part of his grand plan.

For over six months Lock had been living the expatriate life in a city that absorbed him completely, and now he found himself in the Russian countryside for the first time. It was spring, and the low sun picked out the bright new leaves of the alders and silver birch. He first saw Marina as she walked with Yekaterina Malin in a grove of apple trees, and he thought immediately that even in this place she seemed to glow more intensely than the world around her. She was slight and fair-haired, with clear, white skin and a small nose, a little upturned. Her eyes were green, even and light, like peridots.

That night they talked about Russia. Lock had never been invited to a Russian’s home before, and it was made clear to him that this was an honor only granted to a few. Russians, he was told, were by nature an open and friendly people but their recent history—perhaps all their history—had caused them to reserve friendship for longer than they might like. Lock had suggested that perhaps now, for the first time truly democratic, Russia could look forward to a warming of its relationships, at a diplomatic and a personal level. One of the other guests, a doctor and an old friend of Yekaterina, thanked Lock for his eloquent words but feared that it would take more to repair this broken nation, ravaged for centuries by the cruelty of the leaders it craved and probably deserved. Marina bridled at this: she objected to the notion that Russians loved to suffer; and she saw now the opportunity for a real people’s revolution that would allow Russia to achieve at last the greatness that had always been its destiny. As she talked, her cheeks flushed red. Marina in argument captivated Lock, and he watched rapt as she made her case with passion, not caring, it seemed, that she was in the company of her elders. Malin, less forbidding then, had seemed to enjoy every moment, cheerfully goading on both sides.

Still dwelling on the past he arrived at her flat. It was on Holland Park, the road, and looked out onto the park itself. Lock remembered Vika telling him delightedly that she lived on Holland Park, in Holland Park, next to Holland Park. That too was London, ignoring any obligation to make sense. He stood outside the gate for a moment and looked up at the building: white stucco, double-fronted, huge but discreet about it. He breathed deeply, walked up the path and rang the bell.

He saw from the name card next to it that she was still Marina Lock. She had kept his name when she left him, and he still, despite attempts to be disciplined, found in this some small, unrealistic hope of reconciliation. In the rare moments when he honestly reviewed his life he knew, with a certainty he was generally denied, that Marina was too good for him—not perhaps for the man he had once been but certainly for the one he had become. This knowledge pained him, partly for her sake but mainly because it shook the delicate fiction on which his remaining self-esteem rested. He might sometimes succeed in forgetting who he had once been but Marina was always there to help him remember.

Her voice came over the intercom. “Hello?” Each time he heard it now it was a little less Russian.

“It’s Richard.”

“Come up.”

The two long flights of stairs left him out of breath. Vika was waiting for him on the landing, and ran to him as he climbed the last steps.

“Papa!”

He stooped to hug her but felt a short stabbing in his back and knelt down instead. His head rested on her shoulder. It was a long time, he realized, since he had hugged anyone.

Marina was in the door, smiling, less guarded than she would once have been. He stood up and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Come in,” she said. “You look well. Where have you been?”

“Monaco, for a week or so. It was hot.” A pause. He wouldn’t mention Oksana and Marina wouldn’t ask. And he wasn’t at all sure that he did look well.

“Come into the kitchen. I’m making Vika her tea.”

Lock ruffled the girl’s hair. She was fair, like her mother, but had his straight nose and his blue eyes. “And what are you having for tea, rabbit?”

“Daddy, I’m not a rabbit. I’m eight years old. And I’m having fish fingers.”

“Such an English girl these days.” Vika walked into the flat and he followed.

For an hour Lock sat at the kitchen table and talked with his wife and his daughter. Vika was shy with him, but relaxed as he quizzed her about school and England and her holidays. She and Marina looked deeply healthy. They had been to Cape Kolka in Latvia with Marina’s parents for three weeks. They had walked, and swum, and gathered berries. Vika had seen a buzzard. Marina had claimed to have seen an eagle, but Vika didn’t believe her. Lock remembered sitting in hunting blinds with his father-in-law; it had never really suited him.

“Daddy, when can you come on holiday with us?”

“Well,” said Lock, “perhaps you and I could go to Holland and see Opa. We could go at half-term.”

“Can you come too, Mummy?”

“We’ll see.”

They discussed Vika’s friends, and Marina’s parents, and Christmas arrangements. Lock would be in London for Christmas, he hoped. Marina cooked and tidied; Lock and Vika sat at the table. After her tea, Vika went to get ready for bed.

“Might you come again?” said Marina.

“I could. I have endless meetings with the lawyers. I may be here at the weekend as well. One night later in the week?”

“Don’t disappoint her, Richard. It’s getting harder to explain why you never see us.”

“I won’t.”

“Let’s set a day.”

“I can’t until I’ve seen the lawyer. I’ll know tomorrow.”

“All right. You’ll call?”

“I’ll call.”

Marina looked at him steadily and said, “How are you?”