Mary Nichols - The Kirilov Star

Lydia was tired but content when they returned to Upstone Hall about six o’clock. Her bad dream, though not forgotten, had been pushed to the back of her mind.

The church was packed for the wedding when Lydia and Tatty arrived, Tatty in lilac silk and a tiara of real rosebuds, Lydia in a petrol-blue dress with full sleeves and a floating panel. A picture hat with a white full-blown rose on the front of the brim served to shade eyes which sometimes betrayed too much of what she was thinking and feeling. Bobby was already there, acting as usher and showing people to their places. Lydia made her way into the church, leaving Tatty to wait in the porch for Robert and Claudia in the bridal car. Outside the bells rang joyfully and inside the organist played softly.

The congregation turned as the bride entered and came slowly down the aisle on Robert’s arm. Age meant nothing; she was radiant and the smile her bridegroom gave her was evidence of his devotion. They joined hands and turned to face the Reverend Mr Harrington.

‘Dearly beloved…’ he began.

Lydia, listening to the moving ceremony, prayed that Claudia would be happy married to her Reginald, that whatever highs and lows they had would be minor ones, easily overcome.

It was a wish echoed by Robert in his speech at the reception. Reggie’s reply had been carefully prepared and, though he made one or two attempts at a joke, it was on the whole a serious speech in keeping with his character. ‘He’s too stiff,’ Robert whispered to Lydia. ‘You’d think all that wine would have relaxed him.’

‘He’s nervous,’ she whispered back. ‘And at least he’s sincere.’

Everyone was clapping and they joined in. After the last of the speeches, there was dancing for everyone. When the bride and groom set off on their honeymoon in Scotland, the older guests said their goodbyes and left the younger generation to go on celebrating in their own noisy fashion.

‘Not like our wedding, was it?’ Robert said, when they were alone once more, surrounded by the debris. It was gone midnight.

‘It was wartime.’

‘Yes, but I meant we didn’t have a bean, or at least, I didn’t…’

‘Neither did I. I had a job, same as you. And it wasn’t our fault if the war kept us apart.’

‘It wasn’t only the war that did that,’ he said quietly. ‘There was never just the two of us, was there? There was always a third person standing between us.’

She was shocked and turned to face him. ‘Oh, Robert, I’m so sorry. I tried, I really tried.’

‘I know you did and that made it even harder to bear.’

‘Is that why you re-enlisted?’

‘One of the reasons. The other was that the sea is in my blood and Upstone is landlocked. I couldn’t bear not to be able to see it. And you wouldn’t leave Sir Edward and move to the coast. And now the place is yours.’

‘We’ve messed up really badly, haven’t we?’ she said after several moments of silent contemplation.

‘No, not really badly. We’ve been content in our way and we’ve got two wonderful children.’

‘But it’s not enough. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It always has been.’

‘What an indictment of a marriage! What do you want to do about it?’ Her breathing was ragged as she waited for his answer.

‘Nothing. Anything else would break the children’s hearts and I couldn’t do that.’

‘Nor I.’

They were silent. Lydia’s head was spinning. Why had he brought the subject of their marriage up like that, especially as he seemed not to want to do anything about it? Was he telling her he knew about Alex being alive and living not twenty miles away? Or was he preparing her for his own announcement?

‘I’ll leave the clearing up until the morning,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m too tired to tackle it tonight.’

She was in their bedroom in the middle of taking off her finery when he joined her. ‘Let’s forget I spoke,’ he said, hanging his grey silk tie over the mirror and unbuttoning his shirt. ‘It was out of order. Seeing Claudia married and too much champagne made me maudlin.’

She did not answer.

Tatty was in the loft, searching for a suitcase to convey her belongings to Girton. It was a nostalgic trip. Toys, tennis rackets, dolls with arms and eyes missing, a doll’s house, an inflatable boat they had used on the lake until it sprung a leak. She remembered how she and Bob had been tipped into the water, but it was summer and they were wearing bathing costumes and could swim like fish, so they had towed it back to the shore. Fancy her mother keeping that! It was cracked and rotten. There were a couple of tents too, some old armchairs and a large cracked mirror. She went and stood in front of it and smiled at her distorted reflection. Was that how the past appeared to her mother: cracked and distorted? How many of her mother’s memories were clear? Had age distorted them as the mirror distorted all it reflected?

She bent down and lifted the lid of a tin trunk and then she was in another world. It was filled with things her mother had saved from their childhood. Baby clothes, some blue, some pink, some pale lemon and cream. Tiny little four-inch shoes with soft soles, mittens for tiny hands, little embroidered pillowcases, exquisite shawls, carefully knitted and crocheted, all lovingly wrapped in tissue and cotton. She took them out gently and held them up one at a time. Had Mum meant to pass them on? For a moment, she held one of the shawls against her cheek and felt its softness and felt her mother’s love for her and her brother which, in all the years, had never wavered.

Slowly she wrapped everything up again and laid it lovingly back in the trunk. As she began to close the lid she saw the lining was bulging and pulled it down. Out fell a large brown envelope. She sat on the floor and emptied it into her lap. It was a treasure trove. A pile of unopened letters fell out, all addressed in her mother’s neat handwriting to Yuri Nikolayevich Nahmov at an address she could not read. The envelopes were covered in Russian scrawl which she assumed said something like ‘return to sender’. The Russian date stamp on them covered a period from April to August 1961, only two years before. Yuri would have been twenty-two, she calculated, just coming into his stride as an adult. Had he sent them back himself or some unknown official?

‘Oh, Mum, how that must have broken your heart,’ she murmured, as tears filled her eyes. She could imagine her mother’s misery and disappointment at getting the letters back and her reluctance to destroy them, but at the same time she had not wanted to upset anyone else in the family and had hidden them away.

She set the letters aside, unwilling to open any of them, and turned to the rest of the contents, a few badly focused snapshots and some scraps of paper, one a certificate of Yuri’s birth and the other a certificate recording the union of Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov and Lydia Stoneleigh, stamped by someone in Moscow. There was also an official-looking letter in Russian on which her mother had written: ‘Notification that Kolya is dead and I am a widow.’

She picked up the first of the snapshots. Her mother, looking incredibly young, was hanging on the arm of a young man, smiling into the camera. So this was Kolya. She studied his features. He was young too, not tall, but slightly taller than his bride and round-faced, looking very pleased with himself. How had he died? Had her mother mourned his death? There was so much she did not know. Another picture was of three adults, Kolya, Lydia and another woman, curvaceous and slightly older than Lydia. Kolya had an arm about each of them. There was another of her mother nursing a baby, wrapped in a shawl. This, she had no doubt, was her half-brother. It was difficult to tell his colouring in a black and white photograph, but he appeared dark-haired. He was asleep so she couldn’t see his eyes. The next was an old sepia picture of an aristocratic lady in a long evening dress. She was wearing a heavy necklace and long earrings and on her head a tiara on the front of which sparkled the Kirilov Star. And another of her mother with a handsome young man. Her mother was wearing a lovely evening dress and looking young and starry-eyed and she was wearing the Star as a necklace. Judging by other photographs she had seen, the man was Alex Peters. It must have been taken before her parents met and married. Why had this one been hidden away? Had her mother loved Alex? How had she felt when he died? What had Dad made of it? How much of it did he know? How much did anyone really know about other people? All had their secrets, even her most open and above-board mother.