Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Zoya no longer translates for Lucas, though she still drives them occasionally, when the mood takes her, when she’s not working on her own stories or poking at the margins of Mykola Sirko’s business affairs, trying to find a weak link or a disgruntled official who might slip her a lead. At night Zoya stays with Elena in the flat on the second floor and Rachel rarely sees the old caretaker any more. Indeed, Rachel has concluded that Elena is avoiding her. The thought troubles her as she does her laundry in the basement by herself, though she doesn’t go looking for Elena. No more Simplemente Maria , no more biscuits or extravagantly mimed enquiries about whether Ivan is eating properly or sleeping well. Of course she would ask Elena in if she came knocking on the door, but Elena doesn’t.

Lucas notices a change in his wife. When he brings up the subject of what they will do when they go back to London she doesn’t give him the cold shoulder, but talks of playgroups and getting in touch with a couple of estate agents. He can barely recall the girl he once knew, or what he once saw within her – something hidden that stirred him and made him wonder. Motherhood has changed her, he decides. She seems more practical now that the difficult post-birth months are over. She tries new recipes – cooks proper meals rather than chewy pasta added to whatever she can find at the market. She visits Suzie to drink coffee and hear the latest about the house along the lane in Tsarskoye Selo, including how Rob wants to buy it outright from Elena before the refurbishment is complete.

At the end of July Lucas suggests they fly down to Yalta for a weekend. To the seaside, as he puts it – their first holiday as a family. It is easy to arrange. They stay in a sanatorium built for communist party chiefs. Beneath the modernist chandeliers white-uniformed staff trained in balneotherapy and calisthenics feed Ivan soupy kasha flavoured with cherries and guide his limbs into geometrical shapes. The sea reminds Lucas of Brighton, while the tunnel down to the beach is like a set-piece from Dr No. One night he and Rachel make love on the unforgiving mattress of the big walnut bed and it occurs to him that if his wife keeps her eyes closed it must be because she is taking pleasure for herself. He can give her that, he thinks. They can work on that. He pushes Vee out of his mind – it isn’t hard, now that she’s been offered a job in DC and has flown over to meet her new boss. Despite his set-backs, he feels lighter, more optimistic. He has applied for a job in Alma-Ata. Another starter post, but this one comes with a house and the prospect of some TV work at last. He won’t tell Rachel just yet. The interview is at Bush House on the fifth of September. They’ll leave for London three days before.

When Lucas takes Ivan and wades into the Black Sea Rachel picks up a pebble, smooth and grey: a souvenir for their son of a place he will never remember.

‘Take a photograph!’ Lucas shouts, exultant, as he dips Ivan’s legs into the lapping waves.

Rachel clicks the shutter on her little Instamatic. She won’t tell her husband that she has already blessed their son’s feet in the stream at Zoya’s grandfather’s hut. She lets the foam splash over her bare toes and scrunches them into the shingle.

Back at the apartment block on Staronavodnitksa Street, Elena steps out of the lift. The doors clank shut behind her as she shuffles across the thirteenth floor landing, one hand gripping a brown Jiffy envelope, the other hand fumbling in her pocket. Her joints are stiff this evening. Her fingers won’t respond as they should, but she manages to grasp the key Lucas gave her and push it into the lock.

As the door swings open, she pauses, catching her breath. No one is at home. Light from the living room window floods the hallway and she feels its warmth on her face. She should have made this journey before, but she couldn’t face the young mother, Rachel. She couldn’t face her own shame.

She slips off her shoes before making her way to the bedroom. The curtains are drawn; there is no air in the flat, but she won’t stay for long. As she bends down, wincing, and rolls the drawer out from beneath the bed, a light brown cockroach flees beneath the wardrobe. The padded envelope looks odd amongst the nappies. It can’t be helped. The drawer is the only place where that husband of Rachel’s won’t rummage.

As Elena leaves the flat, closing the door firmly behind her, a shadow passes in front of the window by the rubbish chute and blocks out the light. She peers, and flinches. A man stands in front of her. She knows this man, or thinks she does. This is the gangster who drives the silver car, the man who has threatened her, the man she would have stabbed if she could on the way back from Zoya’s hut.

‘ Zdravstvuy, Mama.’

Sacred, dreadful words. Finally, everything she has hidden, everything she has buried is laid bare.

‘Oleksandr?’

Her heart is absorbing every atom of her son. She lost him forty years ago, and now he is here. He has been here all along.

Her shoulders drop. She breathes out. She waits.

When Rachel was ten, her parents took her to Poppit Sands, at the mouth of the Teifi Estuary. Not for a holiday or anything – just a picnic and a swim. Her mother packed Shippam’s beef paste sandwiches and a thermos of tea, both of which she stowed in a string bag along with Rachel’s vest and knickers rolled up in an old bath towel. Rachel’s father drove; it wasn’t sunny, exactly, but watery shafts of light pointed down towards the bay like God’s fingers and the beach swept round in a picture postcard curve, so that was all right.

The nearer you got to the water, the greyer it became. Rachel faced the sand dunes and inched in to the sea backwards. The wind whipped up the spray and she screamed when a wave crashed without warning across her shoulders. She could see her mother, sitting on Rachel’s coat, watching her, lips pursed against the salt. Her father was busy in the hollows behind. She could only make out his top half, but she knew he was wriggling into his trunks in that special way beneath the towel.

Rachel’s father dived clumsily through the surf. He wanted to teach her backstroke, but his touch was unfamiliar and she didn’t like the way the waves broke over her face, so after a few minutes he left her to jump through the waves on her own. The water lifted her, pounded her, pushed her off her feet. She stayed in the sea for longer than was good for her. Her legs became numb. Her fingers turned blue. At lunchtime she ate her sandwich with chattering teeth.

Later, while her mother thumbed through her copy of Good Housekeeping and batted away the sandhoppers, Rachel followed her father up into the dunes. He hadn’t changed out of his swimming trunks and he wore an aertex shirt that barely covered his thin haunches. His collar flopped open and his wet hair flopped down, which made him look different, like someone else’s dad. He seemed different, too. He pointed and named things, he squatted and peered. She tried not to think about the bald patches on the bulge of his white calves and instead placed her feet in the hollows and landslides left by his salt-marked sandals.

Then, in a muffled incline, downwind of the beach, Rachel’s father turned and said, ‘Let’s make a fire.’ When he stooped to pick up a curved rib of driftwood and produced a box of matches from his breast pocket, she felt a tingle low down in her stomach. The smoke made her cough, the crackle of the dried marram grass made her jump but soon she was running about, searching for anything that would burn and feed the flames.

When Rachel’s mother discovered them she put an end to the nascent conspiracy. Rachel was marched to a public toilet to shake the sand out of her knickers while her father kicked over the embers and jangled his keys. In the car park her feet were checked for tar. They didn’t stop for ice creams; the traffic into Cardigan was already building.