'I fell,' she said, gesturing at the staircase. 'The last two or three steps – tripped, fell to the ground and hurt my back. Doctor Thorne suggested I got a wheelchair to cut down on my walking. Walking makes it worse, you see.'
'Who's Doctor Thorne? What happened to Doctor Brotherton?'
'On holiday. Thorne's the locum. Was the locum.' She paused. 'Nice young man. He's gone now.'
She led us through to the kitchen. I looked for evidence of a bad back in her gait and posture but could see nothing.
'It does help, really,' she said, as if she could sense my growing bafflement, my scepticism. 'The wheelchair, you know, for pottering about. It's amazing how much time one spends on one's feet in a day.'
Jochen opened the fridge. 'What's for lunch, Granny?' he asked.
'Salad,' she said. 'Too hot to cook. Help yourself to a drink, darling.'
'I love salad,' Jochen said, reaching for a can of Coca-Cola. 'I like cold food best.'
'Good boy.' My mother drew me aside. 'I'm afraid he can't stay this afternoon. I can't manage with the wheelchair and whatnot.'
I concealed my disappointment and my selfish irritation – Saturday afternoons on my own, while Jochen spent half the day at Middle Ashton, had become precious to me. My mother walked to the window and shaded her eyes to peer out. Her kitchen/dining-room looked over her garden and her garden backed on to the meadow that was cut very haphazardly, sometimes with a gap of two or three years, and as a result was full of wild flowers and myriad types of grass and weed. And beyond the meadow was the wood, called Witch Wood for some forgotten reason – ancient woodland of oak, beech and chestnut, all the elms gone, or going, of course. There was something very odd happening here, I said to myself: something beyond my mother's usual whims and cultivated eccentricities. I went up to her and placed my hand reassuringly on her shoulder.
'Is everything all right, old thing?'
'Mmm. It was just a fall. A shock to the system, as they say. I should be fine again in a week or two.'
'There's nothing else, is there? You would tell me…'
She turned her handsome face on me and gave me her famous candid stare, the pale blue eyes wide – I knew it well. But I could face it out, now, these days, after everything I'd been through myself: I wasn't so cowed by it anymore.
'What else could it be, my darling? Senile dementia?'
All the same, she asked me to wheel her in her wheelchair through the village to the post office to buy a needless pint of milk and pick up a newspaper. She talked at some length about her bad back to Mrs Cumber, the postmistress, and made me stop on the return journey to converse over a drystone wall with Percy Fleet, the young local builder, and his long-term girlfriend (Melinda? Melissa?) as they waited for their barbecue to heat up – a brick edifice with a chimney set proudly on the paving in front of their new conservatory. They commiserated: a fall was the worst thing. Melinda recalled an old stroke-ridden uncle who'd been shaken up for weeks after he'd slipped in the bathroom.
'I want one of those, Percy,' my mother said, pointing at the conservatory, 'very fine.'
'Free estimates, Mrs Gilmartin.'
'How was your aunt? Did she enjoy herself?'
'My mother-in-law,' Percy corrected.
'Ah yes, of course. It was your mother-in-law.'
We said our goodbyes and I pushed her wearily on over the uneven surface of the lane, feeling a growing itch of anger at being asked to take part in this pantomime. She was always commenting on comings and goings too, as if she were checking on people, clocking them on and clocking them off like some obsessive foreman checking on his work-force – she'd done this as long as I could remember. I told myself to be calm: we would have lunch, I would take Jochen back to the flat, he could play in the garden, we could go for a walk in the University Parks…
'You mustn't be angry with me, Ruth,' she said, glancing back at me over her shoulder.
I stopped pushing and took out and lit a cigarette. 'I'm not angry.'
'Oh, yes you are. Just let me see how I cope. Perhaps next Saturday I'll be fine.'
When we came in Jochen said darkly, after a minute, 'You can get cancer from cigarettes, you know.' I snapped at him and we ate our lunch in a rather tense mood of long silences broken by bright banal observations about the village on my mother's part. She persuaded me to have a glass of wine and I began to relax. I helped her wash up and stood drying the dishes beside her as she rinsed the glasses in hot water. Water-daughter, daughter-water, sought her daughter in the water, I rhymed to myself, suddenly glad it was the weekend, with no teaching, no tutees and thinking it was maybe not such a bad thing to be spending some time alone with my son. Then my mother said something.
She was shading her eyes again, looking out at the wood.
'What?'
'Can you see someone? Is there someone in the wood?'
I peered. 'Not that I can spot. Why?'
'I thought I saw someone.'
'Ramblers, picnickers – it's Saturday, the sun is shining.'
'Oh, yes, that's right: the sun is shining and all is well with the world.'
She went to the dresser and picked up a pair of binoculars she kept there and turned to focus them on the wood.
I ignored her sarcasm and went to find Jochen and we prepared to leave. My mother took her seat in her wheelchair and pointedly wheeled it to the front door. Jochen told the story of the encounter with the driver of the brewer's lorry and my unashamed use of the F-word. My mother cupped his face with her hands and smiled at him, adoringly.
'Your mother can get very angry when she wants to and no doubt that man was very stupid,' she said. 'Your mother is a very angry young woman.'
'Thank you for that, Sal,' I said and bent to kiss her forehead. 'I'll call this evening.'
'Would you do me a little favour?' she said and then asked me if, when I telephoned in future, I would let the phone ring twice, then hang up and ring again. 'That way I'll know it's you,' she explained. 'I'm not so fast about the house in the chair.'
Now, for the first time I felt a real small pang of worry: this request did seem to be the sign of some initial form of derangement or delusion – but she caught the look in my eye.
'I know what you're thinking, Ruth,' she said. 'But you're quite wrong, quite wrong.' She stood up out of her chair, tall and rigid. 'Wait a second,' she said and went upstairs.
'Have you made Granny cross again?' Jochen said, in a low voice, accusingly.
'No.'
My mother came down the stairs – effortlessly, it seemed to me – carrying a thick buff folder under her arm. She held it out for me.
'I'd like you to read this,' she said.
I took it from her. There seemed to be some dozens of pages – different types, different sizes of paper. I opened it. There was a title page:
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya.
'Eva Delectorskaya,' I said, mystified. 'Who's that?'
'Me,' she said. 'I am Eva Delectorskaya.'
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya
Paris , 1939
EVAN DELECTORSKAYA FIRST SAW the man at her brother Kolia's funeral. In the cemetery he stood some way apart from the other mourners. He was wearing a hat – an old brown trilby – which struck her as odd and she seized on that detail and allowed it to nag at her: what sort of man wore a brown trilby to a funeral? What sign of respect was that? And she used it as a way of keeping her vast angry grief almost at bay: it kept her from being overwhelmed.
But back at the apartment, before the other mourners arrived, her father began to sob and Eva found she could not keep the tears back either. Her father was holding a framed photograph of Kolia in both hands, gripping it fiercely, as if it were a rectangular steering wheel. Eva put her hand on his shoulder and with her other quickly spread the tears off her cheeks. She could think of nothing to say to him. Then Irene, her stepmother, came in with a chinking tray holding a carafe of brandy and a collection of tiny glasses, no bigger than thimbles. She set it down and went back to the kitchen to fetch a plate of sugared almonds. Eva crouched in front of her father, offering him a glass.
'Papa,' she wailed at him, unable to control her voice, 'have a little sip – look, look, I'm having one.' She drank a small mouthful of the brandy and felt her lips sting.
She heard his fat tears hit the glass of the picture. He looked up at her and with one arm pulled her to him and kissed her forehead.
He whispered: 'He was only twenty-four… Twenty-four?…' It was as if Kolia's age was literally incredible, as if someone had said to him, 'Your son disappeared into thin air,' or 'your son grew wings and flew away'.
Irene came over and took the frame from him gently, gently prising his fingers away.
'Mange, Sergei,'
she said to him,
'bois
–
il faut boire.'
She propped the frame on a nearby table and started to fill the little glasses on the tray. Eva held out the plate of sugared almonds to her father and he took a few, carelessly, letting some tumble to the floor. They sipped their brandy and nibbled at the nuts and talked of banalities: how they were glad the day was overcast and windless, how sunshine would have been inappropriate, how it was good of old Monsieur Dieudonné to have come all the way from Neuilly and how meagre and tasteless the dried flowers from the Lussipovs had been. Dried flowers, really! Eva kept glancing over at the picture of Kolia, smiling in his grey suit, as if he were listening to the chatter, amused, a teasing look in his eye, until she felt the incomprehension of his loss, the affront of his absence, rear up like a tidal wave and she looked away. Luckily the doorbell rang and Irene rose to her feet to welcome the first of the guests. Eva sat on with her father, hearing the muffled tones of discreet conversation as coats and hats were removed, even a stifled burst of laughter, signalling that curious mixture of condolence and exuberant relief that rises up, impromptu, in people after a funeral.
Hearing the laughter Eva's father looked at her; he sniffed and shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, helplessly, like a man who has forgotten the answer to the simplest of questions, and she saw how old he was all of a sudden.
'Just you and me, Eva,' he said, and she knew he was thinking of his first wife, Maria – his Masha, her mother – and her death all those years ago on the other side of the world. Eva had been fourteen, Kolia ten, and the three of them had stood hand in hand in the foreigners' graveyard in Tientsin, the air full of windblown blossom, shredded petals from the giant white wisteria growing on the cemetery wall – like snowflakes, like fat soft confetti. 'Just the three of us, now,' he had said then, as they stood beside their mother's grave, squeezing their hands very hard.
'Who was the man in the brown trilby?' Eva asked, remembering and wanting to change the subject.
'What man in the brown trilby?' said her father.
Then the Lussipovs edged cautiously into the room, smiling vaguely, and with them her plump cousin Tania with her new little husband, and the perplexing question of the man in the brown trilby was momentarily forgotten.
But she saw him again, three days later on the Monday – the first day she'd gone back to work – as she left the office to go to lunch. He was standing under the awning of the
épicerie
opposite, wearing a long tweed overcoat – dark green – and his incongruous trilby. He met her glance, nodded and smiled and crossed the road to greet her, removing his hat as he approached.
He spoke in excellent, accentless French: 'Mademoiselle Delectorskaya, my sincere condolences about your brother. My apologies for not speaking to you at the funeral but it did not seem appropriate – especially as Kolia had never introduced us.'
'I hadn't realised you knew Kolia.' This fact had already thrown her: her mind was clattering, panicked slightly – this made no sense.
'Oh, yes. Not friends, exactly, but we were firm acquaintances, shall we say?' He gave a little bow of his head and continued, this time in flawless, accented English. 'Forgive me, my name is Lucas Romer.'
The accent was upper class, patrician, but Eva thought, immediately, that this Mr Lucas Romer did not look particularly English at all. He had wavy black hair, thinning at the front and swept back and was virtually – she searched for the English word – swarthy, with dense eyebrows, uncurved, like two black horizontal dashes beneath his high forehead and above his eyes – which were a muddy bluey grey (she always noticed the colour of people's eyes). His jaw, even though freshly shaved, was solidly metallic with incipient stubble.
He sensed her studying him and reflexively ran the palm of his hand across his thinning hair. 'Kolia never spoke to you about me?' he asked.
'No,' Eva said, speaking English herself now. 'No, he never mentioned a "Lucas Romer" to me.'
He smiled, for some reason, at this information, showing very white, even teeth.
'Very good,' he said, thoughtfully, nodding to show his pleasure and then added, 'it
is
my real name by the way.'
'It never crossed my mind that it wasn't,' Eva said, offering her hand. 'It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Romer. If you'll excuse me I have only half an hour for my lunch.'
'No. You have two hours. I told Monsieur Frellon that I would be taking you to a restaurant.'
Monsieur Frellon was her boss. He was obsessive about employee punctuality.
'Why would Monsieur Frellon permit that?'
'Because he thinks I'm going to charter four steamships from him and, as I don't speak a word of French, I need to sort the details out with his translator.' He turned and pointed with his hat. 'There's a little place I know on the rue du Cherche Midi. Excellent seafood. Do you like oysters?'