The Accomplice Read online

  “But never mind that. I have been English for almost fifty years now. The bit before was a mistake, a false start. I deliberately put it behind me a long time ago. Read now; read the letter.”

  Zita had opened the paper and read,

  Respected Yevgenia Konstantinovna,

  I hope you will forgive this approach from an unknown member of your family who wishes to re-establish links that have been broken for so long. I am Xenia Alexandrovna Chornoroukaya, your cousin. I am twenty-one years of age and a student in the Faculty of Languages at Moscow State University. My parents are both dead and as I never knew my grandparents I am not very well acquainted with my family history. It is a sad thing that in the past in Russia so many families have been broken up and have not been able to maintain contact with one another. It has been particularly true of families like ours, split between the emigration and our homeland, where our name alone has been a disadvantage to us. All this is to explain to you that I do not know how we are connected. What I do know is that we must be of the same family, for the accusation of being a Chornorouky was one that followed my father all his life. About myself I can tell you. I was born in Siberia in 1971 in a small town called Novoleninsk where my father was teacher of languages at the Technical High School. My father died in 1989 and in that year I came to Moscow State University where I study English. Here she abandoned Russian. Now I write in English, so that you may see that I already know English and that what I am about to ask is not an unreasonable request. I would like to come to England. I can work.

  I will work at anything. I shall clean, or teach or look after children. This would be for the summer vacation. I have some money and the possibility of obtaining a ticket. However, I am told that for my visa I must have an invitation from someone in England. As I know no one there, when I discovered this I was in despair, as I could think of no possibility. Then, one day, I visited the Club of the Nobility in Moscow and there someone told me of you and gave me your address in England. She returned to Russian here, as if to the natural language of emotion. I was overjoyed, as I suddenly saw it was fated that I should go to England after all I write this, dear Yevgenia Konstantinovna, to implore you to help a cousin and to invite me to your country.

  The letter had finished with very business-like instructions about the phrasing of the invitation in order to make it acceptable to the bureaucrats, Russian and British, issuing passports and visas.

  Zita had folded up the sheets and looked at the disturbed face of her friend. “Well, what are you going to do? Is there any reason why you shouldn’t write a letter of invitation for her?”

  “She is an impostor. There are no Chornoroukys left in Russia or elsewhere. You can tell she is not a real Chornorouky: she has no idea who her father or her grandfather were. She has no idea about the family at all. It is inconceivable that a child should be born with the name and not grow up knowing about its ancestry. That is the essential thing about old families: estates and titles and possessions don’t really matter; even great deeds in the past do not matter beside the vital question of birth which carries you back to the Chornorouky, Slav princes before the conversion.”

  She had looked a little embarrassed at her own vehemence, and laughed. “Does it sound strange to hear me say that here in England at the end of the twentieth century? Of course, it does. I’ve abandoned such ideas myself. I’m just telling you how it was.”

  “Did you tell Marcus about this when he was a child?”

  “No,” tetchily, as if Zita had not understood what she had been saying. “Of course not. In the first place, Marcus was not my son. He had no blood link with me or with Russia. It had no relevance to him. And in any case when I came to England, I put all that behind me. I wanted to become an Englishwoman, safe, with no family and no past.”

  “Perhaps Xenia’s father, too, wanted to shed his history. He had even more reason than you to conceal it. It’s not really surprising the girl knows nothing about her family.”

  Resistance had appeared on the old woman’s face. “No, no,” she said again. “You don’t understand these things in England now. There are no Chornoroukys left. This girl knows nothing. It’s a sign that she is not of the family. I know every Chornorouky of my generation, in my mother’s, in my grandfather’s. They are all dead. It is my mother’s family we are talking of, by the way. I wasn’t even born a Chornorouky, yet I know every branch.”

  “Well,” Zita had said soothingly. “It’s easy then. She can’t be a member of the family. She just has the same name as you. I know that serfs, when they were liberated and moved to the cities, used to take their former master’s name, or the name of the estate on which they were bom. Perhaps that is how she came to have the name.”

  Jean had remained silent, unplacated by this historical exegesis. Zita had tried a different tack. “In which case,” she went on, “the question really is, do you want to help an unknown Russian student of English to come to Britain for her summer holidays? It looks,” she consulted the end of the letter, “as if you have to sponsor her in a sense, but she could get a job as a waitress or au pair or something.”

  “But why should I? Why should she reach out of the past and demand services from me? There are hundreds, thousands, millions of young Russians who want to come to the West. I can’t write invitations for them all.”

  “Don’t. Forget it. Forget the letter. There is no need to let it upset you, Jean. Just put it aside, leave it. Don’t even answer it.” Zita could see no reason why such an invitation should not be made. The girl had shown plenty of enterprise in her attempt to visit the West; Jean’s insistence on her not being a relative seemed beside the point. Zita had been finally cornered into saying not what she thought, but what Jean wanted to hear and the tension in the room relaxed.

  “I must get back to the office,” she had said. “Really, Jean, don’t let it worry you.” She had stood up and put the envelope on the little table, as if to signify that it was not necessary to hand it back to Jean to deal with it. “How did she find out about you in the first place?” She had asked suddenly. “No one here knows that you were once Yevgenia Konstantinovna Chornoroukaya. How did she?”

  “I was not born a Chornoroukaya. My name was von Korff. It was my mother who was a Chornoroukaya.”

  Zita had waited to see whether Jean was going to answer her question. At last, the reply had come, reluctantly. “I read in The Times a while ago, after the coup last year, that a Club of the Nobility had been established in Moscow. It isn’t really a charitable organization; it is a truly self-referring aristocratic one. However, since I had its address from the paper, I sent some parcels of clothes, asking the Club to distribute them to anyone in need. And I wrote a letter. I happened to ask if any Chornoroukys were registered with them. I didn’t know where else to start. They don’t even have a phone book in Moscow, you know; citizens cannot cope with so much information. No proper street maps either, only ones that are deliberately falsified. What a society.”

  “So you did think there might be some members of your family still in Russia?”

  “No, no, not at all. I knew there could not be. I just asked. To hear them say no. To hear them say that a family that was first recorded in the barbarism of the ninth century was wiped out in the civilization of the twentieth.”

  Now, seven months later the old woman’s voice was plaintive. “I should have listened to you, Zita, and forgotten about the letter. Instead, I told Naomi and you can imagine what happened next: she simply took everything over.”

  Zita felt ashamed. She remembered very well how she had been manoeuvred into advising Jean to do nothing. And Naomi, seeing that Jean was reluctant to act, had decided to do so herself. Jean’s own unwillingness to involve herself with a stranger had been no reason for Naomi to fail in an act of kindness that had not even occurred to her, Zita.

  “I regretted it as soon as I had done it.” Jean’s voice was stronger now, no longer victimized. “But at first I thought, if they
want to do it, let them. I shan’t have to see her. Now they want me to have her for a month when Lucia is away and they are bringing her down for lunch on Sunday for me to meet her.”

  “Is it really such a bad idea?” Zita asked. “If you don’t like her, you can tell Naomi it’s not on. But it seems quite a sensible plan to me. And a kindness on Naomi’s part to want to help her.”

  Jean appeared to consider this idea as if it were original and striking. “Kindness? Yes, in effect, it may be a kindness, though that is not why she has done it. She invited her because she likes to interfere. She is interested in people and the ways in which they like and dislike one another – that’s why she has that curious profession of hers. In short, she is interested in power. And, though she would die rather than admit it, she is fascinated by aristocrats. There is something about inherited title and birth which, she thinks, is palpable in their possessors.”

  Jean had never before shown her powers of dispassionate analysis of the people who surrounded her. Zita wondered how she was assessed. “Is that what you think, as an aristocrat?”

  “Certainly not. I abandoned all that a long time ago.”

  “So Naomi thinks Xenia really is a Chornoroukaya?”

  “Yes, though I have told her she is not. She cannot be. There are none of us left.”

  This statement was the end of Jean’s complaints about both the Russian girl and her daughter-in-law. She said as Zita left, “You must come on Sunday and meet the Russian. Who knows, her English may be so poor that we shall need you to speak to her.”

  5

  Only after Zita had said goodbye to Lynne and was engaged in putting Tom to bed did she realize that she had not told Jean about the skull. The memory came sharply at the moment when she bent to kiss Tom, neatly tucked into his cot, his arms by his sides. On school days the physical efforts he was put through always tired him out and he went gladly to bed. It was an instant of pleasure that Zita and Lynne competed for. Zita was usually able to insist on it as her privilege and Lynne only took the task over if Zita was late, in order to inflict on her employer a penalty that she would feel. The sight of his hair slicked down from his shower, moulding his skull, his little bony face breaking the surface whiteness of the sheet and pillows, jolted her memory. She had been distracted from her task of telling Jean about the skeleton by the Russian girl. She would phone at once. And then decided not to. She would call Naomi instead, to tell her that Jean did not yet know and to wait until tomorrow, when more definite news of what the builders had found might emerge. There was no point in worrying Jean if tomorrow they were to be told that it was a two-hundred-year-old grave that had been opened.

  Later, when she had turned on the night light and half-closed the bedroom door, she went into the kitchen to make herself something to eat and found a note on the table in Lynne’s large, illiterate hand. Youre Mum Rang. Phoning Valentina, who had arrived in Oxford four days ago, seemed even more daunting than phoning Jean to tell her there was a grave in her garden. She ignored the duty implied by the note; yet she could not refuse to answer the phone when it rang.

  Valentina’s voice was forceful, faintly Americanized by her years in the States. She wasted no time on asking about her daughter’s or grandson’s health, attacking her purpose straightaway.

  “The flat I hired is impossible. I had forgotten, Zita, about English houses and Oxford houses in particular. It has an Ascot boiler. Can you believe it? You might as well be in the Third World. And the carpet, full of damp and dog hair. I shall have to move out.”

  Zita made sympathetic murmurs about the difficulty of finding another flat.

  “No, that is not a problem. I rang everyone I could think of this morning and they have found me somewhere in a new building belonging to one of the colleges, I forget which one. After all, I am here to give their lectures; there’s no reason why they shouldn’t find me a flat. No, all that is perfectly OK. I visited it this afternoon. It’s small, but light and modern. Altogether much better. No Ascot boilers. No, the problem is this. It’s not available until next week and I certainly cannot remain here another day. So I thought I would come to stay with you. I should have to come some time and it may as well be now. So I shall arrive tomorrow. After lunch.”

  Zita could only express delight and welcome, give directions about how to find the house and how to obtain a key from Jean, as Lynne and Tom would be at the Centre until mid-afternoon. She replaced the receiver with a sense of dread. Valentina had not seen Tom since his christening, which had taken place on the last weekend before her departure for America. Zita and Oliver had still been married, just, and Oliver had insisted on a christening as something babies in his family always had. Valentina had attended with the air of a Victorian lady explorer and ethnologist, participating in an unusually obscure and interesting native ritual. How was she going to cope with Lynne and Tom now?

  Zita’s admiration for her mother was unbounded, to the extent that she recognized it as one of the problems of her existence: a problem that had been resolved not so much by her escaping from her mother, as her mother leaving her. It was hard, anyone would acknowledge, to be the child of not one but two Nobel prizewinners; it was even harder when one of those laureates was Valentina, whose life had been as romantic, and even as dangerous, as it had been brilliant.

  When, in the late seventies, ten years after her husband, she won the Nobel prize for physics, Valentina Guilfoyle had suddenly become famous. Not for her work on quantum physics, which was incomprehensible to anyone outside her own field, nor even for the glory of her prize, nor for the fact that she was a woman, nor that she was married to a Nobel prizewinner. She became famous for her love affair and marriage. A television play had been made about her life which had told the story of her perilous love for John Guilfoyle, a Cambridge physicist. Zita’s knowledge of her parents’ lives before her birth was based on the stories of her childhood which had taken flesh as television drama. She had once tried to make Valentina separate fact from fiction, to strip away the glamour bestowed by the camera’s framing shots, without success. Valentina, who cultivated a sceptical view of most subjects, had been perfectly content to accept what the film said about her, even insisting to her daughter on its “truth”.

  Valentina Panteleimonovna Pankratova was born in Moscow in one of the apartment blocks overlooking Patriarch’s Pond. She liked to say that every day on her way to school she passed the spot where the devil met Berlioz and Bezdomny at the start of The Master and Margarita. In those days the flats were still communal, with bathroom and kitchen shared between ten families. They were overcrowded and the occasions for pettiness and spite, selfishness and minor cruelty were manifold. When deliberate maliciousness did not enter into it, simple squalor, the tyranny of the laziest or least fastidious, made life as physically unpleasant as possible. For the Pankratovs the situation was exacerbated by Valentina’s mother’s being Jewish, which made her and her daughter a target for indiscriminate insult and accurate saliva. Her father, wholly Russian, had been a minor bureaucrat on the railways and had survived the upheavals of the Revolution and the twenties because of his technical expertise which had been harnessed in 1929 to the building of the Moscow Metro. He was a scholarly man, interested in literature and philosophy and art. It may have been these subversive studies which caused him to be denounced; or it may have been random chance that he was picked up on the Red Line of the Metro, his own creation, late one night in 1938. Before he disappeared from Valentina’s life, he had shared with his wife her passionate devotion to the cause of her child’s education. It had taken all Lena’s skill to ensure Valentina’s enrolment in the best primary and then the best secondary school in Moscow. But from the time that Valentina was about twelve encouragement was no more necessary than a child’s pedalling a bicycle downhill. Valentina had her own momentum: she won prize after prize, passing into university at the age of sixteen; the hardships of the war caused many disruptions to the family, but not to Valentina’s
progress. Her achievement was not without a psychological price, for the disappearance of her father and her mother’s Jewishness were facts to be suppressed at all costs. Valentina made no secret now of her early life, and she would speak with wondering scorn of the silent, secretive, hard-working child that she had been.

  The culmination of that period of her existence came on 6th March 1953, the day of the announcement of Stalin’s death. Valentina was by then adult, a doctoral student, yet with the rest of the country she had wept hysterically at the loss of the man who had protected her country and killed her father. It had been cathartic, a sloughing off of her childhood, she would say later. In June of that year she had accompanied her professor to an international conference in Rome and there met John Guilfoyle of Cambridge, England.

  On the television film Zita had watched an actor as John Guilfoyle and an actress as Valentina meet and fall in love at the physics conference under the oblivious eyes of her KGB minders and the disapproving ones of the British security services, scenes of erotic charge intensified by prohibition and danger. They had touched hands and exchanged glances as they passed coffee cups in the breaks in the meetings. They had arranged to meet and had escaped for an hour one evening to walk, to embrace, in the dark streets of Rome. They parted. The camera had indicated the passage of the long years of their separation with shots of Valentina sitting at a bench in her laboratory, scribbling notes which she slipped under pages of calculations. The actress’s voice-over, with its attractive foreign accent, recited the passionate words that she was writing. The letters’ itinerary was shown by the hands of colleagues, by the letter boxes of the Western cities to which they were allowed to travel. John’s replies were seen passing from hand to hand until, weeks later, they reached Valentina and were tucked into her briefcase until, in the privacy of the corner of a library, she was able to open them and John’s voice was heard as the camera roamed over the dusty scholars and the overarching dome.