The Accomplice Read online

  After seeing the programme, Zita said to her mother, “But what language did you use, Mama? Did you learn English at school?” For she knew that her father had never spoken Russian, or any other foreign language for that matter.

  Valentina had said only, “We managed, we managed.” Then with a little embarrassment, “When we met I did not really speak English, though I had taught myself a little, enough to read scientific publications. And Dad knew a bit of German.”

  “German? You made love in German?” Thus Zita realized that the relationship had begun essentially without language, and had been more mysterious, more passionate and harder to convey than anything the film had depicted.

  The danger to Valentina had been enormous. She, who had lost her father to the camps, who was half-Jewish, knew what she risked all those years. Finally, in 1957 she was once more allowed to go to a conference in Helsinki. This time, on the second night, after she had delivered her paper, she had put on her raincoat, padded with all her latest calculations, and with nothing else in the world had walked round to the British Embassy in Skarpogaten. She had refused to move from the chair in the interview room there until Guilfoyle’s mobilization of friends in London had finally persuaded the bewildered diplomatists that they had to take her. Zita had doubted if the Foreign Office had been quite as bumbling or her mother quite as Joan of Arc-like as the film showed; yet Valentina had insisted it had been “just like that”.

  The next morning Zita warned Lynne that Valentina was arriving that day. She telephoned Jean about the key and set off for the office in a state of anxiety which she kept at bay while she concentrated on her work, but which threatened to overwhelm her as she returned home in the evening. She found Lynne sulkily preparing Tom’s supper. The television was turned off. Valentina was in the drawing room with Tom in his wheel chair, his computer open in front of him. Zita could hear Valentina talking and Tom’s voice synthesizer answering. He had a choice of voices and had selected the man’s, a sign that he was interested in what was happening on his computer screen. Zita stood in the doorway, with Lynne just behind her, using her as a shield, and saw that Valentina was inscribing figures on a piece of paper and passing it across to Tom who was doing calculations, his head nodding as he used the switches on his head rest. Zita had just time to think, of course, Tom will like that, why have I never thought of numbers for him, before her mother turned to greet her. Lynne, muttering, “He’s had too much work today already,” darted round Zita and seized the wheel chair, triumphantly recapturing her charge.

  Valentina looked older. Her hair, which was cut like a helmet, was now entirely white. She had an American air about her, though her Russianness was ineradicable. She was tall, with broad shoulders, and was clearly meant to have been a babushka by now, a barrel of a woman. Instead she was lean and stringy, exercised almost to gauntness. She kissed her daughter with a kind of exasperated affection.

  “Zitushenka.”

  “Mamochka.”

  The reproaches that Zita knew to be inevitable, that she dreaded, did not come for twenty-four hours, which was an act of considerable restraint on Valentina’s part.

  Zita was preparing dinner, arranging slices of aubergine in a grill pan. Valentina was sitting at the kitchen table and, in the act of pouring herself a second glass of wine, said, as if she could contain herself no longer, “Zita, you must put the past behind you, you know.”

  Zita concentrated on the flames above the aubergines. “What do you mean, Mama?”

  “Why do you live like this? Do you ever ask yourself, why am I living like this?”

  Zita stirred the lemon sauce that was to be poured over the chicken. She did not look at her mother. “I live like this because of Tom. My life is very well organized. I don’t know why you say, why do I live like this? How could I live better?”

  “In fact, everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Valentina picked up the bottle of wine and offered to pour some for her daughter who moved her glass away. A red trickle of liquid splashed onto the table. Neither made any effort to wipe it away. Zita was calm. She was pleased with herself. It was her mother who was behaving in a childish and unreasonable way, not she.

  “If you can tell me what I should do to live better, I am quite prepared to listen.”

  Valentina held her glass in both hands, dangling it so its stem swung gently, like a pendulum. “I don’t speak about your doing law in the first place, instead of something creative; the child of your father a lawyer.”

  “His father was a lawyer, Mama, a judge.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I don’t speak of that. I don’t speak of you working in a little provincial town doing the papers for the sale of bungalows. I don’t speak of that. I accept what you have chosen and what fate has given you. What I am speaking of is Oliver.”

  Zita took the grilled aubergine from the pan and put the slices carefully on the pile of onion in a dish, and placed it on the table. “Do help yourself, Mama. It’ll get cold if you talk too much.”

  Valentina ignored the proffered spoon. “You are living in the past, Zita. You grieve for him. You hope he will come back. You cannot accept that is over, finished, konyets.”

  Zita sat down and began to pile food onto her plate. There was no need for her mother to speak; she understood what she felt. In Valentina’s opinion, to become a lawyer was almost as bad as becoming an accountant or a civil servant; they were worthy professions to make society work, but not ones to be done by anyone of originality or independence. Zita’s reading law at university had been an act of real rebellion; rebellion which had brought down no curses on her head. Her liberal-minded parents made no protests about her decision. They took up a new position: whatever she did, she should do to the utmost. Her entry into a big City firm was applauded and feted. Then came the disaster of her marriage.

  Oliver Daunsey was also a lawyer, already a QC, some seventeen years older than Zita. The force of his charm had worked on Valentina, who made no objection, at the time, to his age or Zita’s youth and professed herself delighted with her son-in-law. He might have been a lawyer, but he was at least a highly talented and successful one. For Zita, Oliver was supreme. Even years later, after conflict and disappointment, she could not cancel her first passionate admiration. Oliver was not exceptional in appearance; even she had to acknowledge that. He was tall, with a long face and expressive features; he lost his hair early which aged him and gave him a philosophical dome. Lanky and graceful in youth, he had begun to thicken out by the time Zita met him. Yet none of this diminished his attractiveness of person and personality, which operated equally powerfully on both men and women. He was funny in a quiet, droll manner, which blunted the sharpness of his remarks, at least until afterwards. He was always remembered, after even a brief meeting.

  Zita had adored him. The first rift was nothing; no more than a hairline crack. Oliver wanted children. He was one of five and wished to reproduce his happy childhood in his own family. Zita wanted children, but not yet, not yet. However, if they were to have a large family, it was better to begin earlier rather than later and they agreed that she would continue to work, to aim for her partnership and they would employ all the nannies and housekeepers that might be necessary. So Tom was conceived; the hairline crack became the rift valley.

  Tom’s handicaps were so severe that they were evident very soon after his birth. Zita, who up to that point had maintained an attitude of detached interest in the matter of her offspring, fully intending to return to work within weeks, fell entirely and wholeheartedly in love with her son, a love which was compounded by the guilt that she felt towards him, at having somehow allowed him to be born so horribly defective. Tom was the watershed. Oliver could not accept a child who was malformed and Tom’s oddly floppy limbs, his violent and uncontrollable movements repelled him physically. He could not bear to look at him after the first few weeks, as the extent of the damage became evident. He could not bear to look at Zita either, as she id
entified so fiercely with her child. Zita had very quickly realized what Oliver’s reaction meant. She had hung on for a time, hoping that the father would become accustomed to his son, although without conviction.

  Just after Tom’s first birthday she had moved out. She had done her research and had discovered the Witte Centre in Woodham, whose work with children with cerebral palsy was both new and controversial. Her faith, her willingness to change her life to bring Tom to them, got him in and while she was directing the bulk of her energy to persuading the Centre to take him, she was scouring the vicinity for a legal firm in need of a partner. Oliver was not ungenerous: his contribution made possible the setting up of a life based on Tom’s needs. His return was that he should never have to be involved beyond the pecuniary level. Tom, and Zita with him, were cancelled from his existence. For Zita, there had never been any question of choice. She had not contemplated a solution that somehow abandoned Tom and left her with Oliver. Nevertheless, she lived every moment with regret for her husband, with his image which never lost its humour and attraction, with his memory that was never clouded by their separation.

  In this Valentina was right. She had uncovered the false premise on which Zita’s life was based. Zita knew that reconciliation with Oliver was impossible. Not only had he never made any attempt to see her or Tom again, he had remarried. This apparently conclusive evidence was, in fact, a secret comfort to her. For Oliver’s second wife was undeniably like Zita, whose Russian-Jewish grandmother had bequeathed to her black hair and an aquiline nose which were curiously similar to Shobana’s glossy Persian colouring and features and her wide pale-eyed gaze. Shobana was a television presenter and journalist who had successfully penetrated the masculine world of political and economic commentary; only the most unjust of her rivals implied that her beauty was as important to her success as the acuity of her judgement. As a stepmother, she could not be faulted. Tom’s birthday and Christmas presents arrived ahead of time: thoughtful, well-chosen, always accompanied by a note for Zita from Shobana herself and a card for Tom, signed, in Shobana’s handwriting, by Oliver. Shobana had, it seemed, no wish for children; at least none had appeared in the four years of her marriage.

  “You must give up the past,” Valentina was saying. “Look at me. I ran away from Russia and I gave it up. I became English. I did not think about the past. Your father died. I moved to America. I have given up the past. You must let it go, abandon it. If you live with it as you do, it will corrode your life.”

  For a moment Zita felt the swelling of the membranes of her nose and eyes and was afraid that her mother was about to exercise her ultimate power and make her do what she had never done since she had left Oliver: cry. If once she began to weep there would be no end to the flow of sorrow for Tom, trapped inside a jangling, disobedient body, unable to speak or move, although as able as anyone to think and reason; for herself, trapped on a treadmill whose alternating steps were her work and Tom; for Oliver and his loss; for what might have been.

  She breathed in sharply and looked at her mother whose eyes beneath her white fringe were speculative as well as concerned, as if she had spoken not merely out of affection, but also to gauge her daughter’s reaction on some scientific scale of sensible behaviour. It was Valentina’s strength that she combined a detachment of observation with a passion of purpose; it was Zita’s weakness that she had never been able to determine whether detachment or affection predominated in her mother’s attitude to her. No tears fell. She considered all the things she could say to her mother’s just reproaches. She would give up the past if she could, but it was beyond her will to blot it out. It was an addiction which she was not willing to give up.

  “You’re right, Mama. I should.”

  Valentina, who was still Russian enough to enjoy meandering discussions that covered the ground without actually reaching a conclusion, put down her glass in displeasure.

  “What’s more, Zitushenka, you should lose some weight, fifteen pounds at least. You take no exercise; you drive everywhere.”

  This time Zita did protest a little. “I have so little time that I have to take the car. Anyway, I enjoy cooking and I like eating.”

  “That’s all very well, but what’s the point. Tom can’t eat anything except purees and Lynne prefers hamburgers. You should just eat salads, then you would gain time to go to a health club or jogging or something.”

  Valentina always went the whole hog, Zita thought. When she decided to become American, she became American; she had never exercised when she lived in England. “You’re right, Mama,” she said again.

  For Valentina, Zita had always been the most exasperating child and even worse as a teenager. She had never disputed with her parents; she had just quietly gone on doing or not doing whatever seemed best to her. Valentina sighed and changed the subject.

  “Yevgenia is an unexpected neighbour to find in deepest Sussex,” she said.

  Zita looked at her in surprise. The worst was over now; she was going to be able to eat the chicken in lemon without more accusations. “How did you discover she was Russian?” she asked. “I have known her ever since I came here and only found it out myself a few months ago. Or did Marcus tell you?”

  Valentina smirked. “I wish it was my perspicacity that had uncovered it, the innate Russianness that spoke between us. No, it wasn’t Marcus either. She spoke to me in Russian right away. It’s a long time since I used the language. It felt quite odd. I think I shall enjoy it. I shall go and see her again tomorrow. Of course, she isn’t really Russian.”

  “She isn’t?”

  “No. Her father was a Baltic German. I think he was a justice minister or education minister under the last Tsar. Her name, von Korff, rings a bell to me. Not that I would have learned about him when I was in school in Russia.” Valentina’s scorn comprehended not only Russians foolish enough to have stayed in Russia after she had left, but all Russian institutions. She gave the impression she had arrived in the West with her bare genius and no other education at all. “She was only born in Petrograd. Her parents took her to Latvia when she was a baby and she lived all her early life on an estate not far from Riga. So she only became a Russian citizen after 1940 when the Baltic States were forced to join the Soviet Union.” Valentina presented these historical details approvingly, as if it showed that Yevgenia’s Russianness was an oddity of fate and nothing innate.

  Zita smiled. “You’ve learned more about her today than I have in all these years. She has always maintained your attitude to the past: she barely admits that it happened.”

  And she suddenly remembered that she still had not told Jean about the skeleton buried under the roses.

  6

  Zita realized that she must tell Jean before Sunday when Naomi and Marcus were coming to lunch with the Russian girl and when speculation about the body could not be avoided. She was uncertain why she had postponed telling her or why it was with such reluctance that on Saturday afternoon she wheeled Tom round to her neighbour’s with Valentina walking by her side. On the face of it, there was no reason to expect that Jean would react any differently from Naomi, who had displayed curiosity and a proprietory interest in the corpse, even a hope that what was revealed would be particularly startling, if only in a remote and academic sense. Why should telling Jean be more difficult?

  The lunch on Sunday had grown into a large affair. To Jean’s original guests, Naomi, Marcus and the Russian girl, had been added Rosie and Al, Rosie’s boyfriend, and Valentina and Zita. Lucia would be there in charge of the kitchen and Ivo, Marcus’s son, had said he might come too. Tom did not count as an eating guest, as he only consumed purees that were laboriously fed to him in private. Zita had volunteered to help Lucia by preparing a walnut tart. It had been agreed that she would do this in Jean’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon, and this was the last opportunity to mention the subject that she found so hard to broach. The two elderly Russians, Valentina and Jean, sat on either side of the kitchen table, watching Zita at the far
end with her hands in a bowl of flour. Tom sat strapped into his wheel chair opposite her. They were speaking Russian.

  “I remember our cook in Latvia,” Jean was saying. “She was rather thin and pale, stringy and energetic, not the traditional fat and rosy cook at all. She mostly used ingredients which we produced ourselves on the farm. We had to buy some things, of course, but as little as possible. Her newly baked bread was like… I can’t say what it was like, far better than caviar or foie gras or any delicacy that you can imagine. Plunging your teeth into that firm, sweet-smelling bread was the most delectable thing in the world.”

  “We used to buy Rizhki chleb, Riga bread, in our bread shop in Moscow,” Valentina said. “It was more expensive than Moscovski.” It was the first time that Zita had ever heard her mother reminisce about her Russian childhood.

  “Not the same at all,” Jean was contemptuous. “Industrial bread bears no relation to what we used to eat. Perhaps I shall get Ivo to recreate it.”

  The elusive Ivo, Marcus’s son, Zita had not met since childhood. He was a chef, a profession which, she gathered, had been hard for his parents to accept at the moment that he had turned down a place at university in order to go to a hotel school in Lausanne. Now that he was a television personality, with two starred restaurants to his name, the family had forgotten their rage at his choice.