The Accomplice Read online

  “I think you will find there is an essential ingredient that Ivo is not able to supply,” Zita suggested. “The taste of the past is always better than anything which can be cooked now.”

  “It has always seemed to me,” Jean went on, “that attitudes to life, to people, to marriage and sex – of course, nowadays these are not necessarily the same thing – can be deduced from people’s attitude to food, more particularly, from women’s attitude to cooking and to the raw materials of cooking. Maris, our cook in Latvia, was so thin, wiry, energetic. She was rather rough with us children, and she had a sharp tongue. Yet she had this feeling for ingredients, for the cheese and milk and eggs from the farm, the vegetables that we grew. And though all the time I knew her I thought of her as old, she was obviously tremendously sexy. She never married, but she had a series of lovers who were utterly in thrall to her. Then, look at Naomi, all theory and no practice, of cooking, I mean. So she buys expensive gourmet things, pre-cooked, all dished up. Like that strange job of hers, all high-minded theory, applied ready-made to the human condition.”

  “Yes,” said Valentina, “and look at me. I don’t cook any more. I have given up completely since John died.”

  “This theory isn’t supposed to reflect the circumstances of people’s lives,” Jean protested, “but of their natures. I have always been squeamish, myself. I never really like cooking meat. I hated the texture of raw flesh, that soft, moist clingingness. I couldn’t bear the stickiness of making pastry and dough, as Zita is doing now.”

  “Ah, Zita…” Valentina said.

  Zita had seen this moment arriving as soon as Jean had started the conversation. “And Lucia,” she interrupted. “She cooks wonderfully, with clinical cleanliness and exact measurement. So Swiss. How I wish I could be as organized as she is in the kitchen.”

  “National characteristics are crude, but they are real observations,” said Valentina, not to be diverted. “Zita is truly Russian; she cooks with passion and emotion.”

  Zita glanced at her reflection in the black glass door of the oven. She could see that she had flour in her hair. “When my mother says something is Russian,” she remarked to Jean, “she means it is bad and to be regretted.”

  “She is right that you love cooking.”

  “I do because it’s relaxing to do and pleasurable in its outcome; it is creative and yet always needs to be renewed.”

  “What does this tell us about the waste of her life, with no one to cook for?” Valentina demanded rhetorically.

  “Mama,” Zita did not want to quarrel with her mother in front of Jean, but she was sometimes too exasperating to be borne. “That you, of all people, should imply that a man is necessary to a woman’s life; let alone that a woman should be cooking for him.”

  “I don’t imply it, I know it,” said Valentina. “All right, I did not cook much for your father. But what would I have done without him? I met him when I was still very young and I did not know what I was doing. There was someone before him, but he did not count. Once I met your father what could I not do? I escaped from Russia, I became English, I had you, I did my work, all because of him.”

  Zita was now rolling her pastry with heavy-handed fury. She knew that the tart would be ruined. “In that case, Mama, you know how difficult it is to manage without him.”

  “Yes.” For a moment Valentina’s voice was sad. “It was very hard for me after he died, I missed him every day. But one cannot give up. You have to forget the past and start again.” Zita resisted the impulse to shout at her mother and her insufferable rightness.

  “I hope Ivo won’t come tomorrow. I am afraid this tart will not be up to his standards.” This was the point to tell Jean of the skeleton. Anything was preferable to allowing Valentina more opportunity to comment on her life.

  She began her account as if what she had to tell was of a minor snag in Naomi’s building works. Jean listened, at first with perfect detachment; the tearing out of her roses was something that had no power to touch her. Even the description of the revelation of the skull by the workmen did not elicit any disturbance in her normal expression. Zita was relieved that her task had been so easily achieved and began to talk with greater ease of the archaeological aspect of the excavation, the calling in of Dr Reskimer of London University who had come with several students to dig out the skeleton.

  “I saw the body myself when I went over there yesterday afternoon. It had been completely uncovered. It was rather strange because when I first saw the skull I had not taken in anything about its size. When I saw it this time, it gave me a shock because it was immediately clear that it was the body of a child. I don’t know whether it is of a boy or a girl. They spoke of it as ‘he’, but I can’t see how you can tell the sex of a skeleton.”

  “I’m no biologist,” Valentina said, “but you don’t need to be a pathologist, Zita, to work out that that structure of the bones will be different: the female skull is smaller than the male; there will certainly be a difference in the pelvis. Overall, the male is larger than the female.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Zita, irritable that Valentina thought she could not work that out for herself. “Of course, that would be obvious if you were looking at the skeleton of an adult; but if you are looking at a child, before you do laboratory tests, how do you know whether this is the skull of a large six-year-old boy or of a small nine-year-old girl?”

  “I am sure an experienced eye can tell by the size and proportion,” Valentina asserted authoritatively. Zita suppressed a sigh. Why, she wondered, how, did she and her mother get into these entirely pointless wrangles over details which meant nothing to either of them. There was no reason, intellectual or emotional, that they should take issue with one another on such a subject.

  It was only then that her attention came back to Jean. Clearly the bickering of mother and daughter was distressing to her; she was looking shocked, as though she wished to remove herself from what was going on around her.

  “So I learned very little yesterday. Perhaps Al will have more news for us tomorrow.”

  “We shall be ten tomorrow, if Ivo comes,” Jean said with an effort. Her voice trailed off. Valentina gave her a sharp regard.

  “It’s years since I saw Marcus and Naomi, Yevgenia,” she said. “I hope they have changed. I don’t like to come back to England and find everything is the same. It’s like coming back to the past. I want to come back to the future, or at least the present. I hope I shall see that they have both aged considerably.”

  Jean laughed. Her expression changed once again, her face transformed by amusement. It was as if she had shut a door on something and by an act of will refocussed her consciousness. She shifted in her chair, looking for her walking sticks. Zita thought, of course, she lives in pain. No wonder she sometimes seems troubled.

  Part Two

  XENIA

  7

  “Xenia is some kind of avenging Fate as far as Jean is concerned.” Naomi was reflecting on the arrival of the Russian girl in London, talking to Marcus as she prepared dinner in the large, open-plan kitchen-dining-living room on the ground floor of their ugly Hampstead house. Xenia was baby-sitting for a neighbour, so there was no danger of her overhearing her benefactor’s thoughts.

  Marcus was sitting with his back to his wife, sunk into the old sofa that served to cut the cooking from the eating areas of the room, leafing through a loose pack of papers on his lap. For Naomi, discussing human relations and their implications was a way of life. She never told Marcus the details of her clients’ problems, although she sometimes recounted funny stories that she had heard during the day, without attribution. The staple of her accounts was her friends’ lives; she had a real interest in human affairs, those that involved the emotions and could be unravelled, in row after row of cause and effect, spanning time and generation.

  “Do you mean one of the Furies?” Marcus asked. “They were snake-haired, dog-faced and bat-winged, I believe. Not a very accurate depiction of our little Russia
n, who is really not unattractive. Anyway, since you believe in Fate, it will amuse you to watch events.”

  It was true that Naomi had a very deterministic view of life for someone who was dedicated to helping people change. This was partly due to her training as a psychologist. Once human behaviour was gathered into a huge enough heap and then sorted into different piles, it had a reassuring predictability. She often felt that if you knew enough about someone: about their parents, childhood, education, upbringing; if you ran all the personality tests that there were on them, you would know enough to predict their careers, marriages, divorces, breakdowns, age at death, even cause of death, with a high degree of probability. Naomi liked ranging her world into such impersonal and tight categories; it gave her the democratic comfort of finding that, in certain things, the rest of the world acted as she did, and the elitist affirmation that, in others, she was in the ninety-ninth percentile of the population.

  She emptied a bag of ready-washed salad into a blue pottery bowl that she had nursed on the aeroplane returning from Greece where they had spent their honeymoon eleven years earlier.

  “Yes, to say she is one of the Furies makes her too fierce. You are quite right; she seems a very quiet, gentle little creature. What I meant was that she represents the past that Jean has tried to repress for all these years, living as an English housewife. That is why Jean is so unwelcoming. You would think that she would be interested in what is going on in Russia. It is a great historical event, like watching the French Revolution. Yet she tries to pretend it isn’t happening.”

  Marcus scribbled a note in the margin of the form he was reading. “She’s old, darling, why should she bother with revolutions? She won’t live to see the outcome.”

  “In the long run, nor shall we.”

  “She has no children whose future concerns her.”

  “Marcus, what rubbish you talk about people.” She was shaking dressing from a bottle onto the salad and then began to turn it, vehemently, enjoying the brilliant green of the various leaves against the blue glaze. “You are Jean’s child. Ivo and Rosie are her grandchildren. She idolizes Rosie, would do anything for her. How can you say she has no concern for the future?” She put the bowl on the table, letting it clash on the wooden surface with unnecessary noise. “You say that because you think that a woman who has no children cannot feel for anyone as a mother does.”

  Marcus put down his papers and advanced towards the dining table, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “No I don’t, darling. I think whatever it is we are going to eat must be ready. It certainly smells like it.”

  Naomi’s own childlessness was the result of a decision they had taken at the time of their marriage. She had her career; they had the motherless Ivo and Rosie to care for; another child was simply unnecessary. As years passed, Naomi began to voice her regrets: the idea of the mother became more potent to her in her work. However, her disappointment was never sufficient to persuade Marcus to reconsider, or for her to take unilateral action. But, the subject was the point at which her companionable ramblings over the doings of their friends would sometimes break down into a personalized commentary. This time she was not truly upset and was easily diverted into serving out the spicy, ready-cooked meal that she had sent Xenia out to buy in the middle of the afternoon.

  “One of the nice things about having Xenia here,” she said as they sat down after rescuing the chicken from the oven, “is that it is a bit like having a grown-up daughter living at home. She is so willing and helpful and it is so nice having someone to chat to at lunchtime after a morning of really horrendous appointments. I shan’t mind at all if Jean refuses to have her for the last month when Lucia goes to Switzerland. She will be very welcome to stay here.”

  “We’ll be in Tuscany. It won’t matter to you where Xenia is.” Marcus forbore to comment on the real grown-up daughter living at home: Rosie in the basement flat. He had already begun to fork up the Indonesian-style chicken.

  “We are so lucky,” she was saying. “Sometimes when I look at all the misery and fear around us, my clients, even Jean who has always seemed so tranquil, I marvel at our luck. I think…”

  The door bell rang with piercing insistence. “Who can that be at this time? I do hope poor Andrew has not muddled up day and night again. Last week he came at nine thirty at night for a morning appointment.”

  Marcus did not speculate; he went to open the door, returning a moment later with Al.

  Rosie’s boyfriend shared the basement flat and was in many ways a more acceptable member of the family, as far as Naomi was concerned, than her stepdaughter. He was an eye-catching figure; his most striking feature was his hair, reaching beyond his shoulders and tied in what could legitimately be called a pony tail, so thick and black was it. Although he lacked the ash that would have adorned his head, he looked like a Hindu holy man or a Muslim saint; his face had an austerity which fitted such a calling. It was long and narrow with a sharp, high-bridged nose and unexpectedly pale hazel eyes. He wore jeans and a denim shirt, neither of them clean or pressed.

  “Sorry, Naomi, I’m disturbing you. I came to ask Xenia for a drink, but Marcus says she’s out.”

  “Al, come and join us. Have you eaten? Have a glass of wine.” Al refused food or drink, yet did not leave. “Xenia’ll be back soon. Where’s Rosie?”

  “At one of her evening seminars. She won’t be home till late.” He turned reluctantly to go. “We’ll send her down to you when she gets in,” Naomi called. “The more conversation practice she gets the better.”

  But when Xenia returned she pleaded tiredness and refused to descend to see Al, preferring to sit between Naomi and Marcus on the old sofa and watch the ten o’clock news. Pushkin, Ivo’s elderly Burmese cat, who had been left with Marcus when Ivo moved out, even though he detested Naomi, curled up on her lap, raising his round face to hers in adoration.

  “Even the cat loves her,” Naomi said later, as she discarded her skirt. Marcus was in his dressing room. He dropped his cuff links into the brass inlaid box on the chest of drawers and made one of his infrequent contributions. “A good thing she didn’t go down for a drink,” he said. “Rosie might not have liked it.”

  “Rosie? Why ever not? I think Rosie is grown-up enough to cope with Al and Xenia having a drink together. If Rosie wants to be jealous, and she isn’t, if you ask me, she could give herself hell about many other aspects of Al’s life before that.”

  Marcus said no more and Naomi, having, with great magnanimity, disposed of his accusation, gave no further thought to her husband’s attribution of interest to Al, or to why such a motive might have occurred to him.

  “I do think we are doing such a good thing with Xenia. Good for her and a pleasure for us.”

  All Naomi’s thwarted maternal instincts had been aroused by Xenia when she arrived. She was, in any case, well disposed towards her: we all want the object of our benevolence to be worthy of us, and when she saw the forlorn figure disembarking from the taxi in Gayton Street her heart went out to her. She had anticipated a strapping girl with a physique to match her force of character. What she saw was someone much slighter and frailer than she expected of any Russian. Xenia had a broad face with wide cheeks and large pale eyes. Her light brown hair was unattractively scraped back and tied at the nape of her neck, which was long almost to the point of exaggeration and was perhaps the element in her appearance which most emphasized her fragility, giving the impression of a twig that might be snapped at any moment. Her clothes were hideous; she was not pretty. She clearly needed looking after.

  Naomi’s warm-hearted care and generosity were immediately repaid by Xenia’s gratitude and admiration. She had arranged for the Russian girl to go to language classes for a couple of hours every morning at a nearby school of English. She had already found two people, one a neighbour, one a client, who would employ Xenia as a child-minder. She had put flowers in her room and a pile of books and brochures about London beside her bed. She had bought her
first week’s travel card for her. Everything she had organized was received with fervent thanks. The pleasure of giving and the power of doing good are strong and Naomi enjoyed them both. And yet… and yet… Was there something wrong, even at this stage, an unplaceable dissatisfaction with herself or with Xenia?

  Even in Xenia’s first week in England, an unease had made itself felt. Naomi had telephoned Zita to ask news of the skeleton. They had decided, in unspoken agreement, to call the body the skeleton: it made it seem much older, an archaeological specimen rather than a murdered child. In the course of the call, she recounted Xenia’s first visit to a supermarket. It had been a good story. Xenia’s astonishment at the high temple of Western consumerism had been all that could have been desired. Her foreknowledge of the copiousness, the extravagance of choice, could barely contend with the reality of aisle after aisle of jars, tins, packets, of snacks, crisps, biscuits, cakes, fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy products, chilled and frozen and dried. In front of the breakfast cereals, as Naomi wandered up and down looking for Marcus’s favourite muesli, Xenia said suddenly, “But what are they all for?” She was walking along reading the names and attributes of the packets and their contents.

  “For breakfast.”

  “No, I mean, why so many? Who needs so many different breakfasts? And how do you choose?”

  “I don’t know really. It’s true I’ve never tried even a quarter of them. What I’m looking for is Luxury High Fruit Muesli With No Added Sugar. Here’s High Fruit, High Fibre, but I think there must be sugar in it. The packet I want is green, can you see it?”

  “This one?”

  “Yes. Clever you. I can never find anything.”

  Xenia turned away. “I cannot discriminate,” she said. “I do not see how you choose.”

  Even then, beneath the gratitude Naomi sensed disapproval and resentment. Xenia was quite right, she told herself, interpreting the wordless criticism in her own terms. We are far too materialistic. Russians, deprived of the endless things which we create to sell and buy, are able to concentrate on ideas, which are truly enriching. But what was really eerie was not silent disapproval of consumerism; it was rather the idea that underneath that agreeable exterior was someone else, another Xenia whom she had not yet encountered.