The Accomplice Read online

  “She is a bit unsettling,” she had said to Zita. “So sweet and useful to have around. But suddenly one starts to see everything with her eyes. I keep feeling apologetic and wanting to explain and excuse.”

  8

  If Naomi sensed a faint odour of hostility emanating from Xenia, it represented merely the vapour escaping from the crater of a dormant volcano. In her first week in England the Russian girl was in a turmoil of resentment and fury which she only hid because she had been trained since childhood in the suppression of her true feelings and the demonstration of acceptable ones. Her alienation from everything that she saw around her was made more distressing because she had no loyalty to what she had left behind.

  She had been brought up with a sense of injustice by her father, who had educated his daughter in the idea that, although it was necessary to conform in order to survive, she must never submit her inner self to the values that she saw around them. An utterly defeated man himself, he nevertheless imbued in her the belief that the preservation of independence and self-respect lay in the secret hatred, and even, if it were possible, subversion of authority. His rebellion lay in an internal monologue of mockery and criticism of Soviet life, a monologue which, when he was drunk, more and more often towards the end of his life, he spoke aloud. His attitude of mind had, necessarily, to be hidden, and the cultivation of a compliant facade was one of the skills of life to be learned at an early age.

  Xenia, although she detested and feared her father, had accepted his view. She had never outwardly rebelled. She had been a docile student in a school system which always discriminated against her. She could not win: that was something she and all her teachers knew. Yet she accepted the conditions that life laid down, apparently without demur. And the system came good for her. When she won a place at the Language Faculty at Moscow State University, the teachers at her Siberian high school marvelled as they congratulated her. They wondered where the blat, the influence, had come from to make such a translation possible, for they knew from their own careers that being clever, as Xenia was clever, was not enough. To gain the good things of life one had to be one of the elect, a high Party official with influence in the workplace or local region or with favours already performed, to be paid off by the more powerful. How the daughter of someone who had come to Siberia as a prisoner, and a political one at that, and had remained as a mere high school teacher, could have won such a sought-after prize was incomprehensible. That there was something more to it than merit went without saying. What they did not reckon with was the operation of luck.

  Xenia was lucky. She had noticed it when she was very young. One of her earliest memories was of the misery of her nursery school, where she was the victim of persecution. The dominant children would mock her. There was always something indefinably wrong about her that could be used to destroy the glory of any success she achieved. The teacher was their accomplice, awarding a star for her excellence in spelling, while permitting the taunts, her acquiescence acknowledging their justice in another scheme of things. Xenia could remember hiding in the sparkling Siberian winter sun behind the concrete wall that separated two sections of the playground, unwilling to emerge and run with the other children. The cold air froze her tears to her cheeks and she felt ice shards forming in her nostrils and between the inside of her lips and her teeth, piercing her skin like knife tips. She wished her persecutors dead, that some great power would sweep down and destroy them, gathering her up for reward and comfort. No miracle happened. She had to run out to face her tormentors. But the very next day, in an administrative rearrangement, she was removed from her class and placed in another school.

  No other explanation but organizational convenience, a quota for the region to be fulfilled, could explain how she got to Moscow University in the first place. Once she was there, she applied herself to her first goal of never having to return to Siberia. It was a difficult task to get her internal passport marked with Moscow residence and she knew that when her course finished she might still be forced to go back to her birthplace. However, with the political changes after the coup in August 1991, her horizons had widened and whereas her first hope had been to travel to the Baltic States, the western window of the Soviet Union, she now hoped to go to Europe itself. Her father, a teacher of languages at the Technical High School, had taught her to speak and read English and French, beginning when she was very young, and those languages had been the verbal expression of her resistance to the Soviets. Her success in them, deriving from her father’s knowledge and teaching, had been a secret pleasure. The discovery of the Club of the Nobility in Moscow had suggested that his name, which had always been a handicap, might now work in her favour. Her father’s death meant that she lacked the proofs necessary to register herself. But this did not matter. It would have been a dangerous thing to do and her caution would have held her back.

  Her visit there had been lucky. She had gone on a day when a letter had arrived from a Russian of the emigration, married to an Englishman, enquiring about the Chornorouky family. She had been shown it by a friendly clerk who had searched for it among the piles of paper on her desk, and found it weighed down with a glass of cold tea. As Xenia read it slowly, she could already see herself in England. She had copied down the name and address and handed the paper back to the clerk, without giving the slightest sign of the vision she had had or the excitement she was feeling. She knew almost nothing of the West or, more particularly, of England than could be learned from the pages of nineteenth-century novels, which, though teaching her many profound truths about the people they depicted and their way of life, hardly prepared her for London in the 1990s.

  So, to find when she reached England that, in spite of the warm welcome, the generosity with which she was met, she still felt that she was on the outside, was a rejection by the place where she had hoped she would at last feel at home. Xenia was, however, always adaptable and the method of existence that had served her in Siberia and in Moscow still worked well in London. She listened and smiled and thanked and thanked. She attended the language school every morning and applied herself diligently to her classes, thanking Naomi for arranging them, although she had no idea of the cost they represented. Whatever else was difficult about a Russian university, the cost of classes was not a problem and it never occurred to her that the lessons were not free and that Naomi had not simply used influence to obtain her a place. She was, however, already aware of the expense of life in London. She could see that the three pounds fifty an hour that she earned baby-sitting would not buy much, even when her basic living expenses were met, and would certainly never support her.

  All these things told her that she had much to learn and that she must set herself to comprehend. She listened and watched in the streets, in the houses where she worked, in her classes, in the shops, above all in the house in Gayton Street. She was fascinated by the Loftus family. She noticed their contempt for possessions and their wealth; their carelessness and their consumerism; the volume of their things spread over a space that would house five or six families in Moscow. She saw how practical problems, the impossibility of moving from one place to another, the difficulties of papers and passports and permissions, the trials of housing, of buying things, even of acquiring food, simply did not exist for them. The minor annoyances of a car refusing to start or the immersion heater not working were solved at once by a telephone call and a cheque. You paid and things worked again. Which left other problems; ones you talked and talked about, but did nothing to change.

  She began to listen outside the door of Naomi’s consulting room to find out what went on there. Naomi had explained to her what she did. She had become expansive over dinner one night, delivering one of her lectures on the benefits of therapy in helping to create the integration of the personality, to become a whole being. The problems of the personality, of its being whole or fragmented, appeared irrelevant to Xenia and she had listened with a blankness which Naomi did not notice, but which clearly struck Marcu
s, who intervened on several occasions to tone down his wife’s claims, as if defensive of her self-exposure before Xenia’s critical gaze.

  Sometimes, during the day, while she crouched on the stairs outside the door of the sunny, first-floor room which was Naomi’s office, she could hear nothing. There were long periods of silence, followed by indistinguishable murmurs, then more silence. On Thursday evenings Naomi held an adultery encounter group and this was a noisy and interesting session for Xenia. She was sitting in her usual place on the stairs, listening so intently to what was being said behind the closed door that she failed to hear Marcus return from work. He mounted the stairs and, turning on the landing, came face to face with her. His surprise was so great that she began to laugh and they had to smother their noise by a rapid descent, to avoid disturbing the encounters that Naomi was supervising.

  In the living room Marcus said, “What were you doing there on the stairs? I wasn’t expecting to find you there.”

  Xenia looked a little shamefaced. “I was listening. I wanted to understand what they did in Naomi’s group.”

  “You mustn’t do that. It’s very confidential. We’re not allowed to hear. Even just passing on the stairs, you must close your ears. I know it’s rather bizarre to you, but you must never tell Naomi you have overheard anything. She would be most upset.”

  Although Marcus and Naomi had been good to her, Xenia felt no attachment to them. They assumed, she thought contemptuously, that their generosity made them likeable. She, on the other hand, could think of no reason why she should like them, when their hypocrisy and self-deception were so glaring. She acknowledged to herself that she would probably resemble them if she lived as they did. She would, in fact, like to live as they did and envy played a part in the impatient contempt that was growing up under her grateful exterior. That she, too, was hypocritical, she recognized freely. But she had the excuse, which she readily accepted on her own behalf, of being powerless. Camouflage is the protection of the weak and she knew at least what was her protective covering and what was her real self. They were free, rich, independent, powerful, yet they concealed themselves and their motives from themselves, as if they were ruled, as she was, by poverty, necessity and impotence.

  Rosie was different, had more perception. Xenia had observed her less, for she and Al led a separate existence in the basement and so she had not worked out what Rosie was hiding from herself, if anything. She only knew that Rosie had seen something in her of the rage at unfairness and animosity towards those who were established with all that she lacked. She respected her for that. As for Al, she paid no attention to him, for she could not see him as a person of significance. He was Rosie’s lover, a hanger on, a black. She was not even sure what he did. Her first concentration in fascination, in envy, was on Naomi, Marcus, Rosie.

  As she became more used to the household during her first week, she became bolder in occupying the spaces, invading its private places. At first, her own bedroom on the top floor, once Rosie’s when she had been a school girl and still decorated with the Laura Ashley sprigs she had chosen when she was eleven and now despised, had seemed a haven. She had retreated there, lying on the bed under the sloping ceiling with Pushkin beside her, purring like a powerful motor, looking out over the roofs of the neighbouring houses descending the hill. She had never had such a vast area to herself in her life. In the obshezhitiye on the Lenin Hills in Moscow she had shared a room smaller than this with two other girls; in Siberia her father had slept in the living room and she had had a little bed that she put up each night in the hall.

  In the quiet mornings, when Marcus had left for the hospital, when Naomi was already ensconced in her consulting room, before the cleaning woman arrived, Xenia began to venture out and explore the house. She started in the more public areas. In the kitchen she opened cupboards and looked thoughtfully at Naomi’s random stacking of jars and tins. She would take out a packet and read its label carefully, Funghi Porcini Secchi; Easy Blend Dried Yeast, Best Before See End, replacing it exactly where it had been before. In the drawing room she fingered the objects with which Naomi decorated the shelves and tables: curiously shaped items from the Far East or India or Mexico whose original purpose was hard to guess. In Marcus’s study-cum-dressing room on the second floor she spent a long time taking books out of the bookcases and browsing through them, before she began on the desk. Marcus kept here hundreds of detective stories; opening them, Xenia sometimes found old bus tickets or laurel leaves, used as book marks. She pondered them with the same attention as an archaeologist gives to an ancient bone from which he can deduce a mass of evidence about the way of life of a mysterious, vanished people. The roll-top desk lay exposed to her view; no picking of locks was called for. She simply pulled open the drawers, pushed her fingers into the crevices of the pigeonholes to look at Marcus’s scribbles on his cheque stubs, at the folded series of American Express statements, where the sums she read seemed to be of unimaginable size. The desk was endlessly rewarding, with boxes of cigars in its central cubbyhole and paperbacks of near-pornography stuffed right at the back of the bottom drawer, along with a bundle of letters from someone Xenia eventually decided must have been Marcus’s first wife, written from the hospital where she was dying of cancer. Naomi, who strictly respected a right to privacy within marriage and who had never done more than enter the dressing room to turn off a light (Marcus was expected to put away all his own ironed shirts, socks and underwear), had never so much as glanced at the telephone pad on the desk. Xenia opened all the cupboards and stroked the sleeves of what seemed to be hundreds of suits in shades of grey and black. She counted twenty-five sleeves one morning. Who could need twenty-five different suits? She slipped her hand into a pocket and found a pound coin and a still-folded, slightly dusty handkerchief. She held them both in her hands for a moment; sniffed the handkerchief on which lingered a pleasant perfume; then thrust both of them into the pocket of her cardigan.

  This act somehow broke a taboo; the closet became a regular visiting place, and she began, too, selecting certain coins from the papier mache bowl into which Marcus emptied his change. She took, ritually, three 1p pieces every day as she finished her browsing, an activity that became more and more prolonged, so that it was often the turning of the key in the door at ten o’clock, announcing the arrival of Mrs Vokins, that called her attention to the time. She would then slide shut the drawer, select her coins and pad upstairs with the silence and speed of an experienced thief.

  From the house she ventured out into the streets of Hampstead, at first just to watch and to learn. The blatant openness all around her shocked and amazed her: the lovers entwined on the Heath with no attempt at hiding or discretion; the goods in the shops displayed with the same lascivious inducement to desire and to possess. She would, all the same, have probably not have done more than look, run her hands over the glassily smooth cover of a book, or lift the tail of a silk blouse to her cheek, if she had not seen two girls of no more than school age, stealing a dress from a little boutique in the High Street.

  She had been standing by the entrance, gazing abstractedly at the models in the window. The girls had entered a moment or two earlier, two slim English teenagers, each with blonde hair tied in a rope at the back of her neck, good-looking, respectable. She only became aware of what they were doing when she saw the flash of a dress sliding off its hanger into the taller girl’s shoulder bag. Xenia looked in startled disbelief to authority, to the sales assistant, whose back was turned as she attended to the questions of the other teenager. A moment or so later, with thanks, without haste, the two thieves left.

  As if in a dream, when you know what you have to do without being told, Xenia entered Waterstone’s, walking slowly round the stacks of books. With an unlearned skill, she picked up a large volume and, bending below the display table, put it into her bag. Her heart, she discovered, was racing; her breathing was rapid and shallow; with a sudden, cold shudder she realized that her back was drenched in sweat.
Not until she was safely in her bedroom did she look at her booty: The Pasta Cookery of Northern Italy. She turned the pages curiously, not to look at the contents of the book or the quality of the recipes, rather to examine what it was her risk had acquired. She rubbed a page between her fingers, as if she were testing the thickness of a cloth. Finally, when her heart rate had returned to normal, she carried the book downstairs and placed it carefully among the cookery books on the jumbled shelves in the kitchen. A sudden wave of nausea overcame her. She ran to the ground-floor lavatory and wrenchingly threw up the bread and cheese that she had eaten for lunch.

  After that she took something almost every day. She followed no plan; she never chose an object beforehand. Her only rule was never to steal twice from the same shop. It was as if an object would jump towards her or place itself in her hands. She knew it was about to happen only when the now familiar rapid breathing suddenly warned her. Some of the things she stole she hid around the house; some she threw away at once, stuffing them furtively into public rubbish bins, or depositing them in a waste-paper bin at her language school. Once she pushed a full bottle of wine into a bottle bank, heard it crash and imagined the gush of red wine over the pile of green glass. She kept nothing.

  9

  For Xenia the lunch at Broad Woodham on the Sunday after her arrival in London was significant for two reasons. It was the occasion of her first meeting with her cousin, who called herself Yevgenia Konstantinovna Chornoroukaya. It was also the moment when she decided she must stay in England.