The Secret Wife(100)
Marta had brought one of her many boyfriends as her ‘plus one’: a staid, prematurely balding Englishman called Stanley who owned a company that manufactured silver cutlery. He had a strange accent from somewhere in the north of England, and Dmitri found it hard to make out what he was saying. After a while it became awkward asking him to repeat himself, so he nodded and smiled vaguely whenever they were forced to make conversation. Marta obviously had no such difficulty because a few weeks after the Santa Barbara wedding, Stanley came to ask Dmitri’s permission to marry her.
Dmitri hesitated. ‘Of course, it is my daughter’s decision, but I hope you do not plan to take her back to England with you. My wife and I would miss her terribly.’
‘Naw, I’m going to be here awhile,’ Stanley promised. ‘America’s the fastest-growing market in’t cutlery trade and we’ll most likely set up home near Albany.’
‘And you think you can keep my daughter and any children you might have in comfort with your earnings from this business?’
Stanley launched into a speech about profit margins and the potential growth of the company, and Dmitri stopped concentrating. He wasn’t sure what Marta saw in this man, who was no more than average-looking, but perhaps she liked the foreignness of him. When he discussed it with Rosa later, she said he treated Marta like a princess but Dmitri couldn’t see how. At any rate, the marriage went ahead, in a church in Albany, followed by a reception for eighty guests in a swish restaurant. After the meal, a swing band played and everyone crowded onto the tiny dance floor. Dmitri and Rosa held each other and swayed to the unfamiliar beat.
‘We’ve done our duty as parents.’ She smiled. ‘Now I look forward to being a grandma.’
The thought hadn’t even occurred to Dmitri and when he considered it he felt sad that he and Tatiana had not been able to have a child together. His direct bloodline would continue into the future but Nicholas and Alexandra’s would not.
Just after Marta’s wedding, Dmitri’s dog, Malevich, fell ill. His belly swelled up and he was in obvious pain, pressing his head against the wall and whimpering. A vet was called, who told them the liver had failed and there was nothing he could do. Dmitri held Malevich’s head in his hands, looking into those trusting brown eyes, as the vet administered a fatal injection. Once the dog stopped breathing he put his arms around him and sobbed into his coat. His head filled with images of all the friends he had lost, of his parents, of Tatiana’s family. He thought of the concentration camps where many German friends had died; of the hard-labour camps in Siberia. Why was life so relentlessly brutal, just one challenge after another? Why did evil so frequently triumph?
For a while it seemed as though losing Malevich, the dog who had alleviated his depression at the onset of war, would tip Dmitri into another full-scale episode. The old symptoms returned: a feeling of uselessness, believing that there was no point in getting out of bed, or dressing or shaving. Senator Joe McCarthy’s Subcommittee hearings to root out Communism had begun to take on the repressive nature of the very ideology they opposed and Dmitri feared he might be forced to leave America, the land that had become home. He went to Tatiana’s house two or three times a week but was taciturn and moody with her. When she tried to make him talk about it, he growled at her to leave him alone and she shrank back, unprepared for this new side of him.
But Rosa knew what to do. About a month after Malevich’s death, Dmitri came home to find a Borzoi puppy scrabbling round the kitchen floor on unsteady legs. It leapt up at him, licking his outstretched hand, eager to make friends. The puppy’s coat was white with brown patches and it was only a few weeks old. He looked questioningly at Rosa.
‘It’s a girl.’ She smiled. ‘But she’s not house-trained yet so we’re going to have our work cut out!’
He crouched and let her lick his face as he ran his hands over the silky coat. ‘Let’s call her Trina,’ he said. ‘She looks like a Trina.’ In his mind, he was thinking of the ladies’ maid who used to take messages between Tatiana and him when she was under house arrest.
Tatiana was charmed when she met Trina, and pleased at the name Dmitri had chosen.
‘I wonder what became of Trina?’ she mused. ‘I hope she found a good husband.’
Dmitri didn’t like to tell her it was unlikely. Most of the Romanovs’ staff had been imprisoned and several were executed by the Bolshevik regime.
One sunny September day, when Rosa had told him she would be out until dinnertime, he and Tatiana drove up to the lakes to take Trina for a long walk. Dmitri stopped at a remote spot on the shore of Lake Akanabee and Trina ran into the water, taking to it instinctively. She never tired of swimming for the sticks they threw, bringing them back and soaking the two of them as she shook the water from her coat. They laughed to remember their failed efforts to train Ortipo back in St Petersburg; this Trina seemed either more intelligent or just more obedient than Ortipo had ever been.
The sun had already set when Dmitri dropped Tatiana back at her cottage and drove home, his forehead pink from the sun. He was late for dinner and hoped Rosa wouldn’t mind.
‘Sorry, darling,’ he called as he came in the kitchen door. ‘I was walking Trina and lost count of the time.’
Rosa was sitting at the table, her head in her hands, and he could tell she had been crying.