The Secret Wife(34)
Dmitri made sure to position himself near the gates of the Alexander Palace from dawn on the 31st. It seemed word of the family’s move had leaked out because there were hundreds of people there, some of them jeering and calling names, others just come to gawp. The disrespect made him very cross, although he understood the desperation of the thousands upon thousands of starving families whose male breadwinner had been killed in the war. He saw an official emerge with a message for the guards and wormed his way close enough to hear that the royal party was being taken out of the west gate of the park on their way to the railway station.
He leapt on his horse and rode at speed to intercept them, arriving at the station just as they were disembarking from a convoy of shiny automobiles. His eyes sought Tatiana amidst the throng and found her at the exact same moment as she spotted him. He touched his fingers to his lips and blew her a discreet kiss and she did the same then folded her hands as if in prayer. Seconds later she had stepped up into a carriage and disappeared. He felt an enveloping sense of emptiness in his core and a foreboding deep within his bones.
Chapter Nineteen
Lake Akanabee, New York State, 12th August 2016
A violent storm swept across the lake one night and the rain woke Kitty at four in the morning, sounding like stones hurled from the heavens as it pelted on the tin roof. She lit her oil lamp and went to the door to watch. Trees were bending sideways in the wind, lightning forked across the lake and her fire pit had already filled with water. At least there didn’t appear to be any leaks in the walls she had patched.
The howling of the storm and the clattering on the roof were so loud she couldn’t get back to sleep, so she opened her great-grandfather’s second novel, Exile. Bob had brought all the novels round a few days earlier, neatly inscribed to him and his wife, Sue. Exile had originally been published in 1927 but this was an American reprint dated 1950. The writing was beautifully lyrical but the story was bleak. It told of a man who had been forced to leave his homeland, for reasons that are never explained. He arrived in a bright city full of corruption, where everyone was trying to sell something: drugs, useless modern gadgets, or themselves. She wondered if this was how Dmitri saw New York then remembered he had not arrived there till 1934. Maybe he was writing about Berlin. The man in the story is haunted by some wrong he has committed in the past. He falls in love with a beautiful woman but is unable to commit to their affair because of the damage to his soul, and in the end she leaves him.
One thing was for sure, Kitty thought, rubbing her eyes: this man understood depression. She’d never read a book that took you so deeply inside the head of a depressive and it was a disturbing experience, which was somehow mirrored by the cataclysmic weather. Dawn was breaking outside with a faint pink glow but still the rain hammered down, bouncing off the sun-parched ground, and the opposite shore of the lake was obscured by low-hanging cloud. Even at eight o’clock it was still so dark that Kitty needed to use her lamp for reading. She decided to drive to the vacation park coffeehouse for a latte and some human company. The novel had put her in a gloomy, introspective mood.
Jeff wasn’t there, but the coffeehouse was full of campers sheltering from the elements. Kitty found a corner and plugged in her laptop to charge, listening to the complaints of the holidaymakers who had hoped to go hiking, canoeing or rafting and instead found themselves with long hours to fill and squabbling children to entertain. The windows misted up with their breath and the loud babble made Kitty feel desperately lonely and, for the first time, homesick. No one paid her any attention as she opened her laptop. First she went to the Guardian website and read about the news back home and the issues that were concerning Guardian readers: government cuts, immigration; the usual stuff.
Her cursor hovered over her email icon and, steeling herself, she clicked to open it. One thousand eight hundred and seventy-five emails were waiting, she was told, and she sipped her latte as they began to flash into her inbox. Tom’s name was prominent among them – the name ‘Tom Fisher, Tom Fisher, Tom Fisher’ flashed past her eyes like strobe lighting – and her chest felt tight. Whatever he had to say, she wasn’t ready to hear it, but she couldn’t help noticing the email headings: ‘I’m so sorry’, ‘Please get in touch’, ‘Urgent – I need to speak to you’, ‘I will always love you’, ‘Please can we talk?’ She let her eye skim down the list but didn’t open any of them. There was a pain in her chest, beneath the ribs on her left side: a hard rock that nagged like a tumour. She tried taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly but the pain persisted. She put her hand over her heart and felt it beating more rapidly than usual and that made her panic. She couldn’t breathe.
Kitty yanked the plug from the wall and closed the laptop, tucking it beneath her arm as she squeezed past the huddle of campers, stepping over backpacks and small children to reach the exit. There was a yell of communal protest when she opened the door, letting in a gust of rain, so she stepped out into the squawl and closed it quickly behind her. She got behind the wheel of the car and pulled out of the car park but her heart was hammering too fast and her breathing was too jagged for her to drive. After a few hundred yards she pulled in to the roadside and bent forward, resting her head on the steering wheel.
What did it mean? Was Tom saying ‘I will always love you but I love Karren as well’? ‘I will always love you but I want a divorce’? What kind of love was he talking about exactly? A month had gone by since that morning when she checked the messages on his mobile phone but she wasn’t ready to hear from Tom yet; that much was obvious. She had been foolish to open the email account. It would take more time before she was able to deal with that situation and all its repercussions. It merely underlined her sense that her marriage had failed, that she had failed.