The Secret Wife(61)
Kitty closed the book and stood up. She needed to drive into town before the stores closed as she’d run out of wine. The quantity she was drinking had sneaked up during her stay until she was polishing off a bottle of a rather pleasant Californian Chardonnay every evening. Chilled in the water beneath the jetty, it slipped down like lemonade after a long day in the sun. She never had a hangover so reckoned her body could cope with that amount. Everyone knew those government guidelines were ridiculously cautious.
In the supermarket, she decided to buy a case of wine – twelve bottles in all – to save her having to come back so often.
‘You having a party tonight?’ the checkout girl asked, and Kitty smiled and said, ‘Yes, something like that.’
In the early hours of the morning Kitty woke abruptly from a nightmare. All she could remember of it was the presence of something dark and evil in a house where she was trapped, possibly as a prisoner, although she never saw her gaolers.
She lay, heart beating hard, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness, when suddenly she became aware of a faint movement in the far corner of the cabin. Terror gripped her. She pulled herself to a sitting position and groped for a box of matches. She couldn’t hear any sounds now except the ones she was making, but it still felt as though something was in the room with her. The thought crossed her mind that it could be Dmitri’s ghost, then she shook herself. Stupid girl. No such thing as ghosts. She struck a match but her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t get the wick of the oil lamp to take the flame and had to strike a second one.
A pool of flickering light spread round the room and she looked into the corner where she had been convinced she heard a noise: nothing but bare wood. She stood up, back to the wall, peering round and listening hard. She was covered in a film of sweat, her hand still shaking, so the lamplight shifted and swung.
Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something coming towards her. She screamed and almost dropped the lamp in panic before realising it was a large white moth, drawn to the light. Its wings flapped and it smacked against the glass of the lamp. Instantly Kitty realised that was the sound she had heard earlier in the darkness; it must have flown into a window.
‘You idiot!’ she whispered, still feeling shaken. She walked across the floor and opened the cabin door, placing the lamp on the porch so the moth would follow it out. The night air was cool and she padded barefoot down to the water’s edge, feeling the sweat evaporating on her skin. There was just a sliver of moon among hosts of faraway stars in an ink-black sky, and the water and trees were utterly still. An owl hooted, breaking the silence.
Suddenly there was a loud, distinctive rustling in the trees to one side of the cabin, and the terror returned. Kitty rushed to the end of the jetty, ready to dive into the lake if a wild animal ran out. What creatures might there be? Most likely it was a deer, she told herself. They wouldn’t have bears or wolves by the lake – or would they?
She crouched on the end of the jetty, scanning the forest, alert for any further rustling sounds. The distance to her cabin door seemed huge. Something might pounce on her as she crossed the space. Her heart was racing. What if she were mauled to death by a wild animal out there miles from anywhere? It would be days before her body was found. She would die alone, in pain and terror. She hoped at least it would be quick, unlike the gruesome deaths of the Romanovs.
A morbid mood descended as she crouched beneath the vast twinkling sky. What difference would her death make? Tom would miss her. So would a few friends. But she had left no mark on the world. The Romanovs had their place in history, Dmitri left behind his novels and his descendants, but she had produced no children, hadn’t achieved anything of note. She had never felt so insignificant as she did at that moment.
Why had she not written a book yet? This summer by the lake would have been an ideal time but she hadn’t produced a single word. Writing was hard work and while she could force herself to do it when there was money on offer and a deadline to meet, she couldn’t imagine how authors slaved for hundreds of hours without pay, on the off-chance they might one day get published. Perhaps she simply wasn’t good enough. Maybe those with a genuine gift felt they had no choice but to write.
But if she wasn’t a writer, what was she? What talents did she have? She thought of her mother’s wish that she should study law and shuddered. That would never have worked. She had chosen journalism because English was her best subject at school, not because of any burning desire to communicate the truth or any of those worthy reasons real journalists have. Perhaps she was simply lazy, as her mum had always said. Good for nothing. Useless.
I suppose this is what they call a ‘long dark night of the soul’, she mused once her heart had stopped racing. There had been no further rustlings in the trees so she hoped whatever creature had been there had moved on. She decided to make a run for the cabin, slam the door and crawl back into bed.
As she stood up, the wood of the jetty was smooth and even beneath her feet.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Urals, Russia, September–December 1918
Every night as he lay in his bedding roll on the hard earth, Dmitri tortured himself with thoughts of the terror Tatiana must have felt when the cottage door was hacked down, the shouting, the rough handling she might have endured. He was still in shock about her disappearance.
Malevich was convinced the family were being held in Bolshevik territory to the west of the mountains, and Dmitri prayed he was right and that Tatiana was with them, but he felt sick to his stomach imagining alternative scenarios.