The Secret Wife(75)
What would you advise me to do, Mum? she asked in her head, and knew straight away that her mother would tell her to go back to Tom and work things out. ‘I won’t have a divorcee in my family,’ she would have said. ‘The shame of it!’
They’d only been in their fifties when they died, after a coach careered through the central reservation of a Spanish motorway. A postcard had arrived a week later, full of holiday joie de vivre; her dad writing about his guilt when picking a lobster from the tank in a restaurant, and her mum commenting that its colour when cooked matched her dad’s sunburn. By that time, Tom was helping her to organise their funeral. All those awful decisions to be made: What clothes do you want to wear to be cremated, Mum? Tom, bless him, had taken care of the legalities of the estate, of clearing and selling the family home where Kitty had grown up, while she – what exactly had she done? She couldn’t remember now, except that as soon as the money came through she bought the Tottenham house and launched herself into a year of keeping busy.
She found herself chatting to her parents in her head while she worked on the cabin. Sometimes she even spoke out loud. Why did no one tell me about Dmitri, Mum? Did you ever meet your grandfather? Did Marta tell you about him? What was he like? There was no one to answer that now. Death was too final; she’d missed her chance.
Kitty had run out of plants so she made a trip to the garden centre for more, and on the way back she stopped at the vacation park coffeehouse. Tom knew she had received his parcel and would be waiting for a reply but she wasn’t sure what to say. Perhaps the words would come to her.
She charged her laptop but instead of going straight to her email folder, she found herself looking up Karren Bayliss on Facebook. The only reason she hadn’t done so before was because she hadn’t known the surname, and now she did, she was astounded. The image on Tom’s phone hadn’t been very clear but she realised Karren looked for all the world like an inflatable sex doll: her profile picture showed huge breasts on display in a low-cut top like plump cuts on a butcher’s slab; brown hair with blonde tiger stripes painted through it; inches-long black eyelashes; swollen lips and a fake tan the colour of butterscotch. It was impossible to think of a physical type less like her. What had he been thinking of?
Kitty almost felt like sending him a sarcastic email about his lack of taste, but that wasn’t the way forward. She glanced through her inbox and replied to a few friends. There was a message from Random House in New York apologising for the delay in answering her query due to staff holidays. Kitty remembered that Dmitri’s Berlin publisher was a company called Slowo; the name appeared on the copyright page of his books. She googled Slowo and found they had been started in Berlin in 1920 by a man named Joseph Gessen, and that they also published Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nabokov, as well as producing a Russian-language newspaper for émigrés known as Rul. There had recently been an exhibition about immigrant publishers in Berlin and she was able to find Dmitri’s name in a list of authors, along with a short biography saying that he was a journalist for Rul. How strange that both she and her great-grandfather had the same profession; perhaps it was in their genes.
It took some searching but Kitty eventually found an article by Dmitri in the Rul archives. It was in Russian but she used Google translate and was able to make out from the stilted text that Dmitri had interviewed Princess Irene of Hesse shortly after she went to visit a girl called Anna Tschaikovsky, who was claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. This puzzled Kitty: the article was written in 1923, and the Romanovs had been murdered in 1918. How could an imposter hope to deceive family members only five years later? She googled Anna Tschaikovsky next and found several long articles about her. It seemed the remaining Romanov family had been split into two camps, with some believing the claimant while others were adamant she was not Anastasia. In photos she looked plausibly similar.
Of course, Kitty remembered, in 1923 the world didn’t yet know about the fate of the Romanovs. It was the following year when White Army investigator Nicholas Sokolov published his report concluding that the family had all been killed in the Ipatiev House. He had found witnesses who told of the blood-soaked basement scarred by bullet holes and frenzied knife thrusts, and had taken photographs of personal possessions found in a burnt-out mineshaft. Even after that, rumours persisted that one or more of the children had escaped. Anna Tschaikovsky maintained her story and it led to lawsuits that were only settled after her death when a DNA sample found she had been a Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanzkowska. Why did so many people believe in her? Kitty imagined it was because the truth – that all the royal children were slaughtered – was too horrific to contemplate.
In his article, Dmitri seemed sure that Anna Tschaikovsky was not Anastasia, and he speculated on the reasons why the poor woman lingering in a Berlin hospital bed might keep up such a bizarre pretence. He suggested that maybe something terrible had happened in her previous life, and she was sublimating the memory by assuming a new identity. The psyche was so deep and mysterious that he guessed she had come to believe the story herself. ‘People can persuade themselves of virtually anything,’ he wrote, ‘as we have learned through the writings of Messrs Freud and Jung.’
Kitty’s thoughts turned to Tom again. Would she have been more upset if he had chosen a mistress who resembled her? Wouldn’t that mean he was trying to replace her? What was he doing choosing someone who clearly offered sex on a plate?