The Secret Wife(78)
Rosa gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Dmitri looked at her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I can feel the top of the uterus. In my opinion the pregnancy is more than twelve weeks along.’
Rosa still had a hand over her mouth but Dmitri could see from her eyes that she was delighted, and he smiled reassurance at her, although he felt shell-shocked. His first reaction was panic: he couldn’t have a child with Rosa; he would be tied to her then. Tatiana would be devastated if she found him and discovered he had a child with another woman. She might divorce him. But what could he do? He had no choice in the matter.
Dmitri followed the doctor outside to pay him. As he counted the notes, the doctor said: ‘Your wife should rest and eat well. No more nightclubs.’
‘She’s not my wife. I’m already married so it is rather a delicate situation …’
The doctor gave him a sharp, unfriendly look. ‘You’ve got yourself into rather a mess, sir. I hope you will behave with decency.’
Shamefaced, Dmitri called a taxi to take Rosa home.
‘Isn’t it strange?’ she exclaimed as they sat in the back seat, Dmitri’s arm around her. ‘I had no idea. I thought I had put on a little weight, that’s all. Do you think it might be a girl or a boy?’
Dmitri shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘I would prefer a boy so he could grow up just like you.’ She seemed nervous. She always talked too much when she was nervous. ‘If the doctor is right about it being twelve weeks, then he will arrive in May next year. That would be lovely – just in time for the summer. You don’t mind about this, do you, darling?’
‘It’s still a bit of a shock,’ he admitted.
‘Yes, for me too. I didn’t think we had taken any risks.’ Dmitri usually withdrew when Rosa was in the fertile part of her monthly cycle. ‘And I hadn’t noticed that I had missed my monthlies. But now it has happened … it will take some getting used to but do you think you will be happy?’
‘Give me a little time to get used to the idea,’ Dmitri said, but he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze.
‘We’ll need a bigger apartment,’ she continued. ‘Not straight away but our son will need a bedroom of his own …’
Dmitri laughed. ‘You are convinced he is a boy, even though you knew nothing of his existence until a couple of hours ago!’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It’s strange, but I am.’
Back in the apartment he helped her into bed then climbed in beside her and switched off the light.
In the darkness, Rosa asked timidly: ‘Dmitri, could we please get married before the baby comes? It would mean so much … And my family will ask …’
‘I can’t,’ he told her gently. ‘I’m already married.’
‘Yes, to a ghost,’ she said sadly. ‘How can I ever compete with that?’
Chapter Forty-Five
Berlin, 1925
The baby was a healthy boy, with sandy blonde hair, blue eyes and Russian bone structure. He looked remarkably similar to Dmitri’s father.
‘What would you like to call him?’ Rosa asked, unable to take her eyes off him as he sucked greedily at her breast. She was blooming, her cheeks pink and her short hair lustrous. Dmitri had been worried that neither of them would know what to do with a baby, but straight away Rosa seemed to have an instinct for motherhood. She was so calm that the child stopped crying the instant he was snuggled in her arms.
‘I like the name Nicholas,’ he said. ‘How about you?’
‘Nicholas is lovely!’ she cried. ‘Do you mean after your tsar?’
‘No, our tsar was a fool. I just like the way the syllables fall from the tongue. Nich-o-las.’
Rosa had found a crib for the boy and arranged his things in the corner of their bedroom. She sang as she rocked him to sleep, or changed his nappy, or played with him on the rug; it was obvious she was happy. She had given up asking Dmitri to marry her but only insisted that he buy her a ring so that people thought them married, and to that he consented.
After the birth, he had planned to take his typewriter to a café on the corner to work without interruption, but found that he liked being at home, with the babble of their voices in the next room and the smell of his lunch bubbling on the stove. Rosa was careful not to disturb him while he was working: as well as continuing to write articles for Rul he had started a new novel.
Like his first novel, Exile had elements of autobiography: the main character was haunted by a terrible act he had committed in his past, before being banished from his homeland, and living a shadowy half-life, unable to forget. Dmitri analysed the experience of being a stranger in a foreign land, with a culture quite different from his own, and concluded that in many ways it was liberating. In Berlin he could reinvent himself outside the strict rules of Russian society. Had his father been alive, he would never have been able to become a writer; he would have been expected to pursue a military career all the way to the top, amassing medals as he went. And yet, he still felt a sense of dislocation, as though he was leading someone else’s life. Not being fluent in German annoyed him; somehow he couldn’t get to grips with the staccato rhythms of the language. And his relationship with Rosa still felt temporary; she was someone to keep him company until Tatiana returned. Even with the baby he couldn’t shake that feeling, although he knew it was unfair to Rosa.