The Secret Wife(97)

She seemed to have thought it all through, Dmitri mused. Perhaps women understood these matters better. He found the whole idea of the deception abhorrent. It certainly didn’t come naturally to him.

He followed Tatiana’s instructions and found her a two-bedroom cottage in Buckingham Lake, just walking distance from his rug import office but on the opposite side of town from their home and the area where most of Rosa’s friends and her mother and sister lived. He opened a bank account for her and put in plenty of money so she could furnish the cottage and buy all that she needed in the way of clothes and household goods.



Back at the hotel they had lunch together and talked about the translation of Interminable Love, which she was keen to start. To anyone watching from the outside, they could have been two old friends. But after lunch they went up to her hotel room and made love, still discovering each other, still overwhelmed by the force of their feelings for each other after thirty years apart. While in her arms, Dmitri didn’t think of Rosa once.

He pulled up in his driveway at six o’clock, the time he would have got home from a day at the office, and Malevich came limping out to greet him.

‘Are you OK?’ Rosa asked as he kissed her in greeting. ‘I called the office and they said you hadn’t been in.’

Dmitri picked up the mail from the kitchen table, knowing he would be unable to look her in the eye while telling an outright lie. ‘I had a long meeting with a wholesaler. He took me for lunch.’ He tore open an envelope but stared without focus at the letter inside, while he waited to see if Rosa had any more questions.

‘It’s chicken supreme for dinner,’ she said. ‘Nicholas called to say he’ll come home on Friday evening and he’ll stay till Sunday. I hope Marta can come too but you know what her social calendar is like! We’ll be lucky if she can squeeze us in for a lunch.’ She laughed, proud of her gregarious daughter.

‘Good. Well, that will be nice.’ Dmitri seemed to have got away with it this time but he was useless at dissembling. This is where the arrangement would fail: he had never been good at telling lies. Rosa had believed his excuse today but what about next time? And the time after that? Would Tatiana become impatient if she didn’t see enough of him? He realised Rosa was talking and he wasn’t listening because his head was full of the problem of loving two women and not wanting to hurt either of them.



It was relatively simple on a practical level for Dmitri to see Tatiana on weekdays. He could slip out of the office, ostensibly for a meeting, or use the time when Rosa had engagements: she volunteered at the local hospital, attended a weekly flower-arranging class, and often went for coffee with friends. At weekends, he could use the excuse of taking the dog for a long walk, but more than once his plans were thwarted when Nicholas or Rosa decided to accompany him.

Dmitri usually drove to Tatiana’s cottage in his Lincoln Continental Cabriolet. Physically, he could be there in ten minutes, but it was harder to make the mental adjustment from one woman to another because he was a different man with each. With Tatiana he discussed literature, politics and history, while with Rosa he talked of their children and mutual acquaintances and they laughed at lot. He was utterly besotted by Tatiana, just as he had been in the old days – she was the creature of his fantasies, his great love – but sometimes when he was with her he found himself thinking of Rosa’s indomitable cheerfulness. When he was at home with Rosa and his thoughts turned to Tatiana he flushed to the roots of his hair at the strength of his feelings. Rosa had been a wonderful mother and companion but she would never be his soulmate; she would never totally understand him because she did not share his Russian heritage.

Tatiana was different from her teenage self. She seemed strong and self-reliant now, quite content with her own company. She never asked that he visit her more frequently but was always pleased to see him when he arrived. There was no sign of her making friends in the neighbourhood; she seemed to live a solitary life when he was not around, working on the translation of his novel or cultivating her garden. She had furnished the cottage in a simple, functional style, devoting all her creative energy into growing vegetables, herbs and flowers in the little twenty-foot by twenty-foot yard out back. He was surprised to find that she could cook now.

‘Do you remember when you were learning to make bread?’ he asked. ‘I was shocked that a grand duchess should have to do such a thing.’



‘That was in Tobolsk …’ Her voice trailed off and a haunted look came into her eyes. Dmitri knew she was thinking of her family.

‘I have your diary,’ he said. ‘The one you left in my cottage. Would you like to see it?’

‘Never.’ She shuddered. ‘No.’

‘And I still have the waistcoat you knitted for me that Christmas,’ he told her, ‘but it is a little snug around my middle.’

‘I have done a lot of knitting since then,’ she said, ‘and made my own wool too. We kept sheep.’

She let slip odd facts from time to time and he stored them up, putting the pieces together. Still there was much she wouldn’t talk about – the night she disappeared from the cottage, how she got back to Czechoslovakia, her dead son Jaroslev – but he would never push her. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, at least not for a while. He was still trying to find his balance in this strange seesaw life he had created.