They followed her to the cabin door, carefully wiping their feet before entering. Kitty lit the gas stove.
‘I’m sorry I only have one chair,’ she told them. ‘You’re my first guests. I’ve been here a month doing up the cabin. I recently inherited it.’
‘You didn’t tell your husband you were coming?’ One of the policemen did the talking while the other wandered round examining the work she’d done patching the walls.
She turned away to spoon instant coffee into cups. ‘I decided I needed a break. He’d been cheating on me.’
‘So you’re teaching him a lesson?’
‘No.’ Kitty shook her head. ‘I couldn’t decide what to do, and I wanted to see if I could rescue this cabin, so it fell into place.’
‘Looks like you’ve done a good job here – but you should let your husband know you’re safe. He thought you might have done something stupid …’
Kitty frowned. ‘You mean suicide? Tom knows me better than that …’ Her voice trailed off. Did he? Could he really have believed she might have killed herself over Karren with the double ‘r’? That implied a level of arrogance she hadn’t thought him capable of.
‘He’s gone to a lot of trouble to find you, so he must be pretty torn up.’
Kitty considered this. Tom was torn up? Well, good! But still she couldn’t face talking to him and listening to all the pathetic excuses he was bound to come up with. ‘I don’t suppose you could pass on a message that I’m safe, and that I’m staying here for the rest of the summer? But please don’t give him the address. I don’t want him turning up.’
‘Why? Is he violent?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not that.’
They looked at each other, and the talkative one pursed his lips before replying. ‘You’re awfully isolated out here. You sure you don’t want him to visit?’
She tried to picture Tom at the cabin, but it felt wrong. The cabin was hers, not his. And, as her panic attack the other day showed, she wasn’t ready to talk to him, not yet. She was acting instinctively, protecting herself from further pain, and when she felt strong enough she would get in touch. ‘I’ll call him, but not yet. I apologise for taking up your time. I’m sure you’ve got far more important things to do.’
‘No, ma’am. It’s pretty quiet out here. The odd car accident, a few DUIs … we’re not a crime hotspot. If you’re sure that’s what you want, we’ll email the police back in England and tell them you’re fine. Thanks for the coffee.’
They looked around for somewhere to put their cups. Kitty smiled and took them. The officers paused for a moment peering out the cabin door, waiting for a lull in which to dash to the car without getting soaked, but no let-up appeared to be on the way.
‘Keep safe, ma’am,’ they called as they ran out into the downpour. She waved from the porch then came indoors and sat on the bedding roll, hugging her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth. How stupid Tom was! He’d be lucky not to get charged with wasting police time. He must have guessed where she’d gone before they tracked her credit card use … he just hated the fact that he couldn’t control this situation.
In a flash of insight, Kitty realised they had slipped into a pattern in which Tom always made the decisions in the marriage. Perhaps it was because he was the one with the regular salary. He decided which holidays they could afford or when they needed new cars. He had wanted to move to Crouch End, a smart middle-class area, even though it meant all the profit she had made on property developing, as well as her inheritance from her parents, was swallowed up. She would have been quite happy staying in the multi-cultural whirl of Turnpike Lane, but Tom thought the crime rate was going up and the final straw came when his car window was smashed in an attempted theft.
It hadn’t been like that in the early days when money was scarce. Holidays had been spur-of-the-moment, and they never booked package tours – simply got a cheap flight to Bangkok or Mumbai and travelled around by local transport, finding basic accommodation in beach huts or rooms in villages where tourists were a rarity. Suddenly she remembered the delicious smell of the fresh tea growing in the mountains of southern India, where they had stayed in a tiny hostel. They’d hiked in the hills by day and sat outside in the dusk eating mango and chatting with local people who passed on their way home from the fields. She remembered the day Tom saved her life by throwing a well-placed stone when a black snake appeared on the grass beside where she was sitting. She remembered the scent of the garland of white jasmine he bought from a street seller for a few pennies and placed around her neck. She remembered how they used to talk and talk and never run out of conversation, endlessly fascinated to hear each other’s point of view. What had happened to that?
Something in Dmitri Yakovlevich’s last novel came into her head: a male character ponders why his relationship is so different twenty years down the line; the dynamic has changed, the power base has shifted. And he realises that as his own position in life has changed, it has skewed the way he views his partner. Kitty mused on this. Tom was not a dictator. She had let him drift into becoming the one who took responsibility for mortgages, cars and holidays. He hadn’t taken the power – she had given it up. She didn’t like making decisions of that sort because she found them stressful – it was easier not to take the risk of what her mother deemed ‘failure’ – and by default had slipped into a role that was almost like that of a child. It was an interesting theory, and the more she thought about it the more true she realised it was. She had been coasting along, not being a full partner in the marriage. Perhaps Tom would have liked her to pull her weight more.
Of course, none of this excused the fact that he had been unfaithful to her. She was still furious when she thought about that. Was she punishing him with her silence? Probably. But the main obstacle was that when she thought about calling or even emailing him, she began to feel panicky. It brought up such a host of anxieties – about money, security, family, what she was doing with her life – that she had to shut the lid on the box quickly and busy herself with something else.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tobolsk, Siberia, 6th August 1917
Malama sweetheart,
We have arrived in Tobolsk, after a long journey by train and then steamer. How remote and strange this countryside is: flat and marshy, with swarms of insects and wide open skies. I’m told it is only possible to reach here in the summer months because as soon as winter sets in the river freezes and no traffic can get in or out. Perhaps this is why they chose to send us here: shut away and forgotten, where Papa can cause no political problems for the new government.
We are staying on the steamer for now because the Governor’s House, where we are to be accommodated, was recently used as a barracks and is in desperate need of cleaning and refitting. We are able to walk around the town and I have found the people curious but friendly. Everyone asks why we girls have short hair, thinking it is some new fashion in St Petersburg, and they don’t know what to say when I tell them the real reason, that we have been ill.
I will mail this letter quickly in the hope that you will come to join us in this little hamlet. I wish I could say more to recommend it, but as you know we will make the most of it. I require little to make me happy: merely to know that my family – and that includes you – are safe and well.
Tenderest love from Your T
The letter reached Dmitri in Tsarskoe Selo two weeks later and he went straight to Malevich’s lodgings. Rather than reveal the truth he told him he had heard from some contacts about the Romanovs’ latest location.