‘But if she were alive, she would have contacted her family by now. Princess Irene, Grand Duchess Olga … She would have tried to find you.’
Dmitri spoke tetchily. ‘Anything could have happened. You don’t understand how dangerous the Bolsheviks are, even overseas. Just two weeks ago a distant cousin of the Romanovs was shot dead in his Paris apartment.’
Rosa sighed. The cake lay untouched between them. ‘So you are telling me that you will wait until you find out what happened to Tatiana before you marry again? Did you not think I had a right to know this, since we have been lovers for four months, nearly five.’
‘Is it that long?’ Dmitri asked, then instantly realised from her hurt expression that it had been the wrong thing to say. ‘I only meant that it feels so fresh and new. I like being with you, Rosa. We have fun.’
‘But you are married. Thank you for letting me know at last.’
On the way home, he could tell she was trying to shake off her bad mood, telling him some anecdote about the brother of a girl at the café, but he wasn’t listening. He was bitterly disappointed that Anna Tschaikovsky was not Anastasia. It meant he had hit another dead end.
That night, after they made love, Rosa whispered, ‘I love you.’ Dmitri froze, unable to say it back, even casually. Instead he tilted her face to his and kissed her tenderly, hoping that would do.
Afterwards, he lay awake, thinking of Tatiana: her voice, her smile, the way she moved. She still filled his heart so completely there was no room to love anyone else. He didn’t want to lose Rosa, who brought joy and laughter and womanly comfort, but it would be a lie to tell her he loved her.
Chapter Forty-Three
Lake Akanabee, New York State, end of September 2016
In the days after reading Tom’s letter, Kitty tipped into a depression. She could feel it happening and didn’t try to resist because it felt as though it had been brewing for a while. Besides, it matched the climate. Although the days were still warm, she could sense the end of summer, with a sharp breeze in the evening and random leaves turning golden-brown and floating down from the trees. It made her realise that her days there were running out, with just over two weeks left before her flight home.
The contents of Tom’s letter swirled around her head as she worked in the garden she had created. Would it have helped if she had let him comfort her after her parents died? She had chosen the only route that felt manageable: keeping busy. The enormity of the loss had simply been too much to bear. Now her parents filled her thoughts as she dug the soil.
Her dad had been a quiet, undemonstrative man, with a character that was steady and true. She loved the fact that he had treated her the way he would have treated a son: sending her up ladders to help with the guttering, teaching her carpentry skills, assuming she could change a plug from an early age. She could tell when he was proud of her by a secret smile and a faraway look in his eyes. Although they seldom talked about emotions, she always felt he was her ally. A memory came to her of a night before a school exam when she had a classic full-scale panic attack that made her tremble and retch convulsively. Her dad had taken her by the hand and led her out to the back garden, where he set out two deckchairs. They sat side by side in the darkness while he identified the constellations above them – Ursa Major and Minor, Andromeda and Pegasus – until she was calm enough to go to sleep.
Her relationship with her mum had been far more volatile. All the pressure she put on Kitty to succeed had meant they were not close during the difficult teenage years. Her mum fussed too much over Kitty’s health, her finances, and her fashion choices, as well as her exam results. After she left home, there were times when Kitty let the answer machine pick up any calls because she couldn’t face her mother’s critical onslaught. Even now, looking back, she felt cross about the pressure she had been under, although she recognised it had been motivated by love.
‘You needed pushing,’ she heard her mother saying. ‘You and your dad. If you had it your way, you’d both sit around all day whittling pieces of wood.’
She’d been critical of Kitty’s teenage boyfriends but took to Tom straight away, even though he was a struggling musician, which wasn’t her idea of a respectable career. She let him tease her about her exacting standards in a way that no one else got away with. ‘Now, Elizabeth,’ he’d smile, ‘are you sure that flower arrangement is perfectly symmetrical? Shouldn’t the salt cellar be a few millimetres to the left?’ Tom was the only person able to make her laugh at herself; Kitty remembered the pretty sound of her laugh.
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?