On the way back on the train, as the children slept on their laps, Rosa asked him a question that had obviously been on her mind: ‘Would you go back to Russia if the Communists were overthrown?’
He frowned. ‘It’s not going to happen in my lifetime. They are too firmly entrenched.’ He realised from her disappointed expression this wasn’t the answer she wanted.
‘But if they were to fall? What would happen to me and your children?’
‘Rosa, I will always look after you. I promise. You have nothing to fear.’
She was playing with the ring on her wedding finger, about to say more, but instead she turned with an almost imperceptible sigh to look out of the window. Suddenly Dmitri saw the situation from her point of view and realised he was treating her appallingly. She loved him, she had borne him two children, and still he was not committing himself to her. It wasn’t fair.
‘Wherever I go, you three will come with me. You are my family,’ he said, and meant it.
Rosa grinned and leaned over to kiss him, carefully, without waking the babes. Deep down Dmitri felt uneasy. What if Tatiana came back? But then a voice said, ‘What if she doesn’t?’ He had made a life, albeit by default rather than choice, and now he must stick with it.
Chapter Forty-Six
Lake Akanabee, New York State, 1st October 2016
The 30th of September was warm and sunny but a cold front swept in overnight and Kitty woke to a chilly, overcast morning on the 1st of October, almost as if the weather was following the calendar. She thought she had been pretty thorough with her repairs, but draughts mysteriously found their way in, making it hard to warm up when she came out of the cold shower. How had Dmitri survived here in winter? He must have been very hardy.
Did Rosa stay with him? Did the children visit? She had found out a few things about his life in Berlin but virtually nothing about what they did in America, apart from the date of their arrival: June 1934.
Kitty had to go to Indian Lake for food and on the way she stopped at the vacation park coffeehouse.
‘Only two weeks until we close for winter,’ Jeff told her. ‘You’re my first customer today and I don’t expect there will be many more.’
‘I’m only here till the fourteenth,’ Kitty told him. ‘But I’ll be back next year. When do you open again?’
‘Easter. It can still be snowing, but we get some hardy souls who venture out.’
Kitty plugged in her laptop and sipped her coffee. She had hit a brick wall researching Dmitri so she decided to see what she could find about Rosa Liebermann through her genealogy site. Straight away she found that she had lived in the Albany area after her arrival in the US, that she served on the Parent-Teacher Association at the high school and volunteered at the hospital. Her mother and sister had come over from Germany in 1936 and lived nearby. She supposed that Dmitri and Rosa must have discovered Lake Akanabee while living in Albany. Were they outdoorsy types?
She remembered Bob saying that he had never seen anyone with Dmitri: no woman, no children. And there was the mystery about why no one had been able to contact the children when he died. Had they divorced and the children took their mother’s side? Kitty searched but could find no record of a divorce.
It was easier to find information about her great-uncle Nicholas, who had moved to California at the age of thirty and got work at a winery in Sonoma Valley. He’d married a Californian girl but they didn’t have any children and she was shocked to read that he died in 1970, before Kitty was born. He’d only been forty-five years old. Kitty vaguely remembered Grandma Marta saying how close they had been as children and how much she missed him when he was gone. They used to have little chats when Marta came to stay over to let Kitty’s mum and dad go out for the evening. Kitty would crawl into her grandmother’s bed in the morning, smelling the familiar old-lady smell of talcum powder and gawping at her teeth in the glass by the bed.
Marta had moved to Britain in the late 50s and Kitty assumed she had come for love, because she married a Sheffield businessman. Kitty’s mum, Elizabeth, had been born in 1960, an only child, and had Kitty in 1981. So the family was geographically spread out, but she couldn’t understand why the police had been unable to find any of them when Dmitri died in 1986. Didn’t he have an address book, for goodness’ sake?
Kitty asked Jeff for another coffee and opened her email folder. The usual rush of messages popped up one after another. Tom, Tom, friends, spam, Tom, Amber, Tom … Random House New York. Kitty clicked to open the Random House message.
Dear Ms Fisher,
I am afraid there are no editors remaining here who knew your great-grandfather Dmitri Yakovlevich but I can see from the historical accounts that he was a much-valued, very successful Knopf author from the 1930s through to the 1970s. My intern found some of his old manuscripts in our archives and, if you would like to have them, we’d be happy to send them on.
I haven’t read any of his works yet but plan to have a look at In the Pale Light of Dawn and Toward the Sunset as soon as I can find the time. I warn you that there is not much demand for reprints of 1940s novels unless there are special circumstances but I will approach them with an open mind.
Many thanks for getting in touch.
All best wishes, Rebecca Wicks
It was nice to feel that Dmitri’s work was appreciated, even though his contemporaries had moved on. She would like to see those manuscripts but couldn’t decide where to have them sent. She could give the address in London’s Crouch End but what if she never lived there again? A tight band of panic encircled her chest as she thought about renting a flat, getting a job and starting her adult life from scratch. That wasn’t what she wanted.
Suddenly she began to type an email to Tom, the words flowing, fingers dashing across the keyboard:
Dear Tom,
I have read and considered your letter but have to tell you that the last thing in the world I want to do is to sit in a dingy consulting room with some smarmy counsellor telling us what’s wrong with our relationship! You knew when you married me that I tend to avoid emotional confrontation; it’s part of who I am and I am not about to change.
Anyway, how did this come to be about my shortcomings? You are the one who committed the marital faux-pas of dipping your pen in another woman’s inkwell. I’d like to throw this discussion right back at you and ask first of all whether you want an open marriage? If you don’t, how can you convince me that you would never do this again, either with Ms Karren Bayliss or some other woman? What if you miss out on a promotion at another job? What if you even get sacked? I don’t know how this works but perhaps you have concocted some plan in your therapy sessions. (Please spare me the counsellor-speak in your reply.)
I will be back in London in a couple of weeks and I suppose we should meet to talk. I don’t feel quite ready to see you yet but …