He crouched and let her lick his face as he ran his hands over the silky coat. ‘Let’s call her Trina,’ he said. ‘She looks like a Trina.’ In his mind, he was thinking of the ladies’ maid who used to take messages between Tatiana and him when she was under house arrest.
Tatiana was charmed when she met Trina, and pleased at the name Dmitri had chosen.
‘I wonder what became of Trina?’ she mused. ‘I hope she found a good husband.’
Dmitri didn’t like to tell her it was unlikely. Most of the Romanovs’ staff had been imprisoned and several were executed by the Bolshevik regime.
One sunny September day, when Rosa had told him she would be out until dinnertime, he and Tatiana drove up to the lakes to take Trina for a long walk. Dmitri stopped at a remote spot on the shore of Lake Akanabee and Trina ran into the water, taking to it instinctively. She never tired of swimming for the sticks they threw, bringing them back and soaking the two of them as she shook the water from her coat. They laughed to remember their failed efforts to train Ortipo back in St Petersburg; this Trina seemed either more intelligent or just more obedient than Ortipo had ever been.
The sun had already set when Dmitri dropped Tatiana back at her cottage and drove home, his forehead pink from the sun. He was late for dinner and hoped Rosa wouldn’t mind.
‘Sorry, darling,’ he called as he came in the kitchen door. ‘I was walking Trina and lost count of the time.’
Rosa was sitting at the table, her head in her hands, and he could tell she had been crying.
‘What is it?’ he asked, alarmed. Rosa never cried.
She took a deep breath. ‘I found a lump in my breast a few weeks ago. I didn’t like to worry you because I was sure it was nothing but I saw the doctor today and he says I have breast cancer. I have to start treatment straight away.’
Dmitri sat down hard on a chair, the breath knocked out of him. ‘You should have told me.’
‘You were depressed. I didn’t want to add to it. But I’m going to need you to be strong now, Dmitri. Is that OK?’
He got up to put his arms around her, careful not to touch her breasts. He wondered which one the cancer was in, but didn’t like to ask.
‘Of course it is. How could you ever doubt it?’
She rested her head on his arm, eyes closed, and didn’t reply.
Two days later, Dmitri accompanied Rosa to her appointment with the doctor who was treating her, Dr Eisenberg. He was a bald man with freckles all over his shiny head, and he wore heavy black-rimmed glasses and a dark suit and tie. His manner was businesslike.
‘I am recommending a radical mastectomy of the left breast, as is standard procedure. We’ll remove all the breast tissue, the lymph nodes and part of the muscle of the chest wall. That should excise all the cancer cells but as a precaution we’ll follow it up with a course of radiation therapy, which we’ll start as soon as the wound has healed sufficiently.’ His tone sounded as though he was reading from a textbook. He looked up. ‘Any questions?’
‘Yes,’ Dmitri said. ‘When will you operate? How long will Rosa be in hospital?’
‘I have her booked in for next Monday, and I would expect her to stay with us at least a week.’
‘And the radiation? How long will that last?’
‘Twelve weeks is standard.’
Dmitri counted in his head. ‘So she could be cured by Christmas?’
The doctor sighed, almost imperceptibly. ‘We don’t talk about a cure, Mr …’ – he consulted his notes – ‘Yakovlevich. We talk about being in remission. And I’m afraid Christmas is a little optimistic.’
He talked on and Dmitri listened hard, latching on to anything that sounded optimistic and memorising the phrases so he could reassure Rosa with them later, reassure himself: ‘state-of-the-art technology’, ‘gold-standard therapy’, ‘I’d recommend the same for my own mother’.
That evening they telephoned Nicholas and Marta to tell them the news, one after the other, and both insisted they were coming home to help look after their mother.
Rosa protested a little but gave in with a smile. She wanted her children by her side. Dmitri’s first thought was that it would be difficult for him to slip out to see Tatiana with them there, but immediately he felt ashamed of himself. That was hardly the most important thing.
The operation lasted six hours and Dmitri was shocked to see how ill Rosa looked when she came round afterwards, her chest bandaged like an Egyptian mummy and tubes draining fluid from her sides. It took all her energy to speak, and he ushered the children away after half an hour, realising that she needed to rest. As they walked down the antiseptic-smelling hospital corridor, Dmitri looked at the dusty overhead pipes, the bright lights, the peeling paint on the walls, and knew they were going to become very familiar over the next few months.
That evening they were all invited for dinner with Rosa’s mother and sister but Dmitri cried off, saying he had a headache, and drove to Tatiana’s instead. She took him in her arms and ran her cool fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp.
‘I got a book from the library about cancer,’ she told him. ‘It is important that she eats lots of good food to stay strong. The X-ray treatment is very successful but it will take a lot out of her.’
Somehow it seemed natural that Tatiana should be comforting him during Rosa’s illness, helping him to present a strong front at home. She had never shown any jealousy of Rosa; instead she was curious about her, wanted to see photographs of her, asked about her likes and dislikes, her hobbies and volunteer work. Once she said that if circumstances had been different she would have liked to be Rosa’s friend. That was an odd thought, but Dmitri could imagine they would have got on. Rosa got on with everyone.
Over the weeks and months of her treatment, Dmitri remained positive in front of Rosa and the children, but he was able to express his fears when he went to Tatiana’s. Sometimes he cried when he described to her the agonising burns the radiation caused on Rosa’s already raw flesh. Often he talked through his worries about the side effects: the fatigue, the inability to taste food any more, Rosa’s tortured breathing when she finally managed to get to sleep, and his own sense of helplessness that there was little he could do. She had become so thin that clothes were falling off her so he bought new ones in loose, soft fabrics, garments that could be slipped on and off without aggravating her wounds. He couldn’t bear to watch while she changed or bathed; couldn’t bear to see the jagged line where her left breast had been. He used to love her pert, shapely breasts.
‘It will pass,’ Tatiana told him. ‘Life will go on.’
As the new year of 1955 dawned, it seemed Rosa was in hospital more than she was at home. Things kept going wrong. She grew so tired she could barely get out of bed; her blood counts were poor; she collapsed with a blood clot in her lungs. One day, when Dmitri visited, she clutched his hand suddenly.
‘There is something I must say and I want you to listen.’ She couldn’t raise her head from the pillow but she sought his eyes, forcing them to meet hers before she continued. ‘When I am gone, I don’t want you to feel guilty about anything. I know you torture yourself with guilt for all kinds of things that were never your fault but don’t ever feel guilty about us. Please believe me when I say that I have loved our life together. You have been a good husband – although we never married.’ She gave a little smile.
Tears began to gather in Dmitri’s eyes. ‘Rosa, please don’t talk that way. I want you to fight this thing and get well. You mustn’t give up. We need you.’
She reached for his hand. ‘I don’t think I’m going to beat this, my love. I’m too tired and running out of fight. But I can’t bear to think of you being miserable when I am gone.’ She took a deep breath that made a rattling sound in her throat, then said, ‘Dmitri, I know you found her. I know you found Tatiana. And when I am gone I want you to be together, and I want you both to be happy. Do you promise me you will?’