“Ready to roll?” he asked.
“I think we are,” Tanya replied.
Geoff walked to the back of the wheelchair. “OK, Owen,” he said to me, “let’s be having you.” And he pushed me forward.
A dark green Renault Scenic was parked in one of the bays. Between the two of them they managed to haul me into the back and fold up the chair. It was Geoff who belted me in. His crisp white shirt and spotted burgundy tie told me he must have come straight from work, was perhaps taking a few hours to help his wife with their mutual friend who was obviously in a bad way. I felt like a charity case.
The Scenic was quite new, a dusting of crisp crumbs in the folds of one seat. Did they use it, I wondered, for weekend trips to the country or just the local supermarket? They must have had plenty of disposable income. Tanya was a successful science journalist, while Geoff was a consultant at the Maudsley Hospital, with a lucrative private practice as well. He cheerfully worked long and unsociable hours. They had no children. Tanya couldn’t have any.
I heard Geoff asking Tanya if she wanted to drive, and her replying that she was happy for him to do so. Tanya climbed in beside him but made a point of reaching back to squeeze my hand. I felt absurdly grateful.
Vaguely I heard them talking as we drove along. Something about Christmas. They spoke as if it was weeks ago. Which of course it was. Just as in Owain Maredudd’s world.
So Lyneth and the girls hadn’t come to visit me because they were in Australia. As far as I knew, there had been no cards either, nothing to say they were on their way home. I had a vague notion that Lyneth might have a sister or cousin who lived outside Sydney. A suspicion that she and the girls had left just before Christmas, that perhaps I was supposed to join them later. What if I had muddled two separate visits to Regent Street, one in which all four of us had gone together, and a later one in which I was alone and had had the accident? Perhaps no one had been able to contact them since; perhaps they were on an extended trip to the outback or somewhere, still blissfully unaware that I’d nearly been killed.
That didn’t make sense, either. Tanya would have referred to it. Which left the unpleasant possibility that there had been some sort of serious rift between us. I just couldn’t remember. My urge to know was tempered by an equally fierce determination to find out for myself rather than risk asking Tanya. Because I did know this: Tanya had once been Lyneth’s deadliest rival.
“All right?”
She’s looking around at me.
I nodded reassuringly. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even asked where we were going. Or had I? Tanya had told me before we set out but I hadn’t absorbed it. It was an excursion, I was sure of that, a little respite from my hospital bed.
I had put her on the spot by asking her about Lyneth and the girls. The topic of children, in particular, was a sensitive one for her. Then again perhaps she and Geoff were deliberately hiding something. But what?
I had no idea. It distressed me to think that Tanya might ever be less than candid with me. We’d met during my final year at UCL, at an extra-mural class entitled “Apocalypse Now and Then: The Turbulent Twentieth Century”. I chose it partly because of the provocative title but also because it was being run by an academic rival of my father’s whom he was never able to speak of without loathing.
As it turned out the course was less stimulating than I’d hoped. Our professor, a doughty Marxist historian, couldn’t persuade us that the self-evident implosion of Communist states was merely a blip in the decline of capitalism and the rise of a politicised working class. Far more interesting was the retreat to the pub after the lecture that became a ritual for a small group of us. Tanya, a final-year student like me, travelled to the class on a vintage Lambretta motor scooter. She wore leathers and was doing a degree in astrophysics. As well as being attractive and intelligent she was also exotic, claiming that she lived with her Russian grandmother in a house in Balham. Though I was still dating Lyneth in Swansea, it wasn’t long before I asked her out. She turned me down three times before finally giving in.
TWELVE
Tanya and Geoff were wheeling me around a park. There were the usual dormant flowerbeds, the smell of leaf mould, water dribbling across tarmac paths. Geoff walked ahead, as though discreetly observing a requisite privacy between us. I found this odd, though not unwelcome. They had always been an unlikely couple, but I’m hardly unbiased.
We stopped at a lake, where children were tossing scraps of bread at avid Canada geese. There was a small island in the middle on which herons were roosting like motionless emaciated hermits. I tried to stir myself but my thoughts were like treacle. It was hugely frustrating. Why had they brought me here? Why didn’t I know what the hell had happened to me?
Tanya put a hand on my shoulder while Geoff paused to scan the treetops before saying something about parrots.
Blah, blah, I thought, though I knew he was only doing his best to normalise the situation. Still as kind-hearted as ever, though physically much changed from our university days. Gone were the beard and the bulk he’d carried, along with the saggy corduroy trousers and chunky cable sweaters. He’d been captivated by Tanya from the start, though of course I hadn’t realised it. I’d shared a flat with him in my final year. He was studying medicine but chiefly interested at the time in concocting potent beers and other alcoholic drinks in the house’s capacious cellar.
Most Sundays Tanya would take me home to have tea with her grandmother, who was indeed a Russian national called Tatiana. She’d anglicised her surname from Petrova to Peters. A stocky steel-haired woman, bent over with arthritis but still vigorous, she spoke English with an emphatic eccentricity that suggested she had originally learned it from books. Whenever I visited I found her welcoming, despite her disconcerting habit of calling me “Odin”.
My visits were generally brief, and I suppose I couldn’t have spent much more than a total of six hours in the old woman’s company. Yet she has always loomed larger in my imagination than this. Conscious of my own mother’s origins, I was intrigued by the mysteries surrounding her past, in particular how she had made the transition from the wartime Soviet Union to quiet suburban retirement in south London.
From the outset Tanya warned me not to say anything about my grandfather’s background or to ask Tatiana about the war years. On the one occasion I broached the latter subject she simply waved her hand at me and said, “That was so long ago. I have neglected most of it”. Tanya herself knew only that her grandmother had been a young woman working at a university in the Ukraine when the German invasion began and that she’d somehow ended the war in the West. Over the years Tatiana had occasionally volunteered information about her later life but the details often varied. She claimed to have married an English brigadier who’d brought her to London at the war’s end; or that her husband had been a wealthy businessman, a lawyer, and even that she’d been engaged to a member of the aristocracy who’d abandoned her when she became pregnant.
None of these stories could be verified because the old woman kept no memorabilia beyond family photographs taken in England. However Tanya had once found an old book amongst the rafters in the attic: a pre-war German edition of A Tale of Two Cities, annotated in English in her grandmother’s hand. She suspected that the old woman was reasonably fluent in German as well as English, though she would never admit to it. There were also once-yearly telephone calls from a posh and elderly-sounding gentleman called Lionel, always on her birthday. Tanya had no idea what they signified because Tatiana always shooed her from the room.