Lydia tried to work out what had made her halt. It was the street where she lived. She’d walked it a million times. It was hot, she was dusty, and her dress was sticking to her skin. She needed a cold drink. Only twenty yards to her own front door. So what was it? What made her hesitate?
Be watchful, Lydia Ivanova. Don’t sleep while you walk. They let you go once but not a second time. Chang’s words to her. Well, she was being watchful all right, keeping alert, yet she could see nothing to be nervous about. Oh hell, maybe Polly was right. Maybe he was getting her head all muddled over nothing. She hurried down the street, impatient with herself, and it was as she was unlocking the front door that she sensed the movement behind her. Not that she saw or heard anything. More a sudden shifting of the air at her back. She didn’t turn. Just threw herself over the threshold and slammed the door behind her. She leaned heavily against it, not breathing. Listening.
Nothing. A car’s klaxon, a child’s laugh, the savage shriek of a gull overhead.
She took a deep breath. Had she imagined it?
She waited while the minutes ticked by, and still her pulse thudded in her ears.
‘Lydia, moi vorobushek, come here, come.’ It was Mrs Zarya beckoning at the end of the hall. She was wearing a bright pink kimono, and her hair was wrapped up in wire curlers. ‘I have a piece of yam for your Mr Sun Yat-sen. Here, take it.’
Lydia moved, but her feet felt heavy. ‘That’s kind, Mrs Zarya. Sun Yat-sen will like that.’ She remembered the clutch of grass that she’d sneaked from the cricket club. It was scrunched tight in her hand. ‘Going somewhere special tonight?’
‘Da, yes. To a soirée.’ Mrs Zarya said it proudly. ‘A poetry reading at General Manlikov’s villa. He was a friend of my husband and he is a fine man who has not forgotten his old comrade’s widow.’
‘Have a good time.’ Lydia scampered up the stairs. ‘Thanks for the yam. Spasibo.’
It was when she reached the last flight of stairs that she heard the voices coming from the attic. They seemed to strike her upturned face. She stood still. One was her mother’s, low and intense; the other was a man’s, raised in what sounded like anger. They were speaking Russian. She opened the door quietly. Two figures were together on the sofa, talking fast, hands gesturing through the air between them. Lydia felt a shiver of dismay and wanted to leave, but it was too late. It was the man from the police lineup, the big bearded bear with the black oily curls and the eye patch, the one with the wolf boots. Beside him Valentina looked like a tiny exotic creature perched on the edge of the seat. The man was staring straight at Lydia with his one dark eye and it was enough to turn her cheeks a fiery red.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I didn’t mean to make the police come after you like that, I just…’
‘Lydia,’ her mother said quickly, ‘Liev Popkov speaks no English.’
‘Oh… well, tell him I apologise, Mama.’
Valentina spoke in rapid Russian.
He nodded slowly and rose to his feet, filling the attic room with his massive shoulders, ducking his head to avoid the low ceiling, and still he stared at Lydia. She wasn’t sure whether it was hostility or curiosity, but either way it made her uncomfortable. But what confused her was how on earth he had discovered where she lived. Chyort! She was jumpy as hell.
He walked over to the door where she was standing, and up close she feared he would tear off her head with one of his great paws.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said once more before he had the chance to unsheathe his claws, and she held out her hand.
To her surprise he took it, swallowed it up inside his own, and shook it gently. But his single black eye seemed to stare at her in disgust.
‘Do svidania,’ she said politely. Good-bye.
He grunted and shambled out of the room.
‘Mama, what did he want?’
But Valentina wasn’t listening. She was pouring herself a drink. Into a glass, not a cup, Lydia noticed, another sign of Alfred’s generosity.
Her mother walked over to the replaced mirror on the wall and stared at her reflection as she took a first taste of the vodka.
‘I am old,’ she murmured and ran a hand down her cheek and throat, over the rise of her breasts and hip. ‘Old and scrawny as a sewer dog with worms.’
‘Don’t, Mama. Don’t start that. You are beautiful, everyone says so, and you are only thirty-five.’
‘This stinking climate is destroying my skin.’ She put her face right up close to the mirror and ran a finger slowly around her eyes.
‘Vodka ruins your skin faster.’
Her mother said nothing, just tipped her head back and emptied the alcohol down her throat, and then for a brief moment she closed her eyes.
Lydia turned away and looked out the window instead. The old woman in the rocking chair had fallen asleep and the two urchins were trying to slide the half-plucked bird from her grasp, but even in sleep her fingers clung on. Lydia leaned out and shouted at them. They stopped their thieving and ran off down the street with their pillowcase of feathers. Above the rooftops the sky was streaked with lilac tendrils as the sun started to slide away from China, but Lydia was not to be distracted.
‘What did that man want, Mama?’
Valentina was at the table, refilling her glass. ‘Money. Isn’t that what everyone wants?’
‘You didn’t give him any.’
‘How could I give him money when I don’t have any?’
Lydia considered snatching the vodka bottle away and pouring it out the window, but she’d tried that once and knew it didn’t work. It was like pushing a stick into a wasp’s nest. It only made her worse.
‘I thought you were going to work at the hotel this evening.’
Valentina gave her a look that made it quite clear what she thought of work and hotels. ‘Not tonight, darling. They can stuff their work up their own fat backsides. I’m sick of it. Sick to bloody death of their groping hands and their thrashing hips. I want to chop them all up into tiny pieces, like steak tartare.’
‘It’s just a job, Mama. You don’t really hate it.’
‘I do. It’s true. They sweat. They stink. They put their hands where they shouldn’t and where they wouldn’t if I were one of their own kind. They want to fuck me.’
‘Mama!’
‘And Alfred too. That’s what he wants to do.’
‘I thought he came and bought all your dances to protect you from the others.’
‘When he can.’ She sipped her drink. The glass was fuller this time. ‘But often he has to work late for deadlines at his newspaper office.’ She fluttered her fingers in the air. ‘Such rubbish they all write. As if this colony were the centre of the universe.’
‘How did that Russian man find me here?’
Her mother shrugged eloquently. ‘How the hell should I know, darling? Use your head. From the police, I suppose.’
Valentina was wearing an old cotton dress that she hated but deigned to put on in the house to save her few other clothes for best. It always put her in a bad mood, and Lydia swore that tomorrow she would throw it in the trash. For now, she went over to the stove and started chopping up the piece of yam.
‘Dochenka, something occurred to me today.’
‘That vodka can kill you?’
‘Don’t be so impudent. No, it occurred to me to wonder where the money came from to redeem Alfred’s watch from the pawnbroker. Tell me.’
The knife hesitated in Lydia’s hand.
‘The truth, Lydia. No more lies.’