Queen K, page 11
*
I was reluctant to go back inside and just sit around in my room. Anton’s invitation had excited me too much. I felt full of restless life. I went upstairs and got my phone and earphones then came back outside and found a playlist of songs labelled ‘euphoric and anthemic’. I sat on a bench close enough to the wall of the building that Anton wouldn’t be able to see me, still down here, if he happened to glance over the lip of his balcony. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. The buildings’ lights came on and the circle of grass the tortoise had walked on was illuminated. I wondered what time Alex, Kata and Tatiana would come back.
I wanted to be out here when they arrived.
I still had no idea whether they were aware that Ivan had turned up.
I was some twenty songs into my playlist when the blacked-out Jaguar rolled up, a ubiquitous model of vehicle round here. The doors opened and yes, it was them, disembarking, looking happy and sunburnt. Even Kata had a pink tint to her cheeks. I saw Alex was laughing and saying something to her mum, and her mum laughed and rumpled her hair in response.
I took out my earphones. ‘Sleepyhead,’ I heard Kata say as they came closer. ‘You choose the movie.’
‘Hi!’ Alex waved at me as they came up the steps and Kata and Tatiana looked at me.
‘How was it?’ I asked. ‘Did you have a nice day?’
‘Wonderful,’ said Kata, with suddenly pursed lips and a private smile, her head held high. She sailed on up the steps; she did not appear to want to elaborate.
Tatiana did not break her stride either. ‘Did you have everything you needed?’ she asked me as she made her way up the steps. Who the fuck did she think she was? She spoke to me as if she was older than me.
Alex hung back to chat. ‘It was such a cool afternoon!’
‘I’m glad you had a good time.’
‘We went on this amazing boat. It was huge!’
Limited space on the boat, huh? I didn’t say it out loud.
I got up from the bench and we walked up the steps side by side. ‘We met Valentin,’ Alex said. ‘He’s so nice. He’s invited us to dinner next weekend.’
‘Great,’ I said.
We caught up with Kata and Tatiana waiting for the lift. Kata’s hair had been blown about. They weren’t chatting as they stood there but their silence was not tense like it had been in the back of the car the day Tatiana arrived. It was the peaceful silence of people grown comfortable around one another. They stood there sleepily and it was clear to me that they had no idea what awaited them upstairs. I wondered how they would react when they went into the apartment and saw him there. I’d soon find out: the red numbers above the doors were steadily descending.
I looked down and Alex smiled up at me. It suddenly didn’t feel right, to wilfully conceal information from her. Even if her dad arriving wasn’t a big deal, even if he regularly dropped in unannounced, when last-minute breaks in his schedule permitted, it felt wrong to go up in the lift with Alex knowing something she did not.
‘Um,’ I said, as the lift opened, ‘I forgot. Hang on a sec, Alex, I want to show you something.’
Alex stood back and the doors closed on the others.
‘Were you expecting your dad? He arrived this afternoon.’
She stood very still. Then she said, ‘No. We were not expecting him. Thank you for telling me.’ She took my hand.
‘Is it bad, that he’s come?’
She stood still, holding my hand, looking down at the floor. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
We went up in the lift together and stepped from its doors into the apartment. We paused as the lift closed behind us, to listen. We could hear the chatter of voices from down the corridor. The voices seemed cheerful enough.
‘My line hooked a sailfish,’ we heard Tatiana saying as we got closer. ‘But of course, I wasn’t strong enough to pull it in myself, one of the crew had to do it.’
‘And you, Kata?’ we heard Ivan say.
‘No, no,’ Kata said, ‘I just watched. I don’t enjoy to fish. It’s wonderful to have you here, my darling.’ We heard glasses clinking.
When we reached the door Kata said, ‘Alex! Look at this wonderful surprise: your papa is here! Come.’
‘Hello, Papa,’ Alex said. The way she greeted him was stilted, formal.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ Kata said. ‘Come!’
Alex hesitated.
Ivan observed her hesitation. ‘Yes, I am here,’ he said. ‘You were not expecting me, were you? I hope I have not spoiled your fun.’
11
When I came to breakfast the next morning, Kata was examining a hard-boiled egg. She peered at it. ‘Is this how you wanted it? It is too hard, it is overdone, you like it softer.’
‘It’s fine,’ Ivan said, but Kata pressed her plastic bell. She spoke to Irina sharply; the egg was taken away. A few minutes later, a more suitable one was brought in.
Kata’s whole manner – the way she angled her body towards Ivan, the way she spoke pretty much only to him, in lowered tones that were demonstrably meant to exclude the rest of us – sent a clear signal: that he was the most important person at the table, that his needs came first, that he was her focus and her priority. She deigned to address the rest of the table – by which I mean Alex and Tatiana – only once, and then it was to say: ‘And what do you kids have planned for the afternoon?’
She did not appear the least shamefaced about disassociating herself from them in this way, eyebrows raised imperiously.
Tatiana looked momentarily confused but played along. ‘I don’t know, what do you feel like doing, Lex?’
Kata had already returned her attention to her husband.
Kata and Ivan went out a lot in the days that followed. For lunch, for dinner. They would get dressed up in the way I remembered from back in Courchevel. For her outings with Tatiana, Kata had worn leggings and leather jackets, kaftans, high-waisted trousers and tank tops, pencil skirts, a whole assortment of outfits – but with Ivan, she wore only dresses. Dresses and high heels. I would see them arranging themselves for departure in the hallway and remember similar scenes from Courchevel. How fascinating I’d found them back then, and yes, I still did, there was nothing simple or straightforward about the way they interacted. When they were in the room, or at the breakfast table, I couldn’t help but want to study them and their complex dance, but this time my interest felt different, cerebral where it had been sensual, their bedroom door, for instance, no longer such a locus, no longer so redolent.
Their movements felt rote and I wasn’t sure if this marked some change in them or in me.
I would watch them, at the breakfast table, in the hallway and living room, and I would watch Tatiana watching them too.
‘Girls, we are leaving!’ Kata called from down the corridor one evening and I went to watch the twilight chorus, as I had done every night that week: Tatiana and Alex gathered in the hallway, waving them off, Ivan with his hand in the small of Kata’s back as they stood waiting for the lift doors to open.
Once they had gone, Alex trailed down the corridor to her bedroom, giving me a wan smile as she passed. The sleeves of her grey merino cardigan were so long they drooped past her fingertips.
The successive arrivals of Tatiana and Ivan had put a stop to Alex’s alone time with her mum. I no longer walked past Kata’s bedroom door to hear the mingled sounds of reality TV and Kata’s voice, talking, talking.
Ivan’s coldness towards Alex on the night of his arrival had been striking. And it hadn’t gone, not completely.
‘Papa,’ she would say, hesitantly, at the table, ‘would you like to try some of this chutney, it goes well with what you are eating …’
‘Papa, Vova told me in Moscow there was a deer in the garden …’
He would respond politely. I sensed a wariness. His eyes would linger on her for a few seconds after he had answered, as if he was assessing her, trying to work something out. He didn’t seem to like her looking at him during meals. ‘There is nothing wrong with my food how it is,’ he had replied, the time she’d suggested the chutney.
I returned to my room and sat on the window seat. I got out my phone and reread the message.
I was just drafting a reply when I heard a knock at the door and I looked up, knowing even before the door opened that it would be Alex.
The wan smile was still there. She had changed out of her cardigan and leggings into pyjamas and a faded pink sweatshirt.
‘Are you busy?’ she asked.
I laughed, put down my phone gladly.
‘No.’
She held up her book. ‘I was thinking, maybe I could …’
‘Sure, come in,’ I said. ‘Make yourself at home.’
She sat in my armchair, smiled at me and opened her book. Curled down into the chair like a little animal, she rested her head on the cushion and began to read. I went over to the bed and picked up a magazine from the bedside table. It was nice to be in this room with someone else in it too. Reading a book, or a magazine, these solitary activities, so much warmer with another human body in the room, doing the same.
Alex had spent a lot of time on her own with Tatiana since her dad’s arrival. ‘You kids’ as Kata had designated them. Ivan and Kata had commandeered Dmitri for their purposes but Sebastian had set up an account with a premier Monte Carlo chauffeur service and a silver Range Rover had conveyed Alex and Tatiana to museums and galleries, their shared interest. They would return bearing bags of glossy art books and gift shop catalogues. Alex would seem animated but within about ten minutes of being back she would make an excuse and disappear off to her room. I got the sense that she found her time alone with Tatiana a bit of a strain. It gave me a twinge of triumph to think that it was me she chose to come to now; that I was where her comfort and solace lay.
After an hour of quiet and peaceful companionship, her with her book and me with my magazine, Alex said, ‘Shall we go to the kitchen and get a tray of things, some tea, some snacks?’ We brought the tray back and put it on my bed and then we searched on my laptop for something to watch, a reality TV show with an elimination format, Project Runway. It dawned on me that what we had recreated here, together, was the intimacy Alex had enjoyed in those long evenings with her mother, before the others had arrived. First her mother had been absent, then she had been overwhelmingly present, pressing Alex to her, talking, talking. Now she was absent again. There is no constancy to that sort of love, I thought, and I remembered having the same thought, back in Courchevel. Selfish mothers. Self-absorbed mothers. Mothers bloated and sodden with their own dramas.
The opening credits of Project Runway rolled. Alex snuggled down into the bed and I retrieved my phone from where I had slid it, face down under a pillow.
Mum had sent through a video tour of her Airbnb. It looked a bit unkempt. The kitchen fittings were harsh and ugly. The view from her terrace was undeniably gorgeous, however. Sea meeting sky in hazy extravagance.
Here!
I hadn’t yet told her that I had the day after tomorrow – Sunday – off.
When I’d been away from Mum long enough, the image I had saved of her on my phone, the one that came up when she called, prevailed through sheer repetition. I had sent her a copy and she used it as her WhatsApp profile picture. This was her, it could therefore come to seem: this wholesome, smiling woman, kneeling in the sun with a trowel.
It really was a lovely picture. It had captured her at her absolute best. The open and happy features, the messy hair piled high. The skill she demonstrated, plants and flowers blooming to life through her care.
I thought of Kata’s mannered posing as she took her leave each evening. I thought of her pursed lips and averted gaze when she had returned from the boat trip and I had dared to ask her how her day had been.
I’ll reply, I decided. I’ll tell her I’m off on Sunday.
I returned my attention to Alex, huddled in the armchair.
‘You must miss your chats with your mum,’ I said.
‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Except, I don’t know …’
‘What? You can tell me.’
‘Except that sometimes it felt like – it’s hard to explain. Like she was talking to me as if I wasn’t there.’
‘You weren’t there?’
‘Because she tells me everything. No filter. I know she wouldn’t talk to anyone else like that. So maybe she talks to me like that because it doesn’t matter what I think. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter to her what I think or what I know. She might as well be talking to herself. She’s always talked to me like that.’
She was a sweet and uncertain girl. Her long limbs had been dusty that day, weeks ago, when we had first sat on our rocky outcrop and she had scratched a seagrass stem across one leg and made a white mark. She was gawky and gangly as a new deer and it gave me a pain in my chest to look at her, like I was looking at myself when I was her age.
‘I know what you’re trying to say. But you could look at it another way, couldn’t you? Maybe she tells you everything because she trusts you. Maybe it’s because she’s closer to you than to anyone else in the world.’
Thinking to myself: What does she tell you? What? How does that woman have so much to say?
*
Ivan told Kata, as she buttered his toast for him the next morning, that he would be going out for the day. He and Vova were testing a new fishing boat. They would eat on the boat, and he would be back in the evening, around nine or ten o’clock.
‘What do you want to take with you?’ Kata asked. ‘Tell me what you want and I will arrange it with Sebastian and Irina. They will pack a cool box for you.’
Ivan hadn’t mentioned Anton. I wondered if he was staying behind. I hadn’t seen him since his invitation, apart from a brief glimpse of him now and then on his balcony, phone to his ear.
When Ivan took his leave we were lying out on the sunbeds. ‘Come out to the pool!’ Alex had said to me and I had gladly taken her up on the offer.
‘Check it with your mum first though,’ I’d said. She had checked and told me it was fine.
Kata rose from her sunbed and went to kiss Ivan goodbye, to do a last-minute check that he had everything he needed. We heard, distantly, the front door close. Kata came back outside and at once the act of the past few days was dropped, the demarcation of adults and ‘kids’. Kata was saying, before she had even resumed her place on her sunbed: ‘I think we will wait, Tatiana, until Ivan has gone, to accept Valentin’s dinner invitation. I have been thinking about it. I know we are supposed to be there tomorrow but I think it is best to postpone. I hope Valentin does not mind.’
She lay back down, completely in the shade, her hair immaculate, her legs pale and solid and moisturised. She never went in the pool.
‘Really?’ said Tatiana. ‘How come? I’m sure Valentin would love to meet Ivan.’
Kata did not reply immediately. She allowed a few moments of ponderous silence, as was her wont. ‘It will be more relaxed, for me, if we wait until he has gone,’ she said. ‘He is not always the best guest at this type of thing. He will change the mood.’
I was watching Kata through my dark glasses. She was two sunbeds away from me; Alex lay in between us. ‘He will probably leave in two or three days, anyway,’ said Kata. ‘He never stays for long. And we have many more weeks of the summer. I hope Valentin will not mind, to postpone. He won’t, I’m sure?’
Tatiana didn’t answer her straight away. Kata turned her head towards Tatiana. Perhaps she had been expecting immediate agreement. Perhaps her question had been rhetorical.
‘I’m not … sure,’ Tatiana said. ‘He may have made preparations already.’
The habitual injection of nerve-freezing toxins made Kata’s forehead less than mobile; nonetheless, I saw the shadowy echo of a frown arrange itself across her brow. Tatiana’s response had not been satisfactory.
‘I do not want to offend Valentin …’ Kata was saying. ‘Maybe we should let him know now, before he goes to any trouble. If we could move the dinner from tomorrow night even just a few days, it would be better.’ She gave a long sigh. ‘It is very stressful, for me …’
She turned her head to look through the glass windows into the living room. I followed her gaze; through the glass I could see Anton. He picked some papers up from a table, then disappeared from the room.
‘These people Ivan has to have with him, all the time,’ Kata said. ‘Anton and Vova. To spend time on the boat with Vova, drinking beer, eating sausage, catching fish, as if they were still poor teenage boys in’ – she said a Russian-sounding name– ‘as if nothing has changed since then.’
She shook her head. The glass doors were opening but it wasn’t Anton coming through them, it was Irina, bringing us some fruit. ‘Thank you, Irina,’ Kata said, before turning back to Tatiana. ‘Ivan needs to behave in a way that is more appropriate for his position,’ she continued. ‘If he always just keeps on like he is, he will never be anything more than how he began.’
‘Mama.’ It was Alex, looking at her mum. She indicated Irina, now lifting the plate of fruit from the tray and putting it down on the table, absolutely within earshot.
Kata waved her hand in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Krest’yanskiy!’ She said the Russian word loudly. I had no idea what it meant. But Irina did. At the word her eyebrows shot up. She went back inside, holding the empty tray.
‘Mama!’ It was Alex again. Her face was white, and I was alarmed by her clear distress. ‘Mama …’ She could hardly get the words out. ‘Why do you say things like that? What if it gets back to him? Why can’t you be more careful?!’
Kata responded by waving her hand again, another gesture of dismissal, this time of Irina, of Irina’s perceptions and reactions, of Irina’s cognitive independence, her capacity to take in an action or statement of Kata’s and respond to it – perhaps even act on it – in an independent way, a way that might have an effect … The possibility of all this Kata negated with one sweep of her dimpled hand. She lay there, big and stupid, just a slab of ignorance, and I wondered what it would be like to slap her, or prod her hard, or tickle her, scrunch up her hair, do something, anything, to surprise her into a state of shock and disarray.
