Mary Nichols - The Kirilov Star

They left the church behind the pall-bearers for a short committal service at the graveside. As they stood about the newly opened grave, with heads bowed, Lydia caught a glimpse of someone standing in the shadows of the great yew tree which stood close to the lychgate. Her heart did a crazy somersault and then began to beat so quickly she could not breathe. She took a half step towards him, her legs buckled under her and she fell to the ground.

She came to her senses lying on the grass beside the grave with her head in Claudia’s lap. Her eyes took in Bobby’s legs clad in his dark-grey school trousers and she raised her head to find him looking down at her, his face screwed up with worry. Tatty was kneeling beside her, clinging to her hand. She scrambled into a sitting position and stared towards the yew, but there was no one there. Had she seen a ghost? She must have. He was dead, had been dead fourteen years. And yet he had seemed so real, albeit older, grey-haired and very thin.

‘It’s all been too much for you,’ Claudia said. ‘Shall I tell everyone to go away?’

Lydia shook her head, as much to deny the apparition as to answer Claudia. ‘I’ll be all right. Help me up.’

Claudia helped her to her feet and she took the children’s hands in each of hers and led the way to the funeral car which took them back to the Hall. By the time she arrived, she decided she had been seeing things. Alex was dead. She must remember that and not be so foolish.

She supervised the refreshments, talked to everyone, thanking them for coming, joining in as people told their own stories about the Sir Edward they knew, some of which raised a laugh. Afterwards there was the reading of the will, though Lydia already knew its contents. Sir Edward had been very generous to long-serving servants, to Claudia, the church and his favourite charities, and he had set up a trust fund for Bobby and Tatty. He had no male heir and the baronetcy had died out with him, and so the residue of the estate, Upstone Hall and the flat in Balfour Place had been left to Lydia. It was enough to keep her in comfort for the rest of her life and to enable Robert to leave the sea and take up whatever occupation he chose. And he could buy that yacht he had been talking about for ages.

He arrived home just as everyone was leaving. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here in time,’ he said, hugging her and then holding her at arm’s length to look into her face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Oh, you don’t know how glad I am to see you.’ And she flung herself back into his arms.

He held her a few moments, then gently put her aside to look to his children, taking Tatty to sit beside him on the sofa. Bobby remained standing, looking down at them.

‘I don’t like the house without Grandpa,’ Tatty said. ‘It seems all wrong.’

‘His spirit is still with us,’ Robert told her. ‘If you love someone, they can never really die.’ A statement that made Lydia, remembering the vision in the churchyard, gulp.

‘The funeral was awful,’ Bobby told him. ‘Everybody was so miserable, though some of them were only pretending; they were laughing afterwards and guzzling sherry and cakes like it was a party. I don’t think Grandpa would have liked that. And Mum fainted. In the churchyard with everyone watching.’

Robert looked up at Lydia, his eyebrow raised in a query.

‘It was nothing,’ she said. ‘My legs just buckled under me. It only lasted a second or so. Nothing to worry about.’

She did not tell him she thought she had seen Alex. It had been an apparition, born of her distress; he had not been real, and telling Robert would only upset him to think that after all their years together a ghost still haunted them.

Alex had wanted to pay his last respects to the man who had been a second father to him. It had not been his intention to reveal himself. He had watched from the shadow of the tree, knowing there was no place for him in the group around the open grave. When Lydia had fainted, he had longed to go to her, but seeing her rise and take her children away, he had left. But he had come back later when all the cars had gone and the gravediggers had filled in the grave. He stood over it, reading the cards on the flowers and musing on a life that had brought him so much love and then snatched it away again.

Since returning to England he had discovered Sir Edward still lived at Upstone Hall and Lydia had married Robert Conway and had two children. He had known, when he had sent her away from him in Moscow, he was shutting the door on his own happiness. Someone like Lydia needed a man in her life, to love and be loved, needed children to mother. He ought not to mind. She would not wish to have the past dragged up again and in any case it would only hurt everyone: Lydia, Robert and their children, not to mention his own battened-down feelings.

He stooped to read the inscription on the largest of the wreaths laid at the head of the grave. It was made up of white and yellow roses. ‘In love and gratitude to the best of fathers and grandfathers who gave freely and asked nothing in return. May you rest in peace. Robert, Lydia, Bobby and Tatiana.’ Fighting back tears, he put his hand under the wreath and plucked a tiny yellow rosebud from where it would not be missed and slipped it into the top pocket of his suit behind the triangle of white handkerchief that peeped from it. Then he went back to his car and drove out of the village and along the road past the gates of Upstone Hall, continued on, and took the main road to Norwich.

It was the death of Stalin in March 1953 which had started the process to set Alex free. As soon as the news reached Norilsk, the prisoners rejoiced, thinking they would soon be sent home. Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s successor, was known to want to dismantle the Gulag system and as a first step he transferred the administration of the complex from the gulag to the Ministry for Heavy Industry. It paved the way for the prisoners to apply to the Soviet Procuracy for a review of their sentences. Those whose sentences were shorter than five years, who consisted mainly of the criminal element, women and the elderly, were granted an amnesty, but the so-called politicals and enemies of the people, which included Alex, were left behind, and conditions, already harsh, became worse.

The guards were afraid that if the prisoners were released they would lose their jobs and were anxious to prove that to grant an amnesty to such prisoners would endanger the security of the country, and so their cruelty increased. They did not seem to understand that, if everyone was suddenly declared innocent, it would make the state legal system look inept, if not worse. When the guards shot at a convoy of prisoners on their way to work it triggered a whole wave of protests which were brutally put down.

Alex was kept so busy processing the prisoners’ applications for a review of their sentences he did not have time to see to his own. It was a miracle that his years in the camp had not degraded him as it had many another. Thin and in rags he might be, but his mind still worked, perhaps because of the translation work he was given which kept his brain cells from going rusty.

It was this office work which had brought him into contact with one of the engineers in charge of the steel works. Leonid Pavlovich Orlov and his wife, Katya, lived in comparative luxury in a larger-than-usual house on a part of the compound reserved for paid workers. Alex didn’t know Madame Orlova, but he had seen Leonid about, directing workers and prisoners, treating both with humanity, something almost unknown in the camp. Sometimes he would come into the office and talk to Alex. He had, he told Alex, worked his way up in his career by diligence, ambition and not a little risk. ‘I seized my chances,’ he had said on one occasion. It was well below freezing, both outside and in, and he was warmly clad in a padded coat and fur hat, which was more than Alex had. ‘During the war Russia needed engineers, people who could design and make weapons, tanks, transports, things like that and I took full advantage. Not everyone in Russia is poor, you know; a man can get on if he’s determined enough. I own my engineering business.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Advancement,’ he had said, laughing. ‘Here I have been allowed to grow even stronger, to make even more money. Mining and engineering together make a lucrative partnership…’

‘Should you be saying this to me?’

Leonid had laughed and looked about him at the empty office. Alex felt he had deliberately chosen that moment to speak to him when everyone else had gone for their midday meal. ‘Why not? There’s no one to hear and no one to care if they did. The guards can do nothing to me, I am not one of their prisoners. Besides, I want to ask you something.’

Alex was immediately wary. ‘What might that be?’

‘You speak English and German?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then will you teach me?’

Suspicion had become part of Alex’s nature and this sounded very suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Leonid repeated. ‘Because I want to learn. One day Russia will be doing business with other countries. It’s inevitable, and it might come sooner than you think. I want to be prepared.’

‘I meant, why me?’

‘Why not you? And who else is there who is so fluent and whom I can trust?’

‘You trust me?’

‘Yes. I have watched you at work. You are scrupulously honest, when anyone else in your shoes would be fiddling the books, hiving off goods and supplies and selling them. Selling the secrets entrusted to you by prisoners too. There are any number of ways in which you could have used your position to better yourself. And yet you haven’t. So, what do you say? I’ll pay you.’