‘Who could have done?’ Sophie asked.

‘Ivan Ivanovich, for one. He befriended me.’

‘He knew me and my parents and brother.’

‘I didn’t know that. He never said.’ He paused to drain the vodka in his glass and open another bottle. He filled Alex’s glass and offered some to Lydia but she shook her head, more interested in his story than in drinking. The more he talked, the more she could see a family resemblance, a fleeting gesture, a slight movement of the head; the way he used his hands.

‘But you must have done well at school,’ she said. ‘You went to university.’

‘Yes. Stalin wanted engineers and technicians and we were encouraged to study and apply for a place. I got on by working hard and keeping out of trouble. If the authorities had known who my true mother was, I would never have got in, so I owe my adoptive mother that debt. After I graduated as an engineer and mathematician, I was given a job in Leonid Orlov’s factory. I married Sophie a year ago. Most of the time we live in our apartment in Kiev, but Leonid Orlov allows us to use the dacha for vacations. He is a very influential man and I owe him a lot.’

‘So do I,’ Lydia said, with feeling. ‘And Alex.’ She turned to smile at him as she spoke. He was not saying anything, simply letting them talk.

‘He came here,’ Yuri went on. ‘Years ago. My mother was terrified of him. She was worse for weeks after he came, jumping at every sudden sound and running to hide. She wasn’t quite right in the head, you understand. It was the result of her injuries in the explosion.’

‘Did you know Kirilhor once belonged to our family?’ Lydia asked him.

‘No. My mother told me I had been born here and she often spoke of her time here before my father died as very happy. I had no idea of the truth. Even last year, when she was dying and told me she was not my real mother, she said my real mother had given me away so that she could go back to England. The authorities would not have allowed her to take a Russian child out of the country. These letters…’ he tapped the pile which he had put on the arm of his chair ‘… tell a very different story. It is very confusing. I ask myself which is the truth.’

‘What I wrote is the truth,’ Lydia said. ‘I grieved for you all the years I have been parted from you and could not find you. It is because of Alex’s promise to me we are reunited now. You have a half-brother and sister. Perhaps, one day, when travel between our countries becomes easier, you will meet them.’

‘Tell me about your life, how it is in England.’

It was so late when Lydia finished talking they were invited to stay the night. Yuri seemed to have accepted the truth at last, and as the evening wore on and the vodka relaxed him, they were able to talk more easily. Lydia showed him her photographs, all the ones that had been tucked away in the brown envelope and others of Bobby and Tatty and Upstone Hall. Sophie was excited to think that her husband’s grandfather had been a count, known to the tsar. The years of Communism had not extinguished a curiosity about that ill-fated man.


‘Satisfied?’ Alex asked her, as they boarded the plane back to Moscow the next day.

‘Yes, oh, yes, my darling. Thank you. Thank you.’

‘And now that’s all out of the way and you have your son back where he belongs as part of your family, what about me?’

‘You?’

‘Yes, you know what I mean. I want to be part of the family too. Bobby and Tatty have met me, they’re not blind, they can see how we feel for each other and we’ve wasted too much of our lives already…’

‘We couldn’t help that.’

‘No, but we can make up for it now. So how about naming the day?’

‘When we get home. I promise.’

‘I’ll hold you to that.’


Bobby and Tatty were at home when they returned, anxious to hear their adventures, and it took ages to tell everything and look at the pictures they had taken, which she had put into an album. Here she was with Leo and Katya sitting round their dining table. Here was Alex, walking beside her in the forest at Kirilhor, which was taken by Yuri just before they left. Here she was talking to Ivan Ivanovich, Yuri and Sophie. Yuri cutting logs with Ivan. Here was the son she had lost who was lost no longer, and the best of it was he now knew and acknowledged she was his mother. Now she could forgive Olga and be grateful to her for bringing him up and keeping him out of the orphanage. Tatty and Bobby crowded round to look over her shoulder while she explained each one.

‘I knew about the envelope in the trunk,’ Tatty told her mother. ‘I found it by accident.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘It seemed too private. But I was curious about the young man in the white tie and tails.’

‘Alex.’

‘Yes, so I realised.’ She laughed and looked at Alex.

Alex took the album from Lydia and set it aside. Taking a small box from his pocket he opened it. ‘Lydia Conway, I love you,’ he said. ‘And I cannot see any reason why we cannot spend the rest of our lives together. Please say you will marry me.’

Seeing the diamond and ruby ring he was holding and which he had every intention of slipping onto her finger, she looked from him to her children who were grinning broadly. ‘You knew about this?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you approve?’

‘Oh, Mum, you don’t have to ask us,’ Tatty said. ‘But yes, we approve.’

‘So?’ Alex said to her, looking anxious in spite of their assurances. ‘What do you say?’

She laughed through a veil of tears. ‘Yes, Alex, yes.’

He kissed her, long and hard, and then pandemonium broke out as Bobby and Tatty vied with each other to congratulate them. The excitement was almost too much to bear and Lydia was exhausted long before anyone else and she needed a moment of quiet contemplation. ‘I think I’ll go up to bed, if you don’t mind.’

She kissed all three goodnight and made her way to her room. It was the room she had occupied as a child. Here she had always felt safe and happy, and she felt safe and happy now. She smiled as she took off the pendant and ran her fingers over the Kirilov Star. It was a link to past and present, to history and to the future, infinitely precious, not because if its worth, but because of what it meant. Picking up the album, she sat looking at the pictures, touching Yuri’s face with her forefinger, as if she could feel the flesh. ‘Yurochka,’ she murmured. She let the album drop and looked across at the framed picture of her father and grandmother with the tsar which stood on her bedside table, next to the one of her and Alex at her twenty-first birthday ball. Even on a black and white photograph, the Star seemed to sparkle at her throat.

She put it on her bedside table, while she prepared for bed, then she climbed between the sheets and wriggled down on the pillows. Alex wouldn’t come to her tonight but it didn’t matter. There were lots more nights to come. The rest of their lives.

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help given to me by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador in Moscow 1988–1992, author of several books, articles and reviews on Russia and the international scene, who kindly agreed to read the manuscript and set me right on Russian spelling and points of fact. Any errors that remain are mine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I read many, many books in researching The Kirilov Star. Here are some of them:

NON-FICTION

Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (Viking, 1998)

— The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (Penguin Books, 2005)

Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow: 1941, A City and Its People at War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

— Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (Yale University Press, 2002)

Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (Pimlico, 2008)

Dimbleby, Jonathan,Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and Its People (BBC Books, 2008)

Erickson, Ljubica and Erickson, Mark (eds.), Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy – Essays in Honour of John Erickson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)

Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Phoenix Press, 2001)

— The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane, 2007)

Hughes, Michael, Inside the Enigma – British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (Hambledon Press, 1997)

Klier, John and Mingay, Helen, The Quest for Anastasia: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Romanovs (Smith Gryphon, 1995)

Matthews, Owen, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury, 2008)

Pares, Bernard, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (Phoenix Press, 2001)

Thomas, D.M.Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (St Martin’s Press, 1998)

Steinberg, Mark D., Voices of Revolution, 1917 (Yale University Press, 2002)

Zinovieff, Sofka, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life (Granta Books, 2007)

FICTION

Helen Dunmore, The Siege (Penguin, 2002)

— The Betrayal (Penguin, 2010)

Alexander Mollin, Lara’s Child (Doubleday, 1994)

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Collins & Harvill, 1958)

By Mary Nichols