Lydia recovered first. ‘Let me finish it for you or you won’t get it straight. I’ll make it look smart, really chic.’

She gently took the scissors from her mother’s rigid hand and proceeded to cut. Each snip of the blades felt like treachery to her father. Valentina had always told her how he’d adored her long hair and described how he used to stand behind her each night before going to bed and brush it into a silky smooth curtain with long, slow strokes that set it crackling full of sparks. Like shooting stars in a night sky, he used to say. Now the soft waves lay like dead birds at her feet. When the act was finished, Lydia picked them up, wrapped them in a white scarf of her mother’s, and laid the slender bundle under her pillow. It deserved a proper funeral.

To her surprise, her mother was smiling. ‘Better,’ she said.

Valentina shook her head from side to side and her hair bounced and swung playfully, curving into the nape of her neck and emphasising her long white throat.

‘Much better,’ she said again. ‘And this is just the beginning of the new me.’

She lifted the half-empty bottle of Russian vodka off the table, walked over to the open window where the evening sky looked as if it were now on fire above the grey slate roofs, and stuck out her arm, tipping the clear liquid into the street without even a glance below.

Lydia watched.

‘Happy now?’ her mother asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. And no more dance hostess for me either.’

‘But we need that money for our rent. Don’t…’

‘No. I have decided.’

Lydia began to panic. ‘Perhaps I could do it instead. Become a dance hostess, I mean.’

‘Don’t be absurd, dochenka. You are too young.’

‘I could say I’m older than sixteen. And you know I dance well, you taught me.’

‘No. I am not having men touch you.’

‘Oh, Mama, don’t be silly. I know how to look after myself.’

Valentina gave a sharp high laugh. She dropped the bottle onto the floor and seized her daughter’s arm. She shook it hard.

‘You know nothing of men, Lydia Ivanova, nothing, and that’s the way I intend to keep it. So don’t even think about such a job.’ Her eyes were angry, and Lydia could not quite understand why.

‘All right, Mama, all right, calm down.’ She pulled her arm free and said carefully, ‘But maybe I could find some other job.’

‘No. We agreed a long time ago. You must get yourself an education.’

‘I know, and I will. But…’

‘No buts.’

‘Listen, Mama, I know we said the only way for us to climb out of this stinking hole is for me eventually to get a decent job, a proper career, but until then how are we going to…?’

‘It is not the only way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean there’s another way.’

‘How?’

‘Alfred Parker.’

Lydia blinked and felt a rush of sour saliva in her mouth. ‘No.’ It was no more than a whisper.

‘Yes.’ Her mother tossed her newly bobbed hair. ‘I have decided.’

‘No, Mama, please don’t.’ Lydia’s throat was dry. ‘He’s not good enough for you.’

‘Don’t be silly, my sweet. I’m sure his friends will say I’m not good enough for him.’

‘That’s rubbish.’

‘Is it? Listen to me, Lydia. He’s a good man. You never minded about Antoine, so why object to Alfred?’

‘You were never serious about Antoine.’

‘Well, I’m glad you realise I intend to be serious about Alfred.’ She said it gently and lifted a strand of her daughter’s shining hair between her fingers, as if to remember what long hair felt like. ‘I want you to be nice to him.’

‘Mama,’ Lydia shook her head, ‘I can’t… because…’

‘Because what?’

Lydia scraped the tip of one of her new shoes along the floor. ‘Because he’s not Papa.’

A strange little moan escaped Valentina’s lips. ‘Don’t, Lydia, don’t. That time is over. This is now.’

Lydia seized her mother’s arm. ‘I’ll get a job,’ she said urgently. ‘I’ll get us out of this mess, I promise, you don’t need Alfred, I don’t want him in our house. He’s pompous and silly and fiddles with his ears and rams his bible down our throats and…’ She took a breath.

‘Don’t stop now, dochenka. Let’s hear it all.’

‘He wears spectacles but still he can’t see how you twist him around your finger like a wisp of straw.’

Valentina gave an elegant shrug. ‘Hush now, my sweet. Give him time. You’ll get used to him.’

‘I don’t want to get used to him.’

‘Don’t you want to see me happy?’

‘You know I do, Mama, but not with him.’

‘He’s a fine Englishman.’

‘No, he’s too… ordinary for you. And he’ll change everything, he’ll make us as ordinary as he is.’

Valentina drew herself up to her full height. ‘That is insulting, Lydia, and I…’

‘Don’t you see,’ Lydia rushed on, ‘I only gave him back his stupid watch to get rid of him.’ Her voice was rising. ‘I used up all that precious money because I thought it would make him hate me so much, he’d go away and never ever come back. Don’t you see?’

Valentina stood very still. Her face drained bone white as she stared at her daughter. The air in the room was too brittle to breathe.

‘You underestimate me,’ her mother said at last. ‘He won’t leave.’

‘Don’t, Mama. Don’t do this to us.’

‘I have decided, Lydia.’

Suddenly Lydia could not bear to be in the same room with this new Valentina Ivanova. She snatched up the greaseproof package, rushed out of the room, and kicked the door savagely behind her.


‘Little sparrow, what are you doing out here in the dark?’

It was Mrs Zarya. She was wrapped in a long velvet cloak and wore an elaborate hat with a black ostrich feather curling around its crown. Diamond drop earrings caught the light from her window and sparkled like fireflies. This was not a Mrs Zarya that Lydia recognised.

‘Just feeding Sun Yat-sen,’ she muttered.

‘You have been feeding him for a very long time.’

Lydia said nothing. The rabbit was cradled in her arms and she could feel its rapid heartbeat against her chest.

‘Did he like the yam?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

There was a silence, neither quite sure where to go next. Somewhere in the street a pig started to squeal. It sounded like a night demon.

‘You look nice,’ Lydia said.

‘Thank you. I am off to General Manlikov’s soirée now.’

A soirée. A Russian soirée. It would be better than the room upstairs.

‘May I come with you, Mrs Zarya?’ Lydia asked politely. ‘I am wearing my smart dress.’

The Russian woman’s stiff and lonely old face softened into a delighted smile. ‘Da. Yes. You must come. You might learn something of the great country that bore you. Da.’

‘Spasibo,’ Lydia said. Thank you.

24

Lydia was determined to enjoy the evening. Her first soirée. It was held in one of the big villas in the avenue that formed the border between the Russian and British Quarters, where Lydia sometimes came to admire what a pocketful of tsarist jewellery had bought for the few lucky ones. But tonight the music only made her feel worse. It flowed like floodwater under her defences and loosened everything inside her. Her words to her mother and her fears for Chang jostled inside her head until she couldn’t think straight.

The piece was a romantic extract from Prince Igor by Borodin, one of the Russian mogutchaya kutchka, played well enough but not as well as her mother would have performed it. Lydia concentrated on the pianist’s fingers, caressing the keys the way her own fingers caressed her rabbit’s fur. Intimate and needy.

‘Now we dance,’ Mrs Zarya declared, ‘before someone starts to sing one of the sad Georgian laments.’

The rows of chairs were swept aside to the edges of the ballroom and couples began to take to the floor. Mrs Zarya sat herself down heavily next to Lydia against the wall, rustling her voluminous taffeta evening dress. It smelled seriously of mothballs and had a tiny mend in one sleeve that was probably where she’d caught it on something, but Lydia toyed with the idea that it might be a bullet hole from a Bolshevik rifle.

‘You enjoy so far?’ Mrs Zarya asked.

‘Very much. Spasibo.’

‘Excellent. Otlichno!’

Oddly, it was the hour of poetry reading at the beginning of the evening that Lydia liked best. She hadn’t understood a word of it, of course, but that didn’t matter. It was the sounds. The voice of Russia. The full-bodied vowels and complicated combinations that rolled around the speakers’ mouths and somehow seemed to resonate. Her ears found a strange satisfaction in them. That surprised her.

‘I liked the poetry,’ she said, ‘and I like the chandeliers.’

Mrs Zarya laughed and patted her hand. ‘Of course you do, little sparrow.’ Her large bosom quivered with amusement.

‘Do you think someone will ask me to dance?’ Lydia’s eyes followed the swirling dancers enviously. She didn’t care who asked. Even one of the old men with the tsarist medals on their chests and the sadness in their eyes, just as long as it was someone. Someone male.

‘Nyet. No. Of course you cannot dance.’

‘Oh, but I can, I’m good at it. I know…’

‘No. Nyet.’ Mrs Zarya tapped Lydia’s knee sharply with her folded fan. ‘You are too young. It would not be fitting. A child, you are. A child does not dance with a man.’

At that moment General Manlikov, a square and impressive figure with curly white hair and a very upright way of walking, bowed to them both and offered his arm to Mrs Zarya. She inclined her head and accompanied him onto the dance floor. Lydia watched. It annoyed her to be called a child, but most of the fifty or more people here were old, some well dressed, others showing signs of patch and mend like Mrs Zarya, and all bound together by the same consciousness of class and country. They were in a grand ballroom with tall gilt mirrors ranging all the way down one long wall and elegantly arched windows on the other, opening onto what looked like a terrace and gardens. It was dark out there, moonless and godless. But the bright lights and laughter in the ballroom made Lydia bold.