Pravda (15 page)

"Please don't use bad language, Mum."

"I meant news of blood."

"Aha!" Isabella eased the bar out from behind a wall of condiment jars. "Toblerone. Jesus, Mum, you must be the only person in the world who still buys this stuff. Not quite what I was after, but there's no sense being all judgmental about things before we've tried them, is there?" Isabella came back to her chair at the table.

"Your father's favorite," her mother said softly. "Half each. You break, I choose."

Isabella snapped the bar in half and said, "I can't believe that they are going to let all the states split off."

"Do not be so sure. Soviet times are over." Her mother took the smaller piece. "But now we see what happens when Russia wakes up."

"Do you reckon there's going to be fighting?"

Her mother nodded. "Lots of things will happen in the night, and we will never know."

The television cameras left the Kremlin and returned to the studio in Shepherd's Bush where assembled experts prepared to expatiate.

"Oh, Isabella, will you look at their smug faces. They're disgusting, these people. Where do they come from? And my good God—listen to that stupid newsreader's voice! She can hardly read the cue. No idea what she says or what any of it
means.
These people make me sick. Even that pretentious buffoon of a reporter in Moscow is better than this silly tit. Surely you have some intelligent people in
this country somewhere? They can't all be like this. For the love of Pete. And they think the good guys have won—ha. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots with their
news.
The KGB will win, you fools. Oh yes—and I'm sure Mr. Bush and the baby Jesus and the World Bank and the pope and all the lovely boards of directors are delighted tonight. Singing into their swill. Well, I leave you in their very good company and care."

The two fell silent for another while, sitting at the kitchen table, watching the screen together, sometimes turning the sound up in curiosity, sometimes down in disgust, their minds on the different matters of their different ages, though all the while conscious of their fellowship and common cause against their precisely identified private array of culprits, major and minor. The chocolate disappeared peak by peak.

By and by Isabella asked, "How will Dad know?"

"He will find out."

"Do you think he'll be back in time?"

"Of course he will."

"I don't understand how you can be so sure."

"Because ... because when that bell goes, Izzy, your father is up and out of his corner as hard and as fast as any man you will ever meet."

And find out somehow Nicholas did. The following day he arrived home at noon, having cut short his "business" in Paris. "I bloody did call. About fifty times from the hotel before I set out. But the bloody phone was engaged all the bloody time, so I decided to stop messing about and get in the bloody car." And throughout the cremation, the obituaries in the newspapers, the formalities with the solicitors, the surreal service and wake (organized not by Nicholas but by Randolph, an old friend of Max's whom nobody quite knew)—throughout all of this, it appeared to Isabella that her father took no trouble at all to hide his relief—his
glee
— that finally, "at long bloody last," the paintings, the Jaguar, the houses in Leningrad and Scotland, were all 100 percent his. And all the money. The greatest fear of his life, he was happy to proclaim—to strangers, friends, and family alike—was that "the old goat would shaft me one more time."

Thin as a corkscrew but outwardly as cool as any eighteen-year-old woman had ever been, Isabella wound in and out of the many shadows of the weekend.

Gabriel returned from Southampton on the Friday night and there was an almost immediate row, Nicholas having volunteered Gabriel to go around to Randolph's house (halfway across London in Holland Park) to help out first thing in the morning, Gabriel furious that he had not at least been consulted before getting to the real point of his anger: that Nicholas was now disappearing for weeks on end without bothering to tell their mother where he was going.

Her mother, meanwhile, continued to whisper about "returning" and—unbelievably—taking Isabella's father's side against her brother.

And for the first time, with the fresh eyes of the returning student, Isabella began to consider her parents' relationship for what it truly was—fractured, incoherent, erratic; mutually critical, disdainful, dismissive, emotionally terse, emotionally
illiterate.
And yet, she observed, there was a bilateral understanding, which, though never explicit or remarked upon, was near absolute—lived out in a series of elaborate codes and oblique conversational procedures. In fact, she now realized, her mother was always pretending to her father's view, as soon as he showed up, though all parties knew her avowals to be utterly false.

In the car on the way to the service, for example, Isabella's secret was detonated out of the blue and her mother suddenly pronounced: "Izzy, don't expect us to support you, if you intend to live at home." (The sheer distancing cruelty of that "intend.") Then, next minute, her father was blithely affecting the opposite—considerate, thoughtful, compassionate: "Is, this is the great opportunity of your life. You need to think very carefully about what you are doing." When in fact Isabella knew full well—they
all
knew full well—that her mum did not care one kopek about money and would have supported her forever, until the last drop of her working blood, and that of course her father did not care one idle flick of his contemptuous wrist about Cambridge as a "great opportunity" or otherwise, having been there himself, to the very same college, and having declared on several painfully public occasions, including the day that she had got her offer of a place to study modern languages, that the university was a convenient depository for "the most boring people in the country—a mini-Australia for the criminally tedious."

On the Sunday, the day after the funeral, when they were all four alone, the ratchet wound itself up another notch. Isabella could hardly believe that they were going to attempt to dine together as a family, but this indeed was the stated plan for the afternoon. "Lay the table,
Is, we'll be back in an hour"—delivered with total
Pravda
-like conviction as her mother put on the green raincoat that she wore four seasons around and made for the heath with a silent Gabriel ... leaving Isabella and her father alone together in the large room at the front of the house, Isabella in the tatty chair by the empty grate, Nicholas standing by the window, watching out for she knew not what.

It was one of those days when no matter where she sat or how many layers she put on, Isabella found that she simply could not warm her bones. The whole house was cold. (Her mother was pretending that the heating was necessarily rationed via the timer and had in fact been on all morning, her father that it was broken. Both were lying—someone had simply switched it off.) There was also something wrong with the workings inside the grandfather clock, so that each movement of the minute hand was accompanied by a just-audible scrape. She was downstairs only because she was awaiting the imminent arrival of her boyfriend, Callum, whom she had told to come over and pick her up, with the idea that they might go down into Camden and see one of his rival Brit-pop band's gigs, and whom she did not want intercepted by her father. Though going out, she knew, would aggravate mother, father, and brother alike. Or maybe nobody would care at all.

She was pretending to look through the neat file of official-seeming documents left behind on the small table by Walter Earnshaw, solicitor and new best friend of her father's. Somehow or other her father had arranged for everything to be transferred to him; she was dimly aware that she and Gabriel should be studying things more carefully, but leaving aside their utter naivete and hopeless lack of resources, it seemed ridiculous to check up on her own father. In any case, her real attention was swooping, perching, and beating its wings elsewhere—far, wide, near and back again. After another minute she abandoned the charade and addressed her father's back, thinking that this was at least some kind of an opportunity to communicate to him the sincerity of her mother's hopes.

"Dad, you know ... you know, you should get Mum a place in Petersburg. I bet you can buy stuff there now."

He did not turn around.

"It'd be a great investment. Everything is opening up again." This wasn't true, or if it was, Isabella had no way of knowing it to be so. But she said it to appear insider-informed in front of her father. And to provoke him. The word "investment," she hoped, would do that.

"We have our own priorities," he said to the windows.

"Mum has been talking about it nonstop since I got back. Honestly, you should see her—she's glued to the news, and every time there's a picture of Petersburg she starts pointing at the TV. She really,
really
wants to go back—even if it's only for a while. You know she does. She was planning a trip with me in any case. We could search for flats. She would love to be able to go there a few months every year." Not looking up, she added, "Now you have all that money, you probably won't even notice some of it gone."

That did it.

Her father turned. "Oh, don't worry, Isabella, as soon as I die, you—"

"You
know
that's not what I am talking about."

"You can all go and hang around Leningrad as much as you like." He fixed her with his eyes. "Why exactly have you left Cambridge? And please don't tell me that it's got anything to do with that bloody boy. What is his name?"

They were speaking to each other directly now.

"Jesus." Isabella was conscious of a heat rash on her chest. All her life she had been caught between these two sufferings: the one—trying to goad her father into engaging with her, and the other—her hurt at his cruelty when he finally did so. "I don't care about the money, Dad. I'm just saying that you should buy Mum somewhere to live—or rent something. And why not back in Russia? We can sell Grandpa's house and buy a small flat. She hates this place. It ... it's cold and it's empty. And I know you are away more or less all the time—fair enough—and she needs some new thing, you know—something she cares about in her life. Just imagine: she's not been back since she was ... well ... well, since she left with you. She'd
love
to see Petersburg again. She'd love to stay there. I really think—"

"Isabella, I want to be clear about this." Seemingly insensible of the cold, he stepped forward, his shirt, as ever, without a single crease. "We're not paying for you to hang around here. If you're at Cambridge, that's a different matter. We've always said that we're prepared to support you until you finish university. But that's it. After that you are on your own. So if you are serious about leaving, then don't think that you can waste the next three years finding yourself here."

"What the hell makes you think I want to live here?"

"I have no idea what your plans are—that is your business. You can live where you please, of course. Here included."

"That's very kind of you."

"But if you are not going to complete your degree and if you do expect to live here, then I will expect you to pay maintenance to your mother. You can't just swan around the world as you please. You're an adult now."

"Dad, for Christ's sake."

"Isabella, please."

"I am talking about Mum." She was aware that her anger was increasing in direct and dangerous relation to her father's calmness—affected or genuine, she could not tell. But her eighteen-year-old self had no capacity for restraint—and so she went on harder, her throat as red as her knuckles were white.

"I'm not
going
to live here. So don't worry. I'm just asking you to consider being decent to Mum—helping her—just once.
God."

"That is between your mother and me."

His expression, his measured tone, even the way he was standing there looking at her was as patronizing as she had ever known. She wanted now to rouse him to outright anger. She wanted it more than anything. She wanted to prize out his feelings—any feelings.

"I don't care, I really don't fucking
care
what you have to say about me or my life or anything else. I don't care what you think or what you do. I just want you once—once—to consider someone other than yourself."

"Isabella, please stop being so tiresome. Your life is entirely your own. To fail with exactly as you please." He sat down slowly, crossed his thin legs, and reached for the documents, pulling them across the table toward himself.

"Don't talk to me like that. How dare you? Not one thing you ever started have you finished. You've never done anything. You've spent your
entire adult life
swanning around. You're a total fraud, Dad. A fraud, a failure, and a small-time bully." She had him now. She had never ever said anything like this to him. She went on, her hot fury the counter to his cold. "Just look at you, sitting there like a pompous little prick—how do you even live with yourself? Well, let me tell you something: I don't care about your crap either. Whatever it is. I don't care. Maybe it is too late for Mum. But I—I don't need you. I don't need to hear your pathetic little lectures. I don't need your money, which isn't even yours, or your control-freak attempts to use it. Gabriel thinks you're an arsehole, Dad. But I—I think you're just plain mediocre. So—you know what? Fuck off."

She made as if to get up. She was rigid with the effort not to cry.

"Isabella, sit down."

"Why?"

"Sit down."

"What's the point?" Her voice was cracking. She wanted to run from the room.

"Sit down."

All the same, she sat back—suddenly feeling like a child but holding her face tight as stone.

He leaned forward, his voice quiet and deadly clear. "I am sick—sick to the back teeth—of you and your bloody brother. The pair of you. You seem to think just because you feel a thing, that makes it externally true. You—you in particular—seem to live at the mercy of whatever juvenile emotions you are suffering. And please don't kid yourself, Isabella. Because in this you're just like all the others out there, all the earnest young women scraped into the polytechnics to do their ghastly gender studies and sociology courses, heads stuffed full of daytime TV and magazines, all the whining Princess Diana housewives who have conveniently forgotten how stupid they were at school and how stupid they continue to be. No, don't kid yourself—you are just like them. Just because you
feel
upset, they assume that it's your right to
be
upset. Just because you aren't intelligent enough to do anything but feel, you want the rest of us to live within the tyranny of whatever the insecurity of the day might be. You ... You go away for a couple of months and you come back with your head stuffed full of all this rubbish. You disappoint me."