Sapphire Skies (3 page)

‘The irony!’ she muttered.

She noticed cat fur on her dress and quickly brushed it off then rolled her shoulders to loosen their tension. She breathed deeply as she stepped out of the bathroom. Making the transition from her sorrowful personal life to her professional one had become second nature to her, but her veneer of composure nearly crumbled when the first person she laid eyes on in the office was Kate, the perky sales coordinator.

Kate beamed when she saw her. ‘Good morning, Lily!’

Lily felt her face sag but tried to smile back. Twenty-five years old, blonde and beautiful, Kate had fallen in love with a fellow Englishman who worked in the hotel’s guest relations department, and was returning with him to Cornwall in September to get married. Everything was being organised by Kate’s mother, aunt and three sisters, who were determined to make Kate’s wedding ‘the most beautiful ever’. Lily could tell by the look on Kate’s face that she had another ‘delicious’ detail to share with her.

‘They’ve ordered the cake!’ Kate squealed, rising from her chair and waving a picture in front of Lily’s face.

The cake was spectacular. The icing was shades of ivory and mocha and decorated with sugar flowers of tea rose and lily of the valley.

‘Look!’ said Kate, pointing to the top and bottom tiers. ‘The piped lace design is taken from my wedding dress.’

Lily felt light-headed. It wasn’t Kate’s fault. Lily hadn’t told her colleagues what had happened back in Sydney, why she’d fled to Russia.

Fortunately, at that moment Scott got up from his desk and came towards them, giving Lily a chance to escape.

‘My life is a super success story!’ she called out as he passed her.

Kate followed with her own affirmation for the week: ‘My life is an exciting adventure!’

‘Good morning, ladies,’ replied Scott, grinning. ‘The demands of life awaken the giant within me!’

Lily used the interruption to flee to the kitchen and make herself a cup of coffee.

When she returned to the office, Kate was sharing her wedding cake picture with the sales manager. Mary was in her early fifties and divorced, but was making the same ooh-ing and aah-ing sounds that Lily had a few minutes before.

Lily sat down at her desk and switched on her computer. ‘Come on!’ she muttered to the screen when she opened her email program. Internet connections in Russia were frustratingly slow. She tried to shut out the voices of the two women. Does Kate’s bliss hurt Mary the same way it does me, she wondered. Maybe not. Mary had been through the experience of a marriage and her wedding was probably only a distant memory. Lily’s dream, on the other hand, had been stolen from her.

The sound of an incoming email brought her back to the present. She pressed her palm against her forehead and willed herself to get on with the day. The message was from her best friend, Betty.
Are you crazy?
was her opening line.
What are you doing with all those stray cats in your apartment? Don’t you know that Russia has rabies?
Lily felt a rush of warmth for her friend; Betty’s outspoken personality was legendary. The email was long and Lily saved it to enjoy later.

Betty was the daughter of Lily’s mother’s best friend, and she and her siblings had become the brothers and sisters that Lily, an only child, never had. Lily shivered. She had no immediate siblings, but before she had come to Russia she’d discovered that in fact she had dead half-sisters — the children of her father and his first wife. They’d been burned alive, along with their mother, by the Japanese during the war in an act of random revenge against the Russian population of Tsingtao. All her life, Lily had believed that the scar on her father’s face had been caused by a work accident. It was only when she’d decided to come to Moscow that her mother had revealed the truth: Ivan had been burned while trying to save his family.

Lily glanced back at Kate, who had now settled down to work. How different their families were, she thought. Kate’s family had lived in the same village for generations. They even had a family tree in the vicarage that went back three hundred years, so Kate had told her. How unlike Lily’s parents, who had endured revolutions, wars and exile. They were grateful to have ended up in Australia but were haunted still by ghosts, secrets and missing persons. At school, surrounded by friends with aunts, uncles and cousins coming out of their ears, Lily had felt like a freak. All she had wanted with Adam was a settled family life. Now she wondered if she had tragedy in her genes.

‘Hey, Lily! Daydreaming again?’ It was Richard, the marketing assistant. He handed her a copy of the
Moscow Times
. ‘The ad for the special rates is on page three.’

‘Thanks,’ said Lily, taking the newspaper from him. Had she been cocky like that with her first boss? She doubted it. As far as she remembered, she’d never even referred to her supervisor at McClements Advertising by his first name.

She opened the newspaper to look at the ad they’d taken out for the hotel. Her gaze drifted to the article next to it:
Pilot’s Plane Found after Fifty-Seven Years but the Mystery Remains
. Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photograph of a pretty fair-haired woman in a military uniform. Lily was pleased. Attractive people drew the readers’ attention to a page.

‘Bloody traffic! I thought everyone was supposed to be on holidays!’

Lily looked up to see Colin, the publicity manager, hanging his jacket on the back of his chair at the desk opposite her.

‘Hey, Colin!’ called Scott from his office. ‘The demands of life awaken the giant within me!’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Colin, sending Scott a wave but not replying with his own affirmation. He sat down at his desk and muttered to Lily, ‘The demands of life bloody piss me off!’

Colin’s dry humour was a lifesaver to Lily. Despite her aching heart, she smiled into the newspaper.

Orlov sank down on the velour couch of his Presnensky district apartment and lined up his medications on the coffee table. His doctor had told him to take the tablets after meals and with plenty of water. Orlov hadn’t thought to ask if the procedure could be followed by a shot of vodka, but he poured himself one anyway. Finding Natasha’s plane after all these years had brought on a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with his age or his state of health.

Taking a nip of the burning liquid, Orlov cast his eye about the apartment. He stared at the red wallpaper, the teak side tables and the amber-tinted glass that separated the living room from the kitchen. He had not changed anything since his wife, Yelena, had passed away from a stroke ten years earlier. It was Yelena who had decorated the apartment; Orlov had been too busy with his work at the space centre to pay attention to domestic life. Homes were the creations of women; even though the women in his life had a habit of not staying around as long as he would have liked. He had been only five years old when his mother died.

The sky outside the window darkened and Orlov watched it for a while, wondering if another thunderstorm was on the way. His mind drifted to Leonid. His son’s wife, Irina, had asked Orlov to come and live with them. She was concerned about him being alone when his health was failing. Orlov had refused. What good would an old man be to Leonid and his family? If he was a woman, that would be different. He could mend clothes, prepare meals, help with the shopping. But an old man with nothing but memories would be a burden.

Orlov had often wished that he could be one of those people who gave themselves freely to their loved ones, whose presence lit up a room. But a lifetime of secrets and guarding his thoughts had made him too introspective. Yelena had understood and accepted that about him. Even Leonid didn’t seem to bear any grudge about having an emotionally distant father. Only Natasha had been able to open up that side of him. Natasha …

Orlov stood and walked to the sideboard. He took out the copy of
Doctor Zhivago
from the drawer and opened it to the page where he kept the photograph hidden. It had been taken in 1943 and showed him and Natasha standing by his fighter plane. They were looking at the camera but in front of them was a map spread out on the plane’s wing. They were both smiling. For a moment, Orlov was startled to think that the handsome young man with dark hair and chiselled features was once him. It was during the battle for Kursk and the tension of flying several sorties a day had made them war weary. Yet in the photograph he and Natasha looked radiantly happy.

‘The absurdity of youth and being in love,’ he mumbled.

Ilya Kondakov had told him that now they had recovered the plane, the next step was to search the forest for Natasha’s body. He was drawing plans for how far she might have drifted with her parachute. It wasn’t considered chivalrous to shoot a pilot in their parachute; their downed plane was enough of a victory. But the Great Patriotic War had been a bloody battle with atrocities committed by both sides. The other possibility was that Natasha’s parachute had been damaged when she exited the plane and hadn’t opened for her. Orlov didn’t like to think about that too much.

He returned to the couch and poured himself another glass of vodka. When Natasha went missing, he’d fantasised that she had bumped her head and suffered amnesia. In his daydreams she was safe and well, living among some peasants. All he had to do was find her. He did not accept that she could have survived the crash and not come back to him. Every morning he had woken up wondering if this would be the day that she returned. After years of waiting with no sign of her, Orlov had gradually accepted that he had to make peace with the unresolved and get on with his life. But it hadn’t stopped him searching.

As the vodka put fire in his veins, he thought about the events of that last day he had seen her. Their regiment had been deployed to Orël Oblast, where German forces were concentrating for a planned offensive. The weather was unbearably hot, so instead of sitting in their cockpits, the pilots had been waiting in a hut. They had expected the Germans to start their attack in the morning but there was no sign of the enemy so far. Alisa, another female fighter pilot in the regiment, was sleeping. Filipp was reading a book but didn’t appear to be turning the pages. These two, along with Natasha and Orlov, were the pilots who had survived since the battle of Stalingrad. The other pilots were new. Some people said that the longer you flew the more likely you were to survive, but others said the opposite.

While waiting for the call to scramble, Orlov and Natasha would usually remain silent, each focusing on the task ahead of them. Occasionally, when it seemed unlikely they would be called on to fly they would dare to look to the future. How many children they would have, what they would do for work, how they would spend their summers. Natasha told him that the war had destroyed her love of flying, and after it was over she wanted nothing more than to be a good wife and give piano lessons to children. Orlov remembered studying his lover’s face that afternoon and the frown lines between her eyes. She had balled her hands into fists as if trying to restrain herself. She normally had a way of putting death out of her mind. ‘It’s no use mourning the fallen,’ she used to say. ‘I have to keep my head so I can fight for the living.’

The knowledge that the Luftwaffe was preparing for a massive air attack to halt the Soviet advance was sobering enough, but Orlov sensed that the peculiar tension in Natasha’s manner had another source. Perhaps it was because their beloved regimental commander had been killed a few days before. Natasha often said her worst nightmare was to go down in flames. Was it the death of Colonel Smirnov that was bothering her?

Her edginess worried Orlov, but when he suggested substituting another pilot for her she wouldn’t hear of it. She had forced a smile and attempted to lighten the mood by telling him about the time she had met Stalin. ‘I thought it was the most exciting day of my life. I was fourteen years old.’

From the moment Natasha had come into his life, she had been a dazzling light to Orlov, all paradox and enticing mystery, a tough fighter pilot one moment and at other times as innocent as a child. Although he had never liked her veneration of Stalin, he had learned to tolerate it. But he had to tell her the truth and this might be his last opportunity.

‘Listen, Natasha, there is something you should know,’ he said.

When the ingenuous expression on Natasha’s face had crumpled, it was as if he had taken a favourite doll from a child and trampled it into the dirt. But before he had any chance to explain himself further the alarm had sounded. German bombers had been spotted and they had to scramble for their planes. That was the last time he had spoken to her.

Sometimes Orlov wondered if what he had said that afternoon had caused her to go over to the other side, to assist the Germans. But he found that impossible to believe. Natasha was intensely loyal. She would not have betrayed her friends. Perhaps instead what he had revealed had destroyed the things that made her a great fighter pilot — her determination, her passion and her concentration. Maybe she had panicked and made a fatal error.

Orlov had never lost a wingman in battle until then; when he did it was his precious Natasha.

He covered his face with his hands and he wept. His shoulders shook and his chest heaved as tears poured from his eyes. Those events had taken place over half a century ago, but it was as if she’d vanished only yesterday.