Snegurochka by Judith Heneghan (best ebook reader for laptop .TXT) 📕

* * *

Rachel is watching Simplemente Maria one afternoon when the phone rings in the hall. Elena has not joined her today – she has missed a few episodes lately, but Rachel tunes in, regardless. She doesn’t care about the storyline – Maria’s eyes fill with tears, Maria wears a jacket with big shoulder pads, Maria’s old love comes calling with flowers. The routine helps her breathe inside the flat. It helps calm the high-pitched sound in her head.

‘Hello, Rachel!’ says a soft voice. It is Suzie. The two have seen each other once or twice for coffee since Suzie sent the nappies, always at Suzie’s flat – never on the thirteenth floor. The nappies aren’t a secret, exactly, but Rachel tells herself that because they aren’t paying for them, Lucas doesn’t need to know.

Today, Suzie has some news.

‘We’re moving!’ she says, brightly. ‘Not far – to a little old house in the Tsar’s Village! It’s rotten and full of mice and God only knows what skeletons, but we’re going to do it up – the full remont! The rent is a ludicrous amount – I could see the dollar signs popping in the owner’s eyes. Rob will beat her down. You must come and see it. I need to know what you think!’

A house, thinks Rachel. Not a flat up in the sky, but a house on the ground.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’d love to.’

‘Next week,’ says Suzie. ‘When Rob says it’s ours.’

* * *

Rachel meets Suzie in the car park and they stroll across the tramlines together, Ivan in the pushchair, no need for his snowsuit today. Suzie is wearing grey wool trousers that show off her slender legs and a cream ski jacket with a neatly cinched waist. Rachel is wearing her new jeans, even though she told herself she’d save them for parties. The sun is shining. A few petals of pink apple blossom float above the dump bins. It’s a beautiful April day.

‘He’s growing so fast!’ observes Suzie, as Rachel stops to pick up the hat Ivan has tossed down to the tarmac. ‘Soon he’ll be walking, won’t he?’

Rachel remembers what Dr Alleyn told her. ‘He’s tall,’ she says. ‘So he has a higher centre of gravity. Maybe not yet.’

She and Suzie pick their way past the burnt-out Lada on the corner and on up the lane through Tsarskoye Selo. Rachel has walked here countless times, up and down from the monastery and the kiosks by the war memorial at the top of the hill. She has counted the wooden gates hinged with twists of wire and the battened and boarded cottages, each with a single upstairs window like a blank eye peering out from under the steeply angled eaves. Some are more dilapidated than others, with a scrawny cat lying on the steps or torn netting hanging from untended trees. There may be people inside, though Rachel never sees anyone – just a lick of paint on the fretwork above the doorways, a bright piece of sanitary ware sitting under a tree or a freshly concreted path, shovelled hastily, its edges already crumbling. Others appear uninhabited, their shutters tightly closed, though their gardens suggest otherwise: neat rectangles of tilled earth beside the steps; green shoots just emerging; fruit trees showing signs of recent pruning, their bare stumps painted an alarming dark red.

‘Can you imagine?’ says Suzie. ‘Me, in one of these? Rob says it’ll take three months to make it habitable. Then I can decorate it how I like, but you know me, it’ll be white, white, white!’

‘Fairytale houses,’ says Rachel, thinking of trails of breadcrumbs. ‘You’ll be like Hansel and Gretel.’

Suzie laughs her smoky, throaty laugh. ‘Oh, I was thinking more Sleeping Beauty! Ivan’s my prince. Look, this is us!’ She pulls Rachel down a stony track and they pass between two cottages towards a more isolated house beyond. It has a mansarded roof, a long, thin orchard displaying the first dabs of blossom, and a peeling waist-height picket fence painted the usual faded blue. There’s a figure bending over by the steps, but Rachel knows it isn’t Rob because Suzie has promised her that he is out of town. Besides, the figure is too short. It looks more like an old woman wearing baggy trousers. Her hair is tucked beneath a sort of knitted beret; thin scraps of it are escaping.

When Suzie and Rachel approach, the old woman straightens up slowly, as if it pains her.

‘That’s the woman we’re renting from, some old communist,’ whispers Suzie. ‘I didn’t know she’d be here.’

Rachel, however, needs no introduction. ‘It’s our dezhornaya!’ she says, taken aback, for she realises she has never asked where the caretaker actually lives, assuming it to be a one-room flat somewhere past the monastery, or even a dark corner in the basement of her own block of flats. ‘Elena, privyet!’

For a moment Elena seems bewildered. Then her eyes narrow and she nods to them both.

‘Dobrey ootra,’ she says – good morning – a rebuke to Rachel’s over-familiarity. Ivan bounces with excitement, stretching out his arms. The old woman leans forward but checks herself and pulls back, rubbing at the dirt on her hands. She and Suzie converse awkwardly in Russian while Rachel unclips Ivan from his pushchair and settles him on her hip. It’s obvious Elena is unhappy to meet them here and this makes Rachel feel uncomfortable. She wonders if renting out the property is distasteful to the old woman, or whether it is the intrusion she objects to. Then she remembers what Lucas said about the houses being built for Party officials. Perhaps Elena had been a spy, as Rachel had first suspected, though she struggles to believe this now that she knows her a little. Elena’s face and body language give too much away.

Elena is waving her hand towards the front door.

‘She doesn’t want us here,’ whispers Rachel, as she and Suzie climb the steps.

‘Too bad!’ laughs Suzie. ‘It’s ours! Rob got his lawyer to draw up a contract and we’ve