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

bag for a spare, but then a family strolls across her sightline and he is gone. Anyway, she won’t interrupt him while he is working. She certainly doesn’t want to talk to him.

Up ahead she spots a bench in the shade, one half unoccupied. She sits down next to a middle-aged couple and fumbles in Ivan’s nappy bag for his lidded beaker. The beaker is an innovation. She bought it at the House of Children in Lipki and Ivan hated it at first. He threw it to the floor and splashed the water Rachel had carefully filtered and boiled and cooled all over the kitchen. Now the warmer weather has arrived he is thirstier and glugs at it noisily, gripping its two handles with his moist pink fingers, his eyes rolling slightly. The sight of him sucking triggers the let-down reflex in Rachel’s breasts and she pulls her thin cardigan across her chest.

The couple next to her are talking in low voices. The man, who is wearing brown polyester trousers and a carefully pressed short-sleeved shirt, holds the woman’s hand and the woman presses her knee against his leg. To Rachel they seem sweet – demure, unshowy in their solicitude. They smile at her child and make encouraging noises, and the man reaches forward and gently pats Ivan’s head.

Then the woman leans round her companion and speaks directly to Rachel in a quick burst of Ukrainian.

‘Nye panimayu,’ says Rachel, shaking her head apologetically. ‘I don’t understand.’

Her response seems to agitate the woman, who says something to the man. They both point at Ivan, who has kicked off his knitted slipper. He beams at the pantomime these strangers are performing for his amusement.

‘Fut!’ says the woman, then again, more sharply, ‘Fut!’

‘Oh,’ says Rachel, smiling politely, though with no intention of covering up his toes. Her new strategy for batting off the imperatives from every woman over forty is to gabble at them in a language they can’t decipher. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ she says. ‘Bare feet won’t kill him. In England, unlike in your country, we know about germs and vitamin D. We know how to bring up our babies quite safely in the fresh air, with no hat on, with no boots on and, sometimes, would you believe it, with no clothes at all!’

This time something is wrong. The man looks angry. He stands, and so does the woman.

‘Then consider yourself fortunate,’ he says, in precise English. ‘My wife wished only to help you. We did not expect an insult in return.’ And with that the couple move away.

Rachel gets up, too, a low mood upon her, exposed and ashamed by her outburst. She wants to be at home now, she wants to read her pages and she wants to hang her washing out in the basement in straight lines, tightly pegged, as tight as she can possibly stretch the towels and the vests and the sheets. She picks up the dropped slipper and rushes away from the park, out through the gates, across Lavrska Street and down the lane towards the tower blocks on Staronavodnitska. Building Number Four still broods there like a standing stone. She looks up, as she always does when she passes into its shadow. As she raises her head someone throws something from one of the balconies. Whatever has been thrown falls clumsily, straight at first, then wheeling and unfolding as it approaches the ground. Rachel sees it is a piece of cardboard or packaging of some kind. She swallows down the bile that has risen in her throat and hurries inside, wishing that Elena was here to shout and summon the lift in order to bang on the door of the offending apartment.

When Rachel walks across the foyer there’s a different old woman sitting in her cubicle.

‘Gdye Elena Vasilyevna?’ she asks. Where is she?

The woman shrugs and scowls at the pushchair’s dirty wheels.

* * *

Lucas marches along Khreschatyk, too much energy in his legs. There’s a pink flush below his cheekbones and he wants all the strollers around him to get out of his way. This city is too much, sometimes – the queues at the kiosks, the endless holidays, the wide blank faces. Take Zoya, who didn’t show up at the War Memorial today. He wants to find her, to tell her straight that he is going to hire someone else, that he’ll be paying someone else to do the job instead of her. She thinks she’s so good he won’t fire her, and that’s his problem, as usual, because he does need her. Back at the office he took a call from Sorin. There’s an obstruction with some of the permissions he needs for his film feature. Lucas could go ahead anyway, but he doesn’t want to upset the director at this point in production – he needs to be invited to the premiere, now scheduled for July.

He passes a woman pulling along a grizzling child and thinks of Rachel, which doesn’t help. Her silences, her deliberateness, her superstitions depress him. When she was pregnant, he loved her softness, her needs. Now, everything is weighted and weighed – a touch, a caress – nothing is gifted to him, nothing is free. He needs to act. He needs to take control of their lives and the emptiness he feels where there used to be attention and ardour. All the same, he wishes Rachel would decide to go back to England without his urging. Nothing permanent – not yet. He’d miss Ivan, but a break would allow them both to breathe. There’s the cost of the flight, though if she stayed with her mother it needn’t be too expensive.

He’ll try to steer her round over dinner.

* * *

In Rachel’s dream she neither flies nor falls. Instead she sits on a chair in the middle of the living room, looking out beyond the balcony to the white gauze of the sky. In her dream everything is still. She sits still; her bones inside her skin rest lightly, her feet