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

He pointed and named things, he squatted and peered. She tried not to think about the bald patches on the bulge of his white calves and instead placed her feet in the hollows and landslides left by his salt-marked sandals.

Then, in a muffled incline, downwind of the beach, Rachel’s father turned and said, ‘Let’s make a fire.’ When he stooped to pick up a curved rib of driftwood and produced a box of matches from his breast pocket, she felt a tingle low down in her stomach. The smoke made her cough, the crackle of the dried marram grass made her jump but soon she was running about, searching for anything that would burn and feed the flames.

When Rachel’s mother discovered them she put an end to the nascent conspiracy. Rachel was marched to a public toilet to shake the sand out of her knickers while her father kicked over the embers and jangled his keys. In the car park her feet were checked for tar. They didn’t stop for ice creams; the traffic into Cardigan was already building.

All the way home, Rachel leaned her forehead against the window to cool her burning skin. She remembered the way her father lay down in the sand, frowning with concentration as he cupped his hands, then smiling at her as the fire took hold, his body shielding it from the wind’s worst excesses. She remembered the way the flames licked and leaned, and she tried not to blink.

Six months later, Rachel’s father was gone. This didn’t surprise her. At Poppit Sands she’d learned that people could be more than one thing.

* * *

On their last morning in Yalta, while Rachel and Lucas are eating breakfast in the sanatorium’s cavernous circular restaurant, Lucas is asked to take a call at the central reception desk.

It is Zoya.

‘Elena is dead,’ she says down the crackling, popping line. ‘Please tell Rachel. This morning. Stepan found her.’

‘Christ,’ says Lucas. Then, ‘What happened?’ He readjusts his voice, aware that the young woman behind the desk is listening. He thinks Zoya might have waited until they got back to Kiev.

‘A leak of some type in the apartment building. Down in the basement.’

‘Was it gas?’

‘It would seem so. The police have been there.’

‘Christ.’

‘Please tell Rachel. She will want to know.’

‘Sure – leave it with me.’

It is only when Lucas has replaced the receiver that he thinks of all the things he should have said, like how sorry he is, and will the apartment block be safe, and who the hell is Stepan.

* * *

‘That was Zoya,’ says Lucas, when he rejoins Rachel at their table. ‘Some bad news, I’m afraid.’ He frowns, unsure how his wife will react. ‘The old dezhornaya – Elena – has died.’

Rachel turns her head and looks out of the window, down past the tops of the ornamental yuccas and the oleander bushes of the formal courtyard gardens to the white marble paving below.

‘Rachel?’

‘How did it happen?’ She turns her head back to her husband, her thoughts separating, re-grouping. ‘Where was she found?’

‘Basement,’ says Lucas. ‘Do you think she did it herself? Someone called Stepan discovered her.’ He checks his watch. ‘It’s shocking news – I’m sorry. I know you’d become fond of her. Did she have any relatives?’

‘I don’t know,’ replies Rachel, her voice far off, like an echo. Then she changes her mind. ‘I heard she had a baby, but she lost it.’

* * *

When Rachel and Lucas return to Staronavodnitska Street there is nothing to show that a death has occurred. The basement door is shut, as is the door to the flat where Elena had been staying. All that time, thinks Rachel, she’d been so fearful of a fall or a push or a chance letting go from the balcony on the thirteenth floor until Elena had shown her how foolish she’d been. Perhaps Elena had always known the threat came from somewhere else.

She doesn’t find the package until the evening, as she puts Ivan to bed. It is tucked in the drawer between the nappies – a brown padded Jiffy bag, addressed to her in her mother’s insistent scrawl. When she looks inside she finds a circular pot of face cream. The silver lid gleams as she takes it out. Her mother has sent her a jar of Visibly Different. She sits down on the bed, rubs her thumb across the raised EA for Elizabeth Arden, then twists off the lid. It has been opened already; the surface bears the mark of someone else’s finger, but it doesn’t matter. The scent of her mother’s skin rises until once again Rachel is a nine-year-old girl, standing in the bathroom doorway of the bungalow, watching her mother dab small dots along her cheekbones, pulling at the slack folds beneath her jawline, her lips drawn tight to keep the cream out of her mouth, those fierce eyes in the mirror, angry with ageing, with her daughter, with herself.

Rachel puts the jar down and studies the package’s postmark – the fifth of December. Her mother sent it in time for Christmas. There is no card to accompany the gift, nothing for Ivan or Lucas. While the three of them have been in Yalta it has arrived here amongst the nappies.

‘Only for grown-ups,’ Rachel’s mother had scolded her.

Elena had a key. Lucas gave her a spare when Rachel was ill.

Truth flashes and shimmers like a fish in the reeds. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you may grasp it.

* * *

‘Mum,’ says Rachel, when her mother answers the telephone.

‘Rachel – is that you?’

Rachel catches the notes of an advert’s upbeat jingle before her mother turns off the television. ‘Yes Mum. It’s Rachel. I’m coming home. On the third of September.’

‘I see. You are sure, this time.’ A pause. ‘I’ll have to make up the spare room . . .’ Her mother’s voice wavers with questions.

‘I got the face cream, Mum. It was delayed – in the post. But I’ve got it now.’

The line pops softly like a bronchial chest.

‘Well, it was meant for Christmas. The cold weather never