It would be easier, I thought, for me to simply go and sleep out in the sitting room myself. That way I wouldn’t have to shift him. Taking care, I slowly reached across to lift his arm from where it lay across my stomach.
Then I stopped, because there wasn’t any arm there.
My own fingers brushed the fabric of my top, confusingly. My hand moved further, to where I could feel the warmth of him … and touched the empty blanket. Even more confused, I turned my head against the pillow.
I was in the bed alone.
But still I felt the hold of his embrace. I felt it even when I sat up, pushed the blanket off, and stood. I felt it while I eased my bedroom door open and, careful not to make a sound, went tiptoeing across the silent sitting room to see with my own eyes what seemed impossible.
He lay sleeping as I’d felt him – on his side, with one arm resting on the rumpled sheets, protectively. And looking at his face I felt a swift, insistent tug beneath my heart, as though someone had tied a string around my ribs and pulled it sharply.
Breathing in, I focused, with my gaze still steady on his sleeping features, and I very, very gently pushed his mind from mine. He didn’t wake.
I felt the cold, without him. Even after I’d returned to my own bed and burrowed deep within the blankets, I felt cold. And worse was yet to come, I knew. It wasn’t such a hard thing to make Rob let go of me, I thought, but how in heaven, after this, could I let go of him?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Rob glanced down at his watch, then scanned the traffic just ahead of us. ‘Your flight’s at half past nine, ye’ve no got time.’
‘It’s barely six o’clock. Besides, it’s on our way. And trust me, it will only take five minutes.’ I was ready for his sidelong glance, and met it with full innocence.
‘Five minutes?’ he repeated, to be sure.
I gave a nod. ‘He said he’d have it ready for me.’
‘When did he say that?’
‘I rang him earlier.’
‘Earlier?’ Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘What is he, nocturnal?’
‘Very nearly. Here,’ I said. ‘Turn left here, and then right just where that other car is turning.’
I’d grown up here, in this little terraced house in Acton, with its 1920s pseudo-Tudor timbers trying hard to make it look distinguished in a slightly dodgy neighbourhood.
My grandfather answered the door fully dressed, freshly shaven, his thick white hair brushed back neatly. He always took pride in his clothes and appearance, and even at his age he looked rather dashing. He shot a suspicious look over my shoulder to where Rob stood leaning against the parked car at the kerbside. ‘Who is that boy?’
Rob had shuttered his thoughts, I knew, at my request. ‘If he knows what you are,’ I’d told Rob, ‘then he’ll give me a lecture. And that will take more than five minutes.’
I kept my reply simple. ‘That’s Rob, Granddad.’
‘Your fancy boss gave you a driver?’
‘He isn’t my driver.’
‘He opened the door for you.’
‘Yes, he’s got very good manners,’ I said. ‘But he’s only a friend.’
With a final hard stare beneath lowering eyebrows, my grandfather switched his attention from Rob back to me when I asked, ‘Did you manage to find it?’
‘The book? Yes, yes, I know where it is.’
I could sense the faintest cautionary nudge about the time from Rob, as I went in the house behind my grandfather, but after all, it had been Rob who’d said last night that it would be a help to me to have an old map I could use for reference.
And I’d suddenly remembered, just this morning, where I’d find old maps.
The book was on the table by the fireplace in the sitting room, beside the half-drunk cup of tea and partly finished crossword that was evidence my grandfather had been awake a while, and on his own. ‘Is Mum at work?’
He gave a nod. ‘The hospital was busy place at three o’clock this morning. Was an accident. They telephoned to call your mother in to the laboratory.’
As a biomedical scientist, my mother was frequently working odd hours. I was sorry I’d missed her, and said so.
My grandfather shrugged. ‘She would only have been curious,’ he said, ‘about your driver. She’d ask questions. Is as well that you have only me.’ He handed me the book. ‘Here, take it. Keep it. I don’t want.’
It was a history of St Petersburg, in photographs, old drawings, maps, and paintings, with small passages of text. A proper coffee-table book. I could remember when my father had come home with it, excited to have found it in the bookshop round the corner from the school where he was teaching, and he’d given it so proudly to my grandfather. ‘That’s where you came from, isn’t it? St Petersburg.’
My grandfather, accepting the gift graciously, had set it on the table, where it stayed at least a year before he’d put it in the cupboard in the corner. I had never seen him open it.
My father, loving all things Russian as he did, had never fully noticed that my grandfather had done his best to cut away all ties that might have bound him to his homeland, and the city where he’d suffered the experiments that had for ever changed him and embittered him and left him so distrustful.
I’d never learnt the full story of how they’d got out of the Soviet Union – my mother had been ten, and could only remember an overland journey through Finland, she thought, and my grandfather wouldn’t give details – but I knew it hadn’t been easy, though he’d always counted it well worth the cost. He had changed his name, after arriving in London, from Ivan Kirilovich Birkin to John Birkin, which to his ears sounded practically English. A good English name, for a man who was finished with being a Russian.