The Lost Daughter Read online

  In the sitting room, there were half a dozen crushed beer cans on the coffee table and dirty clothes slung over the backs of chairs; it didn’t look as though he’d been entertaining any women there. She made her way to his study and scanned the room. The plastic bag she’d filled with her father’s papers was sitting on his desk, but she couldn’t see anything unusual that looked as though it could have come from her father’s safe deposit box. She opened each of the desk drawers in turn, then checked inside Tony’s briefcase, but it was difficult when she didn’t know what she was looking for.

  Suddenly there was a noise at the front door. Val ducked down at the side of the desk, making herself as small as possible so she couldn’t be seen from the hall. There was a rattle, then a dull thud. It took several seconds before she processed the noises and realized it was the postman delivering the mail. She clutched her face in her hands and breathed deeply before standing up again. It was imperative she get out of there as soon as possible. She couldn’t afford to spend any more time searching.

  At the back of the usual drawer she found Tony’s checkbook and tore a single check from near the end of the book, where its absence wouldn’t be noted straightaway. She slid it into her handbag, closed the drawer, had a last look around to check everything was just as it had been, then hurried back to the laundry room. After squeezing out through the window onto the grass, which badly needed cutting, she retrieved a tube of glue from her handbag, dotted it around the edges of the insect screen, and carefully pulled it back into position, smoothing the corners. It would take a miracle for Tony to notice the difference.

  Twenty minutes later, she was at Peggy’s house accepting another cup of coffee. She could have used a slug of whisky to calm her nerves but knew it would only give her a headache later. Nicole and Lenny were charging around the house in a boisterous game of cowboys and Indians, complete with whooping and pretend gunfire.

  * * *

  After taking Nicole to school on Monday morning, Val swung into action. First she went to the bank in Croydon Park, where all the tellers knew her. Vonny, the one with curly red hair, was free, so Val waved and hurried over.

  “Tony’s only done it again.” She smiled. “He forgot to get the housekeeping money on Friday and he’s off on a business trip all week, so he wrote me a check for cash.” She handed it over. “How was your weekend, Vonny? Lovely weather. Can’t believe it’s May already.”

  Vonny picked up the check and glanced at it. Val had forged Tony’s signature several times before and knew she could do it better than he did himself.

  “My dad had a barbecue,” Vonny said. “Usual crowd.”

  “Are you still seeing that insurance guy? What’s his name again?”

  “Ian, yeah.” Her hand hovered over the stamp and Val willed her to pick it up. She shouldn’t really give cash except to the account holder, but she had done this for Val once before.

  “He seemed nice,” Val said. “Very good-looking.” She continued, “Tony went off this morning without any clean socks for the week, even though I’d left them out specially. I pity the man sitting next to him at the conference.”

  Vonny giggled and stamped the check. “How do you want it?” she asked.

  “Tens and twenties,” Val said, waving her hand airily as if it was of no consequence.

  As soon as she left the bank, she drove to the travel agent on Darling Street.

  “Can you still get me on that sailing to China later today?” she asked, out of breath. “I’ve got cash.”

  “Strewth! Talk about last-minute! I’ll call and check,” the agent said. “If not, I’ll ask when the next sailing is, shall I?”

  The next sailing was no use to Val, and she hopped from foot to foot as the agent spoke on the phone. “Cash,” she heard her saying, and that seemed a good sign, then she began talking about the issuing of tickets.

  “You’re in luck.” The woman smiled. “Come back in an hour and I’ll have the tickets printed for you. You have to get to the wharf at four, and it sails at five.”

  Buzzing with a mixture of excitement and nerves—mostly nerves—Val drove to her flat and packed their clothes for the journey into a suitcase, then loaded the rest of their possessions into boxes and drove to Peggy’s with them, collecting the tickets on the way. She’d ask Peggy to pick up the furniture, then stick the keys through the mail slot. She hadn’t paid the rent for May and the landlord wouldn’t be best pleased, but at least she was leaving the place much cleaner than it had been when she arrived.

  “So that’s what you were up to!” Peggy exclaimed. “You’re a dark horse. I’ll send Ken for the furniture after work and it will be waiting here for your return. Have a great trip!”

  There was no time to hang about: next Val drove to the school to collect Nicole. All the time she kept waiting for something to go wrong. Had Tony discovered the missing check? Would the bank have called to alert him to her cash withdrawal? Had he worked out which school Nicole attended? As she walked into the playground, she kept looking over her shoulder, scared that his hand would land on her shoulder at any moment, followed by his right hook exploding into her cheek.

  Nicole came hurrying out with her usual flurry of news, but Val was too distracted to listen. They drove to a Rozelle garage, where she went to the office, ignoring the girlie calendar on the wall, and asked the boiler-suited manager if he would buy her car. She had all the papers with her and crossed her fingers as he came out to inspect it, checking the bodywork, opening the hood, getting into the driver’s seat to turn over the engine.

  “I’ll give you three hundred dollars,” he said, and Val spluttered.

  “You’re kidding me! It’s worth at least a thousand.” She had seen them advertised new for five thousand, and it was only a couple of years old.

  He gave an exaggerated shrug. “Take it or leave it.”

  “Five hundred,” she countered, but he wouldn’t budge. She tried to bluff that she would go elsewhere but knew without checking that she was running out of time.

  “OK, three hundred it is, if one of your men will drive me and my daughter down to White Bay with our luggage. We’re off on holiday.”

  He looked her up and down. “Fair do’s. Come to my office and we’ll sign the papers.”

  She sat there under big-breasted Belinda, May’s pinup, certain that she would have gotten at least twice the price if she were male. Nothing could be done about it. She was thankful that at least Tony had put the car papers in her name for insurance purposes so she didn’t need his permission to sell it.

  Until they reached White Bay, Val hadn’t told Nicole that they were going on holiday, but after the mechanic dropped them off with their suitcase, she pointed at their ship, the Coolabah, towering like a mountain against the sky.

  “Guess what? We’re going to China to see your grandma. Won’t that be fun?”

  “Is it a joke?” Nicole asked, looking from Val to the ship and back again. “How do we get on? Where will we sleep? How long till we get there?”

  Val peered back at the approach road. Still she feared that Tony might discover her plans. Perhaps he would manage to bully the information out of Peggy and turn up at the quay, tires screeching, to grab her and stop her leading Nicole up the gangway.

  “I’ll tell you everything when we’re on board,” she promised.

  She showed their tickets to a steward and they found their way to their tiny cabin, two levels below deck. Val didn’t dare go out into the open air again until the ship’s horn sounded and she could feel them moving out into the harbor. If Tony came now, he’d be too late. She felt the tension begin to melt.

  They climbed hand in hand up the metal stairs onto the deck to watch as the ship glided slowly past the Opera House on their right, Taronga Zoo on the left, and out toward the shimmering vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

  Chapter 23

  Petrograd, winter 1921

  AFTER MARIA AND PETER LEFT THE FARM IN THE Urals, they headed we
st in the wagon they had taken from Svetlana and Joe, foraging for food and sleeping huddled under piles of blankets and coats in remote barns. Peter kept a fire going through the night, but still the raw cold ate into their flesh. It was dangerous cold, the type Maria knew could kill. They cocooned the little ones between them, but Maria often woke with excruciating pain in her fingers and toes, shivering convulsively.

  Once they were far enough away that Peter felt confident the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police—would not track them down, he began taking casual work on the new collective farms. Under Lenin’s agricultural policy, such farms were only supposed to hire family members but most flouted the rules when they were shorthanded. Peter was a tireless worker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the land. Sometimes a farmer took him on because he had tips about how to rid a crop of pests or to uproot stubborn weeds, or a suggestion for improving the milk yield of a herd. He was the last to leave the field at night, first out in the morning, and he got along with the other workers, careful not to threaten their jobs.

  The family never stayed long in one place but moved on, gradually heading toward St. Petersburg, where Peter had heard there were plenty of jobs in the burgeoning new factories. Maria dreamed of simple things: a roof over their heads, running water, a bed. Her past life as a Romanov was like a mirage; whole chunks of time faded from memory.

  Once they reached the city, early in 1923, Peter joined long lines of country folk applying for work at labor exchanges: laptis, the townsfolk called them disparagingly, after their woven bark shoes. He was eventually assigned to a pig-iron factory, where iron ore, charcoal, and limestone were melted together at high temperatures and black smoke belched from tall chimneys.

  With the job came an apartment in a communal block, known as a kommunalka, in a new suburb Maria did not know, far from the River Neva. The four of them slept in one room, and they had to share a kitchen and bathroom with nine other families, but it was clean and modern and there was an enclosed courtyard where the children could play.

  “How lucky we are!” she exclaimed, looking around—and then she stopped, remembering her slaughtered family and the basement in Ekaterinburg that still haunted her dreams. Luck was only relative.

  * * *

  Maria couldn’t have explained what made her take the children on the Tsarskoe Selo bus one morning after Peter left for work. She hadn’t told him her plan because he would probably have tried to talk her out of it, worried that someone might recognize her there. He was always cautioning her not to stand out from the crowd. She had tied a red scarf around her hair, and wore a wide skirt and a polka-dotted blouse. Over her arm she carried a woven basket, so if challenged she could claim to be collecting wild herbs.

  Stepan, now aged four, and Irina, aged two, screeched with excitement and laughed as they were jolted up and down on hard wooden seats when the bus’s wheels struck ruts in the road. Tsarskoe Selo had been renamed Detskoye Selo by the Soviet authorities, just as St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd. Anything to do with the Church or the monarchy had been obliterated as the Communist authorities tried to reeducate the people. Maria peered out at the fields where workers with hoes were breaking up the winter-hardened ground for planting, and felt immensely grateful that their farming years were over. It was too tough to make a living and the winter months were a struggle for survival.

  The bus stopped in town and she led the children up the hill to the Alexander Palace, which had been her family’s main home before the Revolution. She’d heard it had been turned into a museum, but it did not appear to be open that day and the gates were locked. She stood and peered through the railings at the long facade of the building with columns in the center and wings on either side. It seemed run-down, as if no one had repainted the exterior since the family left under guard in July 1917. Sunlight blinked off the vacant windows and there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  Memories came flooding back: tea parties with Alexei and Anastasia in the pavilion on Children’s Island; running around the park with their dogs as they chased birds and squirrels; the pet elephant given to them by the King of Siam, which always used to make Maria nervous with its huge stamping feet. And she remembered their days under house arrest, when townspeople jeered at them through these very railings, yet they carried on as normal a life as possible inside the palace walls. Suddenly she yearned to travel back to those days, just to be with her family once more. Had he lived, Alexei would be eighteen now, Olga twenty-seven. Her sisters would no doubt be married, with children of their own. If only she could see them, talk to them, embrace them one more time.

  And yet . . . if she did go back, the tiny children who were now tugging impatiently at her skirt would not exist, and she would not have found Peter. It was impossible to imagine ever being truly happy without Peter. He was the magnetic core of her existence. From the evil of the execution in Ekaterinburg had sprung the precious miracle of their love for each other, and she never ceased to be grateful for it.

  “Can we go now, Mama?” Stepan demanded in his high-pitched little-boy voice.

  She shook herself. “There’s another, even more splendid palace just over the hill. Wouldn’t you like to see? Come with me.”

  The Catherine Palace, with its azure-and-white exterior, golden domes, and rococo decorative motifs, was every child’s fantasy, set in acres of parkland scattered with lakes, fountains, and grottoes. When they arrived at the brow of the hill, Maria saw the gates were open and there were citizens strolling in the park. She remembered hurrying along the route between the two palaces during the Great War, when she used to visit wounded soldiers who were being nursed there. That was where she had met Kolya Demenkov, the man she’d had a crush on as a fifteen-year-old. It was all so long ago, in a different lifetime; she had been another person then.

  She led the children into the grounds, remembering her elder sisters, Olga and Tatiana, in their nurses’ uniforms, their hair entirely covered by long white headdresses. They had seemed to flit from girlhood to adulthood overnight as they learned to change bandages and administer injections to the wounded. Tatiana had even assisted at surgical operations, but Olga found they made her queasy.

  Suddenly Maria’s eye was caught by a tall, slender woman walking down the central pathway toward the lake. Her posture was erect and her gait particularly elegant, and that was what drew Maria’s attention first; but then she noticed the pale brown hair set against a swan-like neck and she blinked. It was Tatiana, her beloved sister. A feeling of purest joy spread through her veins.

  “Praise God,” she whispered, her hand over her mouth, tears springing to her eyes. She was about to set off in pursuit, but Stepan had wandered a little way away, and she had to turn and grab his hand then lift Irina onto her hip before she could start running.

  What a coincidence that Tatiana should be there the same day she was visiting! God must have intended them to be reunited. Or perhaps she came here all the time, mourning the family she had lost. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world to see her. Maria couldn’t wait to introduce her to her children, to invite her back for dinner that evening to meet Peter. Her heart was exploding with joy.

  She paused at a point where two paths crossed and scanned the crowd, then spotted Tatiana, on her own, strolling by the lakeside, a parasol in one hand.

  “Quick! Run faster!” she beseeched Stepan, almost pulling his arm out of its socket. There was a clear stretch now and they were gaining. Maria couldn’t think what she would say first. Perhaps there would be no need for words.

  “Tatiana!” she called, but her voice drifted away on the wind. “Tatiana!” she called again when they were just a few yards away, and the woman turned.

  Maria skidded to an abrupt halt, so close now she could have reached out to touch the woman’s coat. She wasn’t Tatiana. She was a buxom, coarse-complexioned peasant who looked to be in her forties. It was not a parasol she was carrying, but a long-handled spade. She must be one of the gardeners.

&
nbsp; Maria stood with her mouth open, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked, glancing from her down to the children and back again. “Can I help?”

  At that, Maria began to sob. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman put an arm around her and hugged her like a mother.

  “I thought you were someone else,” Maria managed to say at last. Little Irina had started to cry too, distressed by her mother’s grief.

  The woman touched Maria’s cheek before she broke away. “I hope you find her,” she said, looking deep into her eyes. “I really hope you do.”

  Chapter 24

  Petrograd, May 1923

  AFTER THE CHILDREN WERE ASLEEP IN THEIR BEDS that night, Maria told Peter about her mistake, her voice wobbly with emotion. They were sitting at the table, but he pulled his chair closer to put his arm around her and she pressed her leg against his.

  “Where do you think Tatiana is now?” she asked. It wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, but each time she hoped for some new insight.

  “After she left Ekaterinburg, I think she would most likely have headed south to the Crimea,” Peter said. “And from there she will have gone overseas. She would be unlikely to come here, to St. Petersburg, where she might encounter former palace employees around any corner.”

  “But surely she will be looking for us?” Maria laid her head on his shoulder. “She would not give up. The newspapers only reported my father killed. I can’t believe she would leave Russia without trying to find the rest of us.”

  “Many families have been displaced by the civil war, not just yours. You can’t live with your head in the past. If we ever hear the faintest whisper of your sister’s whereabouts, I promise we will go there immediately by any means possible, but in the meantime”—he rubbed his neck and winced slightly—“we have a new generation to care for.”