I RETURNED TO LONDON two days after Vladimir had taken me across the border. I was exhausted, beaten, but I didn’t want to rest until I was at my final destination.
Finn picked me up at the airport and on the way back to his flat I told him everything.
‘I’ve left,’ I told Finn. ‘Vladimir turned out to be the good guy.’
‘He saved your life,’ Finn said simply. ‘And he saved us.’
I bitterly regretted that I’d never trusted him, that I’d used him and that, in return for my callousness, he’d rewarded me with his ultimate goodness. I was ashamed and inside I cursed the course of my life and I cursed myself.
But when we reached his flat and Finn tried to hold me, I pushed him away. It wasn’t just the memory of Vladimir. There were other matters to deal with, not least the pictures of him with Karin which the Forest had shown me. I knew them to be false, but again my knowledge was no defence. I needed to confront him. We were sitting on the balcony of his apartment and watching the last of the tired, grey leaves fall from the trees across the street.
‘The night we left each other in Basle,’ I said, ‘did you take the train to Frankfurt with Karin that night?’
‘Karin?’ he said.
I could have thrown him off the balcony.
‘The Swiss girl we met in Geneva, Finn,’ I said. ‘That Karin.’
‘Oh, that Karin,’ he said.
It was such a typical response of Finn’s and always a fall-back position for him, even if he had nothing to hide. He did it in order to ponder any question, no matter how trivial.
‘Well, did you?’ I asked.
‘That’s what they say in Moscow, is it?’
‘They showed me a photograph of the two of you. You had the bag with you you’d bought with me the day before in Gstaad.’
‘Christ Almighty.’ Finn looked up at the sky, then scratched some peeling paint from the balcony’s railing.
‘So did you?’
He looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Of course I didn’t, Rabbit.’
‘Why, “Of course not”?’
‘They faked up a photo, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the answer you know to be true?’
‘Yes.’
He tried to put his arms around me but I pushed him away.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is exactly what they want.’
‘That’s convenient, too.’
‘Come on!’
‘That wasn’t all,’ I said. ‘They also provided me with a new background for you that denies everything you’ve said about yourself. Everything you’ve said to me.’
‘So what do they say I am now? A trust-fund kid with a stockbroker father and a charity-worker mother living in a Queen Anne hall in Surrey?’
‘Pretty much, yes.’
‘So their fakes aren’t getting any more convincing at the Forest, then.’
‘Which is true?’
‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’
We sat in silence and the first specks of rain began to fall. ‘You’re going to have to think about this,’ he said. ‘You know the answer. Just think about it. Think what’s preventing you from accepting what you know.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’
I thought about how our profession allowed the lies and deceit to creep through the rest of our lives until it was hard to know what was true and what was a lie. For a moment I almost wanted my relationship with Finn to have been a fantasy, just to stop the uncertainty.
‘Everything is so convenient,’ I said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘What they say, that’s convenient, of course, from their point of view. And your denial, that, too, is convenient. It relies on us both knowing that they are more than capable of faking everything.’
I let him take me by the shoulders then.
‘I love you, Anna,’ he said, and I looked deep inside him. I felt our lives come together with the contact of his hands.
‘I love you too,’ I said.
He grinned.
‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ he said.
We sat in the rain and held each other awkwardly. I knew I couldn’t bear to be without him then.
In the silence, with just the patter of the raindrops and the steady drone of traffic which becomes, in a city, like a kind of silence, he echoed my thoughts.
‘I can’t bear to be without you,’ he said.
‘That’s what Nana always said was the only test of love,’ I replied.
Finn and I went to bed just before midnight. He turned to me in the bedroom, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to marry him.
It was the most direct question he’d ever asked me and I said yes immediately, without thinking. It was as if someone had asked me if I wanted a glass of water when I was dying of thirst.
And so Finn and I got married, just as the year 2006 began.