Next time I visit my father it is mid-week, mid-morning, and I come without Mike. It is a mild luminous spring day, with tulips bursting out in front gardens and new growth greening the tips of trees. In Mother’s garden, the peonies are already out, thrusting up their crimson fists through the rampant weeds in the flower-beds.
As I pull up outside the house, I notice a police panda car parked there. I walk into the kitchen to find Valentina and the village policeman sharing a joke over a cup of coffee. After the freshness of the spring air, it is unbearably hot indoors, with the gas boiler belting away and all the windows closed. The two look up at me resentfully, as though I have disturbed a private tryst. Valentina, wearing a lycra denim mini-skirt and a fluffy baby-pink jumper with a white satin heart for the pocket, is perched on a high stool, with her legs crossed and her peep-toe mules casually dangling on her bare toes. (Slut!) The policeman lounges on a chair against the wall with his legs spread. (Slob!) They fall silent as I come in. When I introduce myself, the policeman pulls himself up and shakes my hand. It is the village constable, the same man I spoke to on the telephone about the wet tea-towel incident.
“Just dropped by to check on your Dad,” he says.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Valentina gestures towards the makeshift door which Mike put up, separating the kitchen from the dining-room, which is now his bedroom. My father has locked himself into his room, and is refusing to come out.
“Pappa,” I coax, “It’s me, Nadia. You can unlock the door now. It’s OK. I’m here.”
After a long while, there is a rattling of the bolt being pulled, and my father peeps round the door. I am shocked by what I see. He is terribly thin-emaciated-and his eyes have sunk back into their sockets so that his head looks almost like a death’s head. His white hair is long and straggles down his nape. He is wearing no clothes below the waist. I take in the terrible shrunken nakedness of his shanks and knees, livid white.
Just at that moment, I catch the policeman and Valentina exchanging glances. Valentina’s glance says: See what I mean? The policeman’s glance says: Blimey!
“Pappa,” I whisper, “where are your trousers? Please put on your trousers.”
He indicates a pile of clothes on the floor, and he doesn’t need to say anything else, for I can already smell what has happened.
“He shit himself,” says Valentina.
The policeman tries to conceal an involuntary smirk.
“What happened, Pappa?”
“She…” He points at Valentina. “She…”
Valentina raises her eyebrows, re-crosses her legs, and says nothing.
“What did she do? Pappa, tell me what happened.”
“She throw water at me.”
“He was shout at me,” pouts Valentina. “Shout bad thing. Bad language speaking. I say shut up. He no shut up. I throw water. Is only water. Water no hurt.”
The policeman turns towards me.
“Seems like it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” he says. “Usually the case in domestics. Can’t take sides.”
“Surely you can see what’s going on?” I say.
“As far as I’m aware, no crime has been committed.”
“But isn’t your job to protect the vulnerable? Just look-use your eyes. If you can’t see anything else, you can see that there’s a difference in size and strength. They’re not exactly evenly matched, are they?” I notice once more how much weight Valentina has put on, but despite this, or maybe because of it, there is a kind of magnetism about her.
“You can’t arrest someone because of their size.” The policeman can hardly take his eyes off her. “Of course I’ll continue to keep an eye, if your dad would like me to.” He looks from Valentina to me to my father.
“You are no different to Stalin’s police,” my father suddenly bursts out in a high quavery voice. “Whole system of state apparatus is only to defend powerful against weak.”
“I’m sorry if you think that, Mr Mayevskyj,” the policeman says politely. “But we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion.”
Valentina swings herself down heavily from the stool.
“I time go working now,” she says. “You clean up you Pappa shit.”
The policeman, too, makes his goodbyes and leaves.
My father sinks down in his chair, but I do not let him rest.
“Pappa, please put on some trousers,” I say. There is something so horrifying about his corpse-like nakedness that I cannot bear to look at him. I cannot bear the look in his eyes-at once defeated and dogged. I cannot bear the stench coming from his room. I have no doubt that Valentina cannot bear it either, but I have hardened my heart: it was her choice.
While my father is cleaning himself up, I search the house again. Somewhere there must be letters from her solicitor, information about her immigration appeal. Where does she keep her correspondence? We need to know what she is planning to do, how long she will be here. To my surprise, I find in the sitting-room, on the table amid the rotting apples, a small portable photocopier. I had overlooked it before, thinking it was some part of a computer, maybe belonging to Stanislav.
“Pappa, what’s this?”
“Oh, this is Valentina’s new toy. She uses it to copy letters.”
“What letters?”
“It is her latest craze, you know. Copying this, copying that.”
“She copies your letters?”
“Her letters. My letters. Probably she thinks it is very modern. All letters she copies.”
“But why?”
He shrugs. “Maybe she thinks to have photocopier is more prestigious than writing by hand.”
“Prestigious? How stupid. That can’t be the reason.”
“Do you know the theory of panopticon? English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Is design for the perfect prison. Jailer sees everything, from every angle, and yet himself remains invisible. So Valentina knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her.”
“What are you talking about, Pappa? Where are all the letters and copies?”
“Maybe in her room.”
“No, I’ve looked. Not in Stanislav’s room either.”
“I don’t know. Maybe in car. I see she takes everything to car.”
Crap car is sitting on the driveway. But where are the keys?.
“No need for keys,” says my father. “Lock is broken. She locked keys inside boot. I break lock with screwdriver.”
I notice that the car also has no tax disc. Maybe she had second thoughts about driving off in it while the policeman was here. In the boot I find a cardboard box, bursting with papers, files and photocopies. This is what I have been looking for. I bring them into the sitting-room, and sit down to read.
There is so much paper here that I am overwhelmed. I have gone from having no information at all, to suddenly having far too much. As far as I can tell, the letters are not ordered or sorted in any way, not by date or correspondent or content. I start to pull them out at random. Near the front of the box, a letter from the Immigration Service catches my eye. It is the letter setting out their reasons for refusing to grant her leave to remain after her appeal-there is no reference to my father’s statement under duress, but there is a paragraph explaining her rights to a further appeal to a tribunal. My heart sinks. So the last appeal was not the end of the road. How many more appeals and hearings will there be? I make a copy of the letter on the small portable photocopier, so that I can show it to Vera.
Now here are some copies of my father’s poems and letters to her, including the letter setting out the details of his savings and pensions-both the original Ukrainian texts and the translations have been photocopied and stapled together. Why? For whom? Here is a letter to my father from the consultant psychiatrist at the Peterborough District Hospital, offering him an appointment. The appointment is for tomorrow. My father has not said anything about this. Did he receive the letter? She has copied the letter (why?) but she has not returned the original.
There are some letters from Ukraine, presumably from her husband, but I can only read Ukrainian character by character, and I haven’t got time to read them now.
There is more of my father’s correspondence-here is the letter from the trainee solicitor about the difficulty of obtaining an annulment. Here is a letter he has written to whom it may concern at the Home Office declaring his love for her, and insisting that the marriage is genuine. It is dated 10 April-shortly before the appeal panel in Nottingham. Was it also written under duress? Here is a letter from his GP, Doctor Figges, advising him that he needs to call in for a new prescription.
In a brown envelope I find some copies of the wedding pictures-Valentina smiling to camera, bent low towards my father so that her fabulous cleavage is revealed, and my father wide-eyed, grinning like a dog with two tails. In the same envelope are a copy of the marriage certificate and an information sheet from the Home Office regarding naturalisation.
Now here at last is the letter I have been looking for-it is a letter from Valentina’s solicitor, dated only a week ago, agreeing to act for her in relation to her Immigration Tribunal, hearing in London on 9 September and advising her to apply for legal aid. September! My father will never be able to hold out so long. The letter ends with a caution:
You are advised that you should avoid at all costs giving your husband grounds for divorce, as this could seriously jeopardise your case…
I am so deeply engrossed that I almost miss the sound of the back door opening. Someone is in the kitchen, I realise. Quickly, I bundle together all the letters and papers, shove them back into the box and look for somewhere to put them. In the corner of the room is the big chest freezer where my mother kept all her vegetables and herbs, and where Valentina now keeps her boil-in-the-bag dinners. I stick them in there. The door opens.
“Oh, you here still,” says Valentina.
“I’m just doing a bit of tidying up.” My voice is placatory (no point in upsetting her-I will be gone soon, and then she will be left with my father) but she takes this as a slight.
“I too much working. No time house working.”
“Quite.” I lean casually on the freezer.
“You father-he no give me money.”
“But he gives you half his pension.”
“Pension no good. What can buy with pension?”
I don’t want to argue with her. I just want her to go, so I can get on with looking through the papers. But then I realise she may have come back for her boil-in-the-bag lunch.
“Would you like me to make lunch for you, Valentina? You can go upstairs and have a rest, while I get the lunch ready.” She is surprised and mollified, but declines my offer. “I no time eating. Only sandwich” (she pronounces it san-yeedge). “I come get car. After finish working I go Peterborough with Margaritka shopping.”
She bangs the door and drives off in the car, and I am left with a box of frozen documents.
I make a copy of the solicitor’s letter, but then I see that there are only two sheets of copier paper left, so I stop. I slip one of the wedding photos into my handbag, as well as the copies I have made. Then I put the rest of the papers back into the box.
As I am doing so, another paper catches my eye. It is a letter from the Institute of Feminine Beauty in Budapest, typed on thick cream paper, with a gold-embossed border, to a Mrs Valentina Dubova at Hall Street, Peterborough. It thanks her, in English, for her esteemed custom and acknowledges the payment of three thousand US dollars in respect of breast enhancement surgery. It is signed with a flourish by a Doktor Pavel Nagy. From the date, I work out that it must have taken place a few months before their marriage, during her trip to Ukraine. My mind goes back to the fat brown envelope. Three thousand US dollars is a little over £1,800. So my father must have known what it was for. Must have known, and must have been eager to pay it.
“Pappa,” I call him, softly, so as not to reveal the extent of my rage. “Pappa, what is this?”
“Mmm. Yes.” He looks at the letter and nods. There is nothing he can say.
“You are crazy. Lucky you have an appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow.”
I stow the box of frozen letters under my father’s bed, with strict instructions that he must replace them in the boot of her car at the earliest opportunity, without her seeing. I suppose I should stay and do it myself, but it is already early evening, and I just want to get away, to get home to kind, sane Mike and my orderly house. I cook him macaroni cheese-maggot-white, tasteless, but he can eat it without his false teeth. We eat in silence. There is nothing left to say. When he has finished, I say goodbye. As I turn from the lane into the main road, a car careers wildly round the bend in the other direction. One headlamp is broken. In the front are two grinning figures: Valentina and Margaritka returning from their shopping trip.