Snegurochka Judith Heneghan (most read book in the world .txt) 📖

our house back at home.’ She walks over to a lime-washed bureau, picks up a photograph in a plain silver frame and hands it to Rachel. The photograph shows a beautiful clap-board cottage with green wooden shutters and the sea, blue and hazy, in the background. ‘That’s us. Suffolk, near Aldeburgh. Where they have the music festival.’

Rachel blinks. This woman Suzie makes it all seem so effortless. Of course her real home is a cottage in Suffolk. There are other pictures, too: a bridal couple in a village churchyard, soft focused, all daisies and cow parsley; a broad-chested man in a wetsuit, the top half peeled off, drinking a beer on a beach. This is how people live back in England, she thinks. Where things are nice.

Ivan bumps his head crossly against her shoulder blade. She remembers that her back is aching. ‘Do you mind if I put Ivan down?’ she asks. ‘I’ve brought a change mat in case he leaks.’

Suzie is slicing into some freshly baked apple cake. ‘Go ahead.’ She puts a plate beside Rachel and sits down, her right hand encircling her left wrist. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like a baby. Rob’s adamant though. Not happening.’

‘Oh . . .’ Now Rachel doesn’t know what to say. She lays Ivan down on his vinyl sheet and glances again towards the photograph of the man in the wetsuit.

Suzie laughs. ‘It’s okay. Hard to imagine a child in this flat. It can’t be easy. For you, I mean. With a baby . . .’

Ivan is kicking his legs on the mat, staring up at the recessed lights in the ceiling. Here in this apartment where Rachel feels like she’s floating, even though it’s on a lower floor than her own, her son looks just like any other baby: all the babies she ever saw before she had one herself. Her head is full of the words she might speak: it’s fine, everything’s fine, nothing is fine; millions of women have done it before her and in markedly more difficult circumstances; the health visitor told her it wasn’t safe to come though she had to come, had to escape her own mother with her bitter jibes and injunctions; she’s lucky to be here at all; sometimes she wishes she’d never had a baby, never met Lucas. The balcony crumbles, the baby falls, she raises her arms above her head and flings her son into the void, but it won’t happen if she remembers that her sole task is to keep him away from the edge . . .

‘Lucas says I get a bit obsessive,’ she responds, surprising herself. ‘I do worry, though. I keep getting infections, and I don’t know any doctors. What if he gets sick?’

‘Oh, there are nurses at most of the embassies, and I’ve heard there’s a British doctor coming soon. Rob says I’m not to go near a local hospital. You can always fly back to London. What about your mum?’ Suzie pauses, waiting, but when Rachel remains silent she breezes on. ‘God, if I had a baby, my mother would be on the first plane out. And then Rob would leave me!’ She laughs again, a throaty laugh like the laugh of a smoker and Rachel notices a little loose skin beneath her chin. She’s probably nearly forty, though her body is toned and her limbs are slender.

‘Look,’ says Suzie, turning up the sleeve of her blouse to reveal a thin elastic band around her wrist. ‘My shrink told me to do it. Every time I feel stressed about something I give this a ping.’ She pulls it away with her other hand, then lets it go so that it snaps back against her blue-veined skin. ‘It stopped me craving carbs, stopped me getting lazy. Maybe it’ll stop me wanting kids.’

When they have finished their coffee, Suzie shows Rachel around the rest of the flat. There are two bedrooms, one with a rowing machine set up on the floor. The main bedroom contains an ornate limed oak sleigh bed with a mound of white bedlinen piled up in the middle. Rachel admires the way Suzie doesn’t care about her seeing the unmade bed. She notices the expensive toiletries, the soft sweaters and pressed shirts revealed by the half-open wardrobe. There are white towels in the bathroom; a gleaming white Kenwood Chef sits on the counter in the kitchen.

‘We should do dinner,’ says Suzie, when it’s time to slide Ivan back into his snowsuit. ‘Sometime next week. Rob would love to meet you both. He’s keen on some new restaurant near Andriyevsky Spusk. The food is terrible, but it’s fun.’

‘Okay,’ says Rachel, thinking this is how it’s done – you have coffee with someone, you introduce your husbands and then you are friends. Maybe things can be smoothed, made white and safe with pings from an elastic band.

Lucas will be pleased.

* * *

When Lucas returns that evening Rachel is reading her copy of Baby’s First Year. She has reached page sixteen. No skim-reading; she’ll have to start again if she fails to enunciate every single word in her head. This book, she knows, will never carry the compensatory power of the novel Lucas took, yet it offers some distraction. Reading out loud is permitted, though only if Ivan is awake. Right now he is dozing in his bouncy chair, which she taps with each new syllable.

‘The line’s out in the office,’ says Lucas, walking into the kitchen before Rachel can turn her page. ‘Just when I’m ready to file. I’m going to have to do it here.’

Rachel closes the book and places it on the table. She hasn’t worked out what to do if a page cannot be completed, but the memory of Suzie’s elastic band still pricks sharp and bright. Just a pinch for now, then. Her finger and thumbnail pluck at the pale skin on the inside of her wrist.

‘In here – you mean the living room?’ She pushes the book against the wall behind the fruit bowl and places the salt cellar