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

‘This is my job, Rach,’ says Lucas, quietly. ‘This is why we’re here.’

‘Right,’ mutters Rachel. She doesn’t look up until he’s gone.

* * *

Once upon a time, Rachel and Lucas told each other a story.

‘We are going to live in garret,’ said Rachel, as the wind outside the tent whipped across the guy ropes and pummelled the flysheet. ‘In a crumbly old building with mice scratching in the eaves. I will make soup and sing at the window.’

‘And I will pull on my felt boots and go out to bring the news to the people and come home with black bread and bacon. It will be hard,’ said Lucas.

‘We will be cold,’ agreed Rachel, ‘but I’ll learn to knit. And we’ll have a stove that I’ll feed with kindling—’

‘Kindling!’ Lucas roared with laughter and pulled the sleeping bag up closer over their heads. ‘What sort of a word is kindling?’

‘Well,’ said Rachel, undeterred. ‘It’s a fairytale word. It goes with woodcutters and forests and witches.’

‘So I’m the woodcutter, hmm?’ Lucas put his hand up her fleece. ‘In that case, Princess Snow White, I happen to know you’re nothing but a peasant underneath that prim exterior . . . a grubby little Cossack!’

‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel, as he rolled her over. ‘A Cossack. That’s exactly what I am.’

* * *

Rachel wakes a little after three a.m. and listens to the click as the front door closes. She doesn’t move. Ivan is asleep in his new cot at the end of the bed; it took her two hours to settle him after his midnight feed. By the time her husband slides between the clingy nylon sheets her body is rigid with tension.

‘Are you awake?’ whispers Lucas. His hand brushes her shoulder. A nick of his dry skin catches on her t-shirt. ‘Rach?’

Rachel says nothing, her thoughts pinning her down. If she responds, he’ll want to have sex. They haven’t made love properly since Ivan was born. She was too sore from the stitches, too tired. Then he flew back to Kiev. Anyway, sex might wake Ivan. This is what she tells herself. This is the story she’ll tell him.

Lucas, however, is drunk and alcohol makes him persistent.

‘You’re all warm,’ he murmurs, nuzzling his chin against her cheek, moving his hand down her breastbone towards her stretchmarked belly. At this she flinches, turns away from him, fingernails digging into her palms.

‘I love you, Rach. I’ve missed you.’ His moist lips wheedle. Soft words. She’s got to decide. Her body is recoiling, yet her mind still toys with a different version of herself – a hazy, generous version, intent on pleasure, spreading her legs. Let go, Rachel. She knows it shouldn’t feel like being someone else, turning around, unbending, letting his fingers circle her breasts. Maybe she can do this; it’s what couples do and they are a couple. Outside, dogs are barking. It’s only natural – don’t overthink it. Or think yourself into it.

As Lucas pushes on she shuts her eyes and tries to relax, tries to block out the squeaking noise she hears, not from their bed but wheeling somewhere up above their heads. It’s the same noise she heard earlier, in the kitchen. Back and forth it rolls. Up and down. Round and round and round.

Chapter 2

Lucas and Rachel were supposed to conquer Eastern Europe. So said the best man at their New Forest wedding, the messages in the leaving cards from colleagues and the friends they’d accumulated along the way. Lucas’s mother, a twice-divorced Reader in Renaissance studies at a northern university, teased her youngest son about his pale-faced bride who couldn’t possibly imagine what she was getting herself into. Rachel’s mother, on the other hand, accepted Lucas as a fait accompli, seemingly relieved that her secretive daughter with her silent, strangled rebellions was now off her hands.

Lucas, went the story, was a golden-haired adventurer in pursuit of the exotic, the Slavic, the surreal. Rachel, the soft-chinned picture researcher, was swept up in his wake. She wasn’t a Romanian spymaster’s daughter or a ­dissident-cum-catwalk model or an almond-eyed soloist from the St Petersburg conservatoire, though this was never discussed openly among the junior sub-editors and fledgling lawyers with whom the couple mingled back in London. She liked Cornwall, and expeditions to the National Portrait Gallery, and drinking frothy coffee in cafés along Northcote Road. No one considered that she might long for somewhere else. Running away was what her father had done, and he was a feckless deceitful bastard in anyone’s eyes; most especially, Rachel’s mother’s.

Then one night, a little drunk, Rachel tried to catch a pigeon in Old Compton Street, scooting along with her hands sweeping forward, swearing she’d pluck it and bake it in a pie. Lucas, who felt he was on the cusp of something and might otherwise, at some not-too-distant moment, have ditched her, made a mental note, along with the After Eights story and the Cossack in the sleeping bag and other minor adventures he’d committed to memory. He confessed to his debts, raised a glass to the future and eleven months later, they were married. When he told everyone his new wife was pregnant, eyebrows were raised, but not for long. She’d never made much of an impression.

Now, Rachel has a fever. She doesn’t leave the apartment for a week – a week in which every day stretches out, each minute an hour. Instead she shuffles up and down the echoing hallway, waiting for the unfamiliar antibiotics that Vee has sent over to ease the infection in her milk ducts. When Ivan is feeding she lets out a little scream, because if she clamps her mouth shut she might bite off her tongue. When he is sleeping she bends over the yellowing bath to scrub the faeces off his clothes so that her breasts hang down, burning and engorged. Then when the chores are done, she lies on her back and reads Jurassic Park slowly, ten pages a day, measuring each word from the first deadly mauling