Omega

I had no idea. It distressed me to think that Tanya might ever be less than candid with me. We’d met during my final year at UCL, at an extra-mural class entitled “Apocalypse Now and Then: The Turbulent Twentieth Century”. I chose it partly because of the provocative title but also because it was being run by an academic rival of my father’s whom he was never able to speak of without loathing.

As it turned out the course was less stimulating than I’d hoped. Our professor, a doughty Marxist historian, couldn’t persuade us that the self-evident implosion of Communist states was merely a blip in the decline of capitalism and the rise of a politicised working class. Far more interesting was the retreat to the pub after the lecture that became a ritual for a small group of us. Tanya, a final-year student like me, travelled to the class on a vintage Lambretta motor scooter. She wore leathers and was doing a degree in astrophysics. As well as being attractive and intelligent she was also exotic, claiming that she lived with her Russian grandmother in a house in Balham. Though I was still dating Lyneth in Swansea, it wasn’t long before I asked her out. She turned me down three times before finally giving in.

TWELVE

Tanya and Geoff were wheeling me around a park. There were the usual dormant flowerbeds, the smell of leaf mould, water dribbling across tarmac paths. Geoff walked ahead, as though discreetly observing a requisite privacy between us. I found this odd, though not unwelcome. They had always been an unlikely couple, but I’m hardly unbiased.

We stopped at a lake, where children were tossing scraps of bread at avid Canada geese. There was a small island in the middle on which herons were roosting like motionless emaciated hermits. I tried to stir myself but my thoughts were like treacle. It was hugely frustrating. Why had they brought me here? Why didn’t I know what the hell had happened to me?

Tanya put a hand on my shoulder while Geoff paused to scan the treetops before saying something about parrots.

Blah, blah, I thought, though I knew he was only doing his best to normalise the situation. Still as kind-hearted as ever, though physically much changed from our university days. Gone were the beard and the bulk he’d carried, along with the saggy corduroy trousers and chunky cable sweaters. He’d been captivated by Tanya from the start, though of course I hadn’t realised it. I’d shared a flat with him in my final year. He was studying medicine but chiefly interested at the time in concocting potent beers and other alcoholic drinks in the house’s capacious cellar.

Most Sundays Tanya would take me home to have tea with her grandmother, who was indeed a Russian national called Tatiana. She’d anglicised her surname from Petrova to Peters. A stocky steel-haired woman, bent over with arthritis but still vigorous, she spoke English with an emphatic eccentricity that suggested she had originally learned it from books. Whenever I visited I found her welcoming, despite her disconcerting habit of calling me “Odin”.

My visits were generally brief, and I suppose I couldn’t have spent much more than a total of six hours in the old woman’s company. Yet she has always loomed larger in my imagination than this. Conscious of my own mother’s origins, I was intrigued by the mysteries surrounding her past, in particular how she had made the transition from the wartime Soviet Union to quiet suburban retirement in south London.

From the outset Tanya warned me not to say anything about my grandfather’s background or to ask Tatiana about the war years. On the one occasion I broached the latter subject she simply waved her hand at me and said, “That was so long ago. I have neglected most of it”. Tanya herself knew only that her grandmother had been a young woman working at a university in the Ukraine when the German invasion began and that she’d somehow ended the war in the West. Over the years Tatiana had occasionally volunteered information about her later life but the details often varied. She claimed to have married an English brigadier who’d brought her to London at the war’s end; or that her husband had been a wealthy businessman, a lawyer, and even that she’d been engaged to a member of the aristocracy who’d abandoned her when she became pregnant.

None of these stories could be verified because the old woman kept no memorabilia beyond family photographs taken in England. However Tanya had once found an old book amongst the rafters in the attic: a pre-war German edition of A Tale of Two Cities, annotated in English in her grandmother’s hand. She suspected that the old woman was reasonably fluent in German as well as English, though she would never admit to it. There were also once-yearly telephone calls from a posh and elderly-sounding gentleman called Lionel, always on her birthday. Tanya had no idea what they signified because Tatiana always shooed her from the room.