When she was at school she was never alone, but had often been lonely. Her school was like that. There was a constant clamor of people, routine and activity, but unless you were the kind of person who slipped naturally into friendship, there was little charity.
Agatha did not require much attention. Her classmates were bland and she preferred her own company. Hers was the kind of school where all the pupils had titles and connections and country houses. They lorded it over her, even though in just a few years, come her twenty-first birthday, she would be able to buy and sell them all ten times over. Possibly they knew this.
When they went out riding they would enquire whether Agatha would be coming along too. Asking was not a kindness. They knew she would decline, once again, because she had no horse and could not ride. They came to ask her in their jodhpurs and riding boots, clutching helmets and crops, and after she had said no she heard them running along the corridors towards the stable, sniggering. When they came back following the afternoon hack they feigned astonishment that Agatha had not been out too. Then she found their dirty riding clothes crumpled up with her clean school uniform and she spent the night scrubbing and ironing it. They knew she only had two sets: one to wear and one to wash.
She told them she was only poor temporarily, because her father died before she was born and his money was in trust somewhere for her and she couldn’t access it until her twenty-first birthday. But when you are thirteen, your twenty-first birthday is far off, and the only salient fact was that she, Agatha, looked poor and dressed like she was poor and acted as if she was poor, and what was more, she literally had no money.
Everything Agatha and her mother had during these first twenty-one years came from Anastasia’s boyfriends. They gave her clothes and jewelry and other expensive trinkets and Anastasia retained what she needed to look the part of a trophy girlfriend and sold the rest to pay for her daughter’s boarding school fees.
“You must receive the best education that it is possible to receive,” her mother said to her. “You must live now the life you will later live,” Anastasia insisted. “There will be people always who will question your right to own all that you will own. But you must not let them question it. You must make them see how much you are worth.”
Anastasia grew up in poor circumstances in a small village between Moscow and St. Petersburg. She never mentions its name, nor talks about her early life much at all. Agatha knows that her mother’s childhood was difficult, that her mother’s mother was drunk and her mother’s father was violent, and that there were lots of siblings, and that Anastasia was the eldest and was expected to look after them. In 1990, when she was fourteen, she ran away to the capital.
In Moscow, Anastasia found a city caught between fat beginnings and slim endings; an empire decaying and regenerating all at once. The wall in far-off Berlin had crumbled, its rubble repurposed as paperweights and ornaments on bourgeois mantelpieces. All those subservient countries between Russia and the West had sidled away, and while the satellites and space stations continued to orbit the Earth, nobody much cared. There was no food in the shops and whole families had to live off a bag of flour and little else for weeks.
Anastasia attached herself to a gang led by a former tank commander in the Red Army. He and his men had seized various military assets as the state fractured, and they were in the process of moving their profits from Moscow to London. Anastasia went with them. She was passed around, but they treated her well enough otherwise. Better than her father had. They clothed her and fed her and some of them chatted to her and made her laugh.
Anastasia met Agatha’s father in Soho in the early 1990s, in a nightclub he owned. He was seventy-three. She was sixteen. His name was Donald Howard. His associates called him Donnie. She called him Donski.
Agatha turns onto her side then onto her back then onto her side. The sheets are soft and slip against her skin. She begins to fall away into sleep but is then awake. This is a common pattern. She’s not sure what manner of insomnia it is. It is not that she cannot fall asleep, but that she cannot stay asleep. She flicks on and off like a faulty generator.
Fedor still hasn’t come upstairs, though it is likely he and Roster have returned from their night-time walk. She rises from the bed and tucks the sheets behind her. She slips a wool blanket around her shoulders, walks across the bedroom and pulls open the heavy doors. Across the wide landing from her bedroom there’s a gaudy life-size portrait of her father. She never met the man but here he is, illuminated from below by the dim nightlights. The portrait once hung in the entrance hall, looking down at anybody who entered. After staring at it every time she came into the house for years, she decided to assert her presence in the building and remove anything she didn’t want. That included most reminders of her father. Instead of following her instructions, Roster has evidently simply decided to move the picture upstairs.
It is indicative of something, Agatha supposes, that the painting survived at all. Her elder sisters were grown up by the time of her conception. After they heard of the death of their father and the fact that his entire estate was left to an unborn child of a new Russian mistress, they did what they could to loot the movables, coming into the house and lifting everything that wasn’t nailed down. But not this portrait. Nobody wanted it. It hung in the entrance hall looking
