Her hopes dwindled and then died. He wandered off. She watched him from a distance. He moved slowly, heavily. He was not yet seventy, but his was a Russian age, and he was old and weary.

As was she. She did not bother with the rest of the food hall. There was no point, no point to anything anymore, foolish to have even tried. She guided him outside to the tram stop. They travelled home in silence.

For two years, her Australian life and her Russian past had existed uneasily together, like a tandem bike with differently sized wheels. Now Soviet Russia was not simply shaping her Australian days, but had actually taken over. She was stuck, with neither desire nor energy to get going again.

14 LOVE AND OBLIGATIONS

14

LOVE AND OBLIGATIONS

The seemingly endless winter of 1988 was wearing itself out.

Two months had elapsed since that red-letter day when Galina had agreed to go on holiday with him, a mere eight weeks since the intruder had broken into her home, but from Andrew’s perspective everything had changed. While Galya appeared to have recovered from the break-in, she was even more controlled and unreadable than before and, significantly, she was keeping him at a distance. They had met for coffee at her local café and there had been a couple of lunches, but he had not been to the saddlery during the past two months, and all his suggestions for exhibitions, for films, for the Saturday excursions she used to like so much were rejected; indeed, she hardly seemed to give them any consideration, responding with a mechanical no-room-for-discussion refusal. As the weeks turned over, his hopes, fired up by her ready agreement to take a holiday with him, were turning to ash.

‘She wants to see me only occasionally and always in public,’ Andrew said to his mother. ‘She couldn’t be clearer about this.’

Sylvie nodded. ‘She’s treating me in much the same way. The mystery is why she’s suddenly changed.’

It was late one Sunday morning, Leonard was out walking, and Andrew and Sylvie were sitting in the Morrow kitchen. A packet of shortbread was open on the table, along with a pot of brewed coffee — a surprising but welcome change, Andrew thought, from the powdered stuff his mother usually served.

‘I can’t believe the intruder is the sole explanation,’ Andrew said, helping himself to another biscuit. ‘Something’s wrong.’ He paused, and when he spoke again it was an unambiguous plea. ‘Would you speak to her? Galya sees you as a mother figure, a confidante. My position’s far more muddy.’

Sylvie smiled. ‘I think that’s muddying the obvious.’

Were his feelings so transparent? And were they to Galina? Not that this was his major concern at the moment. ‘Will you speak with her? Please.’

He realised even as he spoke, that requesting his mother’s help in this, or indeed anything, reinforced rather than loosened her entrenched over-protectiveness. But he was desperate.