Summer in Russia was a revelation Jane had not anticipated.
She had built the estate in her mind as a winter place — inevitably, because that was when she had first seen it, and first impressions of a place do a particular kind of work on the imagination that later visits struggle to undo. She had carried it as a winter image: snow, cold light, the iron quality of a landscape under siege from the season. The forest dark and skeletal. The sky the colour of old pewter. The whole estate like something preserved under glass, beautiful in a way that kept you at a slight distance.
She had not accounted for what it became when the snow lifted.
The forest in July was full and heavy and almost aggressively alive, a deep northern green that had nothing delicate about it — it was the green of a landscape that had been waiting through seven months of winter and was now making up for lost time. The air was warm and smelled of pine and something she couldn't name, a quality of distance, of having come from a long way away. And the light was extraordinary — a midsummer light that barely left, the sky at midnight still holding a residual brightness along the horizon, the full dark not arriving until three in the morning if at all.
She had not been prepared for the light.
She had not been prepared for how much it changed everything, including him. He was different here in summer, less contained, as though the season permitted something the winter did not. He moved through the estate in July the way a person moves through a place they have always belonged to, a relaxation in it that she rarely saw in London, the particular ease of someone who has stopped performing and simply arrived.
They had been there for four days. Working — she on the book, in the long final stretch of it now, the shape of it clear and the ending in sight; he on something she understood in outline and not in detail, which was still how it was sometimes, and which she had made a kind of peace with. The rule she had settled into was this: what she needed to know for her own safety and judgment, she knew. The rest was his to carry.
At midnight the work had simply stopped, naturally, the way it did on evenings that were too good for work. She had looked up from the pages and heard him in the doorway, and he had said: come, and she had come.
He took her to the roof of the east wing by a staircase she hadn't known existed, behind a door she had taken for a cupboard. The steps were stone and narrow and curved, the kind of staircase that had been built for a specific purpose by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. She followed him up in the warm dark.
She had not known there was a roof terrace. When she came out through the low door at the top she stopped and stood and looked, and for a moment did not say anything at all.
It was a flat section of roof, old stone, with a low parapet at the edge. There was nothing up there — no furniture, no lighting, nothing that had been arranged or prepared. Just the stone and the parapet and the sky above it, which was the most sky she had ever seen.
She had understood, abstractly, that you saw more stars away from the city. She had not understood what more actually meant until this moment. The sky above the estate was not merely darker than a city sky — it was a different thing entirely, a depth of it, a layering, stars behind stars behind stars in a way that city-dwellers never saw and therefore never knew to miss. The Milky Way was not a suggestion. It was a road.
She was aware of him standing beside her, watching her look at it.
"I used to come up here when I was small," he said. "After my mother died. When I couldn't sleep, which was often."
Jane looked at the stars and felt the sentence land in her. After his mother died. She knew the outline of it — she knew enough, had been told enough, had understood enough from the gaps and the textures of the things he did and didn't say. But she had not heard him speak of her simply like this, as context, as the reason for a small boy standing on a roof in the dark.
"What did you think about?" she asked.
"Her," he said. "The stories she told me. She read to me from the old collections — folklore, heroes, the stories that are the same in every country with different names. I used to look at the stars and wonder about the heroes. Whether they could see the same ones." He was quiet for a moment. "It was a childish thought."
"It's not childish," Jane said. "It's the right question. Continuity across time. Whether the things that mattered to people who came before us are still there." She looked up. "They are. That's the answer. The same stars."
He was quiet. She could feel him considering this, the way he considered things that mattered — thoroughly, without rushing.
She thought about a nine-year-old boy standing where she was standing. The same stone beneath his feet. The same extraordinary sky. Carrying a grief too large for his age with the particular stoicism of a child who has understood, somehow, that there is no one to hand it to.
She thought about the man beside her now and the distance between those two points and everything that had happened in between, and she felt the weight of it without needing to name it.
"She would have liked you," he said. "She liked people who asked questions and weren't afraid of the answers. She said it was the rarest thing." A pause. "She was right. It is."
Jane didn't speak for a moment. The stars were extraordinary. The warm night air moved through, unhurried.
"I would have liked her," she said.
He stood beside her. Their shoulders touching, which was all — no more than that, just that point of contact, shoulder to shoulder in the dark under the impossible sky. It was enough. It was, in fact, precisely sufficient.
"Yes," he said. "I think you would."
Above them the stars continued their ancient, indifferent brightness, the same ones his mother had looked at, the same ones the heroes of the old stories had looked at, the same ones that would be there long after all of it — the estate, the Organisation, the particular two people standing on this roof in the Russian July — was gone.
Jane found she didn't mind. The smallness of it, in that context, was not frightening. It felt, if anything, like relief.