A Shorter History of Tractors in Ukrainian with Handcuffs Read online

  MARINA LEWYCKA

  A Shorter History of Tractors in Ukrainian with Handcuffs

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, grew up in England and lives in Sheffield. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Two Caravans and Marina's third and fourth novels, We Are All Made of Glue and Various Pets Alive and Dead are all available in Penguin.

  1

  Ever since she’d first read Sherlock Holmes, Laura Carter had dreamed of being a detective. But she came from the sort of family where only dreams of the most practical and down-to-earth variety were acceptable, with the result that instead of being a detective she’d ended up as a small-town solicitor, married to a small-town accountant, with two well-behaved teenage children at private schools, a four-bedroom house in one of the town’s leafier suburbs, and a vague unspecific yearning for a more exotic, more exciting, more meaningful kind of life: the kind of life you read about in books.

  Books were both her escape and her guilty pleasure, which eased her through the boring days and enlivened the nights when her husband was too tired for love. She devoured everything from Proust to Harry Potter, from James Joyce to E. L. James. She adored detective stories, but maybe her favourite author was Marina Lewycka, whose Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian had strangely echoed a case she had once worked on.

  Which was why she was staring with more than usual interest at the young couple standing in the street beneath her office window: a young girl, sparklingly pretty with a flashing smile, wearing jeans and a pink jacket, her hair in a long dark plait between her shoulders; the young man a bit older, say late twenties or early thirties, with shaggy shoulder-length hair and an unfortunate attempt at a beard, and with a backpack over one shoulder. They looked different to the regular Peterborough pedestrians – more colourful, more animated. They were poring over what looked like a map, pointing and puzzling, as though they were strangers in town. Then they put it away and crossed the road in the direction of the shopping centre. There was something about the young man that struck her as oddly familiar, the way he held his face close to the page, the way he walked, slightly bow-legged. Could it be . . .? A case she’d handled many years ago at the county court flashed into her memory. A case successfully resolved in some respects; in other respects, not resolved at all.

  As a small-town solicitor (OK, we’re talking about Peterborough, which is technically a city, but . . .) marital discord was her daily bread and butter – adultery, divorce, greed, scheming spouses, unusual sexual proclivities (though you’d be surprised at how common most so-called unusual proclivities are), the whole sorry human charade of incompetence, malice and lust. Because of this, on the whole she was grateful for her husband Graham’s unswerving dullness: she’d seen where too much excitement can end up. Like that Ukrainian family – the busty gold-digger, the tractor-crazed old man, the two scheming sisters – a volatile and capricious lot, in her opinion. Yes, she never did find out what had happened in the end.

  Without quite knowing what impelled her, she left her desk, grabbed her coat and headed for the lift.

  By the time she was out in the street, the couple had disappeared. A bus was pulling away and lumbering northwards through the traffic. Had they got on the bus? Which bus was it? She started to run, but the lights changed, and the bus vanished round the corner. She stood on the pavement catching her breath, chiding herself for her foolishness. Then, for no particular reason, her eye strayed towards the shop window opposite her office. Dina’s Patisserie. Temptation. Normally, she would have turned away at once, but this was not a normal day. She let her eyes linger. Temptation assailed her in whorls of thick cream, glistening berry fruit and sugar-glazed pastry. And Laura Carter did something she had not allowed herself to do for so long that she couldn’t remember the exact last time she had done it: she succumbed.

  Back in the office, she brewed herself a cappuccino at the machine, and took the carrot cake with mascarpone cream icing into the dusty back storeroom where the old files were kept. Mayevskyj v Mayevskyj. She perched on a stool by the window, and leafed through the pages. The memories flooded back. The ignored injunctions; the ridiculous maintenance demands; the day in court when the wife-to-be-divorced had failed to turn up. Nikolai Mayevskyj, the old man she represented, had arrived at court with his two daughters and been granted a divorce in Valentina Mayevskyj’s absence. Stanislav, Valentina’s son by a previous marriage, had appeared on his mother’s behalf. He would be – how old now? About thirty. And the pretty girl who looked too young for him – well, he wouldn’t be the first in that family to have an age-inappropriate relationship.

  If it was him, what was he doing here after all these years?

  She dipped a corner of the cake into her cappuccino and, as soon as the warm liquid mixed with the sponge touched her tongue, a shudder ran through her as an exquisite pleasure invaded her senses. She put down the cup and asked herself the origin of this half-remembered state of bliss. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The small cafe a few yards away from the courtroom in Peterborough. An adjournment in the divorce case: time for a quick coffee fix. A man was sitting opposite her, enjoying an espresso and a French pastry, and – how could she forget? – he broke off a corner of his pastry, dipped it in the espresso, placed the coffee-flavoured morsel of bliss on a plate and passed it across the table towards her. She looked up and met his eyes.

  It was the judge. He winked inscrutably behind his aviator-style glasses.

  She leafed through the dusty file in her hands, recalling that Stanislav had stood up in the courtroom that day and made a tearful plea on his mother’s behalf, which the judge, kindly but firmly, had disallowed. The judge’s name was Grayson Maddox. She closed her eyes and remembered his glinting wire-framed glasses and silver hair, his steely yet gentle demeanour, the way he had listened to the boy – not dismissively, but mindful of the eternal beauty of British Common Law – and the judgement he had delivered at the end. Robust. A frisson ran through her. There are more ways than one in which a man can be robust.

  Because Valentina, the now-ex-wife, hadn’t applied for maintenance during the divorce proceedings, the judge had awarded nothing, despite Stanislav’s intervention. But there was nothing in law to stop her coming back in the future and lodging a new claim in court. If she had died in the meantime, Stanislav might have a claim on the old man’s estate. And of course there was the question of Valentina’s baby, whose paternity had never been established, who would certainly have a claim if the old man was the father, as Valentina had insisted. But she had refused to allow a paternity test, and Laura recalled that the old man’s daughters suspected the real father was a man who used to run that seedy pub around the back of the Cathedral Close.

  At first, Laura had waited for Valentina to reappear with a maintenance demand. However, as the years had passed and nothing happened, the case had been filed. The old man had gone into sheltered housing; Valentina and her son had disappeared, nobo
dy knew where; the man’s two daughters had patched up their differences and retreated into their families; the house had gone on the market; and that was that. Case closed.

  That robust judge, Grayson Maddox, had disappeared too. At first, she’d come across him in court once in a while. Sometimes their eyes had met, in a mutual understanding. Or maybe it wasn’t so much an understanding as an unspoken admission that the case was still unresolved, and that they fancied the pants off each other. But it was a number of years since she’d seen him. He must have been moved to another district. Shortly after that court case, she’d married Graham, and her life had settled into a comfortable groove.

  In the silent privacy of the back storeroom, Laura Carter did something which she would never, ever have let anyone see her doing: she ran her finger around the inside of the empty coffee cup, wiping up the residual froth from her cappuccino, and sucked it clean. Then she did it again in the other direction. Then, meditatively, she let her tongue remove every last crumb and trace of cream from the greaseproof paper of the pastry, exploring the crevices in the ridges of the paper. Mmm. That was good.

  At six o’clock, after she’d closed up the office, instead of going straight home she took a route that led her in the direction of the Cathedral Close. The road was closed to traffic, but she found a parking spot and walked up the cobbled alley towards the pub, a lowering castle-like building with turrets and battlements, which was called the Slyther Inn. It was not at all as she remembered it, and seemed to resemble a place she had read about recently in one of the books at her bedside. Inside, it was dark and cavernous with a high-beamed ceiling, and Laura noted with surprise that a large owl was wheeling around up there beneath the rafters. Waiters who looked like schoolchildren were scurrying between the tables carrying heaped plates of mysterious batter-shrouded lumps, limp lettuce leaves and mountains of chips.

  As she shouldered through the crush towards the bar, the double doors from the kitchen swung open.

  ‘Table number twenty-three!’

  A waiter no older than a schoolboy barged into Laura – ‘Aaargh!’ – sending the chip-laden plates up into the air, where they scattered and showered down on the drinkers like small golden fishes. People scrabbled to catch them. A bottle of ketchup whacked Laura on the head; a fillet of battered fish lodged itself in her lapel. Shredded lettuce garnished her hair. The chips that had landed on people’s heads were already disappearing into their mouths.

  ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!’ she cried, picking the clinging batter-crumbs from her clothes. ‘Here – the one that got away. A bit battered. Ha ha.’ She handed the waiter the wreckage of a fillet.

  ‘Idiot!’ snorted the waiter, who must have been all of sixteen, with pale eyes and hair, and a haughty expression. ‘What are you doing here? You’re in the wrong story. You wait till my father hears about this!’

  Laura got down on her knees to help pick up the debris from the floor, while the youth leaned against the bar and said, with a look of utter contempt, ‘Are you a Weasley, too poor to pay for your own chips?’

  Still shaken from her accident and the waiter’s rudeness, she made her way to the bar.

  ‘Could I have a white wine and soda?’

  The barman, hook-nosed and thin-lipped, eyed her slimily.

  ‘I don’t expect you will really appreciate the quality of my softly shimmering Cauldrinon Blanc with its delicate hints of lime and gooseberries that will creep through your veins and bewitch your senses,’ he murmured. ‘But I can’t possibly let you dilute it with soda water.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Laura, for he looked like the sort of man who could easily take offence. She took a long sip, and asked, ‘Are you the manager?’

  He shrugged without a word and pointed to a notice behind the bar: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.

  ‘Oh,’ she smiled in a way she hoped was disarming, ‘What happened to the previous chap?’

  A mean trace of a smile crossed the man’s thin lips. ‘Bald Ed? Couldn’t resist the power of the potions. Drunk himself silly and disappeared.’

  ‘Do you happen to know where he went?’

  ‘No. But I’ll tell you something. There was a Ukrainian couple in here yesterday asking the same thing. I told them to eff off. You get the hint?’ His pale eyes were unfriendly.

  ‘Oh yes, sorry.’ She returned to her drink, and realized that ordering a glass of wine was a bad idea at this time of day. ‘I just wondered . . .’

  ‘Stop wondering. When you’ve finished your drink, the door’s over there.’ He turned his back and ostentatiously started wiping the other end of the bar.

  She took another gulp of her drink, which was unpleasantly sour and lukewarm, wondering whether she should cut her losses and go, when a low voice near her elbow croaked, ‘Ukraine.’

  She looked around. At a table below the bar, a big man with long hair and a bushy beard was nursing an almost empty pint glass.

  ‘Ukraine, that’s where ’e went. Pint of Muddles.’ He pushed his empty glass in her direction. ‘Pint of Muddles, Sev.’

  The hook-nosed barman reappeared and served her without meeting her eyes. She ordered another glass of white wine for herself (What the hell!) and joined the bearded man at his table.

  ‘Thanks, my love. Wife don’t like me drinking. She only leaves enough money for one pint, and then that’s it for the night. Don’t know why I married ’er, really,’ he added glumly.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Laura felt her professional antennae twitch. ‘You were saying about the previous manager . . .’

  ‘Yes, Bald Ed. A good bloke, but ’e never got over losing Stan and Val. Took to drink.’ He took a deep slurp and flicked out a quick pink tongue to catch the foam that clung to his moustache. ‘And then ’e got obsessed with finding the baby that ’e reckoned were ’is but Val took back to Ukraine.’

  ‘So he went to Ukraine to find them?’

  ‘Aye. Abandoned the pub and his regular customers. This place used to be called the Imperial ’Otel when Bald Ed were in charge, but this new landlord, Sev Snip –’ he lowered his voice ‘– ’e’s a mardy git. Renamed the pub and tried to bar all the Ukrainians. It’s killed the atmosphere.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Laura nodded, encouraging him to continue.

  ‘The Ukrainians that used to drink in ’ere were a boozy lot. I should know, I married one. But she soon put an end to my boozin’. She’s a right dragon.’ He paused for breath. ‘I reckon she done a deal wi’ Snip. You can never tell wi’ Ukrainians . . .’

  ‘Indeed.’ Laura remembered the haze of incomprehension that had hovered over her when she had worked on the Ukrainian case, in which the humane certainties of British Common Law shone like pinpricks of light in the murky confusion of passion and secrecy.

  Her companion glanced towards the door, and froze. ‘Watch out, ’ere she comes! I’m for it now! Thanks for the drink, my love.’ He took a couple of large gulps.

  Turning to follow the line of his gaze, she saw that a small stout woman wearing pointy high-heeled boots had just entered the premises and was heading in their direction with a fierce glint in her eye, looking quite like a diminutive dragon with her green tweed tight-buttoned coat and fiery red crest of hair.

  Laura got to her feet. ‘It’s been nice talking to you, Mr . . . er . . .’

  ‘Redbourne. Alfred Redbourne. Meet the love of my life – Margaret, my enchanting wife.’ He smiled nervously.

  Laura held out her hand, which the woman ignored. She flung four bulging Tesco carrier bags on the ground at her feet and sat down heavily.

  ‘I know you. You nose-pocking solicitor. Why for you pocking on my Elfrid?’ She turned her scowl from Laura to her husband. ‘Elfrid, I told you no talking wit strangers. Why for you drink so slow?’ She eyed the half-full glass with suspicion.

  ‘We were just chatting.’ Laura was beginning to learn that her disarming smile, which worked so well in the courtroom, cut no ice around here. ‘I’d better be getting off.’

&
nbsp; Outside, in the cool September air, she realized that two glasses of wine had definitely been a worse idea than one. It was because of the cake, she thought. Once you let yourself slip just a bit, there’s no knowing where it will end. Or maybe it all started before the carrot cake with the mascarpone cream icing. Maybe it was the itch of dissatisfaction that had been troubling her recently, that had led to her leaving her desk on a whim to chase a fantasy from the past. Get a grip, Laura.

  She phoned Graham, telling him she’d been delayed in a meeting and that there was a lasagne in the fridge he could reheat. Then she walked round the block a couple of times to sober up. To her left loomed the dark mass of the cathedral, with its ancient cryptic carvings, blotting out the stars. A winged shape flitted momentarily across the dusky sky and disappeared into its hidden nest among the Gothic masonry. She shuddered, wondering why she had never noticed the sinister gargoyles hulking there in the middle of her city, a sullen evil presence that no one understood or even noticed any more. Time changes how we see things, thought Laura, but the underlying message, encrypted in stone, remains.

  The unresolved case flipped back into her mind. Yes, the old man’s two daughters had once referred to Valentina as a bloodsucker. Could she really have been a vampire in human form? At times it had seemed so, and yet in the end there was something pitiable about her. She had disappeared, but the mystery of the paternity of her baby had not been solved. The robust judge had awarded her no maintenance; but would a true vampire ever be able to cease its quest for human blood?

  She pulled her coat tight around her with a shudder, and made her way back to her car.

  It was half past seven by the time she got home to find Graham flapping around pathetically in the kitchen while her daughters were stretched out head to toe on the sofa eating microwave popcorn and watching a video.

  ‘There’s a lasagne in the fridge, I told you. It just needs heating up,’ she said.