Sapphire Skies by Belinda Alexandra Read Free Book Online Page A

its gilded cornices and life-sized statues before wandering into the library, where she would sit down on a chair with swan-head armrests and gaze in appreciation of the shelves of beautifully bound books and the rare engravings on the walls.
    Lily had never met Victor Grigoryevich or even seen a picture of him — all the family photographs had been destroyed in Harbin after the Second World War, along with the house her grandfather had built there. Her grandmother was not allowed to take anything with her when she was deported back to the Soviet Union, nor her mother, Anya, when she’d fled to Shanghai. Still Lily felt a connection with her grandfather. The first time she had come to see the house, a ripple of joy had run through her. She liked to think that in coming here she was somehow bringing Victor Grigoryevich back home.
    When Lily returned to her apartment, she fed the cats and changed into jeans and sneakers before slumping on the sofa with a cup of tea. Acting upbeat at the office all day drained her. Marketing managers were expected to be ebullient not melancholy. It would be easier to be an accountant, she thought, and hide herself behind budgets and figures rather than talk excitedly about new target markets and consumer perceptions. She finished the tea then picked up a canvas bag that she kept near her front door and went out again.
    While Tverskoy Boulevard had retained much of its historic beauty, the rest of Moscow was transforming into a modern metropolis and not all of it was attractive. In the Zamoskvorechye district, not far from where Lily lived, picturesque pastel houses were being knocked down and replaced by gargantuan blocks of apartments and glass-and-steel office towers. Lily’s mother had a saying: ‘Beauty isn’t everything. It’s much more important than that.’ She wasn’t referring to physical beauty or fashion, but the beauty of nature or of something superbly crafted — the kind of loveliness that had the ability to touch the human soul. The destruction Lily saw around her in Moscow made her wince in the same way she did whenever she visited her parents’ bushland home in Narrabeen and discovered that more ancient gum trees had been chopped down to make way for block-like cement houses and gardens of gravel with spiky plants in ceramic pots.
    She approached a construction site with a billboard at the front advertising a ‘New Moscow Signature Style’ apartment block: a hideous mix of neo-classical and neo-Stalinist styles, complete with neo-medieval — if such a term existed — domes and turrets. She looked at the mint-green house with pale pink trimmings beyond it. The workers had left for the day but the damage from the latest onslaught by their jackhammers made Lily’s heart grieve. Only the outer walls remained now, and with the last swing of the wrecking ball the ancestral home of her maternal grandmother would be gone. Alina had been born in China, where her father was an engineer on the Trans-Siberian railway, so she had never seen the house herself. Lily had discovered it through research of the city records: the house from where Alina’s forebears had transformed themselves from enterprising peasants into successful cotton merchants and later engineers. She gazed over the remains of the wrought-iron fence and the broken fountain and decided this would be the last time she came this way. She said goodbye to the house that had seen so much history but was destined to become another victim of progress.
    It hadn’t been Lily’s intention to visit what was left of the house that evening. Her destination was a few streets away: another construction site where a pre-revolutionary house had been reduced to rubble a few months ago. A planning dispute was delaying the construction of a high-rise apartment building on the site and that had bought its remaining residents some time. Lily glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one from the apartment building opposite was