The Silent Oligarch: A Novel by Christopher Morgan Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

of loving London for reasons that he imperfectly understood, something to do with its confidence: London never pretended to be something it was not.
    He had never walked to her flat before. He continued to go slowly, eager and hesitant at once. He wondered which Marina would be there to greet him: the romantic whose broken hopes she still struggled to conceal or the cool rationalist who had understood long before him that they needed to be broken. It was this crisis in her that he loved, and it was this that made him dread seeing her: in her company he felt like either a heel or a quisling.
    They had met in Moscow, early in Lock’s time there. She was a lawyer—she worked in Moscow City Hall, selling off state property to private developers—and Malin’s goddaughter. It was he that introduced them, inviting them to a small dinner at his dacha, where he made a big show of playing matchmaker, embarrassing them both. There were moments later when Lock would wonder if this had all been part of his grand plan.
    For over six months Lock had been living the expatriate life in a city that absorbed him completely, and now he found himself in the Russian countryside for the first time. It was spring, and the low sun picked out the bright new leaves of the alders and silver birch. He first saw Marina as she walked with Yekaterina Malin in a grove of apple trees, and he thought immediately that even in this place she seemed to glow more intensely than the world around her. She was slight and fair-haired, with clear, white skin and a small nose, a little upturned. Her eyes were green, even and light, like peridots.
    That night they talked about Russia. Lock had never been invited to a Russian’s home before, and it was made clear to him that this was an honor only granted to a few. Russians, he was told, were by nature an open and friendly people but their recent history—perhaps all their history—had caused them to reserve friendship for longer than they might like. Lock had suggested that perhaps now, for the first time truly democratic, Russia could look forward to a warming of its relationships, at a diplomatic and a personal level. One of the other guests, a doctor and an old friend of Yekaterina, thanked Lock for his eloquent words but feared that it would take more to repair this broken nation, ravaged for centuries by the cruelty of the leaders it craved and probably deserved. Marina bridled at this: she objected to the notion that Russians loved to suffer; and she saw now the opportunity for a real people’s revolution that would allow Russia to achieve at last the greatness that had always been its destiny. As she talked, her cheeks flushed red. Marina in argument captivated Lock, and he watched rapt as she made her case with passion, not caring, it seemed, that she was in the company of her elders. Malin, less forbidding then, had seemed to enjoy every moment, cheerfully goading on both sides.
    Still dwelling on the past he arrived at her flat. It was on Holland Park, the road, and looked out onto the park itself. Lock remembered Vika telling him delightedly that she lived on Holland Park, in Holland Park, next to Holland Park. That too was London, ignoring any obligation to make sense. He stood outside the gate for a moment and looked up at the building: white stucco, double-fronted, huge but discreet about it. He breathed deeply, walked up the path and rang the bell.
    He saw from the name card next to it that she was still Marina Lock. She had kept his name when she left him, and he still, despite attempts to be disciplined, found in this some small, unrealistic hope of reconciliation. In the rare moments when he honestly reviewed his life he knew, with a certainty he was generally denied, that Marina was too good for him—not perhaps for the man he had once been but certainly for the one he had become. This knowledge pained him, partly for her sake but mainly because it shook the delicate fiction on which his