‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, but he wasn’t really listening.
‘Oh but then . . . good thing happens! I get scholarship. To Germany!’
‘You speak German?’
‘Ja! Können wir Deutsch sprechen?’
‘No,’ said Marisa. ‘Italiano?’
He shook his head tightly.
‘And that was . . .’
‘That was amazing! The food, the supermarkets, the friends, the people . . . Oh, such wonderful country.’
He smiled happily.
‘This isn’t helping me understand where Cornwall comes in.’
‘So I play in Germany then I get work there as répétiteur. At the Munich Opera.’
He visibly swelled with pride.
Marisa shook her head.
‘I play piano. For dancers to practise and singers to practise and everyone to practise.’
‘That sounds like a very important job.’
He beamed. ‘I love it. I know everyone. Everyone knows me. I tour Germany, I go into schools. Oh, how I love it.’
‘And then . . .’
Marisa had drunk quite a lot by this point or she wouldn’t have brought it up. His face collapsed instantly.
‘I haff girlfriend. She is ballerina.’
‘Seriously?’ She tried not to make her surprise too obvious. ‘How did that work then?’
‘Ballerinas very strong.’
‘Okay.’
He sighed and looked into his glass. ‘We were in love. So in love.’
His face was heavy in the soft light.
‘What happened?’
‘She was dancer, I was répétiteur, you see?’
‘No.’
‘She was star! She needs another star. I am not star.’
‘You’re very good!’
‘Oh yes, very good, very good, many peoples are very good,’ he mumbled, seemingly to himself. ‘So. She find star. She dance with star. She want me to play for practice while she dance with star.’
His large hands curled involuntarily in the anguish of the memory.
‘Everybody knows.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So. I come here. I will show her. To become famous composer. To be brilliant genius for the world and Lara will see that I am not useless.’
He hung his head.
‘I am useless composer. You cannot even listen to me through a wall.’
‘Of course you’re not useless! Nobody is! That’s ridiculous!’
But hadn’t it been what she’d been thinking about herself?
‘But why here?’
Alexei waved a large paw.
‘Oh, Reuben, he is good friend to Russians.’
Marisa ignored that.
‘But I don’t know anything about music! You know that! If I don’t like it, that means it’s probably brilliant!’
He half-smiled at that.
‘Ach. And we have eaten well and it is a beautiful night and life says, we must be merry.’
She looked at him as he picked up the now empty wine bottle and frowned.
‘Where did that go? I am talkink too much. I am sorry.’
Marisa shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you told me.’
‘Now. Tell me about you. What is wrong with you?’
She sighed. ‘Well, do you ever get stage fright?’
‘I used to.’
‘When you’re shaking and trembling and terrified?’
‘When I auditioned in Munich, oh. Well. Yes.’
‘I feel like that. All the time.’
Her hands twisted together and she stared at the floor.
‘I see.’
‘What do you say?’ she asked suddenly. ‘When your pupils have stage fright? What do you tell them?’
He looked grave. ‘Well. I say Tazlaswit.’
She looked up. ‘What does that mean? Is it a Russian phrase?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Tazlaswit. Tazlaswit. You know?’
‘I do not know!’
‘Shek it off! Shek it off!’
His meaning finally dawned on her and she burst into peals of laughter.
‘You mean Taylor Swift?’
‘Tazlaswit. I said that.’
She laughed. ‘Shake it off?’
‘For sure. You need to just do it again and again and again until you are not scared any more. You shake it off.’
‘Oh,’ said Marisa sadly. ‘That’s what my therapist says and what’s in my book. You can only get better by doing it a lot. I hoped there was another way.’
‘Everything is practice,’ said Alexei.
He stood up and walked over to the freezer, pulling out of it a vodka bottle with the label in inscrutable Cyrillic.
‘Now we have been talking of old days,’ he said. ‘You will join me?’
Marisa shrugged. She couldn’t work out if this was a good idea or not. On the other hand, when was the last time she had done . . . anything? Spontaneous or otherwise.
‘Sure,’ she said.
He opened the cap, poured the freezing liquid into two small heavy glasses, passed her one then held his up.
‘Za zdarovye!’
She smiled.
‘Za zdarovye!’
They clinked glasses.
‘No,’ said Alexei. ‘You must look me in the eye. Or is bad luck.’
She raised her chin and gazed into his brown eyes. She realised as she did so how very long it had been since she’d done just that; the curious intimacy of looking straight at somebody. It didn’t seem to bother Alexei in the slightest; he didn’t break her gaze. Not in a creepy way. He was simply – and somehow, given his upbringing – comfortable in his own skin, in being with other people. He had got out of his own way.
‘Okay,’ she said, holding his gaze.
‘And how would you say it?’
‘Salute,’ she said.
‘Salute.’
Chapter Forty-eight
Marisa wasn’t sure how much later it was, but she found she was laughing hysterically. Alexei was trying to tell her a story about something that he and his friends had done with some snow, but he had lost all his English and kept switching to German, punctuated by some fairly loud swearing at himself and had ended up trying to act the entire thing out, to Marisa’s increasingly hysterical guesses.
‘Polar bear!’
‘I am not polar bear! I am elegant . . .’
He tried to mime again.
‘Hedgehog! Fire engine! Dumper truck.’
They were both in hysterics by this time.
Alexei growled as he stumbled over one of the many lamps glowing around the little room which gave it a cosy air, against the pitch black of the view outside, flooded every thirty seconds by the lighthouse. He had also lit a small black cigarillo which smelled of cinnamon and cloves and was constantly leaving it teetering dangerously on large piles of paper.
‘You’re a fire hazard!’
‘You are fire hazard oven is off oven is on oven is off. Ssh. I thinkink.’
‘You must know!’
Marisa stared at him once more. That huge rugby player’s physique of his was not graceful in any way, but she didn’t hate it. There was something very reassuring about an intensely broad pair of shoulders, after all; a broad trunk, like a tree.