‘How old is my grandchild now?’ he asked.
‘Elizabeth is nine. Marta absolutely dotes on her.’
‘I thought she’d be older. Didn’t Marta get pregnant soon after Rosa died in 1955?’
‘She did but she lost that baby, and several more, before Elizabeth was born. It’s not been easy for her.’
‘I’m so sad to hear that,’ Dmitri sighed. If only she had turned to him; but he was the last person she would have wanted to talk to. ‘How is Nicholas?’ he asked. ‘Has he read my book?’
There was a long pause. ‘I’m afraid that Nicholas and I are separated. I had to kick him out when his alcoholism got out of control. He lives in an apartment near the beach so I took your parcel to him but I doubt he’s read it.’
‘I’m so sorry …’ Dmitri was stricken. ‘I wish I had known. Is there anything I can do? I could pay for him to go to a clinic.’
‘I tried that, but he won’t go. He’s not interested in stopping. I know he loves me and I love him too. I’ve told him he can come home if he gives up drinking but he simply can’t do it. He manages one day, two at most, then the least little thing sends him back to the bourbon. I’m sorry, Dmitri, but I think he’s beyond hope.’
‘I’m coming out. I’ll fly there next week.’
Pattie gave a big sigh. ‘I doubt it will make a difference, but you can stay here if you want to try.’
Dmitri flew to Santa Barbara in March 1970 and was met at the airport by his daughter-in-law. She drove him to Nicholas’s apartment in a rundown block with some rusty old motorcycles out front. He knocked on the door but when Nicholas opened it and saw his father he slammed it shut again. All Dmitri noticed was that he had long straggly hair and an unkempt beard.
It was difficult with his arthritic joints but Dmitri slid down to sit on the floor in the corridor outside and called through the door.
‘I used to drink too much, Nicholas. Way too much. It was your mother who saved me – first of all by motivating me to write novels, and then by giving me children and forcing me to look to the future. Pattie is a good woman. Please let her help you, the way your mum helped me.’
He waited but there was no sound from within. He wasn’t sure if Nicholas was listening.
‘I miss your mother every day. I’m sure you do too. But imagine what she would say if she could see you now, son. Try to pull yourself together for her sake.’
No reply. He sat there for hours, calling through the door. He’d come all this way and there was no point in giving up, although he supposed he would have to go back to Pattie’s at nightfall. He was too old to spend the night outside. Suddenly the door opened and Nicholas glared at him. ‘Will you not leave me in peace?’ he asked, bleary-eyed and exhausted-looking. ‘I don’t care about your book, or Tatiana, or any of it. Publish what you want. You don’t need my approval.’
He was shoeless, his shirt hanging open, and he smelled rank, as if he hadn’t bathed for a long time. Worse than that was his nose: it was bulbous and red, etched with purple spider veins, a true drinker’s nose. Dmitri remembered such noses on the men back in Russia who drank vast quantities of home-made vodka and usually died young after passing out in the snow or choking on their own vomit.
‘Son, you’re ill. Please let me take you to a doctor.’
‘It’s too late, Dad. You can’t wave your money around and make this go away. Unfortunately I inherited the melancholy gene from you rather than the happy gene from Mum and I don’t want to go through life like this. The drink is merely a means to an end.’
Dmitri protested: ‘You’re only forty-four years old. Your whole life is in front of you. You can do anything you want. Anything!’
‘Good. Because what I want is to drink myself to death.’ He tried to close the door but Dmitri stuck his arm in the way.
‘Come for a drink with me then. Let me buy you a beer at your local bar.’
Nicholas shrugged and agreed to that. He slid his feet into some battered beach shoes but didn’t bother to fasten his shirt or comb his hair. Dmitri’s joints were aching from sitting on the ground and he limped heavily as they walked down the road to a dingy bar with a Budweiser sign out front. Dmitri ordered two beers and let Nicholas have a bourbon chaser then they sat in a booth and talked man to man for the first time in their lives.
‘I never felt you were really there, Dad,’ Nicholas told him. ‘Your head was always somewhere else. I certainly never got the feeling that you loved Marta and me. We were an irritation to you, a duty. I suppose when I found out you’d had another woman all that time, it finally made sense: Oh, that’s why he was like that. It wasn’t because of me. In a way it was comforting. I know Marta was furious for what you did to Mom but I don’t have any anger. I just feel like you’re a stranger.’
While he spoke, tears rolled down Dmitri’s cheek. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at them. ‘I know I failed as a father. I always hoped you’d turn out fine because you had such a wonderful mother but maybe you needed me too.’
‘I don’t know what caused this thing I have: alcoholism, depression, call it what you will. I’m not sure it would have been any different if you’d been the perfect parent. There’s no use you blaming yourself. I’ve screwed up all by myself.’
‘What can be done to make you want to live?’ Dmitri asked.
‘Nothing,’ Nicholas said firmly. ‘Some things are unfixable.’
‘Will you not try? If I find the name of the top expert in California and pay for a consultation, will you at least see him? Maybe there’s a pill you can take, or electric shock therapy, or surgery. I climbed out of the kind of morass you are in, so I know it’s possible. Please try, son.’
At last Nicholas agreed. With Pattie’s help, Dmitri found an expert and paid for a course of detoxification treatment. He left feeling optimistic, but when he telephoned on his return to Albany, Pattie told him that Nicholas had not even attended the first appointment.
There was more bad news. Two weeks after his return, a lawyer’s letter arrived from England saying that Marta would sue him for defamation if he published the book.
‘That’s that, then,’ he told Tatiana. ‘We’ll have to forget it.’
‘Why don’t you talk to Alfred?’ she suggested. ‘When are you next seeing him?’
Dmitri still had occasional lunches with Alfred A. Knopf in New York City. His company had merged with Random House and he had semi-retired but he still dabbled in editorial matters and kept in touch with his favourite authors. When Dmitri met him that spring, at Barbetta, their usual Italian restaurant, he mused that his publisher had barely changed from the day they first met. The moustache and hair were white rather than jet black, and his waist was a little thicker, but the lively eyes and the gregarious character were unchanged.
Dmitri handed over the manuscript. ‘Prepare to be surprised when you read it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want an advance but my only stipulation is that it mustn’t be published in my children’s lifetimes. Marta might live another fifty years, so perhaps it could be pencilled for publication in 2020. Is it possible to arrange that?’
‘It’s out of the ordinary but I don’t see why not. I could leave it in the archives flagged with a note for someone to revisit it in 2020.’
A week later he telephoned, having read the manuscript.
‘Are you kidding me? We’ve been friends for thirty-five years and you never told me you’re married to one of the goddamn Romanov royal family? Well, I’ll be damned. Is there no chance I can persuade you to publish now? I’m sure our lawyers could see off your daughter’s objections.’
‘No, I don’t want to upset her any more than I have already. But thanks, Alfred.’