Dmitri and Tatiana’s lives had been full of tragedy. And yet theirs had been such a strong love, lasting through the decades and transcending all obstacles, that you could also say they had been fortunate. Not many people find such life-affirming intimacy. Kitty’s thoughts turned to Tom. What other man would have put up with her running away for three months? He knew her inside-out and still he was prepared to stick around, and she realised she was incredibly lucky. It must have been difficult being her partner during all those years when she clammed up and refused to talk about her parents, or anything else that was upsetting her. It had taken the thunderbolt of Tom’s infidelity to shake her out of her cocoon, and now she was almost glad it had happened.
She thought of Tatiana and Dmitri living in the cabin in their seventies, supporting each other as they succumbed to the ailments and indignities of old age and continuing what they described in the book as a lifelong, never-ending conversation. Suddenly she knew she wanted to have that with Tom. She wanted to be with him when they were both in their seventies. She liked the sense of history coming around. If only there was a way of letting Dmitri know how much he had helped her; she hoped he would have been pleased.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Lake Akanabee, New York State, 1986
One night in the winter of 1986 Dmitri woke with an acute pain in his chest and knew it was a heart attack. ‘Tatiana!’ he cried, then rolled out of bed, landing with a bump on the floor. Ortipo followed, licking his face. The pain came in waves and between them he scrabbled across the cabin floor to the door, managed to open it and hurl himself down the steps. The chain around his neck caught on something and the Fabergé dog tag with its sapphire, ruby and imperial topaz jewels was ripped off. Ortipo was whining and nudging him to get up.
There was no one left in his life now, no one to live for. If only Marta was nearby; if only she’d forgiven him. He thought of his daughter, so lively and popular as a teenager; somehow he had never understood her. After Tatiana died, he had written her a heartfelt letter about his grief at their estrangement and told her of his profound loneliness. Deep down he knew he could expect no sympathy; she’d rejoice to hear about the death of the woman she considered to have been his mistress. There was no reply and after that final attempt, he became a virtual recluse. He got rid of the Albany cottage and spent all his days in the cabin. Once a week he drove into Indian Lake to do some shopping, pick up a newspaper that he would never get around to reading, and collect his mail from the sorting office, but he dreaded it because too often the letters told of the deaths of people he had known.
His sisters Vera and Valerina lived till their late eighties then died within a year of each other. Their funerals had already taken place by the time he picked up the letters informing him. He wrote to Vera’s children, with whom he had barely kept in touch over the years, offering his belated sympathies.
His dog Trina died and he bought another Borzoi. This time he called her Ortipo, after the first dog he and Tatiana had tried and failed to train. She was a beautiful creature with a rich copper coat and white underside, a sensitive, timid dog who shrank behind him when they met other dogs in the street and hovered close by his side when he worked around the cabin. At night, Ortipo slept on the bed next to him, helping to keep him warm.
Dmitri received notification from a new editor at Random House that his books had gone out of print and he could buy the remaining stock cheaply if he wanted, but he didn’t see the point. His lunches with Alfred A. Knopf petered out around 1980 when Dmitri could no longer face the long train journey into the city. Soon he had no social contacts at all, apart from the lady who worked in the grocery store and a fisherman called Bob who lived on the other side of the lake. Bob married a girl called Sue and Dmitri gave them copies of his novels as a wedding present because he couldn’t think what else to give. Tatiana would have known. Rosa would certainly have known.
He knew he was becoming forgetful. Sometimes his memories of the two women joined up so that they were all sitting together in a glorious sunny field enjoying a picnic and it came as a shock when he remembered that they never actually met. There were days when he awoke and called to Tatiana, as if she were outside working in the vegetable patch, and it could be several minutes before he remembered that she was no longer able to reply. A few times he thought he saw her in the woods, and that was a nice feeling. He often spoke to her out loud, asking what he should do about the rip in his shirt, or how the heck she stopped her scrambled eggs sticking to the pan, or commenting on a dark storm cloud looming over the lake.
And now, in his final moments, his only thoughts were of Tatiana. It was just fifteen feet to the trees by the shore but Dmitri had no breath left. Who knew it would hurt so much? He clung to clumps of frozen grass, pulling himself along, until finally he was lying on top of the earth where his great love was buried. And he smiled in spite of the agony, and spread his arms wide across her grave in a final embrace.
Historical Afterword
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading The Secret Wife as much as I enjoyed writing it. The seed of the story came about in conversation with my very talented friend Richard Hughes, who gave me the greatest gift anyone can ever give to a novelist. He had just watched a BBC2 documentary about the Russian grand duchesses and was intrigued by the love affair between Tatiana and an officer called Dmitri Malama. ‘Could this be your next novel?’ he asked, and I instantly fell off my chair in excitement.
I’d long been fascinated by the tragic story of the Romanovs. Back in my teens I read Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold’s book The File on the Tsar and desperately wanted to believe their theory that some of the family had survived. I read other books about the Romanovs as they were published and I knew that both Olga and Tatiana had flirtations with officers they treated in the Tsarskoe Selo hospital but I’d only come across Dmitri Malama as a footnote. Once I started reading about him, and realised how handsome and courageous he was, and how close he and Tatiana seem to have been, the plot of The Secret Wife fell into place.
During my research I discovered that Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama was born on the 19th of July 1891 in Lozovatka, the son of a cavalry general, and he had two sisters, Vera and Valerina. He trained at the prestigious Imperial Corps de Page in St Petersburg, which brought him into contact with the royal court. In August 1912 he graduated and became a cornet in the Uhlan Lancer Guard Regiment, of which Grand Duchess Tatiana was honorary colonel. Two years later, during the opening week of the First World War, he was wounded in the leg while their regiment was under attack but he refused to leave the field, earning him the Golden Arms sword with an inscription that read ‘for bravery’.
Dmitri was brought to hospital in Tsarskoe Selo in September 1914 and there he got to know Tatiana, who had volunteered as a nurse. There’s a chance he might have encountered her before but now they became so close that he gave her a gift of a French Bulldog she called Ortipo. I slightly tinkered with historical fact at this point: in fact, he asked her permission to buy her a puppy and she excitedly said ‘yes’ straight away, then had to write a note apologising to her mother and asking if it would be all right. He had the puppy delivered to the palace, but as a novelist I couldn’t resist altering the facts to have him surprise her with the gift.
Tatiana’s 1914 diaries list what she has been doing and who she has seen without much commentary, but it is easy to read between the lines with entries such as these:
27th September 1914. Malama took photographs. He is awfully sweet. He is already walking by himself, but of course still limping.
23rd October 1914. Talked to Malama sweetheart in the hallway for a little then went to his ward and took photographs. Today my darling Malama is being discharged from the infirmary. I feel such horrible regret.
28th October 1914. After dinner at 9.15 Malama came over and sat till 10.15. I was terribly glad to see him, he was very sweet.