Work Text:
“Fax for you,” said Betty, dropping by his office with a folded piece of flimsy paper. Valery found her interesting because she was like a television commercial version of an office secretary. She had long pink nails and a way of chewing gum that made it crack loudly. Most of the other secretaries wore woolly cardigans and looked sleepy till noon, but not Betty.
Valery took the fax, pinched between his fingers. Betty’s thick black eyelashes went up and down twice in quick succession. Valery fancied he could hear them: woosh, woosh. The fax machine was brand new and everyone was obsessed. If it could be faxed, it would be. Sometimes people were faxing things from the first floor to the second floor. Valery opened the letter, expecting it to be some figures from the medical research team at the Hospital. As he unfolded the piece of paper, Rosemary appeared at the door and leaned against the doorframe.
“Val? I’ve been meaning to ask if you want to come along with my flatmate and me to the carol service at the Cathedral? And you’ll bring your brother, finally?”
If Valery had been in his right mind, he would have said “No, thank you,” very politely and maybe even have had the wherewithal to try to suggest some alternative suitable wintery activity since he actually liked Rosemary. After a year of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, she was one of only a few people he worked with that he would have called a friend in his own head and to Shekov, not only in public, where it was required.
People seemed to like to look after Valery here the same as they had before, but it wasn’t always useful and too often shaded into paternalism. Rosemary managed to treat Valery like a completely normal human being. He managed to return the favour, which he was afraid to say was a rare gift in a workplace like theirs, where there were only three female employees educated beyond o-levels.
Valery opened the fax. It was written in Polish. He could read it, since he’d learned a bit here and there just in case it was ever needed to secure his cover. There were only two sentences, simply written: “All 5 of us are out safe. See you in the new year.”
“Val?” Rosemary asked. Whatever expression he was making, it sure as hell wasn’t neutral. “Are you okay?”
He stared, wild eyed, hoping he wouldn’t suddenly do something bizarre like eat the paper and completely destroy his reputation. “I just–” He cleared his throat. “I’ve just received some unexpected family news.”
“Not bad news?” She studied his face. “Or... was it?”
He scraped his free hand over the back of his neck compulsively. “It’s not bad news. But I’ve got to–” He looked around, like Shenkov was somehow going to be on hand already. The grey little office might as well have been tipped over sideways for how different it suddenly looked to him. All things shifted, irrevocably.
“I’ll let you go then,” Rosemary said, still looking concerned. “The Carol service, though? It’s Friday at seven in the evening.”
“Sure,” Valery said, grabbing his coat from the back of his chair and shrugging it on. He ducked past her. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
---
It was a long time later that Valery recalled the conversation and recounted it to Shenkov. “Church!” he said, cracking a grin. “How’d you get dragged into that one?”
Valery could’ve told him just then that they were promised to attend the local snake-skinning competition and he would’ve taken on the challenge with grace and dignity. Since Valery’s delivery of the fax, he’d been buoyant with relief. All evening, he kept coming randomly to a standstill in deep thought, while a slow smile of hope rising lit him up from the inside out. Valery was relieved himself. He’d thought of this moment before and worried over it almost as much as he’d wished for it. But now it had come and he’d passed the test: he was only glad and not a hint of jealousy.
“I was distracted,” he said, a little coy.
Shenkov shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’ve been curious to see in there,” he said, meaning the Cathedral. “My English classes used to be right across the square, but I never took myself all the way in."
“We could go any time,” Valery said with a touch of petulance. “It’s open every day – maybe we should be waiting for a day when it won’t be quite so... full of people?”
Shenkov shook his head.
“Don’t say when in Rome,” Valery warned.
“The singing will sound pretty,” Shenkov said, softly. He liked beautiful things. Sometimes, recently, after catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror (having eaten three meals a day for a full year; having slept in a warm and well guarded bed for a full year, having wondered only in passing if he was about to be murdered for looking like he was thinking about something he ought not be thinking about), Valery had begun to feel that he himself might be one of those beautiful things.
Shenkov twisted one of the long, red-gold strands of Valery’s hair around his finger and tugged gently. In response, Valery let out a low sigh. “If it’s not a chore for you.”
“It’s never a chore for me to meet your friends.” This remark was patently untrue, but Shenkov really seemed not to have noticed that yet and Valery didn’t intend to correct him.
---
It snowed on Thursday night, just a light dusting. Shenkov drove Valery into work and dropped him off, since Valery didn’t like to drive in the snow. Even the slightest adverse effects were always considered enough reason to request a lift. Shenkov squeezed the top of Valery’s knee before he got out of the car. This had become a little shorthand between them that meant, ‘I’d kiss you if I could’. The other one was: sometimes Shenkov would put his hand under the elbow of the arm he’d broken. This gesture was even more serious and meant something along the lines of ‘I’m yours.’
Work was wonderfully boring all day long. Rosemary came to collect him from his office at the end of the day. She had a hat and gloves and looked festive with a little red sprig of berries pinned on her dress and more makeup than usual. (The usual amount for Rosemary was none.)
“You aren’t bothered that it’s a CofE service, are you?” She asked. “My flatmate said Poles are usually devout Catholics, but I said you normally never seem much bothered about our lad Jesus and his trials and tribulations.”
This made Valery laugh. He hadn’t realised he’d been a little nervous till he wasn’t anymore. Valery shrugged. “My – uh – our family background isn’t from an especially religious bunch. Uppity city folk, you know.”
Rosemary nodded as though this fit pleasantly in with the image she’s built of him. Shenkov was waiting outside the front of the building in the idling car. He turned the key and got out when he saw them coming.
“Konstantin, Rosemary, Rosemary, Konstantin.”
Rosemary was not stupid. She was one of only three woman in the research centre computer pool. She hadn’t got there without a lot of high level maths and she certainly hadn’t got there without any people skills. This was the main reason that she had never before been allowed to meet Shenkov. She looked between the two of them and her left eyebrow raised a significant inch. This did not fit in pleasantly with the image she’d built of him.
Shenkov glowed winningly at her. Valery made a little shape in the sugary snow on the ground with the toe of his left boot. She said nothing. She got in the front seat, leaving Valery to sit in the back and they drove the rest of the way to the base of the big hill. They got out as Shenkov swiftly and competently parked the car and they set off up the cobbled street leading to the Cathedral, walking three abreast with Rosemary in the middle. As the dark stone Norman edifice loomed into sight, Rosemary’s gaze swung like a pendulum between them.
Valery was out of breath by the time they’d made it to the top of the hill. He wheezed a breath or two and Shenkov’s eyes shot to his, meeting his gaze. “Are you well?” Shenkov asked, compulsively. “Do you want a minute?”
“I’m fine,” Valery said. As usual when Shenkov treated him so gently, he was cast somewhere between secretly pleased and exasperated.
They reached the top of the hill. Valery slowed for a moment to suck in enough air to return his breathing to normal. Shenkov’s hand reached out, past Rosemary, and hovered above Valery’s shoulder for half a second before dropping back away.
Across the wintery square, parishioners were filing into the grand open doors to the Cathedral. It was a clear, cold night. Their breath hung in the air in front of them, milky as the stars spread thickly above. “There’s my flatmate,” Rosemary said, pointing at a woman in a red coat coming across the square to meet them.
“Oh,” Shenkov and Valery said, at once, with surprise. Waving vigorously to them across a stretch of white dusted lawn was Cecelia.
“You’ve met already...?” Rosemary said. It wasn’t a suspicious tone, so much as knowing. But what did she think she knew?
“I thought she is... was... Uh, isn’t she Frank’s wife? We had dinner together a few times. She and Konstantin kinda hit it off? They had a recipe club for a little while, but then it dropped off the face of the Earth. I guess now we know why?”
Rosemary drew to a sudden stop. She looked again between Shenkov and Valery. Valery's heart jumped into his throat because she was looking at them so totally and completely thoroughly, he was suddenly as scared as he’d been in a long time and didn’t that adrenaline sing through his veins, a quicksilver fire of a drug that had him stepping damningly into Shenkov’s moon-shadow before he could think it through. Shenkov’s hand went under his elbow, not saying ‘I’m yours’ at all, but saying ‘you’re mine’.
“Konstantin’s not your brother,” Rosemary said. It was not a question. It was an utter fact. Valery thought, horribly, madly, Shenkov will kill her if he has to, and then before he could let that thought turn over in his mind and become real, she saved them all and said, “Cecelia’s not my flatmate. Or, should I say, not only my flatmate.”
“Oh,” Valery said, relief left him stumbling. Shenkov was looking at him, waiting for the translation, just in case he’d misunderstood. There was still cold murder in Shenkov’s face and Valery thought, I must never let that happen to him again. We must never ask that of him, else we’ll lose him. Valery shook his head (stand down) and translated. “They’re lovers, too.”
“I scared you,” Rosemary said, looking between them, suddenly apologetic.
Cecelia caught up to them and said, unaware, “Fancy meeting you boys here!”
“Let’s go in,” Valery said, his voice sounded only a little strained. “It’s going to start any second.”
The pillars charmed him most of all, patterned columns with zig-zag stripes, lengthwise stripes, little nestled diamonds. The choir was already signing as they entered, filling up the space. They filed into a pew and stood all shoulder to shoulder, two men, two women, gazing up at the buttery-toned stone heights, where shapes curled within shapes. Valery had read somewhere that there were a few saint’s bodies in this cathedral, two important ones: a saint of record-keeping and a saint of island exile.
So there was no God, but Valery was here anyway, awash in the flickering golden beams of harmonising voices and after this, Konstantin would light five red offering candles even though he probably believed in God even less than Valery and then they’d take a detour to the exit through the wrong door and they’d find themselves alone in the cloister, in the icy, silent night, only the blind eye of the moon on the white-coated grass of the Garth and Konstantin would kiss him in the dark, hot and open-mouthed and a little shocking.
So there was no God, but there were faxes bearing promises too perfect to believe and there was dry-eyed Cecilia gazing so sweetly at Rosemary, whose chin was lifted to the lofty heights in bare defiance, and sometimes people were saved in small and random ways which required no great nor terrible sacrifice before anyone was even certain they were in danger and there was a kind of life after death, which Valery could be certain of, since he lived it every day.