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before they were about to take leave of the ship and go down the gangway with their father, mother and sons kissedand hugged each other and made promises to write and for Anoushka to call once a week from wherever she was in the world. Tears welled up in the boys’ eyes and were fought back. There were smiles on trembling lips. It was Alexis who said it for them all: ‘We’re OK, Mom, it’s all just too new and a matter of getting used to.’
    ‘A new door opens and all that,’ chimed in Mishka, and placed an arm round his brother’s shoulder.
    ‘In a way you have to like the excitement of the drama Dad has created,’ said Alexis.
    ‘Well, maybe not
like
but play the role each of us has been cast in it,’ answered Anoushka.
    That seemed to strike a chord in each of them and simultaneously they all laughed and tears vanished. Anoushka laughed too but asked herself, ‘Is this black humour?’ And then she was alone.
    How had it happened? How could she have lost everything? Her boys? Her husband? Her lifestyle? Her home? How did she get to be last in line and so utterly alone? Good questions. Unanswerable. Maybe she was too bruised by events to find answers. Curious, but too crippled to seek any answers. And what, after all, did it matter now?
    Feebly Anoushka waved from the rail on A deck to the boys and Robert down below on the dock. They looked so happy, so full of life and enthusiasm. And why not? They were going home. Robert had everything he wanted. She tried to paste a happy smile on her face for the boys’ sake and thought, How cruelyouth can be. How insensitive, selfish, self-centred. She kept reliving the last three days. How was it possible she was in this hell? Only a few days. It seemed a lifetime.
    The boys were waving now with both arms, great arcs in front of themselves, throwing kisses as the ship was slipping its moorings and lumbering away from the dock. How she loved them. They were the only people on the dock except for the longshoremen pushing the covered gangways, working the massive hemp cables that helped launch the ship.
    Her husband and sons were there because of Robert’s connections. Always Robert’s connections. Those little privileges that men of skill and renown are rewarded with were part and parcel of Robert’s life. She asked herself with some bitterness whether famous doctors’ ex-wives still got favours, whether the cachet of achievement by their ex-husbands still rubbed off on them. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes and now she too waved with both arms and pretended enthusiasm as she bid farewell to life as she knew it.
    A bitter cold wind was whipping off the river. Her family were dancing, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm as the mighty Cunard liner backed into the Hudson River. The blast of her horn, a dramatic, romantic sound, echoed against the buildings on either side. Anoushka leaned out over the rail and watched Robert and her children recede: become smaller and smaller, mere dots, pin points of peopleagainst the massive landscape of the terminal and Manhattan rising majestically behind them. A gust of wind whipped under her sable-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hat and blew it from her head. She grabbed for it but in vain. Anoushka watched it tumble and turn on the currents of air before it drifted down between the side of the ship and the terminal. A longshoreman watching the English liner make its grand exit chased after it. The elegant Adolfo headgear eluded him and drifted down further to the water.
    The boys broke away from Robert and ran towards the end of the dock, trying to catch it. They missed and the river made its claim on Fifth Avenue, taking possession of the hat. It bobbed along on the waves created by the churning of the massive ships propellers and then, quite suddenly, drowned, disappeared, never to be seen again. The last indignity. She had even lost her hat.

Chapter 4
    ‘Clearly, this is not about a hat, though it was a very