One Good Turn (12 page)

“Idyot,”
he was sure he heard the invisible Russian girl say. There was a café in St. Petersburg called the Idiot. He had been there with Irina and eaten borscht that was the exact color of the blazer he’d had to wear every day as a schoolboy. For a man wrestling with an immoral, uncaring universe, Dostoyevsky seemed to have spent a lot of time in cafés, every other one in St. Petersburg claimed him as a customer.
“Jack, say, and little Arthur going to a capital city.”
Seven letters.
“Jakarta.”
He took his spectacles off and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

It had been on one of those packages they advertised in the travel pages of the papers on a Saturday. “See the Northern Lights—Five-Day Cruise off the Coast of Norway,” “The Wonders of Prague,” “Beautiful Bordeaux—Wine Tasting for the Beginner,” “Autumn on Lake Como.” It offered a safe way to travel (the coward’s way), everything was organized for you so that all you had to do was turn up with your passport. Middle-class, middle-aged, middle England. And middle Scotland, of course. Safety in numbers, in the herd.

Last year it had been “The Magic of Russia—Five Nights in St. Petersburg,” a city Martin had always wanted to visit. The city of Peter the Great, of Dostoyevsky and Diaghilev, the setting for Tchaikovsky’s last years and for Nabokov’s first. The storming of the Winter Palace, Lenin arriving at the Finland Station, Shostakovich broadcasting his Seventh Symphony live in August 1942 in the middle of the siege—it was hard to believe one place could be so heady with history. (Why hadn’t he done history at university instead of religious studies? There was more passion in history, more spiritual truth in human actions than in faith.) He thought how much he would like to write a novel set in St. Petersburg, a real novel—not a Nina Riley. And anyway, in the late forties Nina would have found it difficult to travel to St. Petersburg—Leningrad, as it still was then. Perhaps she could have crossed secretly from Sweden into Finland and then smuggled herself over the border, or crossed the Baltic on a small craft (she was handy with a skiff).

Martin had, as usual, effortlessly acquired an unwanted holiday companion—a man who had latched on to him in the departure lounge and had hardly left his side from then on. He was a retired grocer from Cirencester who introduced himself to Martin by telling him that he had terminal cancer and St. Petersburg was on his list of “things to do before I die.”

Their hotel had been advertised as “one of the best tourist hotels,” and Martin wondered if “tourist hotel” was Russian for a featureless concrete block from the Soviet era, containing endless identical corridors and serving up execrable food. In the guidebook he had been studying prior to departure, there were photographs of the interiors of the Astoria and the Grand Hotel Europe, places that seemed redolent with luxury and pre-Bolshevik decadence. His own hotel, on the other hand, had rooms that were like shoe boxes. He was not alone in his shoebox cell, however. The first night he was there, he got up to go to the bathroom and almost stood on a cockroach pasturing on his bedroom carpet. And there was construction going on, the hotel seemed to be simultaneously being demolished and rebuilt. Men and women on scaffolding—no safety gear apparent anywhere, he noticed. A fine layer of concrete dust everywhere. The room was on the seventh floor, and the first morning Martin had opened the curtains and found two middle-aged women standing on scaffolding outside the window, head scarves on their heads and tools in their hands.

The room was made bearable by the view—the sweep of the Neva ornamented by the scroll of the Winter Palace, as iconic a view as Venice approached across the lagoon. From his window he could see the
Aurora
berthed opposite—“The
Aurora
!” he ex-claimed excitedly, next morning at breakfast to the dying grocer. “Fired the opening shot in the revolution,” he added when the dying grocer looked at him blankly.

The first day it was all churches, and they had trailed dutifully at the heels of their guide, Mariya, around the Kazan Cathedral, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, the Peter and Paul Cathedral (“Where our czars are buried,” Mariya announced proudly, as if Communism had never happened).

“You must be enjoying this,” the grocer said to Martin during a brief break for lunch in a place that reminded Martin of a school cafeteria, except where smoking was encouraged. “You being a religious man and everything.”

“No,” Martin said, not for the first time, “religious studies
teacher
. That doesn’t necessarily make me
religious
.”

“So you teach something you don’t believe in?” the dying grocer asked, becoming suddenly quite belligerent. Dying seemed to have made the man rectitudinous. Or perhaps he had always been that way.

“No, yes, no,” Martin said. This conversation was made awkward by the fact that Martin was still pretending to be a religious studies teacher, even though it was more than seven years since he had been inside a school. He was reluctant to say he was a writer and be stuck with that delimitation for the whole five days, knowing the questions it would provoke and knowing there would be nowhere to hide. One of their party, sitting across the aisle from Martin on the plane out, had been reading
The Forbidden Stag
, the second Nina Riley mystery. Martin wanted to say—casually—“Good book?” but couldn’t countenance the response, more likely to be “Load of crap” than “This is a fantastic book, you should read it!”

Martin gave up protesting his lack of religion to the grocer because the man was dying, after all, and for all Martin knew faith might be the only thing that was keeping him going, that and ticking things off on his list. Martin didn’t think it was a good idea to have a list, it meant that when you got to the last item, the only thing left to do was die. Or perhaps that
was
the last item on the list.

On the way back from lunch, walking along a canal on a side street toward yet another church, they passed a sign, a wooden advertising board on the pavement, announcing, ST. PETERSBURG BRIDES—COME INSIDE. Some of the party sniggered when they noticed it, and the grocer, who was clearly stuck to Martin’s side until he actually
died
, said, “We all know what that means.”

“Met horrid accident with lobster dish.”
Nine letters.
“Thermidor.”

Martin felt a little flush of guilt. He had been on the Internet. He had considered buying a bride (because, let’s face it, he was incapable of getting one for free). When he first became successful, he thought that it might make him more attractive to women, that he would be able to borrow some charisma from his more interesting alter ego, Alex Blake. It had made no difference, he obviously carried an aura of untouchability with him. He was the kind of person who, at parties, ended up in the kitchen washing glasses. “It’s as if you’re asexual, Martin,” one girl had told him, thinking she was being helpful in some way.

If there’d been a site that advertised “Old-Fashioned British Brides (but not like your mother),” he might have signed up, but there wasn’t, so first he had looked at the Thai brides (“petite, sexy, attentive, affectionate, compliant”), but the very idea had seemed so
sleazy
. He’d seen one such couple a few months before, in John Lewis—an ugly, overweight middle-aged man and, on his arm, this beautiful,
tiny
girl, smiling and laughing at him as if he were some kind of god. People looking at them,
knowing
. She was just like the ones on the Internet sites—vulnerable and small, like a child. He’d felt sick, as if he were on a pornography site. He would rather die than go on one of those—for one thing he was terrified they were monitored and that he would take one quick curious peek at “Cum Inside” or “Sexy Pics” and the next thing there would be a hammering on the door and the police would break it down and rush in and arrest him. He would have been similarly mortified to buy anything off the top shelf of a newsagent. He knew (because this was part of his karma too) that he would take a magazine to the counter, and the girl (because it would be a girl) would shout out to the manager, “How much is
Big Tits
?” Or if he had something sent in the post it would fall out of its wrapper just as the postman handed it to him on the doorstep—undoubtedly at the moment that a vicar, an old lady, and a small child passed by.
“Whinge may have upset novelist.”
Nine letters.
“Hemingway.”

The Russian brides on the Internet didn’t look childlike, however, and they didn’t even look particularly compliant. The Lyudmilas and Svetlanas and Lenas looked like women, women who knew what they were doing (selling themselves, let’s face it). They had a startling range of attributes and talents, they liked “disco” as well as “classical,” they went to museums and parks, they read newspapers and novels, they kept fit and were fluent in several languages, they were accountants and economists, they were “serious, kind, purposeful, and elegant,” they were looking for a “decent man, pleasant dialogue, or romanticism.” It was hard to believe that their poignant CVs could translate into living, breathing women, yet here they were—the Lyudmilas and Svetlanas and Lenas, or their equivalent, behind a large wooden door on the (rather frightening) streets of St. Petersburg rather than simply floating in virtual space. The idea made his insides flutter with terror. He recognized the feeling, it wasn’t desire, it was temptation. He could have the thing he wanted, he could buy a wife. He didn’t think they were actually
in
the building, of course, corralled inside its peeling walls. But they were close. In the city. Waiting.

Martin had an ideal woman. Not Nina Riley, not a bought bride looking for economic security or a passport. No, his ideal woman came from the past—an old-fashioned Home Counties type of wife, a young widow who had lost her fighter-pilot husband to the Battle of Britain and who now struggled bravely on, bringing up her child alone.
“Daddy died, darling, he was handsome and brave and fought to stay alive for you, but in the end he had to leave us.”
This child, a rather serious boy named Peter or David, wore sleeveless Fair Isle jerseys over gray shirts. He had brilliantined hair and scraped knees and liked nothing better than to sit in the evening, making aircraft kits with Martin.
(“This is like the one Daddy flew in, isn’t it?”)
Martin didn’t mind being second best to the Spitfire pilot (Roly or Jim), a man who had sliced through the blue, blue skies above England like a swallow. Martin knew that the woman was grateful to him for picking up the pieces of a bereaved life, and she would never leave him.

Occasionally she was named Martha, and very infrequently she went by the name Abigail (in the imaginary life identities were less fixed), but usually she was nameless. To assign a name was to make her real. To make her real was to render her impossible.

It was best to keep women locked inside your imagination. When they escaped into the chaotic mess that was the real world, they became unstable, unfriendly, ultimately terrifying. They created
incidents
. He felt suddenly queasy.
“Something used in carrying out suspended sentences.”
Five letters.

10

J
ackson climbed aboard the 41 bus on the Mound and thought, okay, if she wanted him to take a bus, he would take a bus. The 41 covered a long route that ended up at Cramond. He knew “Cramond” as a hymn tune, not a place. Or was it “Crimond”? So many things he didn’t know. The Lord is my shepherd. Was he? It seemed unlikely somehow.

An old woman waiting at the bus stop with him said, “Oh, it’s very nice out at Cramond, you can go to Cramond Island from there. You’ll like it.” He believed her, years of experience had taught Jackson that old women tended to tell the truth.

He sat on the top deck, at the front, and felt for a moment like a child again—some boyhood memory of sitting up there next to his big sister as a treat. Those were the days when the top deck was for smokers. And a time when life was painfully simple. He often thought about his dead sister, but she was usually an image in isolation (the
idea
of his sister). He rarely had a sharply focused picture of something that had actually occurred, and this sudden, unexpected memory of sitting next to Niamh on the bus—the smell of her violet cologne, the rustle of her petticoat, the feel of his arm resting next to hers—tied a tight knot in his heart.

T
he old woman was right, it
was
nice out at Cramond. It was a satellite of Edinburgh but it seemed like a village. He walked past expensive houses, past a nice old church, down to the harbor, where swans were swimming idly. The smell of coffee and fried food wafting from the kitchen of the Cramond Inn mixed with the salty scents of the estuary. He had been expecting to catch some kind of ferry out to the island, but now he could see that it was easily reachable along a short causeway of rocks. He didn’t need a tide table to tell that the sea was shrinking away from the rocky spine of this causeway. The air was still damp from this morning’s rain, but the sun had put in an unexpected and welcome appearance, making the newly washed sand and shingle glitter. A host of different types of waders and gulls was busy beachcombing among the rocks. Exercise and fresh air would be just the ticket, as Julia would have said. He needed to blow away the stale thoughts that had accumulated in his brain, find the old Jackson that he seemed to have lost sight of. He set out along the causeway.

He passed a couple on their way back, retired middle-class types in Peter Storm jackets, binoculars slung around their necks, yomping briskly back to shore, their breezy “Good afternoons” ringing in Jackson’s ears. “Tide turning!” the female half of the pair added cheerfully. Jackson nodded agreement.

Bird-watchers, he supposed. What were they called? Twitchers. God knows why. He’d never really seen the attraction of watching birds, they were nice enough things in themselves, but
watching
them was a bit like trainspotting. Jackson had never felt that autistic (mainly) male urge to collect and collate.