The Firebird (29 page)

He’d found his airline ticket, and seemed grateful to have something else to focus on, but as the minutes stretched, my silence brought his gaze in search of mine. I met it with a frown.

‘Just how much
do
you see?’ I asked. ‘How far ahead?’ I’d been so busy making use of his ability to see the past, I’d overlooked his other gifts.

He thought a moment. Then he said, ‘It all depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On who I’m looking at.’ His tone held the frustration of a person trying to explain in words a thing for which the language was inadequate. ‘Some people are more difficult. My father. You.’

‘But you still see my future.’

‘I see bits of it.’ He took a deeper interest in the writing on his airline ticket. ‘Bits of what it could be.’

I was tempted to explore what he might know about that future. What it could be. What it would be. Whether he was in it, anywhere. But part of me was too much of a coward to go down that road. The past, I thought, was safer.

There was one thing I’d been wondering for two years. So I asked him. ‘Did you know that I would leave, that night in Edinburgh?’

He didn’t answer straight away. I might have missed the nod, except he followed it with, ‘I was never sure, ye ken, on when. I’d only seen the part where we were walking in the rain, I’d no idea what the day would be.’

I struggled to adjust to this, to how it changed the meaning of my memories of our time together. ‘But,’ I asked him, ‘if you knew that I was going to leave, why did you stay with me so long?’

He raised his head and looked me in the eyes. ‘Because I wanted to. Because it was my choice.’

The chaos of the terminal around us shifted out of focus, blurring into one receding whirl of noise and colour, and the only person who looked clear and real to me was Rob.

‘And this is your choice, now,’ he told me. ‘If you’d rather that I didn’t come along, just say so.’

I could see that he was serious. He’d walk away if that was what I wanted, what I asked of him. He wouldn’t try to change my mind.

My choice, I thought. My firebird to follow.

I stood a little straighter, cleared my throat, and asked him, ‘Rob, would you come with me to St Petersburg?’

His smile, though it came slowly, nearly stopped my heart.

‘It’s all a bit last minute, like,’ he said, and dodged the smack that I’d have landed on his arm, ‘but aye, I think I can. There’s just one problem.’

‘What?’ I waited for it, then relaxed as Rob held out his hand, the glint of humour in his eyes restoring balance to my world.

‘They’ll never let me through security,’ he said, ‘without my passport.’

My efforts to teach Rob a few words of Russian were drawing some decidedly amused attention from the flight attendant and an older woman sitting just across the aisle.

We’d started with the basic phrases:
How are you? Good morning, Thank you,
things like that, and now I was writing the Cyrillic alphabet down for him on the paper napkin from my lunch tray.

Rob, while waiting, practised his new phrases on the flight attendant. When she cleared away his own tray, he smiled brilliantly and thanked her with, ‘Spa-CEE-ba.’

Smiling back, she said, ‘Pah-ZHAL-sta’, which was one of those great multi-purpose words that meant ‘You’re welcome’ in one context, ‘Please’ or ‘Here, this is for you’ in others.

Rob, encouraged, told the flight attendant, ‘Min-YA Za-VOOT Rob.’

I smiled to myself, not looking up, and said, ‘That’s good pronunciation, but you’re telling her they call you “slave”. That’s what “rob” means.’

The older woman sitting on the aisle tossed out a dry remark in Russian, about women having fantasies, that made the flight attendant laugh and bend to pat my arm. ‘With such a man,’ the flight attendant said to me, in Russian also, ‘so good-looking, you be sure to teach him how to say “I have a girlfriend”.’

Rob, who didn’t understand a word of this, sat patiently and waited till the flight attendant moved away before he asked, ‘So what’s my Russian name, then?’

‘It’s still Robert, just pronounced a little differently.’ I wrote it down for him: “Poбepт”. ‘RO-byeert. You see?’

‘So the “P” is an “R”.’

‘That’s right.’

Picking up the paper-napkin alphabet, he pointed out, ‘But there’s a perfectly good “R” down here. Well, it’s backwards, but—’

‘That makes a “yuh” sound,’ I told him. ‘Like “yard”. See, I’ve put all the sounds of the letters beside them.’

He studied the list with a small frown of fixed concentration.

‘It’s not the world’s easiest language to learn,’ I said. ‘And Superman you might be, but I don’t think even you could become fluent in one plane flight.’

Rob glanced over, with the crinkles showing at the edges of his eyes. ‘You think I’m Superman?’

‘The point is,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to be able to understand Russian. I’ll be there to translate.’ I knew from the warmth of my cheeks I was blushing, but Rob had already turned back to his alphabet.

Shrugging, he said, ‘I like learning things.’

Watching him working to master the letters and sounds on that napkin, I felt once again that small tug at my ribcage, that small wash of tenderness, and just as quickly I shielded my feelings and thoughts. But I
was
glad he’d come.

I’d been privately dreading the challenge of doing this leg of the journey without him. I’d told myself it was because he was just so much better than I was at seeing the past, and without him I didn’t stand much of a chance of accomplishing anything useful. Assuming I even found Anna, the limits of my own skills meant that I most likely wouldn’t be able to tie her to Catherine the First and find tangible proof that would help Margaret Ross sell her firebird carving for what it was worth.

If I’d had a month in St Petersburg, maybe. But in just a handful of days, I could never have done it. With Rob, now … with Rob, it was possible.

That was the reason, I’d told myself firmly, why I was so glad he had come. Only that. Not because of the way that I felt when he smiled, or the fact that I felt more completely alive in his company than I had felt for a very long time.

And as for that traitorous inner voice trying to get my attention, to point out that this couldn’t possibly last, that like holiday romances it only worked in the moment and wouldn’t survive a return to the real world – I buried that little voice deep down inside, and ignored it.

The real world, I knew, would intrude soon enough. But for now, just for now, I was here on a plane next to Rob, with his elbow and mine touching warm on the armrest between us, and I didn’t want to think further ahead.

He had picked up my pen and was carefully copying ‘Poбepт’ – his name – on the alphabet napkin. ‘How’s that?’

‘Perfect. But it should really be this, if you want to be properly Russian.’ I borrowed the pen back and wrote down a second name under the first, and then watched as Rob worked it out, letter by letter.

He said, ‘Brianovich? What’s that?’

‘Your patronymic. Unless you’re on really close, intimate terms with people in Russia, you don’t use their first name alone, you use their first name and their patronymic. All you do for that is take their father’s first name, and then add the proper ending for a man or woman. You’re Robert Brianovich, for example, because you’re a man, but if we had the same father my patronymic would be Brianovna.’

‘What is it really?’ he asked.

‘Philipovna.’

He gave the brief nod that I knew meant he’d got it all sorted. ‘So if I had two kids,’ he said, ‘Jean and Jack, they’d be Jean Robertovna and Jack Robertovich.’

‘You’ve got it. ‘Except little Jean would be “Zhanna” or “Yana” in Russian, and Jack would be “Ivan”.’ I said it the proper way: ee-VAHN.

Rob smiled. ‘So what’s “Nicola”, then?’

‘Well, there isn’t a Russian equivalent, really. My parents, I think, really wanted to call me Natalya, but nobody wanted to upset my grandfather, so they picked something more English.’

‘Your granddad’s not so keen on Russian names?’ Rob asked.

‘My grandfather doesn’t like any reminders of Russia.’

‘I see.’ His smile turned briefly private. ‘He’s not ower fond of me, either.’

‘What makes you say that?’ I cast my mind back to this morning, when I had been leaving my grandfather’s house and he’d stood in the doorway and glared out at Rob, and I’d thought that the two of them might have been—‘Rob,’ I began, ‘did you … ?’

‘No.’ His tone held a hint of amusement. ‘But he did.’

That floored me. ‘He
spoke
to you? What did he say?’

‘I’m not sure. What does this mean?’ he asked, before speaking a short and succinct Russian phrase that made people in nearby seats turn their heads, scandalised.

Even the older woman on the aisle leant over and told me, in Russian, ‘You should not be teaching him such things.’

Rob leant back, all innocence, closing his eyes as I sent him a look.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I’ve a feeling your grandfather’s not ower fond of me.’

The drive in from the airport took us past the modern factories and industrial monstrosities and bleakly structured Stalinist apartment blocks and buildings that belonged more to the stoic past, when the city had been known as Leningrad, than to the brighter history of pre-Communist St Petersburg.

My mother had been born here, and my grandfather. He’d been a little boy when Hitler’s armies had come overland and cut off the supply lines of the city, and like everyone in Leningrad he’d starved and suffered through more than two years of that relentless siege, those endless bitter winters, while the people all around, including many of his family, sickened, died or disappeared.

And yet the city had survived, as it had always done – endured the changes of its name and government, stood fast through war and siege and revolution, and through all of that had managed still to shelter and encourage art and dance and life and beauty.

It was what my mother always told my brother and myself that she missed most of all about St Petersburg – the beauty that lay everywhere, in unexpected places, if you only had the eyes to see it.

That was why, the minute we had got into this taxi, I had taken out the book that I had borrowed from my grandfather and given Rob a different sort of introduction to the city than he would have had from simply looking out the windows.

‘So there was nothing here at all,’ he summed up, flipping through the maps, ‘until Peter the Great started building.’

‘Well, there was a small Swedish fort just up here,’ I said, and pointed it out. ‘But you’re right, it’s a very young city. He wanted a port, you see. Russia was virtually landlocked in those days, except for this smaller port all the way up on the White Sea, at Archangel, only the ice froze that solid for half the year, and Peter wanted a proper port, and a real navy, like everyone else had.’ I turned back a page to the earliest map. ‘Sweden’s navy controlled all this here, all the Baltic, but Peter came up and just took this. He captured their fort, and he surveyed the land and he started to build. It was technically Sweden’s, I think, when he founded St Petersburg, and I’d imagine they thought they could just take it back. But they didn’t count on Peter’s bloody-mindedness. He wanted what he wanted.’

‘So he got his seaport.’

‘Yes. It was a swamp, this, when he started building. Lots of islands and canals, a lot like Venice. It still floods,’ I told him, ‘when the winds are blowing the wrong way.’

‘Like in Amsterdam,’ said Rob.

Which might, I told him, have been part of the attraction. ‘Peter loved Amsterdam. He’d spent some time there, when he was a young man, learning to build ships and things, and he loved it. He wanted St Petersburg to look like Amsterdam, modern and Western, with lovely wide streets and canals.’

He hadn’t missed by much. The older section of the city, nearest to the Neva River, had a rather Amsterdam-like feeling to its architecture. Our hotel, the Nevsky Grand, was on a shaded boulevard just off the Nevsky Prospekt, in behind the great Cathedral on Spilt Blood, and just a short walk from the river and the Hermitage.

Sebastian never stayed here. It was in an older building, and the rooms, though clean, were very small. Sebastian liked his space, and wanted luxury when travelling. I wanted friendly service and a comfortable bed in a hotel that had at least a bit of character, and everything about the Nevsky Grand Hotel, from its old stone façade with the wrought iron vinework and
old-fashioned
lanterns hung over the door, to the elegant sconces hung high on the walls of the narrow but welcoming entry hall, gave me the sort of a feeling I liked.

I was less sure, though, what Rob would think. I warned him, as we jostled through the entry hall and into the reception room, its floor tiled boldly black and white beneath a high beamed ceiling with a chandelier, ‘Just so you know, the rooms are very small.’

‘Because I’m so manly and huge, d’ye mean?’ He kept his face serious. ‘Well, that might be a problem, but I’ll try to cope.’ He grinned when I elbowed his arm. ‘Will ye stop that? You’re aye hitting me with something.’

‘I am not.’

‘Are sot,’ he shot back, looking like a boy of ten as he turned that half-laughing smile full force upon the clerk at the reception desk.

I saw her blink, and then respond. She was pretty and dark-haired and I felt a stabbing of something that I was ashamed to admit felt like jealousy. I had no right to feel jealous, I told myself. I’d had him once, but I’d left him and now he was no longer mine. He could smile at whomever he liked. And to prove it, I smiled myself at the clerk, if a little too brightly.

She took our passports, which was standard procedure in Russia – they’d be given back to us in a few days – and she used them to read our names. ‘Mr McMorran,’ she said, ‘and
Miss
Marter.’ I gathered that Rob’s reservation had been made some time before my own, but she managed to find us both in her records. ‘And it is two rooms, yes?’

She sounded almost hopeful, and this time the stab went deep enough to make me almost want to tell her no, we’d just have one room, thank you. But remembering in time how complicated that might get, I caught myself and took a breath before I answered, ‘Yes, that’s right.’