One Good Turn

bathrooms, beds, reading material. Someone had left a Scotsman on the table. He made a listless start on the Derek Allen crossword. “First Scotsman on the road.” Six letters. “Tarmac.”

While he was drinking his tea, he heard an accent-a girl’s or a woman’s-drifting across the clatter and chatter of the cafe. Russian, but when he looked around he couldn’t identify to whom it belonged. A Russian woman manifesting unexpectedly in the Royal Infirmary to castigate him, to bring him to justice. Maybe he was hallucinating. He tried to concentrate on the black-and-white squares, he wasn’t very good at crosswords. “Grebe reared in northern Scandinavian city.” Six letters. He liked anagrams best. Little rearrangements. “Bergen.”

“Idyot,” he was sure he heard the invisible Russian girl say. There was a cafe 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 cafes, 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