The Firebird (28 page)

‘Will ye help me with the bed?’

‘What? Oh. Sure.’ I felt as tangled up inside as if I’d been an adolescent, and purposely I kept my eyes away from his the whole time we were pulling off the cushions of the sofa bed and swinging out the mattress. I fetched sheets and blankets and an extra pillow from the airing cupboard, and we made the bed together, one of us on either side. And then I said, a bit too cheerfully, ‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Nick?’

Again too brightly, ‘Yes?’

‘What do you wish?’

My gaze did lift to his then, startled. ‘Sorry?’

He sat nonchalantly on the bed’s edge, barefoot. ‘Earlier, afore your boss called, you were saying that you wished for something.’

‘Oh. Right.’ It seemed harmless to say it, since there was no way it could actually happen. ‘I wish you could come to St Petersburg with me, that’s all. But you can’t. You need a visa to get into Russia,’ I said. ‘I’ve already got mine, it’s for business and lasts a full year, so I just come and go as I please, but you’d need one for tourists, and even a rushed one takes time. I’d have been there and back before you ever got one.’ I forced a smile. ‘Anyhow. I’ve got a lot more to go on now, haven’t I? Thanks to you.’

‘Anytime.’ He stretched out full length on the bed, settling back with his hands linked behind his head, closing his eyes. ‘You’ll do fine.’

I didn’t argue with that. I only said ‘Good night’ again and crossed to my own room, and closed the door.

He was holding me.

I surfaced in the darkness of my bedroom to the feeling of his head close by my own, his warmth beside me, one leg nudging mine beneath the blankets, and his arm a settled weight across my stomach.

‘Rob.’

He didn’t move. I lay there for a moment, coming fully into consciousness, and then I let my eyes close while I let myself relax into the strange and unexpected situation. I had never shared a bed with him before. And though I knew he shouldn’t be here with me now, I somehow lacked the will to wake him right away and make him leave.

He was too warm, his hold too strong and too possessive to be easily dislodged, and I had never felt so perfectly protected, and at peace.

I wasn’t sure when he’d come in. I hadn’t been aware of it, nor had I thought he’d make a move like this when he’d been acting all this time as though he were no longer interested. But clearly there’d be complications if I let him stay and didn’t wake him; if we both woke up together in the morning, in my bed. I knew I’d have to make a move.

It would be easier, I thought, for me to simply go and sleep out in the sitting room myself. That way I wouldn’t have to shift him. Taking care, I slowly reached across to lift his arm from where it lay across my stomach.

Then I stopped, because there wasn’t any arm there.

My own fingers brushed the fabric of my top, confusingly. My hand moved further, to where I could feel the warmth of him … and touched the empty blanket. Even more confused, I turned my head against the pillow.

I was in the bed alone.

But still I felt the hold of his embrace. I felt it even when I sat up, pushed the blanket off, and stood. I felt it while I eased my bedroom door open and, careful not to make a sound, went tiptoeing across the silent sitting room to see with my own eyes what seemed impossible.

He lay sleeping as I’d felt him – on his side, with one arm resting on the rumpled sheets, protectively. And looking at his face I felt a swift, insistent tug beneath my heart, as though someone had tied a string around my ribs and pulled it sharply.

Breathing in, I focused, with my gaze still steady on his sleeping features, and I very, very gently pushed his mind from mine. He didn’t wake.

I felt the cold, without him. Even after I’d returned to my own bed and burrowed deep within the blankets, I felt cold. And worse was yet to come, I knew. It wasn’t such a hard thing to make Rob let go of
me,
I thought, but how in heaven, after this, could I let go of him?

Rob glanced down at his watch, then scanned the traffic just ahead of us. ‘Your flight’s at half past nine, ye’ve no got time.’

‘It’s barely six o’clock. Besides, it’s on our way. And trust me, it will only take five minutes.’ I was ready for his sidelong glance, and met it with full innocence.

‘Five minutes?’ he repeated, to be sure.

I gave a nod. ‘He said he’d have it ready for me.’

‘When did he say that?’

‘I rang him earlier.’

‘Earlier?’ Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘What is he, nocturnal?’

‘Very nearly. Here,’ I said. ‘Turn left here, and then right just where that other car is turning.’

I’d grown up here, in this little terraced house in Acton, with its 1920s pseudo-Tudor timbers trying hard to make it look distinguished in a slightly dodgy neighbourhood.

My grandfather answered the door fully dressed, freshly shaven, his thick white hair brushed back neatly. He always took pride in his clothes and appearance, and even at his age he looked rather dashing. He shot a suspicious look over my shoulder to where Rob stood leaning against the parked car at the kerbside. ‘Who is that boy?’

Rob had shuttered his thoughts, I knew, at my request. ‘If he knows what you are,’ I’d told Rob, ‘then he’ll give me a lecture. And that will take more than five minutes.’

I kept my reply simple. ‘That’s Rob, Granddad.’

‘Your fancy boss gave you a driver?’

‘He isn’t my driver.’

‘He opened the door for you.’

‘Yes, he’s got very good manners,’ I said. ‘But he’s only a friend.’

With a final hard stare beneath lowering eyebrows, my grandfather switched his attention from Rob back to me when I asked, ‘Did you manage to find it?’

‘The book? Yes, yes, I know where it is.’

I could sense the faintest cautionary nudge about the time from Rob, as I went in the house behind my grandfather, but after all, it had been Rob who’d said last night that it would be a help to me to have an old map I could use for reference.

And I’d suddenly remembered, just this morning, where I’d find old maps.

The book was on the table by the fireplace in the sitting room, beside the half-drunk cup of tea and partly finished crossword that was evidence my grandfather had been awake a while, and on his own. ‘Is Mum at work?’

He gave a nod. ‘The hospital was busy place at three o’clock this morning. Was an accident. They telephoned to call your mother in to the laboratory.’

As a biomedical scientist, my mother was frequently working odd hours. I was sorry I’d missed her, and said so.

My grandfather shrugged. ‘She would only have been curious,’ he said, ‘about your driver. She’d ask questions. Is as well that you have only me.’ He handed me the book. ‘Here, take it. Keep it. I don’t want.’

It was a history of St Petersburg, in photographs, old drawings, maps, and paintings, with small passages of text. A proper coffee-table book. I could remember when my father had come home with it, excited to have found it in the bookshop round the corner from the school where he was teaching, and he’d given it so proudly to my grandfather. ‘That’s where you came from, isn’t it? St Petersburg.’

My grandfather, accepting the gift graciously, had set it on the table, where it stayed at least a year before he’d put it in the cupboard in the corner. I had never seen him open it.

My father, loving all things Russian as he did, had never fully noticed that my grandfather had done his best to cut away all ties that might have bound him to his homeland, and the city where he’d suffered the experiments that had for ever changed him and embittered him and left him so distrustful.

I’d never learnt the full story of how they’d got out of the Soviet Union – my mother had been ten, and could only remember an overland journey through Finland, she thought, and my grandfather wouldn’t give details – but I knew it hadn’t been easy, though he’d always counted it well worth the cost. He had changed his name, after arriving in London, from Ivan Kirilovich Birkin to John Birkin, which to his ears sounded practically English. A good English name, for a man who was finished with being a Russian.

He looked at the book in my hands, and said, ‘I would have got rid of that long ago, but it would have made your mother sad. Is good you need it now. You keep it, Nicola.’

I thanked him. ‘It will come in handy.’

‘Why do you want to go back to that place? I don’t know. You should go to Miami. Is warm in Miami.’

‘I’m going for work.’

‘Work.’ His face told me just what he thought of my job, but we’d had that discussion enough times he didn’t seem keen to revisit it now. All he asked was, ‘Are you staying long in St Petersburg?’

‘Only till Monday.’

‘You don’t drink the water.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You don’t forget. It makes you sick, that water.’

‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I won’t drink it. But speaking of drink, shall I bring you back vodka?’ The one thing he hadn’t renounced, of his heritage. ‘What flavour, this time?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe if you can find the blackcurrant. And one without flavour.’

‘All right.’

When he walked me back out, he again looked at Rob with suspicion. ‘He looks,’ he said, ‘like a policeman.’

‘He is a policeman.’

My grandfather frowned. ‘Then you don’t bring him back again, Nicola. Is not good, to have a policeman out there where my neighbours can see.’ He glared at Rob, who raised his head and met the glare with perfect calm.

For one unsettling moment, I imagined that I saw a flash of recognition play across my grandfather’s stern features, and thought perhaps that he and Rob were speaking to each other with their thoughts, but then I realised how ridiculous that was.

‘He never talks to me that way,’ I’d said to Rob, when we were driving down to Ypres.

‘He likely hears you, though,’ had been Rob’s comment.

I kissed my grandfather goodbye, and tried.
Goodbye, Granddad.

I could feel his mind shove mine back, even as his arms embraced me. ‘Be well, Nicola. Come home safe.’

And then, as it had always been, the door was closed between us.

I was quiet on the drive to Heathrow. I wanted to think it was only because I was tired and a little distracted, and not because Rob would be dropping me off and then leaving, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I had thought of and discarded several speeches by the time I realised Rob had parked the car, and since I hadn’t been expecting that, it threw me momentarily off balance so that I could only come around and stand beside him while he took my suitcase from the boot, my mind still searching for the proper words to say.

I started with, ‘You didn’t have to park, you know. It costs too much.’

He set my suitcase on its wheels and reached back into the boot as I carried on, ‘And anyway, this is the long-stay car park, Rob. It’s not—’ I broke off when he hefted out a duffle bag and slung it on his shoulder before slamming shut the boot. And then I asked, ‘What
are
you doing?’

‘Coming with you.’

‘Rob, you can’t.’

He took my suitcase in his other hand and motioned me to go ahead. ‘Try walking and arguing at the same time, or the courtesy coach will be leaving us here.’

I stayed right where I was. ‘But you can’t come.’

His broad shoulders lifted and fell again in what I took for a brief, resigned sigh as he faced me with patience. ‘You did say you wished I would come to St Petersburg, did ye not?’

‘Yes, but—’

He started to walk while I tried to keep up with him.

Tried to explain. ‘But it isn’t that easy to travel to Russia, Rob. Even if you somehow managed to get a seat on the flight, you’d still need a visa. I told you last night.’

‘Aye, you did.’ Unconcerned, he slowed slightly to keep between me and a car that was passing. I caught at his arm.

‘Rob, you can’t get a visa the same day you travel.’

‘Well then, it’s a good thing I got mine a month ago.’

‘What?’ Letting go of his arm, I stared after him as he walked on with our luggage. ‘What?’

He was already several steps further ahead, and he didn’t turn back to explain. But when we were riding the courtesy coach to the terminal, he slid a hand in his pocket and pulled out his passport and handed it to me, as proof.

It was actually there, pasted in. A real visa.

‘But how did you … ?’ I didn’t bother to finish the question, because there was only one possible answer. ‘You knew.’ There were people around us, we weren’t on our own, so I gathered my thoughts with an effort, and told him,
You knew I would come up to Eyemouth to find you.

Rob didn’t reply. With his head angled slightly away, he appeared to be watching something through the window.

Rob.

A wall of static blocked me out, which might have made me irritated if I hadn’t noticed that he looked a bit uncomfortable, as though this weren’t a conversation he was keen to have.

He didn’t ask to have his passport back. I waited until we were in the terminal and standing in the queue to get our boarding passes. Then I held his passport up and open to the visa page, and said, ‘The thing is, that you have to know the dates to get a tourist visa.’

‘Really.’ He was fishing in the zippered outside pocket of his duffle bag for something.

‘Yes. You also have to know – at least, you
used
to have to know – where you’d be staying. And not just the town or city, but the actual hotel.’

‘Is that a fact?’

I wasn’t wrong, I thought. The glance he shot me was defensive.

‘When,’ I asked him, ‘did you know?’

I half-expected him to use his standard line, to smile at me and say, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about.’ Instead, he gave an odd, self-conscious shrug. ‘The end of May.’

‘More than three months ago?’ I didn’t have a right to be upset, I knew. It wasn’t Rob’s fault he could see the things he saw, but even so, the knowledge that my life was such an open book to him, that he could know what I would do before I knew it for myself, was still unsettling.