The House of Special Purpose

1979

IT WAS ZOYA’S idea to make one final journey together.

We had never been great travellers, either of us, preferring the warmth and security of our peaceful flat in Holborn to the exhaustion of holiday-making. After we left Russia, we moved immediately to France; once there, we spent a few years living and working in Paris, where we married, before settling ultimately in London. When Arina was a child, of course, we made our best efforts to take a week away from the city every summer, but it was usually to Brighton, or perhaps as far as Cornwall, to show her the sea, to allow her to play in the sand. To be a child among other children. But we never left the island shores once we arrived. And I thought we never would.

She announced her idea late one evening as we sat by the fire in our living room, watching as the flames diminished and the black coals hissed and spat for the final time. I was reading Jake’s Thing and set the book aside in surprise when she spoke.

Our grandson, Michael, had left half an hour earlier after a difficult conversation. He had come for dinner and to tell us of how his new life as an acting student was progressing, but all the joy of the evening had been swept away when Zoya broke the news to him about her illness and the spread of the cancer. She didn’t want to keep anything from him, she said, although she didn’t want his sympathy either. This was life, after all, she suggested. Nothing more than life.

‘I’m already as old as the hills,’ she told him, smiling. ‘And I’ve been very lucky, you know. I’ve been closer to death than this.’

Of course, being young he had immediately looked for solutions and hope. He insisted that his father would pay for any treatments that were necessary, that he himself would leave RADA and find proper employment to pay for anything she needed, but she shook her head and held his hands in hers while she told him that there was nothing that anyone could do, and there was certainly nothing that money could do either. This thing was incurable, she told him. She might not have many months left and she didn’t want to waste them searching for impossible cures. He had taken the news badly. Having spent so many years without a mother, it was natural that he hated the idea of losing his grandmother as well.

Before leaving, Michael had taken me aside and asked me whether there was anything he could do for his grandmother to ease her comfort. ‘She has the best doctors, right?’ he asked me.

‘Of course,’ I told him, moved by the tears that were pooling in his eyes. ‘But you know, this is not an easy disease to battle.’

‘She’s a tough old bird, though,’ he said, which made me smile and I nodded.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, she is that.’

‘I’ve heard of people that find a way to beat it.’

‘As have I,’ I told him, not wishing to offer him any false hope. Zoya and I had already spent weeks arguing over her decision not to seek any treatment but to allow the disease to work its way through her body and take her when it was finally bored of her. I had tried everything I could to dissuade her from this path, but it was useless. She had simply decided that her time had come.

‘Call me if you need me, all right?’ Michael had insisted. ‘Me or Dad. We’re here whenever you need anything at all. And I’ll stop by more often, OK? Twice a week if I can manage it. And tell her not to cook for me, I’ll eat before I get here.’

‘And insult her?’ I asked, chiding him. ‘You’ll eat what she puts before you, Michael.’

‘Well… whatever,’ he said, shrugging it off, running a hand through his shoulder-length hair and presenting that lean smile of his to me. ‘I’m here, that’s all I’m saying. I’m not going anywhere.’

He has always been a good grandson. He’s always made us proud of him. After he left, Zoya and I both confessed that we had been moved by his thoughtfulness.

‘A trip?’ I asked, surprised by her suggestion. ‘Are you sure that you would be able to manage it?’

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Now, I could, anyway. A few months from now, who knows?’

‘You wouldn’t prefer to stay here and rest?’

‘And die, you mean?’ she asked, perhaps regretting the words as soon as she said them, for she caught the expression of dismay on my face and leaned across to kiss me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. But think of it, Georgy. I can sit here and wait for the end to come, or I can do something with whatever time is left to me.’

‘Well, I suppose we could take a train somewhere for a week or two,’ I said, considering it. ‘We had some happy times on the south coast when we were younger.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of Cornwall,’ she said quickly, shaking her head, and it was my turn now to feel regret, for the name inspired memories of our daughter, and in that direction lay grief and madness.

‘Scotland, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘We’ve never been there. I’ve always thought that it might be nice to see Edinburgh. Or is that too far? Are we being too ambitious?’

‘You can never be too ambitious, Georgy,’ she said with a smile.

‘Not Scotland, then,’ I said, imagining a map of Britain in my mind and looking around it in my imagination. ‘It’s too cold there this time of year anyway. And not Wales, I think. The Lake District, perhaps? Wordsworth country? Or Ireland? We could take a ferry over to Dublin, if you think you could manage it. Or travel south, towards West Cork. It’s supposed to be very beautiful there.’

‘I was thinking further north,’ she said, and I knew by her tone that this was no idle conversation, but something that she had been considering for some time already. She knew exactly where she wanted to go and would settle for nowhere else. ‘I was thinking of Finland,’ she said.

‘Finland?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why Finland, of all places?’ I asked, surprised by her choice. ‘It’s so… well, I mean, it’s Finland, isn’t it? Is there anything to see there?’

‘Of course there is, Georgy,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It’s an entire country, like anywhere else.’

‘But you’ve never expressed any interest in seeing Finland before.’

‘I was there as a child,’ she told me. ‘I don’t remember it very much, of course, but I thought… well, it’s as close to home as we could get, isn’t it? As close to Russia, I mean.’

‘Ah,’ I said, nodding slowly and considering it. ‘Of course.’ I pictured the map of northern Europe in my head, the long border of over seven hundred miles that stretched the length of the country, from Grense-Jacobsely in the north to Hamina in the south.

‘I’d like to feel that I was close to St Petersburg once again,’ she continued. ‘Just one more time in my life, that’s all. While I still can. I’d like to look into the distance and imagine it, still standing. Invincible.’

I breathed heavily through my nose and bit my lip as I stared into the fire, where the last of the coals were turning to embers, and considered what she had asked. Finland. Russia. It was, in the most literal sense of the phrase, her dying wish. And I confess that the idea excited me too. But still, I was unsure of the wisdom of such a journey. And not just because of the cancer.

‘Please, Georgy,’ she said, after several silent minutes had passed. ‘Please, just this.’

‘You’re sure that you’re strong enough?’

‘I am now,’ she said. ‘In a few months’ time, who knows? But now, yes.’

I nodded. ‘Then we will go,’ I told her.

There was a range of signs to predict Zoya’s illness which, taken together, should have been warning enough to me that she was not well, but separated by several months as they were, and appearing alongside the typical aches and pains of old age, it was difficult to recognize the connections between the symptoms. Added to this was the fact that my wife kept the details of her suffering private for as long as possible. Whether she did this because she didn’t want me to know of the agony she was enduring or because of a reluctance on her part to seek treatment to alleviate it is a question I have never asked her, for fear of being wounded by the answer.

I did notice, however, that she was more tired than usual and would sit by the fire in the evenings with a look of sheer exhaustion on her face, her breathing a little more laboured, her countenance a little more pale. When I asked her about this fatigue, she shrugged it off and said it was nothing, that she simply needed to get a better night’s sleep, that was all, and that I shouldn’t worry about her so much. But then her back began to trouble her too and I could see her wincing in pain as she put a hand to an area at the base of her spine, holding it there for a moment until the agony passed, her expression contorted with distress.

‘You need to see a doctor,’ I told her when the pain seemed to be lasting for longer than she could possibly cope with. ‘Maybe you’ve pulled a disc and it needs to be rested. He could give you an anti-inflammatory or—’

‘Or maybe I’m just getting old,’ she said, making a determined effort not to raise her voice. ‘I’ll be fine, Georgy. Don’t fuss.’

Within a few weeks, the pain had begun to spread towards her abdomen and I noticed a distinct lack of appetite as she sat at the table, pushing her food around the plate with her fork, taking only small morsels into her mouth and chewing on them carelessly before pushing the dish away and claiming that she wasn’t hungry.

‘I had a big lunch,’ she said to me, and fool that I was I allowed myself to believe her. ‘I shouldn’t eat so much in the middle of the day.’

However, when these symptoms continued for several months, and she had started not only to lose weight but to be unable to sleep with the agony of her condition, I finally persuaded her to visit our local GP. She returned to say that he was running some tests on her, and two weeks later my worst fears were confirmed when she was referred to a specialist, Dr Joan Crawford, who has been a part of our lives ever since.

It seems a curious thing to me that I took the news of Zoya’s illness worse than she did. God forgive me, but she seemed relieved, almost happy, when the results came through, imparting them to me with consideration for my feelings but without any fear or devastation for her own condition. She didn’t cry, although I did. She didn’t seem angry or frightened, both of which emotions poured over me throughout the days that followed. It was as if she had received… not good news exactly, but a piece of interesting information with which she was not entirely dissatisfied.

A week later, we sat waiting for Dr Crawford in her office. Zoya appeared perfectly at ease but I was restless in my chair, fidgeting nervously as I stared at the framed certificates that hung on the walls, convincing myself that someone who had been trained in this disease and had received so many qualifications from famous universities would surely be able to find a way to combat it.

‘Mr and Mrs Jachmenev,’ said Dr Crawford when she arrived, late but brisk, her manner entirely businesslike. Although she was not unsympathetic towards us, I felt immediately that she lacked a degree of compassion, which Zoya put down to the fact that she was dealing with patients suffering the same illness every day and it was difficult to view every case as tragically as the relatives of its victims would. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. As you can imagine, it gets busier and busier here every day.’

I wasn’t entirely reassured to hear that, but said nothing as she studied the dossier which lay on the desk before her, holding an X-ray up to the light at one point, but betraying nothing in her expression as she examined it. Finally, she closed the folder, placed her hands on top of it and looked at the two of us, her lips pursed in what was an approximation, I thought, of a smile.

‘Jachmenev,’ she said. ‘That’s an unusual name.’

‘It’s Russian,’ I said quickly, not wishing to entertain any small talk. ‘Doctor, you’ve examined my wife’s file?’

‘Yes, and I had a conversation with your GP, Dr Cross, earlier this morning. He’s spoken with you, Mrs Jachmenev, about your condition?’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘Cancer, I was told.’

‘More specifically, ovarian cancer,’ replied Dr Crawford, using both hands to smooth out the papers before her, a habit which for some reason put me in mind of bad actors who never know what to do with their hands on stage; perhaps this was my way of not entering the conversation entirely. ‘You’ve been suffering for some time, I expect?’

‘There were symptoms, yes,’ replied Zoya cautiously, her tone suggesting that she did not want to be chastised for her tardiness in reporting them. ‘Some back pain, fatigue, a little nausea, but I didn’t think anything of it. I’m seventy-eight, Dr Crawford. For ten years now I’ve woken every day with a different complaint.’

The doctor smiled and nodded, hesitating for a moment before speaking in a more gentle tone. ‘This is not uncommon, of course, in women of your age. Older women are more at risk of ovarian cancer, although typically they will develop it between their mid-fifties and mid-seventies. Yours is a rare, late-in-life case.’

‘I’ve always tried to be exceptional,’ said Zoya with a smile. Dr Crawford smiled in return and the two women stared at each other for a few moments, as if they each understood something about the other one of which I was necessarily ignorant. There were only three of us in the room, but I felt terribly excluded from their company.

‘Can I ask, do you have any history of cancer in your family?’ asked Dr Crawford after a few moments.

‘No,’ said Zoya. ‘I mean yes, you can ask. But no, there is none.’

‘And your mother? She died of natural causes?’

Zoya hesitated for only a moment before answering. ‘My mother did not have cancer,’ she said.

‘Your grandmothers? Any sisters or aunts?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘And your own medical history – have you suffered from any major traumas during your life?’

There was a moment of vacillation on her part and then Zoya suddenly burst out laughing at the doctor’s question and I turned to look at her in surprise. Seeing the look of hilarity on her face, the fact that she was doing all that she could to stop herself from shaking with a mixture of amusement and grief, I didn’t know whether to join her in her laughter or bury my face in my hands. I wanted to be elsewhere, suddenly. I wanted none of this to be happening. It had been the most unfortunate choice of words, that was for sure, but Dr Crawford simply stared at her as she laughed without any comment; I suspected that she witnessed any number of bizarre reactions during conversations such as this one.

‘I have suffered no medical traumas,’ said Zoya finally, composing herself and stressing the penultimate word in her sentence. ‘I have not had an easy life, Dr Crawford, but I have been in good health throughout it.’

‘Well, indeed,’ she replied, sighing as if she understood only too well. ‘Women of your generation have suffered a lot. There was the war, for one thing.’

‘Yes, the war,’ said Zoya, nodding thoughtfully. ‘There have been many wars, in fact.’

‘Doctor,’ I said, interrupting her to speak now for the first time. ‘Ovarian cancer, this is curable? You have some way to help my wife?’

She looked at me with a certain degree of pity, understanding of course that the husband might be the most terrified one in the room. ‘I’m afraid the cancer has already begun to spread, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said quietly. ‘And as I’m sure you know, at the moment medical science is unable to offer a cure. All we can do is try to alleviate some of the suffering and offer our patients as much hope for a continued life as we can.’

I stared at the floor, feeling a little dizzy at these words, although in truth I knew that this was what she would say. I had already spent weeks at my usual desk in the British Library researching the disease that Dr Cross had spoken to us about and knew only too well that there was no known cure. There was always hope, however, and I clung on to that.

‘There are some additional tests that I would like to run, Mrs Jachmenev,’ she said, turning to my wife again. ‘We’ll need to do a second pelvic exam, of course. And some blood tests, an ultrasound. A barium enema will help us to identify the extent of the cancer. We’ll take some CAT scans, of course. We need to determine how far the cancer has spread beyond the ovaries and into the pelvic area, and whether it has travelled towards the abdominal cavity.’

‘But the treatments, doctor,’ I insisted, leaning forward. ‘What can you do to make my wife better?’

She stared at me, a little irritated, I felt, as if she was accustomed to dealing with devastated husbands but they were outside of her concern; she was interested only in her patient.

‘As I said, Mr Jachmenev,’ she replied, ‘the treatments can only slow down the progress of the cancer. Chemotherapy will be important, of course. There will be surgery, almost immediately, to remove the ovaries, and it will be necessary to perform a hysterectomy. We can take biopsies at the same time of your wife’s lymph nodes, her diaphragm, her pelvic tissue, in order to determine—’

‘And if I don’t have treatment?’ Zoya asked, her voice low but determined, cutting through the cold granite of these medical phrases which Dr Crawford had no doubt uttered a thousand times in the past.

‘If you don’t have treatment, Mrs Jachmenev,’ she replied, clearly accustomed to this question too, which shocked me; how simple it was for this lady to discuss such terrible notions, ‘then the cancer will almost certainly continue to spread. You will be in the same amount of pain that you are in now, although we would be able to give you some medication for that, but one day it will take you quite unawares and your health will deteriorate rapidly. That will be when the cancer has advanced to the later stages, when it has passed out of the abdomen to attack your organs – the liver, the kidneys and so on.’

‘We must begin the treatment immediately, of course,’ I insisted and Dr Crawford smiled at me with the tolerance of a doting grandparent towards a half-wit grandchild, before looking at my wife again.

‘Mrs Jachmenev,’ she said, ‘your husband is right. It’s important that we begin as soon as possible. You do understand that, don’t you?’

‘How long would it take?’ she asked.

‘The treatment would continue indefinitely,’ she replied. ‘Until we could control the disease. That might be a short time, it might be for ever.’

‘No,’ said Zoya, shaking her head. ‘I mean, how long would I have left if I don’t seek treatment?’

‘For pity’s sake, Zoya,’ I cried, staring at her as if she had lost her reason entirely. ‘What type of question is that? Didn’t you understand what—’

She held a hand in the air to silence me, but did not look in my direction. ‘How long, doctor?’

Dr Crawford exhaled loudly and shrugged her shoulders, which did not fill me with confidence. ‘It’s difficult to say,’ she replied. ‘We would of course need to run these tests anyway to determine exactly what stage the cancer is at. But I would say no more than a year. Perhaps a little longer if you were lucky. Although there is no saying how the quality of your life would be affected during that time. You could be healthy until near the end, and then the cancer could attack quite quickly, or you could begin to deteriorate very soon. It really is for the best that you take action immediately.’ She opened a heavy diary that lay in the centre of her desk and ran a finger along one of the pages. ‘I can schedule you for the initial pelvic exam for—’

She never got to finish that sentence, interrupted by the fact that Zoya had already stood up, taken her coat from the stand beside the door, and left.

Originally, we planned to go no further east than Helsinki, but then, on a whim, we travelled on towards the harbour town of Hamina, on the Finnish coast. The Matkahuolto bus drove us slowly through Porvoo and just north of Kotka, names which sixty years before had been as familiar to me as my own, but which had slowly dissolved from my memory over the intervening decades, replaced by the experiences and recollections of a shared adulthood. Reading those words again on the bus timetable, however, pronouncing their lost syllables under my breath, jolted me back to my youth, the sounds echoing with the regret and familiarity of a childhood nursery rhyme.

Zoya and I were offered seats at the front of the bus owing to our advanced years – I had celebrated my eightieth birthday four days before leaving London and my wife was only a couple of years younger than I – and we sat together quietly, watching the towns and villages pass us by, in a country which was not home, which had never been home, but which made us feel closer to the place of our birth than we had been in decades. The landscape along the Gulf of Finland reminded me of long-forgotten sailing trips along the Baltics, my days and nights filled with games and laughter and the sound of girls’ voices, each demanding more attention than the last. If I closed my eyes and listened to the cries of the seagulls overhead, I could imagine that we were dropping anchor once again at Tallinn on the Northern Estonian coast, or sailing northwards from Kaliningrad towards St Petersburg with a light wind behind us and the sun burning down on the deck of the Standart.

Even the voices of the people who surrounded us offered a sensation of familiarity; their language was different, of course, but we could recognize some of the words, and the harsh guttural sounds of the lowlands blending with the soft sibilant language of the fjords made me question whether we should have come here many years before.

‘How do you feel?’ I asked Zoya, turning towards her as the sign for Hamina indicated that we would arrive there in no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Her face was a little pale and I could see that she was moved by the heartbreaking experience of travelling east, but she gave nothing away in her expression. Had we been alone, perhaps she might have wept out of a mixture of sorrow and joy, but there were strangers sharing the bus with us and she would not confirm their prejudices by allowing them to observe the weakness of an old woman.

‘I feel as if I don’t want this journey to end,’ she replied quietly.

We had been in Finland for almost a week and Zoya was enjoying particularly good health, a fact which made me wonder whether it might not be a good idea to relocate to the climate of the north indefinitely if it meant that her condition would improve. I was reminded of the biographies of the great writers whose lives I had studied during my retirement at the British Library, of how they had left their homes for the frosted air of the European mountain ranges in order to rally against the illnesses of the day. Stephen Crane, allowing tuberculosis to extinguish his genius in Badenweiler; Keats staring out at the Spanish Steps as his lungs filled with bacteria, listening to the voices of Severn and Clark bickering with each other as they consulted over his treatment. They went there to look for revitalization, of course. To live longer. But all they found was their graves. Would it be different for Zoya, I wondered? Would a return to the north offer hope and the possibility of extended years, or a crushing realization that nothing could defeat the invader which was threatening to take my wife from me?

A small café in the town offered us a traditional lounas and we took a chance and sat outside, swaddled in overcoats and scarves as the waitress brought us warm plates of salted fish and seed potatoes, replenishing our hot drinks whenever they ran low. As we watched, a group of children ran past us and one of the boys pushed a smaller girl over, sending her toppling backwards into a mound of snow with a terrified scream. Zoya sat forward, prepared to remonstrate with him for his cruelty, but his victim quickly recovered herself and took her own revenge, which brought a satisfied smile to her face. Families passed by, on their way to and from a nearby school, and we settled back with our thoughts and our memories, peaceful in the knowledge that a long and happy relationship negates the need for constant chatter. Zoya and I had long perfected the art of sitting silently in each other’s company for hours on end, while never running out of things to say.

‘Do you notice the scent in the air?’ Zoya asked me eventually as we finished the last of our tea.

‘The scent?’

‘Yes, there’s a… it’s hard to describe it, but when I close my eyes and breathe in slowly, I can’t help but be reminded of childhood. London always smelled to me of work. Paris smelled of fear. But Finland, it reminds me of a much simpler time in my life.’

‘And Russia?’ I asked. ‘What did Russia smell of?’

‘For a time it smelled of happiness and prosperity,’ she said immediately, without needing to pause to consider it. ‘And then of madness and illness. And religion, of course. And then…’ She smiled and shook her head, embarrassed to finish her sentence.

‘What?’ I asked, smiling at her. ‘Tell me.’

‘You’ll think me foolish,’ she replied with an apologetic shrug, ‘but I’ve always thought of Russia as a sort of decaying pomegranate. It hides its putrid nature, red and luscious on the outside, but split it in two and the seeds and arils spill out before you, black and repugnant. Russia reminds me of the pomegranate. Before it went rotten.’

I nodded but remained silent. I had no particular feelings about the scent of our lost country, but the people, the houses and the churches that surrounded me in Finland reminded me of the past. These were simpler notions, perhaps – Zoya had always had a greater tendency towards metaphor than I, perhaps because she was better educated – but I liked the idea that I was near home again. Close to St Petersburg. To the Winter Palace. Even to Kashin.

But how I had changed since I had last set foot in any of those places! Glancing in the mirror as I washed my hands after our lunch, I caught sight of an old man staring at his reflection, a man who had been handsome once, perhaps, and young and strong, but was none of those things any more. My hair was thin and wispy, pure white strands clumped together at the side of my head, revealing a liver-spotted forehead that bore no resemblance to the clear, tanned skin of my youth. My face was thin, my cheeks sunken, my ears appeared to be unnaturally large, as if they were the only part of my physiognomy not in retreat. My fingers had become bony, a lean layer of skin covering the skeleton beneath. I was fortunate in that my mobility was not suffering as I had often feared it would, although when I awoke in the mornings it took much longer now before I could muster all my strength and resources to drag myself from our bed, perform my ablutions and dress. A shirt, a tie, a pullover every day, for my life from the age of sixteen had been constructed on formality. I felt the cold more and more as every month passed.

At times I thought it strange that a man as old and ravaged as I could still command the love and respect of a woman as beautiful and youthful as my wife. For she, it seemed to me, had barely changed at all.

‘I’ve had an idea, Georgy,’ she said as I returned to our table, wondering whether I should risk sitting down again or wait for her to rise.

‘A good idea?’ I asked with a smile, deciding on the former, since Zoya herself showed no sign of standing.

‘I think so,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘Although I’m not sure what you will think.’

‘You think we should move to Helsinki,’ I said, predicting what she was about to say and laughing a little at the absurdity of the idea. ‘Live out our final days in the shadow of the Suurkirkko. You’ve fallen in love with Finnish ways.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head and smiling. ‘No, not that. I don’t think we should stay here at all. In fact, I think we should keep going.’

I looked at her and frowned. ‘Keep going?’ I asked. ‘Keep going where? Further into Finland? It’s possible, of course, but I would worry that the travelling might—’

‘No, not that,’ she said, interrupting me, keeping her voice clear and steady as if she did not want to risk my refusal by appearing overly enthusiastic. ‘I mean we should go home.’

I sighed. It had been a concern of mine when we set off from London that this trip would prove too much for her and she would regret her decision to leave, and long for the warmth and comfort of our familiar Holborn flat. We were not children any more, after all. It was not easy for us to spend so much time in transit.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ I asked, leaning forward and taking her hand, searching her face for any signs of distress.

‘No worse than I was.’

‘The pain, has it become too much for you?’

‘No, Georgy,’ she replied, offering a small laugh. ‘I feel perfectly fine. Why do you say that?’

‘Because you want to go home,’ I said. ‘And we can, of course we can, if it’s what you really want. But we have only four days remaining of our trip anyway. It might be easier to return to Helsinki and rest there until it’s time for our flight.’

‘I don’t mean go back to London,’ she said quickly, shaking her head as she looked towards the children again, playing noisily in the mounds of snow. ‘I don’t mean that home.’

‘Then where?’

‘St Petersburg, of course,’ she replied. ‘We’ve come this far, after all. It wouldn’t take too many hours more, would it? We could spend a day there, just a day. We never imagined that we would stand in Palace Square again, after all. We never thought we would breathe Russian air. And if we don’t go now, when we are so close, we never will. What do you think, Georgy?’

I looked at her and didn’t know what to say. When we had decided to undertake this journey, there had undoubtedly been a part of both of us that had wondered if this conversation would arise and if so, which of us would suggest it first. The idea had been to come to Finland, to go as far east as the weather and our health would allow, and to look into the distance and perhaps to make out the shadows of the islands in the Vyborgskiy Zaliv once again, even the tip of Primorsk, and remember, and imagine, and wonder.

But neither of us had spoken aloud of travelling the last few hundred miles to the city where we had met. Until now.

‘I think…’ I began, rolling the words slowly over my tongue uncertainly before shaking my head and starting again. ‘I wonder…’

‘What?’ she asked me.

‘Is it safe?’