Prince Korasoff ́s Road Map

By Gervase Shorter

Edward Hayes is a lonely widower. Albertine Sinclair, who is single and 38, is writing a doctoral thesis on Stendhal. They get to know each other by sight at the library where they work and start to feel an attraction for each other but both are too shy to make a first move.

Albertine’s friend Tabitha thinks up an original way to bring them together and when she has set it in motion she lets Albertine into the secret. Tabitha leads Edward through a series of three meetings with Albertine on each of which he sends a report back to Tabitha who, unknown to Edward, sends it on to Albertine. Little by little, Edward and Albertine feel more at ease with each other, discover mutual interests and sympathies to the point where, independently, they both feel sufficiently self confident to carry on without Tabitha ́s help.

Their romance begins to blossom but neither of them can foresee a crisis that is waiting to happen and threatens to destroy their relationship completely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gervase Shorter
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458136947

Gervase Shorter

Born in England, Gervase spent his military service hunting terrorists through the forests of Mount Kenya. After studying medieval history at Oxford he caught the Transiberian train to Vladivostok on his way to Japan, where he lived for four years. He travelled back to Europe overland and then spent three years in Lisbon, moving in 1973 to Rio de Janeiro where he now divides his time between an apartment overlooking the lagoon and a farm 3,000 feet up in the mountains where he grows bananas, avocados, persimmon and pecan nuts. He is married with four adult children.

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Prince Korasoff's Road Map

by

Gervase Shorter

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2011 Gervase Shorter

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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DISCLAIMER

‘Prince Korasoff´s Road Map’ is a work of fiction and all of the characters in it

are imaginary. Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1: Edward

Edward could remember their first contact very clearly. At the time, it had seemed commonplace and of no consequence at all but somehow it had stuck in his memory and later he found that he could summon it up at will as if he had total recall. Quite by accident he had looked up from where he was sitting and caught her eye. He remembered having seen her in the library once or twice before Christmas, a retiring figure, quite tall, with a pale, refined face, dressed with an elegance that, though discreet, contrasted with the scruffiness of the other library users. He transferred his gaze quickly into the middle distance, as if trying to read the titles of the books ranged on the shelves behind her and then looked down at his own papers and periodicals spread out on the table in front of him. Outside, the late afternoon light was already beginning to fade: it was the beginning of January and London was settling in for a bleak winter. A few minutes later Edward gathered up his notes, put them inside his brief case with his lap top and, without a further glance in her direction, took his periodicals back to the librarian’s counter, put on his overcoat and scarf and set out on the twenty minute walk back to his apartment along streets where damp brown horse chestnut leaves still lay unswept in drifts along the pavements and in the gutters.

Edward Hayes had lived alone since his wife Sara died three years earlier. He felt that over the last six years the dimensions of his life had somehow shrunk and that all the future now held for him was declining health, probably reduced mobility and, at the further end of this gloomy perspective, the inevitable death – how far away? He was fifty seven and in good health so maybe he would live another thirty, perhaps even forty years, who could say. As he shaved every morning, Edward looked into his mirror and saw there, looking back at him, a face on which time seemed to have made comparatively little impression. His hair showed no sign of thinning though it was iron grey and receding a little at the temples; there were a few shallow lines across the forehead and round the pale blue eyes but no thickening along the jaw or under the chin. Overall, he looked ten years less than his age, though in other respects he considered that his appearance was unremarkable. For all that, there seemed to be nothing in life to look forward to now, no high points, merely the routine business of day to day living, his work, eating, sleeping, nothing more, a slow but steady decline.

The day following that first eye contact was the sixth of January, and Edward had made a habit of tending his wife and son’s graves at the beginning of each month, a ritual that he clung to, however little meaning he felt that it might have. He took the car, drove north, parked it and then, carrying the dozen white chrysanthemums he had bought that morning, made his way into the vast Kensal Green Cemetery. There was a sharp north wind blowing icy gusts between the graves and the few trees, now stripped of their leaves, stood out black against the leaden sky hanging low overhead. Edward could feel the cold in his bones despite the heavy overcoat and scarf he was wearing as he made his way along a route he now knew almost blindfold, down avenues between graves that he recognized from monuments his regular monthly visits had rendered familiar.

Hubert and Sara were buried side by side in a section of the cemetery where the graves were less grandiose but newer and better kept, beneath two white marble headstones, each with a metal vase for flowers, and a rectangle surrounded by white marble and covered with small white stones. There was an empty space next to Sara’s grave where Edward himself expected to lie one day. Hubert’s headstone bore the words:

HUBERT MARK HAYES

14th July 1982 – 9th November 2001

The Lord hath given.

The Lord hath taken away.

Sara’s headstone bore the words:

SARA ANN HAYES

21st February 1950 - 17th September 2004

Adored wife of

Edward Wilfred Hayes

It didn’t take long to divide up the flowers, placing them in the two metal vases and to tidy away a few hardy weeds that had pushed up between the marble pebbles. There was a small teak bench, a bequest from some long deceased public benefactor, positioned below a tree a little way away and, whatever the weather, it was Edward’s custom to spend some time sitting there, thinking of his wife and son before leaving.

The horror of Hubert’s death on his motorbike would haunt Edward to the end of his days: the police with their flashing lights at the scene of the accident on a motorway at night, Hubert in intensive care, a mass of pulsating tubes and medical equipment, his breath becoming increasingly shallow and then, almost imperceptibly, ebbing away altogether. Edward had found Sara’s grief at the death of their only son just as hard to bear as the death itself. Normally so self controlled, she had lost all restraint and clung to him silently sobbing, her face crumpled and creased with tears. He could hardly bear, even now, to remember those scenes and, later, the wintry funeral with their daughter Daphne and her husband Tom up from the country for the sad occasion, the vicar’s solemn words, a dozen or so of his and Sara’s friends dressed in black standing woodenly around the open grave and a handful of Hubert’s college friends, young men solemn and uncomfortable at their first close encounter with death.

Nobody could be sure, of course, but Edward believed that it was the strain and the grief at Hubert’s death that had lowered Sara’s resistance and that that was why she was diagnosed with cancer about a year later. She had a breast amputated and began a course of chemical therapy, long, painful, sessions at the hospital from which she would return home haggard and exhausted. There were moments when it seemed as if the cancer might have been cured. They would wait for the results of the tests and try to read them in the faces of the doctors breaking the news. The disease played a cat and mouse game, allowing them hope, only to dash it a few days or weeks later. Throughout her illness Sara had remained calm, almost serene, though he could tell that she never expected to recover, and, in the last days, set about quietly putting her affairs in order and saying a last goodbye to old friends. Edward didn’t believe in miracles but he kept telling himself there was always the chance that the prognosis was mistaken – doctors are human, after all. Sara, clumsy and stumbling now but still lucid, the disease having spread to different parts of her body, spent a final week with Daphne and then returned to their suburban house to await the last journey by ambulance to the hospital. Edward stayed with her to the end and watched, hungry and exhausted from lack of sleep, as her breathing slowed and finally halted.

Perhaps it was because he was so exhausted from lack of sleep and so fatigued by weeks of strain, that Edward was unable to take in the fact that Sara was now dead. He seemed to be sleep walking in the week after her death, leaving Daphne to make all the arrangements with the undertakers, giving vague, uncomprehending replies when she asked for some piece of information she needed. It was only at the funeral, at the moment when the mourners scattered earth in her grave and he heard it rattle on her coffin, that Edward really understood she was dead.

Well meaning friends had given him Life after Life and other books about the near death experience but Edward, not a particularly sceptical person, could never bring himself to believe that Sara was present, silently hovering in the same room, as the accounts of people who had recovered after being declared dead suggested might be the case. The human brain was capable of such detailed and convincing illusions in the form of dreams that, in Edward’s opinion, no reliance could be placed on the phenomena the near dead remembered on recovery. No, he was sure that all that remained of Hubert and Sara lay in the ground before him; there was nothing else.

It was not a feeling that Sara was in some way present that haunted Edward; it was the poignancy of her absence. The suburban house in which Edward and Sara had spent most of their married life seemed so empty now that she was no longer sharing it with him. While she was alive, Edward had found Sara’s untidy habits mildly irritating, particularly her way of leaving drawers and cupboard doors open, sometimes making it look as if the house had just been ransacked by burglars but now he found that he missed her untidiness. Without her books and other belongings scattered about and everything now in its place, the house seemed more spacious than before and unnaturally orderly. He kept finding himself expecting Sara to reappear, as if she had just gone out for a morning’s shopping and he would even think he heard her key turning in the latch. Daphne had sorted out her mother’s clothes, giving most of them to different charities and taken her jewellery home for her own use as Sara’s will had directed her to do, but Edward would find himself looking at Sara’s dressing table and remember her sitting there, trying on different pairs of earrings to see which would go best with the clothes she had chosen to wear. After a while he found that the house evoked unbearable memories of her and he decided to put it up for sale. With the proceeds he looked around for somewhere else to live, spending his weekends visiting small apartments closer to central London until eventually he found what he wanted: a light, quiet, two bedroom apartment with a pleasant view onto a small square with some trees and flower beds, convenient for getting to his office which was further out, in the direction of Heathrow. The apartment was a little anonymous but its more limited space provided an excuse for replacing most of the furniture and he was grateful for having small bits of business of this kind to occupy his free time.

And so Edward had settled down to life as a widower. Even now, a little over three years after her death, he would still catch himself thinking of things he must remember to tell Sara only to recollect that she was no longer there to hear them and, though her memory no longer dominated all of his thoughts, he would still find himself remembering her turns of phrase and the little private jokes that they had shared for so long but he could feel that her memory was fading. Already, he found it an effort to recall exactly how she looked. His monthly visits to the cemetery were, as much as anything else, intended to be time deliberately set aside in order to keep her memory fresh in his mind.

At the office, Edward found he was being treated by his colleagues with an unwonted consideration. His workload had temporarily eased and he was aware that some of the tasks his department would normally have handled had been diverted elsewhere or postponed in order to spare him from the normal business pressure. Hutchinson, the director to whom he reported, made time to drop in for occasional chats and Sally, his young secretary, who doubled as the department’s office girl, was making transparent efforts to cheer him up with bright chatter and frequent cups of tea or coffee. Little by little, his working life returned to normal and gradually he began to immerse himself once more in the technical problems for which he was responsible.

Chapter 2: Albertine

When she looked back on all that happened later, it was her own audacity more than anything else that made Albertine Sinclair marvel at the role she had herself played. If it hadn’t actually happened (and there were times when she wondered whether the whole thing wasn’t some kind of illusion) she would never have believed that she could ever have found the courage within herself to do all that she did, even with Tabitha’s generous support. In retrospect, she believed she could trace the origins of that bizarre episode back to a perfectly ordinary, perfectly normal lunch she had had with her old friend in August 2007. The seeds of what happened later were sown at that lunch though nothing of the kind was apparent at the time. She could remember it all quite clearly.

Bertie, how wonderful to see you again after - how long is it? Eighteen months? It seems more like eighteen years with all that’s been going on. Tabitha Smale pulled out a chair and sat down, smiling, at the secluded corner table Albertine had booked for them. They hadn’t seen each other since Tabitha and her husband Phil had sold their house in West London and moved to a village in Essex.

Yes, lovely to see you too, Tabby, and how well you’re looking. Tabitha Smale was Albertine’s oldest friend. They had been at school and then university together.

Putting on weight I’m afraid. I wish I could stay slim and elegant like you, Bertie. You’d think that with all the rushing around with the children I’d get thin but no, I suppose it was having the children in the first place that did it.

How are they? And how’s Phil?

Well, Phil’s away for a fortnight in Oslo, said Tabitha putting on her glasses in order to read the menu. He’s setting up a new subsidiary there. It’s a big assignment for him and already his boss has been hinting that if all goes well he’ll be offered a seat on the board. Phil’s ambitious, you may have noticed, so he’s really putting his soul into it. I just hope that if Phil does get the promotion I won’t see even less of him than I do now - still, of course, the extra money would be nice, not that we’re exactly short but we’ve been doing improvements to the house – you must come down and stay now that the garden’s in some sort of shape and we’re a bit more organized – and you’d be surprised how much the cost of everything to do with children adds up and the expensive bit with school fees hasn’t even begun.

A waiter was hovering to take their orders, returning a little later with a glass of merlot and some mineral water for each of them.

I say, Bertie, this is a very nice place and I’ve always liked Greek food. How did you manage to find it?

Albertine smiled. Well, it’s handy for the library, you know, and I happened to see it as I was passing so I thought I’d give it a try. I liked the food and also the prices are moderate, or at any rate moderate for round here. But you didn’t tell me how the children are.

Amazing. I usually talk non-stop about the children, one of the bad habits of motherhood, said Tabitha. At the moment they’re spending a few days with their grandparents. I hope they’re behaving themselves and not being too exhausting. Phil’s parents are quite spry for their age but I wouldn’t like them run off their feet and I also wouldn’t like Adam and Rosie spoiled rotten either. That’s the other hazard of parking children on their grandparents. Well, Adam’s well into play school now. It was a bit traumatic to begin with. He’d scream if I just left him there but he settled down when I came in with him and stayed around for a bit. He was rather aggressive to start with too but when he’d got to know some of the other kids he calmed down and began to quite like going. The lady who runs it’s very good with the children and so are the couple of helpers she has. Yes, Adam’s getting on fine now and talking nineteen to the dozen.

What about Rosie?

Rosie’s well. She still has the very occasional bout of jealousy but I think that’s natural, you know. I think it’s so tough for the first child. Ever since she can remember she’s been Mum and Dad’s source of unending admiration and treated as their cuddly toy and then, suddenly, as if from nowhere there’s this little red thing that screams if it doesn’t get Mum and Dad’s undivided attention. It’s terribly difficult for the elder child to adjust to the change. No wonder she wanted to give him back to the hospital. We did our best: we gave Rosie a special new doll when Adam was born and we got her to share in looking after the baby but all the books say you can’t eliminate jealousy completely however hard you try. Anyway, apart from that, her reading is pretty good now for a child aged nearly seven. I still read them both bed time stories of course but Rosie reads to herself too – and to her dolls as well.

"Tabby, I must say you look very well on it and a few extra pounds really don’t