A Certain Road

By Alan Ramsey

When first encountered Bobby Ancroft is 41 years old. Though highly successful in his professional life he is extremely unsettled and, perhaps, just a little too preoccupied with the extent of his unsettled state. At much the same time much the same thing might have been said about Liz Clayton.
Meeting either one of them at that time may not have prompted a rush of positive perceptions: he, seemingly, impatient and edgy; she,perhaps a little cool and distant. It is undeniable that they need a change of direction but, as any Satnav user will verify, to select a new destination you must first know exactly where you are and then have a clear idea of where you would like to go. Frankly neither of them did.
A Certain Road is their love story. It is a story with a happy ending rescued from a difficult start and a painful and traumatic middle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483519272

Book preview

Quartets

April 10th 1992 10am

Prologue

He had a problem; he was fairly sure of that.

He was, thankfully, sufficiently blessed with a sense of the ridiculous to embrace the idea that there was nothing remotely unique about his problem and that a great many others may be experiencing something along the same lines. Perhaps, in the wider scheme of things, it didn’t really amount to a proper problem at all (at this point an automatically triggered liberal genuflection to the starving of the Sahel, the slums of Sao Paulo, victims of war and oppression everywhere etc). Perhaps it was merely a dilemma or, worse still, one of the newly fashionable issues. (At what point, incidentally, was the word issues awarded this impressively all-encompassing range of meanings which seem to cover the whole gamut of human ills and why, in Christ’s name, when anyone says it, do they feel obliged to preface it with its own pregnant pause – ‘You have some….issues’).

He had quantified his problem and, with commendable stoicism, given it low marks. So it was far from being specific to him and not much of a problem in the first place. Even he was a little bored with it.

He glanced at one of the two English newspapers he had bought from the kiosk, bearing news of the previous day’s General Election. His father would be disappointed. Still, he had pointed out at the time that the spectacle of a red-haired, freckled political leader conducting a national rally in the manner of James Brown was unlikely to commend itself to a profoundly conservative electorate – even if he hadn’t been Welsh. He attempted to whip up a little disappointment or, at the very least, frustration of his own but found himself insufficiently interested to sustain it.

His closest friend, a man of considerable pragmatism in matters of emotional angst, had once remarked that all real problems could be summed up in no more than two words – for example ‘terminal cancer’, ‘no money’, ‘impending divorce’ – if you couldn’t do it in two words you were straying dangerously close to self-absorption and turning yourself into Woody Allen. So he had done it – the two word summary – and the two words he had chosen were ‘navigation difficulties’.

So, not as serious or specific or dramatic as the given examples, as has already been conceded, but he knew he was right: that’s what he had - navigation difficulties.

He was, at that moment, in a very appropriate environment for considering the issue ( not….issue, just issue) – the departure lounge of an airport (Schipol as it happens). From where he was sitting he could watch a large screen bearing an ever-changing list of destinations with information about times and delays and gate numbers and he could also see a tower with one of those radar dishes whizzing around. His analysis of his problem and rationale for it may not have satisfied Kierkegaard (it may have struggled to pass muster with Oprah) but it was, basically, right and it did show genuine self-awareness. His gate number flashed up and he briefly considered going to find her – probably in the nearest ludicrously overpriced ‘duty free’ emporium. Still, no hurry.

The Hotel Astoria, St Petersburg, April 10th 1992 5pm

Chapter 1

It is observable that some people have the capacity to tune in to the fundamental frequency of certain places, particularly man-made places, and resonate to that frequency. You can actually see them doing it. Most people can’t: they can stand on the gun deck of HMS Victory or stand on the very spot where Beckett was struck down or walk through the massive blood-blackened arches which support the Coliseum and make all the right noises but you can tell that they aren’t actually feeling the hum of history. The others, the minority, the lightning conductors, tend to say nothing at all. They look temporarily untethered from the here-and-now and, if they manage any sort of spoken summary at all, it often seems a bit dissociated and, not infrequently, more than a little peculiar.

Bobby was, most emphatically, one such. It was appropriate that he should be. It was, after all, his task in life to be a maker of places, a creator of the possibility of places. Whether or not this capacity counts as a blessing may, in general terms, be open to question but Bobby certainly counted it as such. He did, however, become aware at an early stage that its product was not necessarily entertaining to others. During his post-graduate year he visited the University of Pisa with two friends and was shown into the room where Galileo had often worked. His reaction had prompted his colleagues to ask, politely, Are you alright? and later, less kindly, What the fuck are you babbling on about? He had resolved, there and then, to keep his moments of communion with great places to himself.

At this point, having introduced this Bobby person, it may be appropriate to point out that his story will be at the centre of our tale. It also seems relevant to add (or, perhaps, admit) that his story is not exactly a pristine exemplar of consistent linear narrative in the third person – or any other person for that matter. There is a reason for this and the reason is Bobby does not organise, and has never organised, either his thoughts or his life in such a way as to constitute a consistent linear narrative. If you should crave exposure to such a narrative could I suggest the explanatory notes for a programmable automatic washing machine - but personally I would try to stay well clear. In addition try to give a wide birth to people who think and talk that way unless you are conducting research into whether it is possible to be literally bored to death.

You need to know that Bobby isn’t just a divergent thinker – he’s a very divergent thinker and that does present its problems. You should also know that this isn’t the result of negligence or laziness on his part: he knows he’s doing it but recognises, almost certainly correctly, that this scattergun 360 degree past, present and future view of his experiences is a vital component of the creativity which has made him so successful in his professional life. Perhaps surprisingly he is no great shakes in the recall department: names, faces, other details are often soon forgotten but he has an unfailing capacity, no matter how evanescent an experience might be, to process his impressions and feelings about that experience and store them up for later use. This can be a little exasperating to others, occasionally it can be endearing, sometimes it can be infuriating beyond expression but it is, undeniably, an ineluctable part of his person. It may well be that it was the central problem in his marriage. You don’t often get that cited do you? More usually it’s sex or money – incompatible thought processes rarely seem to feature, but perhaps they should.

Anyway, to get back to the story (not the main story of course, this bit predates the main story by a good six months, but it is necessary to include it to illustrate to you what his starting point was. This is included as a sort of guide to previous form. You should get used to this meandering route as time progresses: I do hope you get used to it.)

He loved St Petersburg: this was his third visit in two years. For the whole of its three centuries of existence it had always been a place fuelled by over-heated ambitions and political tensions. Now, as it careered at gathering pace from its Soviet past to whatever the future held it carried an additional charge of exciting and unnerving energy. Something in its makeup appealed to his taste for inherent contradictions. It obliged him to attempt to square his moderate, liberal sensibilities with his star-struck awe for its magnificence, its opulence and excess. It forced him to attempt reconciliation between his infatuation with its extraordinary beauty and glamour and his awareness of some of the abject horrors of its human history – particularly its twentieth century history.

He was, for the first time, staying at the Hotel Astoria (not at his own expense) – in a suite no less – having flown there first class (also not at his own expense).

The Astoria definitely counted as one of Bobby’s special places. The first time he walked into it, for a business lunch the year before, he got goose-bumps because he knew The Story. The Astoria, though widely considered to be Petersburg’s grandest hotel, and very prominently positioned on St Isaac’s Square, is not particularly old – indeed some of the city’s oldest inhabitants still referred to it as the new hotel.

Its Story is strange.

Most hotels, if they are deemed to have a presence, have it because they have assumed the aura of previous guests – so visitors to The Savoy may contemplate the sharing of space with Oscar Wilde or Clarke Gable or Churchill and Eisenhower, displaced only by time. When picking up their keys from reception which visitor to The Algonquin has not imagined sharing a wisecrack with Dorothy Parker?

The Astoria’s story, perhaps uniquely, is the story of the guests who failed to check in. Its ghosts are the ghosts of the never-present.

Here is The Story – though if you don’t care for this version of it travel to St Petersburg and ask anyone on the street: man, woman or child. They will all have their own version.

In 1941, with the Germans’ Barbarossa campaign a runaway success, they occupied Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, the sites of the Tsars’ country palaces on the outskirts of Petersburg and within field-gun range of the centre. With the city apparently at his mercy Hitler issued a formal printed invitation and menu to the members of his high command to a dinner and victory celebration at the Astoria. Deciding not to storm the city they besieged it instead and waited for the inevitable capitulation which they expected constant bombardment, cold and starvation to achieve within three months.

The rest is, as they say, history.

The Russians fought them and resisted them and thwarted them and outlasted them and finally, in the Spring of 1944 they pushed them back and forced them into retreat.

The Germans never got their elegant party at The Astoria – all they got was grief and pain for their promised joy.

The grief and pain they left behind them, of course, was only imaginable to someone with a worryingly macabre imagination. Civilian and military deaths approached a million. The citizens of St Petersburg were killed by bombs, by falling masonry, by shells. They died from starvation. Over the course of three interminable, bitter Russian winters they froze to death in the streets. They died from the constant stress and despair of a situation which seemed beyond hopeless.

And then, miraculously, they survived. And then, beyond miraculously, they prevailed.

As the Germans retreated, a few of Hitler’s invitation cards were found in the detritus they abandoned. The best preserved example was brought back into Petersburg, framed, and placed in a position of honour in the City Museum. Thousands have wept at the sight of it.

That, then, is The Story. It doesn’t take long in the telling: what is it – three hundred words or so? – and that’s the long version.

In the time since he had first heard it, it had easily become Bobby’s favourite Russian story, simultaneously evoking inspiring heroism and unspeakable suffering against the backcloth of one of the most exquisite cities on Earth. For romantics it could be improved by a vision of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony ‘Leningrad’ being performed in the city centre as the bombs fell on the evening of August 9th 1942. For Russians, though, it could only be made perfect in 1948 when Stalin came to the conclusion (rightly as it happens) that tens of thousands of the heroic population were his natural enemies and shipped them off to forced labour camps in the silent endlessness of Northern Russia – many of them never to be seen, or even heard of, again. By this tactical masterstroke Stalin was, of course, able to confirm and cement the one unshakeable lesson of life in twentieth century Russia: there is no such thing as the ultimate horror – with determination and application you can always make things a little worse.

Bobby had been initiated into The Astoria Story by a work contact, a civil engineer who was a senior member of the city planning authority. A cultured; almost saintly, 63 year old he had lived through the siege in the early years of his secondary schooling. He spoke good English, rather slowly but with considerable precision – the outcome, he explained, of spending many hours listening to the BBC World Service. Their initial meeting, at which they had got on very well, was in a venue close to the city museum and afterwards Bobby was taken in to see the Astoria Invitation (and nothing else). He noticed with interest that his host strode straight past all representatives of officialdom without a word and concluded that he must be not without influence. From there they had gone straight to lunch at The Astoria and, as Bobby’s host entered, he patted the brass name plate and said clearly, and in English:

Not coming to dinner fascist bastards?

After a few seconds delay of pure shock Bobby burst into peals of laughter.

I have come here for a meeting every week for the last fifteen years and I always say that. It is a sort of prayer – of course I can make it sound a lot worse in Russian.

He loved the story: he loved it so much he felt a little conflicted in using it in this slightly questionable way. Still, he had set this little test up (no, not test; that is much too strong a word – although he couldn’t quite call up another – and it scored much too high on the ‘am I a cold, calculating bastard’ continuum). Anyway there was no point in not seeing what the outcome would be. It wasn’t sly or underhand or intrusive was it? There was no intention to fabricate an outcome which could be hurtful to anyone was there? No it wasn’t a test, it was a sort of observation, a bit of anthropology - he almost half convinced himself.

In any event he was delighted to be here in Petersburg – and for a variety of reasons. First his already mentioned infatuation with the city. Second that he was being rather too well paid to consult and advise on a routine and undemanding job. Third, and perhaps most significant, was the opportunity it afforded (though this was a very carefully contrived opportunity) for him to spend an unfeasibly large percentage of each of his five days there having energetic, frenetic, urgent sex with Marianne.

A few words of explanation may be necessary. Bobby is English (though only just). He is 41 years old. He is fairly sure that he isn’t having a mid-life crisis. He is married (though only just). He is a civil engineer.

Since they met seven months ago Bobby and Marianne have been regular, though infrequent, lovers. Mutual lust has ensured some sort of regularity in their liaisons but his marriage, her engagement, and the inconvenience of not living in the same country has restricted the frequency. He is widely considered to be good-looking (though he has the good grace to be self effacing about it –though, nevertheless, conscious of it) and has been described, even quite recently, as athletic. This term: athletic is, of course, one which may be rather inexactly employed. From observation it would seem to mean, on occasion, not repulsive or giving the impression of total physical incompetence when disrobed. In his particular case we can be precise: even statistically and on-the-record precise. Until about his 24th birthday Bobby was an athlete. He could throw the javelin 70.2 metres. This was good. Moreover he could run the 110 metre high hurdles in 14.4 seconds. This was very good.

It was not, however, good enough, and he knew it. In one of those painful and always-remembered moments when able people are obliged to recognise the limits of their own abilities he conceded to himself that he was never quite going to be good enough to compete at the highest level. With work commitments growing and his engagement to Jenny firming into marriage plans he abruptly ended his athletics career. A taste for exercise, restless energy (and the tiniest dash of vanity) had, however, kept the descriptor meaningful.

He was now obliged to reconcile himself to another, and much greater, failure as he contemplated his inability to do anything about the steady, remorseless, sickeningly predictable demise of his marriage. Now in its death-throes he could look back at an ailment of over 4 years. He took a sort of comfort from the realisation that, for both of them, the decisive moment had come not from any recognition of a lack of ability to do something about it but from a truly awful recognition of the lack of will. When push came to shove neither of them could actually be bothered to try to repair the damage – surely that made it a lot less sad. He had other compensations: though it didn’t take long to list them.

First of all was his besotted adoration of his daughters: now both at secondary school. Secondly was his work: his immersion in it, his compulsive desire to do it better, to extend its limits, to afford him greater recognition. In this last respect he was atypically demanding; his work had already afforded him a greater degree of recognition than most aspire to.

These two were clear: they defined directions in his life with absolute clarity and imbued them with urgency and purpose. The rest seemed, to him, an unresolved jumble – a maze of sundry enthusiasms and affiliations badly navigated in a fog of uncertainty. In occasional dark nights of the soul he had berated himself that he was guilty of a wholly inadequate attempt to build a belief system, a personal credo, a working philosophy. After one particular dark night of too many whisky chasers he had shared this predicament with his best friend who had, after a few moments of contemplative consideration, responded: If we don’t get you a decent blowjob soon your fucking head is going to explode.

This brings us, rather ungallantly, to Marianne. We won’t really be encountering her again but, although she is a transient figure in Bobby’s life, she does occupy this pivotal moment in his stuttering personal re-appraisal.

Marianne is Czech. She is a technical interpreter. When she was 18 she spent a single year at university doing general engineering which was long enough to convince her that she had the makings of a very bad engineer. Fortune had, however, favoured her with a gift for languages so she made the switch to MFL. She had enjoyed a full year exchange placement in Moscow and a term in Cologne. Her Russian, German and English were all excellent but, importantly, her year of general engineering had given her a hinterland which made her translation work unusually precise and contextual. Bobby didn’t feel even a little bit guilty about employing her.

She was barely 26: born in the mid-60s to youthful parents who believed that the first green shoots of cultural liberalization were the herald of a new Czechoslovakia. They were, sadly, going to have to wait a bit longer. Still, when their new daughter came along they weren’t to know that so they had embraced the zeitgeist and named her Marianne (after Marianne Faithful who not only seemed to be the personification of the mood of the moment but was also, apparently, the offspring of unspecified Mid-European toffdom of some sort).

Fortune had not, fortunately, ended its beneficence with a gift for languages – it had extended it with a gift for gorgeousness. She was gorgeous; heads turned. Male heads turned for reasons of carnality; more fastidious male heads turned for reasons which they rationalised as aesthetic appreciation. Female heads turned, appreciatively or not, at the sight of clothes chosen with an unerring instinct for both good taste and sexual allure worn with the casual confidence of beautiful youth.

So here they were in St Petersburg having travelled together from Schipol. When he had arranged the trip a few weeks earlier he had told her about the Astoria booking and told her, in a calculatedly offhand way, the Astoria Story. Their taxi from the airport passed the monument to the heroes of the siege – an impressively huge and romanticised piece of Stalinist bombast. Square-jawed workers with bodies like middleweight boxers, sweet-faced industrious girls, defiant, heroic soldiers – all of them eyes raised and thrusting forward to a new dawn of promise, justice and fulfilment. The sight of it provoked some animated talk but, he was relieved to hear, no mention of The Astoria.

As they approached St Isaac’s Square he revisited the thinking behind his little test. It was ridiculous. Could it possibly be more contrived or puerile? In any case what would it betoken – whichever way it went? If he was exercising any sort of rational common sense he would abandon this unworthy nonsense. And yet he didn’t. Marianne certainly gave him every opportunity to let it go by jumping out of the taxi as soon as the wheels stopped turning and striding into the lobby as though she had an appointment she was late for. Bobby had to abandon the luggage to the care of taxi driver and porter to keep up with her.

Halfway across the lobby she stopped: she stopped as abruptly as a gundog sensing movement in undergrowth.

Was he coming himself?

Was who coming?

Hitler, was he coming to the party himself?

I can’t say that I----

"Can’t you feel them – all those smart uniforms – who wore the black ones - the Gestapo was it, or was it the SS – I’ll bet they would have sung those bloody awful drinking songs like in Casablanca. Can’t you just feel them. Assholes".

(Her colloquial American was also much improved.)

A voice spoke in Bobby’s head – then it shouted:

"Christ – Oh holy Christ. She can do that as well."

A memory entered his head, unbidden and unwanted. Remembering it felt disloyal but it was there and it would not be denied. Just over three years earlier, with their faltering marriage beginning to limp visibly, he and Jenny had taken a remedial long weekend together, without the children, in Dublin. On the first morning of their stay they had taken a walk along The Liffy and up O’Connell Street to The General Post Office. On entering Bobby had been transfixed: his very English heart overwhelmed by the aura of this place sacred to every Irishman. After a couple of minutes this reverie was broken by Jenny returning with a book of stamps which she was to affix to postcards which informed the selected recipients, with a sad lack of accuracy, what a wonderfully healing time they were having.

Bobby scanned her face with genuine hope that he would detect in it some level of emotional response to this unique environment.

Nothing! not a flicker: a cursory glance at her guide book, a remark about how long it would take to walk to the restaurant where they were to have lunch, and she was on her way, unsuspecting.

They were due to have their first meeting at 9.30am at a venue close to the mooring of the battlecruiser Aurora. A young man who worked for the company contracted to erect the steel arrived to accompany them, selected for the task for his facility with the English language. He appeared to know about thirty words of English and mispronounced all of them. Bobby announced that he wanted to travel to the meeting by tram and further refined the request by saying that it had to be an old tram. Their young escort was a little crestfallen by this; he had been given a budget for taxis and had looked forward to extending this largesse to these glamorous westerners – his mental rehearsal certainly hadn’t anticipated this bizarre preference. He announced, rather huffily, that they would have to go twenty minutes early; several trams came within a few minutes at that time, one of them was sure to be old.

The very first to arrive met Bobby’s requirements absolutely – a perfect representative of one of the oldest and largest tram networks in the World. As it rattled and clanked into the stop he lovingly appraised its features. Its steel panels, subjected to ice and snow for the better part of half the year and high humidity for most of the rest, had extensive corrosion damage. This had been repaired, in the most perfunctory way imaginable, with fibreglass matting and copious quantities of filler and then overpainted (you could actually see the brushmarks) in the institutional cream colour which was the chosen livery of the service. On the inside damaged seats had been attended to in the same spirit, with an eye more to practicality than finesse. The massive, rust pitted, cast steel wheels made a hell of a racket at the best of times as they clattered and screeched down the tracks but, as an additional attraction, the tracks themselves had been so poorly maintained in recent years that at some of the intersections the cacophony was alarming enough to suggest the car was about to come off the tracks. Such partings of company were not, in fact, uncommon.

Bobby loved it, which was not at all the norm for him – he usually didn’t give a tupenny damn for such things. If you had asked him about the taxi or the aeroplane he arrived in he couldn’t have told you because he hadn’t noticed them – he never did. But these old trams he loved, they seemed so organic, not just a form of transport but also a sort of metaphor for the spirit of coping. He did think it best to internalise his enthusiasm; with every bump and lurch the rolling eyes of the locals suggested that they considered the tram to be an object worthy of the most abject contempt. Marianne, however, felt no such restraint. Viewing the experience pretty much as a ride on an over-hastily assembled fairground ghost-train she laughed out loud, attracting admiring glances from fellow passengers who were getting used to seeing expensively attired pulchritude in Petersburg, though not on the tram, and rapt attention from the clearly-smitten kid who was their guide. Bobby speculated idly about the possible inspiration for the attractive poses she was striking. He surmised that, given the immediate setting, inspiration might come from Judy Garland’s Trolley Song but on reflection, and given that Marianne had purchased a face-framing fur hat specifically for this trip which she was now wearing he felt certain that it was Julie Christie in Dr Zhivago. In fact he was more correct than he could have