Last Letter from Istanbul: Escape with this epic holiday read of secrets and forbidden love. Lucy Foley

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      There is no answer at first. But as the sub-lieutenant stands before George the colour seems to intensify. He shifts his weight between his feet. Ah. George has a sudden premonition of the complaint.

      Hatton fastens his trousers.

      ‘We cannot cure it, I’m afraid,’ George explains, ‘but we can manage it.’

      ‘But if I were to have,’ the patient takes a breath, ‘relations with the same partner …’

      ‘Unless she is being treated too, then no, it will not help matters.’

      ‘She says it cannot be from her. But she’s the only one …’ He coughs. The next words are strangled by embarrassment. ‘She’s the only one … ever.’

      ‘I think in that case,’ George says, ‘you best desist.’

      ‘But I love her. And she – says – she loves me.’

      And how many others has she promised the same to? He doesn’t say it. This poor dupe has been punished enough.

      ‘What is her name?’

      ‘She was a Russian princess, before the Reds came!’

      ‘Was she, indeed? Goodness.’ And yet being an ex-Russian princess, it seems, is no immunisation against the herpes virus.

      The patient leaves, clutching his prescription. George is amused by his insistence upon the former rank of the woman, as though this might make his unfortunate circumstances seem somehow less sordid.

      Then he remembers that he is in no position to judge. The familiar shame visits him. The smile leaves his face.

       The Boy

      He sits in a patch of sun on the stone steps of the apartment building, playing with the stray cat he has befriended. It has beautiful eyes, large and palest green, ringed with black as though it were wearing kohl eye makeup. On occasions he has seen it angry and frightened, doubled to twice its size, eyes staring, breath hissing. For something so small it makes a rather impressive display. But when it is very happy, as now, it treads the air with its paws like a baker kneading bread, and flaunts its white stomach as though it hadn’t a care in the world. Its favourite thing is for him to stroke the soft triangle of its chin, its sensitive whiskery cheeks.

      He is so intent upon it that he does not hear Nur hanım return. As she passes him he starts guiltily. He should be reading one of his schoolbooks, not the book of food, which is open before him. When she does not say anything about this he knows that something is wrong. He looks up at her. It is not that she has been crying. He would be more likely to see this whole city topple into the Bosphorus than he would to see Nur hanım weep. But her face frightens him all the same because it is like a mask.

      ‘Nur hanım,’ he asks, quietly. ‘Are you all right?’

      She looks down at him, but he has the strange impression that she is not actually seeing him. ‘Yes,’ she says, rather crossly. ‘Of course.’

      When she steps inside she pulls the door shut with such ferocity that it jumps back open again with a clang. The cat springs to its feet in fright, lets out a warning hiss. He thinks how much easier animals are to understand, how much more eloquent and truthful they are with mere actions than humans with all their words.

       Five years earlier

       The Prisoner

      The Russian front. The edges of the Empire; a place of ice and snow. The snow was like a living thing, or many living things; a swarm. It sought the mouth, the eyes – any opening in which it could take up residence. The flakes were the size and weight of feathers. If he stood still his feet were covered in seconds.

      It muffled sound. It stole the senses. It knew something that they did not. They spoke in whispers; they felt that they were being watched by someone immune to it, who laughed at their struggles as if from behind a pane of glass. They spooked at shadows, recoiling from the forms of their own men emerging through the curtain of white.

      When he looked up there was only a vortex of the same, and he saw that it did not come straight down but in a vast spiral. For a few moments he was not looking up but hanging above – dangling by his ankles above an abyss. He stumbled, and almost fell.

      It might have been beautiful, except for the fact that it was terrifying.

      He at least had seen snow, even if it had been nothing like this. What he had thought was winter, the occasional dusting of white over Constantinople, the cold wind that blew in from the Black Sea, seemed to him now as nothing more than an artist’s impression of the season. But there were men here from the southernmost parts of the Empire who had never seen it at all, to whom it had been a thing of myth.

      They had lost a man to the snow: it had swallowed him whole. One moment he had been there, bringing up the rear, the next he had disappeared. He was an Armenian, recruited from a nearby village. He of all of them should have known the conditions, the lie of the land. But it had clearly proved too much even for him.

      Some of the men had not liked him much; you couldn’t trust the Armenians, they liked to say, they weren’t true Ottomans. Still they searched the snowdrifts, digging in packed, freezing depths. You wouldn’t wish such an end on anyone. And then to be discovered, pitiful, when the snow finally melted. But new drifts formed even as they dug. They were forced to move on, tramping through the fresh fallen white and each trying not to think of the man buried beneath it somewhere. If a man like that had succumbed, what chance did they have?

      The idea came to him that they had been sent here to die.

      It was said their enemy, the Russians, had fur-lined boots, thick greatcoats, astrakhan caps. Some of his fellow men, soldiers of the Mighty Ottoman Army, wore sandals. Some wore nothing at all: exposed flesh was dying, turning black. He was lucky to have kept his, thin-soled city shoes that they were.

      To keep his mind off the cold he thought of home. He would summon to himself the memory of spring days beside the Bosphorus, light glancing from the water, the loud celebrations of the birds. The new warmth upon his face, the scent of things growing; the precise scent of the colour green. Then the drone of summer, a lazy spell cast by the heat, the city hazed with gold. He tried to remember the feeling of this. It was impossible to believe that there could have been such a thing as too hot: though he remembered his mother saying it, often, spending her days sheltered in the shaded cool of the sofa, emerging only with the respite of dusk. Colour, too, seemed an outlandish idea. Here was only the white of the snow and the grey of men’s faces and the black of their hair and occasionally the bluish tinge they got around their mouths and fingertips when things were bad with them. He remembered: the purple of a fig, split open. The rust-red sheet of his mother’s hair.

      He had to believe he would return home, to that place of colour and warmth. There he had done the thing he had always felt himself born to do: to teach. The small satisfactions of his day: the walk to the school through the cobbled streets, his bag of books heavy on his arm. As he walked he would plan the day, the lessons, anticipate anything that might arrive; the miniature crises that occurred in a classroom populated by the СКАЧАТЬ