by Kate Vane
‘Maybe you could sign a couple more,’ she said. ‘Then I won’t have to keep asking.’
As he signed the blank cheques, he said casually, ‘Have you and Isabel found a place yet?’
He was sure he’d blushed as he said ‘Isabel’, but hopefully she hadn’t noticed as she took the chequebook from him and put it in a black drawstring bag. It reminded him of the bags you had for PE kit at school, especially as Claire was wearing black canvas daps. He lowered his eyes and already he had forgotten what she looked like again, as if she’d disappeared in a puff of smoke and only the daps and the bag remained.
‘We’re still looking,’ said Claire. ‘It’s not easy finding a place for two.’
‘No. We’ve had the same problem.’
He’d thought about Dudley’s suggestion. The good thing about it was that he’d get to live with Isabel. Spend time with her without needing an excuse. The bad thing was that he’d be living with Isabel. As his clubbing friend Dan the Man so sagely put it, ‘Don’t shit on your own doorstep.’ Shared-house relationships were notorious. If the couple split up, the whole house fell apart.
On the other hand Dudley hadn’t made any effort to find anyone and he wasn’t doing much better. Claire was bound to be more organised than them, just as she was with the city group. The few meetings he had been to were dominated by Claire and Mark. They discussed budgets for photocopying leaflets and posters with a knowing look as if they’d agreed the whole thing beforehand and further, that they were actually speaking in code.
He sighed. ‘Maybe we should make up a four. Me and Dudley, you and Isabel.’
‘You shouldn’t call him Dudley. It’s racist.’
‘Is it?’
‘Anglicising his name just because you can’t be bothered to say Dhanesh.’
‘Actually it’s because –’
‘It’s not as if it’s hard to pronounce. I mean, how would you feel if people called you Paul because Paolo was just too much effort?’
‘Well –’
‘Is he a veggie?’
He had no idea. He was a Hindu and a Smiths fan, so the odds were in his favour. ‘He doesn’t cook meat,’ he said cautiously. That was clearly not a lie, for now at least, because he was living in halls and therefore didn’t cook anything.
‘In that case, yeah, why not?’ She smiled. He sensed that she was relieved, which surprised him. Why would Claire need reassurance when she had Isabel for a friend?
15
He got out of the pub early evening, relatively unscathed. Freddie was going round to his girlfriend’s house (the ‘girlfriend’ was a grandmother, but, as Freddie explained, he didn’t know what else to call her. They definitely weren’t at the ‘partner’ stage yet.)
Back at the hotel, he called Salma. Got voicemail. They were probably eating, or the girls might be doing homework with Salma helping them. Then he remembered it was Brownies and he hadn’t been there to pick them up. It was hard to believe he had been sitting here with Mark only this morning.
Paolo suddenly wanted to be at home. If they still lived in London he’d have gone, he thought, with affectionate resentment. But getting to their Suffolk village from here would take rather longer than flying to New York.
He still hadn’t quite accepted that he lived in Suffolk. He thought of himself as essentially urban, and Salma the same. Although she’d travelled all over the world, in the years since they left Cairo, he didn’t think she’d travelled in the UK beyond the M25. She’d occasionally spoken wistfully about York or Stratford-upon-Avon. He’d teased her for her chocolate-box perception of his country. He’d told her to visit the great northern cities. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle. He hadn’t mentioned Leeds.
So she’d surprised him when, after she reluctantly agreed to a weekend break in Aldeburgh, she said Suffolk would be a great place to bring up kids. Salma, who’d grown up in Cairo, who was equally at ease in New York, London or Doha, wanted a quiet life. She wanted to write a book. A novel. Not a political book. She’d had enough of politics.
There were so many layers of inexplicability to this that he hadn’t known where to start, so he hadn’t asked anything at all. They’d moved to a cheaper, larger property with a garden in a village (she was amazed at the space they could buy, while he thought ruefully of how they’d never be able to move back).
She stopped doing the freelance reporting she’d done for various Arabic-language broadcasters with London bureaux. She no longer appeared as a commentator on British news channels. She changed her mobile phone number. She would no longer get calls in the night about activists who were in police cells, or raped, or disappeared. She would go for long walks and pick the kids up from school (at least they’d save on childcare) and write her non-political book.
The phone rang. It was Salma.
‘Tell me about home,’ he said. Being mildly pissed was making him sentimental.
‘There’s nothing much to say.’
‘Tell me anything. I just want to hear your voice.’
There was a pause and as he rushed to fill the silence he spoke over her, a sardonic, ‘How was Brownies?’ then, ‘Sorry, what were you going to say?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Brownies was fine. The girls are over-excited, and now they don’t want to go to bed.’
He tried to picture his wife. She didn’t wear as much make-up as she used to. He’d always been both seduced and repelled by the amount of slap she wore. Thick eyeliner, full magenta lips, fiercely pink cheekbones. It was unreal and exciting, but it was somehow more exciting when she took it off and showed him the face which no one else saw.
He was confused by her new face which was neither the public nor the private Salma, with lips painted ‘natural’ and just a hint of colour round the eyes.
Salma was a person who was always with people, at the centre of everything. That was when he thought she was most herself. United with her friends, her family, her people, her country. Her revolution.
Now she spent her days alone in the English countryside, her study door shut.
16
Tilda called him at about half past nine that night. She sounded excited.
‘I’ve just got off the train,’ she said. ‘Is Mark with you?’
‘I can’t find him.’
‘Me neither. I’ve been calling him all day. Can we meet?’
‘Now?’
‘It’s important.’
He sighed. He was planning an early night. He had said he would go to Salford to do a live interview on the political upheaval in Lebanon on Breakfast. He arranged to meet her for coffee in the hotel lobby. It would be relatively quiet and the pubs might be busy at this time.
When she arrived she brought energy and cold, fresh air in with her. She threw off her coat and sat on the achingly angular grey sofa.
‘I’ve been to see Sid Jenkins’ daughter,’ she said.
‘Already?’ He was impressed.
‘What did you expect?’
‘And?’
Paolo had assumed that Sid’s family would all live within choking distance of the M25. People don’t often move out of the south east, the pressure was all the other way round, but Emma Jenkins was a Church of England vicar.
‘It seems they pretty much go where they’re sent, like missionaries,’ said Tilda.
‘Or where they’re called,’ said Paolo.
‘Yeah, well Emma was called to three rural parishes outside Doncaster.’
Rural. Such a loaded term. Paolo pictured rolling hills and birdsong, although he knew that what was actually being discussed were the scarred landscapes of the former mining communities.
‘Her place wasn’t what I expected.’
‘You mean the vicarage?’ asked Paolo. Vicarage, another word that immediately conjured up images. Double-fronted Georgian with a back staircase for the maids.
‘It looks like an ex-council house,’ said Tilda.
‘Probably is, round there.’
‘
She was, though. What I’d expect. All earnestness and unkempt hair but sort of tough, too. Like nothing would shock her. I told her that I thought her dad was Mark’s old boss. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Said she doesn’t really have time for the news.’
They were both silent for a moment, out of respect for the decline of their profession.
‘So I gave her a bit of background and she said it made sense. Then she started telling me about how when she was a kid he was never there and her parents rowed when he did come home and she suspected he was having an affair.’
‘How old is she?’ he asked.
‘I’d say late forties.’
‘So when Sid was undercover himself she might have been nine or ten. Old enough to have a sense of what was happening.’
‘Yes. It was weird how it all came out of her, like she’d bottled it up for years. At first she seemed a bit conflicted, like on the one hand she thought he was a shit and wanted to dump on him but on the other she felt she had to be reasonable, but then on the third hand maybe some of the criticism was deserved. Must be exhausting trying to be good all the time. Or trying to be fair and impartial.’ She looked slyly at him so he knew she was teasing him. ‘I guess vicars spend so much time listening to other people’s shit that they can’t believe their luck when someone actually wants to listen to them.’
‘What about now? Does she know what Sid’s been doing?’
‘She said they didn’t have much contact. I got the sense they hadn’t exactly fallen out but they weren’t on great terms. He moved in with a new partner after her mother died. Pretty quickly. And then they’d had a baby. What is it with all these old guys having babies? Then the partner wanted to split so he was looking at selling the marital home to fund the divorce settlement. And the vicar’s cool with it apparently but she’s got a brother who’s worried about his inheritance. I asked about him in case he could be a suspect but he’s a copper on secondment in Bahrain so I think we can rule him out.’
‘Did Sid talk to Emma about the money, what he was going to do?’
‘Well that’s what’s odd. He was down for a while but then he perked up again. Said he was going to do some consultancy. Then he said he’d found an old insurance policy that would pay out. So all in all he was feeling a lot happier.’
‘Sounds rather convenient.’
‘Yes. She was sceptical, I think.’
‘And what was the consultancy work?’
‘She didn’t know. She seemed to think it was private security, because he worked in the Royal Protection Unit for a while before retirement, or so he said, she doesn’t know what to believe now. She said he never talked much about his work. She said he’d got the habit of secrecy, it was almost a religion with him.’
‘That’s quite funny.’
She hesitated, then said, ‘At the end, you might not like this, but I asked if she’d heard from him in the last couple of days. She said no, so I told her about the murder, and that the dead man was about her dad’s age. I wasn’t going to say anything but I’d have felt shitty.’
Hadn’t he hoped she’d do this?
‘She said she’d call his ex and that I’d better go and I said I hoped I was wrong, but just wanted her to know. She said I could have told her straight away.’
‘She’d have been in no fit state to talk to you then.’
‘Exactly. And it’s not as if we know for sure. But –’
He understood. She’d put the story first, gained the woman’s trust, and now she felt bad.
‘Did you take notes?’
‘I recorded the interview.’
He wondered if she’d asked permission. Better, perhaps, not to know. ‘Can you let me have a transcript?’
‘A what?’
‘Of the interview.’
She grinned. ‘You’re so retro. I just took notes of the relevant bits. I can share the file with you if you want. You can get the girls from the typing pool onto it.’
Paolo was going to protest that he’d had years of doing his own transcription but he saved his breath.
17
Paolo got some articles published in Leeds Student. He wrote up the odd demo, he did a few gig reviews, dropped them in the submissions box in the Student office in the Union. Sometimes they used them, sometimes not. He wrote what he thought was a fine satirical piece on student politics in general and the Union in particular. They didn’t use that.
He went to a few of their meetings. They would meet in the office, which was too small, and the door would be shut and anyone who came in and interrupted would be greeted with a kind of weary tolerance that made the interloper realise that this was important so they would quickly go away again. Sometimes they met for socials but Paolo rarely went.
One evening he found himself in the Old Bar at the Union and there they all were, so he sidled up, because he was never quite sure if he was welcome. There was some beery bonhomie going on and he squeezed onto the bench seat next to Tamsin, who was a second year doing English. He’d sensed some vibes between them on a previous occasion and was now in a dilemma, both pleased to have secured this prime spot but also a bit hungry. If he went and scored some chips and mushy peas he’d surrender his seat.
Soon both Tamsin and food were forgotten though. It seemed the entire group were toasting a couple of guys who were unseasonably tanned. They were wearing Indian-style clothing, which wasn’t unusual in the Union but it seemed they’d actually bought theirs in India, not in a flea market like everyone else. All in all, they looked remarkably similar with their sandy, sun-bleached hair and self-assured slumminess.
While they were holding court, Tamsin, next to him, whispered, ‘They’ve been in some remote tribal area, hanging out with Maoist guerillas. And they wrote about it and sold it to the Guardian!’
The Guardian. Even the cool Student people, many of whom were either related to a broadsheet journalist or the people who they wrote about, exhibited a faux-flippancy which only reinforced their awe.
Paolo was not immune. He remembered on his first full day in Leeds hanging out awkwardly in the Union bar, seeing a guy with crimped black hair and a long overcoat and drainpipe jeans and possibly just a hint of eyeliner, ordering a pint as soon as the bar opened and just standing there, reading the Guardian.
Paolo thought, enviously, why can’t I do that? And then he realised he could. You could go to the newsagent and they wouldn’t ask for ID, or make you list the founder members of the Fabian Society, or visit your parents’ house to ensure they had a stripped-pine kitchen (ideally with an Aga) with a framed poster on the wall of a recent exhibition at the Tate, or failing that a guide to rare mushrooms, they would just sell it to you for money. And you too could stand at the bar (he had already crimped his hair). And there would be no family or neighbours or classmates to pull a face that said, Who does he think he is?
‘I was there for months,’ said the first of the heroes. ‘People grew to trust me. They understood my commitment to the cause. And then Jay turned up and, well, he had a really good camera, and so between us we had the makings of a great piece.’
Paolo liked that, the subtle undercutting. I was the brains, he just brought equipment.
Jay either missed the snub or was determined to rise above it. ‘I wanted to get off the tourist trail. You know, Delhi, Agra, Jaipur.’
Paolo nodded along with the rest of them, as if he too was weary of places he had barely heard of, as if the whole of India weren’t, for him, a fantastic dream.
‘So what are you going to do now?’
‘The Guardian have invited us to their summer party.’
A party? This just got more painful. He pressed his thigh nearer to Tamsin, even though he knew the cause was hopeless. She’d done the same to him on a previous occasion but he’d had to go because he’d promised Dudley he’d take home an eighth which Dudley had paid for but had agreed to share (Dudley couldn’t buy his own because he didn’t know anyone to buy it from outside
Dudley). Now, though, he was no one. He was in the shadow of the two golden boys who had been published in a real newspaper.
He finished his drink mournfully. Even his lust was dimmed. There was of course the entirely justified resentment of another’s success. But more than that it reinforced his sense that life was always happening somewhere else.
18
The news of Sid’s identity broke overnight. Paolo guessed that Emma Jenkins had called the police and been invited to identify the body almost straight away. The details were released (or maybe leaked) too late for the papers but it was online by the time he got to the studio and he got a text from Freddie before five with a link to the story saying, ‘You bastard!’ The exclamation mark convinced him there were no hard feelings.
His four minutes on the Breakfast sofa got cut to two-and-a-half as the presenter broke into an unscripted outpouring after seeing his colleague’s new puppy on her Instagram feed. Paolo spent longer in make-up than he did doing journalism that morning.
And Tilda had published a piece on the real Mark Swift. Reading it, his backstory was incredibly similar to Mark’s cover. He had told Paolo once that he was from an army family and had joined up himself.
Paolo remembered the day. They were making drinks in their tiny kitchen, Mark speaking low, as if this was a confidence he struggled to share, or as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. That would make sense. A lot of people they knew were outright hostile to the armed forces.
‘If I’d stayed, I would have been posted to Northern Ireland. That was when I started thinking about what we were doing, and why. I didn’t think we should be there and I didn’t want to go.’
Paolo was curious. ‘What about the other soldiers?’
‘Some were excited. They had joined up because they wanted action, not drills in Germany or Hampshire. Others saw it as a job to be done. The army is all about discipline, doing what you’re told, not asking questions. I think some of them had doubts, and some were afraid, but they hid behind bravado.’