by Alyson Rudd
‘Never,’ she said. ‘I think I can sit here or at another station for lunch because that’s what I did on the day it happened. But I’m not recreating that day, not really. I’m searching, I think, but for something else.’
Ryan nodded encouragingly.
‘What? What are you looking for?’
‘A reason perhaps. I don’t know. Why would a young mother do that? If I had not been there would she have jumped with her baby? And if she would then I have to be here, don’t I? Maybe that’s it.’
Sylvie did not sound convinced but she wanted Ryan to believe they were making progress. He could tell she was trying to please him but she had given him an idea.
‘Can I choose where we go next?’ he said.
‘We can try that,’ she said and he led her onto the Northern line to Euston where they changed for the one stop to King’s Cross.
There was a stooped man helping anyone whose ticket would not open the gates and, when there was a gap in the flow of passengers, Ryan asked if there was anyone in charge he could speak to.
He expected a stare of incredulity or a flat-out refusal but the man led him to an office.
‘Stan, there’s a customer needs to see you,’ he said and then he returned to the ticket barriers.
Stan was stocky and wearing a stocky tie on a short-sleeved white shirt. He did not stand up but he smiled and asked how he could help. Sylvie instinctively stood in Ryan’s shadow, nervous about what was to unfold.
‘A year ago, my girlfriend here witnessed a woman jump in front of a train at this station and she was handed the woman’s baby just before she did so. This has been hard for Sylvie to come to terms with. I wondered if we could have any information about the mother and the baby because I feel strongly that if Sylvie knew more about why such a dreadful thing happened, she could move on.’
The stocky man nodded his stocky neck.
‘Terrible tragedy,’ he said as if he used that phrase at least once a day. ‘Look, give me your details and I’ll see who you should speak to. It might be the family don’t want to give any information, but you never know. If it was me, I’d be mightily grateful this young woman had been there to take the baby, but you never know.’
Ryan led her up into the integrated shopping mall.
‘Do you feel able to leave? To go home, or go for a walk?’
She gazed at the people flocking to the Tube concourse. She wanted to join them, alone, but she fought against it.
‘Let’s try,’ she said and they walked hand in hand onto the street where the sunshine had summoned courage of its own and had warmed the air so that it was the most buoyant of spring days. They meandered and were fortunate to end up in Bloomsbury, which was bursting with daffodils and a Dickensian beauty. She knew how badly he wanted her to say he had found her an escape route, that she could tell this was the beginning of the end, but she did not want to lie and so she remained quiet. It might be the beginning, but she was by no means sure of it.
‘It’s so peaceful here,’ he said. ‘London is amazing, don’t you think?’
She was too busy fighting the urge to drag him into Russell Square station to absorb the wonders of the Georgian architecture but she was glad to be with him and so she did the only thing that felt honest and kissed him with more passion than she ever had before.
Ryan heard nothing for ten days from stocky-man Stan but just as he was considering composing a brusque email, he received a message apologizing for the delay and suggesting that Sylvie should speak to a Jonny Smalling at the social services department that had found emergency foster care for the baby while the suicide was investigated.
Stan was right, it should not be him who made the call, it should be Sylvie, but instinctively Ryan made the call anyway.
Jonny was sympathetic but not overly so. He had the manner of a man who hears sad stories every working day. His specialism was emergencies, not their year-old repercussions, but he remembered the incident and said he doubted it was breaking anyone’s trust to tell Ryan that the child had been reunited with its grandparents.
‘But could Sylvie meet them, see for herself that the baby is well, that she did a good thing? She seems to blame herself for the mother dying for some reason. Or at least she is tied up in knots about whether the mother would still have jumped if she hadn’t been there. What I am trying to say is that while it seems obvious to most of us that my girlfriend saved a baby’s life by being in the right place at the right time, she worries she was in the wrong place and did the wrong thing and was blind to what was unfolding in front of her. Do you see what I’m saying?’
Jonny said Ryan made perfect sense and would ask the family for some co-operation but had a hunch they would not be keen.
‘It’s ruining her life,’ Ryan said, a touch embarrassed by the melodrama of his assertion. ‘Could you tell them that at least?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Jonny said and Ryan could hear the professional barrier in his tone of voice and he wondered if people like Jonny ever cried at soppy films.
The wait this time was much longer. Sylvie went back to her old routine and Ryan prepared himself for two weeks at home with Grandpa.
‘We’re off to America, Grandpa,’ the women said. ‘Won’t be long.’
‘Get me some of that Madeira cake,’ he said. ‘I like that one, no surprises in a Madeira cake.’
Ryan waved his mother and sister off at the front door.
‘He thinks you’re off to the supermarket,’ he said.
‘No need to worry him,’ Grace said and she gave her son a tight hug, the warmth of which meant Ryan felt strong and generous for at least ten minutes. But with his sister and mother gone, the house felt cold and unfamiliar and he noticed, and then became irritated by, his grandpa’s whistling way of breathing.
‘Grandpa,’ he said, ‘how about we go to your local this afternoon? You haven’t been for a bit. They’ll be missing you.’
Grandpa, to Ryan’s surprise, turned off the TV.
‘My word, you look like Joe,’ he said and the tears fell and Ryan wondered why on earth none of them had realized that Grandpa regularly wept because his only child had stepped in front of a speeding truck in the prime of his life.
Ryan handed him one of the many freshly laundered and ironed cotton handkerchiefs Grace had left in the drawer of the small sideboard next to the television, but as his grandfather simply held it, Ryan wiped his cheeks and nose for him. It was the most tender he could remember being with another man.
‘Tell me about Joe,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember Dad much at all.’
Grandpa grunted. ‘Let me move to the table,’ he said and Ryan smiled and filled the kettle and assessed the array of cakes Grace had left under her little mesh cake tent or wrapped in clingfilm on top of the iridescently clean worktop. He had been warned against placing a choice in front of Grandpa but decided there was no harm in a couple of options, so he put two slices of ginger loaf and two chunks of a plain strawberry-jam-filled Victoria sponge on a large plate next to two side plates.
Grandpa peered at them suspiciously but hungrily.
‘Not joining me?’ he said and Ryan chuckled as he sat down to learn about his father free of the worry of what the telling and reminiscing might do to Grace.
‘Very bright boy was our Joe, good at mending things, building things. Elsa couldn’t have any more so we spoiled him a bit. I remember he was suspended from school. He was twelve and he got into a fight. Wouldn’t tell us what that fight was about and then a few weeks later he gave your grandmother a wooden jewellery box he had made for her, decorated with a few hearts, and she got all tearful, she did, and Joe said that was what the fight had been about. A few lads had teased him about the hearts. Called him a fairy. Ha, well, his mother cried proper after that, she did. Loved him to bits.’
‘Not sure I could make a wooden box,’ Ryan said.
‘Oh, it was a beautiful thing, very fine craftsmanship.’
‘Could I see it, is it
somewhere in your room?’
Grandpa steadily masticated on his Victoria sponge, then swallowed dramatically.
‘I threw it away,’ he said. ‘I threw it away with lots of other things I shouldn’t have thrown away when Joe did what he did. I was angry, son, so very angry.’
Another tear slid down his face and Ryan was at a loss to know what to say. He felt as if his mother had left him in charge of something potentially faulty, like a gas fire or a hairdryer, and told him not to touch it, but he had used it and it had set fire to the entire house. He was meddling with Grandpa’s emotions, interfering with his routine. When Grace came home it might be to find a dreadful mess.
‘I’m sorry, Grandpa,’ Ryan said. ‘I’m making you upset.’
‘Don’t be silly, lad, do you think I’m not always upset? Do you think I don’t think about our Joe and poor Tommy unless someone asks me about them?’
Ryan refilled their mugs, wondering if Grandpa was now so emotionally agitated he would be better off taking a nap. He wondered about his father and the pain he must have felt to have wanted to end his life. Not once had he been indignant that he was not motivation enough for his father to stay alive. Hana, though, had suffered that indignation for them both, and, he suspected, still did. Maybe they both needed a drink.
‘Shall we go to the pub now?’ he asked Grandpa.
‘What, straight after cake?’ Grandpa scoffed. ‘The whisky would curdle in my gut. Let’s play some dominoes instead. While the cat’s away.’
Ryan laughed out loud. The idea that playing dominoes was breaking all the rules was ludicrous but to Grandpa it was something for the men to do without the background wittering of the women. To his surprise, Ryan discovered he enjoyed the game. He wondered if he had played it as a child with his grandfather, so comfortable was it to be sat opposite him, running his fingers along the smooth edges of a double six. The pieces were probably Victorian, he thought, and he wondered how it was he knew exactly where he would find the oblong wooden box even though he could not recall when he had last played, if at all. They took turns in finding a match in a companionable silence punctured by Grandpa’s grunts of triumphalism. Surely, it was a game of pure luck, Ryan thought, and yet he was being trounced. Grandpa was the first to win ten rounds so he leaned back as pleased with himself as he would have been had he just defeated Gary Kasparov at chess.
‘Bone and ebony,’ he said, holding a double three. ‘Belonged to my father. I have an idea he told me they were made of elephant tusks but later confessed it was just cow bone. I much preferred playing with them when I thought they were made of ivory. Can’t buy ivory stuff now. I know that from the girls on telly.’ Grandpa leaned in conspiratorially. ‘It’s illegal.’
Ryan suppressed a smile and nodded as if being let in on a big secret, but he pondered if the shopping channel informed his grandfather that cakes were wicked, then would stop he eating them? Was the channel his new religion? What would win in the battle of ideologies? he wondered. Cake or shopping for unnecessary imperishables?
‘I was being serious, you know, about you settling down,’ Grandpa said. ‘And I know why you haven’t.’
Ryan sighed and smiled.
‘Do you now, Grandpa?’
His grandfather leaned forward again, knocking over the double three he had balanced upright on the table. Ryan was taken aback; Grandpa looked, in a flash, ten years younger.
‘You were in love with a girl and I confess right here and now I can’t remember her name but I do know she died while you were away, studying, and I know that she’s with you still.’
Ryan was unnerved and his throat dried. He looked towards the window and thought he saw her, smiling, just for a second, and then, his face paler than usual against his dark curls, he turned back to look at the old man.
‘She’s not telling you to wait for her or to join her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much but I do know that. The dead we love are not cruel to us.’
There was a long silence as Ryan slid the dominoes around the table.
‘Then why is she here?’ he said. ‘Because, it has, she has, you know, made it hard for me to be with someone.’
‘I think,’ he said, carefully, ‘I think maybe you had something so strong that it carried on, that’s all. She’s just a reminder of a deep love, a rare love, at an impressionable age that should have carried on. It’s a great shame, lad, it really is, but it’s not a warning. It’s a reminder of happiness, that’s all.’
Chapter 19
Jonny Smalling looked through the paperwork and decided it was not unreasonable for him to request to see how the child was getting along. He already knew that the girl, Nisha, now just over a year old, was looked after by her grandmother and there was no father on the scene.
He knocked at their front door. It was opened by a young teenage girl who stood there, mouth agape, as he explained who he was. She shut the door on him very carefully as if not wanting to offend him or anyone in the house – or draw to the attention of anyone who might be passing the fact they had an official-looking visitor – and he heard a muffled exchange before the door reopened, softly, and the young girl asked him to follow her into the kitchen, where a tiny woman in her forties was chopping onions.
Jonny asked how she was and she shook her head and muttered that it was a terrible thing to have happened to her family.
‘And where is baby Nisha?’
The woman pointed to the long narrow garden beyond the kitchen window where another teenage girl was placing Nisha on a miniature pink plastic slide, singing ‘Whoosh!’ as the baby descended, and then repeating the operation.
‘She looks very healthy and happy. I wonder if you could help me with something, Mrs Mannan? The young lady who was handed Nisha that day on the Underground is very traumatized, still rather upset, and it might help her to meet you and Nisha, to see how good can still come from such a sad thing. What do you think? Perhaps you have wondered about meeting her; it might be good for you too.’
Nisha was by now in the kitchen being held by her young aunt who said nothing but looked intently at her mother with intelligent and, Jonny thought, defiant eyes.
‘No, no,’ the mother said. ‘That would be impossible.’
‘It’s your decision, of course,’ Jonny said, aware that Mrs Mannan had not weighed up what he had said to her, that she had heard only something that implied prying, that would entail opening her home or her heart, the piercing of long-held secrets.
‘Maybe you could think about it and let me know if you have a change of heart? It’s just to help a young woman out, that’s all.’
Jonny spoke with a degree of perceptible, if professional, sadness; the sadness of a man who knows his words are not being digested but deflected. He waited ten days and then sent an email to Ryan.
The family are very private and I am unable to do more than I already have without crossing various ethical boundaries but perhaps you could tell Sylvie that the baby is healthy and well cared for and has a pair of what appear to be devoted young aunts.
Ryan slammed his fist onto his desk. ‘Very private,’ he muttered.
She insisted she find the house herself and he was surprised that he was pacing the floor, waiting for the knock. At last it came.
‘Grandpa, this is my friend Sylvie,’ he said.
‘Pleased to meet you, young lady. I had a cousin called Sylvia. Long dead now.’
Ryan smiled apologetically.
‘You’ll be Sylvia from now on, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t mind. It has happened before and will happen again.’
‘I’ve never asked about your name. You’re the first Sylvie I’ve ever met or heard of. It’s pretty.’
‘Hmm, my mother loved these Enid Blyton Faraway Tree books and there was a fairy called Silky. She wanted to call me that but my dad intervened, thankfully. They compromised on Sylvie but she’s still been annoyed that my hair is curly ever since.’
Ryan wound a stran
d of her hair around his index finger, released it and let it bounce.
‘Lovebirds,’ shouted Grandpa, ‘how’s that dinner you promised coming along?’
Ryan had been pelting his grandfather with questions, one of which had been why he would eat cake and no proper lunch and often no proper supper. The answer was not so mysterious. He did not like the things Grace thought he liked – because he had once tried them – or the things Grace thought he ought to like, and so Ryan had asked him what he would really like.
‘Corned beef patties,’ he said.
‘And that’s it? Nothing else?’
‘You asked and I’ve told you, son.’
They sat at the table. Grandpa ignored the steamed broccoli and corn on the cob and began to use his fork to break up his corned beef potato cake. Ryan and Sylvie watched on, nervously. They had followed a recipe to the letter but were not at all sure the patties would taste as he expected them to.
‘Supposed to be crispier but not bad at all,’ he said, grinning, but after about ten minutes he became withdrawn, hobbled to his chair and with the sort of grand sigh only old and tired men can summon he sat down and turned on the TV. He ignored the temptations of Tiffany and instead found the snooker.
‘Ah,’ Ryan said, ‘he does like men in tight trousers poking at a white ball with a stick.’
‘You’re not a fan, then?’ Sylvie said. ‘Because you could pretend. To make him happy. We’ll pretend together.’
The rest of the evening was spent with Sylvie and Ryan asking questions about Ronnie O’Sullivan and how he compared to the greats of yesteryear, and Grandpa cheered up and began to enjoy himself enormously. Sylvie smiled to herself. She had won over her father with cricket and was now doing the same with Ryan’s grandpa and snooker.
‘My brother’s getting married,’ she whispered to Ryan. ‘Want to come and meet my grandpa?’
Sylvie’s mother insisted her daughter stay the night before to help with the last-minute hitches that were bound to crop up on the morning of the wedding but there were none. Unsurprisingly, as Sylvie was very good at organizing events to go off without a hitch. Ryan sat with her on his right and her grandfather, an elegant eighty-year-old, on his left. He had thick pure-white hair that curled in a similar manner to Sylvie’s hair and spoke with clipped precision. Ryan could not imagine him gobbling angel cake and letting the crumbs rest in the folds of his sweater.