‘Yes.’ She put the phone down and walked to his office, calculating how loud she would have to yell if it came to it and what she might be able to grab in self-defence if necessary.
She knocked and entered, as was customary, but she left the door wide open. The moment she saw him, sitting behind the desk in his grand leather chair, her heart skipped a beat. Mr Knowles, esteemed partner, was sporting a nasty black eye. His cheekbone was yellow and blue and his eye a little bloodshot.
Anna opened her mouth to speak but didn’t know what to say or where to start.
Mr Knowles coughed again. ‘As you can see, I had a rather unfortunate incident when I left the office last night.’ He avoided her gaze.
Nitz! You promised me!
‘Over twenty years in the legal profession has taught me not to believe in coincidences and so I am quite sure this is something to do with our little tête-à-tête yesterday. Would I be correct in that assumption?’ He lifted his chin, as she’d seen him do when interviewing clients.
‘I...’ Anna swallowed. ‘I don’t...’
‘Let me help you out.’ The lawyer knitted his fingers in front of him on the shiny desktop. ‘I would of course have much preferred a sharp word from you than this.’ He winced a little, seemingly in pain. ‘As it is, we shall chalk it up to experience on both our parts. And I think it best we say nothing more about it.’ He picked up his glasses and popped them on, then selected a sheaf of papers to study, as if that was that.
Anna straightened her shoulders and found her voice. ‘Actually, I would like to say one more thing about it.’ She spoke through lips dry with nerves. ‘You did make me feel very uncomfortable. Scared, even, and it was horrible.’
He glanced up. ‘I...’
‘And I did confide in someone that it had unsettled... that it upset me.’ Her voice cracked.
He blinked, rapidly.
‘But I don’t know who did this to you and I didn’t ask anyone to do this to you. Quite the opposite, in fact. But... But,’ she continued, ‘my ex has a hot head and I guess—’
‘Your ex?’ He interrupted her. ‘No, Anna, this was not done by your ex. I was assaulted by a woman in her mid sixties with a foul mouth and wearing slippers.’
Anna bit her lip, unable to hide the smile that lifted her cheeks. She let out a small, nervous laugh. Sylvie... Oh, Sylvie! Someone was looking out for me! You!
He lowered his papers and sniffed. ‘Well, I’m glad you can find an element of humour in this whole debacle.’
‘I really don’t,’ she replied soberly.
‘You have always been...’ He scrutinised her, as if searching for the right word. ‘...agreeable, friendly, and I guess I thought you might...’ He paused again. Apparently twenty years in the legal profession wasn’t helping with his vocabulary right now.
Anna held her ground, standing tall. ‘Please don’t assume you know me, Mr Knowles. You don’t. You don’t know the first thing about me or where I have come from or where I am going.’
There was a second when he held her gaze and seemed to shrink a little beneath it.
‘That’ll be all.’ He nodded towards the door.
She stared at him, knowing she would indeed keep the secret. But she also knew that her time at Asquith, Barker and Knowles had come to an end. She needed a new job. A new start.
*
That evening, Melissa insisted they go into town and see a film at the Odeon Leicester Square. It was a good call. The Bodyguard, proved to be exactly the distraction Anna needed, she bundled up her coat and left the theatre in good spirits, despite having bawled into a tissue for the last twenty minutes of the movie. It made her think of Jordan. After Chinese noodles in Soho, Melissa jumped in a cab back to her boyfriend Gerard’s house, singing the title song loudly out of the cab window, as she left. Anna laughed to herself, as she walked down to Embankment Tube station.
She had politely refused her friend’s offer to share a cab, not willing to go into the reasons at the end of a such a fun night. The truth was she hadn’t wanted to risk opening old wounds. It had been a month now since she’d conclusively decided to give up her desperate search for her elusive cabbie dad. After Ned had walked out, she’d had a bit of a blitz, going to different parts of the city of an evening, walking, and thinking that if only she could find Michael, he might be the key to what lay ahead, a sort of model perhaps for the man who might replace Ned. Someone who might make it seem sunny, even in the rain. She began finding herself in unsavoury places at unwise times – at 1 a.m. at the back of King’s Cross station, at midnight on a dark side street off the Old Kent Road. It was when she got followed one night and had to run for it, she made a pact with herself: she would stop searching, it was pointless, too hard and failure in the task only made her feel low. She decided that she wouldn’t so much as look at a black cab for the foreseeable future.
As she made her way towards the Tube, past the entrance to the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, a voice called from a nearby shop door. ‘Can you spare some change, please?’ The request was familiar, but there was something about the woman’s voice that made Anna look twice.
‘Can you spare some change, please?’ the woman asked again.
Anna stopped and stared at the figure huddled on an open sleeping bag spread out on the shallow step of a vacant shop. The shadowy figure was wrapped in a grey blanket, with her hand hanging limply down and clumps of an unkempt Afro sticking out at all angles from the top of her head.
Noticing that Anna had stopped, the woman reached towards her, her expression blank. ‘Spare some change for a cup of tea, please? Please?’
Anna bent down and stared into the woman’s gaunt face. Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin looked scarred and her teeth were brown. But beneath the grime and the vacant expression, it was unmistakeably the face of her old roommate, Shania.
‘Oh!’ Anna felt the swell of tears in her throat and something close to panic in her chest. ‘Oh no!’ She spoke slowly, studying the face that was now just inches from her own. ‘Shania! Hello. It’s me. It’s Anna.’
‘Could you spare me some change, please, and a fag if you’ve got one?’ she asked, seemingly unable to recognise Anna.
‘Do you remember me? It’s me, Anna. We shared a room.’ She spoke gently, trying to coax her into remembrance, but Shania stared right past her.
‘Canyousparesomechangeplease...’ she mumbled as her head lolled on her neck. Her pupils disappeared momentarily as her eyes rolled back in her head.
‘Hang on a minute.’ Anna stood and opened her bag. Fishing for her purse, she pulled out all of her cash, a little over forty pounds. ‘Here you go.’ She bent down again and rolled the notes into her friend’s outstretched hand. Then she slipped a piece of paper with her name and telephone number into Shania’s pocket, hoping she might find it when she was more with it.
‘Thank you,’ Shania managed, her head tipped back, her mouth now slack.
‘Let me... Let me get you to a hotel, let me get you some help!’ Anna held her arm, trying to think of what to do.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Shania barked, recoiling and shifting into defence mode.
Several passers-by slowed and stared. Not that Anna cared. She wanted to do something for her friend, her friend who had promised she would stay off drugs.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I won’t touch you.’ She took a step backwards with her palms raised. ‘I just want to help get you somewhere to stay tonight. Shania, please.’
‘I got somewhere to stay tonight. Fuck off! Don’t touch me!’ Shania was shrieking now and kicking out.
Anna stood up and glanced up the street, unsure whether to stay or go. She didn’t want to draw any more unwanted attention to Shania, but...
‘Go on! Fuck off!’ Shania yelled loudly as she shifted backwards on her filthy sleeping bag.
‘Okay. Okay, my darling.’ Anna blew her a kiss and walked away, sobbing.
As she sat on the Tube back to her flat, her mind whirred thro
ugh memories of the days they’d had together at Mead House, the dressing-up, the blue glass earrings she’d left her, the flagging down of dozens of cabs in the search for Michael, the fruitless waiting for Shania’s dad to come and rescue his daughter. She cried noiselessly into her hankie, sad for the life her friend now found herself living, so far from what either of them had hoped for. Anna ground her teeth. You deserve so much more, Shania. My funny, kind, friend. That could have been me. It could have been me and I promised you I’d have a party, but I never did. I never did. And I’m sorry.
10
It had been hearteningly easy to find a new job. Anna had signed up with a recruitment agency and was over the moon to find herself in demand. It was a massive boost to her fragile self-esteem. A glowing reference from Mrs Glacier had paved the way for success, and after several interviews, she was offered three different positions. The one she opted for was at a financial firm located in a beautiful listed building called Villiers House on Cheapside in the City, not far from St Paul’s Cathedral. She liked the fact that the building was occupied by lots of different companies – there was a real buzz about the place – and she liked the people she worked for. Not that she really understood what they did all day, something to do with buying and selling money. One thing she understood perfectly was her role as receptionist, responsible for answering the phone, greeting guests and running errands for the brokers. After nearly three years in the role, she was a dab hand at it.
No longer having Melissa by her side all day had been a wrench, but they still saw each other every few weeks. In fact Melissa had called just the other night, reminding her that she and her husband Gerard were having a dinner party this coming weekend. Anna knew that she’d be introduced to several of Gerard’s available, art-loving buddies, with whom she would have zero in common, but it was a night out and she’d get to see her mate, who, newly married, was now a lot less available than she used to be. Anna understood of course and was delighted to see her friend so happy. She smiled now at the memory of Melissa’s father crying as he walked up the aisle last year with his little girl on his arm. Melissa told her afterwards that they were tears of relief – for a while he’d feared she might hop back across the pond and become his problem once again, something neither his retirement fund nor his nerves could take!
Anna shook her head and returned to the book she was reading, keen to devour all she could of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which everyone was raving about, before she reached her Tube stop. The lengthy commute, from Parsons Green to Mansion House, was another of the good things about her City job. It had allowed her to re-establish her reading habit and to digest what she’d just read on the short walk to Villiers House. She had forgotten just how lovely it was to dive into a book. One of her abiding memories of her mum was watching her sitting on the sofa with her legs folded under her and a book held inches from her nose, completely lost to a story. She took comfort from the knowledge that her mum had had these happy, happy moments too. Anna walked across the beautiful tiled lobby floor of Villiers House and hopped into the ornate lift, ignoring the slight shake to the cage as she pressed the brass button for the sixth floor. Soon after she started working there she’d developed a routine for dealing with the confined space. Standing close to the doors, facing them, she pictured the wide window in the kitchen of her imagination, the one her mum would have loved to have stood in front of, feeling the gentle flower-scented breeze on her face. With her eyes tightly closed, she played the alphabet game while looking out in her imagination.
A... air.
B... blue sky.
C... chirping birds.
D... daisies.
E... endless fields of grass.
F... fields of endless grass.
G... grass in endless fields.
The lift stopped and as the doors opened with the ping of an old-fashioned bell she laughed to herself at her cheating. She made a mental note that she had got to G, which was where she would pick it up again on her next lift journey.
‘Morning!’ She nodded to some of the suited men who were crisscrossing the reception area at this early hour.
‘Mawninanna.’
These guys were always in a rush, eliding her name and greeting into a single word, and usually doing everything at a semi jog, whether it was going to the bathroom or grabbing a coffee, wary of abandoning their desk for any longer than absolutely necessary, knowing that a minute could make all the difference to the success or failure of a day’s trading. It wasn’t unusual for them to work through the night or start horrendously early in order to catch the markets in different time zones. More than once she had arrived at work to find one of them asleep with his head cradled in his arms on top of a cluttered desk, the wastepaper bin brimming with sandwich wrappers, noodle boxes and crumpled coffee cups.
Anna walked to the kitchenette by the cloakroom, hung up her coat and poured herself a coffee from the percolator. She inhaled its deep, earthy scent and smoothed her black skirt over her thick tights before taking up her seat behind the wide, modern desk that ran parallel to the back wall. A vast oil painting hung behind the desk, commissioned by the board to fill the space. In her view, it was total crap and this realisation had made her understand that just because someone had money it didn’t mean they had taste. Her nose wrinkled every time she gazed at the splashes, drips and flicks of multi-coloured paint. Not that it mattered much: when in situ, she faced the entrance door and had her back to it. She was ready with her smile as soon as she saw the shadow of an arrival through the stained-glass doors.
Even at this early hour, a small bundle of mail had accumulated. She flicked through the letters, both incoming and those to be sent, sorting them into wire trays: UK-bound ones destined for the Royal Mail, those going further afield to be sent by courier, and post freshly arrived to be distributed internally. Her fingers arrived at a stiff, brown, formal-looking envelope. She turned it over and saw, highly unusually, that it was addressed to her!
How odd. Her forehead creased in anticipation.
The only people who wrote to her were Jordan and his partner Levi, and their letters arrived like magic in the pigeonhole at her flat. She loved the way they always wrote on half the card each or divided the sheet of paper into two with a neat line and then filled their respective section with wonderful gossip and tittle-tattle about their lives in New York, New York. She loved nothing more than to read about their walks through Central Park, trips to the theatre, the weather, good coffee, bad wine, gourmet hot dogs and a million other little snippets that helped her feel connected to her cousin so far away. She thought it was cute and she savoured each neat line, written in ink pen and dotted with hearts and smiley faces. Unlike her Aunt Lizzie, who apparently found nothing cute about the couple at all and had refused point blank to meet the man her son loved, saying she would wait until he was over this ridiculous phase. Anna clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She’ll have a bloody long wait. Silly woman.
She looked at the postmark: London. That didn’t give much away. It was far from the usual milk receipt or buffet menu that arrived folded over, dropped off and left for her consideration. Having taken a sip of hot coffee, she carefully unstuck the envelope, pulled the folded typed white sheets from their sheath and laid them flat on the table.
Anna instantly recognised the language and style of a legal letter; she had handled enough of them in her time.
DEAR MISS COLE,
She was beyond curious, intrigued by the formality, and quickly read on...
My name is Ernest Faversham and I represent the estate of Mr Harper. It is my sad duty to inform you that Mr Harper passed away on May 16th, 1995 after a short illness.
As instructed by my client, I am contacting you in the wake of his death to pass on a letter (attached herewith) in accordance with the last will and testament of Mr Harper.
Please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours faithfully,
MR E C FAVERSHAM
‘What on earth? I’ve never heard of him! Mr Harper?’ Anna spoke aloud as she slipped the covering letter off the top of the sheets of paper to which it had been paper-clipped, squeezing the bulky corner flap between her thumb and forefinger for good measure.
Dear Anna,
Anna... this was my mother’s name and that’s been a nice thing for me over the years, knowing that her name lives on in you, my daughter.
It was as if the air had been sucked from the room. With trembling fingers, Anna set the paper flat on the table and bent her head forward, almost resting it on her knees, hoping that this might help stop the room from spinning.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ she whispered, trying to control the shudder to her limbs and the shake to her hands. She slowed her breathing, aware that the hyperventilating was making her feel lightheaded.
‘Oh my God!’ she repeated.
‘Anna?’ a voice called.
She looked up to see one of the traders. Marius.
‘Do you know where I can find the...?’ He paused at the sight of her. ‘Are you okay? You look terrible.’
She sat up straight and swallowed. ‘Marius, I... I need to go to the loo. Get someone to cover for me.’
Without waiting for an answer or responding to his stunned expression, she grabbed the sheets of paper from the desk and ran towards the bathroom. Locking the door of the end cubicle, she sat on the closed toilet seat and pushed at her ears; it felt as if she was underwater. Leaning back against the cistern, she closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly. It did the trick.
Finally, when she felt ready, she unfolded the paperwork.
Dear Anna,
Anna... this was my mother’s name and that’s been a nice thing for me over the years knowing that her name lives on in you, my daughter. I don’t know how much you know, sweetheart, so this will come as either a shock or a comfort and I’m truly sorry that I don’t know which. It’s probably a good idea to read this letter with your mum. And if she objects, tell her it’s because enough time has passed and my time has been cut short. I know she will understand.
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