by Simon Mawer
‘And I was at the canteen, on my own. Not that we had many of the lads in. It was just an ordinary day. And we heard something, a gunshot maybe, and then the sirens. It happened all the time. Bombs occasionally, sometimes guns. They blew up the sewage works and the place stank for days. Pooh! You got used to it, you see. Not the smell, the attacks. So the lads in the canteen didn’t do much more than glance up and catch each other’s eyes, and then go back to whatever they were doing – playing cards probably. Rules didn’t allow proper gambling. They used to play for mils, which weren’t real money. Then after a while a corporal came in and said something about returning to barracks. There’d been an incident. That’s the term they used: an “incident”. The soldiers got up cursing and swearing. “We’ll have none of that,” I used to tell them. “The only foul language I’ll allow here is ‘duck’. Not the other one.” That’s what I used to tell them. Foul and fowl, you see. A joke. And they always apologized. They were good lads in those days, not like nowadays. Punks and all that. They need a spell of National Service, that’s what I think. Put them in uniform and send them off somewhere the other side of the world. Anyway, they got up from their game and went away, leaving me all alone. I was used to being alone. I mean, why should I be at risk? Who’d want to attack me? Although people did say that I should take more precautions. But I used to tell them, no one would turn a hair if I was bumped off. And then the door opened and there she was.’
‘My mother?’
‘Yes. I was just finishing the till – my bosses in London were most particular about keeping the accounts accurate. They didn’t want any funny business, and quite right if you ask me. And the door opened and there she was. I remember her standing there, silhouetted against the daylight. I couldn’t really see her face, just the shape of her, and all that brightness. She looked like an angel or something. Really lovely. She was wearing this lovely summer frock, full-skirted. Pale blue. “Marjorie,” she said, “they’ve shot Damien.” Just that. “Marjorie, they’ve shot Damien.” Then she came in and sat down at one of the tables, and that was that. Just sat and stared. Shock, I suppose.’
Marjorie moves her head, as though trying to see whether the muscles are still working. ‘I went to the funeral, do you know that? Major Braudel’s funeral.’
‘Did you?’
‘I went with Dee. She said she wanted me for moral support. They buried him at the military cemetery in Nicosia. Wayne’s Keep, it was called. Now I remember. Good Lord, isn’t it amazing how things come back? A rather bleak place outside Nicosia. Eucalyptus trees, I remember that. The major’s wife flew out. She looked ever so lovely, standing by the grave all in black. Oh dear, they were very upsetting things, the military funerals. Rest on your arms reversed, they used to do. All in slow motion. And then the salute over the grave, the crash of rifles. And the Last Post. There were lots of tears. But not Dee. She just stood there. It was a bit frightening, really. She just stared. Like someone locked in, you know what I mean. I think she was rather fond of him.’
‘Who did it? Did they find out?’
‘EOKA, of course. Young thugs.’
‘But did they find out who the killer was?’
She moves her head. ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t. People sheltered them, you know. The killers, I mean. They were frightened to death, the ordinary people. It wasn’t a very happy time, really. And of course it only got worse. But what can you expect?’
‘And my mother? How was she after that?’
‘Oh, she came round to help out in the canteen a few more times, but very soon a married quarter came available at Episkopi and she and your father moved in there. I hardly ever saw her after that.’
‘I remember that. I remember the move.’
‘I suppose you were at boarding school most of the time.’
‘I remember bits,’ he says. ‘Nothing coherent. Just glimpses. It’s like …’ What is it like? It’s like a landscape lit up by flashes of distant lightning – a scene here, a scene there, and all around, darkness.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’ Nothing seems very funny, not in her condition.
She smiles indulgently. ‘You never know what really happened, do you? Not to other people. You know, I wonder whether she wasn’t a tiny bit in love with Major Braudel. She never spoke much about him, but I sensed something there.’
He leaves soon after that, apologizing for deserting her. ‘Someone is picking me up and I can’t be late.’
‘Will I see you again?’ she asks; the words of a woman to a fickle lover.
‘I’ll try.’
‘Please. Please do. It’s so nice having someone to talk to like this.’
In the entrance hall the nurse repeats the plea. ‘Do come to see her again. She doesn’t have many visitors. She’s got no relatives at all, in fact. There was a lady who came once or twice, but Marjorie tells me that she died.’
‘That was my mother.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Marjorie was most upset when she heard. How kind of you to keep up the good work. I do hope you’ll be back.’
She’s expecting a reply.
‘I’ll try.’
She smiles. When she put her head round the door to Marjorie’s room her smile had seemed bright and optimistic. Now Thomas sees the resignation behind it, and the weariness. ‘I know it’s a burden,’ she says, ‘but it won’t be for very long.’
Kale is waiting for him across the road when he comes out. She has picked up his car from the garage and collected Emma from school and she says she’s OK when he asks if she wants him to take over. But she drives nervously, chain-smoking, glancing in the mirror too often, braking too sharply, accelerating too rapidly. Whenever they come to a halt at traffic lights, she taps her fingers on the wheel and glances round at the vehicles packed around them.
‘You seem uptight,’ Thomas says.
‘It’s this trip, isn’t it?’
‘It’s just a weekend. Just family, nothing more.’
‘That’s the whole point. I’m not family. Me and Emms and my mum, we’re our own family, just about. I’m not inviting you to a do with her, so why am I invited to this?’
‘Because I want to be with you. Both of you. You know that, Kale. You know what I mean.’
‘But there’ll be your sister.’
‘She wants to meet you.’
‘She’ll talk about her bloody journalism or whatever it is and make me feel crummy and inadequate.’
‘She’ll talk about her journalism and you won’t be crummy and inadequate. You’ll be what you are. That’s more than good enough for me; and her.’
She glances in the mirror at her daughter in the back seat. ‘A weekend in the countryside, Emms. What do you think of that?’
Emma tries to decide. ‘Will there be …? Will there be …?’
‘Will there be what, Emms?’
‘Cows,’ the little girl decides finally. ‘Will there be cows?’
‘Horses,’ her mother says. ‘More likely there’ll be horses.’
They make their way through the suburban sprawl south of the city. Terraced houses and office blocks give way to rows of semis. ‘How was she, that Marjorie woman?’ Kale asks.
‘Remarkable, considering. A lesson in hopeless optimism.’
She glances at him. She’s looking older than her years today. A good thirty, her features shadowed, as though sketched in with charcoal. ‘Aren’t we all?’ she says.
Paula’s house is imposing, almost daunting. Built of Kentish ragstone sometime in the seventeenth century, it has gables and mullioned windows and chimneystacks that would look good as pillars in a medieval cloister. ‘Christ, what’s this?’ Kale cries as they approach. ‘A hotel? I told you we shouldn’t have come. It looks like a palace, Emms. You’ll have to wear your crown.’
‘But I haven’t got a crown.’
‘Thomas’ll buy you one.’ She brings the car to a halt on the expanse of grave
l at the front of the house. ‘What do we do? Wait for footmen to appear?’ But when the front door opens it is only Paula and the children who emerge, with the latest au pair hovering in the background.
Kale flinches at the sight of Thomas’ sister. ‘She looks like your mum.’
Thomas can never see the resemblance, but that’s what people say. For him she is just Paula, who has always been there, more or less, who is part of his life whether present or absent, whom he loves in the indifferent way that siblings have – the kind of love that will only really manifest itself when it’s too late. They greet each other with casual familiarity, while the children execute that strange dance that children employ when encountering someone new: part enthusiasm, part reserve, like cats greeting each other.
Paula gives the smile that she uses when trying to put interviewees at their ease. ‘You must be Kale. Lovely to have you here.’
Kale looks doubtful. ‘Thanks for inviting me.’
Paula bends towards Emma. ‘And your name is …?’
‘Emma.’
‘Hello, Emma.’
Emma considers her thoughtfully. ‘Have you got a crown?’
‘A crown? Not exactly. But I have got a tiara.’
‘What’s a tiara?’
‘Sort of half-a-crown.’
‘Can I see it?’
So Paula sends her off in the care of the au pair, to rummage through the dressing-up trunk in one of the bedrooms. When they come back Emma is wearing a plastic tiara that once did duty in a school production of Sleeping Beauty: she wears it with the sublime acceptance of a child, for whom such artificial things may correspond with reality.
‘We’re going to play in the pond,’ Paula’s son announces when she reappears in her regal splendour. ‘Have you brought your boots?’
Emma squints at him. ‘’Ave I?’
‘I don’t know.’ Christopher has the manner of a prep-school pupil, who knows exactly what he possesses and where every item is at all times. ‘You should know. They’re your boots, after all.’
‘Emma doesn’t have any boots,’ says her mother.
‘No wellies? How can she get by without wellies?’
‘She walks on concrete.’
Paula intervenes. ‘I’m sure we can lend Emma some boots. Birgit will show you where.’
So Kale and the au pair take Emma off on the search for boots while Thomas and his sister go through to the garden. Graham isn’t there, which is a relief. He is away on some business trip, in the US, due back tomorrow. Thomas recalls Paula’s evasion when they discussed the possibility of their mother having an affair, and he wonders now about the two of them, Graham and Paula, and how they fit together when they spend so much of their time apart. Maybe Graham is screwing someone in New York, while Paula is screwing someone else in London. Who knows?
‘Is it serious?’ Paula asks. ‘The two of you, I mean.’
‘I told you, didn’t I?’
‘You always say it is. But it never turns out to be. Has she met Phil?’
‘No. No, she hasn’t.’
‘Is she going to?’
‘Of course.’
‘She’s a bit sharp, isn’t she?’
‘She’s nervous.’
‘About what?’
‘You. All this. It’s a bit of a contrast to what she’s used to.’ He doesn’t want to admit the fact, not even to himself, but Paula’s approval of Kale is what he seeks.
‘The house? It’s a millstone round our necks.’
‘For God’s sake don’t tell her that.’
Kale comes out on to the terrace, with Emma now clumping along in rather oversized boots. The older children are already down the end of the garden, beyond the box hedge. Kale watches her daughter run clumsily down the lawn towards them. ‘You be careful, now,’ she calls. ‘I don’t want you getting wet.’
‘Chris will look after her. He’s very good like that.’
‘This,’ Kale says, meaning the garden, the entire property, the lawns and the flowerbeds and the trees, the summer-house down by the tennis court, the pond with golden carp, the three-port garage with Paula’s car in it, and the motor mower and the children’s bikes, the whole damn lot in fact, ‘is it all yours?’ She tries in vain to get the note of incredulity out of her voice. She knows it is all Paula’s. Her intelligence tells her so; it is her instinct that says different. ‘I mean, you don’t share it with anyone or anything like that?’
‘All ours. As far as the wall.’ Paula seems embarrassed. ‘Well, we share it with a few dozen rabbits, and the odd fox and things like that. Anything that can get in from the forest. Don’t you have—?’
‘A garden? You’re joking. The nearest thing’s Loughborough Park.’
‘Isn’t that Camberwell?’
‘Someone who’s heard of it! More like Brixton.’
Brixton. The name is still redolent of racial antagonism, of barricades in the street and cars burning. Paula can smell ‘story’, some heartening fable of working-class pluck in the face of adversity. ‘Is that where you live?’
‘Off Coldharbour Lane.’
‘What have you got?’
‘Got?’
‘A flat? A house?’
Kale laughs; a small exhalation of derision. ‘Oh that. A room. Just a room at the moment. In my mum’s flat. Overlooking the railway. I did share a flat, but we’ve just moved in with her.’
They talk for a while about life in Brixton, about looking after Emma, about Income Support and Child Benefit. It’s an awkward, fitful conversation. You can tell that Paula wants to ask about Emma’s father but that seems a bit tactless, even for her. So she asks about the history course that Kale has signed up to, and for once Kale isn’t defensive, but talks with enthusiasm and intelligence, that native wit that her schooling never managed to feed.
‘I think it’s quite inspiring,’ Paula observes, ‘to find someone like you going into further education. Makes me realize how easy I had it.’
Kale looks at her with something approaching contempt. ‘What do you mean, “someone like you”?’
In the afternoon Paula suggests an expedition to feed the ducks. Emma didn’t know there were ducks. ‘Where are the ducks?’ she asks. ‘Where are the ducks?’ Ducks seem too good to be true, better even than a real plastic tiara.
‘They’re in the forest.’
‘Where’s the forest?’
‘Through the gate at the bottom of the garden.’
‘Is it a secret gate?’ Emma is at that age when the questions all have answers of some kind. Thomas wonders whether that’s what growing up means: it’s when you start asking questions that have no answers.
‘It is a secret gate,’ Paula assures her, ‘but we know the spell to open it.’
The secret gate opens on to a small copse of beech and rhododendron. Beyond the trees there’s open heath. They venture out, the children running ahead.
The forest isn’t a forest, really. It’s a British sort of forest, distinguished mainly by the absence of trees. There is a sandy car park with wooden picnic benches and notices that admonish lighters of fires and scatterers of litter. The place is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the notices announce, in case the fact isn’t clear. Apparently, if you look carefully, you may find bog asphodel and sundew and things like that. Beyond the lake the slope is wooded, but you can see the roofs of houses among the trees. For all the bog asphodel, this is a tame landscape, a forest in nothing but name.
At the water the ducks converge on the children, hustling them for pieces of bread. There are patches of light on the far trees, scudding fast in the wind. The sun shines after a fashion. Once the supplies of bread are exhausted they all return to the house, straggling up the hill from the lake with the ducks complaining at their departure.
‘Where’s Emms?’ Kale asks when they reach the back door.
The question goes unheard at first. ‘Where’s Emms?’ just gets lost in the general hubbub as Paula’s children tak
e off their boots. ‘Where’s Emma gone?’ she repeats. ‘Birgit, where’s Emma?’
‘She was outside.’ The German girl’s voice rises in pitch as though she is questioning the very thing she is saying. Kale goes out to see. A moment later she is back.
‘She’s not there. Where’s she gone?’
Impatience at first, of course. ‘Paula, did you see Emma come in?’
She didn’t.
‘Christopher, where is she?’
Thomas goes back outside with Kale. They stand on the stone terrace looking out across the empty lawn, and feel only impatience. ‘Emms, where are you?’ Kale calls. ‘Mum wants you!’
There is no sign of the little girl. Kale walks across the grass – ‘Where the hell’s she got to?’ – and then suddenly she’s running. ‘The pond!’ She runs through the gap in the hedge and down to the lower level, to the stone surround of the pond where large, mysterious carp float just below the surface. Thomas follows her, dreading what they might find. But there is nothing. No Emma, no figure floating face-down in the shallow water, nothing. ‘Emms!’ she shouts, looking round. Her voice echoes off the flint wall. The light is grey and the wind sweeps through the trees beyond the wall – a sea sound, like waves raking through a shingle beach.
‘Emms!’
A small pulse of fear throbs in Thomas’ throat.
‘Emms, where are you?’ Kale calls. Her face is pale, like the face of someone at the scene of a road accident: shock, disbelief, fear. ‘Where the fuck’s she gone?’ she asks. She doesn’t ask it of Thomas, she asks it of the garden around her, of the lawn and the bushes and the trees.
‘Let’s go and look through the gate.’
‘Oh, Christ, she hasn’t gone outside …’
They discover that the gate is open. There is nothing dramatic, no plastic tiara on the ground or anything like that; but the gate is open. They step out into the trees.
‘Emms! Emms, Mum’s looking for you!’
The trees are swaying and roaring in the wind. Fright metamorphoses into panic, and panic brings the suspension of time. From mere concern to desperation takes a second and it takes half an hour. Impossible to tell which. Time runs at lightning speed and it stops. Immeasurable, it becomes useless. They run, through the trees and out into the open heath. They run because they feel that every second counts; they run without knowing where to run.