by Nina Allan
There was an envelope on the bedside cabinet, one of the standard white office variety I recognized as my own stationery. It was addressed to Mica Okonkwo. The flap was stuck down, and when I tried it with the edge of my fingernail the seal held firm. I took it through to the kitchen and used the kettle to steam it open. The letter inside was written in blue biro on two pages torn from a ring-bound exercise book. Niko’s writing was cramped and spidery, a predictable mess. He had crossed out liberally, leaving heavy indentations in the cheap paper.
I put the letter back in the envelope without reading it. It was harmless curiosity I had felt, nothing more, a child’s longing to know the end of a story. I understood it was wrong, all the same, a kind of theft. Even if Niko never found out, it was a base impulse and I refused to succumb to it. I re-sealed the envelope with Prittstick and once the glue was dry I ran over the flap lightly with a steam iron. Good as new.
* * *
—
A month went by before I was able to deliver it. When Mica finally picked up her phone, we arranged to meet in a pub we both knew, not far from Warren Street tube. I arrived there before her. I bought myself a drink then sat down to wait at a table near the entrance. Mica turned up about five minutes later. She was carrying a zip-up nylon holdall, her bushy hair held back from her face in a striped bandana. She came to sit beside me, shoving the holdall under her seat and resting her feet on it. She looked worn out, even more so than usual.
“Where have you been?” I said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.”
She shrugged. “I had to go away for a bit. My brother’s been home on leave.”
I remembered she had family somewhere in the Midlands: a sick mother who had once been an opera singer, a brother in the army. I knew nothing about them. Nor did I wish to.
“He’s gone, hasn’t he?” Mica said. There was a fierce light in her eyes but no tears, at least not yet. I thanked God for small mercies.
I nodded. “To friends in Leipzig. That’s what he told me, anyway. He left this for you.”
I handed her the envelope. She tore it open straight away. I was surprised by that. I had assumed she would secrete it away somewhere, save it for later, when she was alone. The flap of the envelope came up all of a piece, without tearing. I wondered if Mica would notice such a telling detail, which of course made me think of Niko, all his crazy talk about spies.
She scanned the letter while I sat there, moving her lips from time to time as if trying to memorize the words. After a couple of minutes she put it back in the envelope, which she tucked into the inside pocket of her anorak.
“Did you persuade him to take some money?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Her question startled me with its practicality. I noted the dark bags under her eyes, the closed expression, the accumulation of years of worry and vague disappointment, pain she was so used to bearing it had become the norm.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s what he wants.”
Once again, I felt surprised. I had expected Mica to flood me with questions, to demand to know the final details of Niko’s escape so she could make plans to follow him. When such demands were not forthcoming I began to understand something of Niko’s decision to leave without attempting to see her. He needed something to believe in, some last shred of hope. Times changed after all, and so did regimes. What did the artist in exile dream of nightly but a return to the land and to the people that inspired their art?
A light left burning in an upstairs window, as the sun went down.
Mica Okonkwo would know this. She would take care to ensure that the light did not go out.
Mica went into the tube at Warren Street. I carried on down Tottenham Court Road, wishing I had a plane to catch. It was Saturday, and as I drew closer to Centre Point the crowds increased until I found myself having to step off the pavement to avoid getting jostled. The latest techno-gadgetry sparkled from the windows of the electronics franchises, and I thought about a shop front I had walked past in Budapest once, where knocked-off cameras and fake Walkmans fought for space alongside hunting rifles and World War II gas masks. The gas masks had been fitted with modern chemical filters, although they still looked like death traps to me.
By Percy Street a bank of widescreen TVs in the window of the Sony Centre lingered over the same image: a child dressed in prison yellow being forced down a board ramp into what looked like an empty swimming pool. I lingered for a moment, trying to work out what was happening, and realized with a jolt that the figure in overalls was not a child but Noah Pinkowski, that the screens were displaying a rerun of his execution. Pinkowski’s eyes were sunken and haunted, dark with fatigue. The guards to either side of him carried electronic stun guns of the kind more usually found in slaughterhouses. They had taken away Pinkowski’s glasses, which was probably the reason I hadn’t recognized him. He was wearing leg irons.
Shots of the crowd showed people with their mouths open and fists raised, visibly heckling. Either the sound had been muted or the reinforced glass prevented me from hearing what they were shouting. Either way I was glad.
As I turned away from the screens I saw two women come out of the store. They were clearly mother and daughter, the one a fast-wind-forward of the other. They each held a plastic carrier emblazoned with the crown-shaped logo of one of the newer satellite companies.
“Let’s go to that new place, on Charlotte Street,” the older woman was saying. “I’m dying to take the weight off my feet.”
The younger woman laughed and shook her head. “I told you those shoes would kill you,” she said.
It’s strange, isn’t it, the way our lives all turn on moments rather than epochs? If those women hadn’t come out of the shop precisely then, I would probably still be in New Cross, living out of suitcases and agreeing to tolerate whichever fresh act of madness the Rouse regime chose to perpetrate in any given week. As it was, their words – so innocently spoken, cruel to the point of blasphemy when considered against the atrocity playing out silently on the screen behind them – acted upon me more potently than all my reasoning and counter-reasoning had so far been able. I went straight home, and as soon as I’d taken off my coat I made two phone calls, one to Foxton’s estate agents on New Cross Road, the other to Sallie Stowells’s office in Melbourne.
“How soon can you start?” said Sallie. She really did seem delighted.
“How soon do you want me?” I said.
* * *
—
There was no reason to tell Laura I was leaving but I called her anyway. When she insisted on coming over to say goodbye properly I did not try to dissuade her.
“This place,” she said as she entered the flat. “I never thought you’d sell it.”
“You hate it, Laura, you know you do. You’ve hated it from day one.”
“I said it’s a mess. That’s not the same thing at all.”
Her hair had been recently styled, clinging close to her skull like a piece of expensive silk headgear. As I helped her off with her coat her familiar scent came wafting out, vanilla and roses, the aroma of delight accomplished, with a vague undertow of corruption.
She crossed to the window, staring out over the office blocks, renovated tenements and boarded-up garages of New Cross Gate. I went and stood behind her, pulling her against me, letting her feel how hard I was.
“You’re a bastard, Ivan,” she said. I began to unbutton the top she was wearing, a cropped-off cream-colored cardigan in silk cashmere. We made it slow. At the end I sat on the edge of the bed and let her come sitting astride me in the way she liked. Once she had finished I rolled her on her back and dug into her, hard, climaxing in a single thrust. When I opened my eyes I found her staring right into them, her blue-mauve irises darkened to the color of lupins.
“You’re a bastard, Ivan,�
�� she said again. She laughed softly. I kissed her on the mouth for the last time.
We put our clothes back on and I made tea. While going through my stuff for the house clearance I discovered I still had the Meissen à deux tea service one of her girlfriends had given us as a wedding present. If Laura remembered it she passed no comment. Her feet were still bare, legs crossed at the ankles. The skin over the bone was taut, delicate, bluish-white like the porcelain.
“How will you stand it?” she said. She took a sip from her cup. “They say Australia is going down the tubes.”
“I need a change,” I said. “If it’s too ghastly I can always come back.”
I knew I wouldn’t, though. I think Laura did, too.
* * *
—
In summer you can lie on a hammock strung beneath the eaves and watch the lightning setting off bush fires. For some reason and in spite of all the times I’ve come under bombardment, the lightning terrifies me. One night in an effort to forget about it, I wrote the first six pages of a novel about a firefighter who had been disfigured in a bomb blast. The following morning I was on a plane to Hong Kong to report on the aftermath of the stock exchange shootings. I had a lot on my mind, but at the same time I found I couldn’t forget about that imaginary woman and the life I had begun to invent for her. I’d never written fiction before. I had never really seen the point of it, until now.
Once I’d checked into my hotel I hooked up the laptop and had another look at what I’d written so far. The words seemed both mine and not mine. The sensation was strange to me and curiously exhilarating. I couldn’t help wanting to know how the story might end.
11.
I WAS LATER DOWN TO breakfast than I had intended. A place had been laid for me in the bar. I saw used cutlery and plates at several of the other tables, which suggested there were other guests staying at The Tarquin after all. There was no sign of them now, whoever they were. I sat down to wait, and after a minute or so the barman from the evening before came through to take my order. His hair was tied back with a bootlace, and there was a red smear across the back of his hand that appeared to be ketchup.
“Full English or continental?” he asked. I opted for the cooked breakfast. Bramber had always been at pains in her letters to stress that West Edge House didn’t cater for guests, and I thought it would be unwise to count on getting lunch there. When the barman reappeared with the food I asked him about buses to Tarquin’s End.
“There’s the ten twenty to Padstow,” he said. “That stops at Tarquin’s Cross. You’ll have to walk from there but it’s only a mile.”
I thought he might ask why I wanted to go there but he didn’t. As he came back to clear the table I got up to leave.
“Do you know why this pub is called The Tarquin?” I asked, as an afterthought. “Does it have any connection with Tarquin’s End?”
He shrugged. “The Tarquins owned most of the land around here at one time, so I suppose it must have.”
“Were they farmers?”
“They were rich, that’s all I know. The churchyard at Tarquin’s End is full of them.”
“Are there Tarquins still up at the house?”
“You mean the loony bin?” For the first time since I arrived, the man seemed curious about me. “Is that where you’re going?”
“I have an interest in historic houses,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“That place never had anything to do with the Tarquins, so far as I know,” he said. “Huge, it is. Bit of a rabbit warren. A mate of mine went up there once, on a carpentry job. He said the corridors inside went on forever. Miles, he said. They paid him on time though. You can’t say fairer than that.”
“Is it still in use as a hospital, then? I thought it had been closed down.”
“They don’t lock them up these days, any road. They’re allowed to come and go as they like, apparently. Bit of a peculiar setup, if you ask me.” He stacked my dirty plates in the crook of his elbow. “Ask the driver. He’ll tell you where to get off.”
“Do they still take new patients?”
“I couldn’t say. A real white elephant, anyway. I dread to think what they spend on electricity.”
He shrugged again then left the room. I waited, hoping he might return – my mind was full of questions suddenly – but he seemed to have disappeared. I went back upstairs to my room to collect my holdall. I hadn’t wanted to bring it down to breakfast with me in case anyone asked me what was in it, a precaution that now seemed somewhat foolish, to say the least. I came down to find the door to the street standing open, bright sunlight splashing the tiles. From somewhere upstairs I could hear the muted hum of a vacuum cleaner. It was ten past ten.
The bus stop was on the square. A small crowd had already gathered, mostly women and children. The women carried bulging tote bags and rolled up towels, presumably bound for the beach and seaside amusements at Padstow. As I joined the queue I caught sight of the two children I had seen outside the Jolly Roger the evening before. When the girl saw me she looked down at the pavement and tried to hide herself behind a tall, brown-armed woman in a yellow sundress. When the bus arrived she jumped quickly on board and ran straight to the back. The bus itself looked ancient, its sides streaked with rust.
I asked the driver for a ticket to Tarquin’s Cross.
“Three fifty,” he grunted. For a wonder, he barely glanced at me. I handed him the money then sat down near the front. The vehicle’s interior smelled of warm plastic and dry earth.
“Frog prince, frog prince,” crooned the plump girl’s brother.
“Get off, you’re hurting,” said the girl. I turned briefly in my seat to look at them. He was tugging at her hair. When he noticed me watching he covered his mouth with his hands and began to laugh.
The woman in the yellow sundress told him to stop, her darkened lashes dipping low over her eyes. She looked just like him. The girl sidled away and pressed her face to the window. The last of the town’s granite houses fell away.
The bus turned onto the potholed B-road that skirted the moor. The landscape was stark and barren, the heathery scrubland frequently pierced by outcrops of rough granite. Here and there I spied the ruins of cottages or barns. There was little traffic. The road ran due north for a couple of miles then dipped southwest, following the line of an ancient and mostly eroded river valley. I could see a crossroads up ahead, one route branching northwards in the direction of Pentland and Padstow, the other cutting east-west across the moor. The bus began to slow down. I got hastily to my feet.
“Which way to Tarquin’s End?” I asked the driver. He pointed west, then jammed his finger on the button that opened the doors. I stepped down onto the tarmac. The bus remained stationary for a moment then did an abrupt right-hand turn and lurched away towards Padstow.
The road as it continued was dusty and narrow, scarcely more than a track. The moor stretched away to the horizon on either side. After half an hour of walking I came to a dry stone wall and soon afterwards a humpbacked bridge. The river that ran beneath it was all but dry. The duck pond, I thought – that must feed into the duck pond. The bridge I recognized from the large-scale ordnance survey map I had bought back in London. On the other side of the river was Tarquin’s End.
I counted eleven low-slung cottages including the post office stores. They were built from red brick, a marked contrast with the granite facades I had seen in Bodmin. The duck pond was fringed with dead bulrushes and almost empty of water. In the reeds close to the bank, a child’s wooden sailing boat dangled helplessly by its rigging, its red hull crisscrossed with scratches. One of its triangular sails had been torn away.
I passed a pillar box, a red telephone kiosk. Unlike the phone box in Bodmin, this one had no telephone inside, just a faded directory and a sheet of paper with “out of order” scrawled across it in loose, handwritten capitals. The adhesive tape a
ttaching it to the glass had begun to peel away.
Brick access paths twisted their way between the cottages. Weeds grew up through the cracks, tufts of thistle and ragwort, their stems coarse as horsehair. I started towards the post office stores, meaning to ask for directions, then saw it was closed. In the long back gardens of the other cottages I could see washing hung out to dry on nylon clotheslines, children’s toys scattered haphazardly on the patchy grass. Music drifted from an open window, a chart hit from the 1970s that had been a secret favorite of my father’s. I tried to think of the name of the band but couldn’t remember.
The road sloped upwards past the cottages, following the curve of the valley. To my left stood the Church of St. Ninian’s, a modest but well-proportioned building with a square tower and Norman arches. Whereas the mean red cottages could only ever emphasize the bleakness of the landscape they stood in, the church seemed to exert the opposite effect, wresting from its surroundings an impression of uplifting purity that was unexpectedly exhilarating.
Beyond the church lay the open moor. I hesitated, wondering if I had taken a wrong turning somehow, then carried on up the track. After a further twenty minutes of walking the road ended. There, in the shallow cleft of land between one tract of moorland and another, lay West Edge House.
Had I been expecting a vision of mullioned windows and ivy-clad walls I would have been disappointed. In reality, West Edge House was a three-story 1920s villa that had obviously seen better days. The exterior paintwork was peeling badly, the pebbledash render – clearly once white – had turned a dingy gray. The large and ugly bay windows on the ground floor lent the building an air of graceless angularity, whilst the entrance porch – a pillared portico in a mock-Classical style – seemed like a later addition and entirely out of keeping with the whole.