What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Two girls, Megan and Beth. Megan is five and Beth’s four.’

  ‘You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Well, here we are!’

  Then Dora was quiet; as if, with nothing left to do, she had nothing left to say. When her cup chattered on its saucer Iris saw her hands were shaking, and she had to stop herself from reaching out and stilling them with her own. She didn’t know what to say herself. Dora’s nerves were infectious. The flat was unnaturally silent. It smelt faintly repellant: pipe smoke, egg and cress sandwiches, and two people no longer young.

  She said, ‘You have a piano,’ and Dora looked at the upright with unnecessary gratitude.

  ‘Oh yes! Solly bought it for my fortieth. I learned when I was a girl. I used to play for Solly sometimes, when we met. My father was always there, of course . . . he made Solly so nervous. I could play Bach, but I daren’t now. Sometimes I do try Chopin.’

  She got up, and for a moment Iris thought she meant to play – it might have been a relief – but instead Dora picked up the picture from beside the violets. ‘And this is Henry,’ she said, brightly. ‘You remember Henry, don’t you? Of course you do, you were always running wild together.’

  Pond on a hillside, with a kite across his knees.

  ‘He made that himself, that kite. Solly was pleased, ever so. It was something they did together. It has two strings, you see, for tricks. You like the picture, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iris said, ‘I do. It’s not how I remember him, but –’

  ‘No, because he’d be fourteen there . . . well, that’s what we called him, fourteen. That was his official age. You could tell he was older by then, you could see it in his face. He was always small for his age. You didn’t know him then. He got to be so clever. He caught up like anything at school. He wanted to be a pilot. Not an army pilot, because he was against all that. Fighting.’

  She was speaking of him in the past. A chill went through Iris (the violets; the picture turned to the wall), and she searched out Dora’s gaze. ‘He’s not –’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not like that. We’d have heard, wouldn’t we, if it was?’ Dora asked, reasonably, and all Iris could do was nod into the silence that slunk back in between them.

  They were side by side on the settee. She was looking back at Pond’s face, uncertain, trying to think what to say next, when Dora reached up and stroked her hair. It was a motherly gesture, an errant curl tucked back behind Iris’s ear.

  ‘So, where –’ she started, but Dora went on again, as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘He missed you, after you’d gone. You especially. He liked you, dear. There was Bernadette’s boy, Jem, they stayed friends for a bit, but after Bernadette that was hard. And they went to different schools, and then the LCC men came and condemned the Buildings, and we were all moved out. We all went our own ways. I don’t know what happened to the Malcolms, I think they might have gone by then. You can have that if you like, the picture.’

  ‘Oh,’ Iris said, ‘I couldn’t,’ but Dora tushed.

  ‘It’s no trouble, I’ve copies. I want you to have it. I’ve albums, too, would you like to see?’

  They looked together. Pond as Iris remembered him; animal, whip-thin, all hollow and bone. Pond as Henry Lazarus, filling into hand-me-downs. Henry in uniform: cub scout, boy scout, school. On a beach, on a train, on a boat eating sandwiches (egg and cress, from the look of them). Henry eating spaghetti. Poised over a Christmas pudding and its spectral flame. On a hill, with a kite, smiling, his eyes still searching.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked, when she couldn’t bear it any more, and Dora closed the album, patted it, and pushed herself back to her feet. She went to the service hatch, where Iris’s flowers stood in a cut glass vase, waiting for their right place to be found.

  ‘I’ve always liked ’mums. You don’t have to wonder about them, they wear their hearts on their sleeves. Some flowers are like that, aren’t they? They’re just pretty and that’s the end of them. Do you know what I mean?’ Dora asked, with such expectancy that Iris must have agreed, must have said yes out of politeness; but she can’t recall. Her own voice escapes her, though the memory isn’t so old, in the scheme of things.

  ‘We don’t know, love,’ Dora said then. ‘Henry went away. He went away twelve years ago and he never came back to us.’

  Because it is unfinished. Because, when Michael Lockhart was found guilty on five counts of eight (warehousebreaking with aggravation; stealing the contents of a safe; dangerous driving; assault on a Peace Officer with intent to resist apprehension; manslaughter committed with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of himself, the said Michael Lockhart), being acquitted only of the attempted murder of John McEachan and two lesser charges, which malicious assault Norman Varney had admitted to his common-law wife; and when the Judge called Michael A cold and violent man, and sent him away out of the lives of all who needed him . . . because whatever Iris felt for Pond was unformed, then, only just beginning. Because those feelings were a bright point in the bright time just before the storm. Because she wants to know the end.

  Perhaps that’s why she looks for him.

  The names trouble her. There are too many to account for. He could be Something Pond. He could be Something Lazarus. He could go under Henry, and it still wouldn’t be his real name. There were names given him and lost before Iris ever knew him. Iris has found them. Pond could have found them, too: Dora says he looked for them, in the beginning. So many names are possible that he becomes anonymous.

  And what is he? What has he become? He might have fallen through the cracks. He might be on the streets again, or sleeping in a hole in the ground. He might be a nobody, or wealthy. Wealth might conceal him. He might be dead. He might be flying.

  When they were in Holloway Iris hardly ever thought of Pond. He was part of the lost world then, the world of Columbia Road, and like the road itself he seemed increasingly unreal. Iris doesn’t recall Mum or Floss ever mentioning him at home, and no one spoke of Pond to Dad on those days – rare as birthdays – when Mum took them along on visits to Pentonville (the doors and gates closing them in, the eyes of men dwelling on them, and Floss always terrible to Dad – embittered by lost faith – when she still visited at all). Even after Dad came home Pond remained one of many things never spoken of, the memories that might have lead to talk of Bernadette, and being unmentionable he faded away over the years almost to nothing.

  It was only when Iris left home that Pond came back to her, or she to him. It was at college that she began to wonder, and it began with Semlin.

  Imaginary friends belong to the hard chapters of childhood. They come calling when there are things which can’t be said to people in the flesh, or when the flesh won’t listen, or when what others say is dangerous to listen to, and only the whispers of a Semlin will drown the danger out.

  Later there are real friends, and sooner or later doubt creeps in. It takes a child to make a Semlin and to go on believing in him. That’s what Iris thinks, because that’s how it was for her. Semlin came to her when Iris came to London, and all the friends she’d made in her first six years were left behind in Birmingham; and he left her in Holloway, where she grew out of him.

  Or did she? Has she? In Holloway, Iris kept up the habit of talking to herself, a friendly to-and-fro murmur that made solitude comforting. Bit by bit, in North London, she stopped naming her comforter, but it was half-Semlin all the same, imagined at fourteen or sixteen not out of faith but with dim affection. Iris recalled her made-up friend long after she’d formally dispensed with his services; and even now, now and then, she converses with something, though it might be years since she put a name to her conversant. Iris doesn’t fear to be alone because she never feels alone.

  They became intertwined, those things, though Iris hardly knows it. Her faithful echo became the sum of both lost friends; half-Semlin, half-Pond.

  In 1958, two years after Mich
ael came home, the Lockharts moved from their Holloway flat to a house in Highbury, and Iris went up to Leeds. She’d worked hard at school, had surpassed the expectations of her unexpectant Secondary Modern teachers, and had offers, for History, from two Universities. Leeds was the less prestigious, but it was her choice. Before her interviews she’d looked up her suitors on the map. Leeds was further and that was enough. Iris was less sure of herself then, more willing to follow Florence in her dogged flight from Michael and childhood. All through those years she thought she wanted distance.

  She didn’t find it. Leeds was full of echoes. The back-to-backs, where the kids kicked rag-footballs hell for leather and played their made-up games; the covered markets, where the costers hawked cuts of meat and cloth, choice or cheap; and the forthright people, whose warmth embraced her but whose thresholds she never crossed, never being invited: none of it was foreign to her. It was intimate but faint, as though she’d lived it all herself, not only in another city, but in another life.

  She liked Leeds, but not its University. She was too reticent to shine in lectures, too doubtful to excel on paper. Her tutors had no time for her. She made friends with difficulty. Her hall of residence was Moor Grange in Headingley, a Victorian conversion, handsome to look at from a distance but internally unpleasant, with disused gaslights that still leaked a residual stench in close weather, and dank parqueted corridors that echoed under the heels of girls who shopped in shops, not markets, and whose voices jostled for position, diffident or confident, but always – to Iris – seeming driven by a need to hunt out common ground, a reassuring hierarchy of grammar schools, holidays, paternal occupations, books and clothes and boys and places which Iris had never read or worn or seen or known to fancy.

  The evening she arrived in Leeds: that was when she found Semlin.

  Her train had been delayed, first in leaving London and again later that afternoon while crossing some interminable process of Midlands mining towns. It was dark by the time she reached Moor Grange and the porter was short with her. Iris gave her name and received her keys and dour directions, but somehow she went wrong. She missed her floor and climbed on as far as the attics, which the girls called the Garrets, where the corridors admitted little natural light, and the rooms – she heard it later – were uncomfortably low, their ceilings gathering down to filthy lattice-leaded windows.

  She put down her cases to pat along the walls for light. She found a timer switch, pressed it and hurried on unhindered, peering down at her keys and up at the doors, none of which was hers and some of which were already posted with the names of eager new inhabitants. She had gone half the hallway’s length when the lamps flickered, the plunger by the stairwell forewarning of its depletion, and Iris just had time to catch the name on the next door. J. Semlin, she read, and then the lights went out.

  She stood trembling. She told herself she was wrong, but she knew what she’d seen, and as the dark receded – her eyes accustoming to the dim cast of the next window – the door became half-visible. She made herself go closer. There was the name, handwritten in inked capitals on cartridge paper, the scrap inserted into a brass slot meant for something more enduring. She could hear nothing from inside. She raised her hand to knock and then lowered it and turned back the way she’d come. Somewhere along the walls she found another switch and went on without looking back through the reinvigorated light.

  She never met J. Semlin. She listened for the name, at Moor Grange, at the University and in town, but Iris never heard anyone call for her or speak of her and she never saw her. Later – years later – she asked someone about the name, a man who knew about such things, and he told her that it might be Balkan or German, that there were Semlins in the East and that some of those had gone to Canada. And once, at the end of her time in Leeds, she went back up to the Garrets, meaning to knock, but only once, and that was more than enough.

  In a way it was nothing. Nothing really happened except that the door haunted her. Its name was hers, but not hers. Semlin. It was her possession, being her invention. It was her secret and it had no right to be out in the world. It was like meeting an abandoned friend in a new place, or coming suddenly on a mirror in an unfamiliar house. It was like seeing a ghost. She thought of the door too often, too much for comfort, and as the door nagged at her she began to think and dream of other things. Semlin led back to the street of flowers, to the hole in Long Debris, to Bernadette, and Pond.

  She kept Dad from everyone. She told no one about him until she left college, and then, of those she’d met at Leeds, only Harry, and Connie, her one best friend. She met Connie in the autumn term, in Kirkgate Market, at Turner’s Ladies’ Intimates.

  Iris was looking at the lingerie; looking without touching, because all but the most functional items were beyond her means (half the bras she owned then were still rubberised home-mades; her best were Marks and Sparks discounts, in grim melanoid flesh-tones). Close by, Mrs Turner and a tall girl were discussing stockings.

  ‘I don’t do them,’ Mrs Turner said, and the girl folded her arms, bracing for disagreement.

  ‘Well, that’s a pity. I’ve tried the shops. Women do wear them.’

  ‘Ladies don’t.’

  ‘How would you know? Oh look, I haven’t come to argue about it. I just thought, in the markets . . . I don’t suppose you’d know who has them?’

  ‘Mesh,’ said Mrs Turner, and others besides Iris heard her then, the man with the dogs by Scarr’s Drapery (the dogs following their master’s gaze), the women by the corsets. ‘You’re a student, aren’t you? What do you want with them?’

  ‘That’s hardly your business, is it?’

  ‘It’s my business, if I’m saying what I know.’

  ‘Well are you going to, or not?’

  The coster sucked her cheeks. The girl’s face was flaming. She stood too straight for comfort, as if to draw together the tatters of her dignity. She looks like the guards at Buckingham Palace, Iris thought, like a guard in rotten weather; boylike, toylike, ridiculous.

  ‘Try Loughton’s, over there. They do theatricals,’ Mrs Turner said, and close by in the roofed-in gloom a woman chuckled. Iris became aware that the people around her had become an audience, an unkind one, wanting nothing good, hungry for comeuppance; and with awareness came regret, for Iris, at having thought of the girl unkindly herself.

  ‘Mind how you go, love,’ Mrs Turner said, as the girl turned away; and then, raising her iron-flat coster’s voice, for the benefit of her crowd, ‘You might want to mind your manners, and all.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  ‘Men like young ladies with good manners. You talk with them as you talk with me, you won’t be getting far with them and they won’t go far with you. And then those mesh stockings of yours, they won’t be here nor there, will they?’

  The girl walked briskly. She had reached the market gates, was unruffling a brolly, before Iris caught her up.

  ‘Excuse me, are you alright? I saw what happened,’ she said, and the girl turned to her; on her, almost, with the shoppers shouldering around them, still market-thick in the high street.

  ‘Did you? I hope you had a good laugh at my expense. Save some fun for your friends at Moor Grange, won’t you? I’m sure they’ll thank you for the entertainment.’

  Her cheeks were still flushed, Iris saw, and her eyes were wet; but not miserable, as Iris’s would have been. Agitated, not chastened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t laugh, anyway. I thought it was horrible,’ Iris said, and before she could say anything else the girl was shrugging and glancing away.

  ‘Well, it was my own fault. I asked the wrong woman for my sluttish stockings, didn’t I? And I should have shut up when I had the chance, but I never can seem to. Still, it wasn’t pleasant. I don’t think I’ll be back in a hurry. Gosh, I’m dying to sit down. I suppose that’s the trouble with markets, isn’t it? Do you think someone around here would serve us tea, or will word of
me have spread already?’

  Iris paid for the teas. The girl had cigarettes.

  ‘You’re very kind. You’re an angel, actually,’ the girl said, ‘or a knight in shining armour. Which would make me your damsel in distress, wouldn’t it? Or your soul in need of saving. Are you?’

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘A good Samaritan, always saving Philistines. Was it Philistines with him? Anyhow, you look like you might be.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ Iris said. ‘I don’t know how. To save people, I mean. I don’t know much of anything. My tutor seems to think I’m more of a Philistine.’

  ‘You’re lucky. Mine thinks I’m the damsel, and the story is he eats them. I’m Connie.’

  ‘Iris.’

  ‘Angel, then. Knights get pretty names, like Lancelot or Percival, but Iris is beautiful.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. Flowers and rainbows. Not like Constance. Who chose it?’

  ‘My mum.’

  ‘There you are. Daddy chose mine. You can tell he wasn’t keen. Nothing’s much fun if it’s constant, is it? Miss Constance Nuisance Interruption, that’s what he used to call me.’

  They nursed their teas. The place was cosy, the one window drizzle-fogged. The smell of fried breakfasts, thick as lard.

  ‘Why were you buying them?’ Iris asked, ‘the stockings?’

  ‘Oh . . . it sounds silly now. There’s a fellow I’ve been seeing, at the Medical School. He said something about liking them. Not that I’m doing it for him, I don’t dress for men. He did spark my interest, though. That woman was right, I do go in for the theatrical. I wanted to see Richard’s face. Gobsmacked, is that what you say? Do you have a fellow?’

  ‘No,’ Iris said, meaning Never.

  ‘You should come along to the Med School, you’ll have young doctors swarming all over you.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to be swarmed.’

  ‘It’s alright, they don’t sting, not unless you want them to. They’re gentlemen most of the time, just a bit full of bravado. I think it must be the prospect of future eminence. It’s charming, in any case. Will you? Come along?’