‘May I offer you a cup?’ She hoped he might unbend. From his hesitation she thought he might accept. But his answer was more like the beginning of something he had prepared. ‘Francis,’ he said. The fingers of one hand moved against a pleat in his gown. ‘He has become a problem for us. For us all.’
She continued to look at him, at the light sliding on his glasses. The tiny blank ovals. That was it. Like the Beatle. ‘We know little about him,’ Ambrose went on. ‘He arrived at the Mission and, as you know, is unwilling to tell us anything.’
Lisa felt the pulse in her neck throb, but she spoke calmly. ‘His silence is not by choice, we all know that.’
Ambrose then saying carefully what she knew was meant to tell her more than the words themselves declared. He explained, as he might to a child, to a foreigner who failed to know these things, that for those who lived here, those who knew this country, the boy was from another place entirely. Had she noticed how people here observed him? Had it occurred to her he did not speak because he did not understand the language, that he had nothing to say in return when he was addressed?
The priest took her silence for agreement. His tone altered slightly, as if he meant to compliment her that she was wise to attend as she did. There is nothing remarkable, you may think to yourself, Doctor, that a boy walks into the Mission, ‘a boy from the bush’, a phrase he knew ironically carried more than it simply said. He knew he spoke English with a subtlety that might surprise her. He repeated, ‘There is nothing remarkable in that.’ People of all kinds, of different ages, as she of course well knew, came to take their turn at the clinic, arriving with hope, perhaps because God had moved them, it is not for us to ask such things. He paused, giving her a chance to speak, and then went on, ‘But the boy is not like the others. We have given him a name and a place to sleep, but you must have noticed, Doctor, people look at him because his strangeness strikes them. His silence, his scrutiny, discomforts them. The handsomeness even of his features, which you must be aware of? The sense of such distance from the rest of us? People are afraid of him.’
‘There is no reason to be, surely?’ Lisa said. ‘The boy is either sick, or afflicted in some way we are not yet quite sure of.’
‘Which is what I mean,’ Ambrose said. ‘Perhaps even reasons we are right to fear?’
And then the tall commanding man changed tack again. She felt his distaste at having to speak with her, even that. He said, choosing his word precisely, and the choice not lost on her, ‘The boy is possessed with you.’
‘He trusts me. That is fairly obvious and simple.’
‘As he does no one else. But then they are not his people either. Which is why he must leave.’ And after a pause which he knew disconcerted her, ‘His safety cannot be guaranteed.’
‘You cannot say that, Father,’ Lisa said, the first and only time she addressed him as others did.
‘You might ask your friend,’ he said, ‘the friend you drink tea with. He has been here a long time.’
‘Longer than any, I believe. Apart from Bernard.’
‘Sister Bernard,’ he said.
His glasses again bright glints as his head tilted. Then the man taking her by surprise. Without alteration in his tone or emphasis, his telling her, ‘I can help you.’
‘Yes?’
‘In a few weeks your time here comes to an end. Your contract.’
‘My volunteering.’
‘Francis. He might even leave with you. You would not be deserting him. You could save him.’ For the one time, his smiling slightly, as if the word he chose should amuse her as well. His too obviously enjoying the irony of it.
How matter-of-factly it was done. How neatly choice was taken from her. And then, a brisk phrase cutting across his usual formality. A sigh, was it, of relief? ‘Right, then.’ They would work together. In confidence.
‘You mean Declan?’
‘Father Declan need not be told.’
Lisa felt the sense of relief that flowed from him. His surprising her yet again as he removed his glasses, holding them for a moment in his opened palm, a folded wire insect. The tiredness of his eyes one noticed at no other time.
‘You of course will need to attend to matters as well.’
‘Of course.’
‘At that end.’
‘You mean what we’re doing is illegal.’
He corrected her. ‘Unauthorised.’ And then, ‘I expect it is a little like being a doctor. There are times when necessity suggests its own rules.’ He then explained, almost condescendingly, that she must not expect things to be done everywhere as they were in England. But yes, he would arrange travel in one continent, while she took care of whatever might need to be attended to in another. When such things were arranged, Luke would drive them to the airport for the capital, from there a flight to a country further north. There were trucks one might make deals with, ‘people deals’, on crossings that every day of the week carried legitimate cargoes to and from Italian ports. Legitimate cargoes and sometimes people. ‘There will be no difficulties with that. Not on this side.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, Doctor Ross, you are more or less with your own people. You will be back in Europe.’
Strange, how so suddenly clear it was, what she might do to begin. She had not thought of Fergus for an age, not in any serious way. His charm, his impulsive vanity, his untroubled lack of principle. His desire for her, oh that, certainly, which she knew might still be appealed to, for the reason he had not put an end to it himself. The cards they sent to each other at the end of each year. The pretence of a surviving thread. The cold thought coming to her that she was prepared to lie, to him, to anyone. The fact striking her with an insistent force, as she watched the tall dark man who had now unfolded the glasses lying in his hand, and replaced them, their wire again finding the thin indentations where their arms fitted at the side of his face. At last there is a commitment I cannot avoid.
Lisa said, ‘I will need to use the telephone in the teachers’ common room. There are several calls I will need to make.’
‘The one in my office. You will find that more private.’
Within a day of their speaking, then. While Father Ambrose stood at the front of a morning class, teaching the clever senior boys mathematics with a clarity they admired yet found intimidating, she sat in a wooden chair in his office. A row of folders along the wall faced him when he worked at the dark polished desk, a heavy slab of nineteenth-century furniture from a disestablished German mission fifty miles away. She arranged a call to London first, unsure of the exact time, but finding her professor on the point of leaving for a grandson’s birthday party. Leonard was cordial, he understood quickly what she explained to him, he did not question the decision she had taken. He told her, ‘As if there is any choice.’ He would get in touch at once with his Italian friend. ‘They are more imaginative in dealing with the unexpected,’ he said. Lisa easily imagined his quiet smile as he wryly avoided other words for the strings that would be pulled, the possible favours to be returned, the network of possibilities as a suitable institution was sought. Of course, he assured her. He would be in touch at once with what he called ‘my contacts’. And with another word that seemed so appropriate to him, proposed a week’s time, that would be sufficient for what they planned between them, their ‘co-ordinates’.
She was moved, holding the black heavy telephone in her sweating hand, by how her friend and teacher so immediately accepted what she asked of him, his agreeing without questioning her in detail. Her story must have sounded absurd—to smuggle a boy without papers into another country, breaking immigration laws, risking prosecution, a thought that came to her only as she spoke, and listened to the precise voice answering her from the room she imagined so clearly, the faded Persian rugs on the polished floor, the old-fashioned bookshelves with broad wire meshing, the small Chagall, an animal’s blue head with a small inverted figure drifting in its mirroring eye, that he had showed her with such pr
ide. A handicapped boy, she said. A child who would be at great risk, and Leonard telling her further details could wait, for the moment. His assuring her, ‘I do,’ when she said, ‘You must take so much on trust.’ Then the dead tone of the disconnected line.
Her next call was the more difficult. She was glad it would be late at night, that it was the answering machine she would speak to in her brother’s office. The dark slice as it would be at this hour, the wedge of harbour between the dull concrete sides of the commercial blocks he looked out on. The room where they had argued together last time she was back. But now, the easier part first. To transfer money at once to her bank in Gloucester Road. She would explain all that to him later, as she paid it back. Perhaps for three months. ‘So much up in the air,’ she said, ‘quite a few things to be sorted out.’ She knew David would do this for her at once. He did not need details. A sister who was sensible at least in things like this, to do with money, unlike wives who had no more conception than a child of how it must be worked for, how it might strike them as a boring thing to observe, as a tiresome reminder, but money, no, even though you are a wife, it does not grow on trees. Scraps of his confiding curiously coming to mind even as she left her message for him. Then she needed to ring back, when the recording loop came to an end. The hardest part, not because it would puzzle him, but because what she asked would hurt him even more than anger him. He would think she had not been straight with him. She asked would he walk the hundred or so yards in the Crescent, from the home where their father now lived alone, to the Costellos’ plain brick state house. He must ask Fergus’s parents how he might get in touch with him, urgently. An address, a telephone, whatever. Tell them what story he liked, she said. She realised how much it was, to ask her brother to do this. But she must know. She would explain another time. You must do this for me, David. A life may depend on it. There is nothing I have done so important as this.
The phrase which her niece would hear in twenty years’ time when she talked with the prematurely aged and agitated man Esther’s father loathed and yet encouraged her to visit, whom she sat with beneath a scab-trunked plane tree in a wire-enclosed garden, the harbour on that first visit blue as cobalt in the distance. Sat flattering him, drawing his story. His telling the young woman on the institutional bench facing him, whose similarity to the woman he spoke of both placated and disturbed. That is exactly, he will tell her several times, exactly what she fucking said, what I fucking fell for. There was nothing she had done so important as this.
2001
He tells her again, he doesn’t give a monkey’s stuff for why she is there, why she wants to know, if it’s sentiment she’s hoping for she can forget it now. You won’t get him playing that line, girl, when you’ve seen as much of the fucking world as he has.
Esther holds his eye, letting him know she is no more offended by what he says or how he says it than she is intimidated by his age, his illness, the bully she guesses is there in the petulant and decaying man sitting opposite her, his hunching forward in his chair, one hand clasping tightly on each knee. Epi the Tongan security guard walks up and down on the path outside the visitor’s lounge they sit in, snooping, that’s what they’re paid to do, the man tells her, he has to put up with that every fucking hour of the day. She’ll have to wear it too for the time she’s there. If she doesn’t know what pissed off is like then hang round here for a bit. She smiles at him. She knows he is desperate for her to listen to him. He might dismiss her but he wants that too. He wants to talk. Wants that most of all.
She turns on the tape recorder. ‘It wasn’t posh,’ she prompts him. The last words from the week before. To take him back to that. He does not answer but looks at her. Fascinated as she knows he is by how similar she looks. To what her aunt must have been at the same age as herself. The deceptive petite demureness. The iron you might as well call it beneath the looks. The head of tight black curls. A way of looking so you felt you were held in place by it. You can look at someone so they’re the fly and amber settles round them, he had told her that, so far back. Before Athens even. Hard as rock when it suited her.
‘We don’t need to go on,’ Esther says. She knows the conditions she is under, the supervisor telling her, remember it is always up to him if he wants to talk with you. If he wants to call it off. She knows she is there under sufferance, you could call it that. Only because her professor had cleared it along the line. Only because the old man agreed. ‘We can stop any time you like.’
‘Who’s talking of stopping?’ The flattery, she had to play on that. His wanting her to attend even if his swerves of mood turn against his keeping on. ‘I’d be disappointed but of course it is up to you. Up to you, Fergus. It always is.’
So he starts again. It wasn’t posh, he says, the London he went to and hawked himself round as a teacher, supply teaching they called it, shoving you in front of animals who’d rather eat a book or even defecate on it, anything but read one. But after Corinth it was a breeze. There’s no prick he tells her who’ll fleece you like a Greek will, months of picking their fucking oranges, lying like the bastards they were when it came to pay. Then Turkey would you believe it writing ads for travel magazines, for desperadoes who’d make a Greek look honest, no wonder people want to kill them. ‘The way I wrote about those shithole resorts of theirs you’d think I was Lawrence Durrell. I made them sound like paradise.’ She had picked that up already, how proud he was of what he wrote.
‘Yes,’ she would tell him. ‘When you talk about those places I can see them.’ Shameless, but it drew him out. Bait, how the word came back to her. But he talked, and that was what she wanted of him. Her own deceit did not come into it. So a year after she had left him, he said—it was always ‘she’ he spoke of, as if Lisa’s name tasted bitter to him. A year to the day in fact since she had shot through and he was there in London. That’s how time goes. Notting Hill in those days was black enough to think you were in another country they’d called England by mistake. Lefties of course loved them. If there was one woman I knew in those days must have been half a dozen, couldn’t get themselves a black length quick enough. Then another year I might as well have been Epi out there the way he watches us, me walking up and down classroom aisles at a school in Kilburn Park, every second one of them a mick I can tell you that, their old men truckies and their mums scrubbing offices so there’s no one there when the kids get out of bed to make my day. I wasn’t a teacher, I was a fucking warder.
He laughs as he thinks of it, kids with their flick knives brought back from pilgrimages to Lourdes, the side stories there was no point trying to bring him back from, Esther thinks, you just wait until he starts again on what you want to hear. The story she will never get from anyone else and maybe not from him but tries to find a way to, the researcher who convinces him he is the one, the only one, to tell it. Sympathy like the great lie it is. Her knowing he wants to look at her as well, although there’s no ill intent in that. Mad more than bad, her grandfather says, not that David will hear a word of that. The stories he thinks make him cut a figure, the saddest bits. The Latvian woman he’d shacked up with for a while, her dreaming of Riga like a retard schoolgirl dreaming of being a pop star, no more chance of her getting where she had never been but accepted was paradise because her parents told her Latvia means ‘to believe’. Half the women he ever met, anything rather than facing fucking life the way it is. The Scottish woman after her. A Latin teacher who had been a novice in a convent when she fell for a carpenter brought in to build hencoops. Her first experience of sex on the cleared floor in the back of his van with a hundred chooks clucking and shitting a few feet beneath them. The tradesman’s legs so long the van’s back door wouldn’t close. The woman Fergus said had told him that as they themselves made love on the floor in her Streatham flat, after she had made him an omelette. He wanted Esther to think him entertaining. No idea of his grotesqueness. A man more sinned against than sinning, she must know that? Even if he said it about himself. She must know
the quote.
Esther breaking in, ‘But you still wrote to her? After Athens?’
‘We didn’t hate each other. Just because she left.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’
‘She still mattered.’
‘Of course she did,’ Esther says. She knows early on that placating, flattery, will be part of what he demands.
‘Of course she fucking did. That’s what I’m saying.’
He would send a card a couple of times a year. She sometimes sent one back. He knew she’d feel obliged to. ‘That was us all over. Everything I did was impulse and on the spur. Everything from her was calculation.’ His old man’s self-regard. ‘She hadn’t lost interest just because she’d left.’
‘Italy, though,’ the young woman says. ‘Can we move on to Italy?’
If that’s what you’re waiting for, he thinks, I’ll give you fucking Italy. He undoes the button of his shirt cuff, folding it back to scratch at the patch of raw skin that bothers him. ‘Paper. At this age we’re made of paper.’ The skin had begun to bleed. He dabs at it with a handkerchief. Pleased even with that, she guesses. Something more to make one attend. Then the frankness he hopes will shock her, set the young bitch back a bit at any rate. Because of a man, he said, that’s why I was there in the first place. Another story but one she needs to know. A soft pampered Italian who admired him and he knew would serve a turn. ‘He thought it friendship but now we’re talking together, Esther, we can call things their right names. We both did all right out of it.’
He looks out from the window, across the sloping lawns of ‘the Home’. How it amuses him as he calls it that. Te Hokinga Mai. As full of shit as we are, he tells her. But back now to what he wants to talk of as much as she is obliged to hear. Years of that teaching racket. And what’s the one step you can go down to from teaching? he asks her. I’ll tell you what it is. Journalism. The sort of stuff I did that they call journalism at any rate. Local news, police reports in Scarborough, social notes in a twice-weekly Tory rag in Surrey. But never church news. Never dog shows. He never sank so low as that. A quid, though, he will tell her this, a quid for every pub he stood in long enough to be asked to leave and he could buy this place twice over and afford to burn it down. Chess clubs. He didn’t mind chess clubs. Nor school prizegivings. Must have touched the soft side of him. And on one big break, working for a sod of an editor in Hastings, would you believe it, he covered the Queen? ‘There’s a phrase to make the heart beat faster.’
All This by Chance Page 18