She was sweltering. Sweat tickled her collarbone and ran down her sides. Beneath her sweater she wore a cotton camisole so she peeled off her polo neck and tugged the body of the camisole down over her safety-pinned skirt. Aloysius glanced briefly across at her and then stood up with such force that he knocked over his own chair. ‘I’m getting drinks,’ he shouted, not quite meeting her eye and certainly not meeting her chest. ‘Scotch?’
‘No. Get me a martini and remind me to drink it slowly.’
‘Okay,’ he called over his shoulder and then he was gone.
Five minutes passed and then ten and then fifteen. Song flowed into song; shaking, shifting beat melted into lion’s roar and then into the pulse and growl of jazz piano. When men tried to catch her eye Anna scowled her fiercest girls’ school scowl. The music rocked and pounded through the floor and the table and her limbs. The sweat dried on her back and chest and brow; she felt the hairs on her arms prickle and stand aloft; she was very aware of the ache between her legs. Had she really been left alone? she wondered. Had she disgusted him? Her hands scrabbled on the floor below her chair and she pulled her sweater on again, put away her flesh, turned off her body and turned on her mind.
The white girls in the club wore pale dresses cut high on their thigh; dresses that shimmered with a pearly blue light, and gold and mustard thread. The black girls wore red and black, green and purple, bold bright colours which moved with their long, dark limbs. The women swayed their hips, backs curving sinuously, arms hovering in the air, grazing shoulders, stroking hair. Men in long, slim black trousers and white shirts rolled up their sleeves and danced with the same fluidity as the women. The more Anna watched the more she realised that there were no men and women in here but only bodies, a strange luminous tribe of humans lost in a single swell of sensation. Mostly hidden by the turntables, a thin black man in a dark shirt drank slowly from a bottle of beer and lifted discs to the light to read the labels. He chose one and Anna watched him move and sway as he fitted it to the turntable. Flown here from over the ocean a voice cried, ‘I’m going down to girls’ town!’ and the tempo lifted and rocked, shaking the dancers in their reverie.
Aloysius edged his way back to her carrying a martini and something short in a round glass. He noted her redressed form and straightened his jacket.
‘I was asking around.’
‘And?’
‘Martin – the barman at Cue Club – his flatmate Derek is in the kitchen so I talked to him. Iolanthe was here most nights the past month. Three, four times a week. He said she might have been with different guys, he wasn’t sure. But two, three weeks ago she was seeing this guitarist, played for some of the little acts that came through here.’
‘And he was black?’
‘No. White.’
‘Then he can’t be the father.’
‘Maybe the white guy found out that she was having an affair and did something to her.’
‘Does he have a name?’
‘Mark something. Derek’s seen him around Soho late at night. There’s an Italian coffee bar down Kingly Street he drinks in and a pub on Beak Street where Derek thinks he works behind the bar.’
‘So, what do we do? Go and look for him?’
Aloysius shrugged. ‘This is your adventure.’
‘I keep waiting for someone to say, “Oh, yes, I know where Lanny is.”’
‘Yeah. I don’t think anyone’s going to do that.’
Anna examined how much of her martini she’d consumed. ‘You know, I wasn’t even going to go after the father. I thought we’d try and find out where she went to get her … pills or whatever. She went somewhere in the days after she saw Dr Jones, she must have done. She must have slept with someone or visited someone or I don’t know …’ Her voice was getting hoarse from shouting above the music.
‘Do you want me to go back and talk to Derek again?’
‘No. You’re right. I’m meant to be looking for Lanny myself and now I’ve just given up and handed over to a man.’
Aloysius laughed. ‘That must be very humiliating for you.’
Anna rose and straightened her safety-pinned skirt. She needed to use the lavatory and time in the lavatory was time to think. She made her way over to the ladies and joined the queue. She glanced back over her shoulder to see if Aloysius was watching but the crowd of dancers blocked her view. She thought of Iolanthe coming here every night after the show. Dancing, dating some man in secret from her other life, her other world. This was an easy place to feel secret in. In this world of black faces Anna felt oddly invisible, as if she’d entered another country and nothing she did here mattered to the girl who lived on Neal Street. She might very well strip naked and make love to Aloysius while the others watched for she had no need to be Anna any more if she didn’t want to be. She wondered briefly if she might change her name again. She lived an assumed identity anyway – why not strip off her flesh, like the skin of a snake, and start over?
On the sound system a man’s voice could be heard chugging, chuffing and blowing in rhythm with the trumpets and someone shouted ‘Guns Fever!’ Bullets whizzed and wailed above a beat that ran like a horse, all four legs lifting off the ground for a second at a time. A woman on the dance floor laughed and spun her girlfriend round, their faces glinting in the light. ‘Guns Fever!’ they shouted.
The queue inched forward. Anna fiddled with her skirt and tights. Her shoes were hurting her. She watched the women at the sinks do their make-up, scrape through their hair with their fingers, adjust their bras and their stockings, rub the mascara from off their cheeks. A young woman in a dark orange minidress exited a stall and caught Anna’s eye just for a second. Anna was about to move past her when some strange mathematics of recognition started working inside her brain and she knew she had seen someone who was out of place. The girl in the terracotta minidress hadn’t stopped to wash her hands but was already moving for the door when Anna’s head came up with its result and she spoke the word aloud: ‘Samira!’
A Suit-Wearing, Tea-Drinking Man of London Town
Wednesday, 10 November
In West End Central Barnaby Hayes was still making calls. After his conversation with Nathaniel he next called the two main banks in Boston to ask them about mortgages held in the name of Maria Green. The man he talked to at the first bank gave him very short shrift about asking for client information but the lady at the second bank pronounced herself charmed by his accent and said that ‘yes, of course’ in the case of a missing persons enquiry at Scotland Yard she would be happy to take a look at their records for the twenties and thirties and she’d see what she could find before close of business. Hayes did not correct her when she made the assumption that he was calling her from Scotland Yard. He knew that romanticism had a part to play in all acts of policing and he had learned not to stand between people and their prejudices just as long as those prejudices helped him along in his work.
He tried quite fruitlessly to track down the New York bank that held account details for Yolanda Green and was well into the second half of the packet of digestives when the switchboard rang to say he had a call waiting from Boston.
‘Miss Pettifield, how kind of you to call me back,’ cried Hayes, pulling himself up to his full height of Englishness. Miss Pettifield laughed immoderately.
‘Detective Sergeant Hayes, I have been through our records and I have found your mortgage. Would you like to hear the details?’
‘Miss Pettifield, I would love to hear the details.’ More laughter on the end of the line.
‘Well now, our bank first granted a mortgage against the property in 1926 to a Mr Harold Green who paid $14,550 for the property, of which we loaned him $9,270. In 1942, on the death of Mr Green the house and mortgage passed to Maria Green, who I assume was his wife. On Maria Green’s death in 1943 the property passed jointly to her children Nathaniel and Yolanda Green. Between June 1943 and June 1944 we received no mortgage repayments, but after that month they resume. In 1945 the ho
use was re-mortgaged twice, both times with us. And then in November of 1947 the house was sold and the mortgages repaid in full. Would you like me to repeat any of that?’
Hayes had been writing furiously as she spoke. He tried now to re-read his notes.
‘No. I think I’m clear. I’m just going to check … you said Nathaniel and Yolanda Green?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not Iolanthe Green?’
‘No. Definitely Nathaniel and Yolanda.’
‘And you think that Harold Green was married to Maria Green?’
‘Well, I honestly couldn’t say. I’m making an assumption based on the shared name and leaving her the property. She might well have been his sister or someone else entirely.’
‘And you said the house cost fourteen and a half thousand dollars in 1926. That sounds like a lot of money. Was it?’
‘Well, yes. That’s an expensive house we’re talking about. You don’t know Beacon Street, I’m guessing, because the houses down there are lovely six-storey brownstones. You’d pay $40,000 for one of those now. Way beyond a mortgage clerk’s salary, I can assure you.’
‘One more question. Can you tell me anything about the name Cassidy?’
‘Do you have a first name?’
‘I don’t. I know that a Mr Cassidy had been in touch with the missing woman and I believe he was an American. I wondered if you were aware of a connection.’
‘I’m sorry, Detective Sergeant. This is Boston. I could pitch a handful of paperclips out of my window now and be pretty sure of one of them hitting a fellow called Cassidy. Without another name …’
‘I understand completely. Miss Pettifield, I am already indebted to you, but can I ask another favour?’
‘Anything you like, Detective Sergeant.’
‘Would you happen to have a telephone book for Boston somewhere in your office? I was after the phone numbers of some of Mr Green’s former neighbours.’
***
Over in Roaring Twenties Aloysius was waiting for Anna to return. It had begun to occur to him that he had rather overcommitted himself to a group of people whom he hardly knew. He was attracted to Anna but he’d had flirtations before and as often as not they were driven by a sudden rush of hormones, a desire to release some tension within himself. He lived in fear of becoming trapped by a girl’s unwanted pregnancy; lived in fear of committing himself to a woman whom he liked but did not love. He had a life to build for himself and it was easier done alone. He didn’t want to explain why he took this job or that; didn’t want to feel that he was needed back at home at six o’clock; didn’t want to be tied to a house or a street or a particular city.
He had willed himself to England and into the life of a middle-class gentleman even if he was still not perceived as such by others who shared that description. He had drawn a thick, dark line between himself and those parts of Caribbean culture that might seem to reclassify him as something different from the man he wished to be. He was a suit-wearing, tea-drinking, Financial Times- and Evelyn Waugh-reading man of London town. He was as English as toast. And when the time came – when he was fully formed – he would take an English wife in whatever colour she happened to arrive.
But in following Anna he had been led into the lives of two people: Anna herself and the missing Iolanthe. He had accidentally taken some responsibility in this unknown actress’s fate and he couldn’t help feeling that the course of his relationship with Anna would somehow be determined by the benign or malignant nature of Lanny’s disappearance. Moreover he was struggling with the fact that he didn’t actually care at all for the missing woman. He couldn’t even picture her. She was a name connected to a puzzle presented by a girl who he would like to see naked.
He closed his eyes. The heat and the music and the brandy were working on him like medicine. He saw his mother dancing in an orange dress with wide full skirts, smoking long thin cigarettes on a Saturday and Sunday night, drinking a glass of brandy when the rest of the family came over. He remembered his cousin Philip taking him to one of the grown-up dances when he was thirteen, watching the full-breasted women in their loose tops and pedal pushers pump their arms in time to the music in the rich, hot swell of a June night. They played American music then, rhythm and blues and honking rock ’n’ roll and the Alpha Boys down in Kingston played their marching band tunes, which became jazz and ska and blues after school was out. But he was a Knox College boy, a scholar, an aesthete: he sat in the audience, he didn’t play the music.
‘Louis’ll get himself buried in a square box,’ his Auntie Pauline said, ‘the better to fit in the ground. What all them people doing with those arms and legs, he thinks. Why you all so untidy?’ And everyone would laugh at him.
‘Aloysius!’ Anna’s voice was calling him back to the club. He opened his eyes and there she was, walking towards him, clutching the arm of a young girl in a minidress.
‘Aloysius, this is Samira. She’s the daughter of Ottmar, the man in the cafe. She’s only sixteen and I know for a fact she isn’t allowed out this late. I’m sorry – this has nothing to do with Lanny – but we need to take her home. For Ottmar. Just so we know she’s safe.’
Samira held out her hand to Aloysius. ‘I’m actually fine. Anna’s going crazy because … I have no idea. I’m here with friends and they’ll walk me home when it shuts.’
Aloysius looked at the two women, both of whom had turned the full intensity of their gaze upon him, and stayed silent.
‘Right. Everyone get their coats,’ Anna commanded. ‘We are going to take a very quick detour and then we’re walking Samira home.’
The young girl grimaced. ‘Samira thinks you’re making a fuss about nothing. I’m not drunk, I’m not stoned, I’m not having sex in an alleyway.’
‘It’s after midnight and Ottmar and Ekin will be scared to death. Come on. It’s school tomorrow anyway.’ Something of the head girl had crept into Anna’s voice as she marshalled her followers together.
Aloysius picked up his coat and walked behind Samira to the table where she’d been sitting with a group of girls in jeans and bright-striped tops. She rolled her eyes at them. ‘I’m being walked home,’ she said.
And then they turned and climbed the steps up into the white world of the street.
It wasn’t snowing any longer but the cold was bitter at this time in the morning. Samira’s coat was short and her legs were bare; she shook as Anna led her through the streets.
‘Where are we going?’ Aloysius asked.
‘To see if we can spot this Mark. Maybe ask him a few questions. Since we’re here.’
‘Is it a good idea bringing her along? Shouldn’t we try this another night?’
Anna looked at him. ‘Iolanthe isn’t getting any younger, is she?’
Almost all the bars on Kingly Street were dark, as was the Italian coffee bar, but Anna pressed her nose to the glass door nonetheless. And there in the back of the bar, sitting near the counter, were a group of men in black jackets smoking and playing cards lit by the light that shone through from the kitchen out the back. Anna reached behind her and without looking gestured with her hand for Aloysius to join them. The three of them peered through the door together.
A single face shot up from the crowd of heads and shouted out: ‘We’re closed.’
‘I’m looking for Iolanthe Green,’ Anna shouted through the door.
Now all the heads turned round to look at them and a dark-haired man sitting at the end of the table called out to her, ‘She isn’t here!’
‘I know. She’s missing. Please, can you tell me if one of you is Mark?’
‘Who’s asking?’ shouted the dark-haired man.
‘I’m Anna. I’m a friend of Lanny’s. I’m worried about her.’
The man nodded his head towards Aloysius. ‘Who’s the coon?’
Anna licked her lips. ‘We’re all friends of Iolanthe. Do you know where she is? Do you know if she’s safe? If she doesn’t want to be found, we’ll understand. I just
want to know she isn’t in trouble.’
The man with dark hair stared at her and then turned back to his cards.
‘I’ve no idea where the bitch is. Probably fucked off with someone else.’
‘Is there any chance that you would let us in?’ Anna asked.
The dark-haired man, who presumably was Mark, nodded to an older man who came over to unbolt the door. He opened it and stood there looking at them, blocking the entrance with his body.
‘I don’t think I really want these people on my premises.’ He pointed a finger at Aloysius. ‘And I don’t like the look of him.’
Anna hesitated and looked at Aloysius, who had made himself very still. ‘Well, you see, we’re all friends of Lanny’s and we’re all together.’
‘You girls can come in. Blackie there stays in the street.’ The man stood back to allow the women to pass and Anna looked inside, into the dark cafe and at the eight or nine strange men sitting with their beer bottles and their cards, and decided that she and Samira weren’t going anywhere on their own.
‘We’re all together,’ she repeated. ‘We’d be grateful if we could all come in. Please.’
The man pointed his finger again, first at the girls, ‘You,’ and then at Aloysius, ‘Not him.’
‘Hey, Nick, you all right?’ The call came from behind them in the street and they all turned to look. Two policemen, dressed in capes and hats, were watching them from a little way up Kingly Street. The taller one, the one who’d spoken, nodded towards Aloysius. ‘That one giving you trouble, then?’
Aloysius held his hands up and walked away from Anna and Samira, putting space between himself and the man in the doorway. ‘No trouble here.’
The policemen walked towards him. ‘What you doing then? What you doing with these young ladies?’
‘He’s helping—’ Anna began but she was shouted down immediately.
‘I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to your coloured friend.’
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 13