Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  ‘Do you remember her knowing anyone by the name of Cassidy?’

  ‘Cassidy? No. I don’t think so. She was never with any friends. Said she wasn’t meant to be out all hours. She had to look after her voice, not get sick, all that actress crap.’

  ‘As far as you know was she in a relationship with this Del person when she went missing?’

  ‘No idea. Maybe. You know the Twenties isn’t that nice any more. All gone quite jungle, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Do you think I might find Del there?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  Hayes stood in silence and watched Mark sweat. Was this a violent man? he asked himself. He seemed to be something of a shambles. If he’d killed Iolanthe then why hadn’t he run? He wasn’t married, not rich enough to own his flat. He could have just left. He was probably guilty of something, Hayes thought. Drug use, petty thievery; he certainly hung around with a few thugs. Did he hate Iolanthe enough to have her killed by someone else?

  The sweat from Mark’s face was soaking into the top of his shirt. He started blinking furiously, had to wipe it from his brows and eyes.

  In frustration, Hayes broke the silence. ‘You know the penalty for murder is a mandatory life sentence. If it was manslaughter … an accident … you’d be better off speaking up now. Give you a chance of seeing the outside world again.’

  Mark’s eyes had grown rather pink, either from the sweat or tears. ‘I didn’t hurt her,’ he said at last. ‘I might have said some shitty things about her but I wouldn’t punch a woman, let alone kill her.’ He held his hands out towards Hayes, palms up. They were shaking. ‘I’m not a violent man,’ he said. ‘Don’t have it in me.’ Hayes met his eyes. Do I believe you? he thought.

  Very slowly Hayes put away his pad. Mark watched him for a second, then seized the moment and barged back through the black door into the club. Inside the room Hayes could hear Muriel crowing with laughter. He walked back down the stairs.

  Out in the street two coloured men in khaki suits were arguing about the quickest way to get to Muswell Hill. This city, Hayes thought. There is life but no gentility.

  The Strength of Weeds

  Thursday, 11 November

  Anna didn’t want Kelly to hear them making the calls to the numbers on her piece of paper so they went to find a call box. She already felt quite badly for leaning on the woman in such a personal way. These were not things that any of them wanted to talk about – sex, pregnancy, abortions. These were the dirtiest of subjects, like menstruation or defecation: the rank, unpleasant workings of the body that had to be denied. She felt herself flush at the thought of it, the thought of her body in all its slippery reality, the way she had ached for Aloysius in the club the previous night. How was a woman meant to stay something lovely to a man when her body and her workings were so base? How could she, Anna, who kept herself so clean and clever, hope to hold the respect of a man once she had stripped for him?

  A girl walked past them both, black boots, bare thighs, navy skirt cut high on the leg. Anna looked at her and then at Aloysius. Had he noticed? Aloysius attempted a smile. She couldn’t tell.

  ‘Thank you,’ Anna said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For doing this with me. For not wanting to give up. No one would blame you if you wanted to go home.’

  Aloysius shook his head. ‘Not till we find her. When we find her then we can all go home.’

  They walked into the call box together, Aloysius spread some coins out on the shelf and Anna dialled the East Ham number first.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. I was given this number by a friend of mine. I hope it’s okay to call out of the blue. My name is Anna …’ and then she wasn’t quite sure how to continue.

  ‘Hello, Anna. Can you tell me what you’re after?’

  ‘I’m actually not sure. I think there are …’ Anna’s brain would not cooperate. What was it you were meant to say? She remembered a picture of a smiling woman with a shopping basket from an advert in her mother’s magazine. ‘What’s regularity of cycle?’ she’d asked. Her mother had laughed uncomfortably. ‘For when your period stops and you need it to start again,’ she’d said. And at the time Anna hadn’t understood what it was she meant.

  ‘It’s in regards to regularity of cycle. Pills, maybe a tonic, for regularity of cycle. Does that make sense?’ she asked.

  ‘It does. Do you need to come today?’

  ‘I’d be grateful if I could.’

  ‘Do you have my address?’

  ‘High Street?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m at 118B. South of The White Horse and the park, above the bookies. The cost of medicines is between fifteen shillings and one pound six.’

  ‘I see. Okay. Thank you very much. I will try and get there this afternoon.’

  She hung up and rested her forehead on the receiver. ‘Well, that was scary.’

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Aloysius told her. ‘Just sound confident.’

  Anna picked up the phone again and dialled the number in Shoreditch.

  ‘Hello? Shoreditch 7526. Marion speaking.’

  ‘Hello, Marion. My name is Anna. I’m ringing up regarding regularity of cycle.’

  She paused, hoping that Marion would jump in and help her but there was silence at the end of the line.

  ‘I was given this number by a friend. I was after perhaps pills or a tonic.’

  The phone went dead.

  ‘She hung up on me!’

  ‘Maybe they went out of business.’

  ‘Maybe I was too direct. Do I call her back?’

  ‘Not if she doesn’t want to talk. Let’s go to East Ham and meet the other one.’

  ‘We’ll need a pound. Or fifteen shillings at least. That was the cheapest thing she had and I don’t have any money.’

  ‘Are we going to buy pills?’ Aloysius asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like we should. I think they’ll be more inclined to help if we’ve paid them something.’

  ‘I’ll draw some money. Listen, I need to make a phone call. I have appointments this afternoon. I have to let them know I’m, you know … sick.’

  Aloysius sat in the seat behind her on the number 15 and Anna didn’t say a word in disagreement. They had received some very alarmed glances from the driver as they boarded and had gone to sit as far away from other passengers as they could manage.

  Anna found his face difficult to look at now. His beauty was entirely hidden and in looking at him she only found herself going over the events of the past night. So they stared out of the window and watched Fleet Street roll past. The roads were less busy than usual on account of the snow. There were fewer shoppers hurrying to railway stations, fewer visitors flowing to the Royal Courts of Justice and St Paul’s. The snow reminded Anna that it would soon be Christmas. She wondered if Iolanthe would be found by then, or whether the Galaxy would have taken in another show and her wages would be paid again. The sense of a very mournful time spread itself out before her and she wondered if she might not see Aloysius at all after today.

  The bus trundled on, past the Bank of England where naked stone figures holding bundles of keys and weighty chains made Aloysius avert his gaze. Anna stared at the figures of the women pouring down showers of coins on the heads of those who passed beneath them and at the naked boy and little girl who they clutched against their legs. Such an odd sight, those little naked children always on the edge of falling. And she too looked the other way.

  What did it profit them, all the great institutions of the kingdom? Life wasn’t lived in churches or banks or the Houses of Parliament. It was lived upon the street, on buses and in the carriages of trains, in ordinary houses and ordinary living rooms. It was lived by people who arranged their lives around the meals they ate or what was on television on Thursday or whether their team was at home at the weekend. What were the institutions for at all? She knew they had names, little badges, signifiers that gave them a purpose. Churche
s were for faith. Police stations for safety. Courts for justice. Banks for the wealth of all the nation. But these were not buildings she ever entered. These were not people she knew. She was reminded of some of the elderly women whom she had come to know in her time waitressing at the Alabora. In the days after she had left to work at the Galaxy she would pop in for coffee with Ottmar and wave to Rose, to Enid, to Millicent.

  ‘Come to the theatre,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll see if I can get you cheap tickets for a weekday mat.’

  ‘No!’ they’d tell her, alarmed by her kind offer. ‘No! Theatre’s not my thing, dear. I wouldn’t know what was going on.’ Having never stepped inside the doors of a theatre they found themselves terrified by the idea of doing so at the age of seventy-five. Anna would laugh at them with Leonard, rather snottily she realised in retrospect. ‘What do they think will happen? Culture will gobble up their bones?’

  A child of a good school and clever parents, she had run away to hide herself in penury but retained the idea that institutions somehow belonged to her. She had a sense of ownership of the buildings of the kingdom that had been bred into her by all the adults that she knew. But now, in the moment of needing something … some kind of institution to sweep down and rescue her, she found herself quite alone. The police had beaten Aloysius and walked away from it. And somehow the overturning of one institution had cast all the rest into doubt. If the police were not what she supposed them to be, were the lawyers, were the priests, were the politicians? After a lifetime of laughing at the kind of people who feared walking into a theatre or a museum or even a grand library she found herself mistrusting each great and stony building she encountered. A sense of general hostility had seeped into her world and was colouring everything like a bloody finger smeared across a lens.

  Aldgate station next and out along Commercial Road. Past the vaulting snow-capped might of St Mary and St Michael, where a smiling, bearded Jesus dressed as a king sat on a throne above the door. One cold and lonely pigeon huddled on the orb in his left hand. Ave Rex Christe, the words proclaimed. Hail King Christ. A circle of poppies lay half obscured by snow on the pavement by the gate. Remembrance Day, Anna thought. Where had they been at eleven o’clock? Aloysius had still been in his prison cell. She’d been walking with Ottmar, Ekin and Samira. She had not heard the bells, had not thought to keep the silence.

  Poplar. Canning Town. The heat on the bus was lulling them into sleep and now and then Anna’s forehead would bounce against the cold glass of the window as exhaustion overwhelmed her. Upton Park. East Ham. This was not the London she knew well. ‘Last stop,’ the driver called as they neared a corner of the park and a line of other buses, windows dark. They walked slowly down the stairs and stood on the snowy pavement, stunned into silence by tiredness and the shock of the cold. On the far corner stood a cafe and through the window Anna could see seven or eight workmen gathered around a table all looking at something in the paper and laughing.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this much longer,’ she told Aloysius.

  ‘One more visit. While we’ve still got a chance of something. Come on …’ he told her. And he took her hand and led her across the roads. There was something formal, parental in the way he led her now, such a long way from how they’d held hands in the street last night. She felt as if she was being told off, that she’d let him down, and in a way perhaps she had. But hadn’t other people let him down far more? She wondered if he thought she was on their side, the side of the police, the side of the white world? Did her skin colour manifest itself as strongly to him as his did to her? Did her skin even have a colour? Perhaps he saw her as she saw everyone else: the pale complexion signalling the blankness of the slate.

  They stood at the front door beside the betting shop and Aloysius rang the bell. A window creaked above them, and they heard a child’s feet running on the stairs. The door opened on a chain and the face of a girl around twelve years old looked round the crack.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello. I’m Anna. I rang up earlier. Perhaps I talked to your mum about coming over?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s my boyfriend.’

  The child unchained the door. The hallway inside had been burned a rich, sulphurous yellow from years of cigarette smoke and the thin carpet on the stairs was ripped with holes and slashes. The child herself wore a red cotton sundress with just a white vest beneath. They followed her slim, bare legs up the stairs.

  The flat above could only really be described as a factory of the cottage variety. In the living room there were various tables and desks set about the walls, each one piled with white boxes and bottles and sheets of labels with scrollwork and lots of writing on them. There was a tiny television standing in one corner, a sad-looking pot plant in another, and the walls up here were as ochre yellow and brown as the ones below. A young woman of about seventeen was sitting at one of the desks labelling the boxes and the child went over and joined her, sitting beneath her on the floor from where she filled the boxes with little paper wrappers full of something dark.

  Anna could see through to the kitchen where yet another table was piled with paper packages and labelled bottles and large brown boxes sealed with tape. A woman finished taping up a box and came out to them, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘I’m Hen. You must be Anna. We’re a bit short on chairs but you can take the one at the empty desk.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Anna said and, remembering that she was supposed to be pregnant, slumped into it gratefully while Aloysius hovered by the stairs.

  ‘You the boyfriend?’ Hen asked and Aloysius nodded, suddenly terribly aware of his smashed glasses and boxer’s face. ‘She do that to you?’ Hen laughed.

  ‘No. Her father did,’ Aloysius told her. Hen raised her eyebrows. She had a clever, mobile face and a small, skinny body. She reminded Anna of a bird, all alertness and bones.

  ‘How far along?’ she asked Anna.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe twelve weeks. Is that a problem?’

  ‘Doesn’t work as well as the pregnancy goes on. Just have to tell you that. Works best early, though I’ve known women use it at six months. Just a bit more hit and miss. You might need to take it a few times.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anna told her.

  ‘So, the tea is cheap but it’s on the mild side. The pills are stronger. You can try a couple a day, going up to three at a time if it hasn’t worked after a week. We have an oil that’s extremely potent but you have to be very careful not to overdose. It’s the same with all the stronger stuff. You gotta treat it with caution. Minimum dose then build up slowly. Never double up. Never take two kinds at once. If something isn’t working and you’re on maximum dose then you try something else. If pennyroyal doesn’t work for you, you come back to me and I’ll send you in the right direction for something with blue cohosh in it. Different women react differently to the preparations. We’re all particular. For twelve weeks I would suggest pills or failing that the oil, if you promise me to go easy on it.’

  ‘I don’t know. What do they cost?’

  ‘You can get twenty-five pills for eighteen shillings or a little bottle of the oil for a pound.’

  The room was rather warm and the chair comfortable. Anna felt her lids flutter. Hen looked at Aloysius.

  ‘You paying?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Got an opinion?’

  ‘Not really. This is a woman’s world, you know. All a bit mysterious to us.’

  ‘It’s men thinking like that keeps me in business,’ Hen said, rather sharply. ‘Never mind. Shall we start you off on the pills? Simpler to get the dosage right with those.’

  ‘Okay,’ Anna said, aware that she was meant to be asking questions but at a loss as to how to start. ‘I, um, I was a bit nervous because a friend of mine, she took a preparation a couple of weeks ago and I heard it made her quite ill.’

  ‘Did she follow the instructions?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t seen
her since.’

  The teenage girl turned and glanced over her shoulder at Anna. Hen’s face creased up.

  ‘Well, did she get it from me?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’m not accusing you of anything. It just made me nervous. She was a bit further along and she couldn’t face having … you know, a procedure. So then she was going to try something herbal. But I think she got sick.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘Not a very close friend, I’m guessing, then.’

  ‘Well, she was. I don’t know. It’s just a bit of a scary time.’

  Anna looked towards the older girl who was watching her quite intently. Hen’s face relaxed a little bit.

  ‘Maybe your friend needed a little break. We all need a bit of space around these things; you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. If you follow the directions you’ll be fine. Just don’t go necking the whole packet thinking it’ll speed things up.’

  Hen gave Aloysius a meaningful glance and he drew his wallet out of his coat and produced a pound note.

  ‘We’ll have the pills, please.’

  ‘I’ve got some change in the kitchen. Give me a minute.’

  She disappeared into the kitchen and Anna heard a key rattle in a lock.

  The older girl was watching Anna still. ‘Did your friend go and stay with someone, then? Sometimes they go home to their mums … time like that.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know where she is. I don’t think anyone does.’

  ‘She’s gone missing?’ the girl asked.

  ‘She has.’

  The girl’s eyes grew very wide and then she looked away.

  ‘You know,’ said Anna, ostensibly to Aloysius, ‘I really have to eat something before I keel over. Can we go across to the cafe? Just for a sandwich or something?’

  Aloysius shrugged and creased his brow. His face had become extremely hard to read in its swollen state. Anna nodded at him, willing him to understand what she was doing. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘yeah, let’s go and get some lunch. Have a bit of a rest before the journey back.’