Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  Summer and Washington

  Thursday, 11 November

  Nathaniel Green wheeled himself along the long, white corridors of the library building, a pile of returns held in his lap. When he reached the cases in the far room he started to shelve the books, barely even glancing at the numbers on the spine. He knew the position of most every book in the place. He knew the colour and the feel of all the favourites. He knew what every shelf should look like full, each one stretching before him like an old, familiar painting, the ripples of the tops like hills from a memory of boyhood that he did not own. He wheeled himself back into the central aisle, moved further down the rows. His eyes scanned the titles of the books remaining and he found, as he often did, that the words made pictures in his head.

  The Influence of Sea Power bobbed like a bloated galleon in a sunlit bay. Ossian, Son of Fingal strode like a giant over rocks.

  I will never have sex again, he thought. It occurred to him almost as if it were a new idea.

  He had come inside a woman just once. Margot Brewers, who had developed a crush on him the year after his mother died and who wanted to fix him. They had courted, chastely at first, for nearly a year. When she heard about his place at the Academy she had wanted him to say that he’d go steady. She’d wanted him to do it with her once, so they could both remember it when he went to sea. If he had known that it would be the one and only time he’d be inside a woman he would have made the whole experience last much longer. He would have been kinder to her too. He would have kissed her and touched her and made her happy by way of thanks.

  But that had been the crazy year. When he and Lanny spent till they were broke.

  In the back office the phone was ringing. Nat turned the chair and wheeled himself towards the sound.

  ‘Naval Academy Library, Nathaniel Green speaking. How can I help?’

  ‘Good morning, Nathaniel. It’s morning with you now, I think? I’m Detective Sergeant Hayes. We spoke yesterday.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘I have ever such a quick question for you. Was Iolanthe right when she told a Times reporter that you served as a midshipman on the USS Missouri?’

  ‘That is correct, sir. That was my rank.’

  ‘That’s very impressive, Mr Green. It takes the recommendation of some very senior people to make it to the Naval Academy as a cadet.’

  ‘Yes, sir, it does.’

  ‘Was this something that your mother’s employer helped you with?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, sir. I had the chance to meet a lot of very senior men in Boston society because of who my mother worked for. I gained entrance to the Academy in ’45 and I served as a midshipman for eleven months.’

  ‘That must have made you quite unique.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m asking because I checked with a naval friend of mine and he seemed to remember that coloured sailors in the US Navy were confined to the post of steward’s mate …’

  There was silence at the end of the line.

  ‘Mr Green? Mr Green? Are you still there?’

  Nathaniel gently replaced the receiver. What had Lanny done to them now? He looked around the little office, out of the window at the trees beyond, as if at any moment he would be dragged bodily from the building. Perhaps, he thought, this is what I need. I am trapped. I can feel it in my bones. Though whether I am trapped by this building or this chair I cannot tell.

  Dad died. Nathaniel’s breathing slowed. Mom died. And then we were alone.

  He and Lanny had been sitting in the kitchen having lunch. Their mother had been upstairs in bed. When Lanny went to take her her medicine she wouldn’t wake. Lanny rang her father’s friends the Cassidys. ‘Mom’s gone,’ she said. They called the undertaker.

  Nat and Lanny hadn’t gone to their father’s funeral, didn’t know how to arrange one for their mom. ‘We can have her cremated for you,’ Mrs Cassidy said. ‘Sprinkle her ashes in the garden. It avoids the problem of where to put the stone.’ The garden was their father’s place, as were all the upstairs rooms. They had the kitchen and the utility room and the two basement storage rooms they had decked out as bedrooms. The house and the garden were somewhere they visited ‘on holiday’, when their father suddenly took delight in playing with his family. They would sleep in the big beds, ride bicycles in the garden, study their father’s globe. If it was Christmas there’d be a party and his friends would come. Some knew who the children were, some simply thought they were the cook’s. The Cassidys brought them presents and called them by their father’s name. Yolanda Green. Nathaniel Green. ‘Not their fault,’ Robert Cassidy always said. ‘Harold should have thought it through.’

  The holidays never lasted. Sooner or later things between Harold and Maria would cool off or there’d be some big fight and the three of them – Nat, Lanny and Maria – would be back downstairs again. No parties. No steak. No comfy beds. Just sitting and waiting to see how the wind blew next.

  Maria had left him once. Just once. Out into the street one night after they’d had a row. Under the stars. Standing at the bus stop. Two suitcases, two kids. ‘We’re free,’ she said to them. ‘We’re free. We can be anything we want.’ But they had no money, no car, no family to fall back on, so five days later they were back, standing on the steps of the house, Maria in tears.

  No one else was like them in the neighbourhood. You were black or you were white and it felt like there was nothing in between. Not that that mattered so much if you never went to school. And Nat and Lanny never went to school. Their mother taught them to read and write as best she could; their father taught them geography and maths when the fancy took him.

  They were Mackley – Maria’s name – until the last two years. When their father knew for sure that he was dying they were all allowed to take Green – he even had a pastor come to the house and marry him and Maria just for the documents. Harold asked that they stay living in the basement after his death so nobody could suspect their true parentage. Maria agreed. She outlived him by a year.

  After Maria’s death, Robert Cassidy and the solicitor had come together for the reading of the will. Nathaniel was by then fifteen and Yolanda had turned eighteen just the month before. They escaped the need for an official guardian by weeks.

  Nat and Lanny had been left the house, with its mortgage still to be paid off. They were to have the interest from their father’s stocks for an allowance. Did they understand? Cassidy had asked them. They nodded. Will you call me if you’re struggling? he asked. They nodded again.

  The house was very quiet with Harold and Maria gone. Some mornings they forgot to pull the curtains and just turned on all the lights. Lanny wasn’t much of a cook, she hated it. Nathaniel heated up things he found in the cupboards until all the supplies ran out. They phoned Mrs Cassidy. ‘You have to place an order from a food store,’ she told them. ‘Didn’t Maria teach you what to do?’ But Maria had refused to train her children to be servants. She had taken the work only upon herself, protected them from everything she could. Yolanda found the number for a butcher in the phone directory. For months they lived on nothing but sausages and bacon and ham. When letters came they put them in a pile on the hallstand. Almost nothing was addressed to them anyway.

  In November the refrigerator broke. Yolanda put on her coat, summoned her courage and walked all the way to Filene’s department store on the corner of Summer and Washington to ask if she could buy another. The clerk took some details from her. Did she want to use Harold Green’s account? he asked. There was credit of more than $1,000 available and it was also authorised to a Maria Green. ‘Yes,’ Yolanda told him. ‘Thank you. That’s exactly who I am.’ Did she need anything else for the house? he asked.

  Yolanda came home very late, having bought a television set (one of only two available in Boston), a new sofa, nine dresses, two coats, four pairs of shoes, three handbags, four suits for Nathaniel, a gramophone, a stand-up piano and a radio. When Nathaniel asked abo
ut her day she told him that the ladies at the store had given her tea and cakes in a little room and shown her lots of things in a catalogue of goods. Nathaniel was particularly excited about the television.

  The house filled up with boxes. Dresses lay unworn on the sofas. The piano sat untouched, for neither of them could play. On weekday evenings, Nathaniel would put on one of his suits and walk down the block to the nearest bar where he would sit and drink on his own in a booth in the corner. It was here he met and courted Margot Brewers, who had an eye for a fine suit, and it was here he would take her on dates when her mother thought she was out babysitting. Yolanda rarely left the house. She had no one to take her, no sense of where it was she belonged. She did not understand the rules of the outside world, did not know when to modulate her voice or how to make small talk. She danced alone to the radio, watched white women behave beautifully on television, stood silently in the back garden after dark when no one could see her and she couldn’t shame her father. On one of her many evenings alone, Yolanda decided on an impulse to open all the letters they had been sent. But when she found that most of them contained demands for money, she stopped and remade the pile on the hallstand as if it had never been touched.

  One morning in May the lights would not turn on in the bathroom. The television set sat darkly in the corner. Yolanda rang the Cassidys. ‘Nothing in the house is working!’

  Mrs Cassidy sighed. ‘Have you remembered to pay the electricity bill, Yolanda?’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ the girl admitted.

  Mr Cassidy came to see them after work. They sat at the dining-room table and opened all the letters from the hallstand. ‘You’re eleven months in arrears with the mortgage,’ he told them. ‘You’re a year behind with electricity and gas. You haven’t paid taxes on your income or the water rates. And you owe $1,061 to Filene’s department store, much of it interest.’ Yolanda and Nathaniel stared miserably back at him. ‘Children!’ he said. ‘Children! What were you thinking?’

  ‘But there’s money coming in,’ Yolanda told him.

  ‘$1,425. That was your income last year, before tax. There’s a war on, Yolanda. If you had paid the mortgage and the bills you might have managed, but as things are …’

  ‘What do we do?’ Nat asked him, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Well, first of all I will call everyone and explain your circumstances: discreetly. Then we pay off what we can. We return what Filene’s will take. We figure out how you’re going to live. I am willing … for a year or two … to sign over to you my profits from your dad’s old company. Just to get you straightened out. You can pay me back one day when everything feels easier. Don’t worry,’ he told them. ‘We won’t let you sink.’

  So calls were made. Payment cheques sent out. Tax documents filed. The television set returned. Mr Cassidy had been at school with the head of the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He rang him and explained the situation (omitting only the colour of Maria Green since Nathaniel could almost pass for swarthy white). The two men agreed that a discreet entry into a military institution could be the saving of the boy.

  Yolanda was to stay home and find herself an occupation outside the house.

  ‘Anything you like, Lanny. This isn’t for money. It’s just to give you a bit of purpose in the day.’

  With a reference from Mrs Cassidy, Yolanda got herself a job at a theatre and dance academy a couple of blocks from the house. She worked as a receptionist and secretary, though her typing skills were non-existent. After a few months she was allowed to help out in class, to prompt and to read in parts. She chaperoned the serious theatre kids to their auditions, she helped them learn their lines. She had a pretty face. She started to play little parts in academy productions, she started to find her feet. One Monday morning Lanny – opening one of the tabloid papers that the parents left on the waiting-room chairs – read about children who had been brought up in a cult.

  ‘That’s us!’ she wrote to Nat. ‘We grew up in a cult. Except we had nothing to believe in. It was all fear, and nothing shiny or bright. I am playing the Blue Fairy in the Christmas show. It’s Pinocchio. It was a film in the cinema a few years ago. I have started to go to the cinema! It is magical. Do they let you go at the Academy? I hope they do. Please try and go if you haven’t yet. When I sit in the dark and watch the pictures everything else goes away. It’s like it all never happened. Please go. You will find it so lovely. Sometimes it is better to forget.’

  The phone started to ring again. Nat watched the receiver twitch on its stand. Slowly his hand advanced towards it.

  ‘Naval Academy Library.’

  ‘I think I handled that rather badly, Mr Green.’

  ‘Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. I didn’t mean to make it sound like a threat.’

  ‘Did you not?’

  There was a pause on the end of the line and then Hayes said, ‘No.’

  ‘What was it then?’

  ‘It was a question. And … Look, in the great scheme of things it probably wasn’t the most important question. May I ask you something else? On another matter …?’

  ‘You can try.’

  ‘Do you know anyone by the name of Cassidy? An American. Somebody that Iolanthe knew.’

  ‘Cassidy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nathaniel thought about this. ‘No, Sergeant,’ he said at last. ‘I know no one of that name.’

  Modern Holidays

  Thursday, 11 November

  Aloysius watched Anna watching the snowy fields go past. They were facing each other in a drab third-class compartment of a virtually empty train to Clacton-on-Sea. It was four o’clock and no one, it seemed, was travelling home or taking a trip to the seaside. Now and then Anna’s mouth and brow would wrinkle slightly and Aloysius became aware that he was watching someone in the process of having a waking dream.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked her and she glanced across at him and made a face.

  ‘I was having a conversation with myself.’

  ‘Well, naturally, if you have no one else to talk to …’ he told her and this made her laugh. But when that sound evaporated she returned once more to watching the changing scene.

  Aloysius was trying to distract himself from the memory of that interview with Hayes. That moment, of speaking Dr Jones’ name aloud, replayed itself to him over and over again. He wondered if Anna, less distracted, might notice the guilt written on his face.

  Outside the little window the houses and the building sites had ebbed away and they were travelling through a kind of countryside now. Large modern houses stood near the train tracks surrounded by square gardens bedded down with white, and young oaks lined the streets. Fewer cars out this way; no people on the roads. Dusk was arriving and the heavy, grey snow-clouds crowded the roofs of the estates and cul-de-sacs.

  ‘Sometimes I feel like I have landed on another planet,’ Aloysius observed.

  Anna blinked at him. ‘Why? Because of the snow?’

  ‘Snow just makes you notice it more. The differences. The telegraph poles. The rows of cars. The factories and the great fat houses.’

  ‘You don’t have factories in Jamaica?’

  ‘In the town we do. But I lived in a village until I was eight. Did my homework by lamps. No electricity. No running water. My first two years of school I had no shoes. Uniform but no shoes.’

  ‘But how do you walk to school without shoes?’

  ‘You walk. Grit roads. Dirt roads. It was normal. When my father came back from the war – he was a very able man – he’d been working in the engine room of his ship. He came back with all this knowledge, engineering, mechanics, electrical repair and they’d started up the buses then: “buses for everyone”. He got a job as a mechanic in one of the depots at May Pen, this big town near where we lived. I’d hardly ever ridden in a car and suddenly I was riding the buses any time I wanted. Single-decker, green and white, pink sometimes, little windows that lifted up in front and always breaking down, do
ors coming off at the hinges. We got everyone else’s cast-offs. Buses from Miami, from Kenya, South America. All the buses the world no longer wanted.

  ‘We moved to this five-room apartment with blue flowers on the living-room wall. Electric light in the kitchen, a proper bath. I could read anytime I wanted. I could do my homework at nine o’clock at night. We took our lunch to school with us in a little box. Rice and peas, rice and fish. We were the rich kids then – Daddy working in the depot, Mama helping in the nursery – destined for the big big school. We had it all in front of us.’ Aloysius looked at the haze of white and grey outside the window. ‘It made me believe things could always change, always get better.’

  ‘What do you think would have happened to you if your dad hadn’t got that job?’

  Aloysius frowned, insulted somehow by the remark. ‘I’d still be me.’

  ‘But you didn’t want to stay in Jamaica? Didn’t want to be a success out there?’

  ‘I was in love with the idea of England. It was all I read about. It seemed more real than May Pen or Kingston or Mandeville. The Thames was this extraordinary thing and in my thoughts at night I could see Pip and Herbert rowing past the steamers to get Magwitch more clearly than I could conjure a scene upon the Rio Minho. In all those books there was England again and again and again, so fine and complicated. Until Jamaica seemed a carbon paper place, a weakened version of something else.’

  Anna thought about this. ‘When I was a child my father taught at a university in Wales. Some of the men he worked with would speak Welsh in the senior common room, Welsh in the corridors, Welsh everywhere except in class. And it made my father feel quite lonely because he struggled with his English for years and Welsh was just a step too far. And I remember my mother saying to him one night at supper: “Why are they all so ungrateful? Why wouldn’t they want to speak the language that Shakespeare spoke? Why aren’t they grateful for those books and plays?” And my father said, because he was a thoughtful man, “Every child in the world knows Shakespeare and perhaps a few thousand know Taliesin. But if they all recite ‘To Be or Not To Be’ and no one ever speaks the words of Schlegel or Taliesin or Racine then what is the point of culture? Shakespeare speaks and through the power of the sword and the pocketbook his words fly round the world. And Shakespeare becomes another Bible. This set of stories – perfectly fine in their own right – but nothing else is allowed to have such sway. Is that the world you want to live in?”’