‘Rachel! Mahmut! You’re both in charge.’ Ottmar ran to the hall and took his coat, feeling in the lining for a wallet. ‘Sorry!’ he called and then he was gone.
Samira headed south through the Garden. It was twilight already. Stalls were packed up, sellers gone home to bed. Boxes stacked eight feet high behind wooden gates at the flower market. Green-painted trollies pushed up against the walls to rest. The theatregoers would be here in an hour or two, pubs filling up, restaurants too. Men in dinner jackets and bow ties, ladies in beaded gowns that glittered below the hems of their navy and cream wool coats. Something was always on at the Opera House on a Friday night. But this was the quiet hour, the waiting time between low- and high-class commerce. Down into the darker streets Samira turned, behind the Opera House, heading for Aldwych. A taxi man stood rubbing his hands on Catherine Street, An Ideal Husband spelled out in pink lights above his head. Outside the Opera Tavern, a group of students dressed in graphic monochrome stood without their coats to better show their clothes.
As Samira turned onto Aldwych, Ottmar lost sight of her and hurried through the crowds, desperately scanning faces, aware he might be seen. He paused by Drury Lane and turned in full circles, looking for a small, slight girl in a long, black coat. Such a small person to mean all the world to him. There she was, in a crowd of shoppers, leaning against a bus stop. He stood by the doorway of a cafe with his back to her and pretended to examine the menu. When the number 68 came, Samira got on it with the shoppers. Ottmar waited until they were all well inside and he had seen her climb the stairs, then he ducked in himself and sat downstairs.
The bus set off. Ottmar twisted in his seat and watched the stairs. He had bought a ticket to Elephant and Castle because that’s all he’d had a chance to notice on the front of the bus but they sailed past the concrete might of its shopping centre with no sign of a Samira. The light fell fast and the street lamps flickered into life. The roads got wider, the trees more plentiful; they passed hospitals and parks and schools. Camberwell Green, Denmark Hill. On Herne Hill they paused at the lights and he read the boards of the evening paper seller.
WHITE RULE IN RHODESIA
Why was the world so full of places that he’d never heard of? All those sixteen-hour days, never leaving the cafe. That world kept him protected; he even turned the radio down when the news came on. He said it was to protect the ladies and the children in the cafe, but really he didn’t want to hear about the killing. So much killing and there he was, just as he had been in 1942, an impotent soul wondering why the love he had to offer seemed to cure nothing at all.
As they approached a sign for Tulse Hill station Samira suddenly appeared upon the stairs in a group of men and women, all descending. Ottmar waited for as long as he dared and then he leapt off the board at the back of the bus and hurried behind the wall of a bus shelter. Samira walked up and down for a couple of minutes peering at the walls and street signs and then she pulled her mother’s London A–Z out of her pocket and thumbed her way through the pages. Ottmar peered at her from the edge of the shelter and felt quite ridiculously silly. Was this what it meant to follow someone? Surely spies didn’t do this in real life. Then she was off again and he behind her, keeping at least thirty yards between them when they were on the same street and running desperately and breathlessly when she turned a corner. Palace Road, Hillside Road, Amesbury Avenue – the streets went on and on, Samira walking ever faster. At Streatham Hill station she turned around suddenly and frightened the life out of him. Ottmar spun on his heels and stood quite still, his head lowered, waiting for the sound of her voice but it never came. When he glanced up and round she was on the other side of the street, turning onto Drewstead Road. Ottmar blundered his way into the stream of traffic, trying to keep his eyes fixed on her, waving madly at the cars in apology. Samira walked purposefully on, scanning the fronts of houses. Eventually she paused beside one and went up the front path. Ottmar crept forward on the road, still twenty yards away, and watched her go in. He moved closer and read the little plaque.
Drewstead Road General Practitioners
Why would she come all this way to go to a doctor’s surgery? He could not think of a single happy reason. If she is pregnant we will be kind to her, he thought. We will offer to help her keep the baby. Maybe, if we are kind enough, she will start to love us once again.
He waited on the pavement, hands in his armpits to warm them. Somewhere in the distance church bells rang. Was that six o’clock? Did people go to church at six o’clock? He lived too far away from the sound of church bells to know. Did people go to church at all? he wondered. In London? Still? For all the talk of it being a Christian country he never heard people speak of God. They worked and drove and went to the cinema on Sundays. They swore constantly. If, as Leonard had sometimes wryly noted, Christianity was full of injunctions against hoarding money then the city was surely an anti-Christian one. A city that hates Christ, Ottmar thought. We’d probably have nailed him up as well.
He was so deep within his own thoughts that he was taken by surprise when a girl materialised before him and with a cry of annoyance called him: ‘Dad!’
‘What!’
‘You followed me!’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I was worried,’ Ottmar managed, having given little thought to what he would say. ‘What were you doing at the doctor’s?’
‘None of your business.’ Samira drew Ekin’s long wool coat more tightly round her. It was the one her mother kept for Rashida’s school events and going to visit clients in Fitzrovia. ‘I was doing a favour for a friend.’
‘For that Aloysius man?’
‘Why don’t you just call him what you think he is?’
Ottmar took a step back, genuinely hurt. ‘Because I’m not like that.’
‘Really? Really? Because you’re so bloody perfect. Aren’t you? Not like me. Why won’t you leave me alone?’ Her voice cracked with emotion.
‘I don’t understand it, Sami. Why are you so angry? All this rage. What is it that you think we’re doing to you? We buy you clothes. We buy you food. We love you. We don’t hit you. But you treat us like we’re nothing. You go out in the evenings … doing who knows what with your friends. Your mother and I are terrified. Are you being used? Are you taking drugs? You and Rashida, you are our lives. We’ve given you security: a flat, good schools, money in your pocket. And now you’re throwing it all away. Are you going to school at all? You act as if you live alone.’
‘But I don’t live alone! That’s the point. I need some bloody privacy.’
‘We’re four people living in a small flat, Samira. None of us has any privacy! I live in front of other people twenty-four hours a day. That’s just how it is. I would have loved to buy you a big house. I would have loved to buy you everything in the world. I look at these roads and roads of houses and I failed. I know that. I failed. But I didn’t do it out of selfishness. This – what I’ve given you – it’s as much as I could do.’ Ottmar paused for a moment, and then asked because he couldn’t bear not to: ‘Are you going to have a baby?’
Samira hissed with annoyance. ‘Couldn’t you think of anything else I’d be doing at a doctor’s?’
‘I don’t know, Sami. I’m scared.’
Samira thought for a minute. When she spoke her voice was low. ‘I was letting a lady know something so she didn’t get in trouble. The police like to pick on people. So we look out for each other.’
Ottmar wanted to ask what she meant but he held his tongue. She had trusted him a little; that was enough. He cast around for something to distract them both. ‘You know, I was following you on the bus, feeling like a salak, like an old man playing at being James Bond. But I came too far on my bus ticket. I was supposed to get off at Elephant and Castle. And I found myself thinking: what would a spy do?’
‘On a London bus?’
‘With the wrong ticket.’
Samira’s eyebrows rose. ‘Baba! You have officially committed a crime. Against London
Transport! How d’you feel now?’
‘Terrible.’ It was the truth.
‘Who’s in the restaurant?’
‘Rachel, Helen, Mahmut.’
‘You just left them?’
‘I got scared,’ Ottmar told her. ‘I couldn’t keep letting it happen. You walk away, Samira, and I get so frightened that you won’t come back.’
Samira caught his eye for a moment and he saw in her a wavering, a flicker of openness. She looked away again. Then she turned and walked a few steps back towards Streatham Hill. At the second lamp post she paused and waited for him to catch her up. They walked together in silence for a while.
‘You know,’ Samira said, ‘no one else is like us. No one’s Turkish. No one’s Muslim. Half of them have never heard of Cyprus. At school I’m this thing. This thing that doesn’t fit. I feel like dirt.’
Ottmar reached out and momentarily touched a hand to his daughter’s hair. ‘You’re the furthest thing there is from dirt,’ he said.
The Second Best Hotel in Town
Thursday, 11 November
Lanny was not alone when she arrived at Fishguard and Goodwick station in the dark of that November evening. While Anna and Aloysius were searching for a room in Clacton and Hayes was walking the streets of Westminster, two women and a child were arriving at the single-platformed station beside the port.
Through an iron gate lay a little car park and a weather-beaten kiosk from inside which a middle-aged woman in a green corduroy coat sold cigarettes and newspapers and sweets.
‘Do you smoke?’ Orla asked.
‘Not right now,’ Lanny told her.
Orla bought a packet of Senior Service and a lighter. ‘Look, Gracie,’ she said. ‘Senior Service. Like that big sign we always look at in the station!’ Her daughter laughed. Orla lit one with a shaking hand and drew a great breath in. Her face crumpled.
‘Not good?’ Lanny asked her.
‘Haven’t smoked in years.’ A filthy taste like soot and iron filings spread itself across her tongue. They walked together onto the edges of the deserted road.
‘You ladies got somewhere to stay tonight?’ the woman in the kiosk called to them.
‘Not as such,’ Orla called back.
‘If you head towards the port there’s the Fishguard Bay Hotel. Nice if you’ve got the money.’
Orla cast a glance across at Lanny who shook her head.
‘First place they’d look,’ Lanny whispered and turned her face away from the woman’s gaze.
‘What if we don’t have the money?’ Orla asked.
‘Then you’ll need to walk into Fishguard. Road you’re on takes you to the upper town. Or there’s a path round the headland; that’ll take you past the upper town and down to the harbour and the lower town. There’s a pub with rooms. That’d be my second choice. Pretty place. Lovely and quiet.’
Orla finished her cigarette and picked up Gracie, letting the girl snuggle into her neck. There was no snow on the coast but a fierce wind swept in from St George’s Channel. Alongside Lanny she leaned on the railings at the sea’s edge and took in the lines of the coast. To the west a fortress of containers marked the edge of the port. Beyond it a stone jetty ran into the sea and above it all a cream-coloured, crenellated pudding of a building nestled in amongst the trees, clinging to the edge of the cliff.
Orla lowered Gracie and they started to walk east. Past the fishermen’s cottages with their neat, spare gardens; up the mulch-covered steps between the trees; Gracie clung to her mother’s hand. On the steps Orla felt Lanny’s hand grasp her wrist. She reached across and circled the other woman’s waist, pressed her face close to Lanny’s ear. ‘Can you do this?’ Lanny didn’t answer. ‘Do we need to find you a doctor? We’ve got time. We can get you somewhere and still make the boat.’
Lanny rested her head briefly against Orla’s shoulder. ‘If I can’t do this you can leave me, you know. Take the boat without me. If I’m too sick to do this, then … Well …’ Lanny gave Orla’s arm a sharp squeeze and pulled away.
They rose to the crest of the headland and traced its edges, the sea rustling and clapping the rocks beneath them. The clouds obscured the moon and stars. Orla pulled Gracie away from the cliff’s edge and held her on the safer side of the path. She heard Lanny’s breathing grow loud behind them. As they rounded the headland the lights of a harbour appeared below them and to their right. A wooden bench sat on the grassy slope above them and Gracie ran to it before Orla could stop her.
‘For God’s sake, Gracie. We can’t go sitting around on benches now.’ But Lanny was making her way towards it too, staggering up the little slope.
Gracie sat between Orla and Lanny and gazed across to the cream-coloured hotel, gleaming softly on the cliffs in the distance. ‘Why can’t we go there tonight?’ she asked her mother.
‘Money,’ Orla said and Lanny laughed.
‘We’d be queens,’ Gracie said.
‘D’you want to be a queen, Gracie?’ Lanny asked.
Gracie stared at her for a moment. ‘Don’t you?’
‘No,’ Lanny said. She nodded towards the ring of dim lights that surrounded the blackness of the harbour. ‘I want to be down there.’
The harbour opened its arms to them, fishing boats bucking softly on the quiet water. They paused by a set of curving steps which wound from the path down onto a sandy beach below. Lanny peered down the slope. ‘Which way now?’
‘Keep following the lights,’ Orla said. ‘Follow the houses round.’
Single file they crossed a small stone bridge beneath which a river surged with unexpected force. A sign swung gently from the walls of a stone inn.
The proprietor’s wife brought them soup and toast and tea in their rooms. ‘Because the poor lady looks done in.’ Gracie ate a slice, crawled onto her mother’s bed and fell asleep. Orla closed the connecting door and sat with Lanny by a little gas fire, mixing the last of the milk with the half-cold dregs of tea. Lanny unwrapped the scarf she’d tied tightly around her hair.
‘How was your brother?’ Orla asked, for want of conversation.
‘When?’
‘When you phoned him. Back in London.’
Lanny stared at the bars of the fire. ‘Do you have brothers, Orla?’
‘Three young ones. Adults now. With wives and babies that I’ve never met.’
‘Why not?’
Orla frowned. ‘I never went home.’
‘Nor me.’ Lanny studied Orla’s face with an expression that Orla couldn’t read. She reached out and touched the other woman’s arm. Then she eased herself from her chair, lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.
Friday, 12 November
The proprietress agreed to walk around the bay and buy the tickets. Two adults and a child for the Saturday sailing at noon. Lanny stayed in bed but gave Orla a handful of pound notes to pass on.
Gracie played with her dolls under the bed. Orla sat on the window seat in Lanny’s room and crocheted a flower from a little piece of thread with a hook she found in her handbag. When the thread was finished she pulled the work free and started once again. Lanny slept.
The lady brought their tickets up at half past twelve with a tray of hot lamb soup and bread. Orla spread the papers out upon the table and checked them and then rechecked them until she started to dog the corners of her and Gracie’s birth certificates. Would the security guard make the connection between the passport for Orla Hayes and the certificate for Orla Keane and her daughter? Gracie’s birth certificate recorded under ‘mother’s name: Orla Hayes formerly Keane’. And my picture, she thought. Lanny will need to look more like me than I do. A momentary ripple of fear passed through her. I’m going to mess this up, she thought. We’re going to mess this up.
She stowed the papers and the tickets in the pocket of her handbag, broke the skin on the soup with a spoon.
‘Gracie! Come and get your lunch.’
Gracie came with her dolls from the other room and stared at the lamb so
up with unguarded horror. Lanny stirred under the covers and Orla went to her, pressing a hand to her forehead, touching a hand to her cheek.
‘Do you want me to feed you?’ she asked the woman softly.
‘Why?’
‘You don’t look right, Iolanthe.’
‘Give me a minute.’ Lanny levered herself upright in the bed.
Orla could see her daughter watching Lanny, studying the woman’s fragility.
‘Gracie! If you don’t like the look of the soup, you can take the bread and butter next door.’
Gracie helped herself to two thick pieces of bread and went back to her game.
Orla pushed the connecting door closed. ‘I don’t think we can travel together,’ she told Lanny. ‘My name’s on Gracie’s birth certificate and your passport. And it’s one thing you passing for me but quite another me not passing for myself.’
Lanny rubbed her eyes and eased herself to sitting. Her hand went to the bedside table to find her pills. Orla saw what she was looking for and fetched her handbag from the end of the bed. Before Lanny could tell her not to she had opened it and was looking for the little bottle. Orla pushed the stack of letters first to one side, then the other.
‘Do you want me to post these?’ she asked, still looking for the glint of brown glass.
‘No. They’re not for posting.’
Orla smiled. ‘Are they love letters?’
Lanny’s face fell. ‘I wish they were. They’re demands for money.’
Orla found the bottle of pills, untwisted the cap and handed them to Lanny. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said. ‘It’s none of my business. I know that.’
Lanny took a pill and swallowed it with water. Then she recapped the bottle and handed it back to Orla.
‘A long time ago now … My brother and I got ourselves into debt. Our father had died … Our mother …’ Lanny’s fingers passed through the air. ‘We were gone. Lost.’
Orla seated herself at the end of the bed, signalling her willingness to listen.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 27