The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “I won’t!” she said. “I promise! She’s in Marylebone, Balcombe Street. I’d be there and back before you know it. Just… don’t call the police on me. Please.”

  “The hell you would,” he said.

  “Please!” she said desperately. “You’ve got to believe me. I’ll… I’ll leave something here with you. For you to look after. Something to keep, so you know I’ll come back.”

  She glanced down at her open satchel, and his eyes followed hers, scanning the contents. The book. A pencil, worn down to a stub. A rubber band ball. And the doll.

  “Like what?” he said. “What have you got that’s worth coming back for?”

  She looked at the doll, quickly, furtively - just long enough for him to see her looking - then looked away, keeping her focus fixed on the table in front of her.

  “What’s that you got there?” he asked, pointing down at the doll with the tip of one finger. “Aren’t you a bit old for playing dolls?”

  “It was my Granny’s,” she said quietly. “She left it me when she…”

  She let her voice trail off.

  “What are you carrying it around with you for?” he said - but he was softening at bit, she could tell.

  “I’m not carrying it round,” she said. “I’m taking it home. That’s why I was round at my Auntie’s this morning, picking it up.”

  He looked at the doll again; stared at it.

  “Leave it here,” he said. “Leave it here with me, and then I’ll know you’ll come back.”

  Her lip wobbled, the picture of heartbreak.

  “Leave it here?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, you are coming back, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, vigorously.

  “Alright, then,” he said. “So here’s what we’ll do: you leave the doll with me, and I’ll keep it behind the counter for you until you come back to pay your bill. Safe as houses.”

  She hesitated, her face broadcasting her train of thought with the volume up. She didn’t want to part with the doll, it said; not even for 5 minutes. But she owed him money, and he’d threatened to call the police, and what would her Auntie say…?

  She extracted the doll from the satchel by its arm, gently, and handed it over to the manager.

  “You will look after it, won’t you?” she asked.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said.

  She bit her trembling lip; stood up from her chair, pulling the satchel over her chest.

  “I’ll be quick,” she said.

  She shot out of the cafe like a rocket, racing down York Gate and slowing to a walk when she made it to Regent’s Park. She stopped just before the Jubilee Gates; sat down on a bench, took A Scanner Darkly from the satchel and settled down to read.

  An hour and four chapters passed. When she judged the time was right, she put away the book and jogged back to the cafe - through the park, and back up York Gate.

  At the cafe’s door, she pulled two pound notes from the back pocket of her jeans, rubbed both against the sweating palms of her hands - it’s the little details, Ruby had told her, it’s them that really sell it - and stepped back inside.

  The manager was waiting for her behind the counter.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long!” she said breathlessly. “My Auntie was out at the shops, and I had to wait for her to get back so she could let me in, and then she couldn’t find her purse…”

  She threw the now-damp notes onto the counter.

  The manager smiled at her - a half-moon wrinkling of the jaw that made him look, she thought, not unlike a frog.

  “Not to worry!” he said magnanimously. “You’re back now, that’s the main thing.”

  There was a pause, long and - to El at least - painful.

  “Do you have…?” she began.

  “Oh, yes!” he said, as if remembering. “The doll! Of course, I’ve got it here.”

  He kneeled down behind the counter, then stood up again, the doll tucked under his armpit.

  He made no move, she observed, to hand it over.

  “The thing is,” he said, “while you were gone… my little girl came over to see me. She’s younger than you, only seven. Still plays with dolls - not like you. And she… well, she took a shine to this doll of yours here. Couldn’t stop playing with it."

  El said nothing. Let him do the talking, Ruby had said. The more he talks, the less you have to try.

  “She said to me,” he continued, “‘Daddy, can I keep her?’ And I told her no, that she belonged to another little girl - well, a big girl, really - and so we had to give her back. But she got herself worked up about it, wouldn’t stop bawling, just kept saying, ‘but I love her, Daddy! Why can’t I keep her?’ And I didn’t know what to say. So I told her: that girl’s coming back in in a minute to pay for her lunch, so when she gets here I’ll tell her about you and tell her how much you love that doll, and we’ll see if we can’t work something out between us. And you should have seen the look on her face! I’d never seen her so happy.”

  “I don’t understand,” said El, understanding perfectly.

  “This doll,” said the manager. “I know you got her from your Granny. And I know she must mean a lot to you. But let’s be honest - you’re not going to play with her, are you? Not the way my little girl would.”

  “I don’t know,” said El uncertainly. “Probably not?”

  “Of course you’re not,” said the man, pressing his advantage. “She’d just be sitting in a box at home somewhere, gathering dust until you’ve forgotten all about her. But my little girl... well, having something like that would make her day.”

  El let her mouth drop open a little - just enough to seem perplexed by the situation.

  “What about this, then?” he said, opening the till and ostentatiously rifling around inside. “I’ve got... let’s see... nearly ten quid here. It’s probably a fair bit more than she’s worth - but I know you must be attached to her. And my daughter, I can’t tell you how much she loved that doll, and I’d do just about anything to make her smile. So how about it?”

  “You want to give me money for Gran’s doll?” El asked.

  The manager pulled a handful of notes and coins out from the till - £9.85, she counted, mostly in ones and 50 pence pieces.

  “Take it,” he said, pressing the money into her hand. “You’d be doing us both a favour.”

  She stared at the money; at the two other, crumpled pound notes on the counter.

  “But... I need to pay you,” she said. “What I owe you. For lunch.”

  He pushed the two notes back at her.

  “It’s on the house,” he said.

  ———

  “About two minutes after you leave to get the money off your ‘Auntie’,” Ruby had told her on the bus to Baker Street, “I’ll make my entrance.”

  She’d walk over to the counter; order a cup of hot chocolate, extra milky; make polite chitchat with the manager, her accent shifting effortlessly into a crisp RP. In the course of that conversation, she’d have cause to peer over the counter, where - if she was any judge of character - the man would have stashed the doll.

  Balancing her tortoiseshell glasses on the bridge of her nose to examine it more closely, she’d ask a string of unanticipated questions - who it belonged to, where it came from. Whether it was his.

  “Why’d you want to know?” he’d say, interrupting her.

  She’d apologise for her rudeness, for overstepping, but could offer in her defence only that she was tremendously excited - she ran a small antiques shop on the Marylebone High Street and, though she and her partner specialised in children’s toys, she’d never seen a Baby Henrietta up close before, not in the flesh.

  “A what?” the man would say.

  “A Baby Henrietta,” Ruby would say, surprised at his ignorance. And then, slowly understanding that he had no clue what she was talking about - that he didn’t know what he had - she’d explain:

  The Baby Henrietta
collection of lifelike dolls, modelled after real children, was manufactured by Switzerland’s Arnholdt Company between 1921 and 1924. At the time, the dolls were considered commercial failures, their too-realistic appearance judged off-putting for the real-world children to whom they were marketed. Their comparative rarity, though, meant that their value had increased significantly over time - to the extent that the thirty or so Baby Henrietta dolls remaining were now changing hands, among those in the know, for some fairly substantial sums, at least by the standards of the antique toy trade.

  “What kind of sums are we talking?” the manager would ask.

  “Oh, £2000 or more, at the higher end,” Ruby would answer.

  Dollar signs would appear in the manager’s eyes.

  “Two grand?” he’d say, seeking confirmation that he hadn’t misheard, that the dirty-looking doll he’d shoved under the stack of Coke cans below the counter could really go for more than the price of a new car.

  “At least,” Ruby would say airily.

  The man would be speechless - initially, anyway.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” Ruby would add, “where did you get her? I assume you’re not a collector yourself.”

  “She’s... my daughter’s,” the man would reply.

  “I don’t suppose...” Ruby would begin.

  “What?” the man would say.

  “I don’t suppose you’d ever consider selling her?”

  The man would fall back into silence, dumbfounded, leaving Ruby embarrassed.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d stutter. “I shouldn’t have asked. Terribly presumptuous of me.”

  Seeing the new car drive away from him at speed before he’d even put the key in the ignition, the man would spring into action.

  “It’s fine!” he’d say, spluttering in his haste to get the words out. “No need to apologise. I just had no idea she’d be worth that much. I mean, obviously I knew she was valuable, you’ve only got to look at her to know that - but not, you know... that valuable.”

  “Perhaps,” Ruby would say slyly, “I could give you my card? I’m on my way to a valuation just now, but as I say, my shop is only on the High Street. You could call in one day this week, and we could have a little chat.”

  She’d fish a card from her handbag, a sharp-edged matte rectangle that felt denser and more expensive than traditional cardboard, and would pass it across the counter to him.

  He’d stare at it for a moment, still processing the information.

  “We’ll see,” he’d say, and tuck the card in his wallet for safekeeping.

  ———

  On Baker Street, El slipped the banknotes between the pages of her book, the coins into her pocket.

  Following Ruby’s instructions, she walked through Fitzrovia to Oxford Circus, then took the tube from there to Tottenham Court Road, proceeding on foot for the rest of the journey. The place she wanted, Ruby had said, was just off Endell Street - another greasy spoon very like the one she’d just left, this one going by the slightly grandiose name of The Cavendish.

  She found it easily enough. Ruby was there already, positioned at a table with a clear view of the door. She didn’t react at all as El came in, though she’d clearly seen her.

  El responded in kind, walking over to the till and ordering a cup of tea from the middle-aged Indian woman behind the counter. Then she crossed the room to Ruby; slid down into the seat opposite her, nonchalantly.

  Wordlessly, she withdrew the notes from the book and the coins from her pocket, and placed both on the table between them.

  “How much?” Ruby asked quietly.

  “Nearly a tenner,” said El, dropping her own voice in response.

  “Good girl,” said Ruby. She took four notes from the pile, folded them and secreted them inside her waxed jacket.

  “You can keep the rest,” she added.

  El shoved the rest of the money back into her pocket, before Ruby could change her mind.

  The Indian woman brought over El’s tea. Somehow, in the moment of transferring it across to the table, the cup slipped from her hand, falling onto the floor and shattering, loudly – spilling six inches of copper-coloured water onto the linoleum in the process.

  “Sorry, very sorry,” she said in broken English, getting down on her knees beside the table to collect the cracked pieces of ceramic and mop up the liquid with a cloth.

  The woman’s boss, a bearded white man with an enormous belly, stepped out from behind the beaded curtain that separated the cafe from the kitchen and half-ran over to them.

  “What have you done now?” he said angrily, his belly pulsing rapidly in and out like a fontanelle.

  “She’s alright,” said Ruby. “Just a little accident. No harm done.”

  “I don’t call this ‘little,’” said the man. “What’s wrong with you?” he added to the Indian woman, half-shouting, contempt flaring his nostrils. “Can you not even be trusted to make a cup of tea properly?”

  The three other diners in the cafe - workmen, two of them still wearing hard-hats - paused, mid-conversation, and turned to look at them.

  “Sorry, so sorry,” said the woman again, head down, still scrubbing at the floor.

  “That cup’s coming out of your wages,” said the man. He paused, El thought most likely for dramatic effect, then flounced back behind the curtain, belly first.

  “Here, love,” Ruby said to the woman kindly, her voice loud enough to carry. “You come and sit down a minute, get your breath back.”

  She moved across to the seat next to her, creating room for the woman to join them.

  “Thank you,” said the woman gratefully, smoothing down her checked apron and lowering herself onto the vinyl. “Thank you.”

  The workmen, sensing that the entertainment had drawn to a close, turned back to their fry-ups, a low hum of renewed dialogue drifting over from their table.

  “He seems like a prince, that one,” said Ruby to the woman beside her, even more quietly than before.

  “He’s an absolute oaf,” said the woman, equally quietly. “How anyone thought a man like that could be trusted to wash money for the Cypriots, I’ll never know.”

  El was so absorbed in trying to decipher the meaning of the woman’s words that it took her a second longer than it should have done to register the change in her accent, the apparently instantaneous transition from faltering to precisely-enunciated public school English.

  “I did say you should have started with that bloke in Harrow instead,” said Ruby.

  “I know, I know,” said the woman wearily. “But I do so hate going too far north of the river. It’s a wasteland up there, I don’t know how you stand it.”

  Ruby glared at her - but affectionately, El thought.

  “And who is this?” the woman asked, gesturing almost imperceptibly towards El.

  “This is El,” said Ruby.

  “Another one?” said the woman, raising an eyebrow at Ruby - an eyebrow that was, El saw now that she was closer, perfectly plucked and shaped.

  Ruby sighed.

  “El,” she said, leaning in towards her over the table, “meet Sita. Actress, roper extraordinaire and all-round international woman of mystery. Though apparently her table-waiting leaves something to be desired.”

  “It’s an improvement on your bartending, if memory serves,” said the woman - Sita. “I can’t imagine what that woman at the Gateways was thinking, when she took you on.”

  “Got you a foot in the door, didn’t it?” said Ruby. “And in a few other places too, as I recall.”

  “That was a wonderful year, wasn’t it?” said Sita, a nostalgic smile temporarily lighting up her face.

  El cleared her throat, only half-deliberately, and Sita snapped back to the present.

  “So,” she said, her eyes on El but the question directed at Ruby. “What is it you’re teaching this one?”

  Chapter 7

  Highgate

  1998

  The back of the
Bentley was less sumptuous than its extravagant exterior suggested.

  “It’s dreadfully Spartan, isn’t it?” said Sita, reading El’s mind. “And yet somehow also… tasteless. I mean, really: cream leather? It beggars belief."

  “I take it it’s not yours?” said El.

  “Good Lord, no! I borrowed it from a friend. A gentleman friend.”

  Only Sita, El thought, could utter the phrase “gentleman friend” with a straight face.

  “It’s certainly in character,” El said.

  “Isn’t it? It strikes me as exactly right for a woman like Qureshi. Do you know, she’s sold me into this as an interior designer? And an amateur one, at that. A dilettante.”

  The “she,” El knew, meant Ruby.

  “She didn’t mention it was you she’d brought in as the buyer,” El said.

  “Of course she didn’t. You know what she’s like - she adores the element of surprise. I imagine she thought that springing me on you would elicit a more authentic reaction.”

  She took a long, slow pull on her cigarette holder, closing her eyes in pleasure, then exhaled through her nose, releasing dragon-like plumes of smoke into the confined air of the car.

  “Now,” she said, taking El’s hand and squeezing, “tell me. How are you?”

  “I’m well,” said El awkwardly. “Busy.”

  “You work too hard.”

  “I’m trying to slow down.”

  “You must. Why do we do all this,” she threw her hands up in the air theatrically, “if not to luxuriate in the benefits it affords us? The work is the means, after all, not the end.”

  “I will,” said El. “Definitely.”

  “And are you seeing anyone?” asked Sita, going for the jugular.

  She should have expected this, El thought. It was a short leap from Sita quizzing her about work to interrogating her about her sex life.

  “Not at the moment,” El said.

  “What happened to that girl?” said Sita. “The architect?”

  The same thing that always happens, El thought. We had a few nice dinners, spent a few long weekends in bed, and then she started asking why she’d never seen my house, or met my friends, and why I never talked about where I grew up or what I did for a living. And then she stopped calling.