by Paul Kearney
‘Where have you been?’ he asks distantly, and he fumbles in his waistcoat for his pocket watch. He presses the stud on the side of the Breguet and it gives a series of beautiful little chimes, telling the hours and the quarters.
And I do not feel the least shame in lying to him. ‘I walked around, and played in the snow. I went along the canal, and wandered Jericho. It was very quiet. I didn’t speak to anybody.’
He looks at me. ‘It’s after eleven. All this time, Anna?’
‘I don’t have a watch, father. I’m sorry. I forgot the time. But I’m all right.’
I stand up, and go to him, and hug him, smelling pipe tobacco and whisky and the old stale tweed of his jacket. ‘I’m quite all right.’
He runs his hand over my hair. I can feel it curl into a fist for a moment, and I am sure he is going to belt me – I brace for it – but then the fingers relax again, and he sighs. ‘I forgot the time too.’ And he hugs me back. ‘I should have gone looking for you.’
‘I was not lost, Pa. There was no need.’
‘You can’t be running around the streets of Oxford at all hours. And you smell of smoke.’
‘There was a brazier lit somewhere. I stood by it to warm up.’
He lifts up my head to look in my eyes, and I can’t help wonder if he can see the lies in them. His own are watery, as if he has been crying, but it is only the booze. I know the look.
‘You’re half frozen,’ he says with a snap.
‘My feet are cold,’ I admit, and I smile up at him, willing him to believe.
He shakes his head. ‘This just won’t do, Anna. I must be able to trust you. I said one hour, and here it is the middle of the night. Anything could have happened to you.’ And he tugs me close.
‘Christos,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t you know you’re all I have left?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I mean it. The way he hugs me makes me feel little again, and reminds me of the days when he would put me to bed and read to me, or tell me stories of Agamemnon and Achilleos as though they were people who lived in the world we knew, and could any day drop by for tea, leaving their spears and helmets in the hall and breezing in all brown and sunlit and full of life. But I know better now.
‘We’re never going home again, are we Pa?’
He shakes his head and runs his fingers through my hair. ‘Oxford is our home now, moraki mou. We are not Greek any more.’
‘Then why do you still have these meetings, with all the old Greeks?’
He pauses for a long time, until I think he will not speak again. When at last he answers his voice is as thick as though he had a heavy cold.
‘It is complicated. Greece is still out there, Anna, but it is not the same as the country we knew. Our city was unique, and the people in it…’ He trails off.
‘Just by coming here, and talking about it, and remembering things; it is a way of keeping some part of it alive. Those people need that. They sit here of an evening, and recall the time that is gone, and the loved ones who are no more.’ He swallows. I can see it in the thin flesh of his throat.
‘Perhaps it is not altogether healthy. But it’s a hard thing, to give up on a life. Harder still when you are my age, and all the happiest days of that life are dead and gone forever, and youth gone with them.’
‘We can still be happy, Pa. We’re still together.’
He shakes his head, and smiles. ‘Kori, I have had my love and happiness, my life’s share of it. There is nothing more to come now but the fading of the memories, and yet more loss. All lives reach a point in their years where there is only sorrow to be had, and the joy has all been given or taken away. Grief is the price we pay for having loved.’
He raises my head in his hands.
‘You have the look of your mother, always had. She was from Anatolia, and she lived in a little village in the hills. When I first met her I was not much more than a boy, and she was barefoot and illiterate, but she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.’ He smiles. ‘I took her away from there at a gallop in a two-wheeled trap, and I thought her father was going to shoot me for it, but your grandmother blessed us both, and told him that God had meant me to find her.’ He looks away, and his eyes are full of real tears now. ‘She had a voice, such a voice. When she sang the nightingales would stop to listen.’
There is agony on his face, and he has broken out in a sweat. His hands tighten on my face until it almost hurts. Then he lets me go and pushes me away, wiping his eyes.
‘It’s time you were in bed now. Go on up, and take the lamp with you. I shan’t be needing it tonight.’
I want him to keep talking, to tell me more about my mother, but I know that it would be of no use now. He walks into the front room and lifts the oil lamp and hands it to me. I stand in the hall with it, the heat rising from the glass, and watch as he shuffles back into the darkened room, scarlet with the dying of the fire.
Then he turns. ‘Where is your doll?’ His voice has changed. He is quite sharp now.
‘I left her behind. She’s in my room.’
A grimness comes into his face, all red light and black shadow.
‘Good. It’s time you left childishness like that behind. We must all of us grow up sometime. We can’t hold on to things, no matter how hard we try.’ And his face clenches up like a fist. ‘That is something you will learn, soon enough.’
His shoulder strikes the door with a stagger as he closes it behind him, and I stand alone in the hall with the light in my hands. For a mad instant, I wonder what would happen if I took the lamp and dashed it against that door; whether he would even care.
At last, slowly, I begin climbing up the stairs into the darkness of the snowbound house.
I LIE LATE in bed on the Sunday, listening to the bells of Oxford. I love the sound of them. Somehow there is hope and reassurance in the peals tolling from one church after another, as though it were the city itself calling out to those who lived in it. I lie in my bed with Pie in the crook of my arm, and I stroke her head as father stroked mine, and I think of Wytham Great Wood, and the Romani, and of kissing the boy Luca. That is the first time I have ever kissed a boy, and I wonder if he liked it. I think of my mother, barefoot in some mountain village far across the world in miles and years, a girl like me who could shame the nightingales with her singing, and I wonder how she died. I hope it was quick. I hope she went to God in an instant. I hope she is with him now, singing still.
Lord Jesus Christos, this is Anna. And I know I do not talk to you as often as I should, and when I do I am always asking for something. But all the same, could you please help my father, and bring him back to the way he was, and make him drink less of that horrid Scotch. And try to make him happy.
Amen. Thank you.
I TALK TO Pie as I lie in the warm bed, and tell her about the forest, and the people in it, and the stew from the pot, and the pretty girl, Jaelle, who put her arm about my shoulders. And I tell her of Luca walking me home, but I do not mention the beast stalking the trees in the night, because I do not want to frighten her, and besides, it seems almost like a dream now, in the bright morning with the church bells tolling and the sounds of motor cars in the streets below.
AND PIE LISTENS to me with wide black eyes.
FATHER STAYS IN bed late on Sundays these days, especially after a meeting, so I get up and dress and splash water over my face from the basin in the corner, and run a brush through my hair, wincing and hissing as the knots and tangles come out of it. I stare at my face in the mirror, and study my long nose and wish it was smaller, and brush my teeth with the green tooth powder. I wish I was beautiful, like Mama was. It’s all very well to say beauty is under the skin, or in the eye of the beholder, but no-one would say no to being prettier if they had the chance, so it is all rot.
IT IS ANOTHER bread and dripping day, being closer to the end of the month than the beginning. But I cannot face it. I drink water out of the brass tap, stuff down a crust of bread and cheese, and then
Pie and I are set up for the morning. I listen at Father’s door on the landing, and I can hear him snort and breathe as loud as a horse on the other side of it, so I leave him a note saying I have gone for a walk, and with that I have a clear conscience.
The snow has been trodden on and is broken and crunching and dirty, and my socks are damp in my paper-stuffed shoes, but it is bright and sharp and still, the world wide awake, and the streets full of people. Everyone is going to church, and the children are all buttoned up in their Sunday best with pink knees and new collars, and some of the students are trying to ride their bicycles in the frozen ruts with their gowns billowing out black around them, and there is a snowman standing at the corner on Little Clarendon Street with a hat and scarf, and coal for eyes, and it makes me happy just to look at him.
I keep walking, hugging Pie close and staring all around me. I wonder if Luca and his family ever come into the city and walk up and down the streets like normal people, or do they stay in the wood and sit around the fire and eat rabbit all the time. I wonder how they brush their teeth in the morning, and if they ever take a bath. What a strange way to live. But on a morning like this, it does not seem a bad way of doing things, though they must miss clean sheets and pillows every so often. And I could not live without reading books. Though I could happily get by if I never saw another word of French, or those horrid letters in algebra that are supposed to add up to something but never do.
The High seems busy to me, despite the snow and the fact that it is Sunday. There is a beggar sitting swathed in rags in front of St Mary’s church, and people just walk past him as though he is not there. I smile at him, and he looks up at me out of a red, bearded face, and does not smile back, but stares blank as a stone, and something about him makes me feel cold.
But I forget him as I walk on in the bright bustle of the day. Even on a Sunday, Oxford is noisy. I’ve heard Father lament the fact that there are so few horses to be seen on the roads now, and motor cars are everywhere with their din. I think the horses are another reminder of Pa’s youth, but even I can remember a time when it seemed there were far more of them, and when you crossed the road you had to watch where you put your feet. But the world is changing fast it seems.
It was the War that did it, so Miss Hawcross is always saying. There is no decorum these days, and young people are quite out of control. And I grin as I think on it, and wonder what she would make of rabbit stew in the woods with the Romani. Their world has not changed, it looks like, not in years and years. Mowgli would be quite at home sitting at their fire.
I find myself on Magdalen Bridge, and jump up a little so I can lean on the balustrade and look down into the half-frozen Cherwell. The punts are all stacked up for the winter and there are fans of ice spread out from the banks, and fragments of it bumping slowly along in the lazy current.
I have been here in summer, when the river is a raft of boaters as people take their sweethearts and friends out in punts with hampers and parasols, and the river is brown and thick and slow, like sun-warmed treacle, and the stone itself is warm against my skin, like a reminder, a little echo of the fierce bright light and heat I knew in our old home, and the balcony that looked out not on a sleepy Oxfordshire river, but on the Aegean Sea, where Agamemnon launched his galleys, and Don John fought the Turks at Lepanto, and Nelson led his band of brothers to beat Napoleon at the Nile.
Now if only that history were the one that Miss Hawcross taught me, I should be so much more interested in it than in which Queen got her head lopped off by horrible fat old Henry.
I cross the road, crunching in the brown, frozen ruts, and I jump as someone in a bug-eyed motor squeezes their horn at me. Parp parp! It is such a comical noise. No wonder old Toad loved it so.
I make my way into the Botanical Gardens, where there are some wonderful old trees and plants and things that do not grow in England, and which I love to smell to bring back the memories of that warm sea.
The Gardens are dishevelled now, and the colours are muted, as though the place is sleeping through winter, and as I stroll along with Pie it becomes quite quiet, and even the traffic noises seem to fade away, and the place seems almost abandoned. And there is another tramp here, asleep on a bench, little more than a mound of rags. I walk more quietly, suddenly reluctant to pass by him.
But further on, by one of the most interesting of the trees there is a lean man wrapped in a scarf and smoking a pipe. And as I look on he goes up to the massive trunk and pats it, as one would the flank of a horse. As though the tree were an old friend. And I think it is a strange but also a rather lovely thing to do, so Pie and I stop and watch him as he peers up into the bare branches. His face is familiar.
He turns, and sees me standing there, and gives me a nod and a rather shy smile. He has a thin, pale face, and I recognise him as Jack’s friend, who rode off on his bicycle the night I met them outside the pub.
‘How do you do,’ he says.
‘Very well, thank you sir,’ I say politely. I can see that he knows my face.
‘Have we met?’
‘Your friend Jack walked me home one night.’
It dawns on him. ‘Ah, the little girl, of course. I am glad to see you well my dear.’
‘You like that tree a lot,’ I say, stepping forward.
He shrugs slightly, takes his pipe out of his mouth and peers into the bowl a moment. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I think it’s beautiful. I like trees too,’ I say.
‘Do you? That’s splendid. So few do, these days.’ He pats the side of the great tree again. ‘Pinus nigra, black pine. It’s Austrian, in point of fact.’
‘It looks like it has arms.’
He smiles. ‘Yes, it does rather.’
‘They pollarded the willows in Binsey last year, and they looked so sad afterwards, all stumpy and grumpy.’
‘That’s what they do,’ he says, and his pale face becomes animated. ‘They use trees without looking at them, harvest them as though they were mowing grass; and yet there’s something in trees that is found nowhere else. They are the oldest living things. This one is a mere stripling, perhaps a century or two. But there are yews growing in English churchyards which were alive before the Normans came.’
I stare at him. ‘But that’s wonderful – imagine if they could talk!’
He laughs. ‘Yes. But what language would they speak?’
‘Their own I suppose. Tree language, all deep and slow.’
He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘Now that’s a curious idea. I like that.’
‘I’ve been to Wytham Wood, and there are old trees there, and it’s a curious place altogether,’ I say a little breathlessly. ‘I was there in the night, and it was like being outside England, like an older place where time is not moving so fast and there are memories in the wood, and you might see anything if the moon is right.’
He stares at me once more. He has a long, kind face and very bright eyes that seem younger than the rest of him.
‘So Jack walked you home, eh?’
‘Yes. And he knew who Agamemnon was. He is very clever.’
The man laughs again at that, throwing his head back. ‘I shall be sure to pass on the compliment. He is waiting for me in the Eastgate.’ He pauses. ‘And what are you about on this cold Sunday afternoon?’
‘Just walking. Father is still in bed, and so Pie and I are taking the air.’
‘Pie?’
‘This is Pie,’ I say, holding her up. ‘Her real name is Penelope, like Odysseos’s wife, but she likes to be called Pie.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ the man says, nodding at Pie. Then he does something no-one has ever done before. He reaches out and takes Pie’s little cold hand and shakes it, rather solemnly.
‘And you are?’
‘Anna Francis. I live in Jericho, but I come from Greece. I am quite English now, though.’
‘You look rather cold, Anna.’ He considers a moment. ‘Would you and Pie like to join Jack and me for a hot chocola
te in the Eastgate Hotel? I’m sure he would be pleased to meet you again, and they keep a fire burning.’
I look at him. Hot chocolate! ‘That would be very nice,’ I say carefully. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘No trouble. My name is Ronald, by the way.’
‘Jack called you Tollers.’
‘Yes, he does that. Come now, before your nose turns even more blue.’ He looks me up and down, and a frown goes across his face, and his mouth clamps on the stem of his pipe. ‘We must get you in front of that fire. A hot chocolate is just the ticket for warming up little girls. Come on – hop to it.’
He walks surprisingly fast for someone so old – he must be forty at least, and I have to skip to keep up with him. The tramp is gone from the bench and the gardens are all deserted now.
It is not far, but as we reach the door of the Eastgate I hear the din of all the people inside, and shrink back. I am apprehensive, and I cannot think why.
‘It’s quite all right,’ Mr Ronald says quietly. We’ll find a spot by the fire and you can watch them all come and go.’
I follow him inside, and there is a blast of heat and noise and smoke which quite makes my head swim, and I hug Pie tight to me. I have never been in a public house before, or a hotel, or whatever this is. But the warmth is very welcome, and I see Jack’s big beefy face almost at once. ‘Tollers!’ he cries out in that booming voice of his from the middle of a crowd at the bar, and he raises a brown brimming glass to his mouth, then sets it down again as he catches sight of me.
‘Well I’m blowed. It’s little... little...’
‘Anna,’ Mr Ronald tells him. ‘Order her a hot chocolate Jack, there’s a good chap. She’s half frozen. Join us by the fire. And a Burton for me, if you please.’
