The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet)

by Smyth, Silver

  ‘And from then on Bakir was acting as Mungo’s inside man?’

  Hugh nodded. ‘He was very worried when Tanner was brought in for your virginity checkups. He practically never left your side ever since.’

  ‘I thought that was on my father’s orders.’ I didn’t know what other term to use for the nameless man. It was all too fresh.

  ‘Listen,’ Hugh dropped a couple of files into his briefcase, ‘how about I take you out to dinner tomorrow?’

  ‘Is that wise?’ Hartsfield House was my safe house. I would have happily lived on baked beans and water for the rest of my life rather than face the world.

  * * *

  It was very wise, as it turned out.

  ‘I think you’ll like this,’ Hugh said looking very smug.

  I did. We ended up in France, at the same small coastal farm along the Côte d’Opale where Hugh had bought the cheese and seafood that he brought with him to the Sanctuary.

  When on a farm, you eat as the farmers eat.

  We were shown into the kitchen, with two large trestle tables under the right angle to each other. Both were already populated in the corner by a single party of about twenty. A local family and their visiting relatives, as we later learned. At the far end, an elderly man was reading a paper and dunking his bread into a bowl of stew. Opposite him was a woman, drinking wine out of a large, thick glass and picking at a plate of whitebait and fresh tomato in front of her. We never worked out if they were together or not. There didn’t seem to be any waiters around, but soon after we took our seats next to each other, away from the noise of the family party, a young man in a white shirt and black jeans brought us a carafe of wine, a jug of water, a bowl of dressed purple-coloured olives and a hot, fresh baton of bread. A minute later he came back with a few gasses.

  Hugh poured a glass of water for himself.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ I grinned, lifting the carafe.

  ‘Just one,’ he grinned back and pushed the smallest of the glasses to me. ‘Let’s place our order.’

  I followed him to the business end of the kitchen. A middle aged man was stirring two clay pots at once on the top of an old aga, a woman next to him was opening oysters and arranging them on a few plates with wedges of lemon and small cubes of ice around the rim.

  The couple greeted him as if they saw him yesterday. At their speed, I could only pick up a few words of French here and there. Foreign languages were not my strength at school. Must be hereditary, I thought. Just look at Bakir. After over twenty years in the UK he still struggled with his English.

  ‘Do we want fish soup?’ Hugh provided the welcome distraction from the depressing subject.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Oysters?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The French couple said something and laughed.

  Hugh joined in, not as amused as them. ‘According to them, you seem to think that I can use all the help I can get.’

  Out of politeness I smiled back at them. They probably said it to any man ordering oysters.

  Apparently, we were in luck. The fish of the day, caught only a few hours ago, was turbot.

  ‘Grilled with truffles?’ Hugh translated the woman’s question.

  I nodded with another smile.

  If my mother was here, she would have asked for a recipe in decent French, then passed it on to the Boys or anyone else who was cooking on the day.

  The deserts were displayed on another counter for diners to serve themselves.

  When we returned to the table, my glass of wine was still there as I’d left it, but the carafe was gone, replaced by a jug full of some amber-coloured liquid.

  ‘The lad is new, he doesn’t know me or else he wouldn’t have brought wine at all. I can’t drink and fly, can I?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Freshly squeezed grape juice. From their own grapes.’

  ‘There are bits in it.’

  Hugh removed a sliver of ice from his oyster and brought it to his mouth. ‘Woman-up, you wimp, and drink the ambrosia from the well when you can.’

  ‘Ambrosia is the food, nectar is the drink,’ I sneered childishly. ‘On Mount Olympus, at any rate.’

  ‘We must go there one day and check.’

  The kitchen was rapidly filling up with people and noise. The boy who served us kept the door and windows open to dilute the smells and smoke from the grill. I had no idea where we put it all, and still ended the meal with a portion of apple strudel each. The same lad brought us a jug of thick cream.

  ‘My sister and her husband make all the sweets for the farm,’ he said proudly in very good English.

  Before leaving, we followed the owner into the shop. The large, white-washed room was lined with large, deep sinks full of sea water and live fish swimming around. A couple of them contained Atlantic crabs, lobsters, and nets full of mussels and oysters.

  The man pointed to the next room. ‘Freshwater. Mostly perch and eel today,’ he said in French that I actually understood.

  ‘What will we have?’ Hugh turned to me.

  ‘You choose.’ I slipped out. As soon as I reached the path I took off my sandals and ran the two hundred yards to the shore. There was a patch of fine soft sand extending into the sea and I rolled up my jeans up to my knees and waded in.

  It was a night of full moon with just a few fluffy clouds floating across the shiny dome above me. The night was neither warm nor cold. Just fresh and clean, as was the sea. Cleansing. I filled my lungs with the healing air and let it out slowly, respectfully. Just a little further out, the moon was sprinkling the surface with sharp crystals. One by one, I took off all my clothes and threw them back to the shore. A few steps in, the sand stopped, gave way to larger stones. Millions of years of polishing made the pebbles kind to my feet. Once the seafloor disappeared from under me, I turned on my back and let the tide take me out.

  * * *

  I hadn’t fainted and I wasn’t asleep. I must have heard the roar of the engine, but it was probably a part of some story that I was floating through and I didn’t recognise it for what it was.

  Hugh lifted me into the powerboat, rubbed me with something rough and warming, and wrapped me in a large woollen blanket.

  ‘The tide is very strong at this time,’ said the boy waiter in his competent English, as he turned to boat to the shore.

  The woman from the restaurant was shielding my modesty with the blanket as I changed into my own clothes. She also made me pull on a soft woollen cardigan. All the clothes felt warm; she must have kept them by the fire when the boat went out to get me. Someone handed me a large mug of very sweet tea with a dose of rum in it. My teeth were still chattering so I had to try very hard to say Thanks and Merci as clearly as possible. There was a lot of hugging and kissing before Hugh loaded me onto the chopper.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said when we reached the full height and Hugh aimed the craft in the direction of the shoreline across the Channel.

  ‘As you bloody well should be.’

  His voice came through the earphones harsh and metallic. I flinched as it whipped me across the face.

  ‘I didn’t think...’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You never do, do you, Sonata?’

  ‘It was so beautiful. So clean. I can’t go back to all the filth and depravity. I felt the slime seep in through my very pores. Now that I’m out of there I can see it more clearly, precisely for what it is. It’s not a safe house. More like a house of horrors.’

  His breathing sounded angry through my earphones. ‘It’s all about you, isn’t it? What you can and what you can’t. About how you feel. What you’re going back to is more love and self-sacrifice on your behalf than most kids ever had. And don’t say that you didn’t ask to be born, it’s not worthy of you,’ he forestalled me with scary accuracy.

  ‘They could have run away.’ I was so angry that I could have killed him. ‘But, they didn’t, did they? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the first time they turn
ed against him was when he had nothing more to give?’

  ‘Ah, I see. You were happy to do without his money, you were almost looking forward to it, but they couldn’t? They turned on him because he’d let them down? You do realise, don’t you, that after all they’ve done for you, you resent you parents more than you resent the murders, maiming and torture committed by that sadistic control freak. I know you’ve been through a lot recently, but what harm has actually come to you? Mungo and your parents shielded you with their lives, their bodies and their love all the way. Don’t they deserve some recognition and gratitude?’

  He called them my parents, twice, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. I hated him for it. ‘They could have got away a long time ago,’ I repeated.

  ‘Maybe they could.’ Hugh was shouting now. I was sure that I would have heard him above the noise of the engine even without the headphones. ‘Maybe someone else could, someone less credulous or less impressionable. Yes, they may have developed a hostage syndrome. We’ll never know. But we do know that for years your father lived on the fringe of existence for your sake. And that you mother managed to smile and look radiant in her exorbitantly expensive frocks in spite of horrendous, repeatedly inflicted injuries inside her. For your bloody sake. If your heart can’t guide you, use your head, Sonata.’

  We landed. The blades were still rotating at speed. I jumped out of the chopper and ran towards the house. Somewhere half way down the path I turned back.

  ‘I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t ask to be born!’

  Chapter 23

  There was one thing one could say for Hartsfield. It was well built and well maintained. Not a single wooden board creaked when I crept out of my bedroom at midnight. I had no idea if those sad journos ever abandoned their vigil at the gate, but they were the least of my problems. The same moon that swam in the English Channel a couple of hours ago loomed low over our drive too, sparing me the need to switch on the lights as the car quietly rolled down the drive. I clicked the fob at the last possible moment and the gate slid open. There was no one around. Some fifty yards further down the lane I switched on the lights and took first turn on the right towards Munro House.

  Their gates would have been locked too at night. I parked the Evora by the low stretch of the wall, climbed over and followed the path to the back of the house. With luck, I might catch Rosie in the middle of midnight feast. My luck was out. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was in darkness. I sat on the step and fished out my mobile.

  ‘I’m at your kitchen door. Can you let me in?’

  Thirty seconds later a small light came on in a first floor bedroom.

  Rosie’s pyjama bottoms were white with a pattern of bright red pursed lips scattered all over them. She gave me a silent hug. ‘Ice cream?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Chocolate or strawberry?’

  ‘Strawberry, please.’

  Rosie brought two plastic boxes out of the freezer and two soup spoons out of a drawer. She pushed the pinkish one in front of me and added a couple of misted glasses of filtered water. ‘Water is very good for grief.’

  It took five large spoonfuls of ice cream and half a glass of water for the tears to start running down my face. At the first sign of my wet cheeks Rosie popped over to the sink and returned with a brand new kitchen roll. She tore off two sheets and pushed them into my hand. I first attended to the snot, two more sheets dried my face.

  ‘Want a brief summary?’

  Rosie nodded.

  ‘It won’t be all that brief,’ I warned.

  She shrugged.

  ‘The man I thought was my father, the one who called himself Leon Ganis, was actually British, as yet unidentified. He must have done something very bad in his youth because he went on the run and eventually ended up in Armenia. There he met the real Leon Ganis and his much younger brother, Bakir...’

  ‘Bakir, the eunuch?’ Rosie asked in whisper.

  ‘He wasn’t a eunuch then. That happened later. Bakir was just an urchin, an orphan. He, the unknown Brit, killed Leon Ganis in a fight, stole his money and all the family papers and went on the run again, taking the boy with him....’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did he take Bakir along?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t know. As an interpreter, because having a child with him gave him a degree of respectability... who knows? He was good to the boy.’

  ‘Why don’t you give him a name?’

  ‘Like what? That’s the whole point, I don’t even know who he was.’

  ‘Gringo? That’s Spanish for a stranger, I think.’

  ‘No, no, that’s much too romantic. There are songs about gringos.’

  Rosie looked up to the ceiling as if searching for inspiration there. ‘Ignotum? That’s Latin for an unknown person.’

  ‘Yes, that will do. Sounds fittingly ignominious.’

  ‘Will you be coming back to school? The term starts in three days time.’

  I’d been thinking about that a lot. I liked school, but it wasn’t just that. I hated the thought that the bastard Ignotum might rob me of yet another key aspect of my life even after his death. ‘After a fashion. I don’t think that Eleanor String would welcome hordes of reporters around the gate all the time. I thought that I could maybe attend via Skype. I see all of you, you all see me. It would be like actually being there with you only minus Selena Buerk’s farts.’

  We both laughed and that prompted another bout of sobbing.

  ‘Once they reached Turkey or maybe Greece, Ignotum, found work on ships, merchant ships that were bringing him and Bakir closer and closer to the UK. He used the time to eradicate all the indentifying marks including his fingerprints. Later, when he applied to the Immigration for asylum, he showed them the scars as evidence of torture back in Armenia. He and Bakir got their leave to remain in the UK and later their nationality papers as brothers. Leon and Bakir Ganis.’

  ‘Blimey!’

  ‘On his way up the greasy pole, he got involved with promotion of beauty contestants. That’s how they met my mother. She and Bakir, who was about twenty at the time, and a very attractive young man, fell in love. Mother got pregnant...’

  ‘With you?’

  I nodded. ‘Worse luck. Why couldn’t she just had an abortion and be done with it?’

  ‘Nat!’

  I ignored Rosie’s indignation. ‘The bastard Ignotum, who had never shown any interest in her before, which makes sense now that we all know that he was impotent and sadistically revengeful with it, organised an assault on Bakir. The control freak had Bakir mass raped and castrated. After that, under pretence of tender loving care, he had him pumped full of all the wrong hormones and stuff... Then he asked mother to marry him, and because Bakir was very ill and in a shock for a very long time, mother agreed. Once I was born, he started torturing her. Sexually... I won’t go into details. She had to grin and bear, literally, because he had us both under constant surveillance and threatened to do the same and worse to me. And, I do mean worse... You can’t even begin to imagine and I don’t want you to... Anyway, that was his trademark all along. Anyone who stood in his way was either killed or tortured by his gangs of sick desperados, most of whom he got rid of in much the same way so that no one could ever bear witness against him. Remember Mungo?’

  Rosie nodded. She was deathly pale.

  ‘Shall I stop?’

  ‘No,’ she said shakily. ‘No, get it all out now and then we can... we can forget all about it together.’

  ‘Ignotum learned about the brief encounter between Mungo and me. A week later Mungo was ambushed by several of his thugs and raped. All of the assailants were HIV positive. Quite accidentally,’ I continued, careful to avoid the sight of Rosie’s reaction, ‘Mungo eventually learned who was responsible for the attack and its consequences. He set out to ruin Ganis Enterprises. Inadvertently, he also brought Hugh and me together in the process.’

  R
osie squeezed my hand.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes. In the midst of death we are in life... Sorry. Didn’t mean to be facetious. He, Mungo, was more successful than he thought. Ignotum literally went off his rocker. If he’d been deranged before, and he had to be to commit such atrocities, the loss of his business pushed him totally over the edge. He got it into his head that if Mungo and I married, and he killed us both, all Mungo’s assets would come to him. Of course, he used the good old threat against me again to make us go along with it.’

  ‘Would he have inherited?’ Rosie raised her eyebrows. ‘Even if Ignotum wasn’t a suspect, I don’t think...’

  ‘You’re probably right, but it doesn’t matter any longer. Mungo was sick and tired of living anyhow. He willed his private property to Hugh and me by the way of an apology for what he’s put us through and forced the old bastard aboard the faulty jet.’

  ‘So, you’re not Mrs. Steen and you’re still Sonata Ganis?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, Sonata Ganis, the daughter of a eunuch.’ Totally exhausted, I returned to the comfort of the plastic tub of slowly melting ice cream.

  Rosie followed suit. She replaced the lid on chocolate and dug her spoon into strawberry. For several minutes the only sound around was the ticking of the kitchen clock.

  ‘Want a bed?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, thanks. There are three separate engines throbbing away inside me. They need to run out of fuel before I can get any sleep.’

  ‘And, they are?’

  ‘Remember the garden party and the garden shed?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie whispered.

  Through my mist, I felt a little guilty for reminding her. For all the pretence, she’d never really got over it. ‘We both felt dirty, soiled and unworthy afterwards, didn’t we?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s how I feel now. The smelly, slimy daughter of the gutter.’

  ‘And the second engine?’