The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  As for the other picture, in which she and Charlie look ridiculous – smug and super young – she can’t remember it being taken, but it could easily have been one weekend soon after they bought the house and were showing it off to friends invited for old-fogey Sunday roasts before she became aware of acting crassly, before she grew nervous about all that debt. And though every instinct urges her home, where it might just be possible to slip in through the back gate unnoticed and take to the duvet, she knows that her salvation lies the other way entirely, at the office, with a pile of contracts to fillet and skewer.

  There is no one reading the Daily Post on the Tube, but by the time she arrives in the office, she is exhausted by the agony that someone there might have read the piece. And she realises that to have lost two parents in such a way feels shameful. Mel at reception hands her a baby wipe. ‘Right shoulder,’ she says.

  On the glass coffee table between the sharply contoured Italian sofas, a copy of the paper is cast at a casual angle. She extracts the Business section, lays it on top of the FT, then removes the remainder and drops it in the bin.

  In her inbox, there is an email from RENNIE, Miles. It is curt, and to the point. She is to handle the Grosvenor deal on a fixed fee he has already firmed up with the client. Right away, she knows the sum agreed is ridiculously low, that she will need at least two junior associates working on it with her. She emails back to tell him that, and then she goes to work on the documents that have already begun arriving, direct from Grosvenor’s in-house lawyer. She manages to skim one contract, to find the flaws in a couple of the obvious problem clauses, the usual sticking points. Around mid-morning, she feels suddenly cold. The air con perhaps, or a window seal gone. But as she tries to rub the chill out of her upper arms, she starts to realise that it is coming from inside.

  Charlie calls to ask if she’s OK. He’s seen the paper. And though she can tell he’s rattled by it, he hides that very well.

  ‘That’s the shock,’ he says when she tells him about feeling cold. And she remembers how kind he can be, how kind he is really, deep down. ‘Make yourself a milky coffee, lots of sugar. Maybe have some chocolate. Or take some time out, go home and rest.’

  When she puts the phone down, she buries her face in her hands. She wants to forget. Is that so bad? Just forget. She wants to gather her walls around her, and finish trawling through this document, neutralise the danger zones she knows by heart. And sure enough, even though her heart is pumping so loud she can feel it in her ears, the text calms her as it always does. However chaotic and uncontrollable the world, she can always manage the words on the page, massaging them into shape, closing off ambiguity, freighting them with established meanings only another lawyer will recognise. Belt and braces. Making things safe.

  She works on undisturbed till lunch, which she spends in the canteen with Sarah.

  Sarah smooths her linen shirt down over her six-month belly and sighs. ‘Another one of those bloody NCT classes yesterday. Those earth mothers, God. Just give me the drugs. All of them.’

  Jess decides not to mention the conversation with Miles. It’s the last thing Sarah needs to hear. Besides, they have dug one another out of many a hole.

  ‘You left in quite a hurry the other night, Jess. Everything OK with Ruby?’

  ‘Oh, she was fine. I just missed her, that’s all.’

  ‘Missed her so much you left your laptop behind? That’s not like you.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve changed.’

  Sarah makes a face. ‘But you’re my best hope, Jess. The one who has it sorted.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You’ve got me worried now. I don’t fancy losing my marbles once Junior makes his exit.’ She sits back in her chair and rests her folded arms on her bump. ‘By the way, what did you do to Miles Rennie? Someone said they saw you two, deep in conversation.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Intense, that’s what I heard.’

  ‘Well you heard wrong.’

  And even as she says the words, she knows that she has burned a bridge here, and put herself beyond help. That she has made the wrong decision.

  ‘Oh, you know Marcie, that new PA. Probably just Bellini brain, not that I can talk, the way my head is at the moment.’

  There is a chance here to raise the subject of things Sarah might have forgotten to do, but she can’t bring herself to do that.

  ‘I mean, on Saturday, I actually went to a baby-clothes show. Can you believe that? I never even knew there were such things. What a world! My mum wanted to buy a little cardigan in three different colourways, even though she’s refusing to be called Granny. She doesn’t want the tag, she says. And actually, Granny Annie, can you blame her? What does Ruby call your mum?’

  ‘My mo— mum? I’m not really sure.’

  ‘I don’t like Nana, do you? As for Gran – that’s just dreadful.’

  She feels an intense sense of shame now – it is an insult to the friendship that she has never told Sarah about what happened on the beach. She would like Sarah to know, but she can’t bring herself to tell the story, partly because she has no idea how to start. There is no easy entry point.

  ‘What’s your mum’s name? I guess some names are more grannyish than others.’

  ‘Sophie. Her name is Sophie.’

  ‘Not remotely grannyish,’ Sarah decides.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jess says. ‘Not remotely.’ And it hurts so much that she has to make her excuses and retreat to her office.

  Back at the desk, Jess’s phone is blinking – a voicemail from Hana on her direct line. ‘Call me,’ she says.

  The secretary from the conference floor rings to say that the guests have arrived and that she has them in 4C. Should she serve coffee right away or wait for Jess? Jess gathers her papers together, a pen and a spare, the reading glasses she needs occasionally when she is tired. The next time the phone rings it is Hana again. She sounds agitated, borderline peevish. Jess recognises the mood at once, and moves to quash it.

  ‘Hana? Is everything OK? Where’s Ruby?’

  ‘Ruby is fine,’ she says. ‘This is not about Ruby.’

  ‘OK …’ Jess opens the drawer and retrieves a mint from its crackling wrapper. She doesn’t even like mints but she needs something.

  ‘There is someone outside the house. I had Ruby in her buggy and we had just been to café for pain au chocolat. We came back and he was at the back gate.’

  Jess has always hated that gate. ‘Probably just someone having a nose around. He’s gone now, is he? And the gate is locked?’

  ‘I think he is gone.’

  ‘Look, don’t worry. There are all kinds of people on the Common. Most of them are perfectly fine.’

  ‘You think that it’s OK, that some strange man can just stand at gate to wait for us?’

  ‘Well, I doubt he was waiting for you. And the gate’s locked now. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why don’t you take Ruby to the swings, and we’ll talk when I get back. I shouldn’t be late tonight.’

  ‘Shall I call Neighbourhood Watch?’

  Hana seems to think that Neighbourhood Watch is some sort of militia.

  ‘No, no. No need to bother them. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.’

  She picks up the newly printed pages, and rushes to the meeting. Just inside the door, the attendees are clustered around the tea trolley with its plastic flasks of hot water and coffee and its shallow china dishes containing tea bags that remind her of the lavender bags her granny used to make each summer. In fact, the silky little pouches – chamomile flowers, hibiscus – put her off slightly and she usually sticks to coffee. The men look up at her expectantly.

  ‘Feel free,’ she says, then smiles to take the edge off it. It’s enough that she drafts their documents. They can pour their own coffee.

  The meeting begins, and very quickly they are snagged on one of the clauses that never give anyone any trouble. She can feel her patience ebb. In he
r pocket her phone buzzes. Once, twice, three times. She excuses herself and steps outside. Hana again. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Hana.’

  ‘For God’s sake? Why God’s sake? This man, he actually came into the garden. He saw Ruby and spoke to me and—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He follows the man with wine for party into the garden. And then he asks about the party. When he leaves, the deliveryman tells me he is a weirdo, and to lock the gate. But he is still outside the house. What am I supposed to do? If I move shutters, he disappears. But then when he thinks I don’t see him, he comes back again. What you want me to do?’

  Jess’s heart clenches. ‘Where’s Ruby?’

  ‘She is upstairs, with naptime.’

  ‘She’s OK? You’ve checked?’

  ‘Of course I have checked.’

  And then she forms the question she has been dying, but not daring, to ask.

  ‘What did he look like, this man?’

  ‘I suppose you think he must be black. That all trouble is black.’

  That is the last thing she thinks, but she knows too that there is no point in fighting off the personal slur, and so she waits for Hana to continue.

  ‘His hair is like it doesn’t have any colour to it. Not blond exactly. Just kind of nothing. And then there is this place on his arm that he keeps scratching. And it is like he might tear himself. So skinny and pale.’

  So skinny and pale. She visualises him, with his milk-white skin, his shadowed eyes. Nobody knows why Ro scratches that arm. That’s the thing with Ro. Nobody knows.

  Another message from Hana, this time with a photo attached. It’s fuzzy and she can’t quite make it out. It could be him, she supposes, standing just outside the back gate. But then again, it could be almost anyone.

  When she returns to the conference room, she finds it hard to concentrate. The meeting starts to drag. It occurs to her then that her client has no intention of doing this deal at all. He is putting up unreasonable barriers, sticking on points that he knows the other side can’t possibly agree. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall behind the client is jerking slowly towards seven. Somebody needs to get back to the house to relieve Hana. She steps outside the room again, puts a call in to Charlie.

  ‘If I could, I would. You know that, babe. But that’s why we have Hana, yeah? Hey, I’ve gotta go.’

  ‘Oh, and I think Ro is—’

  But Charlie has already put down the phone. She sits and stares at the blank wall in front of her. Babe?

  ‘Fuck this,’ she tells the corridor.

  ‘That bad?’ One of the associates from Environmental raises his eyebrows as he passes by.

  She looks in at the meeting through the glass panel on the door. The in-house lawyer for the other side is jabbing his finger at the document and gesticulating. When she tries Charlie’s number again it’s busy. She glances through the window into the meeting room. This is ridiculous. What was she thinking? She needs to get home.

  She walks into the meeting room, where voices are raised now. Her client looks to her as if she has the solution, but she is about to break it to him that she isn’t staying. She presents it as a fait accompli. ‘I’ve just had an emergency at home, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to leave.’

  ‘What? Right now?’ The client clearly doesn’t believe his ears.

  They all look up at her in astonishment.

  ‘Look, why don’t I ring down for Carl and see if he can stand in for me. OK?’

  ‘Carl?’ says her client, investing the name with maximum disdain. She is beginning to like him less and less.

  ‘You’ve met him, Geoff. He was at the last meeting, remember?’

  ‘The articled clerk?’

  Has she suggested an orgy? She doesn’t think so.

  ‘He only needs to take a few notes. I’ll be on to it as soon as I get in tomorrow.’

  And with that, she simply backs out of the room, leaving them all open-mouthed. In the lift, she feels strangely liberated. She has never done anything like this before, and yet the sky hasn’t fallen. The plaza outside is unchanged. The silver and gold mime artists are still magically held aloft, and the same wet-weather gear is flapping its pessimist’s charter outside Mountain Warehouse.

  She feels herself crumple as she gets on the Tube. She isn’t sure which she hopes for more. That it’s Ro, so at least then it isn’t someone else. Or that it is anyone but him. Because she doesn’t think she could cope with Ro. Not just now.

  She can picture him standing there, still strangely child-like, waiting for her to solve all the problems that have no answer. When they were brought home to London by Auntie Rae, Sparrow would slip his hand inside hers and sometimes not let go of it for hours. She has often tried to imagine what being Rae was like. She was probably only five or six years older than Jess is now when she took them in. She already had her own daughters – orderly, piano-playing types who liked Brownies and patchwork – when she was suddenly put in charge of two bewildered, semi-feral children who had no notion of bathtimes and multiplication tables. When, at the insistence of their father’s family, who had firm ideas about abstract things like discipline and tradition, Ro was sent away to school, Jess was the one he blamed when it turned out not to be Hogwarts, even though it broke her heart too, even though she’d had no say.

  When Jess walks through the gate, Hana is already at the window, peering out over the plantation shutters. As Jess puts her key in the door and steps into the pale stone-flagged hallway, the squat, wide-hipped Swedish clock that stands there like a distressed babushka starts its din. Hana is already pulling out the sleeves on her jacket that she always hangs, annoyingly, on the banister at the bottom of the stairs. She must have a date.

  ‘I need to have more support from parents,’ she says, like a schoolmistress dealing with a recalcitrant mother. Jess can read the warning signs; she has been here before. She can’t afford for Hana to leave, not just now.

  She tries a gentle ‘I really appreciate the care you—’

  But Hana shoots right back at her. ‘This man, he was interested only in this house. Every time, he was outside this house. Right there.’

  She tugs at Jess’s sleeve and leads her out along the carefully gravelled path to the back wall.

  ‘Come, open,’ she instructs. When Jess has pressed the buttons to release the gate, and they are both standing looking out at the Common, she points.

  ‘This bench, right here. This tree. And sometimes he is over by these new exercise things. I told you about that? Pulling up and looking over. Yes?’

  Jess nods, but open-air exercise doesn’t exactly sound like Ro’s thing. She hadn’t noticed the appliance before, though she’s embarrassed to admit that. It looks like it might have sprung up out of the ground. Wood and metal, parallel bars for swinging like a monkey. Now that Hana realises she has Jess’s attention, she goes for the jugular.

  ‘If he returns and you are not here to give support, then I will find better family.’

  She has no intention of apologising to Hana – not for the presence of a stranger outside the garden wall, even if he might yet turn out to be her brother. But she is disconcerted by Hana, who makes her feel larger and clumsier than anyone else does. She finds herself shrinking inside, growing self-conscious. Hana never makes an excess movement. Everything is just enough, and performed with aesthetic care.

  When Hana leaves, plucking her coat off the newel post, jabbing delicately at her phone, Jess feels a sense of relief, as if she is gathering the house around her again. Reclaiming it. But someone wafts in to fill the gap left by Hana.

  After they returned to London, Ro grew silent. He would look up at them all from under his long blond fringe, but he said nothing. No one was allowed to touch his hair. He was impossible to bathe. Auntie Rae used to have to carry him into the shower where he would cower against the tiled wall and slip slowly to the floor.

  Now that she is a mother herself, Jess can see how difficult it must have been for
Auntie Rae to cope. In the beginning, she had been determined to keep the two of them together, though Sparrow had been difficult from the start. She seemed to think that she would break through eventually, that he would come to accept her affection instead of jerking away from her each time she attempted a hug. But she was already a widow, with a full-time job as a nurse.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Jess overheard her at one of the weekly kitchen gatherings of local mothers. ‘I just don’t have the skill set.’

  Jess, sitting at the top of the stairs in wait for snippets of information, didn’t know what that meant, skill set, skillet, kill it, but she already knew that Auntie Rae had had enough, her cousins had said as much. The girls had parroted back to Jess all kinds of things she preferred not to think about. That Sophie was selfish, with a penchant for useless men. That her father was a disaster. As for Ro, Auntie Rae said that the trouble with Sparrow was down to his jeans.

  Jess had puzzled over that for days, until she realised that she was thinking of the wrong jeans, that the right genes get passed on to you by your parents. But stop right there, she thought. If Sparrow is troubled by his genes, why does she not have that trouble too? When she asked that question, straight out one afternoon, Auntie Rae had flushed scarlet and said she had no idea what she was talking about, that she was sorry if Jess had been worrying about something as trivial as that.

  Later the same day, Jess had found Ro curled into the corner of his bed, sucking noisily on the corner of his red plastic truck.

  ‘Please talk to me,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair that you don’t talk to me any more. I’m afraid of what will happen if you don’t start to try to talk.’

  She reached out and tried to touch Ro’s arm, but he pulled away from her, and then he began to whine. He shook his head. Whip whip whip whip, back and forth, his fringe flicking his forehead, his neck stiff. And then she took him by the shoulders and shook him until she was shaking him in time to the whips of his head.

  ‘Why Don’t You Say What You Saw?’

  He screamed, high like a girl, and when he threw back his head, that scream hollowed out into a howl. Jess heard footsteps thudding up the stairs, and then the door was flung open and there was Auntie Rae.