by Adale Geras
Now Adrian was out for the count and she was awake with her mind racing. She turned on to her right side and wondered about Isis. What sort of an evening had they had together, she and Cal? And had Em met someone fantastic at the party she’d gone to? She deserved a really, really special boyfriend, Zannah thought, and slid at last into sleep.
Thursday
‘If this is what we have to do now, imagine what it’s going to be like in 2012 when we’re actually celebrating the Olympics,’ said Zannah, who was standing rather precariously on a desk in Louise’s classroom, helping to take down the banners, streamers and balloons that the children had stuck up everywhere before the previous day’s announcement of London’s win. She’d agreed to help with the clearing-up over break, which Louise conceded was a sign of true friendship.
‘Nearly finished,’ Louise said. ‘If we’re quick, there’ll be time for a coffee in the staff-room before the next lesson.’
Suddenly, the head came into the room. Mrs Greenford was the kind of woman who never ran, who was never flustered, yet she came bursting in without knocking and in what for her was a hurry.
‘Zannah, there you are. I’ve been looking for you. There’s a Mrs Parrish on the telephone. She says she’s been trying to get you on your mobile, but they’re all down at the moment. There’s been … well, it’s an emergency. I’ve told the rest of the staff a moment ago, but of course you two are here … ’
Zannah climbed down and picked up her bag from the chair where she’d left it. ‘What emergency?’
‘They’ve closed the Underground. The police are speaking of bombs. No one has many details yet, but we’ve been told to stay with the children until their parents come to fetch them.’
Bombs on the Underground … Zannah felt cold. Em … Adrian! No, Adrian was in Edinburgh. He’d flown up last night. He was coming back tomorrow. Adrian was safe, from whatever it was. How odd … Being frightened and no longer being frightened had happened to her at exactly the same moment. She hadn’t known she was scared till the fear had left her.
In her head, a thousand questions immediately appeared. She didn’t seem able to articulate them as words, but they were like a mist in her head, a confusion, a muddle. She was conscious of Mrs Greenford walking behind her down the long corridor to her office. My mobile … Em might have tried to leave a message. And Cal. Where would he be? At work? Where were the bombs? What was happening?
In the office, she picked up the receiver.
‘Charlotte? It’s me … ’
Zannah closed her eyes and listened to Charlotte’s voice, explaining, reassuring, setting out all the facts, one after another. ‘And now that I’ve spoken to you, Zannah, I’ll phone Joss again and tell her you and Isis are safe at school.’
‘Thanks, Charlotte. And I’ve just remembered, Em was supposed to be going to a fashion shoot in Chelsea.’
‘She got as far as Euston and was turned off the bus. She rang from a phone box. She’s walked home, apparently. And she’s rung your parents, so they know we’re all safe.’
But Cal … Where was he? She said, ‘Thanks, Charlotte. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for this. I’ll phone Ma and Pa later. And Maureen and Doc. Bye.’
‘Sit down, dear,’ said Mrs Greenford, unexpectedly. ‘Use this phone. There are all kinds of problems with mobiles. Come and tell me in the staff-room when you’ve finished.’
As soon as she was alone, Zannah scrabbled in her handbag for her mobile and found it nestled next to her book. She always turned it off during school hours. Now her fingers were almost out of control and she nearly dropped it in her haste to turn it on again. Five new messages. They must have got through before all mobiles were turned off, or scrambled or whatever had happened. Adrian: ‘Darling, are you all right? Phone as soon as you get this.’ Ma: ‘I’ve just spoken to Charlotte. Em’s all right. Ring me.’ Tears in her mother’s voice. Em: ‘I’m at home. Phoned Ma and Pa. Ring when you get this.’ Maureen: ‘Please ring us, Zannah. Hope you’re all okay. Adrian is so worried about you.’ And Cal. ‘Zannah? You and Isis okay? And Em? Please phone. I’m in Hampshire at Mum’s but trying to get back to town soonest. Hope you’re at school, Zannah. Please phone.’ A long silence on the line. ‘Couldn’t cope without you, you know.’
Zannah used the school phone to dial Cal’s mobile. No signal. She’d have to try again later. Or perhaps he was at the office. She dialled his work number and managed at last to get put through to his desk after speaking to three different people. He answered almost at once as though he’d been waiting with the phone in his hand for her to ring.
‘Oh, Cal … ’
‘Zannah.’ A long exhalation, as though he’d been holding his breath. ‘You and Isis okay?’
‘We’re fine. At school. I thought you might be down there … in the City, near all this … ’
Tears of relief came to Zannah’s eyes. She wouldn’t have to tell Isis her dad was hurt. Or dead. Some children would hear bad news tonight. How did the men who made the bombs and thought so carefully about their dispersal look their own children in the eye? Sleep? Live? She listened to Cal’s voice telling her to take care. Then she rang off and dialled Adrian’s number. Couldn’t cope without you … Cal had said. Why was she so pleased about that? Ridiculous, after all this time since the divorce. Before she rang Adrian, a thought flashed through her mind: I rang Cal first. I phoned him before I phoned Adrian. What does that mean? It means I was thinking of Isis, that’s all. Her father. She took a deep breath and dialled the Edinburgh number he’d given her.
‘Adrian? Darling, it’s me. Yes, we’re fine. At school. Yes … yes, we’ll take care. You take care too.’
One phone call after another. Ma, Em, Maureen. At last Zannah stood up and made her way to the staff-room. Isis, all the other children, everyone who’d been so happy celebrating the Olympic win only yesterday. They’d have to be told something. They’d have to be shielded from the pictures. There were sure to be pictures everywhere. She rang Em as she walked along the corridor.
‘Em? Take the fuse out of the TV plug or something before we get home. We can put it in later when Isis is in bed … Yes, I know she’s got to see something some time, but not tonight, okay? Not till I’ve tried to explain it. Reassure her a bit. Just for tonight, okay? We’ll tell her the TV’s broken. I don’t care what kind of a fuss she makes. She won’t, anyway. She’ll be fine. Ta. See you soon.’
They’d all know soon enough, the children. There would be no school tomorrow, but Mrs Greenford would say something about it in assembly on Monday. Zannah had no idea how she would do that without terrifying the kids. And Isis will want to know everything, but tonight I’m going to lie to her if I have to, Zannah thought.
*
‘But what if,’ said Isis, sitting up in bed and looking serious, ‘the bombs start a fire in the Tube and it just rushes down the tunnels to where we are? To our Tube station? Maybe there are tunnels under this house. It could come right up to the houses, couldn’t it?’
‘No, darling. That won’t happen, I promise,’ said Zannah, trying to sound braver than she felt. It sounded an altogether logical idea to her: fire whooshing out of control, fanned by the draughts … there were always draughts down there … licking through the darkness, leaping up and up to reach the houses, a conflagration, an inferno. She said, ‘No, it’s okay now, really. The police and the firemen have got everyone out and some people are in hospital, but no fires any longer. They’ve all been put out now. Really.’
‘Are you sure? No more fires?’
‘No,’ said Zannah. ‘No fires. You go to sleep.’
Isis lay down and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Finn said some people died. Is that true?’
Isis admired Finn. Would it be wise for Zannah to contradict her daughter’s friend? Should she lie? She’d been determined to do that, but in the end, it wasn’t possible. On Monday morning, all kinds of details would be spoken about in the playground, so perhaps it was
better that they came from Zannah than from someone else.
‘Some people died, yes.’
‘Is it anybody we know?’
‘No,’ said Zannah.
‘It’s still sad, though,’ said Isis. ‘I still feel sad, even though I don’t know them.’
‘Yes,’ said Zannah. ‘Of course you do. It’s sad, and there’s nothing to be done about that, but there won’t be any fires now and no more bombs.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
There’s a lie, thought Zannah, if ever there was one. But if it lets Isis sleep tonight, I don’t care.
Wednesday
This is the sort of scene, Charlotte thought, that I used to conjure up when I was in prison, although I didn’t know who’d be in it then. This is the sort of day that makes it hard to believe less than a week has gone by since the Underground trains and the bus were bombed. That bus, a red London bus, opened up like a tin can; a bus full of people. Since that Thursday, her head had been filled with the most unbearable pictures. It was hard not to conjure up what it must have been like down there in the tunnels when the media flooded your head with images that were impossible to erase: phone videos flickering and flickering. Everyone pixel-lated, glowing, walking silently, seemingly calmly, like shadows one after another down the tunnels. Bravery. Gallantry. Sorrow. Defiance. And London going back to work, down into the Tube, up into the big red buses, straight away. Val, who never went to central London if she could possibly help it, had made a special trip last Saturday. Just to show the bastards that I can and I bloody well will, she’d said. Charlotte read the newspapers obsessively for a couple of days, then stopped. It was too much. There was too much to take in. And she was certainly not going to spoil today by allowing herself to think about such things.
It’s a sunny day, she told herself. My great-niece and her daughter are sitting on the grass under a tree in my garden. Edie, Val and I are at a table on the terrace, with the remains of a good chocolate cake on a flowered china plate. There’s a pretty teapot standing among the cups and saucers. Silver spoons catch the sunlight. She closed her eyes. She scarcely ever, these days, thought of the time when the sky was what was visible from the small square of her cell window, when she couldn’t walk out of her own front door and down the road. No one who hadn’t been in prison understood properly what it was not to be able to do simple things: choose a pair of shoes, buy a ticket for the cinema, ride on the top deck of a bus. On the day she was released, Charlotte had vowed to enjoy the small things, the things that everyone took for granted, and she’d stuck to her resolve. This meant that she ignored nothing that gave her pleasure. An apple. A freshly ironed blouse. Clean surfaces in her kitchen. She realized that this was the secret of happiness. The real sadnesses: the cruelty of Nigel, her first husband, the death of Gus, her second husband, her childlessness, the injustice of her imprisonment – even those, though they never stopped being painful, were not as desperate as they might have been. Each had what some would have called a silver lining, though Charlotte never did. Augustus Parrish, for instance … darling Gus … had left her this house, and it was still haunted by him in the nicest possible way.
The greatest sorrow of Charlotte’s life was the death of her younger sister in a car crash when Joss was ten years old. She herself had been only thirty. The horror of that – the car, ripped open, metal no more use than paper when it came to protecting the passengers – was made both better and worse by the fact that she had had to do everything. There were no parents to help her and no other siblings. Overnight, she’d become a mother to Joss. It fell to her to comfort the child and help her through the loss of both parents while she herself was still raw with pain. And, of course, to make things more difficult, Joss had come to live with her while she was still fighting for compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
When Charlotte was released, she had almost no money. In those days, Gus was no more than a person she’d glimpsed on visits to her own lawyer’s office. He’d made a point of acquainting himself with the details of her case and one day, after a particularly gruelling session with a dry and rather unsympathetic elderly partner, he’d followed her out of the office and invited her to have tea with him. That had been the beginning of a relationship which had brought her nothing but good things.
Her flat in those days was not much more than a glorified bedsitter in a seedy part of Kensington. Charlotte had to work to provide for herself and Joss, whose parents had left a little money but not nearly enough. No one would consider giving an ex-con a job as an accountant, even though she’d been innocent. Every firm she approached had been sympathetic but adamant. She would be ‘bad for business’ in some indefinable way. Even after she married Gus, Charlotte had worked for years as a secretary in an advertising agency. Then Gus came into his grandfather’s money, over thirty years ago, and they had moved into this house, where she’d lived ever since. When they first came here, Gus had asked her: ‘Are you so devoted to your work that you can’t bear to think of not doing it?’ And she had told him, quite truthfully, that nothing would give her greater pleasure than to stay at home and work at making the house beautiful; their life together the very best it could be.
‘Charlotte, wake up!’ said Edie. ‘You’ve dozed off again.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Charlotte. ‘I just had my eyes closed.’
’Hmm,’ said Edie. ‘Have another slice of cake. Or a scone.’
‘No, thank you. I’ll have some more tea, though. Would you like some?’
Zannah had wandered up from the end of the garden and sat down beside Charlotte. ‘I’ll have some too, Edie. Thanks. It’s such a gorgeous day, isn’t it?’
Zannah, with her fair skin, had to be careful of the sun. She was wearing a very flattering wide-brimmed hat and a cotton dress in a shade of blue Charlotte always thought of as heliotrope … a blue on its way to being mauve.
Zannah said, ‘The garden’s looking spectacular, Val. You must have been working overtime on it.’
‘I do the brainwork, dear,’ said Val, ‘and the fiddly bits. I have some nice young men to do the heavy stuff.’
‘How are the wedding preparations going, Zannah?’ said Edie. She was knitting something shapeless in pale yellow wool on very fine needles. No one had ever seen a finished garment Edie had made. Charlotte had come to the conclusion long ago that knitting was just a kind of camouflage. There were stories of how Edie had managed to outwit not only violent spouses who threatened the women in the refuge she was involved with, but also their lawyers. ‘Don’t let the sweet manner fool you,’ Charlotte told Joss once. ‘She’s about as sweet as a lioness and more obstinate than a beach full of donkeys.’ Edie herself claimed that the knitting relaxed her and soothed her mind. It was, she said, as good as a tranquillizer.
Zannah sighed. ‘Maureen, Adrian’s mother, is nagging me about the venue. She wants something really grand and I just … I don’t know. I don’t seem to be able to convey to her the sort of wedding I’m after. I want something beautiful but not enormous. Intimate and pretty and not grand. I don’t want more than seventy-five people. She wants droves of them … Oh, I don’t want to bore you with this.’
‘I find it fascinating,’ said Edie. ‘Other people’s weddings always are. My own wasn’t much fun – in the middle of winter and my dress was far too thin. I was blue by the time we went home for the reception. My mother and grandmother had made everything themselves, from the cake to the sandwiches. That’d never do these days.’
‘Mum, look,’ said Isis, running up the steps to the terrace. ‘Look what I’ve done.’
She held up the sketchbook in which she’d been drawing.
Zannah laughed. ‘Lovely, darling. It’s beautiful.’ Isis had produced a dozen new designs for her own bridesmaid’s dress. Zannah turned to the others and said, ‘My daughter is almost as obsessed as I am. Have a bit of cake, Isis.’
Isis put the sketchbook down and sat on the top step of the t
errace with her plate on her lap.
‘I think,’ said Val, ‘that I’d like to have my reception in a garden. Like this one. You could put up a marquee just there below the terrace and decorate the trees down by the fence and people could wander about on the grass. Lovely.’
For a few moments, no one said anything. Then Zannah said thoughtfully, gazing around her, ‘I’ve considered gardens, of course. It’d be almost my best option, but … ’
Charlotte smiled. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that I’ve been more than usually slow. Val’s right. This garden is the perfect venue for the reception. Would you consider it, Zannah?’
‘Are you sure? Really?’ Zannah stood up. She walked down to the lawn and looked up at the terrace and the house. ‘It’s totally and absolutely perfect, Charlotte. Wonderful. Oh, it’s the best idea ever. But won’t it put you out? You’d have marquee people and caterers and florists swarming all over the place. Could you stand it? The disruption?’
‘I’d be honoured,’ said Charlotte. Truly. It’ll be magnificent.’
Zannah sat down again, and picked up Isis’s sketchbook. She began to draw. ‘I’m thinking of something like this,’ she said. ‘What d’you reckon?’
In a few quick pencil strokes, Zannah had drawn a beautiful tent, with flaps pulled back, and the house behind it. In the foreground, she’d sketched in a few people with glasses in their hands. ‘I just hope,’ she said ‘that Adrian likes it. Oh, how could he not? It’s gorgeous.’
‘Marquees these days,’ said Val, ‘can be terribly luxurious, can’t they? And I’m sure you could decorate it yourself. Though I suppose there’d be people to consult if you needed to. Gosh, it’s going to be fun. You must let us help. I can be very useful in the garden. I’ll make it my business to see that everything’s tickety-boo in that department.’
