The man behind the bar looked up from where he was lifting a large glass, overflowing with froth, onto his counter. He glanced her way. ‘Looking for someone, luv?’
‘A Mr Fotheringham,’ she murmured.
His friendly expression gloomed over and she watched his gaze shift to where a man with a sweep of silver hair sat alone and hunched at a table over a glass of amber.
‘Bernard?’ he called.
‘What? Can’t you see I’m drowning my sorrows?’
‘Er, there’s a young lady asking after Fotheringham.’
She leaned further into the pub from the doorway where she stood so that Bernard, whoever he was, could see her and she noticed silver eyebrows meet in the middle of his frown. ‘Do I know you?’
She shook her head and then glanced around, further embarrassed to be drawing attention. ‘May I speak with you a moment?’
He stood. ‘No. I’m busy.’
‘Mind your manners around the lady, Bernard,’ the barman warned. He nodded at Claire with encouragement.
She approached the man. ‘I’m Claire Nightingale.’ She held out a gloved hand.
‘Enchanté,’ he growled with a flawless French accent that was loaded with sourness.
‘I’m very sorry to interrupt you,’ she said, noting his half-drunk whisky.
‘Then do me a fine favour and leave me alone.’ He lifted the glass but didn’t drink from it, instead banging it down on the table.
‘I just want to ask a question, um, Mr Fotheringham.’
‘You’ve got the wrong person, Miss Nightingale.’
She looked over at the publican.
‘Bernard Jenkins, don’t make me come around and shake you. That’ll be your last drink if you don’t act politely.’
Claire was confused. ‘I’m sorry, um . . .’
He looked up from red-rimmed eyes. He wasn’t drunk, not yet, but she sensed he was planning to be. ‘Ask your wretched question and leave me to another Scotch, will you?’
‘Do you recall the Parsons family from Hove?’
He considered her question, downing the rest of his nip of liquor as he did so. ‘If I do, I can’t bring them to mind. Now, excuse me,’ he said, standing, adjusting his cravat before reaching for his hat and pushing past Claire. ‘See you later, Don.’
She was so surprised at his rudeness that she watched him until the pub door closed behind him and it was only the sound of its slam that stung her into action. She rushed out after Jenkins.
‘Mr Jenkins!’ she called, soon catching up. He used a cane to walk but swung it in an affected way, clicking it down every third step on the pavement. ‘Forgive me,’ she began again.
‘No, I won’t. Stop following me. Just leave me and Leo alone.’
She halted, unsure of what next to do, watched him cross the narrow street and head down another alleyway.
If you let him go, you let Jamie go, breathed a voice loud in her mind, silent to the world.
‘Wait!’ She hurried after him and caught up, panting and pulling at his arm.
He shook her hand away. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, leave me to my grief, you wretched woman!’
Grief. She thought she could swallow the rising anger but it beat her, quickly finding its way out. ‘Mr Jenkins, I too am grieving. The world is grieving!’ He turned. ‘I am not here to interfere with your life but I believe you have something that belongs to me and I would like to get it back, please. I will trouble you no further once I have.’
He looked at her from those slightly glazed, red eyes, which she now understood appeared sore from weeping. ‘What the hell are you blathering about?’
‘Well, if you’d pause long enough to let me explain, perhaps I’ll stop bothering you.’
‘Damn it! Not here!’ He stomped off. Then turned around. ‘Well, come on, then. This is your idea.’
She ran to catch up again, following him at a hurried walk as he strode, ignoring her, down one street and another until Claire had lost her sense of direction and her vision had narrowed to following the polished heels of tan brogues peeping from beneath brazen, caramel-coloured trousers. It only struck her now that she thought about it that Jenkins was a dapper dresser, flamboyant, even, given the tweed jacket and matching waistcoat that was far more colourful than most men chose to wear.
Suddenly the brogues crossed into a garden-like setting and she was following him into a sweetly scented courtyard of bright freesia. She hadn’t expected anything so pretty but didn’t let her gaze linger. He unlocked the door, stomped across the threshold and up some stairs. Claire quietly followed, disconcerted and embarrassed, but she was on her mission now and refused to leave empty-handed. She closed the door and tiptoed up the flight where he met her at the landing.
‘Right!’ he growled, swinging around. ‘You’ve pushed your way into my house. Whatever this is about, let’s get it over with.’ He marched to the cabinet and pulled down a decanter.
‘Mr Jenkins, let me quickly say this and then you can return to your, er . . . day,’ she said, glancing at the fiery liquid being sloshed into a crystal glass.
He turned back and swallowed the contents defiantly while watching her. Claire breathed in through her nose, adopting her serious nurse’s expression.
‘Say it, then,’ he demanded. ‘I’m already bored of you.’
‘Why are you being so rude?’
‘Because I hate you for being here and talking to me because it means I’m alive and having to get through yet another bloody day.’ His voice had escalated to a shout.
‘Be quiet!’ she snapped. Stunned initially, Jenkins then began laughing to himself. He tottered deeper into the house. Claire looked around her and was treated to a sumptuous and tastefully furnished sitting room. The colours were bold with a rich yellow and green palette. She’d not seen anything like it. Jewelled colours reminiscent of Egypt. She stared at the chuckling man and knew she needed to rescue the situation before he really did drink too much to make sense.
‘I . . . I admire your art, Mr Jenkins,’ she said, glancing around at the post-Impressionist landscapes.
He blinked, clearly not ready for the compliment. ‘Thank you. I’ve been acquiring them for nearly ten years. A French artist, and I suspect he will be “highly desirable”, as we say in the trade. We used to spend whole nights discussing them.’
She looked around. ‘We?’
‘Leo and I,’ he said in a dull tone. ‘We were lovers, Miss Nightingale, does that shock you?’
She paused. ‘I know you want it to,’ Claire admitted. ‘Look, I told you, I just want to claim back something that belongs to me. As I understand it, it was wrongfully sold to Mr Fotheringham by a Mrs Parsons.’ She briefly recapped the situation.
His mouth twitched with a heartless grimace. ‘This is not my problem, Miss Nightingale.’
‘Do you have the prayer book?’
He sighed. ‘I do.’
She closed her eyes briefly against the instant watering of relief that welled. She reached for a chair back, leaned against it as she aimed for a steady voice and forthright tone. ‘May I see it, please?’ she asked, achieving neither. Claire cleared her throat of the gathering emotion.
He lurched to an elegant writing bureau near the window and pulled back the desk door, reaching inside to retrieve the familiar book. He held it up and Claire felt a moment of dizzied desperation to wrestle it from him. The book felt like a talisman winking at her when the sunlight caught the golden gilding.
She rapidly calculated what it might cost to persuade him to return it. ‘Mr Jenkins, how about —?’
‘This belongs to me,’ he said. ‘It was a gift from Leo . . . the last thing he gave me. I loved him, Miss Nightingale, and I don’t expect you to understand that or be anything but repulsed by it, but he was everything to me and when he gave me this book he was perfectly well, filled with laughter at having escaped married life in Hampshire to live six glorious, secretive weeks in Brighton with me. Within two
days, Miss Nightingale, the only person I’ve ever loved was dying in my arms. I had to deliver him to a hospital so he could die there alone, frightened, but at least his family and their name was protected from scandal. All I have now of darling Leo, apart from memories, is the faint smell of his pomade on my pillows, some clothes hanging lifelessly in my wardrobe and this Arabic prayer book. He knows my interest in the Levant.’ He gave a mirthless grin. ‘No word of a lie. The world of the Arab and the Muslim faith is thoroughly intriguing to me.’ His voice returned to its cut-glass sharpness. ‘Leo lived off his wife’s inheritance, Miss Nightingale, and he lived off me. I didn’t care. He made me feel alive in a way I haven’t since a happy childhood in Berkshire.’
Claire blanched. ‘You could be describing me, Mr Jenkins. I was born in Berkshire as well and I recall being very happy. And then, perhaps like you, I simply was no longer happy, not for many years, until I met someone called James Wren. And I feel about Jamie as you clearly do about Leo: that Jamie has no equal. And my world has been dismantled since I lost sight of him in a Cairo hospital.’ She said that deliberately to pique his interest and saw a flame light in his gaze at mention of the Eygptian capital. She continued, pretending she hadn’t noticed. ‘I’m a nurse. He was gravely wounded, even died once in a hospital ship’s theatre en route to Egypt, but both times we managed to revive him. This was the man I loved but now I have no idea where he is or even if he is still alive. Just as you do, I have some short-lived memories and a couple of curiosities, one of them that prayer book that he gave to me.’ She didn’t believe Jenkins needed to learn the truth.
‘How do I even know it’s yours?’
‘Look!’ she said, holding up a hand to stop him saying another word before dipping into her pocket and retrieving the bullet tip she carried habitually. ‘May I?’ she asked, gesturing towards the prayer book.
Jenkins stared at her suspiciously initially and then relented, handing it to her. She stepped closer and showed him. ‘See how this bullet tip fits into that depression?’
He let out his breath in a sigh of wonder; his expression briefly allowed a flash of a smile. ‘I have been trying to imagine what occurred.’ He surprised her with a small chuckle as he rubbed his finger across the depression. ‘That’s exciting.’
‘I can give you more,’ Claire pressed. ‘I can give you the provenance of that prayer book.’ She’d pinpointed his weakness and waited only a heartbeat to see the glimmer in his gaze at the suggestion. ‘This prayer book belonged to a young man called Açar Shahin, a Turk from Istanbul, fighting in the German allied forces in the Dardanelles. From what I learned, Shahin was an ascetic, a poet, a dreamer, Mr Jenkins. He played music, he wrote stories, refused to kill any of the enemy deliberately. I gather from someone who knew him briefly that Mr Shahin wanted to follow the ways of the mystics, but he believed wholly in some manner of his own heightened awareness that he would not survive the war. During a day-long armistice he met Jamie and he gave him this book,’ she said, loading her voice with as much gravity as she could muster, ‘and Jamie responded in kind.’ Yes, she would tell the truth, she decided in the tense moments as he watched her, and Claire didn’t pause to consider this decision any longer. After she’d told him, Claire ended with a shake of her head. ‘It is a journey of forgiveness,’ she breathed, suddenly understanding Shahin’s gesture, and her voice warbled slightly in that moment of dawning. ‘Shahin called Jamie his friend . . . no, brother. And Jamie admitted to me he felt closer to this Turk during that bright, brief, heartbreaking time of the silenced guns and the thousands of dead than to many people he’d known all of his life. These two men have come to represent for me all the suffering innocents who were bearing the burden of other people’s greed, desire, anger and power.’
She watched Jenkins swallow his anger.
‘And what do you wish to do with my book?’
‘It is not about whether this is your book, my book, Jamie’s book. This is about honour, Mr Jenkins. You honoured Leo’s family at the last, even when you were at the height of your suffering. I am suffering now and I wish to honour the dead too. Shahin wanted Jamie to have this book.’
Her words had guided him to a place of peace, it seemed, for he regarded her now with what felt like respect; it was grudging but he straightened.
‘That’s not entirely correct, Miss Nightingale.’ She blinked in annoyance. ‘The Turk did not wish your friend to have this book. He wished his father to have his book returned. There’s a difference.’
‘Yes, but —’
‘I will give you this book on one condition.’
‘Go on.’
‘That you return it to the Turkish family.’
She opened her mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say initially. They stared at one another awkwardly. It had not occurred to her to take on such an adventure alone . . . was it her place? But even as she thought this, the answer came back that it didn’t matter who returned the book, so long as it was given back to Açar Shahin’s family.
‘I mean it. If you really want to honour the dead as you claim, then honour your nursing friend who kept it safe for you, honour your fiancé who promised to be caretaker of this book for its owner,’ he said, waving it before her, ‘and honour unreservedly the dead owner’s wishes for this book. Nobility takes deeds. I took action that hurt me deeply but prevented pain for others. So take the book back to Turkey or don’t take it from me at all. If it’s going to gather dust among your lace underwear, it might as well gather dust in my desk.’ Bernard’s eyes blazed with the fervour of his challenge.
‘You may not keep it, Bernard,’ she said in what sounded just short of a growl. Claire took a breath and said in a milder tone, ‘I know Leo gave it to you but Jamie gave it to me first. It’s my only connection to him.’
He glared at her.
‘But I will return it. I shall go to Istanbul.’ She was giving voice to a promise that her mind could barely keep up with, but her heart took over – the pact was made between Jamie and Shahin and she and Bernard and even Leo were irrelevant to that equation. She aired this thought.
‘Nonsense! All that matters is that the book is returned. Your Turk will lie easy in his grave and your fiancé, if he’s alive, will surely admire your pluck. Are you plucky, Miss Nightingale, or just clucky?’
Claire felt her lids narrow and she was sure she was giving Jenkins a look of pure scorn.
‘Ah, I feel your rage like a scald, Miss Nightingale,’ he mocked. ‘Can I get you a cooling drink? I know I need one.’ He walked over to the cabinet and poured himself another small tot.
‘A water, please,’ she said and could hear the strain in her voice.
He poured her a small glass of water from the jug he kept near the whisky to dilute it. He returned and handed her the glass. ‘Shall we or shall we not drink to Istanbul?’
Istanbul! Was she mad, agreeing to such a dare? Claire’s acceptance of the challenge blazed back through her eyes like mica glittering from the hard countenance of bedrock. ‘Serefe!’ she growled.
‘Indeed, cheers, Miss Nightingale,’ he said clinking his squat, crystal glass against her thin beaker. It made a dull sound of celebration as he held out the prayer book to her. ‘Take it.’
Claire stared at it for several seconds. Finally she took it, privately rejoicing at the feel of the vellum once more against her skin. ‘Thank you, Mr Jenkins.’
Relief, like an explosion of radiant light, pulsed through her. She was back on course, one step closer to her purpose. Another obstacle to Jamie felt as though it had been conquered and as daring as it was, she couldn’t deny that the hum of fresh energy was not all anger or even relief but a new sense of purpose, of adventure, even.
She was surprised at being able to dig up a smile.
‘When will you go?’ Bernard asked.
She finished her water, handed him back the glass. ‘As fast as I can. I might have mentioned that I have a date in April to keep.’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, what a cunning girl you are. Bravo, Miss Nightingale, bravo. I hope you will write and tell me how it all turns out. I have a vested interest in this prayer book, after all.’
‘I will. When were you last in Egypt?’
‘As a young man. Too long ago. Would you like to see the house, Miss Nightingale?’
She nodded. ‘I have a few minutes before I must leave for my train. But only if you’ll call me Claire.’
‘Then please call me Bernard,’ he replied and for the first time since they’d met, his expression cleared. ‘Oh, and by the way, can you enlighten me as to who those people are in the photo? They don’t look a bit Turkish.’
‘What photo?’ she frowned.
‘May I?’ She handed him the prayer book and he opened the back flyleaf from where a tiny photograph fell out into his hand.
Claire gasped. ‘I had no idea that was there!’
He stared at her quizzically. ‘Surely you looked at the book when it was given to you?’
‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘We were on the ward in Cairo, Jamie was finally conscious and I didn’t want to even think about the wretched book then. All I cared about was making the most of our hours together. I put it in my bag, haven’t really thought about it properly again until two days ago when it suddenly became important again.’ They’d both been staring at the tiny photo as she spoke and now her voice shook slightly. ‘This is Jamie’s family,’ she said with certainty, regarding the tall, striking woman leaning against a verandah post. The house itself was lost as the camera had tried to capture the people in close up but the image was grainy nonetheless. The woman was laughing, dark head tilted, caught in a moment of delight. Claire touched the woman. ‘His mother,’ she whispered, in awe of seeing his family captured in the surrounds that she suspected Jamie loved as much as he loved her; not that she could see much but it was as though she could suddenly feel the dry heat of the desert winds and taste the eucalypt on the air. A boy sat cross-legged on the steps with a grin that was heartbreakingly reminiscent of Jamie. Features were smudged on the two other men, presumably his elder brothers, who leaned over the railing near their mother, and she sensed that their relaxed poses in white collarless shirts with their sleeves rolled up included big smiles.
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