Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  ‘I see,’ said the vicar. They sat and looked out at the ocean. ‘In my years here,’ he said, ‘and there have been many years, only four men have never come back.’

  ‘One of them was my grandfather,’ said Marion quietly, ‘and another was my father.’

  ‘That they were,’ said the vicar. ‘That they were.’ They sat for a while in silence. ‘So what are we to do, then?’ he asked her. ‘Are we never to fish?’

  ‘Not if we want to be part of a family,’ replied Marion. She said it quickly, as if it was something she had said many times before.

  ‘I see.’ The vicar took Marion’s hand and held it gently. ‘Gideon is a good man. He will take care of you – and your baby.’

  ‘Is that God’s answer, then? I tell Gideon he’s the father and we settle down and play happy families for the rest of our lives? Until the sea takes him?’

  ‘It seems the kindest answer. You said yourself that Gideon is probably the father.’

  ‘But he might not be.’

  ‘But even so . . . the baby needs a father. Every child needs a father.’

  Marion turned to look the Reverend in the eye. ‘I never had one. And my mother never had one.’

  Above them the herring gulls wheeled and shrieked in the cold January sky. Marion released the vicar’s hand and reached into her basket.

  ‘Why don’t we let God decide,’ she said firmly.

  ‘That’s good, my child,’ said the vicar. ‘Put this matter into the hands of God.’

  Marion drew out a loaf of bread from her basket and began, with some force, to break off small chunks. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll give God the problem. Does God control the seagulls?’

  ‘The seagulls?’ The Reverend Lender looked puzzled.

  ‘Of course he does. God controls everything.’ She tossed a piece of bread onto the path. ‘Let’s see which bit of bread the gulls take first.’

  ‘Look, I really don’t think this is a good idea,’ said the vicar, getting a sense of her intentions.

  But Marion was not in a mood to be swayed. ‘If they take that piece first,’ she declared, ‘then I’m having an abortion.’

  Lender recoiled at the word. ‘Look . . . Please. Don’t do this.’

  She threw another chunk. ‘If they take this one, then I’ll raise the baby on my own, just like my mother had to do with me.’ A third piece: ‘And this one, God, is if Gideon is the father and you want him to move back in.’ A fourth: ‘And this is Peter. Peter the barman, Peter the Englishman, Peter the poet who wants to be a sailor.’ A fifth: ‘And this is John. John the landlord, John the husband already.’ She clapped her hands in triumph. ‘Come on, God,’ she called to the sky. ‘Give me your answer.’

  ‘Marion, look, this makes no sense. This is no way to solve your problems.’ The priest was clearly anxious now. ‘You can’t mean this.’

  ‘Oh, I can,’ said Marion, ‘I absolutely can. If God can read my mind then he’ll know I mean it. Otherwise what would be the point?’

  Above them, the gulls were circling closer.

  ‘This isn’t the way to put your troubles before God,’ said Lender. He was rising to his feet to scare the birds away from the bread.

  Marion took hold of his arm. ‘Wait,’ she said.

  A large gull all a-flap had landed on one of the gravestones. It hawked at Marion and Lender with its great yellow beak, tacking cautiously towards the trail of bread.

  ‘This isn’t a fair test,’ protested the priest.

  ‘Let God decide,’ said Marion. A second gull dropped from the sky. A third.

  ‘Stop this!’ The vicar’s voice drove the birds back, but only for a moment.

  A fourth gull landed. A fifth. The priest was struggling to escape Marion’s grasp. And then, of course, it was too late. With a flash of grey wings a bird swept in without landing and carried off a piece of bread. Emboldened, the flock surged forward, and soon all the bread was gone, carried aloft by the gulls.

  Marion released the vicar and rose to her feet.

  ‘Which one was it?’ the priest asked weakly.

  Marion gave him a twisted smile. ‘It wasn’t Gideon,’ she said, collecting up her basket. She gave a rueful smile. ‘And you’ll be pleased to know it wasn’t John. John the master of wandering hands. Maybe God does move in a mysterious way after all. Maybe He does.’ And without looking back, she set off down the hill towards the village.

  6

  October 1978

  The name ‘Azaliah’ was originally proposed by the Reverend Jeremiah Lender, the man who was later to drop the baby into the font. At the time Marion Yves was leaning towards the name ‘Hazel’. She suggested this name to the vicar, but he gave her a disapproving look.

  ‘With all the names we have in the Bible,’ he rebuked her, ‘and with all the names of all the saints in heaven, you want to call your baby after a nut?’

  ‘But I like the name Hazel,’ Marion had protested.

  ‘In that case,’ said the vicar, ‘you should call her Azaliah. It’s close enough to Hazel, isn’t it? And it means ‘set aside by God’.

  If you go back through the christening records for the parish of Port St Menfre you will find at least two more Azaliahs, along with a host of other biblical names. The villagers of Port St Menfre were Josephs and Ruths and Jacobs and Esthers and Rebeccas and Matthews; they were rarely Melvin or Roger or Veronica or Brenda. Clearly the Reverend had engaged in similar conversations with a generation of mothers. If you look up ‘Azaliah’ in a book of names, then it does indeed appear to mean ‘set aside by God’, or ‘close to God’, but curiously, if you search the Bible itself you will find this name only once, and in the event even the gender is ambiguous. Shaphan, we are told, was the son of Azaliah. So the original bearer of the name was probably male.

  But, nevertheless, in her new life Azaliah became Azalea. The girl set aside by God became a flowering shrub.

  The General Register Office in England has a process for the issuing of adoption certificates to foundlings. No birth certificate is issued, but a birth date is normally entered onto the adoption papers, marked, if necessary, as an estimated date. So as well as providing the foundling girl with a name, it was also necessary to establish an estimated date of birth. At the time Azalea came to live with the Folleys she was four years and three months old; but no one knew that, and with no known birthday the authorities were obliged to assign one for her. The doctor who had checked Azalea when she was found at the fairground had estimated the little girl’s age as around four and a half, which would have made her almost five when she was adopted. We now know that she was only three years and ten months old when she was discovered. Her gangly frame may have made her look a little older, and her confident demeanour probably helped in this assessment. The doctor’s judgement would have placed Azalea’s birth date around December 1977. Her true birthday was in August 1978. But it was left to Rebecca and Luke Folley to agree with a registrar from Cornwall on an official date. The Folleys were anxious to resist a December date because this would be too close to Christmas, and had they been wiser they might have gone for January or later; but, in the event, the date they chose was an even earlier one – 1 November 1977, because this was All Saints’ Day, adding a little over eight months to Azalea’s age.

  Eight months is a big gap for a four-year-old to make up. But the first intake in a school year will typically include children up to a year apart in age, so Azalea did not stand out as too young or too old when she joined the reception class at school within days of joining the Folleys.

  Fate, of course, plays a part in all of our lives. As an adult, Azalea would often reflect upon the unlikely sequence of events that seemed to have directed her life. She would, many years later, visit the cliffs at Millook where Marion had perished, and there she would throw flowers onto the rocks in memory of a woman she no longer remembered. Had a hungry seagull snatched a different piece of bread, had a complicated train of events involving a faraway
conflict in the South Atlantic not conspired to make her mother bundle her into a car for a six-hour drive, had the fairground lights not caught her eye, had Carl Morse not been prowling, had her mother been able to escape his clutches, had Azalea as a three-year-old known an address she could have given to the policemen, had the police in Sheffield possessed more imagination – then none of what was about to happen might ever have transpired. But all of us lead lives that twist and coil, and no one can truly say what might have been.

  It wasn’t until some years later that the young Azalea would learn of another cruel event that had happened on the very same day – 24 November 1982 – that she was adopted by the Folleys. It was an incident of such callous barbarity that Luke and Rebecca Folley would shield her from the news of it, even as she became slowly aware of the episode that was to determine her future in ways that no one could foresee. It was an event that may have been coldly unfolding, even as the Folleys hugged their new daughter and smothered her with new-found affection. Even as the car pulled up in the drive of the Folleys’ home in St Piran, even as Azalea tore the coloured paper off the welcome gifts that her new parents had so lovingly wrapped, even then events were unravelling in a very distant land. Sometime on that day, as Rebecca Folley showed Azalea the little bedroom where she would sleep, as they looked out together at the boats that bobbed in the harbour, as they served up their first meal as a family – at some point a small conical slug of lead was starting a short and violent journey through the barrel of a gun, emerging into the bright sunlight of a town and a continent a great many miles from St Piran. And like the cascade of colliding balls on a snooker table, cold and inevitable consequences would accompany this fragment of metal as it crossed the void from its dark metallic tube. The repercussions of its flight would echo across years, and over continents, until the aftermath would engulf Luke and Rebecca and Azalea Folley – and eventually even Thomas Post as well.

  One year after Azalea’s adoption, the ripples had already reached the Folleys. By then the house in St Piran stood empty. Azalea and her new family were in Africa.

  7

  June 2012 / February 2011

  ‘We met at Euston Station,’ Thomas says. ‘I don’t think I ever told you that.’

  He and Clementine are in the basement canteen of the university. They have lunched here many times before. Clementine picks at a healthy salad of unfamiliar beans and leaves. Thomas has goulash with chunky fried potatoes.

  ‘Euston Station? How delightfully romantic,’ Clementine observes. ‘It reminds me of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.’

  Thomas raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Brief Encounter,’ says Clementine. ‘Please don’t tell me you haven’t seen that film.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ Thomas says, lamely.

  ‘They meet at a railway station. He helps to get something out of her eye. It’s love at first sight.’ Clementine hums a tune and lets her fingers dance over an imaginary piano. ‘Rachmaninov plays in the background,’ she says. ‘Piano Concerto Number Two.’

  ‘Ahh.’ Thomas nods. ‘It wasn’t quite like that with us.’

  ‘No Rachmaninov?’ She is teasing him.

  ‘None whatsoever.’ He looks into his goulash and stabs at a potato.

  It doesn’t seem that long ago. How long was it? A year? A year and a half?

  ‘It was February,’ he tells her, ‘February 2011.’

  It had been cold; colder than winters in London have any right to be. There was ice still on pavements and swept-up snow in gutters. But the chill east wind was easing, and signs of a thaw were evident in the loosening of the coats and scarves of city commuters. There were fewer hats pulled down over ears than there had been just a week ago. Thomas, who rarely wore a hat, noticed these things.

  They had never met. They were colleagues. But the University of London is Britain’s largest; it is absurdly easy to pursue an entire career there without ever encountering the majority of one’s colleagues. Azalea taught English literature and poetry to adult learners at Birkbeck, usually working unsocial hours at the college, where most teaching takes place in the evenings. Thomas was a philosopher, spinning out his days in an undistinguished annexe of the Institute for Philosophy in Russell Square. The two of them spent their working lives within the same few city streets; they undoubtedly swarmed down the same busy pavements to the same tube stations; they probably stood in the same queues for sandwiches in summer, and ate them on the same park lawn in Tavistock Square; they would have browsed together in the university bookshop, and must surely have squeezed into the same rowdy pubs after work. But huge universities and great cities deliver a cloak of invisibility, and so it was that when Azalea Lewis and Thomas Post mounted the top step of the escalator at Euston Station in the middle of the morning rush hour, neither would have afforded the other more than a courteous glance. They were strangers in a city of strangers.

  That anonymity was about to change.

  You may be familiar with the escalator at Euston Station; if not, you will at least recognise the general category of escalators that bear tides of people into the dark intestines of cities at all hours, but most especially at those times when, like one of the great animal migrations, the world’s commuters take to their streets. Euston railway station, like a thousand city hubs from New York to Shanghai, is a portal, disgorging trainloads of workers from homes in the suburbs, propelling them down into the maze of tunnels that is the underground transport network. There is a moment every weekday morning when the sheer mass of humanity swarming onto the down escalator at Euston threatens to overwhelm the orderly unfolding of the steel steps, and a crowd begins to build and to push, as the urgency of the day’s commute becomes more acute. Some workers filter off to the central stairway between the down escalator and the up escalator; they take the stairs in a hurry, often two steps at a time, anxious not to be overtaken by glassy-eyed travellers sweeping effortlessly down on the conveyor. Most commuters simply join the melee, waiting for the crush to carry them to the top step.

  They are a diverse lot, the commuters of London; this one in an Italian suit off to get the Northern Line into the city; this one in fatigues off to clean a hospital; this one in the uniform of a nurse; this one in the uniform of a waiter. They clutch their bags and their newspapers and their laptop cases and their mobile phones, and they move with the precision of colonial insects driven by an unwavering programme to press forward. They make little eye contact. They rarely speak. They acknowledge fellow travellers with the faintest of nods. They are men and women on a mission, a familiar and practised journey from A to B. Thomas Post was one of this species, and so, on that February day, was Azalea Lewis.

  There is a convention on the London Underground that the right-hand side of an escalator is reserved for standing passengers, while the left is a freeway for walkers. The walkers are impatient. The escalator is too slow to match the urgency of their commute. The convention fails when tourists, unfamiliar with the practice, find themselves on the left; then regular walkers get irritable and there can be pushing and bottlenecking. This is what happened that day. Two steps in front of Thomas Post (on the right) and Azalea Lewis (on the left), a pair of tourists were squeezed onto a step with large and unwieldy suitcases. A tetchy tail of commuters had sprung up behind. It should have been just another morning crush, but as the throng of people slid towards the depths, a man on the step behind Azalea tried to assert his right to push forwards. Azalea was forced to steady herself by holding up a hand, which fell rather heavily on the tourist ahead; and the tourist, taken by surprise, tried to move and fell awkwardly over her suitcase. With creditable speed Thomas Post’s hand flew out to catch the visitor, but she was falling too fast – and now Thomas was falling too, and Azalea was caught up in it.

  And now the escalator reached the bottom. The twisted pile – two cumbersome suitcases, two frightened tourists and two employees of the University of London – was unceremoniously deposited onto the concourse. There wa
s no time for anyone caught in the pile to extract themselves before commuters from two steps above also collapsed into the heap; and a second later another two, and then two more; and then a woman with a child in a pushchair and a man with a heavy parcel, and then two more people, and then two more.

  It was astonishing how swiftly the mound of people grew. For those joining the stack, there was a grim inevitability about their destination. Unable to move backwards, unable to step sideways, they were carried forwards and cast onto the pile. Screams grew from the press of people at the bottom and the cry carried back up the line, but the crowds joining at the top were blind to the commotion and they continued to press forward. Somewhere halfway up the escalator was an emergency button, but in the wave of panic that infected the crowd no one above the button thought to seek it, and those beneath it were unable to reach back.

  The risk of injury was enhanced by those in the crush who struggled hardest to escape. The thrashing of legs and arms and the digging of heels made it worse for those who were being stamped upon, elbowed and punched by an increasingly panicked mob. Thomas had withdrawn his left arm from the woman on the stair below, and as they fell, he had gallantly extended the arm to protect the stranger who shared his stair. Now that arm was broken. Azalea for her part had broken a rib and was finding it difficult to breathe. Both of them stopped struggling to get out of the crush. By now any effort to move was painful.

  At last someone found the emergency stop button and the relentless supply of new bodies was staunched. Even so, it took some time to disentangle all the limbs and to pull everyone to safety. Several commuters had been injured. One man was bleeding heavily from the face. A woman had possibly broken her neck. Another had a broken leg. A stiletto heel had been driven into the back of one of the Eastern Europeans and he was in a lot of pain. A student had seen her laptop computer trampled and crushed. Another had lost her glasses. Several people were in shock. The pushchair had buckled; but the baby, thank God, was unharmed.