Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  ‘Are you claiming to be psychic?’

  ‘No, not at all. I don’t even believe in that sort of thing. This was more like a deep memory. I could see myself clambering over the stile and running up the pathway and in my mind the sun was shining, the daffodils really were blooming and with me there was a woman and I could feel her next to me and there was this enormous sense of warmth between us.’

  ‘I’m starting to see where this is leading,’ Thomas said, tugging again on his earlobe.

  ‘So anyway. I waited for a lull in the rain, but none ever came. Finally I just thought, to hell with it, and I made a dash for it up the driveway, and all the time I was cursing myself for not bringing an umbrella, or even a coat with a hood. And then, when I got to the front door there was no porch. I stood there for about five minutes, in the downpour, ringing the doorbell. I almost gave up. I thought I was going to have to walk all the way back down to the valley. Then finally he came to the door. p. j. loak. Not an old man, particularly. He was twenty-two when he lost his sight, so he was only forty-something when I met him. You’d think from that poem that he was decrepit, but I suspect that’s just how he thinks of himself. He looked fairly trim. He wasn’t wearing dark glasses or anything, but his eyes looked glazed. We sat in his front room. He had a little electric fire. He didn’t make me tea, or offer to let me dry myself. He’s blind, so he couldn’t see how wet I was. So we just sat, and I realised that I hadn’t really prepared much for this meeting – hadn’t really thought what I should say. I didn’t want to come over like some crazed groupie. I told him I was the woman who had written to him, and he said that he used to get quite a lot of letters, but not so many now.

  ‘The funny thing was, all this time, coming in through his little hallway, sitting in the front room – I had this eerie sense that I knew this house. I knew the hallway, I knew this room; I knew there was another room that I hadn’t yet seen, and in that room there would be a piano and somehow, in a parallel universe, I could hear it playing, something soft, dreamy, a lullaby perhaps. I could see a door that led to another room, and I wanted to get up and snatch the handle to prove that I was wrong. Maybe it was just a broom cupboard. Or maybe behind that door there would be a room in which the sunlight flooded through the windows, where a man would sit at the piano and his fingers would become musical notes; and maybe there would be a woman in the shadows and maybe she would sing, with a voice as pure as an organ pipe, and the words she would sing would speak of love.

  ‘But of course I didn’t. I didn’t get up and open the door. I was scared. Something was making my heart race. Then I told Loak my name was Azalea Lewis. It was an uncomfortable moment. My head was still swimming from the turmoil of images I’d experienced. Loak paused for a very long time. “Tell me how old you are, Azalea,” he said. So I told him my age – I was twenty-nine. He seemed to think very hard about this. Then he asked me my birthday. I told him it was the first of November. “That’s good,” he said, and he seemed to be off in a dream somewhere. Then he said, “I knew an Azalea once – a long time ago; a very long time ago. She would be twenty-nine now, too. But I have no idea where she is, or how to find her. Her birthday would be in August.” ’

  Azalea paused, as if the effort of telling the story was too great to bear.

  ‘Go on,’ Thomas coaxed.

  ‘The thing you need to know, Thomas, is that I’d heard these words before; almost these exact same words. Do you know what it’s like when somebody quotes something back to you that should be familiar, but just for a moment you can’t place it? Well, that was what his words were like to me. It was as if he was playing me a recording of a conversation that had taken place at another time in my life. I was . . . unbalanced by it. Like when you cross a beck on stepping stones and one of them suddenly wobbles.’

  ‘I‘m beginning to understand why you teach poetry,’ Thomas said.

  ‘The thing is, Thomas. Well, the thing is . . . my real birthday is in August. I’ve never bothered to change my birth certificate. After all, you get used to your birthday, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose you do.’

  ‘Anyway – now I was spooked. I said, “If . . . just if . . . I was born in August . . . and if I was the same Azalea you knew a long time ago – well, then you would be able to tell me what part of England I was born in.”

  ‘He just sat there and shook his head very slowly, in some kind of reverie. Finally he said, “If . . . just if . . . you were the same Azalea I knew a very long time ago – well then, I would be able to tell you that you weren’t born in England at all.”

  ‘Now I was almost shaking. He said, “If I tell you the name of the place, can you tell me the name of the village?” I said I could. Then he said, “If . . . you were the same Azalea I knew, you would have been born not far away . . . not far away at all as the seagull flies . . . but far enough for it to be a different place and a different country way across the Irish Sea. You would have been born in the Isle of Man.”

  ‘And I could barely say it, Thomas. I could hardly speak. My mouth and tongue just locked and I couldn’t get the words out. I was crying. It was so sudden. Down by the gate I’d seen a shadow of my mother, the first I’d seen since I was a toddler, and now he’d pulled away the floor, and I was just floating . . . not even floating, I was sinking. So at last I just choked out, “Port St Menfre,” because that was the name. The name of the place.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘There was a long moment when he didn’t speak at all. I just looked at him with my mouth wide open. I was trying to find my voice again. Finally I said, “How do you know all this?” and he just started to laugh. And then as he laughed it wasn’t a laugh any more. He was sobbing. He was crying into his hands. When he looked up, I could see that even if his eyes no longer worked, his tears still ran.

  ‘ “The Azaliah I knew would have had . . .” and I took his hand, because I knew what he was about to say. His hand felt big and cold. I put his fingers here.’ Azalea brushed her hair away from her face to reveal the faint trace of a scar.

  ‘I knew then what he was going to say, and I was almost willing him not to say it. “The reason I know all that, Azaliah . . . the reason I know that . . . is because I’m your father.” That was what he said.’

  Thomas held Azalea’s gaze. ‘I see. So this . . . Loak . . . he was the blind man – the blind man who said he was your father?’

  ‘Not exactly, Thomas,’ she said. ‘No.’

  ‘But I thought you said . . .’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So this chap Loak . . .’ Thomas was floundering.

  ‘This is my coincidence, you see,’ said Azalea. ‘This is why I’m the person who won the lottery twice. You see, Peter Loak wasn’t the first blind man that I’ve met quite out of the blue who told me he was my father.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Oh, no.’ She looked directly into Thomas’s eyes. ‘He was the second one.’

  They walked from Thomas’s office through the green park in Bedford Square, past the British Museum, and found a small café – one where Azalea could savour the rich smell of roasting coffee and find herself on a different continent half a lifetime away. Azalea drank her coffee rich and black, the way Luke Folley had once done. Thomas drank tea.

  They sat in a corner on two inadequate stools. Thomas ordered a ciabatta, Azalea a salad. She was muffled in a stylish overcoat and matching scarf. He was unsuitably dressed in a plain blue shirt and a loose brown cardigan – all the better, he had thought in the morning, to protect his plastered arm, but now he looked like an invalid at large.

  ‘What do we look like?’ Azalea said. ‘Like a couple of survivors from Waterloo – you with your arm and me with my rib.’

  Thomas offered up a grudging smile.

  ‘Creeping into the dark shadows of a little coffee house,’ said Azalea, demonstrating something of her flair for the dramatic, ‘to nurse our wounds and share battle stories.’

  Thomas stirred sugar into his
tea.

  ‘It’s just as well,’ said Azalea, ‘that we’re not sneaking off here to have an affair! Imagine trying to do that with your arm and my rib.’

  ‘Imagine,’ echoed Thomas Post.

  They found their way back to the story of p. j. loak, and Azalea told Thomas about her childhood. She explained the events at the fairground in Totnes, and filled him in on the scant details she had learned about her mother.

  ‘Peter Loak was convinced that he was my father,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re not so sure?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. They didn’t marry – Peter and Marion. She was quite a few years older than him. He offered to marry her, but she refused. She said that God had told her to raise me on her own, just as she’d been raised by her mother. So, by and by, he went back to England, just a few weeks after my christening; back to his father’s old house in Cumbria, while Marion stayed on in Port St Menfre.’

  ‘Then Peter joined the navy. It was what he’d always wanted to do. He was nineteen, and I think it was something he needed to get out of his system. One day when he was back on shore leave, my mother turned up at the Buttermere house with me. I must have been around two, or two and a half. I don’t remember it, of course. And then they made up their differences – at least some of them – and for a while, Marion would return to Port St Menfre when Peter was at sea, and then cross back to England when he was home on leave. Then, in the autumn of 1981, Peter set off on HMS Sheffield to the Middle East, and they toured there for a few months until the spring of 1982. She was thirty, and he was twenty-two. It can’t have been easy. He promised her this would be his final trip. She was terrified that he’d be lost at sea. And they had words. From the way Loak tells the story, they just about stopped speaking. He didn’t know if she’d be waiting for him back at the house in Buttermere, or if he would ever see her or his daughter again. He cabled to tell her that the Sheffield was on its way home. But of course it wasn’t. The Sheffield got sent off to the Falklands. And then – kerbang! One duff Exocet missile later, Marion paid off the rent on her cottage in Port St Menfre, packed all she had into two suitcases, bundled them into her old car and took the ferry over to Liverpool. Then she drove up to Buttermere and let herself into the empty house. She hadn’t spoken to Peter on the phone, but she’d been in touch with someone on the hospital ship where he was taken. That hospital ship, by the way, was called the Uganda. Anyway. Somehow a message got through to her to say that Peter had been hospitalised in Uruguay, and that he was coming back to a naval hospital in Plymouth. So Marion left her belongings at the house, packed a small overnight bag and strapped me into the car. We drove all day from Cumbria to Devon so that we could go and see him in hospital. Only that never happened. We never got as far as the hospital. We didn’t even get as far as Plymouth. I was found wandering alone in a fairground. And Marion was never seen again. No one knew, for a long time, if she was still alive.

  ‘When Peter Loak was eventually discharged from the naval hospital, he went home to Cumbria. Marion hadn’t been to visit him in hospital, of course, and he figured that she was probably gone from his life. She never answered his letters. He wrote to the vicar of Port St Menfre, and he received a reply saying that Marion had never returned to the village. Someone else was renting the cottage on Briny Hill Walk. So he stopped writing. What else could he do?

  ‘Loak drew a services disability pension from the navy, and that’s what he lived on – and still does – apart from a very modest income from his poetry. And then, about ten years after moving back into the house, he employed a decorator to do some repairs and other general improvements on the house. The decorator said, ‘ “What do you want me to do with these two suitcases?” Marion’s cases were still on top of the big oak wardrobe in the bedroom, exactly where she had left them. Loak, being blind, had never seen them – and his various cleaners had simply dusted over them and never mentioned them. The decorator opened up the cases and told Loak what they contained. That was when he realised that something must have happened to Marion. He called the police out from Cockermouth, but no one seemed interested in ten-year-old suitcases or a missing woman and child. Eventually he lost patience with the police. He had given up all hope of ever seeing Marion again, but he was desperate to see his daughter. I use the word “see” the way a blind person uses it – the same way Loak uses the word. Of course he would never see either of us. But he still wanted to see his daughter, as a blind man does. He had a photograph of me as a three-year-old on his mantelpiece – a strange thing, you might think, for a sightless man to have. But every now and then, if he had visitors, he would direct them to the picture and he would ask them to describe me. Then he would write down their descriptions, and sometimes he would turn them into poems.

  ‘Finally Loak went to a private investigator in Keswick – a lady called Susan Calendar. It took her less than two weeks to uncover everything he needed to know. She was thorough. She drove all the way to Exeter to examine the police files, and then she wrote up a report and delivered it to Loak in person. She had a Braille copy made especially for him. Loak still keeps the report in the desk in his front room.’

  Azalea looked across the café table to Thomas. His tea had gone cold.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Tell me what the report said.’

  Azalea drew a breath. ‘The report said that Marion Yves had been abducted and raped by a man called Carl Morse. This was the very first time I’d heard this story. Morse had murdered her and had thrown her body into the sea from a place called Millook Cliff in North Devon. When she was finally washed ashore there was no way to identify her body. The daughter was adopted in November 1982 by Luke and Rebecca Folley, teachers from a village called St Piran in Cornwall.’ She nodded thoughtfully and turned her face away. ‘Luke and Rebecca were my parents,’ she said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘In January 1984 the Folleys went to run a mission school in Africa, taking me with them, of course. That’s what the report said, and that’s what happened. Then, in June 1992, according to the report, just one year before Susan Calendar’s investigation, the mission in Uganda was raided by a militia group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. Four orphan children were taken to become child soldiers. The Folleys and their daughter were slaughtered.’

  There was a long silence at the table; elsewhere, the clinking of crockery and the hiss of the espresso machine and the murmur of voices.

  ‘Of course, that isn’t what happened,’ said Thomas. ‘Or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly what happened,’ said Azalea.

  They listened for a while to the coffee-shop noises.

  ‘Have you ever visited the spot where your mother was killed?’ asked Thomas Post. ‘Your birth mother, I mean, Marion.’

  Azalea looked down. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe to lay some flowers.’

  There was another long silence. ‘I would like that,’ Azalea said.

  The espresso machine emitted a geyser of steam and someone in the café started a loud conversation on a mobile phone.

  ‘What were you planning to do this weekend?’ Thomas Post asked.

  13

  June 1992

  The day had begun so well. The augurs didn’t cry and the carrion crows didn’t circle. The two LRA men and the Folleys settled themselves inside the mess hall. It could have been a cosy business meeting.

  Odokonyero, who rarely sat for meals, came and placed himself firmly between them. When Rebecca cast him a reproving look he said, ‘Mrs Rebecca – I know these people. You don’t.’ And that was that.

  Luke Folley took his familiar place at the head of the table. Now comfortably into his forties, Luke had arrived at a time in his life when the intersecting paths of providence were well behind him, and where the work he did and the role he played rested easily upon his shou
lders. The faint echoes of youthful rebellion had long been silenced. His past and his future had melded into a single broad river; he knew where he came from and he knew where he was headed, and while there may still have been invisible rapids around the bend, the riverbanks themselves presented no diversions. His destiny was clear. He was the fourth Folley to run the Holy Tabernacle Mission, stepping confidently into the shoes of Lesters I, II and III. Lester III, of course, had been his brother. One day, he felt, he would hand it all on to his daughter. Azalea would make a fine teacher. Luke was sure of that.

  He had never rediscovered his lost faith; but many a clergyman in a fine house, drawing a comfortable salary, had found ways to balance the contradictions between personal faith and professional duty, and Luke, in a much more modest way, would make the same concessions. He had learned to enjoy the fragile sliver of status that came with heading a small mission in a small township in a forgotten corner of an overlooked country. He didn’t have to wear a suit and tie for work. No one appraised his performance. He didn’t battle his way through commuter traffic, or worry too much about a pension plan. There were anxieties, of course; the strained political map of northern Uganda was a constant focus of harassment by political or militia groups. And then there were the events that had befallen his parents and his brother, Lester III. Their deaths were always there in the background, a reminder that he should never grow too complacent. But the years came and went, and the mission routine survived all attempts to derail it, and Luke acquired the skills of a manager, a teacher, a fundraiser and a politician, and all of the related talents required to steer the little enterprise through the years of the Uganda Bush War and into the uncertain new millennium that lay just a few years ahead.

  Luke stretched out his arms and entwined his fingers. He may have been shaking – but only slightly. ‘If you’re here to meet with us, gentlemen, perhaps we should introduce ourselves.’ He glanced around the table as if seeking approval for this very Western formality. ‘OK, then. Let me begin. My name is Luke Folley, and I’m the director of this mission. The mission was founded by my grandfather, Lester Folley.’ He indicated the whole compound with a broad sweep of his arm. ‘We have a school here where we teach sixty children from Langadi village. We have an orphanage where we look after fifteen children. We also operate a small medical clinic, a hospital of sorts with around sixteen patients, and a church. We employ a full-time nurse and three part-time nurses, and three – or is it four? – nursing assistants, who don’t have any professional training but who help out in the hospital. Our clinic takes place twice a week, led by a Swahili doctor who drives up from Gulu. Is this helpful to you?’