The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

She’s there, of course, she’s there, holding Mervyn on her hip, the breeze flicking her bobbed hair from side to side. The two older boys emerge from the kitchen door behind her, David marching out in his short trousers, while Omar clings to Laura’s legs and pulls grumpily at her tartan skirt. She points up to the prison and Mahmood whips his handkerchief from his pocket and waves it out of the window frantically. Laura’s face is too far away to see clearly but he catches sight of the moment that she notices the movement and bends down to move David’s head in the right direction. Omar spots him without help and starts jumping on the spot, holding his stomach in a pantomime way as he staggers back in glee. They wave, he waves, they wave harder, he waves until it hurts. He wants to holler at them but there is no way his voice can reach them. This fluttering white handkerchief is all he’s got. It reminds him of that moment when a passenger ship is about to leave port and the travellers gather on the first-, second- and third-class decks to wave to the masses on the dockside. As the pilot guides the liner out to sea, you have a flurry of handkerchiefs on both sides, like falling snow, shivering until well after the ship’s horn has stopped sounding and they are so far out to sea that it looks like the ship could be slipped into a bottle.

  Laura kisses her hand and throws the imaginary peck to him, he snatches it in his fist and slaps it against his own parched lips. She had told him once that he was the best thing that ever happened to her. The best thing. He made her feel like a queen, she said. She was a queen, his Welsh boqorad, no lie. Her body, her heart, her thoughts could not easily be cut from his; David, Omar and Mervyn’s even less so. Their short podgy arms are flagging, but they continue to flap them in bursts of renewed energy. What must it look like to them? The broad, dirty, grey-brown shell of the prison, studded with dozens of rabbit-hutch-sized barred windows; their father hidden, apart from his black hand waving a white flag. Laura had heard David explain to Omar and Mervyn that Daddy was a prisoner in the castle and that the naughty sheriff would keep him there until he’d paid his taxes. His comics, nursery rhymes and imagination filled in what the adults hid from him, but he understood that his father was in trouble, at the mercy of powerful men.

  Mahmood stops waving, he wants them to go inside before they catch a chill. Slowly, Laura and the boys lower their arms and turn back into the house. Mahmood watches them until she finally closes the kitchen door and then he stays in place, letting the breeze dry his tear-brimmed eyes. Be a man, he chastises, get a hold of yourself, you spent months away from them at sea, take it easy, look how close they are. This ain’t no worse than a ship, you got your bunk, your feed, and you don’t even need to fire a furnace. Keep your head together, say your prayers and don’t cry like a damn woman.

  TEN

  Toban

  Diana waits for the new owner of 203 Bute Street, Mr Wolfowitz, outside the swept and emptied premises. No longer ‘the shop’ or ‘home’, just ‘the premises’ now. The bundle of keys in her hand range in age from huge, rusted things cut in the 1910s to small shiny ones bought this year. There are some she has never seen or used before. Violet loved locking things; her mind settled by the act of turning a key and checking once, then twice, that it was indeed bolted. She’d read somewhere that in Georgian times the man of the house wouldn’t sleep until he had secured all the shutters, doors and windows of the home, and Violet, as ‘the man of the house’, took that upon herself. She also brought home the money that kept them all in comfort, and now with her passing and the liquidation of all their possessions there is a small fortune to divide between Diana and Maggie. Their father had arrived in Cardiff from Russia with just five bob in his pocket, but now Diana has more money than she knows what to do with. Violet had been so secretive and controlling about financial matters that Diana had no clue how much she had made from canny property deals, stocks and gilts. Neighbours are gossiping about their wealth, and she wonders what the worst of them might say about her failure to save Violet from the killer. Money, or even the thought of it, seems to twist people into crooked postures.

  ‘Sorry to keep you vaiting, Mrs Diana.’ Mr Wolfowitz bundles up to her, holding the black kippah on his head flat so it’s not blown away.

  ‘It’s no bother, Mr Wolfowitz.’

  He is one of the older generation, his wispy salt-and-pepper beard and twinkling pale eyes hinting at woes and adventures she can only imagine. His accent is fixed in the Pale of Settlement rather than in the Vale of Glamorgan.

  ‘My son come, ve vait two minute, please?’ He smiles and, just like with her father, she can’t refuse him.

  ‘Of course.’

  His son is the one she has been negotiating with, and he treats Diana like a fool.

  After rooting around in his pocket, Mr Wolfowitz produces a tin of jewel-like boiled sweets and offers them to her with a small bow.

  ‘That’s very kind but …’ She shakes her head.

  ‘You take, take! Make you even sweeter.’

  ‘I’ll take it for my daughter, how about that?’ she offers.

  ‘Please.’

  Diana takes a sweet shyly from the tin, wraps it in a clean hankie and puts it into her own pocket.

  ‘Ah, here he come!’ beams Mr Wolfowitz as his bespectacled son saunters down Bute Street, a new-model Kodak camera hanging from his neck.

  ‘I hope you’ll excuse the wait, Diana, I had a spot of car trouble earlier,’ he says unconvincingly.

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ she replies, with a tight smile that reveals the little creases where her dimples had once been.

  ‘We won’t keep you, it’s just that my father wanted a little memento of the day, it’s the largest store we’ve bought, you see. You wouldn’t mind, would you?’ he asks, lifting the strap of the camera from his neck before she’s had a chance to reply. ‘It’s easy enough to operate, ignore all the dials and buttons apart from the top one …’

  Diana gives him a look that shuts him up, before taking the camera and bringing it to her eye.

  Father and son take position before number 203’s black front door, adjusting their heads so that the number plate will be clear. ‘The keys!’ Wolfowitz the younger shouts.

  Diana throws him the lot and he misses the catch, scrabbling for them on the pavement.

  They strike a pose again, each holding the large key ring with a hooked index finger, their free arms tucked behind their backs. They look like a hammy variety act on a poster at the Lyceum: the Incredible Wolfowitzes or the Canton Cantors.

  Diana takes one picture, then moves the camera to take another in landscape. She presses the button but the son has leapt out of shot.

  ‘Mind your fingers there,’ he grabs the camera from her, ‘it’s absolute murder getting the focus right.’

  It takes him two beats before he realizes what he’s said, and to whom, then the where and when of it flushes his face a deep burgundy. He offers a resentful mumble that Diana assumes is an apology.

  His father looks back and forth between them, trying to fix the situation but stuck for words.

  Diana tucks her chin down, unsure of her expression. Does her face show anger? Pain? Shame? Amusement? Nothing at all? She feels everything at once, but how can she explain that?

  ‘Well, I hope the shop brings you as much happiness as it did us,’ she says, turning and walking away towards the police station. It’s not until she has passed the Cypriot barbers that she realizes that her words sound like a curse.

  ‘Eat up, dearie.’

  ‘I’m stuffed.’

  ‘So stuffed you can’t squeeze in a Knickerbocker Glory?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Grace smiles.

  ‘Well …’

  Grace resolutely sticks her fork into the baby carrots. On other tables courting couples flirt over stacked tiers of sandwiches and cake slices, and two older women bicker over who should have the honour of paying the two-bob bill.

  The Howell’s uniform is boxed up under the table: blue tunic, navy blazer, white blouse, khaki
-coloured stockings, and old-fashioned bloomers. It had cost far too much but seeing Grace in the outfitters, turning this way and that in the mirror, her small shoulders swamped by the blazer, had lifted a little weight from Diana’s heart. She has found a small flat for the both of them near the school, on the ground floor of a tall Victorian terrace and with a half-acre garden. The owners have recently decorated it and its sterility appeals to her. There are no secret childish doodles, no abandoned shoes, no hairs in the drain to remind her that this is someone else’s home and her own is three miles away, on the wrong side of the railway bridge. She had shown Grace around the flat earlier in the day, and she had been aggressively positive about everything; the sash windows were lovely, the small black fireplaces lovely, the new russet carpet lovely, and the wisteria-laden pergola in the garden even more than lovely. The child in her is disappearing, obstinacy and egotism dropping away with her milk teeth. A tender bud of a woman is emerging, with two dark scanning eyes searching her mother’s face for a clue of what to say, to do, to feel. The tap-dancing Shirley Temple morphing into a silent movie ingénue, eager to melt away into the shadows. ‘We’ll make it nice,’ Diana kept saying, but the place is too foreign, too quiet, the street outside too genteel and dead. Not one soul has knocked on the door to say hello, and the nights pass by in eerie silence. Maybe it is what they need, a makeshift sanatorium in which to heal.

  They never talk about what happened but it’s always there, heavy between them, in their silences and distracted gazes. Grace is going to have to give evidence in court. Detective Powell insists on it, saying the jury needs to see her take the stand. It is difficult to argue with him; she ends up wanting to please him rather than demand what she came for, leaving her feeling diminished and prized at the same time. He said they have built a strong case against the Somali, with forensic evidence and multiple prosecution witnesses, but they still need Grace to say he is the man she saw on the doorstep. Powell said that after a bad shock the mind can play tricks on people, wiping some memories away and making others crystal clear, but they need to try harder to remember the attacker’s face because all the evidence was pointing to the Somali. The detective showed her the suspect’s photo again, Mattan’s mournful eyes staring up at her from the table, and told her she had ample time to recollect what she saw, as the trial wouldn’t start until the Swansea Assizes opened in the summer.

  Leading her out of the police station, he shook her hand. ‘Let me know if you or your daughter need anything from us, Corporal Tanay. I remember your father coming to the police station to get his naturalization papers in order, all the way back in the twenties. Your family has been nothing but a credit to this town. I’ll pray you won’t need us for any troubles, but if you ever need a reference or some such I am only a telephone call away.’

  Spring has no patience for mourning, plants already burst forth from the leaf-strewn borders of the garden. Bluebells, a clump of pink ranunculus, a few late, squirrel-nibbled tulips and tall saffron-tongued irises bring life to the static, grey and melancholic scene. Diana roughly rakes last autumn’s brown sycamore leaves on to the scrappy lawn to allow the flowers more sunlight; her own stark white arms warming in the sun too. The temperature is almost twenty degrees centigrade, and it’s the first day she’s had time to herself since the calamity. Her life is returning to her, the public business of grief taking up less and less of her time: the visits, the questions, the cooing and encouragement, the money, the solicitors, the police. After the trial it will all be over. Straightening her spine, she throws the rake down and takes a cigarette box from her apron pocket. The afternoon sun rests behind two mature sycamores that shield the garden from the railway line, their spindly branches intertwined and glowing like struck matches. Taking a long drag on the mentholated fag, her cheeks pucker, her lungs stretch open and the sweet cool air shoots down all the way to the pit of her stomach. Clarity. Peace. She feels them both for a few seconds. As a child she had enjoyed staring out of the window, pretending to smoke with a piece of broken chalk held between her fingers, her eyes fixed somewhere over the streaming chimneys. ‘You waste too much time,’ her father used to chide, idleness a greater sin than any other in his mind, but these moments, when the breeze caresses her hair and carries her thoughts away, pacify her warring soul.

  Stepping in from the fresh garden, the kitchen smells so strongly of the new plasticky linoleum that it’s enough to give Diana a headache. She pushes open the window above the steel sink and then searches the mint-green cabinets until she finds the flour, butter and condensed milk she’d bought earlier. In two hours she has to collect Grace from her new primary school and bring her to the flat so she can look through fabric swatches and pick her own curtains and bedding. She’ll surprise her with a caramel tart, a treat they both love. The ingredients and tools she’ll need are basic, which suits her as the kitchen is still rudimentary.

  Caramel tarts take her back to her own childhood, to the Lyons’ Corner House on the Strand in London. A fine confectionery of a building, with gilt vines and pillars on the exterior and fat samovars and latticed ceilings inside. Tiny chocolates, huge flower displays, ribboned biscuit tins, imported delicacies; it was pure opulence. The counters of the dining hall were jewelled with patisseries so delicate that she felt guilt at the thought of eating them, and plumped for a plain caramel tart and custard each time. A nippy with a white doily hat would take their orders at the smartly dressed table. Her father’s voice was stiff, his leather briefcase clutched in his lap as he carefully pointed out their choices from the menu, the solemn High Court having chastened the three girls into silence. Violet and Maggie would order millefeuille, Black Forest gâteau, peach Melba, queen of puddings, or whatever took their fancy, but Diana always took pleasure in the homely comfort of the brittle pastry and the warm custard.

  London was an assault on the senses: the merciless crowds between Piccadilly and Oxford Street, who seemed happy to trample a little girl into the gutter; traffic that never quieted; the bellow of newspaper men and flower sellers; policemen blowing whistles. She marched beside her father with her hands up near her ears in alarm. He took them to London two times, for each of the divorce trials. Diana is now the same age as her mother was when her husband, their father, tried to divorce her for the first time. It seemed to come on him like madness, soon after his mother died in Russia, a kind of rage that nothing could cool. He accused their mother of adultery and sued for divorce and custody of the girls. She remembers keenly the hot looks her mother received as they waited to buy ice cream from Salvatore’s cart on Stuart Street. An ordeal of whispers and laughter, the divorce splattered across the newspaper, men asking their father where he got the money from, women telling their mother to fall to her knees and beg forgiveness, whether innocent or not. The subtle feeling that all their neighbours were laughing at their father too; at this small shopkeeper from Cardiff who would go to the expense and shame of a divorce. When the High Court, that white castle that replaced any picture-book castle in her mind, rejected her father’s petition, he finally allowed their mother to return home. No one explained anything to her; she was ten years old and looking through the school dictionary for ‘adultery’, ‘clandestine’, ‘impropriety’.

  Violet kept house and made sure they were all fed and cleaned; if she knew more about the ‘situation’, then she never said. Long-coated rabbis came to the house and holed up in the dining room with their father for hours, counselling patience and trust, but he never looked kindly on their mother again. Less than six years later, he brought a new case of adultery against her and won, exiling her from the home and burning as many of her photographs as he could get to before the girls saved them. The woman he saw in Mam was one they could never see: in the touch of her hands they felt love, while he sensed pollution; in her laughter he heard betrayal, while they saw pleasure; in the distant gaze that he read as slyness, they perceived sadness. She was a tree that he wanted to chop down, and he used the law as his axe
. The girls helped her pack her belongings and move to the small house where she died, a few years later, her tears unquenchable. Her whole life was built around motherhood, and then the highest court in the land judged her an unfit mother. Poor woman. Diana still doesn’t know what to believe about that time: if the judges were led astray by her father’s paranoia, or if their mam really did love a man named Percy. They grew up in a world where the truth was something you needed shielding from.

  ‘We weren’t made for an easy life,’ sighs Diana, as she slaps the dough on to the worktop. She isn’t like Mam, she knows that, she doesn’t need a man for his money, or as an escape, and she’ll make damn sure that Grace won’t either.

  A few days later, Maggie, Daniel and Diana stand around the dining table, with Grace at its head, her face glowing from the eleven candles on the birthday cake. A large bow on her head giving her two polka-dot rabbit ears.

  ‘Make a wish first!’ Daniel calls as she dives down to blow the flames out. ‘Blow, not spray, don’t you be getting any spittle on my slice.’

  Grace sticks her finger into the icing and threatens Daniel before dipping it into her mouth.

  ‘L’chaim!’ Diana thrusts her glass of sherry in the air, her voice louder than she intended. ‘Long life and success, my love.’

  The adults line up to kiss Grace on the cheek and Diana, last in the short line, can see that her daughter is on the verge of tears. ‘Hold it back, hold it back,’ she whispers in her ear, squeezing strength into her.

  With a nod of her head, Grace is back to smiles and laughter.

  The small party moves to the new sofa for the present opening; the guests sit while Diana and Grace stand around the coffee table, cooing over the thick wrapping paper that each gift comes in. From Maggie and Daniel a whole treasure chest of books, and a pair of red house slippers. Diana leads Grace to the window looking out on to the garden and reveals her present: a blue-framed bicycle with a front basket full of artificial flowers.