What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

A whistle starts up its shrill screaming. Michael wrestles the wheel, veers around the frozen water fountain. The car fishtails, corrects. Faces – hundreds, it seems – turn to him, pale flowers to his sun.

  Faster! The car balks, jerks, mounts the pavement. There are shoppers idling even behind the stalls. What’s he saying? Something, something. Get out of it, blast you! Out of it! Punters shout catcalls, cheer and pull, shove and scatter. The crowd is on his side – everyone in Shoreditch loves an underdog. Laughing Boy is there beside him, an old man in dapper clothes, thumping the roof. ‘Go on, my son!’ he’s bellowing, ‘you lead them a merry dance!’

  Now he’s almost clear – oh, he’s so nearly free. It is so close and so dear to him that he groans aloud through clenched teeth. The whistles are falling behind him. He guns the engine, risks a glance in the mirror, sees the Black Maria still unmoving on the corner.

  When he looks ahead again the dark woman is in his path.

  She is stopped on the pavement, one arm bent to her hip. She is looking directly at him. Her man is in the road beside her. He is at the last stall, buying flowers from Rob Tull – Christmas roses, wrapped in newspaper. They are all done up in their Sunday best, Clarence and Bernadette, as if they have just been to church, though it is not church they come from.

  Her eyes are wide. Her smile of pain has had no time to fade. Michael turns the wheel. The tyres slip. This time there is no correction.

  When he opens his eyes he is alone. His hands still grip the wheel: he can feel the pulse in his fingertips. He sways in the dusty hush. It seems to him that he feels the collision only now, after the fact: the force of it shudders through him.

  The crowds are drawing closer, though they no longer have eyes for him. They are gathering beside him, by a figure who lies doubled in the gutter. Policemen are ushering them back. Dick Wise is calling out to them, Gentlemen, is there a doctor here? Hallo?

  A man begins to howl. Another asks to be let through. Iris is there, her face milk-white, her hand in the orphan boy’s. Clarence is down on his knees. His hands are fluttering, patting, stroking. He is calling his wife’s name as if she isn’t there.

  She is, still. Bernadette looks up at her man. She says, ‘My baby. Oh Lord, Clarence, Sybil, my baby.’

  Does she think she has lost her child? Is it a blessing that she is wrong? She is wrong. It is Sybil who will be saved. The baby – who, inasmuch as she has ever wanted anything, has never wanted to go anywhere – will be delivered, will go on. It is her mother who is dying. Even now, as Clarence smooths her face and hair, the life that has come so far is running out of Bernadette. It is leaving her in pieces, with her words, with her breath, without it.

  *

  1968

  (The Collisions)

  1. Florence in June

  Swimming pool colours: turquoise, azure, iridium. The shadows of ripples on the tiles, all tiger-band and giraffe-skin, their patterns gelling and rescinding in perpetual slow motion.

  Florence floats, sun in her face. Her eyes are shut, spangled with lash-drops. The light still feeds into her, creeping through her lids, entering into her mind in blooms of magenta.

  Oh, she thinks, you pretty world.

  The lilo bobs: it starts to move. Florence shades her eyes and peers along her length with the hauteur of a popstar. Terence is towing her in. He frog-squats at the poolside, inscrutable in sunglasses. He lays a hand on her.

  ‘You’re hot,’ he says, and Florence flexes.

  ‘Sizzling,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Take care, baby. You don’t want to burn.’

  ‘I might,’ she says. ‘You don’t know. I might want to try everything once, anything, even burning.’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ Terence says.

  Florence reaches for his sunglasses. ‘Take them off.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I want to see your eyes.’

  They have crow’s-feet, Terence’s eyes. They are warm, amused, potentially cruel. Florence likes them. Too often they are hidden behind lenses. Terence has English knees, thinning hair, a sparrow chest puffed up with curls. His eyes are the best bit of him.

  ‘Come in the water. Play with me,’ she says; but Terence stands.

  ‘Not now, I’m going to make a run into town. You want anything?’

  ‘You’re dull,’ she says.

  He pauses above her, a small man towering against a faded denim sky. ‘Anything?’

  But Florence doesn’t answer. She pushes off from the poolside. She stretches, tigerish herself. The lilo lulls her. Anything, she thinks. I can have anything, anything.

  After he’s gone she pads inside in search of cigarettes. She sits on the steps, under the trees, and watches the hand-span butterflies that float down to the rocks and model themselves in the sunlight she slowly shafts with smoke.

  Terence is fun. They won’t last. He’s not her husband, it’s not her pool. Both are as good as hers for now, but she’s always been better at the finding than the keeping. When Terence is over (which might be sooner rather than later; his wife is busy mending bridges), Florence will find someone else, someone else with somewhere else where she can bask and float.

  Terence is a photographer, the kind who has become as celebrated as the celebrities he shoots: the kind who invests in property, in London and here in the sun. He works mainly with women, likes women more than men, admires and flatters them, and makes a point of making love to them. Not only for the pleasure but because he wants the moment after. Florence has given him that. Having given it, she suspects he lives for that more than anything: the shutter-capture of the instant when all the guards are down, when the eyes lie open.

  She finishes her drink and swims a dozen dutiful lengths before collapsing back onto the lilo. She’s thirty but looks younger.

  She thinks of property. She owns nowhere herself. ?Terence won’t even tell her how many places he has. It isn’t shyness or modesty, but a sure reticence she supposes comes with power. All week he’s been on the phone to London. He has problems with squatters in Camden. Possession is nine-tenths of the law: that, Terence says, is just the problem.

  Florence trails pool water through her fingers, willing it hers, possessing it.

  It won’t work. Never mind – easy go, easy come. She should leave soon, she thinks. Better to resist temptation and go while she’s still wanted, while there’s nothing more complicated than a honeymoonish summer to remember. She has been here since the start of June and now the month is almost out. She’ll give it one more week. And then?

  And then she’ll be free again. Chain-free, Terence would say. She’ll be scot-free and clean away.

  A voice speaks in her head. It mutters up out of nothing.

  Dirty as a coal miner.

  This is how it happens with her. A memory will eel through her, slick, dark, muscular. This time all Florence grasps are the words, the fierceness they once inspired, and a tangle of things which are all of a piece: a ghost, an orphan boy, a black pit in a ruined world. Her mother, calling her in.

  Floss?

  She shivers in the heat. It’s not often, now, that anyone calls her that. It’s been a long time since anyone called her home. How far is Florence from those things, here, how many years and miles? Tens and hundreds and not enough. Her childhood is out of sight, but her mind won’t relinquish it.

  More miles, those are what she needs. It has worked for Terence and it will for her. Keep clocking up the years and miles, keep chasing the sun, and one day she must wake to find she’s left Columbia Road behind, and the girl’s name with it. And the girl.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I don’t worry,’ Floss says, ‘I just don’t like it. I don’t want to be remembering all that, growing up. What’s the point?’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Course it does.’

  ‘It doesn’t. I’ve changed. I mean, no, I haven’t – that’s what I mean. It’
s not just that I’m here, it’s that I never belonged there. This was what I was always meant for. This, you know, somewhere like this.’

  The cicadas begin, one joining one joining many. Terence goes to the kitchen counter. He starts to cook as he unpacks, taking only what he needs – eggs, smoked meat, white cheese, green leaves – unhurriedly, efficiently.

  ‘You might never have got this far,’ he says, when the eggs are going, ‘if you hadn’t started there.’

  ‘That’s rubbish. Sentimental hippy tosh. Either you’ve got it or you haven’t. It’s nothing to do with anyone else, or anything. It’s you. You know what I mean. You’re the same. You didn’t need to live like crap to know you were meant for better. Did you?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Terence says, tasting a finger. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Florence cries. ‘Exactly my point.’

  He brings the food. It’s not half bad. Terence cooks only three things – egg and chips, omelette, and beef and onions – but he does them well, and Florence has nothing to do with kitchens if she can help it.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, once they’ve put away the omelette and only the token salad remains, ‘you’ve scrubbed up well, haven’t you, Little Miss Coal Miner? I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘You dirty Bow Street bastard.’

  ‘Come here,’ he says, and she does.

  There is a dream she has sometimes. In it her body is transformed. It has no shape or orifice. It becomes a hairless, sealed thing. Her new body floats in a sea so proximate to blood heat she can hardly feel it.

  Nothing else happens in this dream. It doesn’t go anywhere. And Florence doesn’t mind it – there is even an easefulness to it – but it puzzles her. That smooth sexlessness. That has nothing to do with her: that too.

  Terence prefers the beach.

  ‘It’s loony. You’ve got a pool like that, what do you want with this?’

  Still breathing hard from the sea he throws himself down (all knuckles and knees), towels off his hair (what there is of it), and frowns down the strand, as if he’s trying to square his view of it with her dismissal. He shrugs.

  ‘I like it,’ he says.

  Florence needles him. ‘You just like being recognised. It’s an ego trip, isn’t it? I think you get off on it.’

  It’s not true and they both know it. Terence enjoys his fame, but he has retained a photographer’s gift for imperceptibility. He takes pleasure and a boyish pride in that. In London, in company, Florence has seen him switch on his famous self like a flash bulb. He dazzles, then; but not now. Here and now he is – as he prefers – a watcher in a candid world.

  This place of his is on Corfu, and the island suits him. Few here know or care what Terence is elsewhere. He is one of several moneyed foreign owners of one of several bespoke villas concealed in the hills beyond a west coast fishing village. Most local interest in him stops there, and tourists are still rare beyond Corfu Town. Today the two of them share the beach with a yacht’s-worth of Italians, two quiet Americans, a handful of young Corfiots, and a mad dog-pack of village boys who duck and chase along the rocks and up to the quay, where they leap in slapstick postures into the all-consuming sea.

  (Nor is Florence recognised herself. There was a time she might have been, for a season or two, years ago, when her spritely face and form were sought after by the fashionable magazines. No one here would know her now. She misses it.)

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘I should be getting home.’

  Terence squints at her. ‘Don’t be silly. What for?’

  ‘For fun. A bit more town, a bit less country.’

  ‘You should have said, if you felt like that. I thought you were having fun. You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. Besides, I don’t want you waking up one day and realising you don’t want me here.’

  ‘I want you here,’ Terence says. ‘There’s nothing to realise.’

  Florence says nothing. It surprises her, that her leaving gets under his skin. She lies back in the sun and enjoys the fact of it.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Terence says. ‘I’ve got to clear off in a fortnight. You could’ve had the place to yourself.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘Didn’t know. Only heard the other night.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘The States. I didn’t think you’d mind,’ he says; but he has seen that she does, and Florence stiffens. Take me with you, she’d like to say, but it’s too needful and she bites it back.

  ‘Over the Pond and far away. Lucky you. I should still go, I’d die of boredom out here on my own.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘You always say that, and I always do.’

  He stretches out, propping his head on the lunch hamper. I could have stayed, she thinks. Oh well. It’s true about the boredom.

  She can feel him still watching her, lazily composing her. For him, Florence looks out to sea. Somewhere out there is Italy, one of the few countries she’s been, years ago, on a shoot. Most of the world she only knows from pictures. She can see Italy now . . . but no she can’t, she’s wrong. There’s nothing there but clouds.

  ‘You should try to be less English,’ Terence says, and Florence breaks her pose.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Stop worrying what other people think. A woman like you doesn’t need to. You’re beautiful, Flo.’

  ‘I know,’ Florence says, ‘and I don’t. Anyway, you’re English too, and you’re not even half pretty. You should be the one who’s worrying.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not, am I?’

  Hoots of laughter reach them. Terence’s eyes drift away from Florence. The Italians are playing football, the diffident girls in flotsam goals, the boys striving to reach them. Terence sits up, opens the hamper. He takes out his cigarettes and then, more stealthily, a camera. He lights up without taking his eyes off the Italians.

  ‘I like it,’ he says again, softly, and trains the lens.

  On her last night on the island they go for dinner at a friend’s. The friend is Terence’s, of course (Florence knowing no one here, any more than they know her), an American half-Scot, the founder-owner of a transatlantic publishing house.

  Like Terence’s own villa, that of the publisher is freshly built along the lines of an old Corfiot mansion, on the smaller ruins of which it stands and from which it takes its bearings and, here and there, a stone that still carries the trace of some broken relief or pattern. The older guests are in the lounge with drinks, the younger by the poolside. Florence opts for the terrace, where the generations mingle and there is a predominance of men, a group of them gravitating to the publisher himself. Florence likes male company. She is more at home with the other sex than with her own: in that, as in their beginnings, she and Terence are alike.

  The men are all more or less famous. The publisher is a deft host, approaching seventy and unconvincingly retired; brisk but soft-spoken, in the manner of one used to being listened to. The younger men around him are drawn out of themselves: in their efforts to perform, their small talk exhausts itself and moves on to greater things.

  ‘You’ve had protests in London, too?’ an American film actor asks of an English oarsman.

  ‘So we claim. Pretty weak tea, I’m afraid – we’re not much when it comes to revolution.’

  ‘Why be afraid? It’s not like you need revolting.’

  ‘But we don’t like to be outplayed. The Continentals put on such a show . . . all those barricades! They’ve shown us up, you see. These days we feel rather as if we’re acquiring the losing habit. Football aside. And war, of course.’

  ‘Perhaps it is a war,’ the actor says, and an older woman at the edge of things rattles a cough of irritation.

  ‘It’s not a war, nothing like. Be glad you’re too young to know the difference.’

  ‘Tell it to the Vietnamese,’ the actor s
ays, tartly, but the oarsman is quick to smooth things over.

  ‘It’s not a world war, to be fair.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the actor says. ‘The whole world seems to be going crazy, these days. I don’t know where we’re sailing, but I don’t like the cut of our jib. And don’t tell me London doesn’t have its share of crazies, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Oh, we do, but ours are harmless. They’re not doers, like yours. Our crazies don’t knock people off. They’re even worse at shooting than they are at shouting. We’re not much cop at assassination.’

  ‘Character assassination,’ the actor mutters. ‘I’ve read your critics, you’re plenty good at that.’

  The publisher stirs. ‘Speaking of the devil, there’s something I might show you. Entertain yourselves,’ he says, and goes inside, reappearing soon enough with a thin cyan folder. He holds it low down against his thigh, like something best kept inconspicuous.

  ‘That looks devilish, alright,’ the oarsman says. ‘What is it, the next Lady Chatterley?’

  ‘It’s a Verifax,’ the publisher says, ‘of the diary of Sirhan Sirhan.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ the actor says. ‘May I – ?’

  ‘Who’s this Sirhan fellow?’

  ‘The psycho who shot Bobby K. How did you get this already? Is it for real?’

  ‘So I’m reliably informed.’

  The actor exclaims as he reads. Florence is closest to him when he offers up the folder. She takes it out of politeness, angles its pages to a lantern, and reads:

  my determination to eliminatee eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession.

  please pay to the order

  plea

  port wine

  port wine

  port wine

  port wine

  R.F.K. must die. R.F.K. must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated. R.F.K. must be assassinated assassinated as. Robert F. Kennedy Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated assassinated. I have never heard