What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Tea’s made,’ Mum says, and Iris mutters thanks, hauls herself up, helps carry. They sit by the new French windows, looking out at Harry’s joy, his southern suntrap garden, with its neat beds and sheds and lawn.

  ‘At least we got out cheap,’ Mum says, more at ease now the weight’s off her feet. ‘Dad’ll be proud of us.’

  Iris smiles for her. ‘I don’t suppose we needed anything anyway.’

  ‘No, well,’ Mum says, ‘we’ve his hard work to thank for that,’ and she lights up and starts on the brochures. The first is full of holidays, pages of paradise. ‘Look at this, Rome. People get born in London and it isn’t enough for them. They’re all like cats, they don’t know where they want to be, in or out. I wouldn’t mind that view but Dad wouldn’t stand it. I sound old.’

  ‘You don’t, Mum. You’re not,’ Iris says. But the first assurance is a lie, even if the second is true. Her mother sounds as she looks. The sunlight that slants through her smoke finds Mary reduced. She isn’t yet fifty, but time is overtaking her. Her health isn’t the best. The doctors are talking of tests. The years of waiting have wrung half the life out of her. Mary isn’t the woman she once was.

  ‘Floss went to Italy once, remember? I’ve a picture, look,’ Iris says, and she gets the photocube that holds the shot and watches her mother soften and brighten, finding her better-favoured daughter.

  ‘That’s lovely of her,’ Mum says, but gradually her frown creeps back. She hardly sees Floss, by more or less mutual consent. The few meetings they have go poorly, their talk always turning to Dad. Neither of them can help herself. To Mary it’s unthinkable that Floss can go on blaming him, unforgivable that Floss can be so unforgiving, when what he did, he did for them. As if he hasn’t been punished enough. As if they haven’t all been punished.

  Still frowning, Mary turns the cube. ‘I don’t know why you keep this one. You could have more of family. I never liked that boy one bit. It all went bad after him. What was his name?’

  ‘Pond,’ Iris says, and she is reaching for the cube, reclaiming it, when the telephone starts to ring.

  They meet in Golders Hill Park, the three of them together for the first time in twenty years.

  ‘You’re jealous,’ Florence murmurs, and Iris tugs at her cardigan, peering after the gentle stranger Jem has become, in case he hears them talking from his place at the ice cream kiosk.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m happy for you.’

  ‘Oh, I know you are, you always are. You’re the saint of happiness for others. You could be jealous too, though, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not. Shush.’

  Jem is grinning as he comes back. He has choc ices in his hands. Park-goers and ice cream-queuers look up at his beaming height: this July Saturday he is the Ice Cream King.

  ‘They got all sorts here,’ he says cheerily. ‘Coming up with funky things now. Butterscotch ripple, Italian flavours.’

  ‘I went to Italy once,’ Florence says. ‘The food was awful, all grease.’

  ‘I’ve still got the picture,’ Iris says, and her sister crows.

  ‘You haven’t!’

  ‘Why not? I like it.’

  ‘I don’t even remember what I was doing there.’

  ‘Advertising. They took you to Siena. Come on, you must remember.’

  ‘I’d like to see that,’ Jem says.

  ‘You should come, then,’ Iris says. ‘Come for tea, if you don’t mind taking pot luck. You could meet Harry and the girls. Will you?’

  ‘We really have to get back,’ Florence says, but Jem is speaking too, more eagerly, and their eyes meet as their voices jar: they have argued this over before, in anticipation of the matter arising, on the way up to Golders Green. ‘Oh,’ Florence relents, ‘alright. Why not? I haven’t seen the girls for ages.’

  ‘No, well,’ Iris says.

  Unwittingly they have begun to walk, across the park’s ridge of high ground, towards the bandstand. If you had to pick the older sister you’d pick wrong. Florence could be twenty-one, with her foxy gypsy skirt and her sandals in her hand. And Iris, in her shirtwaist dress and Orlon cardy, with her not-blonde hair, coils of which escape her ears whatever she applies, punctuating her face with mousy brackets or incessant questions . . . Iris is twenty-nine, and could be pushing forty. Two children – neither an easy birth – have slowed her, and slowness has thickened her. Big-built, people call her now, though she never used to be. She seems older than her older sister, and she feels it, and sometimes it seems to her that she always did, as if the past itself could be rewritten by the present.

  North and west, London is clear for miles under a mackerel sky. Jem points out Wembley. ‘I might bring my old man up here. He’d like it, if I could shift him.’

  ‘Does he take much shifting?’ Iris asks, and Jem grimaces.

  ‘Takes a crowbar.’

  Iris turns. South and east, the hills of Hampstead obscure anything beyond themselves.

  ‘You can’t see far that way, can you? You wouldn’t know the East End was there at all. There are plenty of people who like it that way, up here. The ones who got out.’

  ‘East End’s alright,’ Jem says. ‘It weren’t so bad for us. We had good times down there.’

  Iris lifts her gaze from the curtailed view; she lays it, curiously, on Jem. ‘I don’t know how you can say that. You of all people.’

  Once upon a time Florence was the fearless one; but times have changed, and the sisters with them. If anyone is remotely fearless now, in the uneasy silence Iris leaves, it is Iris herself. Florence occupies herself with a plaque of chocolate that is sliding earthwards from its slab.

  ‘It was alright,’ Jem says again, awkwardly persistent. ‘We had some good times back then. That isn’t wrong, it don’t make what happened worse. I’m alright with that.’

  They sit. A dog sidles up for patting, then drags its owner off to see the deer in their enclosure. The sun passes behind a scud of cloud. It’s one of those summers when all it takes is a cloud for all the warmth to go out of a moment, which is why Iris brought the sensible cardigan.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I liked it down there. I just didn’t think you would. I loved the Buildings.’

  ‘The Columbia Buildings,’ Jem smiles, ‘and the flower market.’

  ‘Oh, I loved the market! And I never loved Holloway at all. That’s where we went afterwards. Mum thought it’d be easier, because it was nearer Dad, and no one knew us up there.’

  And what about Dad, come to that? What about him? Florence threw back, when Iris first asked, cradling the telephone in the private shadows of the hall. Jem doesn’t want to meet him, and I can’t stand the sight of him, so it’s easy, isn’t it? Dad’s got nothing to do with us, Florence said, and Iris thought, You silly fool, of course he does. He’s everything to do with you, both of you. You can’t run away from him forever.

  She pulls her cardy tight. She shouldn’t have said yes to ice cream. Her beautiful fool of a sister finishes her chocolate with aplomb, eyes the bared vanilla. ‘I’ve had enough,’ Florence says. ‘Jem, you have it.’

  ‘Your sis might want it.’

  ‘She doesn’t. Iris is jealous of other things,’ Florence says, and Iris blushes to her roots.

  ‘Floss!’

  ‘What? Anyway, it’s true,’ Florence says, and turns to Jem. ‘Iris thinks I get all the luck. Which is ridiculous, of course, because Iris has everything.’

  ‘Aha,’ Jem says. He lies back on the lawn, closing his eyes, keeping out of it.

  ‘This is nice,’ Florence says, ‘The three of us. It feels like we’re the same as ever, doesn’t it?’ she asks, and Iris stirs.

  ‘I’m really not,’ she says. ‘Jealous. I don’t know why you say that.’

  ‘You are, though, a bit. It’s because of Pond, isn’t it?’ Florence asks, and beside her Jem opens his eyes.

  ‘What about Pond?’

  *

  What about Pond?

&nb
sp; Iris has one photograph of him. She keeps it in her photocube, along with the cropped shot of Florence (sunset-lit, sipping a long drink in Siena), recent snaps of Harry, Megan and Beth, and one of Mum and Dad, twelve years old, taken the month he was released.

  The photocube lives on Iris’s best, deep windowsill. The six pictures in the cube are of those who matter most to her. One picture, of necessity, is always out of sight.

  Iris thinks about this. It’s as if, when she rotates the cube (after Harry goes, every day), she’s turning a picture to the wall. It’s as if she’s ashamed of someone she loves, or can no longer face them. That’s how it feels to her. She doesn’t like doing it.

  Iris isn’t needy. It’s not that she needs to see these pictures: needs aren’t so frivolous. Needs aren’t frivolous, are they? Needs aren’t just wishes or desires. Needs are the things you live for, and for the lack of which you sicken. Food is a need, and love might be, if love is a thing for which you live.

  Who does Iris love? Her father. Her other family, according to their needs. Harry, often; not always. Iris could get by alone – she isn’t afraid of solitude – but need should be respected, and so those who need her, matter to her. She is charged with them. In this way, for Iris, needing or being needed have come to much the same thing.

  She thinks about the cube too often. She has weighed up solutions – taking one photo out (but which would go? Would it be Pond?), or not turning the cube at all – but even as it is, six pictures hardly cover those who matter. Losing a picture for good wouldn’t make things better. It would make more sense to throw away the cube, but then Harry would ask more questions. There have been enough about Pond, over the years, and Iris doesn’t want to scrabble for answers.

  And it annoys her, too, that a cube should have six sides, when there are seven days in a week. It’s messy, slipshod. It means that if you rotate your cube in order – as she does – someone is turned down twice each week, Monday and Sunday. Like this:

  ABCDEFA

  BCDEFAB

  PondDEFABPond

  Iris knows it’s too much, all this thinking. She’d never mention it to Mum or Harry. She knows the cube means nothing in the scheme of things. And it shouldn’t matter anyway, since it balances over time. This turning down of the loved, it all evens out in the end.

  Does she love Pond, too? She thinks she might have, once. She thinks she could again, although it has been almost too long to know; and what kind of love it might have been, or could be, isn’t clear to her.

  And does she need him? Why would she? The photocube is full. Iris has loved ones all around her. In her dreams her family is a net, spread out on her lap (??from her lap) and unfurling out of sight, with snarls she worries at and rents she works to mend. Iris is the one who tries to keep things together, if anyone does, above and below and around her. If Iris is starved of anything, it isn’t love.

  And nor does Pond need her. Iris knows it must be true. He can’t need her, or he’d have looked for her; and if Pond had looked for her then he’d have wanted to be found; and if he’d wanted that then she’d have found him by now, wouldn’t she? But if he has no need of her, and she has no need of him, then why does she still look for him? Why even keep the picture here, orphaned amongst her family, on the best windowsill?

  Sometimes Iris thinks her thinking will send her mad.

  Everyone’s mad, Harry says, but some are madder than others. It’s one of his sayings, this. Harry is full of sayings. I’m full of it, Harry says.

  The photograph of Pond shows him as Iris never knew him. He looks fifteen or so, half-grown, not quite handsome. He is dressed in an open-collared shirt which might have been khaki in life. He is sitting outside, on a hillside, holding a kite he’s made. Its tail coils on his knees. The reels and guys lie in his hands. He smiles at the camera, but his eyes are searching, as they always were.

  Iris knows he made the kite because Dora told her so. It’s four years since she found Mr and Mrs Lazarus. She was just beginning to look, then, and they came so easily that for a while Iris felt as if Pond, too, would be simple; that he, too, wouldn’t have gone far, his presence just around some corner she’d soon effortlessly turn.

  Later she looked for other things – records of orphans and bombings, trails of triplicate – but to start with it was just the name. Not Pond, the one he gave himself, but Lazarus, which he was given.

  How long did it take to find Dora and Solly? It can’t have been ten minutes. Harry was still at the hospital, the girls out like lights, the house straightened after them. Iris had a space to herself and she’d made up her mind to try. She sat down in the sitting room with a whisky neat (a bolster against self-ridicule) and the green phonebook – London Postal Area, L–R – and did the simplest thing: she looked up Lazarus. There were only eight of them, and a quarter looked like Solomon.

  Lazarus, S., 124A Newling Estate, Columbia Rd., Shoreditch, E.2.

  Lazarus Watches (commercial), 24 Great Eastern St., Shoreditch, E.2

  ‘I beg your pardon? No, I’m sorry, dear, you must have the wrong number, I don’t think I know . . . Iris Lockhart? Iris Lockhart! Goodness, of course I do! Is it me? Well of course it’s me, Dora! How are you? And how’s your sister? How’s your mother? I’m talking, Solly! No, it’s Iris Lockhart. LOCKHART. Yes! No, not that one, the other one. What, dear? Oh, that would be lovely. Oh yes. Oh, you’d be welcome. No, you choose. You choose, I’m sure you’re busy, Iris, aren’t you? Thursday lunch . . . no, I’m available. You’ll miss Solly at the shop but never mind, I can tell him all about it later. No, don’t worry yourself. How nice! How good to hear from you! I’ll see you on Thursday. See you!’

  She took a Dundee cake and flowers; white chrysanthemums and blue gentians. Meg needed walking to school that year, while Beth was still at nursery, and Iris left late and got the flowers in a rush at Golders Green station, dissatisfied with them but seeing nothing better.

  She was halfway to Old Street, rearranging the blooms on her knees – the way Dad used to, nipping off the dead wood – when she realised what a foolish gift they were to be taking to Columbia Road. As if she’d never been before, and didn’t know where she was heading.

  And then she got there and she didn’t. She hadn’t been back, then, since she was nine years old, not since Dad was sent down and Mum moved them away. Afterwards they’d sometimes heard bits about Columbia Road – the Buildings had been demolished, the dairy on Ezra Street sold on – but to Iris they’d seemed more and more reports of another world, a place she’d read about, not real or attainable. Mum never took them back and Iris never took herself – it came to seem almost forbidden – though now and then, in Holloway, she’d see someone on a Sunday morning, laden with pots and greenery, and she’d feel her loss.

  She needn’t have worried about the flowers.

  ‘Oh, how lovely! You’ll spoil us. Let me find something for them. And shall I take your things? Look at you, Iris, all grown up!’

  Dora looked the same to her: smallish, prettyish, foreign-ish. She had a pretty smile, too, but behind that welcome her face was waiting to fall back into a habitual unhappiness. And that was the same, too, Iris was sure, though as a girl she’d never seen it, or seeing it hadn’t recognised it for what it was.

  ‘Make yourself at home. You’ll be hungry, won’t you? I’ve made too much, I’m sorry . . . and you’ve bought this delicious cake . . . but I’ve only done sandwiches, and Solly likes them for lunches, so we don’t have to finish them, we can have cake instead, what a treat. How’s your mother?’ Dora asked, and she said that Mum sent love, though Mum didn’t, of course, because Iris hadn’t told her anything. What would have been the point? Love would have been the last thing Mum would have sent to anyone from the Buildings, all of them forever tarnished by association with the death of Bernadette, all despised for having been witness to Michael’s humiliation.

  ‘Have you come far?’

  ‘Yes. Well, just from Golders Green.’
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br />   ‘Oh yes,’ Dora said, knowledgeably, respectfully. ‘Golders Green. I expect it’s nice there, is it?’

  What did she answer? It doesn’t matter. She had followed Dora through into the kitchenette – making herself at home or useful – and from the window she could see the clearances. The slabs of half-finished cluster blocks and rain-stained high-rises, the vista of demolitions and great empty foundations with ironwork rising overhead like rusted spears or russet saplings; and inside, through the service hatch, in Dora’s boxy lounge, an upright piano, a pot of violets, and a picture in a prop-foot frame, its face turned towards the wall.

  ‘It’s changed so much,’ she said (not What is that picture? She didn’t know to ask that, then), and Dora tutted, busying herself with the teapot and cosy.

  ‘You shouldn’t look out there. I don’t understand it. They say they need houses and then they knock them down. Sometimes they come and say Shoreditch has to go, all of it. I think they hate it. I don’t know why, do you? What do they think is wrong with us? They promise to make it better, but it isn’t better, you can see. They’re too quick with their promises, that’s the trouble with politicians. And you know about the Buildings? A white elephant, they said. Even the baths, all gone. Still, we mustn’t grumble, that’s what Solly says. At least we have this, and the shop. There, the tea. Look at this cake!’

  They passed trays through into the lounge. Their talk grew smaller as they ate.

  ‘And you’re married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does your husband do?’

  ‘He’s a doctor, a surgeon at the London Hospital.’

  ‘Oh, you must be proud. My father was a doctor. And children?’