by Tobias Hill
He wakes again and night has fallen. He crawls and stands under the stars. He calls, but no one hears. Everything he knows is gone. Where his home was there is nothing but ruins and mud and water. There is nothing but a pond, and in the pond, a moon.
*
The first time he sees Mrs Malcolm he gives no credit to it. She is walking down Tottenham Court Road under a big scarlet umbrella. It is the rush hour, but the umbrella forges space for her. There is a young woman with her, a girl with false blonde hair: the false blonde girl is laughing, though Mrs Malcolm is not. She looks youthful herself. She is younger than him and very much alive.
He doesn’t believe his eyes and so he does nothing about it. He turns away and walks on towards Store Street. For a while, on the way, he thinks of Mrs Malcolm: brave, generous with her strength, powerless against harm. There weren’t many who stood up for him back then, but Mrs Malcolm did. It was just the once, but once is enough when you’re that hungry for kindness. And then he was there when she died, and there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do for her, though the child might be saved. That was what the doctor said, the one who came out of the crowd and knelt down by her side, and he was right.
Still, by the time he gets to work he has put her out of his mind. It isn’t her. It is someone who looks like her. It is August 1968, and Mrs Malcolm has been dead for almost twenty years.
He thinks nothing more of it until it happens again. This time Mrs Malcolm is alone. It’s the evening of a fine day and she doesn’t carry the umbrella. They are at the traffic lights, waiting to cross the Euston Road, and in the crowd with them is a man in a sandwich board, banging his corners into people and shouting about the end of time. ‘No more of your debauchery!’ he yells, but the boards say NO MORE OF YOUR DEBORTUARY, front and back, and Mrs Malcolm gives the man such a look. He knows the look. He knows the face and he has time to be sure of it. When the lights change she crosses with the sandwich man steering clear of her, but he stays where he is. Mrs Malcolm is dead and he doesn’t want to walk beside her.
His sleep is disturbed that night. The next day he feels no better and Kitty notices. They’re having their sandwiches in Bedford Square and she prods him. ‘What?’ she asks, and he says, ‘Pardon?’, and she says, ‘You can’t fob me off, Sydney. Look at you, you’re all goosebumps. Aren’t you going to tell me what’s wrong?’
As best he can he does. Kitty thinks about it. She is eating one of his sandwich paste sandwiches and her blue eyes are on the trees. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it certainly isn’t poor Mrs Malcolm. There’s no such thing as ghosts. You know that, don’t you?’
He thinks of Erith, of the barge that no one rows or steers, but ‘Yes,’ is what he says.
‘Well then, you needn’t be afraid of her. If you see her again you must ask her. You’re not such a bad looking chap, I don’t suppose she’ll mind. I’ll bet a round of cheese and celery she’s nobody you know. Or you can choose the filling.’
‘It’s not just looks. It’s how she is,’ he says, ‘they’re just the same,’ and Kitty shrugs. She has finished eating. She’s winnowing crumbs from her skirt.
‘Perhaps it’s a relation,’ she says. ‘Did anyone survive her, your Mrs Malcolm?’ Kitty asks, and he doesn’t reply, because at once he knows.
He is impatient to see her again. It’s a week before he does, but when the chance comes he takes it. It’s another morning and he follows her. He worries that he’ll be late – he never is, for the library – though in the end he isn’t, because Mrs Malcolm’s daughter doesn’t take him far.
She is with the false blonde girl again. He is quick and neither of them notices. They go down Tottenham Court Road as far as the Tabernacle. Mrs Malcolm’s daughter treads out her cigarette and the women go into a shop together. The shop is called Donald Fisher Travel. He doesn’t enter it.
He learns the times to walk and linger, the spaces in which their paths might cross. Often he gets it wrong. It upsets him to miss her. Once he is close enough that he can hear her talking. With the false blonde girl she is discussing strangers, a Tess, a Charles, a Don. Mrs Malcolm’s daughter doesn’t have Mrs Malcolm’s voice. Hers has more London in it, less of the sun, more of the gloom. One day Kitty is off sick and he spends his whole lunch hour watching. He loiters by the tobacconist’s at the dark mouth of Alfred Mews. Across the Tottenham Court Road he sees Mrs Malcolm’s daughter inside Donald Fisher Travel. She eats her lunch at her desk, she takes two sugars in her tea, she smiles for her first customer of the afternoon.
He imagines she is good at what she does. She always smiles for those who go into the shop. When she smiles she is transformed and people buy from her. She is selling them holidays. She smiles for the customers and sometimes for her friends, but not when she thinks no one watches. Not once in his sight does she smile for herself.
He no longer takes books home with him. Instead he sits by his window and watches dusk fill Arlington Road, down from the sky and up from the cellars. He thinks of Mrs Malcolm, shrunk into a victim, and of her daughter, born one. She was delivered from a dead mother in the back of a Black Maria. She must be nineteen years old. He is thirty-three. He would seem old to her, and strange. To most people he is strange. He doesn’t want to frighten her, but he wants to meet her.
He wants to talk to her. Or . . . what? He wants to do something. He doesn’t know what it can be. He works at knowing, day by day. And then one night he wakes in the dark from the dream of the fire, and he grasps it.
4. Sybil in September
Before Uncle Neville died, on the days when he was well, he sometimes gave Sybil lessons. What were the lessons in? Nothing that has yet led her to a better life or place; but Sybil adored the lessons, as she adored her uncle.
He taught her the history of Jamaica, through the mingling of its peoples. The long-lost Ciboney and half-remembered Taino. The Spanish and the English, and with them the slaves of Africa, the Congo and Igbo, Ashanti and Fanti. Then the Maroons up in the hills, with Taino and Ashanti blood still running in their veins – like Queen Mother Nanny of the Windward Maroons, who fought the English to the end. And then the Scots, who Cromwell banished halfway across the world; and the Indians and Chinamen, who bought their freedom through their service; and the droves of Irish, the long-lived Jews, the red-nosed Dutchmen and red-necked Germans; and the small islanders, sailing from pitiful places no bigger shore to shore than Camden Town, some of them; but all of them, in turn, finding good harbour under the blue mountains and green hills of Jamaica.
Neville taught her about Glasgow, Westmoreland Parish, a place as far from anywhere as maybe anyone could go. The Glasgow Estate, way back, its puncheons of rum and hogsheads of sugar going to the wharves of Green Island and from there to an Empire always in need of sweetening. The church where your father once found a yellow snake in the font. The fruit trees where you can help yourself: the children who walk country miles to school and breakfast as they come, cane joints in their pockets and mango on their fingers. The view from Mount Cromwell: the highlands to the east, and north and south the miles of cane, the telltale cloud above the Frome sugar factory, the Green and Newfound Rivers losing their ways in the Great Morass; and west, the rooftops of Green Island, where your mother went to boarding school, the first Glasgow child who ever did so well, the finest student I ever had the privilege to teach. The shining sea beyond, and after dark the Negril Lighthouse, lighting sailors to their beds.
The names of places. Rock Spring and Mint, Jerusalem and Paradise. The strong names the Maroons gave their country far up east: Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come and the Land of Lookbehind. The way the Trade winds carried inland the presence of the sea – and the evening wind, the Undertaker, bearing down from the hills the smell of orange groves and pimento barbecues. The nights, sounding of paddy frogs, smelling of cookfires and paraffin in cork-wick bottles. And then the warmth of the mornings, sinking in to the bone.
Neville told her about her families. The Malcolms wit
h their Scottish blood, the Jarretts with their property. The mothers and grandmothers: Millicent Malcolm – Aunty Centy – Aunt Yam in the marketplaces – who raised Neville and Clarence mannerly, who saved the packets her daughter-in-law sent from the promised land of London, bought a higgler’s truck and higgled yam to Lucea and Savanna-la-Mar and as far as Kingston right until the day she died; and Mrs Jarrett, who might never die if she has a say in it, with her bloodhound jowls and the face of a Roman Senator. Her twelve acres, cattle and cane, out on the highland road, and at the dim-lit heart of them the old manse with its drive of flametrees, its rooms dark as caves but airy as coves; and just as old, the stories of Mrs Jarrett’s great-grandmother, Cooba – a Maroon name – born a slave and made a mistress, who lived like a white lady. You should have seen your father sweat, the day he went up that long drive to ask for Bernadette Jarrett! She knows how to stare a man down, your namesake, Sybil Jarrett – but always Mrs Jarrett – who returned with cold regards the first and only packet your mother ever sent. But that’s where the fight in you comes from. That’s who you should be thanking, any time in your life it comes down to fighting.
When she was seven, Sybil said goodbye to everyone. She told them she was leaving London. Her family were moving to Jamaica, to the house where her mother was born. She had convinced herself and so she was convincing: even the ladies at chapel believed her. When Clarence put the record straight Sybil burst into fierce tears. She hated London. She hated Dad. ‘Your uncle only tell one side,’ he said, when she had cooled to sullenness. ‘You ever hear of anyone going home?’
There were other lessons, too. The love of books, the reading of them, and anything and everything they contained. The rules of the Shakespearian sonnet, the roll calls of prime ministers, the ruined dream of Rome. The wonders of architecture: the proportions of cathedrals, the spun-stone glory of the windows of the Saint-Chapelle and Chartres.
‘The men who built these towers,’ Uncle Neville said, his scarred hand framing the picture, ‘they used to make up nets. Come dusk they fished for their suppers, up on the towers they raised.’
‘Flying fish,’ Sybil whispered, but she was wrong, like she always was.
‘Birds. Those men fished for swifts. Caught them clean out of the air. The world was full of wonder, then,’ Uncle Neville said: but afterwards Sybil told Jem, and Jem told Dad, who shook his head, laughing without really laughing, the way he has always laughed in the lifetime Sybil has known him. ‘Man do anything for hunger.’ was all he said.
*
It’s Monday morning, and it’s raining as if God stirred and thought, What’s that infernal noise down there? Since when did I tell those wretches they could make a place like London? It’s time I put an end to summer and drowned the sorry lot of them.
Sybil wakes. She thinks, I hear you, raining. Don’t think you humble me, you up there. I don’t expect better from you; I don’t need your charity.
It isn’t far to work. She dares herself to walk: go on. If she was still a kid she would. If Trudi were here they might, for kicks. But this isn’t just umbrella weather, it’s not the kind of rain you sing in, and besides, Trudi isn’t here, she’s been home to see her mum, she’ll come to work from Somers Town if she makes it in at all, and so when Sybil sees the bus she does what anyone would do; she waves her free arm like a schoolgirl – Me Miss, Me Miss, Me – and runs towards the Hampstead Road as if her life depends on it.
She has to push aboard. In spite of the crowd there’s one seat, right up by the driver’s box, beside a black woman. More fool the lot of you, Sybil thinks, and presses in. No one begrudges her the place.
The woman turns to her. She is old and broad and her eyes are red. As her voice starts to rise the passengers nearby shift away as best they can, and they haven’t gone far before Sybil is on her feet, cheek by jowl amongst them, shivering in the damp: ashamed, and angry at herself for feeling such a thing.
‘So you want to sit by me?’ the woman calls after her. ‘What you want me to do, girl, split myself in two? Cut me in half. I worked hard for this seat. I come from a better class than you. Cut me in half! My parents send me to school. Asking for my seat! I can smell your pouch, girl. I clean your pouch in hospital for fifteen years. What you going to do? Cut me in two? I know you, girl,’ the woman shouts, though Sybil is beyond her reach, stepping down into the rain beside the wet dark edifice of Whitefield’s Tabernacle.
Donald Fisher is keeping watch. He stands at his window, hands tucked back, like a captain or a lighthouse keeper.
‘Look at that,’ he says to Sybil. ‘You might call that rain, Billie, I call it free publicity. All those poor mugs getting soaked, stuck here when the sun don’t shine. Eh?’
‘Yes, Mr Fisher,’ Sybil says.
‘Look at it,’ Don says, with relish. ‘You can’t get that for love or money.’
‘Yes, Mr Fisher,’ Sybil mutters, and edges towards Trudi, who has made it after all, and who is miming Sybil in nodding caricature.
There are four women at Donald Fisher’s: Sybil, Trudi, Tess and Phyllis. Don’s Dollies, the men call them, and now and then it’s what they call themselves. Some things, you just put up with them, don’t you? And then you get used to them. Familiarity breeds consent.
In the old days (as Don says, to any cornered listener) the backbone of the business was business: Paris and Rome for the small fry, long-haul for the same old blue-chip flyers, paid for by the same old blue-chip firms. Now times are changing. The Tottenham Court Road office is placed to catch the passing trade, and has framed pictures of wonders (Corcovado, the Taj Mahal), exemplary souvenirs (hats of various shapes and sizes), complimentary beverages, and a less businesslike class of chair (upholstered in two-tone yellow) to accommodate the backsides of the civil servant put out to clover, the widow with her affairs in order, the homesick émigré, the whizz-kid who means to flaunt it, the well-endowed honeymooner – all those who might be rich enough to fly the world for pleasure.
It’s just work. To begin with Sybil did find enjoyment in it, of a vicarious and jealous kind, and Don was always full of talk of trips and junkets he had known. She should have known better than to hope. She has been lured by hints of promises: she isn’t going anywhere. There is no escape for her. Her work is to sell to others the thing that she herself desires.
All day the rain keeps up, but still the punters trickle in. Donald Fisher knows his business: people shake their brollies, look at the wonders and over their shoulders, as if they never mean to set another sodding foot in London.
‘Omelettes,’ says Trudi’s customer. ‘I’m particular about my food. Omelettes, see, they’re easy on the old carburettor. My wife used to do them. Would they have omelettes, there?’
Trudi rearranges brochures; the dusks and dawns, noons and nights of a dozen paradises. She looks as if she has a headache.
‘What we’ve got,’ she says, ‘is packages. They’re very popular. All your meals taken care of, no bother with anything –’
‘That’s all very well,’ the customer butts in, ‘that’s very nice, I’m sure, but do they do omelettes, dear? That’s what I’m asking.’
From the corner of her eye Trudi can see Sybil. It’s Sybil’s turn for mime: My wife used to do them, she mouths. She’s keeping her face businesslike, keeping herself looking busy. There’s no one queueing, though for some time a small man has been stood by the door, advancing no further, as if he’s sheltering from the rain. Cap in hand, peeking at the souvenirs, the salesgirls, the pictures, as if he expects to come on one that says Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
Trudi swivels. ‘Billie?’ she says, crisply, ‘this gentleman would like to know if they can make him an omelette in Brazil. Could you make some calls? Start with the Copacabana Palace.’
‘Hang on,’ says the customer, alarmed, ‘no need to telephone international –’
Sybil picks up the phone. The customer watches her warily. ‘Who’s paying for that?’ he asks.
/> Sybil says, ‘It’s courtesy.’
‘Oh well,’ the customer says, sitting back, ‘if it’s like that.’
Sybil ignores Trudi’s sanitised mirth. She holds the phone to her head like a weapon. In passing she notices that the man by the door is leaving: he glances back at her as he steps into the street. ‘And how do you like your omelette, sir?’
The customer ponders the question, and Sybil with it. ‘No foreign muck,’ he says. ‘No monkeying around. That’s what I’m looking for, see? I want them done just the way my wife used to do them.’
Don’t count on better. Count on worse, then nothing going to let you down. The words are Clarence’s. Sybil takes them to heart. She tries to live by them. They’ve never disappointed her: they leave no room for disappointment.
But nor do they allow her hope. There are too many days like this, with no good to be got out of them, in which everyone she meets contrives to shame or anger her. On days like this it’s hope you need. She wants it. She does hope, when she thinks no one is watching. Despite the words that knot her heart, Sybil knows she hopes too much.
She takes the bus home with Trudi. Charles is up and making curry. Tony’s keeping him company, reading out choice bits of news. The four of them live on Mornington Terrace, facing the arched cliff of brick that cuts down to the Euston railway lines. It’s a decent squat. The owner is an artist, a celebrity photographer who hasn’t the heart for aggro, or perhaps for the aggravation of attendant bad publicity. The heavies came round just the once, cut the power and cleared them out, but Charles (who is older and knows the form) shimmied back in and tapped the wires, and that was a year ago. There’s been no trouble since.
There are nine permanent residents, but most of them are nomads. Charles is on the dole and Sybil and Trudi work close by, but Tony is only home on off days. Tony’s a flight attendant, as are three of the absentees, all of them pretty boys (and all of them straight, as all are too quick to add when asked their business), all of whom spend stretches in the air, or overnighting overseas in jetlagged five-star hotels, from which they liberate – in seasons of one-upmanship – treasure troves of bad taste houseware: mismatched faux-silver cutlery; hewn rock-effect glass ashtrays; monogrammed dressing gowns; pea-and-princess stacks of towels; golf umbrellas; heated blankets; scented soaps; doll’s-house jars of marmalade and honeycomb; four yards of Hollywood red carpet (now muddied in the hall); a hookah pipe shipped from Damascus; and once (Tony’s finest hour) a throne-like kingsize armchair, with Excelsior, Penang impressed in its jade leatherette.
