What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  Barnard’s headquarters is above a memorial masons, its waiting room reached by way of an unlocked side door and a poky ascent. There are two secretaries, one smoking and typing, one filing and eating a chocolate orange. ‘Can I help you?’ the filer asks, and before Dora can reply, ‘Would you like some of this? Go on, there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m on a diet, that’s all.’

  Dora takes a segment. ‘I don’t have an appointment. Mr Barnard told me to come, just as a favour –’

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ the filer exclaims, ‘him and his favours! He could warn us sometimes, couldn’t he?’, but the smoker chips in wearily. ‘He did say something. Hang on, I’ll see who’s in.’

  ‘If you’ll have a seat, Mrs –?’ says the filer, and Dora gives her name and obeys. laitnediseR & laicremmoC, says the window behind her, as if Mr Barnard’s employers are strange foreign gentlemen. There are magazines on the counter, but she’s too impatient to read: nor can she face the chocolate, which grows greasy in her fingers, until, when the receptionists aren’t looking, she slips it into the plant pot beside her. Then there is nothing to do but stare at the fish tank in the corner, its denizens brighter than life, ornaments distracted by their own ornaments: a sunken galleon; a ruined castle; a treasure chest on a bed of doubloons.

  Lucky fish, Dora thinks. Someone looks after you.

  ‘Mrs Lazarus?’ the smoker calls, ‘you can go in now,’ and Dora proceeds, through a ribbed glass door and down a gloomy corridor, towards the warm light of the room which lies open at the end of it, where a man sits at his desk, speaking on the telephone.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘leave them be. Give them enough rope, we’ll see what they do with it. You’ll wait for my word.’

  His face is lowered. It is his voice Dora recognises. The soft, measured command of it. The lilt, and the effortless menace.

  ‘Michael,’ she says, ‘Michael Lockhart,’ and at his name he looks up, and it is as if the light has changed, the atmosphere; and his face with it.

  He makes to stand before he speaks. It takes only that moment for him to regain himself. ‘Please,’ is his first word, with a gesture of admittance. He eyes her as she enters. Quite suddenly she is sweating: she can feel the cool shame of it under her arms and on her lip. She stares at him and can think only one thing: I am here with the man who killed Bernadette Malcolm.

  He has remembered the phone, still in his hand. ‘Oscar? Keep me posted,’ he says, and hangs up. His startlement has ebbed, perhaps as hers has become apparent.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Dora says quickly, as if she is the one at fault. Is anyone? She’d like someone to be. ‘Mr Barnard told me to come, he didn’t say it was you.’

  ‘Good old Bill,’ Michael says. ‘Talks for England, never says much. Sit down, won’t you?’

  She arranges herself, not looking at him. She is in her best worsted day dress, but it is no defence now. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve forgotten your name,’ he says.

  ‘It’s Dora.’

  ‘Dora. The watchmaker’s wife. Solly Lazarus.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had a boy. The one who lived wild.’

  ‘Yes.’

  On the desk a carriage clock apportions seconds. She is braced for the enquiries which must follow. They don’t come, but all the while – she can feel it – he goes on watching her. When she has finally steeled herself – when she looks up to meet his gaze – his eyes are curious.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘Bill put you onto us.’

  ‘We are in Grey Eagle Street.’

  ‘Bill’s place. You’re on our books, then.’

  ‘We can’t stay. Bill said – Mr Barnard said –’

  ‘He told you we’d help.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  She runs out of words. She has had no time to think about this. How can she want Michael Lockhart’s help? He has no right. She wants to be away from him: it has only been fright which has kept her in her seat, first fright and now pride. It is all wrong, it is disgusting, that he should have the privilege of offering her anything. She should have nothing to do with him. And who is he, to be putting his finger on her feelings? How is it he thinks to ask what she should have asked herself?

  She remembers Bernadette. A picture house, the four of them squashed up together in the dark, sharing potato crisp sandwiches. Henry and Jem, side by side, their eyes lit up: angels watching angels.

  She is about to stand when he does so himself. ‘I was on my way to lunch,’ he says. ‘You’re welcome to join me. Will you?’

  ‘No!’

  He glances at the clock. ‘You’re not hungry?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘No.’

  ‘Come, then,’ he says tersely, picking his hat from the stand. ‘Or don’t. It’s your choice,’ he says, and so it is.

  It is the first time in her life she has eaten an Italian meal. Only later does this occur to her. At the time she is too nervous to notice, too angry with herself for going, with Michael for asking her.

  The trattoria is four doors down. There are red carnations in mismatched vases and a window table waiting. Michael orders for both of them: minestrone, veal parmigiana, beef ravioli, no wine. The owner sends them aperitifs in tiny wasp-waisted glasses.

  They begin in thorny silence. Outside a mother goes past in an apron and cardy, three girls merry-go-rounding around her.

  ‘You can talk to me,’ Michael says. ‘I don’t bite.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘You could tell me what you want. Or if you don’t want my help, you could be civil for a minute. You might as well tell me about yourself. What you’ve been doing these last nine years, you and your husband and the lad.’

  ‘It is not your business, what we do.’

  He shrugs, tends to his soup. ‘You got out of the Buildings, leastways.’

  ‘They are knocking them down, they don’t give us a choice.’

  ‘I heard. Can’t say I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be. The Buildings were special.’

  ‘They were old. The new estates are opportunities. Livelihoods and living space for thousands. Like you.’

  ‘Not like me. They promise us nothing. And what is so good about these new places? Will they be beautiful?’

  ‘Beauty comes at a price we can no longer afford.’

  ‘Will they last longer than the Buildings? A hundred years?

  ‘Probably not.’

  She savours the point, pushes home her advantage, glad to give better than she gets. ‘It should make you happy. Every block they knock down, it must mean more rent for you.’

  He has the courtesy to meet her eye, to measure her, and not to smile. ‘There is that,’ he says.

  ‘What about you? What have you been doing? Getting rich and fat.’

  ‘I’ve been poorer and thinner. I’ve done well enough.’

  ‘You must deserve it,’ Dora says, the acid of the words cutting the sweetness of her dish. Then she realises. He is handsome as he ever was – the lopsided quirk of his mouth and all – but Michael’s features are no longer striking in their gauntness. There is a puffiness around his eyes, and his frame, too, has filled out more than he might like. He is in his thirties, she thinks, as she is herself, but he could pass for older. It is an easy mistake to make, to look at his good suit and shoes and think that he has dined in restaurants all these years. Only he can’t have done. He is a man who has consumed what he has been given, who has been told when to eat, and who has exercised only as permitted by the rules of his confinement.

  Good, she thinks. I wish he was still in there. If he is happy it has not been enough. She is blushing, though, the flush spreading contagiously, and she bows her head and works at her meal.

  ‘Your husband, still down the markets, is he?’

  He is carrying on as if he has noticed nothing, and despite herself Dora is grateful. ‘He has a good pitch on the Lane,’ she says.

&
nbsp; ‘You know, our business started in the markets. We do a fair share of housing now, but on the whole we’re still commercial. Pitches, lock-ups. Shops.’

  She glances up into the pause he leaves, snorts ridicule. ‘How nice for you. You are suggesting we could afford a shop?’

  ‘You can afford what your business earns. Yours is sound: people will always want the time on them. Get them inside, put them at their ease, you’ll find them less thrifty. Your husband might find it easier, too. He never struck me as a barrowman by nature.’

  The owner’s slender-waisted glass still sits untouched beside her. Dora takes it, sips from it, for courage or forgetfulness. ‘Mull it over,’ Michael is saying. ‘I could set you up with a premises here, shop and top, get you out of Shoreditch –’

  ‘No! We want to be close to the Buildings . . . to where the Buildings were.’

  He is looking at her too much. ‘Alright. I’ll see to it. Shall I?’ he asks, and she can’t help but meet his eyes as she says that, please, he will.

  ‘Any luck?’ Solly asks, as he creaks into bed that evening, ‘Placewise?’

  It isn’t luck, she wants to say. You shouldn’t think it’s that, Solly, it doesn’t feel like that. Not for you.

  ‘Mr Barnard’s company are looking.’

  ‘That’s good of them. Don’t give them anything up front.’

  ‘They talked about a shop.’

  ‘Talk’s cheap.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a big place. You’d like it better in winter.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I just?’ Solly murmurs, and Dora listens to him, nursing his bad back in the gloom. ‘No harm dreaming, I suppose. It’s about time we got on in the world. Good chap, Mr Barnard. Good girl, you,’ he says, and pats her flank, rolls over the sag in the mattress to nuzzle her, abruptly falling asleep in her arms.

  That night the man she dreams of is not her husband.

  Friday they meet again. Barnard gives her the address – on Great Eastern Street, by Old Street – but she’s not surprised when it’s Michael who comes for her.

  It’s raining as he parks. ‘Hop in,’ he says, and she does. The car bears his smell and that of women: Mary, she thinks, or his girls. She almost hopes it is them, though it can do her no good to be right.

  Beside them is a small parade – a rope merchants, a veneer workshop, a barber-cobblers and a pub. The fifth front has a to let sign above the furled awning. It’s a neat place, set back with its neighbours from the greater eastwards march of tenements and warehouses. ‘Is that it?’ Dora asks, and he nods, eyeing it through the splotched window.

  ‘Close to home,’ he says, ‘as ordered. I’ll have keys next week, but what you see is what you get. You should bring your man down, have him try it on for size.’

  ‘Is that the flat, above it?’

  ‘No, not for want of trying. There’s a fellow in there won’t shift till they carry him out in a box. I’ve a place on Old Street. We’ll drive, if it’s the same to you.’

  It isn’t far: walking distance. He is ungainly in climbing from his seat, and it is only then Dora remembers he ever needed a stick. He shakes out keys, leads her into the stairwell of a tenement. The rain is too unforgiving for niceties, or for her to stop and think what it is she’s doing.

  Four flights up and he bends to unlock a second door. ‘After you,’ he says, and Dora steps into the gloom, feeling him close behind her, brushing past her to open curtains and scuff at dust.

  ‘I lodged here myself, a long time ago. It hasn’t changed much.’

  ‘You have,’ she says, ‘you became the landlord,’ and he shrugs, not modestly, she thinks, but as if he is too sure of himself to care, his gaze still moving critically over the walls and ceiling.

  ‘There’s not much to it. Front room, bedroom, privy. I’ll keep looking, but you can move in here whenever it suits. It’s the best I can do for now.’

  She walks to a window, lets out a gasp. ‘You can see for miles!’

  Michael moves to stand beside her. ‘Depends on your point of view. From where I’m standing it looks like a hundred yards of East End rain,’ he says, but drily, and she is smiling herself.

  ‘It’s much better than where we are now.’

  She crosses to the second window, comparing the greatness of the sky, the fantastic landscape of rooftops. ‘If it’s views you like,’ Michael says, ‘I’ve some dealings with the fellows at the Buildings. Six storeys they’ll be putting up, if they stick to their guns. I could –’

  ‘No.’ She turns. ‘A garden, that’s what I’d like. A garden where I can grow things, and I want a tree in it, an elder.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Why? Why should you even try?’ she asks, and his smile ebbs.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? You asked me to.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, ‘I’m grateful. Michael, before, in the Buildings, I was nothing to you. You never looked at me. You were never kind. No kinder than you had to be, not to strangers.’

  ‘Is that what you want of me, unkindness? Because you expect it of me?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘of course not. I just need –’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, under his breath. He has drawn in, hands gathered into pockets, head bowed, and a weariness has crept into his voice that draws all definition from his words.

  ‘What does that mean? You don’t know what I want of you? You don’t know why you’re doing this?’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice to me,’ he says, and Dora understands then that she should be frightened, that she is frightened, in fact; and that she doesn’t care. I am alone with him, she thinks. I meant to be alone with him, and there is no helping me now.

  ‘It doesn’t make it better.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It doesn’t make you right. I can’t forgive you for Bernadette.’

  ‘Who are you saying?’ he whispers, and the anger in his eyes is rising, inflammatory; and then she is kissing him.

  As if he means to shove her away his hands go to her shoulders. Then he is kissing her back, his fingers climbing to her hair, into it, fiercely cupping her skull. She is moaning into his mouth. One foot jounces on the boards as her legs begin to go. Michael is hoisting up her dress.

  ‘Little skipjack,’ Fred Isaacs says, patting at his wife’s belly. ‘Little bumpkin, are you dancing for us, in there?’

  ‘Gently,’ Sarah admonishes, and then, ‘Congratulations, Dora, Solomon. You must have friends in high places.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Dora says, ‘just Mr Barnard.’

  ‘To Barnard,’ Solly says, cheery as a Buddha, refilling glasses. ‘No, scratch that – why should he get all the credit? To my wife, my pertinacious, perspicacious, pretty wife, who needs another top-up. I don’t see who else I should be thanking.’

  They’re in the Isaacses’ room, the men both half-cut, and Dora tipsy, too, in the hope that it might soothe her nerves. ‘We shouldn’t celebrate,’ she says, ‘not until we have something in writing,’ but Solly isn’t having that.

  ‘You deserve a medal, that’s what . . . and look here, all we’ve got is sherry. You should see the shop, though, Fred, you’ll want Sarah out there, too, doing the business.’

  Only Sarah is sober, and quieter than the rest. She is an attentive woman. Dora can’t hate her for it, it’s the way she is, but Sarah is the one who sees when she comes and goes, sees what little she has to show for the hours she spends away; who hears – if anyone does – when Dora fills the basin and washes her parts, crouched alone in the mole’s-eye room. Sarah’s gaze is gentle, but Dora shivers when it lingers.

  Her hours are spent in joy. They meet in the gardens by St Paul’s, where no one who knows them would have any business being, and walk apart, like strangers, to the car. Michael is the man with the keys to the city, to unlet Soho attic flats and disinhabited Southwark railway terraces, though once, in Woolwich, the place he brings them to has been taken up by squatters, and he leads her off without a
word, the muscles ticking in his cheeks, and drives until they find waste ground, and fucks her there in the noon-hot shadows of a derelict. It is summer, and the smell of the place fills her as her pleasure overtakes her. The sweetness of the estuaries, the candied semen of balsam, and the rankness of old elderflower, soiled, unharvested.

  How does she dare? She has never been brave, but she is proud, and she is owed joy. Isn’t everyone?

  In July they move to Old Street. It’s Barnard who deals with them, who gives them the tour and the salesman’s spiel, as if the flat were fancy or they in any need of convincing. Michael’s name is never mentioned. As Solly signs the contract Barnard’s eyes meet Dora’s, and she understands that his discretion is exercised according to instructions.

  Mrs Walkling, their new neighbour, is a widow with no time for women. She is capricious with Dora, full of malign misinformation, but takes a shine to Solly and bakes him Eccles cakes: the first has two hairs in it, one ginger, one tawny, neither Mrs Walkling’s. She has nine cats, all mollies. ‘They don’t vie with me,’ she says, as she scoops them from their stairwell lairs. ‘They don’t talk back. My girls know better,’ Mrs Walkling says.

  One evening she looks up and Solly is watching her. She is darning their old curtains, and – she knows it only now – has been singing as she works. ‘What?’ she asks, and he shrugs.

  ‘You’re on top of the world.’

  ‘Just happy,’ she says, ‘I must be happy. Can’t you hear me singing?’

  He smiles for her, but the dimple of his frown remains. ‘I can stop,’ she says, ‘if it bothers you.’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘why should it? I’m happy when you’re happy.’

  Another night he falls asleep over his reading. Dora goes to close the book. It’s something from the library: history is Solly’s thing, or essays – Orwell if there’s nothing better – but this is poetry, she sees, and she turns the page and reads.