by Janet Davey
Although I am grateful for the crumb of recognition, I feel a crisis of identity followed by hatred and reply to his latest email with the opening sentences of Wuthering Heights.
Hello Randal, I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.
Lorna
Randal will skim read and delete.
In the centre of London, I am as quiet as a hermit. I tune out tourists and marching soldiers, the State Opening of Parliament, the self-important outriders with whistles. The room I occupy is carved out of a corner of a larger one. It has an internal window, half-masked by a Venetian blind with wonky slats that looks onto the main office. Since the window is behind my desk not much looking takes place. I treat it as an aberrant part of the wall. Light comes from overhead fluorescent tubes and some, in the form of daylight, through my open door.
I work alone for much of the time, though there are volunteers at the archive and also members of the public who come by appointment to do their own research. In the last round of spending cuts, funding for extra projects was withdrawn and all the young temporary cataloguers were laid off. The big office is empty and the computers covered over. The concealed forms and dusty surfaces, together with tired paintwork, make it a place of abandonment. It might be a garment factory in abeyance through lack of orders – all stitching suspended. More than half the operations have moved out to new premises on the Greenwich Peninsula. The entire 1920s structure, the cruciform block that rises in steps to a tower above St James’s Park underground station, is to be sold off and converted into bespoke luxury apartments. Civic offices, hospitals, magistrates’ courts, police stations, libraries – buildings with a function throughout London – have become savings accounts with en-suite bathrooms. By night, the stairwells of these unoccupied premises are vertical bands of light. Windows glint blackly. No one lives behind them.
Every day, enquiries land in my inbox. They are often about relatives who were employed by London Transport but I also receive less mainstream requests. I form a picture of my correspondents from their names and the style of their messages; a picture that disappears rapidly as soon as I clap eyes on them. Not only are the specifics wrong but the whole tone of the person. I sometimes wonder what becomes of these images and whether they people my night-time dreams. Certainly, my dreams are full of individuals I do not know from Adam. It is no different with Chris Orrick whom I collect from reception. He turns out to be bald and agile, a retired operations manager in a freight-haulage company and, he takes pains to inform me, still available as a consultant. I loathe the newly retired. They have a lifetime of work behind them and a pension and continue to forage for employment. Chris is an ambiguous name and this person might have been a woman, though the ‘Cheers’ made a man more likely. He wears jeans and a red polo shirt and carries a beige mac over his arm. He has a laptop in a case, a stubby fold-up umbrella and a Marks and Spencer’s plastic bag that he tells me contains a snack.
I’ve moved goods all over the world. Logistics have a universal resonance. Now I’ve retired, I want to write a novel. Nothing too dark. A London Underground disaster would make a good starting point. Cheers, Chris
I explained in my return message the difficulties of calling up unspecific material and recommended that Chris find a topic to focus on. He then homed in on the Bethnal Green crush of 1943, saying it had potential. The lapidary writing style misled me. Chris Orrick talks non-stop. His eyes go everywhere. He has never felt fitter. His contemporaries veg out on sunshine holidays but he, Chris Orrick, has a project. As we walk side by side along the corridors of closed doors, he comments on the cabling that bulges from a broken section of trunking, the high-pitched noise of a lift held open while cartons are unloaded, a missing carpet tile. The first time he halts mid-step, I think he has suddenly realised he has left something on the train, or is meant to be somewhere else. But it is to point out a defect he has spotted. ‘A a a a a a a,’ he says, as if he is imitating a motor scooter stuttering to a start, followed by a long low ‘whoo’ like wind in a ventilator.
‘The place is falling apart,’ I tell him. ‘Nothing’s been done because the block is being sold to developers. It’s a wonderful building. There were once marble drinking fountains on every floor – supplied by an artesian well.’
‘OK. Interesting. I remember the old drinking fountains. Filthy, weren’t they? We had one in the local playground. My mother told us not to lick the metal.’ He gives me a sidelong glance. ‘Funny when you think about it. Little tongues poking out into an arch of water. Why would you want fountains in a place like this? Legionnaires. It’s a risk. You could make a nice fitness suite down here, though.’
Speculation on the likely price per square metre of the prospective apartments accompanies us the rest of the way. By the time we reach my office, Chris Orrick is abominating social housing quotas on new-builds and recommending that I read Ayn Rand. This is fairly typical of members of the public. Right-wing views and sexual innuendo bubble out of them.
‘Where’s the library, then?’ he says.
I explain that there are no documents on the premises. Everything is off-site in a salt mine at Winsford, Cheshire, and delivered on request.
‘Wow. Any chance of a visit?’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ I say with a polite smile. ‘Staff only.’
I sit Chris Orrick at a desk. After half an hour he is still chatting. I re-park him in the main office at one of the tables. I shall no longer be able to see him but I take the risk that he is not a pyromaniac or a paper-tearer. ‘No drinks, no food,’ I remind him, as I glare at the Marks and Spencer’s plastic bag. ‘Only pencils allowed. I have my own work to get on with,’ I say firmly.
He raises his eyebrows in a jocular way. ‘A bit brighter by the window, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you rather be in here? I thought this research would take months but it looks like I’ll polish it off in a couple of goes. There’s not much information, is there?’ He taps the thin folder of documents, as he re-settles himself.
‘That’s all we have. The press wasn’t allowed to report on the tragedy. You’ll find more in the Tower Hamlet’s archive – eyewitness accounts and so on.’
‘This writing game is a mindset thing. I’ve figured out how it works. You need action and you need a cracking opening to wake people up. Three hundred men and women piled on top of each other in the narrow stairwell at Bethnal Green station. What’s it like to fight for your breath?’ Chris Orrick clamps his hands over his nostrils and mouth. His eyes bulge and I notice small, reddish-brown discolorations in the irises.
Christ, I think.
8
MY FRIEND LIZ tells me that the nuclear family is a recent invention and that children in the past were frequently farmed out to aunts and uncles, real or nominal. Having many years ago read the book from which Liz gleaned this theory, I believe that the position is more nuanced than she makes out but I do not want to get sidetracked into an argument with her. I stop complaining that Ross is never at home and tell her about the corporate hoes flyer. We are as one on that topic.
Liz can be quite scary but at least she is intelligent. For years she had a long-term boyfriend, Jeff, whom she grumbled about consistently, then – out of the blue, or, more precisely, out of the department of Law and Criminology at Aberystwyth University – came Libby. Libby has many sterling qualities. She is older than Liz and a wonderful cook; devoted to all things Welsh though she is not Welsh herself. She cooked roast rump of black-faced lamb for my parents when they visited while on holiday in Cardiganshire. I felt she’d known him personally, my mother said. His farm, his field, how he spent the summer.
Better prepared after the September fiasco, I use such bargaining power as I have to stop Ross from absenting himself on school nights. However, for five consecutive weekends he sl
eeps away. He is at Jude’s house. He has told me a million times. He sets off and returns on his bike; he is a bike ride’s distance from home. Why would he cycle fifty miles on a wet Friday evening? His bike is crap. He has never known anyone with a crappier bike. It will conk out. He can’t be ‘anywhere’. ‘Anywhere’ is ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine per cent unfeasible as a destination. He isn’t shouting at me. If he is I deserve it. I drive him nuts. Anyway, why do I need to know?
The arguments always boil down to that. ‘Why do you need to know?’
Jude’s surname gives some clue as to his parentage. His mother is Bennet and his father is Dutch. They live in Crews Hill; a place that in the most far-reaching of the London A to Zs – the Master Atlas of Greater London – is surrounded by white patches. There is a grown-up sister, or maybe she is a half-sister, who lives in Barcelona. Dirk Neerhoff is an eye doctor, Teresa Bennet is an eye doctor. What, both eye doctors?
That last question does for me. The handle comes off the spade. No more digging. I am left with my own impressions. A fifties house; the kind with a chain-link fence and a frosted-glass bathroom window on the first floor, visible from the road. Grass verges to the pavements. A golf course or two at the back. No bus service – or maybe one of those small single-deckers that potter from nowhere to nowhere bearing an alpha-numeric sign. As for the Bennet-Neerhoffs themselves, I imagine a blond square-headed man and a Roman Catholic English woman. I envisage a darkened room, in the centre of which stand a slit-lamp machine and a white-coated person peering in, seeing everything, noting everything, while the patient views a tiny tunnelled world through a haze of yellow fluorescein.
Strangely, although I construct a view of the Bennet-Neerhoff set-up that in a dreamlike way veers between the numinous and the diabolic and contains some precise images, I form no picture of Jude. He is the empty space in the frame.
I tell Ross that it is wrong to accept hospitality indefinitely without returning it. Reciprocity, it is called. Someone gives you something and you give something back. Ross says he knows what reciprocity means. Invite Jude here for a change. Silence. Well, make it happen.
9
I FINALLY GET hold of a telephone number for Jude’s family from Ginny Lu at the end of October. It is a mobile number and I have no idea whether I will get through to Dr Bennet or Dr Neerhoff. Ginny does not know whose number she has been given. She is friendly and brisk.
The advantage of the telephone when introducing myself to someone new is that appearance is irrelevant. All the same, I glance in the mirror that hangs over the fireplace in the front room before calling the Bennet-Neerhoff number. I have no idea whether this is a good time. Sevenish on a Friday evening. I do not want to interrupt a clinic or their supper.
My hair, due for a cut, falls in dense, uneven clusters to my shoulders and resembles the outline of a larch tree. This dishevelment really is of no consequence though it can affect my mood. What I look for are signs that I am ‘together’, as people used to say. I look calm enough so I move away from the mirror, press the numbers and lift the phone to my ear.
‘Hello.’ It is a thin little voice against a hiss that grows louder.
‘Hello. Teresa? I’m Lorna, Ross’s mum. I hope this isn’t a—’
The signal cuts out.
Dr Bennet might have been driving, or dealing with a gas leak, so I do not try again immediately. I feel relieved to have made contact, however brief. I now know there is someone I can speak to – the mother, not the father – and that Teresa sounds more like a child than the efficient, imperious person I feared. She exists. That takes a weight off my mind. Ginny Lu is the parents’ rep for Ross’s year group and everything within her scope is bona fide.
I pour myself a glass of wine and put a wash on.
At around nine o’clock, I call Teresa Bennet again. She seems somewhat distracted – but pleasant.
‘Ross? I haven’t seen him yet but he’s probably here somewhere,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to find him?’
A dog is barking in the background. Her voice is reedy more than girlish and she is called Frances. I apologise for getting her name wrong and say how kind she is to put up with Ross and that we would love to reciprocate and have Jude to stay.
‘Oh, yes,’ Frances says. ‘Nice idea. Sorry, the dog’s going a bit mental. I’ll have to go and feed her.’
Frances Bennet does not sound like an eye doctor, not an eminent one, anyway. I am also surprised to hear about the dog because toxoplasmosis is a terrible eye disease that children, born and unborn, can get from uncooked meat and the faeces of pets. I worried enough about it myself when the boys were little and was forever checking their hands and telling them to watch out for dog turds when they beat paths through the long grass, flailing seed heads as they went.
10
I TRAMP THROUGH Grovelands Park for what will be the last time this year. For a short while I am on the wing – airborne. I shall miss the path over undulating ground, the stream that runs invisible among the trees crossed by little wooden bridges, the sound of children’s voices in the wood. The ground is firm, not yet spongy or fungal, and the grass smells fresh. The clocks go back at midnight. From then on the gates will shut at 16.45 and progressively earlier times. It seems too soon to call off daylight saving while there are good ways to spend it. I have lost the sense that autumn is a beginning. School and university drive it into you and growing older drives it out. Until April, I shall be walking between Palmers Green and Winchmore Hill along suburban pavements.
Saturday tea at my father’s flat in The Heronry. The weekly pattern repeats. I cry off if something crops up and William accepts any change with equanimity. Quite simply, I like to see him and my occasional feelings of being trapped in an arrangement that could go on indefinitely are checked by remembering my mother’s death from cardiac arrest – the suddenness of it. Nothing goes on indefinitely.
The park has altered little in the last hundred years. Humphry Repton laid out its beautiful bones. The civic amenities were added early in the twentieth century. I can imagine myself here as a child, or my parents or grandparents, also as children, because as types in a landscape we are cut and come again. The big house, built in the 1790s by John Nash for a Tottenham brandy merchant, was never demolished and has passed through many changes of use, mostly medical; it has been a military hospital, a convalescent home and, more recently, a private clinic where in 1998 General Pinochet was held under house arrest. He must from time to time have looked out of a window, contemplating the English park – a gift to the public made by Southgate Urban District Council in 1911 – though he probably would not have stood for long, as he had undergone a back operation. His gaze left no visible mark. The pitch and putt, the bowling club, the single table with umbrella in front of the shack selling ice cream and drinks exist on their own terms. The clinic lays no claims to the park. The only medical reference is on the ‘Lost’ notices pinned to two trees; one near the Palmers Green entrance gate, the other on the Winchmore Hill side. They have been there since the summer holidays and are now faded and rain-battered. Each displays a photograph of a tabby cat with three white paws and the words, ‘Gustav critically ill and needs his medication urgently’.
Ewan, Oliver and Ross would once have been passionately interested in the cat Gustav. They would have wanted to know where he had gone, what his illness was, how he had caught it, what his medication consisted of and whether he would be given it from a spoon. I used to like these conversations that went off in bizarre but predictable directions and were endlessly repeated. I tried to interest my little boys in General Pinochet but there was always something more Gustav-like that they would rather discuss. Dictators are all very well but what about the lost cat? It took me a while to adjust to infantile preoccupations but they became firmly fixed so that now, in middle age, they are intertwined with adult ways of thinking and I can waste time wondering who let go of a stray balloon and where it might come to rest.
In the dusk, the park becomes mysterious. Because it stands on a section of sloping valley that is not smoothly flat, it is impossible to take in the whole area at a glance. Pockets of land reveal themselves like photographic slides, subtly different from what came before, and people too can suddenly loom up. The evening dog walkers are a grumpy lot and sometimes menacing-looking. From an early age, Ewan was able to recite the names Dogo Argentino, Fila Brasileiro, Japanese Tosa, Pit Bull Terrier, and claimed he could restrain any one of them with a magic muzzle. I avoid eye contact with a character whose two Staffies are straining on choke leads and, as he comes towards me, direct my attention to the lake that has just come into view. The sky is yellow – not the yellow of pollution but a clear, primrose colour that happens as the year turns towards winter – and is reflected in the water. Birds float, weightless as black silhouettes on the surface. A man sits on a bench staring at the lake, his face, in profile, lit by the setting sun. He wears a dark-coloured cagoule, with high-visibility stripes down the sleeves and across the back. They catch the light. A bicycle is propped beside him. Something about him is familiar but I cannot place him. Then he moves. He searches in a pocket for his phone, half-rises from the bench, and I recognise the long neck and ungainly movements of Alan Child, Ross’s English teacher.
An early firework goes off; a sudden flare, a bang. I hurry by with my head down.
11
‘WHY DID YOU tell me Jude’s mum was called Teresa? Her name’s Frances,’ I say to Ross, who has reappeared in my absence. He is perching on the boxes stacked in the hall and is eating baked beans from a tin with a spoon.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Ross says.
