When it pours, we reign
Avoid the squeeze, please
Bond drives an Aston
Life is for living. Don’t be stuck on ‘DRUGS’
‘“She looked as happy as a rose-tree in sunshine.”’
‘What?’ Anna turned to Aloysius and then back to the adverts. What was he reading from?
‘“I should only be de trop: I’d best go and talk to the hermit.”’ Aloysius nodded his head to the great stretch of wasteland beyond the advertisements. ‘The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. That’s where they went.’
‘Where who went?’
‘Becky Sharp. On the night Mr Sedley was meant to propose. When I realised that that was what had happened to the gardens I think a little piece of my heart died.’
The bus moved off and Anna craned her neck to see the jumble of earth beyond the hoardings and to understand what it was Aloysius was trying to tell her.
‘Becky Sharp?’
‘Dr Gillespie used to make us read that chapter out loud. It made him laugh.’
Anna stared at Aloysius. She felt as if she’d gone to sleep and woken up in another conversation entirely. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Vanity Fair.’
‘By Thackeray?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never read it.’
‘Oh,’ said Aloysius, looking quite deflated. ‘Sorry. I didn’t realise.’
‘How have you … This is coming out quite rude. But how have you read it?’
‘I was a Knox College boy in Jamaica. Head prefect. Dr Gillespie, fifth-form literature, made everybody read Vanity Fair.’
‘What an odd choice.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, did that world make any sense to you?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it?’
Anna had literally no idea how to answer this politely so she let it pass. Aloysius, who’d been holding on to the bar on the back of her seat, withdrew his hands and laid them in his lap. Conversation stopped. The bus chugged down to Stockwell and on to Brixton.
Aloysius watched the darkened terraces pass by. For the most part he had done away with his romantic notions about London. It was very much colder, dirtier and more unfriendly than it had been in his imagination. But he retained a romanticism when it came to English girls. He had been captivated by Anna’s voice, with its English accent with a capital E. She didn’t look like the working-class white girls he saw on the way to and from work, with their stocky legs and cheap-looking minidresses. Anna was very tall – as tall as an Englishman, he thought; perhaps even five foot ten. Her frame was muscular with long, powerful legs and wide, strong hands. Her mouth was broad, her nose almost Roman and she had very large dark grey eyes. She reminded him of the women you saw carved in wood on the front of old ships in Kingston Harbour. She looked like a goddess from another place and time and he had wanted to impress her with his education, with his reading.
He had gone out of his way to present himself well since he moved here. He had bought a briefcase like the ones he saw the English accountants carrying in Kingston. He had invested in a fine suit, made to measure from a tailor’s shop in Croydon. He polished his shoes. He shaved meticulously. The boys in the back rooms would tease him about his appearance, calling him a fop and a nancy boy. A gentle man by nature, he had forced himself to suppress every instinct he had to answer back or defend himself from slander. When people laughed at him in meetings he smiled and allowed them to have their moment of humour; when he was refused service in a pub or cafe he packed up his things and left quietly; when men made monkey noises on the bus he moved his seat. He was fighting the assumptions of the English with every weapon in his arsenal but nine times out of ten he was left feeling empty, exhausted and defeated.
Anna, meanwhile, was staring at the landmarks she knew and desperately trying to find a literary connection between them and something that she’d actually read. She realised that the conversation was broken and she wondered if Aloysius would now abandon her somewhere in darkest south London. If she could only think of a connection between Brixton Town Hall and Dickens she might be saved. Anna turned to Aloysius, who seemed to be deep in thought. ‘Have you read The Ballad of Peckham Rye?’ she asked.
Aloysius thought about this. ‘No. I don’t remember reading anything called that,’ he said at last.
‘Oh. I only asked because we’re quite close here.’ Anna gestured vaguely at the world outside the window. ‘It’s about the devil,’ she went on brightly.
‘I see. And what does the devil do?’
‘Well, we don’t really know if he is the devil. He just turns up and experiments on people. He tries to influence them.’
‘Do you recommend it?’
‘Well, yes, maybe. I liked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie better but that’s about girls in a girls’ school so …’ She trailed off.
‘I shall keep an eye out for both of them,’ Aloysius said with a nod of his head.
Anna searched her mind for something else that might rekindle their spark of connection earlier in the evening. Of course she didn’t know this man at all and really had no idea how to begin talking to him; though she had begun quite nicely when they’d had Iolanthe to talk about so perhaps things would get easier when they got off the bus. They rode on in silence.
They were on Tulse Hill when Aloysius stood and rang the bell. Anna stood too and he motioned for her to precede him down the staircase. They stepped out into the cold and Anna looked around her to see if she recognised the road.
‘We can cut through down the street over there.’ Aloysius nodded over the road and they crossed, though this time he did not take her arm.
They walked in silence for several minutes, Aloysius leading the way, and then Anna asked: ‘What are we going to do when we get there?’
‘You mean, what will we say?’
‘Am I going to have to pretend that I’m in trouble? She might want to examine me.’
‘No. No. We’ll just say we’re friends of Iolanthe’s and we don’t want to make trouble but has she seen her.’
‘Do you think she’ll tell us the truth?’ Anna asked.
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Anna looked around here. Here was a neighbourhood of red brick houses, a park bordered by box hedges. Clean and anodyne suburbia, fathers and husbands passing with swift steps on their way home from work, rows of Morris Minors broken up here and there by the flashy lines of a Ford Cortina. Aloysius touched a hand to her elbow, they turned another corner and the houses seemed to rise and tower above them. Oversized chimney stacks, decorative gables, turreted roofs and circular windows: houses for the newly and gleefully wealthy, the Edwardian rich. Each new street a neighbourhood, Anna thought, a level of success. They turned again, onto Streatham Hill, crossed at the lights and started up Drewstead Road. The style of the houses became hushed once more, pre-war semis for the modestly affluent. Cautious buildings for cautious families. They came to a large semi-detached house, much like all the other semi-detached houses except it had a brass plaque on the gatepost.
Drewstead Road General Practitioners
Dr P. Jones
Dr A. Matthews
Surgery hours:
9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Monday to Friday
‘But it’s closed,’ said Anna.
‘There’s a light on round the side. Let’s see if there’s another entrance.’
They walked up the gravel driveway and round the side of the house where they found a second front door with a small brass plaque announcing: Dr P. Jones. Aloysius rang the bell and looked at Anna. His good humour was returning; Aloysius clearly liked an adventure.
The lights came on in the hallway and a figure came to the door and looked through the frosted glass. A middle-aged woman in navy trousers and a beige jumper opened the door to them.
‘This is outside surgery hours,’ she said.
‘We know,’ said Aloysius, �
��and we’re sorry, but we heard that Dr Jones was a very special kind of doctor.’
‘Dr Jones is having supper,’ said the woman.
‘We’ve come a long way,’ said Anna, trying to make herself seem smaller and more vulnerable than she normally looked. ‘We don’t mind at all if we have to wait. We only wanted to have the very briefest of words.’
Another figure appeared at the top of the stairs, though they could only see her shoes. ‘Who is it, Carla?’
The middle-aged woman went to the bottom of the stairs and leaned heavily on the banister. ‘They want to see you now.’
‘Have you explained it’s out of hours?’
‘I have,’ replied Carla, evidently annoyed but without the absolute authority to shut the door on them.
‘I’ll give them five minutes after supper.’
Carla turned towards the door. ‘You both hear that?’
Aloysius and Anna nodded enthusiastically. Carla closed the door with some force and turned off the hallway light.
Anna could see their breath rising in the air. They looked at each other in the near darkness, the orange glow of a remote street light leaking into the space where they stood. Aloysius laughed and then bent down towards Anna’s face. She started back a little but then felt the warmth of him against her cheek as he whispered: ‘I thought she was going to let us wait inside.’
‘Do you think she realises how cold it is?’ Anna whispered back.
‘Oh, I think she realises very well.’
They stood for a minute listening to the far-off sounds of cars on Streatham Hill. Anna put her hands inside the collar of her coat to warm them.
‘Don’t you have gloves?’ Aloysius asked.
‘I left them at home today. I went out this morning and I thought: I know, I’ll pop across to Carnaby Street and see if anyone’s about at Roaring Twenties. And there wasn’t so I went across to the Marquee and then when I’d finished there I went back to Roaring Twenties and somehow I just kept walking and asking people if they’d seen Iolanthe until I ended up at Cue Club and then here.’
‘Don’t you have work to go to?’
‘The theatre’s dark. They got a flood of cancellations when Iolanthe went missing. Then there were articles suggesting that it was bad taste to keep the play on when no one knew what had happened to her. Then the insurance company wanted it settled one way or the other. So now they’ve pulled Iolanthe’s play – The Field of Stars – and they’re looking for another show to bring in. Until something else opens I’m not even getting paid.’
‘Oh …’ Aloysius’s face fell a little in sympathy. ‘What was it about anyway?’
‘What was what about?’
‘The Field of Stars. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘It’s this melodrama about a woman who’s invented this other version of who her parents were to create sympathy for the things she’s done. It’s set in America, in the South, and she’s a kept woman living in a big house that was bought for her by the governor. And almost everyone sees her as a whore and she has no friends. So she makes up this version of herself where she’s Spanish and her parents were killed walking the Way of St James and she was brought up by nuns and then sent over to America all on her own.’
‘Why the Field of Stars?’
‘Santiago de Compostela is the town that you get to at the end of the Way of St James. Compostela means field of stars. It ran for a bit on Broadway fifteen years ago but it never made it over here. I don’t know. It’s very … florid. Not modern at all. But people like the costumes and the big sets and the histrionics.’
‘What happens to the lady at the end?’
‘She shoots herself on a balcony behind a fluttering curtain.’
‘What a depressing evening at the theatre.’
‘Well, yes.’
They stood in silence for a moment. Anna shivered in her coat. Aloysius opened his mouth and asked a little hesitantly, ‘Would it be odd if I offered to warm your hands?’
‘Oh. Well. No. Not odd, exactly.’
Aloysius held a gloved hand out towards her. Anna, consciously making her hands as stiff and unalluring as possible, pressed them together and placed them on his gloved palm. He closed the second gloved hand on top of the first and they stood there together in the cold, very aware of how they were almost touching and not quite sure what to do about it next.
After a few minutes they heard footsteps on the stairs and the hall light came on again. Anna withdrew her hands from Aloysius’s clasp and thanked him quite formally.
The woman – Carla – opened the door. She was obviously disappointed to find that they were still there. ‘You can come up for five minutes. Dr Jones needs her evening.’
They followed her up the carpeted stairs and into a large sitting room with a dining table at one end. The walls were covered in cream woodchip and decorated with sculptured art made from metal and nails and cord. Spider plants sat on the top of every bookcase and baby spiders cascaded like bead curtains in front of the hundreds of serious-looking tomes on medicine and history and art.
Dr Jones sat at the dining table. Her finished supper plate had been pushed away. A second sat across from her, a fish skin sunk fatly into a pool of grey gravy. Dr Jones was smoking a cigarette and reading the Guardian. She was a diminutive woman, well built and smartly dressed. She wore glasses and her thick black and white hair was cut into a bob. She put down the paper unhurriedly and looked first at Aloysius and then at Anna.
‘We were about to have coffee. Would you like some?’
‘I would, actually,’ said Anna. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Yes, please,’ said Aloysius, the seriousness of the room somehow quieting his voice.
Dr Jones waved her hand towards two low armchairs and the visitors duly sat, or rather perched, like small children, their knees drawn up in front of them. Carla picked up the finished plates and went out into the kitchen.
‘So,’ said Dr Jones. ‘How can I help?’
‘It’s not about me,’ Anna started in, ‘it’s about my friend.’
‘And why isn’t your friend here talking to me herself?’
‘Because we don’t know where she is. Nobody knows where she is.’
Dr Jones nodded but said nothing.
Aloysius held a hand up to signal that he was ready to take over. ‘Both myself and Anna here are under the impression that you are a doctor who helps women in trouble. Is that right?’
Dr Jones studied Aloysius for a few seconds. ‘Are you the boyfriend?’
‘Me? No. I’m just helping Anna.’
‘And are we talking about who I think we’re talking about?’
Anna nodded. ‘Iolanthe Green. I worked with her. We think perhaps she came to see you.’
Carla came in with a coffee pot and a stack of mugs and started to pour. She moved with the quiet concentration of someone who was listening to every word being said.
‘Miss Green did come to see me.’ Dr Jones drew a cup of coffee towards her. She and Carla exchanged a look.
‘Was it the last weekend of October?’ Anna asked. ‘She went missing on the night of Saturday the thirtieth so I thought perhaps she came here on the Saturday or Sunday.’
Carla passed them two half-full cups of black coffee, briefly blocking from their view the sight of Dr Jones. Aloysius and Anna were each aware of the other one holding their breath until the shadow had passed away.
‘I saw her on a Thursday morning,’ Dr Jones said slowly, as if struggling to recall the details. ‘I believe it was the Thursday before she went missing. We had a conversation. I didn’t treat her for anything.’
Anna felt a rush of relief when Dr Jones said this. Without the spectre of discussing what she might have done to Iolanthe, Anna felt free to use the actual words. ‘She was pregnant?’
‘She registered as an emergency patient. I owe her my confidentiality.’
‘But she’s disappeared; she might be dead. Surely there comes a
point when you can break confidentiality.’
Dr Jones just shook her head. Aloysius reached across and touched Anna’s knee. ‘Dr Jones, I respect that a doctor has a duty but Miss Green came here to ask you about an illegal practice. And if the police end up here and they question you, then you might find yourself ending up in all kinds of trouble.’
Carla, who had been hunched over her coffee listening, leaned back in her chair. ‘Don’t threaten us,’ she said.
Aloysius held up both his hands, a gesture of surrender. Anna finished her coffee and put the cup down on the floor by her foot. She started to speak again but she didn’t look up at the two women.
‘I have no desire to see either of you get into trouble. I’m guessing that something else happened between the meeting here on Thursday and her disappearing on Saturday night. But if she has run away it makes sense that it was about the pregnancy, so anything you can tell me will help me to find her. And if I find her then the police don’t have to.’
She glanced up at the women to see how this was going across. They were both watching her intently.
‘I give you my absolute, solemn word that I will never say that I came here and never mention your name to anyone. And if I’m lucky enough to find Iolanthe, I’ll make sure that she understands the same. Nobody here wants to threaten you.’ And Aloysius held up his hands again, wordlessly.
Dr Jones lit another cigarette. She cast Anna a sharp look and said, ‘Why don’t I tell you some of the reasons that women find themselves in trouble. Sometimes, as I’m sure you’re aware, young women don’t understand about contraception … or indeed about reproduction. But sometimes it happens at the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes women who are quite fertile believe themselves too old to have a child; they may be unmarried and thus barred from being prescribed the pill; sometimes they’re just unlucky. Often these women have good jobs: they work as doctors, headteachers, manageresses. They know that they will lose their position if they have a child. There may well be no way back for them. But ending a pregnancy can be tricky. There are various methods and women find some more palatable than others. Sometimes women want to take a pill or a herbal concoction. But if the pregnancy has gone beyond, say, eight or ten weeks then the pill method becomes less effective. The only sure route is to perform a small operation. Many women do not want to hear this. Many women run away from hearing such a thing.’
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 8
