Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  He got off the train at Whitechapel and walked south, arriving at the front door of Orla’s block at a little after nine.

  Orla opened the door. She was wearing her dressing gown and carrying a towel.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  Brennan opened his mouth to speak but then the words wouldn’t come.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ Orla said and she turned on her heel and walked up the stairs to the bathroom. It seemed too forward to let himself into the bathroom itself so Brennan climbed the stairs to her bedroom and sat down on the bed.

  Orla was obviously in no mood to hurry. By half past nine Brennan was so nervous that he started to tidy the room just to give himself something to do. Having established a clear patch on most of the surfaces he went through her small collection of books and selected The Water Babies as something neutral to read.

  At a quarter past ten Orla pushed open the door.

  ‘Oh!’ She nearly dropped her towel when she saw him.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What are you doing here? I thought you went away.’

  ‘I can’t follow a woman into a bathroom.’

  ‘Did you tidy my room?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was nervous. I don’t know why I said it. The prospect thing. I don’t think … You’re not like that. You know that Eddie Miller likes you and maybe I was jealous or scared or something …’

  ‘So you’re apologising.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Our children would have to be Catholic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘We don’t have any children.’

  ‘Yes. But if we stay together we might. And I know you don’t believe and I think … I think that I can live with that. But not my children. I need to know that they’d be Catholic; that you would let them believe.’

  ‘Why are we talking about children?’

  ‘Because if we stay together then I think this is it. Don’t you? I think we do this or we don’t. In or out. I need to know if you’re serious.’

  Orla threw her towel down on the bed. Brennan stared at her, too shocked to turn away.

  She crossed her arms over her breasts. ‘Could we at least do things in order?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Could we at least sleep together first?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really believe—’

  ‘Yes, I know that, you idiot. But I’m saying let’s just go about this like two human animals. Let’s go to bed together. And tomorrow to the pictures. And then to bed again. And then let’s see what we feel for each other. I can’t promise to marry you. And I can’t promise to baptise children I haven’t had. But if you will treat me well I will try to do the same. Two grown-ups. Doing what the other grown-ups do.’

  Five months later Orla Keane and Brennan Hayes walked again down the chequerboard aisle of St Mary and St Michael, this time amongst a congregation of six, and as Orla stood before the priest and made her vows, she kept one hand firmly pressed onto her stomach. For the vows that she made that day weren’t simply to Brennan, they were also to her baby, her new-made friend, her love, her very fire and light inside, growing second by second, fruitful and adored, inside her womb.

  The Duke Vin Sound System

  Wednesday, 10 November

  Snow was piled high in the corners of the windows and Ottmar decided to close early for the night. The last of the customers had left at half past eight when the weather made its turn for the worse. Helen had gone home already, worried about her buses. Rachel could finish the cleaning on her own; he’d put some extra shillings in her pay packet to say thanks.

  He turned the sign on the door, letting his fingers rest on the glass as he did so. The door fizzed with the cold outside. He ran his broom very quickly round the edges of the tables and retreated to sit by the hatch and drink tea while Rachel worked. He felt lonely tonight, lonely and downhearted.

  Leonard was upstairs waiting for a phone call from Benji about his sister. Rashida was in bed and Ekin was sitting up, sewing name tapes inside a hockey kit and waiting for Samira to come home.

  They had tried to stop her, he told himself. Tried to reason with her. Tried to pin her back down. Just last weekend they had told her she could not go out at all and she had stayed in the flat all Saturday and Sunday, which meant of course that Ekin could not go out either. Samira had pretended that Ekin didn’t exist, ignoring her when she walked into the room, preparing food as if Ekin was not standing right beside her.

  Ottmar had been watching his little family fight and fall apart for so many years now that he no longer knew if there was any other way. In many ways he lived a life quite separate from his wife and daughters. He had his little world downstairs which consumed his time, his attention and his money. The women’s intensity frightened him. He regarded them as a line of boiling pots whose lids might blow into his face at any second. They seemed to love each other, though as the girls grew older he saw more love flowing from Ekin than back the other way. He watched his daughters’ cruelties, their indifference to their mother’s feelings, and racked his brains to ask himself if he had been the same when he was still a boy. He had felt pain – actual, real, unimagined pain – when he contemplated the way that he had destroyed his mother’s life, disregarded her opinions, fled from her arms.

  ‘I was a terrible son,’ he said to himself out loud. He had sat down to write a letter to her and had got more than a dozen sentences in when the futility of his gesture had overwhelmed him. He folded the little piece of airmail paper and tucked it away in his inside coat pocket. His mother had been dead six years already. He had not seen her in the nineteen years since he’d left Cyprus. He had not attended her funeral.

  Rachel was finishing cleaning.

  ‘Will you be able to make it home?’ Ottmar asked her.

  ‘I’m going to walk,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be home in thirty minutes and it’ll keep me warm. Don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Rachel. Wait. If the snow is worse tomorrow please telephone first. I might not open for lunch.’

  ‘Okay,’ she called to him, already halfway out the door. Ottmar noticed how the darkness and the snow seemed to flatten the mood, the temperature, of his little cafe. He noted how the bunting over the hatch was looking ragged; how people had picked mosaic tiles of mirror off some of the frames around the room; how the red and yellow paint on the chairs was starting to crack and peel and chip away. A cold wind was blowing through his little slice of Istanbul and he realised with annoyance that Rachel had not shut the door.

  He was hurrying over to secure it when he spotted her standing in the falling snow and talking with two tall, coated figures whose shoulders, faces and heads were almost entirely white. As he watched her he heard Rachel call ‘Goodnight,’ and walk quickly away. The shorter of the two figures approached Ottmar, waving to him through the glass. The figure wiped her eyes and nose and he saw that it was Anna.

  The figures entered, shaking snow onto the mat and then onto the floor. Ottmar helped Anna to peel off her coat as she shook her hair out and wiped clean the rest of her face. The man beside her was attempting to clean his glasses with his shirt.

  ‘Allow me.’ Ottmar handed him a napkin from the nearest table and the tall figure thanked him in an odd accent. Ottmar went into the kitchen to heat a pot of coffee and from the safety of the little room he watched Anna’s friend unpeel his coat and shake his hair free of snow. The man Anna was with was not white.

  When the coffee was ready he brought it through to them and they all sat round the table furthest from the doors and windows.

  ‘This is Aloysius,’ Anna explained. ‘Aloysius is an accountant. And this is Ottmar. I used to work for him and both of us live in the flats upstairs.’

  ‘How do you come to know Anna, then?’ Ottmar asked.

  Aloysius thought about this for just long enough that Anna stepped in. ‘I
went and talked to a lot of people today about Iolanthe. I met Aloysius at the Cue Club and he had some very helpful suggestions, which we followed up. But then the snow came and Aloysius insisted on seeing me home.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ottmar, adopting a fatherly tone, ‘I approve of that.’

  ‘She has my gloves. I’m really just hoping to get them back,’ Aloysius joked and Ottmar frowned a little, not appreciating levity in anyone who was lucky enough to spend the evening with Anna.

  Aloysius knocked back the rest of his coffee and choked violently. Anna reached out and grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t drink the grounds at the bottom! They’re disgusting.’

  The way she said the word disgusting made Ottmar’s heart burn in his chest. He saw how Anna touched the coloured boy, how she leaned in towards him with concern, brushed his shoulders with her hand. His stomach ached with self-loathing. He rose from his chair and nodded to them both. ‘Forgive me, but it has been a long night and I promised I would go up to Ekin.’

  ‘Sorry, Ottmar. We’ll be on our way.’ Anna signalled to Aloysius that they were leaving and Ottmar fetched their coats and helped Anna on with hers. He noticed as he stood behind her that Anna’s hair smelled of the same shampoo that Samira used. He had forgotten who he was waiting for. Please God, any god, let Samira still be his little girl.

  Aloysius opened the door for Anna and they slipped outside.

  ‘What a strange man,’ Aloysius said.

  ‘I think he’s just tired tonight.’ It was still snowing but only lightly now. ‘Where does your friend live?’

  ‘Just beyond Soho.’

  Anna held out his gloves; they were soaking wet. They looked at the sorry things lying in her hand and laughed.

  ‘Keep them,’ said Aloysius. ‘No use to me tonight.’

  ‘I feel as if I should walk you home now. Or at least to Soho.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Go in and get warm.’

  ‘I feel stupidly awake. I shouldn’t have drunk all that coffee.’

  ‘You know you can call me again,’ Aloysius told her. ‘I’d like to help. Any way I can.’

  ‘Can I? I want to go to Roaring Twenties, perhaps tomorrow night, and I don’t really want to go alone.’

  ‘It would be my pleasure. Or I could always put my head in now. On the way past. It’ll still be open.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘For another hour. Maybe more.’

  Anna stood in Neal Street and looked up at the falling snow. Her shoes and tights were soaked through. But somehow she couldn’t stop herself. She needed tonight to carry on; she felt the momentum of its action, felt as if the night itself were willing her to stay up that bit longer and find out how much further she could go.

  ‘You know, if you’d let me change, we could go to the club together. It’s just I’m so wet, I need some drier shoes.’ She laughed and felt her laughter catch in her throat because she feared the hesitation she saw in Aloysius. He looked at her and then glanced over at the cafe as he thought. His brow wrinkled.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Deadly sure.’

  ‘That’s very sure.’

  ‘You can come up and wait for me in the warm.’

  And so they went inside. Aloysius sat on the stairs while Anna changed quietly in the living room. Her Oxfords were soaking and the only other shoes she had were heels, meant for interviews or smart occasions. She hated wearing them, though she thought perhaps they’d be more appropriate at a club. She’d never been to a club before.

  She knew the girls up Carnaby Street wore their bright little dresses or their black and white minis. She had a green corduroy skirt whose waistband she could pull up around her ribs and safety-pin to make it shorter, and a black polo neck jumper. She couldn’t imagine going without tights, though plenty of girls did even in the middle of winter, so she pulled on her thickest black pair. She went into the tiny bathroom and brushed her hair. Kelly’s make-up was sitting on the shelf. Anna spat in the little pot of mascara and ran the brush through her lashes a couple of times. The face in the mirror looked like a picture from a magazine. She ran the water and washed her face, getting most of the blackness off. Then she put on her coat and her uncomfortable black heels and made for the door.

  At the last moment, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, Anna left Kelly a note.

  Have gone to Roaring Twenties. Expect to be back tonight/morning. A

  She collected Aloysius from the stairs and together they walked back out into the snow.

  Ottmar had not gone upstairs to Ekin. Instead he was sitting by the hatch in the darkness of his little cafe, waiting for Samira to appear. He saw Anna and Aloysius pass by, Anna stepping high to keep her heels out of the snow and holding on to Aloysius’s arm to stop herself from falling. Where were all these young women going? The ones who walked out into the snow or out of sight with other men?

  ***

  Carnaby Street was quiet tonight, the snow had frightened most of the young people indoors. Charlie Brown was standing where he always stood at the door of Roaring Twenties, half inside half outside, a thick black overcoat and gloves protecting him from the cold.

  ‘See,’ said Aloysius, ‘I told you they’d be open.’

  ‘You won’t leave me on my own?’ Anna asked.

  ‘You can stick to me like glue.’

  The bass ebbed up to them from the space below as they squeezed down the stairs and into the hot, dark interior of the club. They shook their bodies free of snow. The air was smoke, beer, sweat, rum and sweet, sweet perfume. Down one end there were tables where groups of women and couples on dates hunched over their drinks or shouted to each other or watched the dancers dance. There must have been a hundred bodies on the dance floor, the room was thick with them, the young women ducking and weaving as men squeezed through the crowd carrying drinks from the bar, cigarettes hanging from their lips.

  They looked around them, getting their bearings. A man to their left knelt up on a bar stool and raised a hand to Aloysius. Aloysius slipped off his coat and silently unbuttoned Anna’s for her too.

  The rhythm was not a rhythm Anna knew. A low bass line pumped like an unsteady urgent heartbeat, an incessant entreaty that tickled the blood in her veins and unsteadied her nerves. Over the bass line a melody tugged at her clothes, nipped at her skin, wound itself around her like a snake. Aloysius touched her arm and she jumped. The music felt like another pair of hands on her, hundreds of hands, and the heat of the room was shooting through her body like a fire. She hadn’t had a drink in seven hours but she felt drunk now.

  She pushed her hand into the crook of Aloysius’s arm. ‘Find us a table,’ she told him as they moved through the crowd. The throbbing bodies separated them and she stood for a moment alone, jostled and pushed in the midst of the dresses and the suits. She turned around and then around again, panicking at his absence, and then she raised a hand, one long black-sleeved arm, and waited for him to find her. A long-fingered hand wound into the air six feet away and she danced towards the sight of it. When she found him she laid one hand on his white-shirted chest and pushed against it as if to test his presence for herself.

  Aloysius covered her hand with his own and they moved together, rocking backwards and forwards until the song had exhausted itself. The heartbeat stopped only for a moment and then the music shifted sideways and the trombones played and a soft rasping Jamaican voice sang, ‘I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you …’ and Aloysius smiled with a kind of surprised wonder and raised her hand to his mouth to kiss her palm. Anna watched him do this and though she felt his mouth on her hand it was the sight of him – his eyes closed, lost in the sensation of the moment – that seduced her. Here was a man who could both think and feel and it occurred to her that such a man would be the kind of man to marry. They stood there, Anna watching Aloysius watching her, lost in the narcissism of desire.

  Anna was the first to break away and, taking his hand, she led him out of the crowd and to
wards the tables. One table stood lonely in the far corner and Anna threw herself into one of the chairs and arranged their coats around her. Aloysius stayed standing, watching the room, allowing a flush of embarrassment to pass. He cleaned his glasses and sat, refusing to look at Anna.

  She leaned across the table and laid her hand on his wrist. ‘Are we okay?’ she asked him.

  Aloysius nodded but said nothing. The music bucked and surged. Aloysius sat up very straight and watched the dancers dance. Anna felt the blood tingle in her face and lips. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to take off his suit jacket and unbutton his shirt. Her fingers moved unconsciously, tracing the rise and fall of the melody, creeping along the lines of a body so real in her imagination she could feel the hardness of the muscle and the line of the ribs.

  Piano keys jangled over a snaking bass line and someone somewhere far away could be heard riffing their way trance-like through ‘Summertime’ as if playing in a dance hall of the undead. Couples moved closer, so close that no darkness could be seen between their bodies, and the room rocked together to a twisting line of syncopated notes. It was, Anna thought, as if the more the music strayed and twisted and confounded them the more they moved together as one, catching at the beat below to guide them, grinding through the strangeness as if hypnotised. She looked at the shiny, open-mouthed faces; they looked like a room of people drugged, high as flying kites on heat and proximity, their hearts tripping and racing just as hers was doing within her chest.