‘I’m Gracie.’
‘Hello, Gracie.’
‘That’s my mummy. Her name’s Orla. What’s your mummy’s name?’
‘My mom’s name was Maria.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘You can call me Lanny if you like.’
‘Okay. I’ve got a bear called Hodge. But he’s at home.’
‘Were you and your mummy coming back from somewhere, Gracie?’
‘We just sit and watch the people and the trains.’
‘I see.’
Orla started to bring things over from the counter. There was a pot of tea with two cups and a glass of milk for Gracie. Gracie shuffled across and Orla sat down with them at the table. Lanny was staring at the table so Orla poured the tea and Gracie added milk very carefully from the little jug.
‘Would you like some sugar?’ Orla asked. ‘You look like you could do with some.’
Lanny nodded and Gracie added sugar and stirred the tea with great solemnity. Then she pushed it gently across the table.
‘I’m not involved in anything shameful, you know,’ Lanny said. ‘I kind of went missing by mistake.’
‘You don’t have to tell us,’ Orla reassured her. ‘It’s your life. If you need a break from things … I can’t imagine what it’s like having everyone staring at you like that. Up on a stage every night.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the work. I like my work.’ Lanny sat and thought about all the things she couldn’t say. ‘Do you know – Orla? yes? – do you know how it is when you realise that one part of your life needs to end and another to begin?’
Orla’s face creased a little. ‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes the ending of one chapter … you want it to be gentle and it isn’t. It feels like setting off a bomb.’
A lady in an apron brought them two plates of toast and an iced finger for Gracie.
‘What d’you say to the lady, Gracie?’ Orla asked.
‘Thank you.’
‘There was this journalist,’ Lanny said. ‘He came to the theatre two weeks ago, talking about Ireland and how I should go there … You’re … I think your accent …’
Orla nodded. ‘I’m Irish. Gracie’s a bit of a mixture.’
‘Mummy calls me a mongrel,’ Gracie said cheerfully.
Orla blushed. ‘In a nice way, darling. Mammy meant it nicely.’
Lanny smiled. ‘You see, I’ve been sick these past two weeks. Liver problems. And all those hours lying in bed … I started thinking that maybe I should follow his advice. Maybe it is time for me to go. And why not Ireland?’
‘I think the question should be: why Ireland?’ Orla said.
‘What’s wrong with Ireland?’
‘I didn’t suit it, that’s all. We’re a bad fit.’
‘But it looks so beautiful. Like a giant wood. Or something from a fairy tale.’
Orla smiled. ‘If you say so.’
‘I think that you could get lost in Ireland and no one would care. No one would ever find you.’
‘That might be true.’
‘Do you think? Do you think you could disappear there?’
‘You or me?’ Orla asked.
‘Well … me. I saw this poster for ferries to Rosslare and I thought maybe I’d just get on one of those. Course I’d need a passport. And I left my passport …’
‘Where?’
‘I think the police have it now. I don’t know … Are they strict? When you take the ferry? Will they want all my papers?’
‘If you’re not Irish or British they will. Me and Gracie would be allowed on with a birth certificate, a driving licence, anything. But you’d need something else.’
Gracie finished her bun and licked the icing off her palms. ‘You can come and stay at our house. If you need somewhere to sleep.’
Lanny found that she was smiling, though it hardly seemed the time. Here in this smoky little room with this mother and her daughter she felt a brisk wave of normality wash over her. How nice it might be not to be Iolanthe Green.
She watched Gracie, gazing upwards at her mother. The baby, if there was still something that could be called a baby, was real to her only for a few seconds at a time. Sometimes she forgot about it. Sometimes it became this awful parasite, trying to eat her from the inside. She imagined holding its little hand. And then she imagined that it had never existed. She both wanted it and didn’t want it; feared it and marvelled at its very existence.
Tears started to spill down Lanny’s cheeks. Gracie stretched a hand across the table and patted Lanny’s fingers but Lanny only drew her hand away, not wishing – in this painful moment of adulthood – to be infantilised by the touch of a child.
‘I want to start again,’ Lanny said. ‘Forty isn’t any age to …’
‘It’s no age to give up,’ Orla said. ‘But then I’m a one to talk. Thirty-two and I’m pretty sure I gave up at twenty-seven. Everything just … You think you’re walking into something beautiful and then the shutters come down. I still find it amazing some days how you become completely imprisoned in your own life. Things that on the surface look so sweet and so benign, they trap you. They pin you down.’
‘You have a lovely baby girl …’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Gracie pointed out.
‘Nothing wrong with Gracie …’ Orla leaned over and kissed her daughter hard. ‘She’s the bit that keeps me going.’
Lanny’s face fell and Orla stopped herself in her tracks. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘this isn’t about me. I forget that. Talking to other adults. I forget the give and take of it. You’re my first adult conversation in two days.’
‘That must be very odd. Not to talk to other adults.’
‘It sends you gently mad, Miss Green. It pickles your brains. Come on,’ Orla said. ‘Come on, Gracie. Let’s move our bottoms. The lady needs something from the pharmacy. Tell me what we’re getting.’
Lanny opened up her handbag. ‘It’s called glutathione. I can give you the bottle to show them. You’ll need to tell them it’s for a friend with an injury to her liver and she’s going away and forgot to get enough pills. I have a five-pound note you can take as well. Are you sure? You don’t mind?’
Orla stood. ‘Not at all. Can you give me twenty minutes or so? The chemist’s shop is a little way from here.’
Orla led her daughter by the hand out of Liverpool Street station and round the southern side. ‘Now, listen. I need to drop you off at Debbie’s house. Just for a couple of hours. I’ll pick you up before tea. Is that okay? Do you want to go and play with the doll’s house?’
‘Okay. Are you going to get the lady her medicine?’
‘Trust me, chickadee. I will sort it all out for her.’
Orla dropped her daughter off on Pindar Street to play at dolls and servants. There were two chemists she could try but she found herself walking instead towards the flat on Sun Street. She stopped outside and looked up at the dirty windows.
Like a bomb, Iolanthe had said. It feels like setting off a bomb.
She had felt so trapped back home in Ireland, so out of place. London had felt like freedom itself – everyone here was an oddity and a misfit, abnormal was the norm. She had thought that by marrying in London, by having her child here, she would escape the isolation and confinement that her own mother had clearly felt. But then the walls had come down around her. And Brennan and she had gone from two people who said everything to each other to two people who never spoke a word of truth.
Shopping, cooking, ministering to Gracie. It didn’t matter how much you loved your child: it was hard. She missed her work. She missed her friends. I have no adults in my life, she thought. I wanted Gracie to be my little love but now she is my everything.
Back in the buffet, Lanny sat and tore her toast into pieces. She didn’t have much of an appetite after all and her stomach hurt. As the time passed and Orla didn’t return she started to wonder if she’d made some sort of awful mistake. She gathered her things i
nto her handbag but her legs felt heavy and she couldn’t find the strength to move. Where was she going anyway? Did she really have to do all this alone?
More than an hour had passed when the buffet door opened and Orla’s shape appeared. She hurried to Lanny’s table and sat down opposite her. In one hand she held a white paper bag and in the other a little dark blue book.
‘I got your pills. They let me have twenty-four – emergency supply. Said you had to go back to your doctor.’
‘I didn’t think you were coming back.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I had to drop Gracie off with someone. I brought you something else.’
Orla pushed the little book across the table. ‘I want you to have it. It’s got another six years to go.’
Lanny opened the cover. There was a small, slightly blurry black and white photograph of Orla. Her birth date. Her place of birth.
‘Orla Jane Hayes,’ Lanny read. ‘This is … This is your passport.’
‘I’m giving it to you. So you can be me. If you want. If you need. Our colouring is close enough, face shape. You even have some freckles. You’d need to cut your hair, maybe … And be careful how you used it. But they’ll glance at it for two seconds at the port and then you’ll be in.’
‘But what if you need it?’
‘I’ll say I lost it. I can apply for another if I have to. Look. I know you don’t know me. Not really at all. But I want to do this. You’re making me jump. I want to jump.’
Lanny fondled the little book.
‘You can do anything with it you want,’ Orla told her. ‘You can go back to America. You can cross to Ireland. You can start up a new life. Bank accounts in my name, maybe. I can go back to being Orla Keane. It won’t hurt me, Iolanthe. It won’t hurt me. It’s a gift.’
Lanny shook her head. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t say anything. Just take it. We’ve got your pills. We’ve got a passport. I can go and draw money out for you if you like …’
‘Wait!’ Lanny pleaded. ‘Wait! I’m not ready. Please. We need to figure this all out.’
***
When Hayes returned to his little flat that night it was already after nine. He stood in the living room and listened for the sounds of Orla moving around but heard nothing. He checked the sofa but she wasn’t there and her quilt was still in its cubbyhole. In the kitchen a piece of paper was propped against a bottle of squash. He picked it up.
We’ve gone. I am doing this for myself but also for Gracie. She has a right to a happy mother. I am not a happy mother.
In a way, it’s not your fault. This was a disaster we both made. At least Gracie came out of it.
When we are settled I will write to you so you know that Gracie is well. I’ll get her to do you a picture. When she’s better with her letters she can write to you as well.
I’ve taken as little as I can. I hope you have everything you need. Sorry. Try not to hate us.
Orla
A Chill Night on the Steps
Thursday, 11 November
Brennan sat at the kitchen table for a long time. He thought of Gracie’s bed upstairs, empty of Gracie now and in the future. His bones felt cold.
He ate some slices of bread and cheese, put on his overcoat and left the house. It had snowed again and the pavements were pristine white, stretching out before him like white lines drawn on a dark map. The air in Sun Street was excessively cold and a wind whipped against his face, burning his eyes and nose so that he briefly retreated into his own doorway and wondered what to do.
He couldn’t think about finding them tonight. His head was scrambled with the immensity of what was happening. He hated her. He hated Orla. He wanted to find her and hurt her and he knew he wasn’t allowed to do that. He had to walk away the anger. To channel it into something worthwhile. He thought about James Wingate sitting in that saloon bar this afternoon on Fleet Street and feeding him little pieces of poison about Iolanthe. And then he thought about Delbert and his account of Iolanthe’s ‘madness’. ‘Said she’d had it off with journalists, with anyone …’
Wingate had said something about heading for his club to round out the evening. Hayes set off.
***
In a large rose-wallpaper-covered room in Clacton Anna lay under a quilt fully dressed and watched the shape of Aloysius who lay in a long, dark, knobbly line on some cushions on the floor. Like a fallen branch in a forest, she thought to herself.
‘You need to sleep,’ she told him.
‘I can’t,’ came the tired reply.
‘We’ll find a way of leaving her some money in the morning,’ Anna said.
‘Do you think that will keep us out of hell?’
‘I think the non-existence of hell will keep us out of hell,’ she countered, though she felt oddly crushed by the kindness of the landlady and her own mismatched deceit.
‘My mother doesn’t believe in hell either,’ Aloysius said. ‘She says a kind God is a kind God. And you can’t throw hell into the mix or she’ll stop believing.’
‘What about you, Reverend Weathers? Do you believe?’
Aloysius sighed. ‘I think there is a thing called goodness that is larger than us. And I think that some people call goodness God. And some people call it goodness. And some people lead lives so terrible that they never get to believe in good at all. I am thirty and that is as far as I have got.’
‘Will you know if there’s a God when you’re forty?’ Anna asked, only half joking.
‘I’ve no idea. I used to think you did all your learning in school. And when you came out at eighteen or twenty-one that was it. You were all filled up.’
‘I was an idiot at eighteen,’ Anna noted. ‘Though I didn’t know it then. Now I’m not sure about any of it. I feel like I’m a grown-up. I feel educated. But I have this creeping worry that I’ll get to fifty and realise that thirty-year-old Anna was a moron.’
‘What about seventy-year-old Anna? What will she think of that baby of fifty?’
‘She’ll probably find her frighteningly naive. Ottmar says it never stops. Learning, experience. It never stops. And yet we are all meant to go to university and choose our careers and our husbands and have our children …’ Anna stopped in her tracks.
Aloysius waited patiently for her to go on but instead Anna lay back upon the bed in silence. Aloysius crept across the floor on his hands and knees. He waited for Anna to signal to him that he could climb onto the bed but she just lay on her back, her breathing unsteady.
Aloysius rose and seated himself carefully on the edge of the bed so she would not mistake his intention. He put one arm on her shoulder. Anna rolled onto her side and drew him towards her. They lay together on the bed, nose to nose and knee to knee.
‘Some nights,’ she told him, ‘I feel as if I’m disappearing. I wake, I work, I eat, I sleep. Nothing connects me to anything. Nothing anchors me. No family, no great career. I could disappear tomorrow, like Iolanthe. But not because of a pregnancy or illness or anything like that. I feel like I could disappear because I’m not real to other people.’
Aloysius smiled at her in the darkness. ‘I think you’re real,’ he whispered. ‘You’re real to me.’
Anna cried a little in silence and Aloysius kissed her forehead. She curled a hand around his cheek, to feel him, to know that he was there. And then she slept.
Aloysius lay awake and stared at her face in the darkness. Why did you leave me in the police station? he wondered. And will you leave me like that again? I’m coming apart, he told himself, but she doesn’t know that. Maybe if she doesn’t know who I really am then she can hold me all together.
***
In the darkness of the Alabora after midnight Ottmar sat and watched the lights move down Shaftesbury Avenue. Samira was home. Ekin was heartbroken. Which was greater, he wondered: the weight of shame at Samira’s disgrace or the joy and relief at her safe delivery home? And did it even matter? In a couple of days it would be part of the blur.
<
br /> ***
Detective Sergeant Hayes reached Fleet Street at half past eleven and decided to ask at the offices of The Times. The young receptionist was reading a paperback Christie and biting her nails.
‘Detective Sergeant Hayes. Metropolitan Police. I don’t know if you remember – I was here earlier with James Wingate.’
‘Different shift I’m afraid, sir. I would have been older and more of a man, probably.’
‘Right. Sorry. Would you happen to know where Wingate is now? He wandered off talking about a club.’
‘He isn’t in the offices now, sir. He might be in again tomorrow lunchtime. Would you like me to leave a note?’
‘I really need to talk to him tonight. It’s a police matter. Which club is he a member of?’
‘I believe he goes to The Rag, sir.’
‘The Rag?’
‘The Army and Navy.’
‘Is that on Pall Mall?’
‘Big modern building, sir. On the corner of St James’s Square. You can’t miss it. It sort of sticks out.’
Hayes set off towards Pall Mall but he found himself wondering if Anna or anyone else had rung him since he went off shift. So he veered north at Charing Cross Road and ended up in the warm foyer of Savile Row where the desk sergeant seemed to be melting into sleep on top of the log book.
‘Have I had any calls?’ Hayes asked.
‘What? You’re not on shift, sir. You clocked out hours ago.’
‘I’m back. It’s the Green case. It won’t quite lie down and go to sleep. Any calls?’
‘Not at the desk, sir.’
‘Well, sign me back in please. I’m going to check the office.’
The office was mostly dark, though Knight was still up and reading some vast sheaf of notes in his little corner cubicle. A note on Hayes’ desk read:
Nathaniel Green called. American. Naval Library. Annapolice. Sp?? Asked you call back. Says you have number. Going home now. June.
Hayes found the number in his notes.
‘Naval Library. Good evening.’
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 24
