Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  ‘Well?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Right. Okay. So. The thing is … I’m going to have to drive to Wales.’

  ‘I … What? You’re driving to Wales?’

  ‘A woman in the ticket office remembers a woman in a black coat and heels with lots of curly hair who fell on the concourse yesterday. She was helped by another woman who then also helped her to buy a train ticket to Fishguard so she could connect with the ferry to Rosslare. So I looked at the train and the ferry times and the earliest ferry to Ireland she could be on is the one leaving tomorrow lunchtime. So that’s where we need to be. Fishguard. That’s where Iolanthe is right now.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sergeant, but could we not just ring the police in Fishguard?’ Aloysius ventured bravely from the back.

  Hayes didn’t even turn to look at him. ‘I don’t want her being set upon by some random uniformed officer. She’s in a delicate enough state as it is. I think we have a chance to bring her home, gently, with her agreement. If she crosses into Ireland that’s a whole other police force to deal with. And after the call to her brother … I’m not even convinced she’s safe from herself. I think she just needs a good friend right now. And in the absence of a good friend I’m hoping that Anna will do the trick.’

  Anna wasn’t sure how to take the last remark so instead she simply checked again. ‘You’re driving to Wales?’

  Hayes handed her the book he was carrying. ‘I bought a road map of Britain.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Can you navigate?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘First things first. Petrol.’ Hayes fired the engine and released the clutch.

  ***

  The passengers in Sergeant Hayes’ panda car sat in virtual silence, interrupted only by the odd direction from Anna. Aloysius stared at Wingate and at the back of Anna’s head. Nobody seemed to be challenging the complete insanity of a policeman driving a random selection of people hundreds of miles out of his jurisdiction. Perhaps, he thought, British policing was entirely eccentric. Perhaps it operated quite separately to the rule of law. There was a kind of amateurism about the whole affair which made him wonder how greatly he should be afraid of being made an informant. Did the strange behaviour of the English police make them more or less dangerous? He really couldn’t tell.

  Anna navigated as best she could. She’d barely been in a car the past ten years and certainly never read a road map. As they headed out of London and onto the byways of the Home Counties she started to wonder if Hayes had lost his mind. He seemed to be sweating quite profusely, almost as if he had a fever, and she found herself watching him carefully. When they passed a lorry outside Reading she imagined for a moment he might be about to turn the wheel into its path. A profound tension ran through him, an air of violence and of misery. Once or twice she allowed herself a glance into the back of the car. She caught Aloysius’s eye and they exchanged a look of utter bemusement that the day had taken this turn.

  They were past Swindon when Wingate woke with a great howl of pain. He rolled from the back seat and curled into an anguished ball on the cramped floor of the car.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Hayes shouted back to Aloysius.

  ‘I’ve no idea. He just rolled onto the floor. Is he ill?’

  ‘He’s drunk. Dead drunk. Or at least he was. He hasn’t been conscious or awake since three this morning.’

  ‘Should we take him to a hospital?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No. He just needs to come round,’ Hayes said, an edge of steel in his voice.

  ‘Look, I don’t mean to ask silly questions,’ Anna said, ‘but why are we taking the poor man to Wales?’

  ‘Because I’m pretty sure he’s the father of the baby.’

  ‘Of Lanny’s baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she got rid of the baby. Or wanted to. Why on earth would she want to see him?’

  ‘I’m not going to show him to her. I’m just waiting to question him more closely.’

  Wingate moaned and doubled up violently. ‘Has he seen a doctor?’ Anna asked.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Hayes snapped. ‘Just leave him alone. He’ll soon pull out of it.’

  Aloysius gave Anna a look of such deep disgust that she briefly wondered if she was implicated in it as well. Then he crossed his arms, adjusted his coat and sat back to stare out of the window and pretend that he was somewhere else entirely.

  Wingate’s body eventually slackened and he pulled himself upright and back into his seat. He glanced very briefly at Aloysius.

  ‘Do you have any aspirin?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t,’ Aloysius replied and went back to staring out of the window. Wingate gazed for a while at the back of Hayes’ head and then at the road in front of them. Everyone else in the car seemed to be taking it for granted that they were all meant to be there. His head banged violently and his guts felt like they were weeping blood. He tucked his head into a corner between the door and the seat back and soon began to snore.

  As they passed an inn just north of Chepstow, Hayes pulled the car into the little space beyond the verge.

  ‘Rest break,’ he announced, took the keys out of the ignition, got out and marched towards the pub. It was two o’clock. Wingate snored. Anna turned and looked at Aloysius.

  ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ she asked quite softly.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to come.’

  ‘Do you need to go to the …’

  Aloysius did but he didn’t really want to find himself alone in a bathroom with Sergeant Hayes.

  When Hayes returned Anna and Aloysius were walking up and down the verge. ‘I said I was the police and they offered to do us some sandwiches. Anyone want sandwiches?’

  Anna and Aloysius mumbled their agreement. Hayes eyed Aloysius rather beadily. ‘I need someone to stay with Wingate and I’m afraid you’re it. You can use the lavatory if you like. And then we’ll bring you something out when we’re finished.’

  Anna opened her mouth to speak but Aloysius had already set off towards the pub, striding with a kind of ferocity that suggested he didn’t really want to talk about anything right now. Anna followed Hayes into the bar and let him choose a table by the window. The pub was pleasantly warm and the windows quite fogged against the cold exterior. They shrugged off their coats.

  Anna sat in silence. They were in Wales, land of her almost-childhood. She hadn’t been in Wales for eleven years. She scratched at the back of her hands.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that, you know. You’ll damage the skin,’ Hayes said. Anna slid her hands under the table. The barman brought them over a pint and a half of bitter. ‘No charge,’ he said and winked at Hayes.

  Hayes raised his glass as if to toast, and slightly unwillingly Anna raised hers too.

  ‘Your health,’ he said. The glasses clunked against each other. They were brought two plates piled high with sandwiches, fish paste and meat paste and ham and cheese and egg. Anna carefully divided her sandwiches in two and saved one half of each for Aloysius. Then they ate in silence.

  Hayes drained the end of his pint and ordered another. ‘Just to keep me going,’ he told the barman. Anna sat and watched him drink. There was something off about him. He was not the Sergeant Hayes she had met earlier in the week. He seemed unsteady, perhaps a little mad.

  Hayes finished the second pint quickly then, his fingers shaking, he reached out across the table and laid one hand on top of Anna’s. Anna pulled away but Hayes tightened his grip. When he opened his mouth to speak his voice had changed, his Northern Irish tones had started to break back in, unfurling in the spaces.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful.’

  ‘Please let go of my hand,’ Anna said. Hayes’ eyes were pink and moist with tears.

  ‘That man’s no good. I don’t just mean … the colour of him. I mean you’re better than that. Smarter. You stuck your neck out to find Green. You’re a truly good person, Anna. I think you should be with a good person too.’

&nbs
p; ‘Could you please let go of my hand,’ Anna said, speaking slowly and carefully.

  ‘I only want to tell you … that I have a great deal of admiration for you. And if you should ever need a friend … or a champion …’

  ‘If you don’t let go of my hand I will scream,’ Anna said. She had had more than she was prepared to take of Hayes’ lunacy. He had no right to touch her. He had no right to complicate an already quite insane situation. Hayes’ fingers sprang up. Anna pulled her hands away and hid them under the table.

  ‘Sergeant Hayes – Barnaby – I am here for Iolanthe. Not for anyone else. I don’t need a friend or a champion. I have a friend. He’s sitting in the back of your car with his face in pieces. Now, I’m going to take him some lunch. When you’re ready to come back and join us we’ll be waiting for you.’ And Anna swept up the remaining sandwiches and walked out of the pub.

  Left alone, Hayes rubbed at his wet face with his hands. ‘My wife is gone,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘and I’m not even looking for her.’

  Anna

  ‘Discuss the symbolism of the house itself in Howard’s End.’

  Anna stared out of the window at cars passing slowly down Stanwell Road. It was July but the sky glowered as if it were October. A grey summer day on the South Wales riviera. Women in wide woollen coats and neat little hats walked the pavements slowly and sedately, handbags swinging from elbows, handkerchiefs stuffed into pockets against the threat of a summer cold. Off they go, Anna thought, to tea with the women from the WI or rummy at the Conservative Club, choosing lamb at the butcher and carrots at the greengrocer, picking up David and Ruth from school at four, then husband home from Cardiff at ten to six, dinner on the table at half past, pinny on, pinny off, a plastic tablecloth hemmed by hand. Lamb on the bone, roast potatoes, boiled carrots, peas; The Frankie Howerd Show at five past nine, unless Father found it too risqué. A life for a woman who hadn’t been to Oxford; a life for a woman who had chosen to procreate.

  ‘In writing Julius Caesar was William Shakespeare concerned with portraying ancient Rome or sixteenth-century England?’

  Her mother had brought the papers to the mother and baby home on her last visit. Old Oxford entrance papers for ’49 and ’50. Anna was due to sit the exam in two months. The plan as it had been presented to her was that she would have the baby, then she would be given two weeks’ recovery time and return to school exactly ten days before the exam. This meant her revision had to be complete before she went into labour.

  Her mother had passed on a message from her father: ‘Do some test essays. A couple a day and post them home to me. Then I can mark them and return them.’

  Anna had absolutely no intention of writing practice essays. But then she had had very little intention of giving up her child. It’s not that she terribly wanted a child; she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother at all and certainly not at the ludicrous age of seventeen. But she was horrified at the thought of someone else being allowed to bring up the baby badly.

  She lay awake at night and imagined some red-faced housewife in a dirty apron slapping her child and shouting at him. The nurses told her not to be silly: ‘Why do you think we’d give the child to someone cruel? The child will go to a lovely home, maybe even to people who can’t have babies of their own. You’ll be giving them a gift.’

  All the same she was determined that her child was not to be mistreated. She had composed a letter, sitting up after everyone had gone to bed, writing by the light of a torch.

  To the new mother and father of my child,

  Please love this child as I would have loved them. Please treat them with gentleness and respect. Please never hit them or humiliate them. Please hold them when they are scared or hurt. Please do not send them away to school or give them up in any way – they will find it hard enough to be given up this once. Please let them read all the books they want to. Please let them ask questions and be tolerant of their mistakes. Please take them to the cinema if you are able. Please let them eat cake sometimes. Please tell them they were made out of love and do not let them imagine anything awful about their origins. Please tell them that their father and their mother were very young and meant no harm to anybody. Please tell them that I will never have another child and that they will always hold a unique place in my heart.

  From Anna, their first mother

  ‘How do Milton’s Latinisms affect the immediacy of his message in Paradise Lost?’

  Of course she did still want to go to Oxford but her parents seemed to think they could tuck this child into a box and slide it away somewhere out of sight. They reacted to her pregnancy much as one would if one’s daughter developed terrible hay fever in the run-up to her exams. They took her to the doctor. They sought out the best advice. In the absence of options to remove the child entirely from Anna’s system they came up with a plan of action to move it instead to one side. Anna’s path must not be blocked. Anna’s dreams must not be denied. Anna was their best-prized sailing ship and they were blowing her towards a brighter land.

  She had tried and failed on more than one occasion to write to Ben. He had been expelled from school in disgrace as soon as the relationship had been found out. Both children had been told in no uncertain terms that they were not to see each other.

  ‘He’s not exactly destined for Oxford,’ the headmaster had reassured her parents. ‘He’s no chance at all of following Anna there. I’ve asked his parents to make it very clear to him that he is not to bother her again.’

  ***

  On Friday a letter arrived from her father.

  Dearest Anna,

  No essays yet. Are you feeling sick again? Please don’t worry that I will mind marking them. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want only to help you, my darling one.

  I spend four hours of every day marking at the moment. You mother suggested that we might find the extra money for all this summer’s expenses by taking on extra marking from the schools. I am now marking papers for subjects I don’t even teach. Most nerve-wracking. What do I know of Homer? Possibly more now than I did before marking all these scripts.

  Write to us soon, dear one, and just one or two essays. It will take your mind off it all. Eyes on the goal, my darling, eyes on the goal.

  Your loving Papa

  But was he her loving Papa? He still talked as if he was but his actions spoke of something different, something steely and determined. Was it he who had first decided that they would give the child away?

  Time. She wished she had more time. Decisions of this kind demand a lot of time.

  All that afternoon Anna sat by the window, as the strange bundle of limbs inside her shifted uncomfortably about, and she wondered if it were even possible that she could reply to her father. Did she have anything to say to him that wouldn’t sound out her pain or hatred?

  She thought back to the first letter she could ever remember writing. She had been six years old and her father had been in his third year of internment on the Isle of Man. She and her mother had taken a room in a boarding house on Anglesey, her mother having only escaped internment by volunteering both as a music teacher to the deluge of evacuees on the island and as a part-time engineer’s assistant at the RAF base to the west. When the bombs fell on Holyhead they thanked their lucky stars they had taken lodging in the leafy interior. But Anna lay awake at night fearful that German planes were thoughtlessly bombing her papa and believing that if she only stayed awake and thought of him then he would stay safe.

  ‘Father, he is on one little island,’ her mother had once told her, ‘and we are on another just below. At night we will think beautiful thoughts and send them to him across the ocean and they will move most speedily because there is nothing in their way but seabirds and mist.’ It was perhaps the most poetic thing her mother ever said and Anna wondered in retrospect if she had spent a long time formulating the words.

  For the Christmas of ’43 her mother had given her a writing set, with very thin pieces of pa
per and a yellow pencil decorated with flowers. ‘Write Daddy something,’ she told Anna. ‘Make his heart swell large.’

  ‘Lieber Papa,’ Anna wrote. ‘Wir haben Dich lieb und Du fehlst uns. Gibt es viele Vögel auf Deiner Insel? Kannst Du einige Stückchen Deiner Liebe an die Vögel binden und zu uns schicken? Wir sind nämlich ein bisschen traurig hier so ohne Dich und Deine Liebe. Dein Bart fehlt mir. Anna.’

  Dear Daddy. We love you and we miss you. Are there lots of birds on your island? Will you tie your love to them in pieces and send it home to us? We have become a bit sad without it here. I miss your beard. Anna

  The cars rolled past the window of her bedroom in the home. She would have liked to walk into town, she knew there was a library just out of sight, but she had been discouraged from mingling with the wider community.

  She thought back to her father and his time in the camp on Hutchinson Square. No. It was too crass a comparison to make. She hadn’t been interned. She was just … She reached for the right words. Confined for her own benefit? Imprisoned in a web of love? She made herself laugh despite it all. How ridiculous these grown-ups were. How misguided their priorities. Still, though … All the same … How exactly was she to escape?

  Such a Small Person to Mean All the World

  Friday, 12 November

  In London, it was the quiet time between lunch and dinner. Two ladies sat at a table by the window and nursed cups of tea. Long tweed skirts, thick knitted cardigans, handbags neatly placed by chairs. Ottmar watched them, missing his mother.

  From a door in the street, outside the cafe window, a figure emerged in a black overcoat. From the colour of her hair he could see it was Samira. Ottmar watched her step off the kerb and walk down the centre of the quiet road. He thought of Iolanthe waving goodbye to Anna in those newspaper reports.