Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  ‘Really? Did you like any of them?’

  ‘I think I fell into a kind of crazy sadness and I thought I could fuck my way out of it. And I’m pretty sure you can’t do that. Fuck your way out of things. So much chaos, Anna. So much destruction. I’ve been spinning in circles.’ Lanny’s voice got fainter. ‘Spinning …’ She fell silent.

  Saturday, 13 November

  It was still dark when Anna was woken by banging at her door. Outside in the dimly lit corridor stood Hayes, dressed for the outside, clutching his hat against him.

  ‘Is she in there?’

  ‘What?’

  Hayes walked straight past Anna, fumbled against the walls by the door and found the light switch. The room, when illuminated, showed two empty beds.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Anna stared about her then she walked to the bathroom. No Lanny. No sign of Iolanthe. We did find her, didn’t we? she asked herself. I didn’t dream it all?

  ‘Where is she?’ Hayes asked again.

  ‘I have no idea. What time is it?’

  ‘It’s half past seven.’

  ‘Maybe she’s gone to breakfast.’

  ‘There’s a woman’s handbag lying on a beach by the harbour in the lower town.’

  Anna’s eyes searched the room for Lanny’s handbag. She couldn’t see it.

  ‘I don’t understand. Where d’you think she’s gone?’

  ‘I think she’s gone into the harbour. I think she’s drowned.’ Anna tried to absorb this utterly discordant new idea.

  ‘I have to go back into the town,’ Hayes told her, ‘and you need to come with me.’

  ‘Okay. Just give me one minute and I’ll be with you in the lobby.’ Anna picked up her key, her coat and her shoes and hurried down the corridor.

  Of course, Hayes thought. Of course she would go and fetch him first.

  A very grave-faced Aloysius ran alongside Anna down the stairs and with Hayes they set off into the dark outside the hotel. Hayes drove them past the railway station, where a steady stream of worker bees hurried towards their train, over the hump of the upper town and down into the lower. After a couple of minutes travelling in silence Hayes managed to summon his policeman’s voice.

  ‘Last night, as a matter of courtesy I phoned the local police and informed them that I was in town and of the reason for this visit. This morning at half past six the night porter wakes me to tell me that the local station is trying to reach me on the reception phone.

  ‘A fisherman had gone down to the little harbour to check on his boat and he’d seen a person standing on the steps by the beach in the darkness looking out to sea. He thought it was a woman because she had a great mass of curly hair. On his way back up from his mooring he decided to make his way across and check that she was okay. He found a woman’s handbag lying on the beach but no sign of the woman at all. She’d just disappeared. He didn’t hear anyone go into the water but then he’d climbed aboard his boat and checked the inside for a couple of minutes so he says he probably missed it then.’

  Anna found herself both relieved and surprised at Hayes’ naivety. ‘But why d’you assume she went in the water? She might just have forgotten her handbag.’

  ‘There’s a letter.’

  ‘What kind of letter?’ Anna asked.

  ‘A letter addressed to you.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘We don’t know. The local police have it. I need you to come and open it.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Anna and Aloysius’s hand found hers across the darkness of the back seat of the car. Outside, the sky at the horizon was turning from deepest blue to pink. It was starting to get light.

  The local police officer was a man called Iolo Gordon who they found standing with a crowd of locals all discussing the possible fate of the ‘poor girl’. One of the fishermen was in tears and was being comforted by a woman who wore a great grey knitted shawl tied about her waist with a dressing-gown cord. Anna wondered where she had seen this before and some part of her mind pulled up an image of the homeless men asleep on the benches in Savile Row, bags around their feet, blankets bound to their waists. She looked at the calm, still water of the harbour. She remembered Aloysius’s face. All that blood. Her stomach turned.

  A man handed her an envelope. She opened it and stared at the page and then her mouth opened but no sound came out. Someone must have taken the paper from her because a voice close by to her – which might well have been Aloysius’s – read some words aloud:

  ‘“Dear Anna, I have so much to ask forgiveness for. Too much for such a little time of knowing you. But life is all uneven. I think we both know that.

  ‘“I have a favour to ask you. Last favour, I promise. Will you see that Nat is left undisturbed? Make sure he has moved his money sensibly. Help him do it if need be. I have asked Mr Wingate to help me too. But you don’t have to bother yourself with him.

  ‘“I hope you and the Aloysius man are happy. I like to think of you having somebody after all. Have the best life you can manage, Anna. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like any of the pictures in your head. Sorry for the heartache, Lanny Green.”’

  Down at the harbour’s edge, somebody had sat Anna down on a low stone wall. Somebody else had squeezed her shoulder. Time passed. Everything was quite peaceful inside the silence, she observed. Aloysius came and sat beside her but she couldn’t hear what he was saying and after a while he just gave up and went away. Someone in a black diver’s suit waded into the water in front of them and started to swim around.

  In the bedroom of the inn, Orla sat on the window seat and watched her husband take charge of the scene. Iolanthe had rung her last night to explain that she couldn’t come back to the room. She’d warned her that a policeman from London was with her and of course Orla had wondered if it might be Brennan. How predictable, she thought to herself, that her husband should be fifty yards away and yet quite oblivious to her presence. And what were they all doing anyway, crowding round on that tiny piece of beach, peering into the water?

  How considerate he looked, bending over to talk to the pale young lady, putting an arm around a weeping man. Behind her on the floor, Gracie played with her dolls, making a hospital for them to run under the bed. He’s a good man when he’s not with me, Orla thought.

  Her father had been a dairy farmer and very clear in his priorities. ‘Work, Orla, is not a pleasure or a privilege. The rich will tell you that it is but that’s because they never do any. People first. Every time, my darling. Your children and then your spouse and then your parents and then the rest of all the world. Work is what we need to feed the family. But let it into your heart and there’ll be no more room to spare.’

  How was it that Brennan could put his arm around a stranger but when she had knelt before him, in the early days of Gracie, crying so hard she couldn’t speak, he just stood there looking terrified? It’s odd, she thought, how men seem to think the act of providing is an act of love – equal to affection, comfort and support. I haven’t lost him, she told herself. He just wasn’t who I thought he was at all.

  An aching sadness passed through her all the same. She looked at Gracie. I am still alone, she thought. She tugged the nets down so she could no longer see her husband’s face.

  ‘Do you want to be the patient?’ Gracie asked her.

  ‘Yes, darling. I’ll be your patient.’

  ‘Your leg’s broken.’

  ‘Is it, now?’

  ‘Yes. Lie down on the carpet, please. We’re going to chop it off.’

  Outside, on the beach, a uniformed policeman led Anna to a car and drove her back to the Fishguard Bay Hotel. A member of staff ushered her into a quiet, empty salon and sat her down with a view of the sea. Someone else brought her a cup of tea but when she put out a hand to drink it, it had gone quite cold. A ferry sailed away in the distance. People asked her questions but got no reply.

  The Anna inside her head remarked to the Anna of her body that the peacefulness was actually
rather pleasant. Not happy, of course. The happiness had been removed from everything, quite possibly the world itself. But the silence was strangely bearable, if very slow and viscous like sinking into treacle. Things that would not normally have any texture at all, like oxygen and time and mortality were nubbly and fuzzy and discernible. She felt immensely present on the earth. But the earth had changed its nature all around her.

  I failed her, she thought. I didn’t want her enough, didn’t love her enough. That’s why she went.

  I should have told her that I understood that panic, that need to be alone again in your own body.

  I was in the same room as her but I left her on her own. I didn’t mean to make her lonely. Oh God, Lanny, I didn’t mean to make you lonely.

  At two o’clock, just as people were filing out of the dining room from lunch, Aloysius returned to the hotel. He found Anna, her face washed of character. She stared out to sea, glassy-eyed. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his but she didn’t turn. He squeezed her fingers and her mouth wrinkled slightly.

  Aloysius leaned his head very close to Anna’s and whispered softly: ‘You have to come with me. Very quietly. Right now.’

  She turned to him, blinking her confusion, and he started to help her up before she was even ready.

  ‘I’m so tired. I can’t hear properly.’

  ‘Lean on me,’ he said and threaded a long arm round her waist.

  They walked together, a little unsteadily, down the steps of the hotel and turned away from town, down a path that ran through some trees and then down to the port.

  The cold air and the movement woke Anna a little from her trance. She’d come out without her coat. She stopped them both and pulled away; Aloysius’s face – very nearly the right shape again – was nonetheless unreadable. ‘Hang on. Wait. It’s too cold. I don’t know where we’re going.’ Aloysius smiled and took off his coat. She accepted it without a word.

  ‘If I was a more nervous man, I might feel that my role in this relationship was to take off my clothes and hand them to you.’ Aloysius smiled at her and his smile had in it more than a small amount of flirtation.

  ‘Do you understand …’ Anna’s voice was swollen with fury. ‘Do you understand that Lanny is dead?’

  Aloysius held up both his hands. Then he literally bowed to her, there on the path, in his stained suit. ‘I am sorry beyond words,’ he told her. ‘I had forgotten that one of us was still in grief.’ He laid a hand on his chest. ‘I have something very beautiful to show you.’ He walked a few steps down the path and Anna followed him, speechless, numb.

  Aloysius led her a little way up a grassy verge, along the side of the port and around a couple of cement buildings from which the dockers came and went. He pressed a finger to his mouth to tell Anna that they were not to speak. At the end of a concrete path there lay a building of wood and brick painted with the faded message ‘Public Lavatories’. There were three blue painted doors, one for men, one for ladies, and the third without a sign on it. Aloysius knocked softly at the unmarked door and it opened almost immediately to show a young woman wrapped in a blue spotted overall carrying a dustpan and brush.

  ‘Megan, this is the lady I told you about.’

  Megan placed the dustpan and brush carefully on the floor and wiped her hands vigorously on her apron.

  ‘Morning, miss. Your friend here told me the tale. He said you’d be back to see.’

  ‘To see what?’

  Megan started towards the ladies and beckoned for Anna to follow her inside. The room was tiled white and green inside and there were three cubicles and a row of handbasins. The cubicle in the middle showed a little paper sign:

  Out of order. Apologies of Manajement.

  ‘Your friend said I wasn’t allowed to clean it or let anybody in till he brought you back to see.’

  Megan pushed open the door of the middle cubicle and gestured to the toilet inside. The cubicle floor and the toilet bowl and indeed every white surface the eye could see was covered in tiny wisps of black. Anna stared at it and then at Megan.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s hair, miss. A giant storm of hair. It’s going to be a nightmare to clear up. Sticks to everything, hair does.’

  ‘But … Okay. So … Do you know when it … how it …’ Anna could see Aloysius’s thinking but there wasn’t strength enough in this to convince her Iolanthe was alive.

  ‘Your friend came down here an hour ago, about half an hour after the lunchtime boat sailed and he was asking some dock hands if they’d seen this woman, lots of black hair. And I said to him that there had been a woman came in here an hour before the boat with a shiny headscarf on, looking quite posh. And she’d been in here ages and I’d been in here too ’cause I was cleaning. And after twenty minutes I gave her a knock and asked if she was ill. Because we’re meant to do that if people go in and don’t come out. And she says, ‘No, no, not ill.’ Anyway, she comes out a few minutes later and the shiny scarf is tied round her neck and she’s got really short hair, like those boy haircuts, you know. And she says sorry and hurries out and doesn’t even do her hands. Anyway, ten minutes later a lady comes and knocks and complains that the middle toilet is disgusting and I should clean it. But I didn’t get around to it because then the boat sailed and no one else will be using them for ages.’

  ‘What did the woman look like?’

  ‘She was a bit shorter than you, thin, her skin was quite yellow. She looked like a posh teacher, a shop owner. Someone a bit fancy.’

  Anna leaned against the door frame of the toilet cubicle. Her mind chattered nervously inside her head but she was too tired to hear what it was saying to her.

  ‘And she got on the boat?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see her, miss. But she was with that crowd.’

  Anna blew out her cheeks and let her mind whir for a minute. Then she spoke. ‘You utter shit.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Not you.’ Anna walked outside to Aloysius who was waiting for her with eyebrows raised.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Utter shit.’

  His face fell. ‘You were meant to be happy.’

  Anna set off back towards the hotel without a word.

  Aloysius waved goodbye to Megan and walked behind Anna, watching her long legs stride across the concrete.

  A man in a security guard’s outfit noticed them. ‘Excuse me, miss. Can I help you?’ he called.

  ‘No you can’t!’ Anna shot back and kept walking.

  Aloysius smiled apologetically at the guard. ‘We’re having a bit of a bad day, sir,’ he told him. ‘She didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘I bloody did,’ Anna muttered and veered to the side of the path solely for the purpose of being able to kick the stones. They climbed the path back to the hotel, Aloysius at the rear, before Anna paused on the tree-lined avenue, wrapped the borrowed coat tight around her and stared out to sea.

  Aloysius hovered at a distance. ‘I thought you’d be more pleased.’

  Anna didn’t turn. ‘I am pleased,’ she said, though she didn’t sound it.

  ‘We found her,’ Aloysius whispered, fearing to have this moment of triumph spirited away.

  Anna ignored him, lost in her own thoughts. ‘She could have confided in me last night. Bloody hell, Lanny!’ she shouted, as if her voice might be able to reach across the sea. ‘Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?’

  ‘What are we going to tell Hayes?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Let her go. Let her go if that’s what she wants. It’s not as if we can tell him about Hen because I promised the daughter. We can’t tell him about Geri. We can’t tell him about Dr Jones …’ Aloysius winced.

  Anna turned to him now, her face furrowed. ‘I didn’t tell you the truth.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Lanny. She was black. Black mother, white father. Hayes told me and I never said.’

  Aloysius thought about this. ‘Does it matter?’

&n
bsp; ‘I’m not good at saying things.’

  ‘Did you mean any harm by it?’ His eyes searched hers.

  A look of confusion passed over Anna’s face. ‘My name isn’t Anna Treadway.’

  Aloysius put his head to one side, listening.

  ‘My real name is Anna Wolf. Or it used to be.’

  Aloysius smiled at her, both puzzled and touched by her confidences.

  ‘And I shouldn’t have left you at the police station,’ she went on. ‘I’m afraid I’m something of a coward.’

  Aloysius thought about this. Now would be the moment to speak. To tell her about his meeting with Hayes, the threats, the promises, how he had informed on Dr Jones. But instead he simply said: ‘We are all cowards, Anna Wolf.’

  They stood in silence for a moment, lost in their own worlds. Then Anna asked, ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘I can cash a cheque at the hotel.’

  ‘Do me a favour, will you?’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to.’

  ‘No. Go on. It’s my week for doing favours.’

  ‘I would like a book. A book and a train ticket. I can pay you back for them eventually. But if you will buy me a book and a train ticket I think I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Any book?’

  ‘A decent book. Nothing silly.’

  ‘You’re a very conditiony sort of an animal, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have standards,’ Anna told him. ‘We both do,’ she corrected herself so that she didn’t sound quite so obnoxious. ‘We both have standards.’

  ‘How very English of us.’

  They started back towards the hotel, walking side by side.

  ‘You can’t expect anyone to be a single thing, you know,’ Anna said. ‘You can’t expect me to be something absolute or perfect.’

  ‘I would never see you as something absolute or perfect.’ There was a flicker of a smile on Aloysius’s lips.

  ‘The me inside of me is disappointing,’ Anna told him. ‘Sort of corrupt. Or corrupted.’

  Aloysius slipped his hand in hers and gave it a friendly squeeze. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get our things. We shall go and be corrupt together on a train.’