Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars
Page 30
Epilogue
Yolanda Green sat on a hillock of long grass. The sea before her was a deep grey-blue and pale brown birds perched in pairs on every rock as far as the eye could see. Not long ago a ferry had passed by on its way to the harbour at Rosslare, blowing smoke which touched for a moment the low-hanging clouds then disappeared. She wrapped her hands around her thin shoes to warm her feet.
Far out to sea, the dark grey whiskered heads of seals broke the water, making rings. In the air above them one of the pale brown birds from the rocks carried an eel it had caught high into the air and almost immediately was set upon by a dark-backed, white-winged hunting bird. The hunting bird snatched at the eel with its talons and for a moment the two birds spun in the air, the smaller of the two twisting and falling to hang limply beneath the claws of the predator as if shot and tied for suppertime. Three times the smaller bird tried to break away and three times the larger bird increased its grip, flew upwards and broke the balance of its rival.
Yolanda turned her eyes from the sight of them. She didn’t need to keep watching to know that the larger bird would win or the eel be split in two. She spread her hands in the soft grass beneath her and raised herself to her feet. Cautiously she stretched her aching body and surveyed the land around her.
A memory caught her by surprise. Dancing in Roaring Twenties, her body pressed firmly against Delbert. The smell of his sweat in her nostrils. The thumping of the floor beneath her feet. She had stood some nights in a crowd of bodies and felt herself at home. As if her adult life had been some terrible extended trip into the body of a stranger. It had felt so good to be that part of herself at last, to feel the comfort of blackness enveloping her, to feel at home in the company of people she didn’t even know. How brief that pleasure had been. And how intense.
She still slept late into the morning and napped through the afternoon. But she was eating and drinking like her old self now. She found – much to her surprise – that she thought little of what would happen to the child inside her. She rather assumed that it had died but a part of her, a very small part, was sometimes hopeful that it might yet be born alive. With no career to speak of any more, out of the sight of the press, it no longer mattered if she had a child or not. Though perhaps this was because the child she had created still seemed wholly unreal. She was someone else entirely now. Perhaps she would call herself Maria, her mother’s name, or maybe she would stay Orla Hayes another twenty years.
The man at the Iona Hotel had been very good about getting her The Times of London every day, though by the time it reached southern Ireland it was nearly two days out of date. She had waited patiently to check that Wingate would write the story he had promised and when at last he did she cancelled her request for newspapers and turned her attention from the English press to the property section of the local Irish newspapers.
She had an idea that she might take the long-distance bus to Waterford and look for a cottage to rent outside a town somewhere. Yolanda was certain that there was a life to be made and some pleasure to be had in the making of it. The money she had with her would last for a little while. And after that she would teach children to dance, or buy a machine and sew curtains. She could cook and clean if she had to. She was only forty. There was still a world of possibilities before her.
She had ridden bicycles in the back garden with Nathaniel and her father a million years ago. Now she would buy one and teach herself to cycle slowly and carefully along the country roads. She would learn to make a fire in a grate and cook stews and soups on top of a kitchen stove. She would disappear into this country like a woodcock or a pigeon in a copse of trees.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my husband for being there, being kind and making me laugh. And for bringing me poached eggs on a tray whenever I need them. Thank you to my children for your loyalty and enthusiasm and for drawing me so very many pictures. Thank you to my dear parents and lovely in-laws for your help and support. And thank you to my friends for cheering me on, cheering me up and pouring a lot of coffee and conversation into me.
Thank you to my PhD supervisors at Cardiff University who have dealt so graciously with a student who turned up on the first day of her first year saying: ‘The thing is … I wrote this book … and I assumed nothing would happen to it but now it’s been bought. Oh, and I need to write another one.’ Thank you to Sonia and Mathias for rendering Anna’s letter into German. And thank you to Gus Berger, who sped me a copy of his invaluable documentary Duke Vin and the Birth of Ska all the way from Australia.
Thank you to my agent, Caroline Hardman, for communicating her excitement about this book to other people who weren’t necessarily looking to be excited at that moment. Thank you to Helen Garnons-Williams, Iris Tupholme and Claire Wachtel for taking the plunge and buying it. And a big thank you to Helen for being the most understanding, generous and thoughtful editor a writer could hope for. I’d also like to thank the whole team at 4th Estate and HarperCollins for their unstinting enthusiasm and love of all things bookish and interesting: I’m so pleased to be working with you.
Lastly, a note on the use of language in the novel. In 1965 the language used to denote a person’s race was in flux. The term ‘coloured’, which was considered polite in England, even liberal, through to the end of the 1950s was in the process of being replaced by the more modern ‘black’. But, from my research into the period and from the – often contradictory – responses that racial language used in the novel has produced in some of my early readers, I am aware that the pace of this change was different for different groups of people.
Representing language in its fluid state can be challenging for both writer and reader. However, I hope that I have gone some way towards illustrating the landscape of prejudice in 1965: a landscape within which structural racism could so easily be upheld and acts of racial violence went unpunished. My intention was to underscore some of the ways in which we have progressed in the past 50 years … and the ways in which we have not.
About the Author
Miranda Emmerson is a playwright and author living in Wales. She has written numerous drama adaptations for BBC Radio 4 as well as some highly acclaimed original drama. Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars is her first novel.
About the Publisher
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