‘Yes. I guess. It was a conference stint. Only problem is conferences have the unfortunate side effect of making you voluble.’ He grinned apologetically.
What was it on?’
‘Oh, this and that. Memory, trauma.’
Leo stiffened. ‘You’re a therapist?’
‘No. An addict though. I’d love a cigarette. The forbidding increases the longing.’
She gave him an uneasy smile and turned towards the window. After a moment, she lifted her laptop onto the table.
‘Just to put your mind at rest, I’m a historian. Second world war and all that. The terminology floats.’
‘Too much,’ she found herself muttering beneath her breath and then to put an end to the conversation, switched on her computer.
‘OK then. Snap.’ He drew out a similar machine and focused determinedly on the screen.
The stiff embarrassment of his posture brought home to Leo just how incapable she had become of ordinary encounters over these last years. She was too prickly by half. Suspicious, too. It was as if she couldn’t take any one on trust and elicited rejection even when she didn’t know she wanted it. Because she spent too much time alone. Yes, because she wanted to spend too much time alone.
It suddenly occurred to her, as she floated at a height of 33,000 feet, that one by one her New York women friends had all fallen away from intimacy. She wasn’t altogether sure why. Maybe she just said ‘no’ to invitations too often and ceased to make any of her own. Maybe she didn’t want to see people who were part of a past she would rather bury, people who reflected her failure to make her marriage work. Or maybe she had simply become too boring. Yes, certainly that. She gazed into the trough of self-pity and refused the temptation of diving in, all four trotters at the ready.
There was Isabel. Only Isabel had stayed close, indeed grown closer since her separation. Yes. That was when the bond between them had really been cemented.
After Jeff had left, Isabel had flown over from London and like a sister in need, had seen her and Becca through. Sensitive to the pain beneath Leo’s stiff mask of wryness, Isabel had allowed her to remain silent or talk and moan, none of which seemed possible with her New York friends who inevitably let pity or covert glee slip. Or simply manifested too much rage on her behalf. Isabel, instead, had been matter of fact, had treated the split as one more step on life’s erratic journey. Leo had had the sense that in front of her she could say anything and meet with neither disapproval, nor a prurient curiosity. Isabel had made her laugh, too, as she welcomed her on board the ship of single women where it was an aberration even to consider having a man in one’s life and mind every day and night of the year. Her buoyant presence had helped put Leo on an even keel.
It was during those weeks that their knowledge of each other had taken on new depths. For the first time they had really talked about their childhoods. They had discovered that despite their evident differences, there was an odd symmetry between them. They were both only daughters who had spent much of their girlhoods in schools far from what were roving homes. Neither was fond of her mother. Isabel’s father had died when she was barely four and they had speculated on whether the paternal death had been a greater loss to Leo who could remember her father or to Isabel who had no vivid memories at all. ‘Harder for you,’ Isabel had said. ‘I’ve never seen any need to replace mine. No loss. No new boss.’
Ever since those weeks and their free flow of intimate conversation, Leo felt she had become a little like a junkie with a peculiar addiction. She needed a regular dose of Isabel to keep her spirits running. She needed the catching up. The narrative of life only seemed to take on weight and meaning when recounted in Isabel’s presence. Her friend’s radically different outlook, the inevitable unexpectedness of her responses, the inflection her words and laughter put on things, the sheer pleasure of being with someone whose energy and love of life were boundless had become as regular a necessity to her as her work. And she felt that Isabel’s need matched hers.
They had dreamt up this spring trip together across the United States in the depths of those short winter days Leo had spent in London just before Christmas. It was a dream of sun and open skies born of cold and darkness and Leo hadn’t known just how much she was looking forward to it, until it seemed it wasn’t to happen. She couldn’t stay in an apartment full only of absences and the fear that mounted with each moment of passive waiting.
With an effort, Leo examined the panic which had taken her over since Isabel had failed to appear. It was undeniable that her motives for being here, on this plane bound for London, had an edge of selfishness. Yet she knew that Isabel would not have stood her up casually or abandoned her without a word of apology. And if Isabel was in some kind of trouble, then Leo, her sister of choice, as she had once called her, had to help.
She forced herself out of reverie and searching for tangible clues for Isabel’s failure to arrive, scrolled through the e-mail folder that bore her name. Her friend’s letters were all there, stored in reverse order, starting with the most recent. Leo highlighted the first, already well over two weeks old, and read a flight arrival time and hurried words.
‘Just greetings, beautiful. Busy, busy now. See you v. soon. Going off to do research.’
What research had Isabel gone off to do? She had always been intrepid, Leo reflected. In the early days of their friendship, when she still worked for the Consumers Association, she had gone off to investigate everything from soap powders to cars to the pricing policy of supermarkets. Once she had started to write her ‘A day in the life of…’ column, the research took on a different turn. She would somehow convince corporate and media executives, bankers and financiers, social workers and hospital consultants, oil rig workers and long-haul lorry drivers to allow her to shadow them for a few days, after which she would produce columns which walked a taut line between reportage, hilarity and exposé.
Had some scorned subject decided to take his revenge on her? Had she gotten herself involved in an investigation which had taken a dangerous turn?
A scene plummeted into Leo’s mind. She saw a dank shed on some remote Hebridean island trapped in rain. Isabel, her hands and feet bound, hopped towards a locked door, pounded at it, scratched splintered wood…
Dread tightened Leo’s throat as tangibly as a garrote. She coughed. She couldn’t stop the coughing.
‘Here.’ The man at her side turned concerned eyes on her and poured some of his wine into her glass. ‘Have some of this.’
Leo drank, nodded what she hoped was a grateful thank-you and turned an embarrassed face back to her screen.
Earlier messages from Isabel gave no particular clues. Her date and time of arrival in New York were twice reiterated, together with her enthusiasm for their projected journey south. The brevity of these messages, now that Leo looked at them in this new exploratory light, surprised her. In her mind her conversations with Isabel were endless. Indeed, when she checked her ‘sent items’ file, her own letters rambled at far greater length than her friend’s.
Uncomfortable at this realization, Leo scrolled quickly down to the bottom of the file. January 4, 1996 - the starting point of their e-mail correspondence. She had just gone on-line then, as if it had taken Jeff’s departure to vault her into the modern world. Isabel’s first message was a New Year’s Resolution list.
I will:
1. Seduce my latest shrink, one Daniel Lukas, as soon as he gets a proper haircut.
2. Axe the current beau who has grown far too needy.
3. Drink only the very best wine.
4. Lose ten-and-a-half-pounds, the half straight away.
5. Refuse all invitations to book launches and celeb parties - unless I gain a stone and grow vast enough so no puffed-up media executive can cast furtive eyes over my shoulder in search of a more powerful puffed-up executive or starry bimbo.
6. Ring my mad mother at least once a month, whatever the emotional cost.
7. Make a serious attempt to
move into a new flat before the chaotic clutter of this one overwhelms what little remains to me of a brain.
8. Be patient with my neighbours, despite their overflowing washing machines and disgusting habits
9. Give up the flap of the weekly column and concentrate on my book.
10. See my friend Leo more often, now that she has had the good sense to scrap her vagrant husband.
Leo smiled, despite herself, as she read and reread the list. Whatever the fate of Isabel’s other resolutions, the last had taken hold. Their transatlantic flights had developed a kind of regularity and they had seen each other whether in London or New York, once even in Paris, at intervals of no more than four months, packing long accounts of their lives into short bursts of togetherness.
Another of Isabel’s resolutions had also come good. Towards the middle of 1997, her book on childhood had appeared. It was an odd choice of subject for Isabel who had no children and apparently wanted none. The book itself was nothing if not provocative. Childhood was an idea, Isabel contended, an imaginary terrain drawn by adult hopes, fears and memories distorted by nostalgia or blame. Colonised by novelists, psychotherapists, sloganeering politicians and social workers, it had little to do with the real lives of children.
As background for the book, Isabel had spent some months working in two very different families as a nanny, another few first in a children’s home and then in a school, and finally a period as an observer in the juvenile courts. The book which emerged was a compendium of interviews counterpointed by analysis and historical background. A flurry of controversy had attended its appearance. When Leo had seen Isabel a month or so after its publication, they had discussed her ideas for the length of an evening and then Isabel would talk about it no more. It was as if the book no longer existed for her. ‘I’m on to the next,’ she had said with an enigmatic smile.
Quickly, Leo moved to the letters which followed that meeting. Something must be in them to signal what Isabel had decided to take on next, no matter how secretive she was about work in progress. She read through entertaining babble about boyfriends and cats and London life and what Isabel named her ‘headlines from the couch’. She paused at one of these.
‘Now his rebarbative voice has gotten under my skin. It comes with me everywhere, like an allergy I can’t shed. And he still hasn’t cut his hair.’
‘Quit,’ Leo had said to her over the summer. ‘I can’t imagine why you bother.’
‘Nor can I,’ Isabel had groaned, shaking her head in self-derision. ‘It’s hell.’
Then, in the autumn, had come the news that Isabel had, indeed, quit. Leo clicked to the relevant e-mail.
‘That’s it. I’m through. I hate him. I’m leaving. He’s a monster of pride and manipulation. Tell you all about it when we meet. I’m going to expose their ruthless mind games. See if I don’t.’
Leo gazed at the word ‘expose’. Was this it - the subject of Isabel’s research? A little thrill whose origins she couldn’t quite place went through her. Yet when she and Isabel had met at Christmas, Isabel had said nothing more about her therapist. Perhaps Becca’s presence prohibited it: Becca was fond of the shrink-grandfather who regularly plied her with exorbitant gifts.
Leo skimmed the next few letters and then paused to read a longer one more carefully. It was one of Isabel’s diatribes, this time all about the clandestine infiltration of genetically engineered or modified products into run-of-the-mill supermarket foods, the stranglehold of the multinational producers, the mega-bucks involved, the difficulties of the small organic farmer, the duping of third-world growers, the probability of dire effects on the food and animal and human chain, not to mention the environment. ‘I have a good mind to do some infiltration myself. Monsanto are about as saintly as my arse!’ she finished roundly.
The cough came to Leo’s throat again, a constriction she couldn’t control. She sipped the remains of the wine.
‘You all right? I’ll get you some water.’ Her broad-faced neighbour slipped out of his seat and came back a moment later carrying a small paper cup.
Leo sipped. ‘I think I must have caught a cold. All that rain. And then the temperature shifts, freezing one minute, beach weather the next.’
‘Weird isn’t it? Almost makes you believe in the power of that Al Niño who’s getting all the hate mail in California.’ He chuckled.
‘You heard about him in England?’
‘Oh yes. And we have our share of millennial anxieties - global warming, environmental destruction, rampant cloning, epidemic depression, rising suicide rates. Makes you want to curse the decimal system.’
Leo felt a smile tugging at her lips. ‘You mean the zero’s are at fault.’
He shrugged. ‘Seem to be - from a historian’s perspective. The last millennium produced a spat of apocalyptic anxieties and every turn of the century seems to bring its own. This time round we’ve even built them into our computers. Global collapse is nigh…’ The grin contradicted his words. ‘I’m Tim Hoffman by the way.’
‘Leo Holland. You don’t by any chance know a woman in London called Isabel Morgan?’
‘Isabel Morgan. Let’s see.’ His forehead crinkled. ‘Journalist, isn’t she? She’s the woman who writes a columns in… which is it…the Independent? Acerbic and exuberant by turn. Come to think of it, I haven’t read anything of hers in a while.’
‘That’s her. Yes.’
‘Can’t say I know her. Though I saw something about her in the press just recently. Media section of the Guardian, I think it was. The photograph caught my eye.’ He flushed a little and hurried on with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Professional deformation of the historian. You remember trivia. It was in one of those gossip or small item columns. It said she was being mooted as a presenter for some television series. Channel 4.’
‘Oh?’
‘Is she a friend of yours?’
Leo nodded, but she was no longer really listening. Her mind was racing. Could the explanation for Isabel’s failure to turn up in New York be as simple as a sudden television shoot which had usurped all her attention. So much so that she had forgotten even to alert Leo as the tapes rolled in some distant location? It didn’t seem likely, but it was just possible.
With the sense that she was clutching at the thinnest of straws, Leo clung to the possibility. Any hope was better than her nameless and brooding apprehension.
The road into London glimmered with the last rays of pale spring sunshine. By the time the taxi had come to a virtual standstill in the congestion of King’s Cross, night had fallen. And there were still miles to go, Leo reckoned as she watched the metre tick its way to astronomic heights.
Some eight months back, Isabel had left the stuccoed comforts of Notting Hill for a part of London Leo hardly knew, so well had it kept its secrets from foreign eyes. It was tucked away beyond Clerkenwell to the back of the financial district. The Barbican was the only place of note close-by, together with a gloomy little square of a cemetery where William Blake and John Bunyan lay buried beneath dank stone unencumbered by ivy or flowers. It was an area of old office and factory buildings, punctuated by the occasional four storey house and a smattering of sixties tower blocks, so run-down they seemed to tilt forward, ready to dive into the tawdry parking lots that surrounded them.
On her last visit here, Leo had been converted by Isabel’s enthusiasm to a dawning appreciation of the neighbourhood - the bustling flower market at Columbia Road, the jostling crowds at Brick Lane and Spitalfields where Cockneys vied with Bangladeshis and the fashionable young over the purchase of cheap dresses or bits of furniture and crockery; the new comedy clubs and gyms brashly moulded into the ground floors of nineteenth century factories; a graceful old Wesleyean church hidden between derelict office blocks; minimalist restaurants in cool colours serving rediscovered English food - shanks of underdone lamb or quail and school puddings.
Now, as her taxi swerved past the futurist curve of the Old Street roundabout and turned into a d
esolate road, all of Leo’s initial misgivings surfaced. She shivered beneath the solitary street lamp which cast its murky yellow glow only on a muddy stretch of car park surrounded by grimy disused factories. The one on the right was the site of Isabel’s new loft. Hurriedly Leo paid the taxi driver, who gave her a crooked smile and pointed towards the top of the structure. ‘Looks like someone’s expecting you.’
Leo veered round, her heart pounding. Isabel was here. She peered up into the distance. On the left of the building which gave onto the car park, a raised blind showed a rectangle of light. Bending over the ledge was a shadowy figure, arm raised in greeting. Leo hesitated and then returned the wave. As she did so, she realized that Isabel lived not on the top floor, but on the third and that the close cropped head of the waver could not be Isabel’s unless in a lightning decision she had suddenly cut her hair. She heaved her carry-all over her shoulder and walked slowly towards the door, four concrete steps up within a functional porch. On impulse, she rang Isabel’s bell and waited, repeated the action, half expecting her voice over the ansaphone. But all she heard was the low rumble and squeak of the taxi’s departure. In its wake, the street had an ominous quiet.
Taking a long breath, Leo reached in her bag for the keys. She was relieved when the door opened to their complicated action. She switched on the light. To the right of the staircase stood an aluminium-painted table she didn’t remember, atop it a fern in a large pot and a pile of post. Feeling like an interloper, she flicked through the pile. All the letters bore Isabel’s name. She stuffed them into her bag.
On her way up, she noted that the stairwell had acquired a collection of silver-framed photographs, surreal colour shots of women posed against towering city scapes. Only when she reached Isabel’s landing, did it come to her that the eerie quality of the images came from the fact that the women were display mannequins, the buildings distorted reflections in the windows of the store fronts where they stood.
With a furtive sense she couldn’t explain, Leo unlocked the door to the apartment and swiftly reached for the light. As she walked through to the large sweep of a lounge, her heels set up a cavernous echo on the polished wooden floor. She looked round her nervously. The place was chill and for Isabel, uncannily neat, almost too empty, as if she had done a thorough clean out before leaving.
Sanctuary Page 3
