Читать книгу Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars - Miranda Emmerson, Miranda Emmerson - Страница 12

Tuesday, 9 November

At half past ten Rachel brought the remaining customers their bills on little silver plates with tiny pieces of Turkish delight around the edges. At ten to eleven Ottmar turned on the main lights in the coffee house, flooding the space with a harsh yellow glow. By five past eleven the bills had been paid and Ottmar was ready to lock the doors.

Rachel and Helen cleared the tables, blew out the candles, stacked the plates by the sink and started to sweep and scrub the restaurant clean. In the kitchen Mahmut scoured the surfaces and washed down the hob. Ottmar brought the radio up to the hatch and tuned to the Light Programme for the last hour of Jazz Club. All but one of the overhead lights was turned off and the cafe sank back into a gentle night-time space where the silver mirrors on the walls threw strange shafts of light across the floor and the ghostly, mesmeric sound of Stan Tracey playing ‘Starless and Bible Black’ seemed to echo, bounce and flutter against every wall. The people in the cafe moved slower now, feeling the night soaking into them, filling their arms and legs with darkness and a dreamy quiet that felt like drunkenness and sleep.

Ottmar sat on a stool at the counter behind the hatch and arranged in a series of little metal bowls a late supper of eggs and flatbread and spinach and yoghurt. He cut up the end of the coffee cake and arranged a pyramid of squares on a blue china plate and then he carried the plates and the forks and the dishes of food and laid them out on two of the longer tables which he pushed together.

He noticed a blank, black human shape standing at the glass doors to the front.

‘Helen!’ Ottmar called and Helen let Anna in. Ottmar waved his hand for Anna to join him at the table as the others cleaned and swept around him. Anna pulled off her coat and gloves and scarf and flung them down over the back of a chair.

‘How are you doing today?’ Ottmar asked.

The question made Anna want to cry, though she didn’t really know why. ‘I went to look for her.’

‘For Iolanthe?’

‘I walked the Strand and the banks of the river … past The Savoy. I looked for her in St Paul’s Cathedral. I had this sense of her seeking refuge from something. I walked in there and I started to believe that I would see her sitting at the end of a pew or hiding in the shadows. But once I’d looked around it didn’t feel like somewhere where anyone would go seeking refuge. So much grandeur. So much pomp and frilly woodwork, lights and gold. It looked like a theatre. And that’s the last place Lanny would run.’

‘You’re sure she ran away?’ Helen asked her.

‘I have to believe it.’

‘From what, though?’

‘From us?’ Anna shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Money trouble.’

‘Men,’ said Rachel.

Anna shook her head. ‘I went to meet a policeman today and he asked me questions and he showed me the interview Lanny did and it’s full of mistakes so I don’t even know if we can trust it but it said she’d been going out to the clubs. Like the jazz clubs and the ones down Carnaby Street.’

‘Does that seem likely?’ Ottmar asked.

‘Not really. She never even talked about clubs or music or men or any of that. But then the man from the paper claimed that she’d been seen coming out of Roaring Twenties more than once.’

Helen and Rachel threw their rags and brushes into the corner of the kitchen, stripped off their aprons and used the edges to scrub the smell and slick of grease from their hands. Mahmut brought out a pot of coffee and a bowl of sugar and sat at the end of the table slapping his face violently with his hands as if to beat out the tiredness. The music from the radio changed and now the notes rippled through the air like the smell of grass on a clear spring day. The lights seemed to burn a little brighter above them and slowly, imperceptibly, the pace of their movements changed. Anna poured herself a cup of coffee and ate a plate of spinach and yoghurt, which tasted like midsummer and helped to draw the chill from her bones.

Ottmar’s mind drifted free of the assembled group and took him back to Melanippus’s vast living room in Nicosia with its white marble floor and long dark leather seats. In a former life he’d written book reviews for a Greek magazine in his native Cyprus. The only Turk on the staff, he’d spent his evenings smoking cigarettes and talking about art and philosophy and life with all the other twenty-somethings who dreamed of flying away to a life of avant-garde delights in Paris or Berlin. Melanippus, the editor, would play jazz until four in the morning: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Artie Shaw. Ottmar had so desperately wanted to belong and for a little while he had. And now, here in his cafe at midnight with The Harry South Big Band playing ‘Six to One Bar’, he knew that he was not quite locked out of that world; just downgraded to a cheaper room.

Anna had sunk into a kind of sulk. Her broad shoulders fell forward and she stared at the corner of the table while her fingers worked apart a piece of bread. ‘It’s too strange, Ottmar. We talked every day. But then I think about the things we talked about and there’s her clothes and her looks and we joked about men and people in the company but she never told me anything about … before. Where she came from. Everything was always in the present. She never mentioned family. She never mentioned her past.’

Ottmar made a slight face as if to say that Iolanthe was not the only one. Anna chose to ignore this. ‘She had all these bank accounts in different names. Maria and Yolanda and Nathaniel. Nathaniel, her brother, isn’t even alive any more – but she’s paying money to him all the same.’

Ottmar frowned. ‘You mean Iolanthe?’

‘What?’

‘You said Yolanda.’

‘Well, yes. She was Iolanthe but she paid money into the bank account of a woman called Yolanda Green.’

‘But they’re the same name. Iolanthe is a Greek name, yes? But in Spain, she’d be Yolanda. Iolanthe; Yolanda: same name.’

‘Oh.’ Anna was taken aback by her own ignorance. ‘I didn’t realise. I … Thank you.’ She stared at Ottmar and he couldn’t quite read the emotion in her look. ‘I went to the police station today and it felt real again. And I realised that all those stories, all those articles and interviews, they’d turned this thing – Lanny’s disappearance – into something else. They took it over. Made it unreal. I’d come to feel that Iolanthe belonged to some other world. A world of newspapers and radio. Almost as if she wasn’t real. Wasn’t our problem. But she is real. And she is our problem. She was this person that I knew and liked … and something horrible has happened to her.’

***

Anna dreamed that night that she was standing on the Strand in the darkness. A line of red double-decker buses queued on the other side of the Aldwych, their windows dark. She knew she had to get home but she couldn’t remember where it was she lived. Forest Hill? No, that had been years ago. Where did she live now? She tried to call up the name of the roads she’d lived on. Aberystwyth Close. Horns Lane. Bearwood Road. Havelock Walk. None of these seemed right. A figure approached out of the darkness. It was a man. A policeman. But his uniform was strange: a black suit with a mandarin collar and bright buttons down the front. He wore a peaked cap with a badge she did not recognise and carried a thin black stick. When he opened his mouth to speak she expected to hear a language other than English pass his lips.

‘I think the buses have stopped for the night now, miss.’

Anna peered at his face, which was hard to see, and shifted rather from glance to glance. He had red hair like that young man she had met … she couldn’t quite think where.

‘There are night buses. I always used to catch the night bus,’ she assured him in as definite a voice as she could manage.

‘Where to, miss?’

‘I can’t remember. I’m so sorry. I can’t remember where I live.’

The policeman smiled at her. ‘Well, how do you imagine you’ll get home if you don’t know where it is you’re going?’

The next moment they were standing together just north of St Martin’s near where she used to wait for her bus to Forest Hill. Anna felt an odd sensation of pinching in the palm of her right hand and looking down, she realised with horror that she was holding hands with the policeman. She pulled away quickly, though he seemed unwilling to let her go.

‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to get my bus.’

She walked north up Charing Cross Road without once looking back, but she found then that her stop had vanished and with it the statue of Edith Cavell. Anna stood in the spot where Edith’s monolith should have been and then gazed warily up at the sky in case perhaps the statue had been rocketed into space and would descend again at any moment, crushing her where she stood. Fifty yards away the policeman raised his hand and waved to her as if to attract her attention to some new emergency. He seemed to be calling to her and Anna strained to make out the words.

‘Your bus is coming, miss!’

Anna turned and there it was, a great red metal tower charging onto the pavement towards her as she stood watching, paralysed, already doomed.

Anna woke, the sheet around her clammy with sweat. She untangled herself and got out of bed. There was a thunder of feet coming down the stairs outside the flat and Anna could hear Leonard’s voice speaking quickly and urgently. The footsteps passed by and she stood for a minute in the dark living room listening for what came next. The street outside was quiet; no traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue at this time. Footsteps climbed the stairs again and paused for a moment outside the door of the flat.

‘Leonard?’ Anna spoke his name almost without meaning to.

‘Anna?’

She fetched a dressing gown from the back of her door and pulled it tight around her. Leonard stood on the stairs outside the door dressed only in pyjama bottoms, his hair sweeping madly to one side, his eyes bloodshot.

‘What happened?’ Anna asked.

‘Benji’s sister’s sick. We’ve been up for the last hour trying to call people and now he’s gone to find a cab. Can I come in? No. Sorry. Scratch that. You need to get back to bed.’

‘No. It’s fine. I was having a rotten night anyway. What time is it?’

‘It’s five or half five. Do you want to come up? I’ve got proper coffee. Might even manage a bun.’

Anna had no great desire to sink back into her clammy bed. ‘Not like there’s a show tomorrow.’

‘Well, quite.’ And Leonard led the way.