Burning Bright Page 10

  This long uphill street is still Samuel’s patch. He’s usually on the green at night, under a tree, even now when the new rash of homelessness has queered most of the pitches. Nadine always gives him something. Remembering the price of the wine she has just drunk, she feels for the dead metal of a pound coin in her purse and drops it into his raised hand. A stink of burnt fat rolls from the open door of the Burger Bar, and the doorman at Club Suzie shifts his feet and looks at Nadine, but she goes past. A couple eat, spotlit in the window of a trattoria, looking intimately into one another’s eyes as if they are being paid by the hour to do so. Nadine goes by within six inches of them, on the other side of the glass, not disturbing their gaze. She can walk faster in the dark, swinging uphill, breasting the warm night and the pulse of music and beery gusts from pub ventilators.

  She turns off into tall silent streets where the lamps don’t work and the trees are overgrown, tapping windows, scratching heaps of builder’s rubble in skips. A retaining wall bulges towards her. She steps off the broken pavement and walks in the middle of the road. She passes a street light which works and her blunt orange shadow trails out behind her. She doesn’t like it when her shadow is behind her. If someone steps on your shadow they possess your soul.

  No, I’m not frightened, she thinks. Come out, come out, wherever you are, she sings softly as she chanted in the playground once, but no one answers. Black summer leaves hiss above her head. The honeyed smell of waste land buddleia drifts past like someone’s perfume, then there’s a burning smell of fox. There are foxes all over the city. She has watched them from the balcony in the early mornings, walking down the street with their heads up, long claws ricking on the pavement. Their ears are big and pointed. They have the perfect self-possession of actors. They map the city secretly, at odds with published maps of roads and footpaths. Their routes are tunnels through allotments and rows of garden, through steep-hanging ruined gardens above the docks, in and out of timber yards and upriver to the restaurant bins of the city centre, back to safe suburban gardens where the covers may have been left off the rabbit hutch, where the fat pedigree guinea-pig shivers in his straw-packed corner and smells fox.

  She’s almost home. Past the stained-glass lights of the Prince and Pauper, past the clang of the bin-lids where Clara shovels in uneaten bolognese, past the bakery where blue fluorescent lights will be humming again at four a.m., past the corner of the graveyard and through the alley, dark and slender with its one Victorian lamp-post shedding a pale ring at the blind corner. The blind bend in the alley where someone could hide. It’s empty. Safe again. The square. Home.

  The stairs are dark.

  ‘Nadine! Nadine! Is that you, dear?’ Enid’s voice, nerveless and commanding. ‘Come on up, dear.’

  As Nadine climbs the last stairs to Enid’s attic, the door opens just a crack, enough for Enid to peep round and wrinkle up in welcome. She opens the door a little wider and Nadine slides in.

  ‘You ought to get a bolt fitted,’ says Nadine. ‘Then no one could get in.’ There is no lock on Enid’s door.

  ‘No one has ever troubled me,’ says Enid, looking at Nadine with sudden severity. ‘Never trouble till trouble troubles you. Those squatters were perfectly nice young people. Once they realized that this room was my home, they didn’t try to come in. They respected my privacy.’

  ‘I didn’t know there’d been squatters here.’

  ‘Well, there weren’t, not once your Kai and Tony had bought the place. They were gone as if the hag was after them. Why that should be, I can’t imagine, seeing that your Kai and Tony are both so nicely spoken.’ And she gives Nadine a sharp look.

  ‘Did you know them?’

  ‘Well, you get to know people, don’t you, dear? Not like I know you, of course. There was Jenny, a very nice young person but taken up with the baby. Still, that’s only natural, isn’t it?’

  ‘If she had a baby, I suppose she could’ve got on to a housing list.’

  ‘Oh, yes, very likely she could. So that’s all right, then, isn’t it? I expect they found her a council flat,’ adds Enid satirically.

  Enid’s small fire burns in the grate, making the room stiflingly hot. The windows are closed. A big bunch of buddleia droops on a table, overpoweringly sweet at first, then half forgotten like an infusion in the air. Enid painted the room herself two years ago, in brilliant Monet blue and pink, lavishly streaking the walls and ceiling. The paint is too heavy for the wallpaper and it has begun to peel away from the plaster. Enid does not believe in wasting money at launderettes, so she washes her sheets in the bath and hangs them perilously out of the window, where they leave long runnels in the grime. A small clothes-line dips above the fireplace, where two or three pairs of woolly knickers and vests hang, stiff as card. Just now the floor is covered with rushes. Enid was taken on a river trip two weeks ago. While consuming tea and scones at the riverside tea gardens, she spotted a bank of rushes, and, after begging a sharp knife from the proprietor, she cut herself pretty near a bin-bag full, saying that it was for church decoration. She brought them home and strewed them on her floor. ‘As they did in medieval times, years ago, dear, to keep the air pure. It stopped the plague. And we shall be having the plague again, if they don’t do something about the sewers round here. They’re crumbling away inside, you know. And the things people put down them these days. Nappies and I don’t know what. One of these days there’ll be a collapse and a bus will go down into the sewers and then something will be done, once it’s too late. The greatest gift of our ancestors thrown away by foolish neglect. Sanitation, dear.’

  The rushes lie limp in the extreme heat, streaked with yellow. They smell unpleasantly.

  ‘If you open the window, they’ll dry out properly,’ remarks Nadine.

  ‘Oh, no, dear, I can’t have all that dirty air in here. I can taste the fumes right down in my throat. By rights we should all leave the city in summer, but what can you do? Perhaps you could go and visit your family, Nadine?’ Enid’s small face peers inquisitively from behind the line of knickers. This is not the first time she has set out to discover a little more about Nadine. ‘It’s nice to know a little bit of background, isn’t it, dear?’ And why not, thinks Nadine. All these secrets. I’m getting as bad as Kai. Enid’s so out of the world, who would she tell?

  ‘It’s too far,’ she says. ‘I can’t afford the fare.’

  ‘Surely Kai could give you something? He’s always going here, there and everywhere himself. Money doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.’

  ‘My parents live a long way away. In Germany.’

  ‘In Germany! Well, that does come as a surprise to me. I should never have taken you for a German, with your beautiful English.’

  Nadine laughs. ‘I’m not German, nor are they. They moved to south Germany. They’re living in an Esseler Home there.’

  ‘I seem to know the name. Very German – some sort of philanthropist, wasn’t he? Of course they have a lot of those over there. Are they quite old parents, dear?’

  ‘The home is for my sister. She has cerebral palsy – you know what that is? The home runs a programme for people with cerebral palsy. My mother works in the kitchen, and my father works in the office and on the farm, and so that pays for Lulu’s keep there.’

  ‘That sounds rather hard work for them, I must say,’ says Enid, all her sympathies at once engaged by the thought of two elderly people doing heavy manual labour. It’s refreshing, thinks Nadine, to find someone who doesn’t immediately start to question and sympathize about Lulu.

  ‘They’re quite young, really. Early forties. They do get time off, and there’s plenty for them there as well. Singing and meditation groups and so on. I had a postcard from them showing the place. It’s above a lake and there are apple orchards all round. The work is tough, but this place is wonderful for Lulu, and that’s what counts. It’s her turn now,’ quotes Nadine expressionlessly. ‘That’s what they put on the postcard. That’s about all I know about it. They
did send me some brochures and things.’

  The little black kettle over the fire lets out a quavering warble and a puff of steam.

  ‘There now! She’s singing already!’ exclaims Enid delightedly. ‘Now we can have a nice cup of tea, and you can tell me what your turn was.’

  ‘My turn? Oh, being clever was my turn. Being able to do things. Passing exams. Going to university and having chances nobody else had had, that was going to be my turn.’

  ‘So what happened? I mean, this is a very interesting house and I’m sure you’re learning a lot here that you couldn’t learn at the university, but it’s not quite the same thing, is it, dear? Bugger these rushes. Nearly had me down then.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d have a book in front of me and I’d be reading it but I couldn’t understand what it was saying, not even the words. They weren’t like words any more, just like black things I had to put in the right place. Only I couldn’t. The words weren’t like words any more. They felt so heavy, I couldn’t get through them. Once I read one page and then I realised I’d put a tape on at the beginning and it had finished. And I hadn’t made sense of a word. It wasn’t even a difficult book. It was just a page of a novel. I got frightened.’

  ‘And then you met Kai.’

  ‘No, I knew him already. I met him when I was doing GCSEs –’ She stops. Enid registers the slip, but instead of commenting or questioning further, she goes off at a tangent. Thank God, thinks Nadine, old people’s minds don’t stay long on one thing.

  ‘I often wonder about this business of turns, if you like to put it that way. One day, when I was in Manchester, not long before the war it was, in 1937 –’

  ‘Were you living there?’

  ‘Not exactly. I was a business girl, living in Warrington at that time. But I’d seen a little of the world by then, even though I was only twenty.’ She shoots Nadine the small coy glance of a woman who is lying about her age. Twenty in 1937, calculates Nadine rapidly, even that would make her about seventy-seven now. Can she be older than that? She’d have to be nearly eighty.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve moved around a bit in my lifetime. But I’m staying put now,’ Enid adds quickly, remembering that Nadine is not just any young girl, but one who lives with the landlord, and that the landlord would like to be rid of his sitting tenant. ‘I don’t believe you’d be able to guess where I came from originally, now would you? No, I thought not, dear. Well, I had come up to Manchester after an opening, very promising it sounded, I had to meet a Mr Albion at the Exchange Hotel. I thought it was a funny name even at the time, but then people do have funny names, don’t they – like your Kai. I can’t say his surname to save my life.’

  ‘I expect it’s perfectly ordinary in Finland, like Smith or Roberts.’

  ‘I daresay it is to them. But not to us, is it, dear? Now where was I? So I waited for nearly three quarters of an hour in the hotel lobby and Mr Albion never turned up, and I could see the hotel staff were starting to look at me sideways – very suspicious they were in those days if you didn’t have a man with you, you’ve no idea – so I went up to the desk and said very à la posh, “If a Mr Albion asks for me, tell him I was unable to wait,” and out I swept into the street before they could say anything – there was a very saucy-looking boy by the lift.’

  ‘So didn’t you ever meet Mr Albion?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Albion was nothing, he doesn’t really come into the story at all, he was just the occasion of it, so to speak. Oh, no, I was delighted never to hear one word from Mr Albion again. An alias, you may be sure of it. But I wasn’t going to go straight back home to Warrington with my tail between my legs. What a waste of the fare that would have been. It was only midday, and I thought I would go and look round the shops, and then have my tea. But when I went down the steps it was pouring with rain. You don’t know Manchester rain, not as it used to be. It would leave black streaks down your clothes – you never wore white or cream when you went to Manchester. I was wearing a very nice costume, navy-blue, my best for the interview. I had my umbrella with me – you always did in Manchester – but I knew that I should be soaked through in no time even so, with the rain coming down the way it was. So I set off walking, thinking I would get something to eat in a tea-shop. Then it began to tip down just as if someone had emptied a bucket over me, and water was running down the street so I could see my best shoes would be ruined in a minute. I’d have taken them off and walked down the street barefoot only it wasn’t respectable. I had to take shelter. I saw a shop entrance, so I hopped up a step and stood against the glass. It was a jeweller’s shop. There were two or three of us waiting – everyone had scuttled off the pavements and the rain was still bouncing up and hitting my face even in the shelter of the shop doorway. Then I heard a voice say, “Come in a little farther, you’re getting wet,” so I did, even though it meant I was pushed right up against the lady who had spoken. It was a voice you’d notice, even in the midst of a rainstorm. Low and clear; what we used to call well modulated, though that’s not an expression you hear these days. And the voice sounded as if the person speaking was smiling. I noticed the voice more than I noticed her, just at first; we were all crushed up together, and I could smell lilacs. We said one or two things, I can’t remember what, about the rain, I expect. There was a car which went past slowly with a wave of water parting at the wheels, and I said it reminded me of the Red Sea. I always liked that story, from a child: the thought of the sea parting, and the floor of it bare. I used to wonder what happened to the fish. Were they swept up in the wave, or did they lie there floundering? She laughed – she had a lovely deep laugh, it went with her voice, and said she wished we were Israelites.

  ‘The rain didn’t stop and didn’t stop. There was a cab coming – the rain made it look quite white for a minute. She looked at me and she said, “I’m going to get that cab. Can I drop you?” and I said, stupidly, “I don’t really know where I’m going,” so she laughed again and said, “Then you’d better come with me. I can take you somewhere out of the rain.” She leaned out and signalled to the cab – it saw us and turned in towards the kerb. But I wasn’t sure if I ought to go with her. You heard lots of stories in those days – white slave traffic and women in taxis with syringes. She must have seen it, for she said, “It’s all right. It’s a Ladies’ Club.” You couldn’t look her straight in the face and think she was white slave traffic, so we both got in the cab. She pulled off her hat and shook her hair out – it was wet at the ends, like mine. She seemed very worldly and sophisticated to me, so I thought she must be quite old; I knew later that she was just thirty. I liked the way she signalled to the cab, and it came wheeling round, and the way she told the driver where to take us. Then she leaned back against the leather seat and said, “That’s all right. We’re out of the rain. Oh, this Manchester rain! Can you believe it? It’s like some awful film.” She hadn’t a Manchester voice, but then I hadn’t a Warrington one, or no more than a touch. I was looking at my shoes. “Suede, aren’t they?” she said. “Don’t worry, they won’t spoil. We’ll get them seen to.”

  ‘It wasn’t very far, then the cab stopped in front of a little entrance, so close we had just a step to the door. She paid the cab. I had a shilling in my hand, though it was meant for my dinner, but she wouldn’t take my money. It looked a dull place, and I was a bit disappointed. I’d thought it would be somewhere special. There was just a small door with a brass handle and a little plaque beside it: the millicent sowerby association for ladies. “Dreadful, isn’t it?” she said as we went in. “No one calls it that, of course. We call it the Manchester Ladies.” I didn’t think that sounded much better, to give it a name like a public convenience. But in we went. The entrance was narrow and brown and old, the way these buildings are, then it suddenly swelled out into a big entrance hall, one of those geometric shapes with six sides, you know? There was a plain green carpet, and big seats to wait in, but “We’ll go straight in,” she said and pushed a big swinging door – doors led off the h
all in all directions, and there we were.’

  ‘Where were you?’ asked Nadine, sipping tea.

  ‘I couldn’t quite take it in at first. It was a big silvery room, as if sunlight was coming in from somewhere. That was the mirrors. They ran from ceiling to floor on one side of the room, so that everything shone back on itself and you couldn’t tell how big the room was or how many people were in it. There was a fire with big clean-looking flames leaping up in the grate. Then there were plants, nearly as big as outdoor trees, growing right up the walls. They had an orange tree in a tub, I remember, with little oranges growing on it. You could smell the oranges. It had white waxy flowers as well as the fruit. How I wanted to pick one of those oranges! I’d never seen such a thing growing before. There was a dark blue and rose carpet, like an oriental carpet. And all round the room chaises-longues and women lying on them. Two were playing cards: there were three white five-pound notes crumpled on the floor between them. There was a woman in a kimono writing in a notebook; she looked up when we came in, as if she’d been thinking of something and we’d interrupted her. I thought perhaps she was a writer. She was my idea of what a writer ought to look like. She went out by another door. And there was a red-haired woman stroking a cat – stroke, stroke, stroke. I can see her now. That was Caro. It made me shiver to watch her. She looked up and saw us and said, “Darling! Who’s your friend?” “My name is Enid Shelton,” I said quickly, not wanting the lady I came with to let on that we didn’t even so much as know each other’s names.

  ‘But I could see the red-haired woman wasn’t really interested in my name. She put the cat down and came over to us. She touched my lady’s shoulder, and then her hair. “Sukey, you’re wet through. Come and take your things off.”

  ‘We went into another room – this time it was quite plain, with wooden panelling and a couple of beds, and a big carved wardrobe with more kimonos hanging there. Sukey took one and held it against me. “Yes – that suits you. Would you like a bath?”