Enlightenment (19 page)

She’d been home for three days when she wrote that. She’d stepped off the plane with a fever of 104. But even as her ceiling rose and her posters buckled, she would have known her mother held nothing against her. It was her incorrigible ex-husband that Nancy Wakefield felt like strangling. How dare he put this girl on a plane in this condition? It was his
duty as a father
to explain the damage done. It was her
duty as a mother
to hold him to it.

Especially during those first few days. She couldn’t help it! Anger was coming out of her head like smoke. But to no avail. The consulate wouldn’t say where he was. The State Department wouldn’t either. ‘I just got through to Amy,’ she told Jeannie one evening. This was when she was well enough to sit up and try some soup. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Amy and I just had a pretty long chat, and I must say I’m a little disappointed. Because you know, we had many pleasant conversations
over the past year, and I had come to think of her as a friend. But this time…well, something’s definitely come over her.’

Nancy Wakefield sat down on the foot of her daughter’s bed. ‘So anyway. It was about 9 pm their time when I finally got through, and a man answered. A man who couldn’t speak English. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?’

She patted her daughter’s knee. ‘You still there, lambie?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Anyway, when I asked Amy about this man who answered her phone, she said he was her bodyguard. So of course I wanted to ask. Why would you need a bodyguard? But her tone was so sharp I just asked if she knew where we could find your father. She then told me she’d be the last person to know, as she had severed all connections with him. Severed all connections! Can you credit that? When I asked her why, she got pretty huffy! All she’d say was that – to the best of her knowledge – he’s back in the States. But I’m sorry. I’m just not going to accept that. You leave it to me, lambie. I’ll get to the bottom of this.’

Off she wafted. To make another phone call? Her voice was softer now. She did more listening than talking.

‘I’m finally getting somewhere,’ she said later that night.

The next morning, when she sat down on the end of Jeannie’s bed, her eyes were red. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘So, so sorry. I should have stood my ground. I should never have let him take you.’ She clenched her little fists. ‘The lies he fed me. The things he didn’t tell me! Well, I sure know now. What a name for a tree. Boy am I going to give that father of yours an earful.’

When Jeannie asked who she’d talked to, she said, ‘Never you mind.’

When she asked if she’d talked to someone called Sinan, her mother said, ‘Sinan. That’s his name, is it?’

‘You talked to him?’

‘I believe that the…’ She folded her arms and swallowed hard. ‘I believe I spoke to the boy’s uncle.’

‘Which one?’

‘Oh lambie, you don’t expect me to remember that, do you? They all have such strange names.’

‘What’s happened? Don’t tell me something bad’s happened!’

‘Of course something bad’s happened!
Look
at you!’

‘I didn’t mean me, I meant Sinan.’

‘Are you talking about that boyfriend of yours? Well, there’s a change! Jeannie, I can’t tell you how hurtful that was. To find out you had a boyfriend but didn’t trust me enough to tell me. I’ll bet it was that father of yours who talked you into that. I’m right, aren’t I? I can just hear him. Best not to tell you-know-who you have a boyfriend. Well, some boyfriend he turned out to be!’

‘He said he was okay, though?’

‘Oh, yes, indeedy. He’s just fine.’

‘But someone else isn’t? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

‘How the heck am I supposed to know?’ Seeing the tears streaming down Jeannie’s cheeks, she said, ‘I’m sorry, lambie. I didn’t mean to upset you. But really, you can’t expect me to ask about people I don’t even know. Listen, let’s just take it slow, okay? Whatever happened out there, it’s over. The important thing is that you’re home. Let’s just concentrate on making you better.’

But she wouldn’t be better, couldn’t, shouldn’t, until she heard his voice.

The floor looped and buckled as she struggled to the phone.

This time Jeannie got Sinan’s mother. For the longest time, she could hear only her breathing. ‘Why are you calling?’ Sibel asked finally.

‘I need to speak to Sinan.’

Another long silence. An echo. Then a click.

‘You may not be surprised to hear this,’ Jeannie’s mother told her when she made it downstairs for supper. ‘But your father has still not graced us with a call. Judging by his track record, we could be in for a long wait. But if he does call, you are not to speak to him. You are to hand the Postcard Man straight to me. Understood?’

As if.

‘Sit down, lambie. I’ve made us macaroni cheese.’

Over supper, they fell back into their old pattern. Her mother told her about everything that had happened to her over the past
year – her job at the library, her foray into night school, the woman’s group she joined and abandoned, the boyfriend who hadn’t worked out, and the new one she wasn’t sure about. Jeannie asked her why and she explained. She told Jeannie how it felt to fall in love when she was still smarting with hurt from the man who’d come before, and how it felt to sit in a room with a group of women who were even angrier with men than she was. How walking into her first night class had been like stepping off a cliff. She told Jeannie how bored, how suffocated she felt every morning when she went into work, how the dread of being stuck there forever was what had kept her going to that night class and then she confessed that when Jeannie had left last June she was ‘quite simply, bereft’. ‘Nothing prepared me for it. I’d actually been looking forward to a little time alone. Because you know, lambie, you’d been so difficult. So critical. So unappreciative. All you wanted to talk about was leaving.

So I thought, well. Why put off the inevitable? I knew I was going to miss you. But that first morning when I came down here? I felt dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jeannie said meekly.

Triumphantly, her mother took her hand. ‘You mustn’t say that, lambie. The important thing is that you’re back. Now you’re back, I can breathe again.’ And Jeannie nodded, smiled, commiserated. She kept her talking, hoping she wouldn’t remember that a mother ought to stop talking about herself now and again, and do some listening.

When Jeannie stood up, her mother handed her a jar with a pierced lid. ‘Really, Mom. You’d think I was eight.’

‘Well, just this once,’ she said. ‘Just for old time’s sake. It used to make you so happy.’

‘I cried when they died.’

‘They don’t live long anyway. You know that!’

So Jeannie took the jar outside.

And there they were – the fireflies. Hundreds and thousands of them circling through the night. As she stood on the lawn with her jar, she could hear the teenagers horsing around the pool next door.

She would never laugh like that again.

It was Chloe’s father, Hector Cabot, who broke the news. Since divorcing Chloe’s mother, he had been living in Woodstock, Connecticut, and it was to Woodstock that Chloe had been dispatched within days of Jeannie’s departure. Hector had called to exchange notes with Jeannie’s mother, and to suggest that the two girls be brought together so that they could do the same. He had been somewhat taken aback to find that Nancy Wakefield wanted to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ But he knew how to talk to her. In early July he was granted permission to drive over to Northampton to speak to Jeannie face to face.

‘Though you don’t know me from Adam, you know at least that I understand the country. I can guess what you loved in it. For I once loved it, too. And Jeannie – I know the pain of heartbreak. The onus of a new beginning. What’s more, I know your father – as a man, and as a friend.’

It was in this sanctimonious mode that he began his weary monologue. This is not my harsh judgment, but his. When we met in Istanbul in November 2005, Hector Cabot talked of hating the ‘tinny echo of manufactured goodwill.’ But in July 1970, he had less than two years of sobriety behind him, ‘which means I was
very
sober. Suffocatingly sober. It was the best I could do.’

He had never met Jeannie before so could not tell me how she’d changed. He recalled an emaciated girl with a great mass of blonde hair, a mouth that twisted to one side and hands that never stopped tapping. She sat hunched in her chair, eyes fixed on the ground
between them – though from time to time she would fix him with a cold blue glare.

‘You were stepping out with Sinan, I take it.’As soon had he said this, he knew it was the ‘wrong way in’. Was it the past tense that made her wince as if she’d just been stung? Had his antiquated turn of phrase added insult to injury? He proceeded with caution. ‘How well did you know Dutch Harding?’

Another wince. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

Sensing now that there was no right way into this ‘tangled web – or right way out, for that matter’, he answered her directly. ‘Jeannie, he’s been murdered.’

‘
What
?’

He’d heard people say some pretty nasty things about Jeannie over the years – rumours, based on speculation, or on outright lies – but none of these people had been in that room that day, and he had been. He’d seen the terror in her eyes, so he could assure the ‘sirens of the gossip mill’ that (a) she was hearing this ‘macabre tale’ for the first time and (b) she had no idea what to make of it.

The story he told her was a sanitised version of the account I myself had read in that lurid news article: a group of students belonging to a Maoist cell called Enlightenment had discovered that the man they trusted above all others was an agent provocateur… She stopped him here. ‘Are we talking about the same people?’ She’d gone on to claim that she knew no Maoists. ‘They only said so to annoy their mothers. They never opened the Little Red Book except to laugh at it.’ But Hector had persevered. He could give her the names. Suna, Lüset, Haluk, and (‘there is no easy way of saying this, my dear, so brace yourself’) Sinan. Had it not been for the prompt and selfless intervention of Jeannie’s father, the list might well have included Chloe’s name, and her own.

‘Prompt, perhaps. But not selfless! Not selfless!’

Tears, followed by tissues. ‘May I continue now? There’s more, I’m afraid. ‘Much more.’

A peremptory nod from Jeannie. A deep breath, and then he went for it. Keeping to the basics: upon hearing that one of their number was an agent provocateur, the group’s suspicions had passed
from one possible culprit to the next, until a chance remark exposed Dutch Harding as the enemy amongst them. After putting him on trial (‘though I hope you understand that I am using this word metaphorically’) and pronouncing him guilty, they had condemned him to death. (‘Which must be seen as a measure of their betrayal. I have never been to a country where they honour their teachers more deeply than they do in Turkey.’)

She took this news calmly. Too calmly. Falsely encouraged – though he ought to have asked himself why she was clutching her head in her hands, and why she had dropped her head so low it almost grazed her knees – he had described the gory aftermath: the chopping up of the body, the cramming of body parts into the trunk, the ill-conceived getaway plan, the trail of blood that prompted a member of the public to report the girls and their trunk to the police. The arrest. The
so-called
interrogation, and Suna’s leap from the window.

Here she’d interrupted his ghastly flow. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I heard that right.’ So he’d told her again, but filling in some detail. Turkey being Turkey, they would never know for sure what had gone on in that interrogation room. But officially Suna had jumped. A flower vendor in the street below had seen her dangling her feet on the fourth floor window. Which did suggest…

This was when she had gone for his throat.

Painful and startling though this had been, he had only himself to blame. He was better at passing on sad tidings now. ‘I was awfully clumsy in those days,’ he told me. ‘Sobriety had robbed me of my social graces. Having made such a mess of it, I decided to concentrate on Chloe, who was in the same sort of mess. I sorely regret sending her off to Radcliffe that September. I ought to have realised she just wasn’t ready yet. She’d barely spoken all summer. My every effort to discuss this terrible murder ran right into the proverbial brick wall. Why I thought that meant she’d moved on… Though I must say, I kept pretty close tabs on her all autumn. She and Jeannie were very close that first semester, did you know that? Though it was not, I would now say, the healthiest of bonds. They’d joined together against a world that didn’t understand them. They goaded each other on. I am not trying to say that Jeannie was responsible in any way for
Chloe’s breakdown. Far from it. No, if Jeannie hadn’t called me that December, to express her concerns – by which I mean, to tell me Chloe was in the infirmary, having cut herself – well, who’s to say? We might easily have lost her. So of course – and whatever injury or distress Jeannie later caused us – we are eternally grateful to her.’