Voices in the Dark (13 page)

‘No,’ said Leo. ‘You’ll have to stay in the shop today.’

‘Why?’ Jasmine wailed. ‘I don’t like it in the shop. There’s nothing to do!’

‘You can go out to the yard later if things quieten down.’

‘No!’ Jasmine lay down on the doorstep and began crying. People glanced at her as they passed.

‘Jasmine,’ I said. ‘Hey, Jasmine. I’ll take you for a walk later—’

‘No,’ said Leo, picking Jasmine up and carrying her, screaming, through the door. ‘You are both staying inside.’

We opened up the shop, and my mother insisted on going to work, but all day Leo was glancing at the door, and every customer made him start. We saw the police passing several times, sweating in their red uniforms. The summer seemed determined to finish with a flourish. Even the shade shimmered black and restless. The other traders kept calling into our shop, as though we were under siege and had to raise each other’s spirits. Leo closed at four o’clock. We had taken nothing all day.

I could tell Leo was not sleeping, because I could not sleep either. Lying awake in the moonlight, I could see the faint light of the oil lamp on the shop counter creeping up the
stairs and across the living-room floorboards and coming to rest against the bottom of my door. A few nights later, we were woken by shouts again. A building somewhere was on fire, and people were running up and down the street with guns. Smoke billowed thickly across the clouds. We all stood in the living room, not speaking, while the police ran about and people clamoured in the street. Then, after a while, it fell silent again. Even the dogs did not dare to bark.

My mother made tea, and we sat around the back room in silence. Jasmine was on Leo’s knee with her face buried in his shirt. Across the table, his eyes kept meeting mine. ‘I wish to God that Aldebaran was here,’ he said eventually.

‘Don’t blaspheme,’ said Jasmine, her voice muffled.

Leo hugged her more tightly. ‘I wasn’t, Jas.’

My mother started talking about the baby. It was kicking tonight, she said, as though the riots had woken it too.

‘Does he sleep?’ said Jasmine.

‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘It sleeps and wakes up like anyone else.’

‘
He
, not
it
,’ said Jasmine. ‘It’s going to be a boy.’

‘If it is a boy,’ said my mother abruptly, ‘I want to call him Stirling.’

No one spoke, but the silence this time had a different quality. ‘Stirling is a good name,’ said Jasmine. ‘Would you have called me Stirling if I was a boy?’

‘Your middle name is Stella – that’s the closest we could get.’

‘My middle name is Stella?’ Jasmine demanded. ‘Why didn’t you tell me ever before?’

‘It’s on your certificate of birth,’ said my mother. ‘I must have mentioned it, haven’t I, Jas?’

‘Let me see that certificate,’ said Jasmine.

Leo got up and searched through the drawer where we had once kept important documents, but they had long since been swamped by other contents. ‘It must be here somewhere,’ he said.

‘I wrote it down in my journal,’ I said. ‘Remember those journals I used to keep?’

‘Go and find it,’ said my mother.

‘I don’t know where they are. Maybe in that box under the sofa.’

‘Go on, Anselm,’ said Jasmine.

I took another lamp and went upstairs. The box was furred with dust, but I could see the journals there on the top. I had kept them as a child when I saw Leo writing and wanted to copy him. I found the one from the year of Jasmine’s birth and carried it back down.

‘Is that your writing?’ said Jasmine when I opened it.

‘Yes. Look – here it is.’ I had recorded it carefully, in Leo’s ink pen, borrowed for the occasion. ‘“I am glad to report that Jasmine Stella Andros North was born safely in our apartment in Citadel Street, delivered by Sister Mary Fuller, AMC."’

‘What’s AMC?’ demanded Jasmine.

‘Me being pompous,’ I said. ‘It’s on the plaque outside her door.’

‘It just means Advanced Midwifery Certificate,’ said my mother. ‘Sister Mary Fuller. I liked her. Perhaps I’ll have her again for this baby.’

‘Go on,’ said Jasmine.

I read on:'“I, Anselm Andros North, ran to Paradise Way to fetch the midwife. My sister is called Jasmine because of the jasmine flowers growing in the gutter outside the
window. And Stella in honour of my uncle Stirling. She is nine years and one month and thirty days younger than me. Jasmine looks red and small, but I can tell already she will be a beautiful lady. She cried in the church when the priest baptized her. She cries a good deal.”’

Jasmine laughed at that. ‘“She cries a good deal”! Did I?’

‘I forgot about Anselm running for the doctor,’ said my mother. ‘And, yes. Yes, you did cry a good deal, at least at the start.’

The firelight and that account held us against the dark outside.

‘Why did you name me after a flower that grew in the gutter?’ Jasmine asked, looking up at my mother with something like disappointment.

‘Because it was the one beautiful thing in that place,’ my mother said.

After we went back upstairs, I sat at my desk under the window and turned over the pages of those old journals. Some of them went so far back that I could not even remember the circumstances in which I had written them; they were like a stranger’s words. Others I could recall, even down to the look of my small hand gripping the pen and the light outside the windows. I turned to the year that we moved into the shop and found an entry I remembered well: ‘I have a new friend next door whose name is Mikeal. We are going to signal to each other from the windows and when we grow up we are going to travel around the world together and be the best of friends always, even when we get married and go to different places.’ And Michael had crossed out his name a few weeks later when he insisted on
reading my journal and had written the proper spelling very firmly underneath it.

That only made my heart ache, so I closed the journal and went back to the earlier ones. I found an entry from the year before that made me pause and turn up the lamp. ‘Jasmine looks like Leo and my mother already,’ I had written, ‘and I keep thinking about my real father. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I can see something about his face in mine. I think he had red hair and a strong kind of look. I wish I had seen his grave. I wish I knew what his first name was and whether he would have been proud of me.’

I turned a page back and found ‘my real father’ again. He was there, too, in the journal from the year before, every few entries, and he took up six pages of speculation in the one before that. And suddenly it came back to me clearly, the way I had felt about not knowing – before Leo became my father and I decided not to think about it any more.

I closed the journal and watched the clouds drifting over the stars. They looked like the continents of another world. I wondered where Michael was by now. I wondered how long he would remember me.

Everything felt wrong with my heart since Aldebaran had died, as though his absence had set the whole world out of joint. That night, I decided two things as I watched the clouds and shivered and could not sleep. I would find out who my real father was, before things grew too uncertain. And then, before life divided us, I would find Michael again.

‘You were in love with your friend Michael,’ said Mr Hardy. He did not ask it; he just said it.

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘And are you going to find him?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’ He waited. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever find him again now,’ I said. ‘With everything that’s happened since.’

‘I think you should find him,’ Mr Hardy said. ‘One day. No matter what has happened since.’

I got up and refilled his glass of spirits, more for the sake of avoiding his glance than for any other reason. ‘I thought you would be shocked,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘I probably look old to you,’ he said. ‘But that means nothing. People have fallen in love since time began. Sometimes with the wrong person, as that newspaper put it, but always irrevocably and in spite of the fuss it has caused.’

I could not help smiling at that. He was strange, Mr Hardy, and I did not know what to make of him, but already he had become a kind of relative to me in the loneliness of the journey. He sipped his spirits thoughtfully, then said, ‘I was in love once.’

‘Just once?’ I said.

He considered it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just once.’

I had expected him to have a whole line of women in his history; he was a traveller and a man who knew about the world. ‘I’ll tell you the story, if you want to hear it,’ he said.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘Well,’ he began. ‘I used to write copy for a company that sold encyclopaedias. I wanted to be a great writer, but the newspapers wouldn’t have me.’ He gave a dry laugh and sipped his spirits again. ‘Anyway, they assigned me the worst letters, and I worked on those. X and Z. I was seventeen years old and just out of school. I had a four-mile walk home across the city, and in the winter it froze your blood. I used to walk home past a convent where poor girls took rooms. They went out to work as clerks or housemaids in the town, and in the evenings they helped the nuns at their chores.’

I did not know where this story was leading, but I knew better than to interrupt.

Mr Hardy studied the spirits in his glass and went on. ‘Anyway, one night I was late coming home, and as I was walking by this convent, I heard someone singing. If you had heard it …’ He shook his head. ‘It was the most beautiful thing in the world. I suppose I was very young, but I know it was beautiful. Like an angel’s voice. I stood there listening for half an hour and didn’t even notice that my fingers were numb with cold. And the next night I came home late again, just in the hope of hearing her singing.’

‘Did you hear her again?’

‘Yes. Before I knew it, I was staying for an extra hour every night, just so I could be outside the window when she came home. I used to stand in the cold outside the convent walls, even when the snow was falling like tomorrow would never come. And I was in love, I swear.’

‘Without ever seeing her?’ I asked.

Mr Hardy laughed, and his eyes glittered in the lamplight. ‘Yes, I suppose so. It was weeks before I really saw her face. It took me that time to work up the courage. I waited one day until she came out of the convent door on her way to work. I didn’t go up to
her; I just watched her pass. She had lovely grey eyes and a way of walking.’

‘How did you know it was her?’

He shook his head. ‘I just knew. She was just how I imagined her, from that angel’s voice. She walked like an angel, like her feet didn’t touch the ground. I know it’s an old and hackneyed way of speaking, but I swear it was how I felt. And she had a way of dressing, too, like she refused to be poor. I remember that about her. In the years afterwards, even when we were struggling—’ He broke off then and laughed. ‘But I have given the story away now.’

I was sure that he had meant to. ‘So you got the courage to speak to her eventually?’ I said.

‘Eventually. I sent word by one of the nuns, and she met me at the convent gate. I had thought she would refuse altogether, but she came down to meet me. She was very proud and indignant. She wanted to know what I had been doing standing under her window every night. I told her the story.’

‘What did she do?’

‘Thought I was a very foolish boy and marched away in a high temper.’ He laughed. ‘And eventually became my wife.’

I waited for the moral of the story. The tales he told me of his past life always had some meaning, like the chord that resolves an old song. ‘So I know what love is,’ he said at last. ‘And let me tell you, I’m glad I had the courage to go up to that door. I’m glad, even though I lost all hope when she turned and marched away. It was weeks before she relented and let me see her. To try and find out the truth, or change the world, or make your own life better is like jumping from a cliff – you risk losing everything. But the cautious lose everything anyway, because they try to hold onto it. Either you cast it to the four winds and trust to faith that it will come back again, or it falls through your fingers by degrees.’

‘Are you telling me to go and find Michael again?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘I would never do that. I am just telling you what I think.’

The snow threw itself against the window and made the little boy sleeping in the corner murmur softly and turn his head.

‘Go on with your story,’ said Mr Hardy. ‘It is of much more consequence than my sentimental ramblings.’ He gave a quick smile.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was interesting.’

‘Well …’ He acknowledged that with another smile and poured me more spirits. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how to go on,’ I said. ‘That’s where I’ve got to so far. I’m writing it down, but I don’t know what to write next.’

‘Then you can always read to me, if you aren’t too tired.’

I nodded and got out those papers. When he was not listening to my story, he wanted to know all about them, and it was easier to read to him than listen to the silence of the country around us.

‘This part is somewhere else,’ I said. ‘It’s part of the same story – I think it happened at the same time – but it’s not in the same place.’

‘Did you write it?’ he said as I unfolded the papers. ‘I have been wondering.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t even understand it.’

‘Who did, then?’

‘Someone else.’

‘Someone you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone,’ said Mr Hardy, ‘who knows about other places.’ Then he was silent for so long that I thought he had forgotten the inn and the story and the night outside.

‘Yes, go on, read it,’ he said eventually, and came back.