Coincidence: A Novel (5 page)

6

October 1978

T
he name ‘Azaliah' was originally proposed by the Reverend Jeremiah Lender, the man who was later to drop the baby into the font. At the time Marion Yves was leaning towards the name ‘Hazel'. She suggested this name to the vicar, but he gave her a disapproving look.

‘With all the names we have in the Bible,' he rebuked her, ‘and with all the names of all the saints in heaven, you want to call your baby after a nut?'

‘But I like the name Hazel,' Marion had protested.

‘In that case,' said the vicar, ‘you should call her Azaliah. It's close enough to Hazel, isn't it? And it means ‘set aside by God'.

If you go back through the christening records for the parish of Port St Menfre you will find at least two more Azaliahs, along with a host of other biblical names. The villagers of Port St Menfre were Josephs and Ruths and Jacobs and Esthers and Rebeccas and Matthews; they were rarely Melvin or Roger or Veronica or Brenda. Clearly the Reverend had engaged in similar conversations with a generation of mothers. If you look up ‘Azaliah' in a book of names, then it does indeed appear to mean ‘set aside by God', or ‘close to God', but curiously, if you search the Bible itself you will find this name only once, and in the event even the gender is ambiguous. Shaphan, we are told, was the son of Azaliah. So the original bearer of the name was probably male.

But, nevertheless, in her new life Azaliah became Azalea. The girl set aside by God became a flowering shrub.

 

The General Register Office in England has a process for the issuing of adoption certificates to foundlings. No birth certificate is issued, but a birth date is normally entered onto the adoption papers, marked, if necessary, as an estimated date. So as well as providing the foundling girl with a name, it was also necessary to establish an estimated date of birth. At the time Azalea came to live with the Folleys she was four years and three months old; but no one knew that, and with no known birthday the authorities were obliged to assign one for her. The doctor who had checked Azalea when she was found at the fairground had estimated the little girl's age as around four and a half, which would have made her almost five when she was adopted. We now know that she was only three years and ten months old when she was discovered. Her gangly frame may have made her look a little older, and her confident demeanour probably helped in this assessment. The doctor's judgement would have placed Azalea's birth date around December 1977. Her true birthday was in August 1978. But it was left to Rebecca and Luke Folley to agree with a registrar from Cornwall on an official date. The Folleys were anxious to resist a December date because this would be too close to Christmas, and had they been wiser they might have gone for January or later; but, in the event, the date they chose was an even earlier one – 1 November 1977, because this was All Saints' Day, adding a little over eight months to Azalea's age.

Eight months is a big gap for a four-year-old to make up. But the first intake in a school year will typically include children up to a year apart in age, so Azalea did not stand out as too young or too old when she joined the reception class at school within days of joining the Folleys.

Fate, of course, plays a part in all of our lives. As an adult, Azalea would often reflect upon the unlikely sequence of events that seemed to have directed her life. She would, many years later, visit the cliffs at Millook where Marion had perished, and there she would throw flowers onto the rocks in memory of a woman she no longer remembered. Had a hungry seagull snatched a different piece of bread, had a complicated train of events involving a faraway conflict in the South Atlantic not conspired to make her mother bundle her into a car for a six-hour drive, had the fairground lights not caught her eye, had Carl Morse not been prowling, had her mother been able to escape his clutches, had Azalea as a three-year-old known an address she could have given to the policemen, had the police in Sheffield possessed more imagination – then none of what was about to happen might ever have transpired. But all of us lead lives that twist and coil, and no one can truly say what might have been.

It wasn't until some years later that the young Azalea would learn of another cruel event that had happened on the very same day – 24 November 1982 – that she was adopted by the Folleys. It was an incident of such callous barbarity that Luke and Rebecca Folley would shield her from the news of it, even as she became slowly aware of the episode that was to determine her future in ways that no one could foresee. It was an event that may have been coldly unfolding, even as the Folleys hugged their new daughter and smothered her with new-found affection. Even as the car pulled up in the drive of the Folleys' home in St Piran, even as Azalea tore the coloured paper off the welcome gifts that her new parents had so lovingly wrapped, even then events were unravelling in a very distant land. Sometime on that day, as Rebecca Folley showed Azalea the little bedroom where she would sleep, as they looked out together at the boats that bobbed in the harbour, as they served up their first meal as a family – at some point a small conical slug of lead was starting a short and violent journey through the barrel of a gun, emerging into the bright sunlight of a town and a continent a great many miles from St Piran. And like the cascade of colliding balls on a snooker table, cold and inevitable consequences would accompany this fragment of metal as it crossed the void from its dark metallic tube. The repercussions of its flight would echo across years, and over continents, until the aftermath would engulf Luke and Rebecca and Azalea Folley – and eventually even Thomas Post as well.

One year after Azalea's adoption, the ripples had already reached the Folleys. By then the house in St Piran stood empty. Azalea and her new family were in Africa.

7

June 2012 / February 2011

‘W
e met at Euston Station,' Thomas says. ‘I don't think I ever told you that.'

He and Clementine are in the basement canteen of the university. They have lunched here many times before. Clementine picks at a healthy salad of unfamiliar beans and leaves. Thomas has goulash with chunky fried potatoes.

‘Euston Station? How delightfully romantic,' Clementine observes. ‘It reminds me of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.'

Thomas raises an eyebrow.

‘
Brief Encounter
,' says Clementine. ‘Please don't tell me you haven't seen that film.'

‘I've heard of it,' Thomas says, lamely.

‘They meet at a railway station. He helps to get something out of her eye. It's love at first sight.' Clementine hums a tune and lets her fingers dance over an imaginary piano. ‘Rachmaninov plays in the background,' she says. ‘Piano Concerto Number Two.'

‘Ahh.' Thomas nods. ‘It wasn't quite like that with us.'

‘No Rachmaninov?' She is teasing him.

‘None whatsoever.' He looks into his goulash and stabs at a potato.

It doesn't seem that long ago. How long was it? A year? A year and a half?

‘It was February,' he tells her, ‘February 2011.'

It had been cold; colder than winters in London have any right to be. There was ice still on pavements and swept-up snow in gutters. But the chill east wind was easing, and signs of a thaw were evident in the loosening of the coats and scarves of city commuters. There were fewer hats pulled down over ears than there had been just a week ago. Thomas, who rarely wore a hat, noticed these things.

They had never met. They were colleagues. But the University of London is Britain's largest; it is absurdly easy to pursue an entire career there without ever encountering the majority of one's colleagues. Azalea taught English literature and poetry to adult learners at Birkbeck, usually working unsocial hours at the college, where most teaching takes place in the evenings. Thomas was a philosopher, spinning out his days in an undistinguished annexe of the Institute for Philosophy in Russell Square. The two of them spent their working lives within the same few city streets; they undoubtedly swarmed down the same busy pavements to the same tube stations; they probably stood in the same queues for sandwiches in summer, and ate them on the same park lawn in Tavistock Square; they would have browsed together in the university bookshop, and must surely have squeezed into the same rowdy pubs after work. But huge universities and great cities deliver a cloak of invisibility, and so it was that when Azalea Lewis and Thomas Post mounted the top step of the escalator at Euston Station in the middle of the morning rush hour, neither would have afforded the other more than a courteous glance. They were strangers in a city of strangers.

That anonymity was about to change.

You may be familiar with the escalator at Euston Station; if not, you will at least recognise the general category of escalators that bear tides of people into the dark intestines of cities at all hours, but most especially at those times when, like one of the great animal migrations, the world's commuters take to their streets. Euston railway station, like a thousand city hubs from New York to Shanghai, is a portal, disgorging trainloads of workers from homes in the suburbs, propelling them down into the maze of tunnels that is the underground transport network. There is a moment every weekday morning when the sheer mass of humanity swarming onto the down escalator at Euston threatens to overwhelm the orderly unfolding of the steel steps, and a crowd begins to build and to push, as the urgency of the day's commute becomes more acute. Some workers filter off to the central stairway between the down escalator and the up escalator; they take the stairs in a hurry, often two steps at a time, anxious not to be overtaken by glassy-eyed travellers sweeping effortlessly down on the conveyor. Most commuters simply join the melee, waiting for the crush to carry them to the top step.

They are a diverse lot, the commuters of London; this one in an Italian suit off to get the Northern Line into the city; this one in fatigues off to clean a hospital; this one in the uniform of a nurse; this one in the uniform of a waiter. They clutch their bags and their newspapers and their laptop cases and their mobile phones, and they move with the precision of colonial insects driven by an unwavering programme to press forward. They make little eye contact. They rarely speak. They acknowledge fellow travellers with the faintest of nods. They are men and women on a mission, a familiar and practised journey from A to B. Thomas Post was one of this species, and so, on that February day, was Azalea Lewis.

There is a convention on the London Underground that the right-hand side of an escalator is reserved for standing passengers, while the left is a freeway for walkers. The walkers are impatient. The escalator is too slow to match the urgency of their commute. The convention fails when tourists, unfamiliar with the practice, find themselves on the left; then regular walkers get irritable and there can be pushing and bottlenecking. This is what happened that day. Two steps in front of Thomas Post (on the right) and Azalea Lewis (on the left), a pair of tourists were squeezed onto a step with large and unwieldy suitcases. A tetchy tail of commuters had sprung up behind. It should have been just another morning crush, but as the throng of people slid towards the depths, a man on the step behind Azalea tried to assert his right to push forwards. Azalea was forced to steady herself by holding up a hand, which fell rather heavily on the tourist ahead; and the tourist, taken by surprise, tried to move and fell awkwardly over her suitcase. With creditable speed Thomas Post's hand flew out to catch the visitor, but she was falling too fast – and now Thomas was falling too, and Azalea was caught up in it.

And now the escalator reached the bottom. The twisted pile – two cumbersome suitcases, two frightened tourists and two employees of the University of London – was unceremoniously deposited onto the concourse. There was no time for anyone caught in the pile to extract themselves before commuters from two steps above also collapsed into the heap; and a second later another two, and then two more; and then a woman with a child in a pushchair and a man with a heavy parcel, and then two more people, and then two more.

It was astonishing how swiftly the mound of people grew. For those joining the stack, there was a grim inevitability about their destination. Unable to move backwards, unable to step sideways, they were carried forwards and cast onto the pile. Screams grew from the press of people at the bottom and the cry carried back up the line, but the crowds joining at the top were blind to the commotion and they continued to press forward. Somewhere halfway up the escalator was an emergency button, but in the wave of panic that infected the crowd no one above the button thought to seek it, and those beneath it were unable to reach back.

The risk of injury was enhanced by those in the crush who struggled hardest to escape. The thrashing of legs and arms and the digging of heels made it worse for those who were being stamped upon, elbowed and punched by an increasingly panicked mob. Thomas had withdrawn his left arm from the woman on the stair below, and as they fell, he had gallantly extended the arm to protect the stranger who shared his stair. Now that arm was broken. Azalea for her part had broken a rib and was finding it difficult to breathe. Both of them stopped struggling to get out of the crush. By now any effort to move was painful.

At last someone found the emergency stop button and the relentless supply of new bodies was staunched. Even so, it took some time to disentangle all the limbs and to pull everyone to safety. Several commuters had been injured. One man was bleeding heavily from the face. A woman had possibly broken her neck. Another had a broken leg. A stiletto heel had been driven into the back of one of the Eastern Europeans and he was in a lot of pain. A student had seen her laptop computer trampled and crushed. Another had lost her glasses. Several people were in shock. The pushchair had buckled; but the baby, thank God, was unharmed.

First-aiders and paramedics started to arrive and Thomas and Azalea were pulled away and propped up on the cold stone floor, leaning against a wall. His broken arm was still draped around her shoulder as if they were a couple. In shock and in pain, neither of them sought to move it.

‘Are you all right?' he asked her, unable – or unwilling – to move.

Azalea shook her head. ‘I think I've broken some ribs. You?'

‘My arm,' he said.

It was difficult to talk. They waited. Station staff tried to clear the crowd. Ambulance men arrived with stretchers.

‘It's all right – I can walk,' said Thomas, getting to his feet and wincing with the pain.

‘Are you two together?' asked an ambulance man. Thomas shook his head.

‘In that case, if you can walk, can you go with my colleague?' he nodded towards a fellow rescue worker. ‘Let's have a stretcher over here for this lady,' he called.

A first-aider tied a sling around Thomas's arm, and helped him to make his way back up the central stairwell to the station concourse. Thomas glanced back to see Azalea strapped onto a stretcher behind him. Her eyes were closed.

At the Accident and Emergency unit of University College Hospital, Thomas looked for the red-haired woman who had shared his step. But some of the ambulance cases were being directed to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

Thus quickly and unexpectedly our lives can change. None of us sets out to break a bone or to participate in an incident like the one that took place at the foot of the escalator at Euston Station that day. These things, when they happen, come as a surprise. Escalator pile-ups, as it turns out, are not especially rare. London Underground suffers dozens of incidents a year. This one was worse than many because of the intensity of the crush and because the couple at the front of the pile-up had heavy suitcases that blocked the way for anyone thrown into the fray. But the incident didn't even warrant a paragraph in the
Evening Standard
. A few bones were broken, but no one was killed.

In the days that followed the accident, Thomas found himself thinking about the woman with the broken rib. They had sat together in the corridor of the Underground station, waiting for the emergency services to arrive. His arm had been draped over her shoulder. He felt embarrassed to think about this. They had barely spoken a sentence to each other. Even in the chaos they had watchfully observed the Londoner's code of silence. But now he discovered himself trying to picture her face. There was a familiarity to her. Did he know her? He had struggled
not
to look at her. He had never asked her name, never enquired about her journey, never volunteered his phone number. He had, however, scented a delicate perfume, caught just a faint hint of organic fragrance from her hair, and now he longed to recapture the memory of this elusive aroma. For just a moment her head had rested upon his shoulder, seeking comfort like a lover's head, and he out of instinct had turned towards her, almost as if he might place a gentle kiss upon her hair. And then the moment had passed. But in his imagination and in his memory of the incident, this was the brief second that Thomas Post would revisit, this fragment of time and this indefinable scent. He thought of calling the accident unit at the Royal Free Hospital, just to enquire about the woman who had broken a rib, and on one occasion he did dial the number and he let it ring a couple of times, but he checked himself and hung up. The hospital would not share patient information unless he could prove that they were related, and how could he claim that if he didn't even know the woman's name?

The day of the escalator incident was a Friday. Thomas was back at work by Wednesday morning, his arm in a plaster cast. He had an ordinary day. He taught a class on the social understanding of unusual events. It was one of his fields of expertise. Most of us, he argued, are bad at calculating the likelihood of quite normal events and we tend, therefore, to see them as remarkable, or divinely inspired. ‘How likely is it,' he asked his class of twenty-five students, ‘that you visit the theatre, and there in the audience is someone you just happen to know? Or let us say you stop at a motorway service station, or you go on holiday to Ibiza and there, in the same hotel, is someone you knew from school?' He let the students ponder this. ‘I once flew to Madrid,' he said, ‘and on the same flight were a couple whose wedding I had attended a year before. Was that a coincidence?'

He took a marker and did some calculations on a whiteboard. ‘How many Facebook friends do you have?' he asked a girl in the front row.

She giggled. ‘Around, maybe, four hundred,' she said.

‘OK.' Thomas wrote
400
. ‘Now if we add to these all your relatives, and your neighbours and people you've lost touch with, then four hundred probably becomes six hundred, doesn't it? Add all the people you'd recognise from school or university – not friends, just people you know – let's make it a thousand.' He crossed out the
400
and wrote
1,000
. ‘When we look at it, that turns out to be a good estimate for the number of friends and relatives and acquaintances that each of us will typically have. So you'd probably recognise and go and greet a thousand people if you were to meet them in an unexpected place like an airport lounge or on a beach.' Again he sketched out the calculation on the whiteboard. ‘How often are we in any kind of situation where there are two or three hundred strangers? At a theatre? In a supermarket? On a tube train? In the high street? Maybe four or five times a day.' He wrote the numbers up. ‘Now your thousand acquaintances represent, say, one person in every fifty thousand in the UK. But you probably see the faces of fifteen hundred people every day. So you should have at least one chance encounter with somebody you know at least once a month.' Thomas lowered himself carefully onto the desk at the front of the lecture theatre. His arm was in a sling and it was still uncomfortable.