London Tides: A Novel (The MacDonald Family Trilogy Book 2) (4 page)

Now Grace understood. This wasn’t just a visit; this was an impromptu intervention. Henry had been one of the last foreign correspondents from her batch to stay with the job, but he’d spent the last several years in Eastern Europe while she covered the Middle East. “I can hardly believe it. I thought you’d be the last one standing. What are you doing now?”

Henry exchanged a look with Melvin. His expression turned a little sheepish. “I just took a position in communications with Children’s Advocacy Fund.”

Grace let out a laugh of disbelief. “You’re working for an NGO. After all the times we said that was the last job we’d ever take?”

“Times change, Grace. You of all people should know it’s not so easy to let go of your life’s work. Besides, I believe in this organization. They’re actually doing things right. And it lets me use my experience doing something other than sitting behind a production desk.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve found something that makes you happy. And Ella has to be thrilled.”

“She is. So am I.” He paused long enough to fix her with a serious look. “That’s why I want you to come work for me.”

Grace blinked at him. “Work for you in what way?”

“I need a creative director, someone with experience in the field who has a strong editorial eye. I’ve been following your work for years, Grace. These photos here”—he waved at Melvin’s board—“prove your talent doesn’t just lie in conflict. These are the kinds of photos our donors need to see.”

“So you want me to be a fund-raiser?”

“No, I want you to be a journalist. The marketing collateral coming out of London right now is slick. Commercial. It doesn’t tell a story. It’s all smiling African children and happy farmers. It doesn’t communicate our needs, or why donations are important. I think you’re the perfect person to change that.”

Grace sat there, stunned. Yes, she had come back to London wanting to make big changes to her life. But she’d been thinking she might go back to commercial photography. Working for a charitable organization had never occurred to her. She’d always had the impression of the head offices being filled with do-gooders who had never put a foot on the ground, who had absolutely no idea what the program directors in the far-flung reaches of the earth went through. Westerners came to Asia and Africa and India, mucked up what was actually working in the villages, and left them worse off than before, all in the name of charity. And now he wanted her to be one of them? Melvin’s earlier words began to make sense.

“See what we’re about first and then decide.” Henry pulled out a heavy square of vellum from his inside pocket and passed it to her. “We’re having a fund-raising dinner on Friday evening. Come, see the presentation, talk to the board of directors. You know me, Grace. I’m not going to be involved in something that isn’t making a difference to the people we’re trying to help.”

Grace turned over the invitation in her hand. The Savoy hotel. Possibly the poshest venue in London and the last place she wanted to spend a Friday night. But she couldn’t bear to dash the hopeful looks on both men’s faces. “Okay. I’ll go. But I’m not promising anything.”

“Fair enough.” Henry gave Grace’s shoulder a squeeze, then rose to shake Melvin’s hand. “Nice seeing you, Melvin. I’ll see you Friday, Grace.”

Grace nodded as he left the room, then turned an accusing stare on her former editor. “You set me up.”

“What? I’ve known you forever, Grace. You’re not going to be happy shooting weddings and births and skyscrapers for a living. You need more meaning to your life. What’s wrong with having a little security at the same time?”

Grace shook her head and shouldered her rucksack as she rose. “You meddle more than a little old lady.”

“So my wife says. You can thank me later.”

A reluctant smile crept onto her face. “We’ll see about that. Call me when you have the test prints started.”

“Will do, Grace. Don’t cause any trouble in the meantime.”

It sounded like a challenge, but that was because she felt backed into a corner. She wound her way back out through the construction zone and took a deep breath of exhaust-filled air. Of all the nongovernmental organizations she’d interacted with, the Children’s Advocacy Fund was one of the better ones. Asha volunteered with the organization for part of the year, claiming it focused on local development rather than handouts. Still, Grace had spent her life being an observer, a dispassionate reporter, a watchdog of sorts. It was her job to record the truth, to witness the things that no one wanted to acknowledge.

And look where that’s gotten you.

She plugged her earphones into her ears and started back the way she had come. Melvin might think her return to London was ensured, but he’d unintentionally given her more reasons to doubt.
You need more meaning in your life than that,
he’d said. Even he didn’t understand the whole truth of it. It wasn’t just about meaning. It was about identity.

If she wasn’t a war photographer anymore, then who was she?

Chapter Four

Grace woke with a cry as a grenade shook the ground beneath her feet. For several terrified moments, she scrambled for protection, something to shield her from the next one, but she came up with a handful of blankets and a mangled pillow instead of dirt and rubble.

A dream. Thank you, God, just a dream.
She reached for a lamp just as Asha burst out of the bedroom.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

“I’m sorry. A nightmare. I’m … I’m really sorry.” Grace pressed her hands over her racing heart and realized her T-shirt was drenched in sweat.

Asha deflated like a balloon. She sank down on the arm of the sofa that served as Grace’s bed and pushed her tousled hair from her face. “Are you all right?” She didn’t ask what the dream was about. She already knew.

“I’ll be okay. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Asha squinted at the clock. “I have to be up in twenty minutes anyhow. I’ll go make some tea.”

While Asha stumbled to the kitchen and began banging about in the cupboards, Grace sank back against her pillows and tried to banish the memory of the dream.

Brilliant light shone down on her from an unnaturally blue sky, seeming to amplify the oppressive heat. Explosions rocked the ground around her, and she ducked behind a stone wall beneath a shower of dust and debris. The photographer beside her—as green as any twentysomething she’d ever met—huddled over his camera, his eyes terrified. He yelled something at her, but the automatic-weapons fire drowned out his words.

When there was a break in the barrage, Grace poked her head up over the wall and raised her camera again. “Now or never!” she said to Brian, whom she assumed was still hunkered behind her. But a quick look revealed nothing but empty space.

She swore loudly as she saw him running in a half crouch toward a broken-down section of the wall. Before she could call him back, a flash of light burst in her vision, followed by a deafening explosion that threw her back to the ground. The scene swam around her, colors, muted sounds, a ringing in her ears. Dazed, she lifted her head.

Brian was gone. Or at least in any form recognizable as a man.

Grace pressed her fingertips to her eyes as if it could erase the memory. That wasn’t even how it had happened. Brian had been killed three months ago in Syria, but her memory had superimposed the violence in Misrata, Libya, where two of her more experienced colleagues had died in the period they now called the Arab Spring.

Syria or Libya, she’d witnessed enough violence to last a lifetime.

She fingered the small Celtic cross tattoo on the inside of her right forearm, the one she had inked with the dates of Brian’s birth and death. It was a replica of a larger one he’d had on his arm, at least as much as she could remember from the one night they’d compared tats. His had had more detail, though. Maybe she should add some shading to the cross and the lilies behind it …

But she knew very well that the design was just a record. Proof. It did nothing to change the reality of what she’d seen and experienced. It did nothing to bring him back. That’s why she had chosen to finish the sleeve with the green dragon before she left Paris, a symbolic ending not just to her career but also to the things she’d done to cope.

“That part of your life is over,” she murmured to herself, unsure whether it was supposed to be reassurance or a warning.

“What did you say?” Asha called from the kitchen, her voice more alert.

“I just asked if the tea was ready.”

“Almost. You bought croissants?”

Grace climbed off the sofa bed, then wandered into the kitchen, where Asha was staring at the kettle. The normalcy of the act relieved the pressure building inside. “They’re for you. I don’t know how you manage to keep your figure with all the junk you eat.”

Asha grinned and waved a hand over her hip. “Jake likes me with some curves.”

“On you, the weight goes to all the right places. On me, it gets lost in the middle and meanders about aimlessly for a bit.”

“Oh, don’t make me laugh. It’s too early.”

Grace threw her a grin and retrieved a carton from the refrigerator. “You eat the pastries. I bought yogurt for me.”

“So, from the looks of the refrigerator, I owe you an apology,” Asha said. “I had no idea you were making dinner, or I would have come home early.”

Grace waved off the apology. “Busy night at hospital?”

“Understaffed, as usual.” The kettle clicked off, and Asha poured water into each of their mugs. “How about you? What did you do?”

“Dropped by the gallery to see Melvin. Who apparently thought I needed an intervention, because he brought in Henry Symon to see me.”

“What?” Asha plopped into the seat across from Grace and shoved a mug of tea toward her. “The journalist, right? The one who nearly got you killed in Kandahar.”

“He nearly got
himself
killed in Kandahar. I was just along for the ride.” Despite the dodgy situation the journalist’s bad intel had gotten them into, she could look back on the situation with a chuckle. They’d gotten out with their lives and relatively whole, even if she’d ended up losing a thousand euros in equipment. “Besides, I think that experience is what soured him on his career choices. He is apparently now living a quiet and very safe life in London as the communications director for CAF.” Grace sipped her tea and watched Asha over her mug. “And he wants me to come work for him.”

“Are you considering it?”

“I don’t know. Possibly. He invited me to the benefit on Friday.”

“Oh good. That saves me from having to scrounge you up a ticket.” Asha tore into her croissant, then paused with a piece of the pastry halfway to her mouth. “You’re actually doing it, aren’t you? Moving back. Quitting.”

“I don’t know, Ash.” Grace had spent most of the previous night turning that very question over in her mind, and she was no closer to an answer than she had been before. “It all depends, I guess.”

“On Ian?”

Grace let out a harsh laugh. “Hardly. He made it pretty clear he has no interest in talking to me. If I’m staying, it will have nothing to do with him.”

Asha didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t argue as she finished the rest of her tea and croissant. “You mind if I take the bathroom first? I have to be at work in forty-five minutes. No, scratch that. Thirty-five.” Asha put her mug in the sink, then headed for the bathroom, turning when she reached the door. “Grace, if you need someone … call me, all right?”

Grace nodded, glad that Asha didn’t feel the need to elaborate. “I will.”

As soon as Asha closed the door, Grace tossed the barely touched yogurt into the bin, then turned to packing her gear bag with the lenses and filters she would need for the Sunday-morning flower market. A few minutes later Asha emerged from the bathroom in a pair of slacks and a button-down blouse, her damp hair fastened into a knot at the back of her head. Even without makeup, she was one of the prettiest women Grace had ever seen.

Asha grabbed her handbag from the hook by the door and fixed Grace with a serious look. “I mean it. Call me.”

“I will.”

The first strains of sunlight peeked through the louver shades, nudging Grace in the direction of the bathroom. If she waited too long, she’d miss the peak lighting for the stalls. Shower first, though. If you could call it a shower. The claw-foot tub had never been plumbed for a showerhead, so she had to settle for a handheld sprayer attached to the tub filler by a rubber hose. She wasn’t complaining, though. Considering all the places it was standard practice to fill a bucket in order to flush the toilet, London’s reliable municipal water supply seemed nothing short of a miracle.

Fifteen minutes later she was bounding down the building’s staircase to the pavement, wearing a light pullover, jeans, and a newsboy cap pulled on over her cropped hair. The short walk to the Earl’s Court Tube station helped clear the last ghosts of the nightmare, building anticipation for her morning outing. Of all the locations in London she’d shot, the flower market and neighboring Brick Lane were among her favorites.

She plugged her earphones into her mobile while she waited on the platform, staring at the bills pasted to the opposite wall of the tunnel. Somehow she’d always loved the dusty, dank underground smell of the Tube, the rush of warm air, and the clatter of rails as the train approached.

Only a few people waited on the platform this morning, older people dressed for church, younger ones looking as if they were dragging themselves in from clubbing the night before. Grace climbed into the nearest carriage—heeding the warning to “mind the gap”—and settled into one of the gaudy-colored seats. The Rolling Stones blared through her earphones. Perfect. She tapped her foot along to the music until it was time to hop off at her next station and change lines for the last leg of the trip.

Her mood was lighter and her nerves more settled when she emerged onto street level and headed toward the short, packed street that was the Columbia Road flower market. She backed into the shelter of a shop awning to unzip her gear bag and affixed a 20 mm lens to her Canon camera body before she let the crowd swallow her again. Flower vendors lined each side of the street, leaving barely enough room for pedestrians to squeeze by the pitches marked out by rolling racks and open barrels, awnings both solid and striped. Around her, the hum of voices made a pleasant counterpoint to the deep, harsh shouts of the vendors hawking their wares.

“Fresh roses!” one shouted. “Peonies. Two for a tenner!”

Grace smiled at the vendor to her left and wove her way to his stall. Tall and beefy, with sunbaked skin, he looked more like a dock worker than a purveyor of delicate blooms.

“Morning,” she said. “Lovely selection. Have you any tulips, or is it too late in the season?”

His weathered face cracked into a smile. “No tulips, dear, but I’ve Belgian roses. Come have a gander.”

Grace squeezed between a barrel of carnations and two gawking women. She looked over the cellophane-wrapped bouquets for a moment before she selected a small bunch of yellow roses streaked with red. They’d be lovely on Asha’s kitchen table. “I’ll take these.”

The vendor pulled the bunch from the water and dropped them into a cone-shaped bag, which Grace tucked into the string sack over one shoulder. She handed over a five-pound note and asked, “Do you mind if I take some photos?”

“Go right ahead.”

Grace smiled her thanks as she backed away and knelt for a different angle. The Columbia Road vendors had a reputation for being unfriendly to photographers, but they really just wanted to be treated with respect. Photographing their stands without permission would be like walking into a shop and snapping pictures without asking. She’d never been turned away, and she always came home with a string bag full of flowers and a memory card full of images. It was more than a fair trade.

“Cheers.” She waved to the vendor and moved on, getting swept up in the relentless flow of pedestrians amidst the perfume of thousands of flowers and blooming plants. She’d forgotten how much she adored London. The sights, the sounds, the jumble of accents. And yet, despite a handful of visits in the past decade, she’d never stayed long, moving on instead to assignments on the continent or in Asia, Africa, the Middle East. How strange to find it was still the only city that felt remotely like home.

She continued to shoot market stands and street scenes until the sharp angle of the morning light forced her to put her camera away for the day. Her rumbling stomach reminded her she’d never finished her breakfast or managed to get herself a cup of coffee. She wandered toward Hackney Road and her favorite Parisian-style café, tucked between a shoe store and a used-book shop. Coffee and a pastry—regardless of what she’d told Asha about swearing off the croissants—would be just the thing to finish off her morning before she headed back to the flat.

Patrons holding paper cups of coffee and glassine pastry bags jostled her on her way into the tiny shop. Apparently she wasn’t the only one in desperate need of a midmorning pick-me-up: the queue wound haphazardly through the space, twenty patrons deep.

Grace found a spot behind an elegant-looking blonde in high-heeled boots and a trench coat. The woman spoke rapid-fire French into a mobile phone, her voice occasionally rising in pitch above the hiss and puff of the espresso machine behind the counter. Something about a winter issue and a certain Jacques’s inability to make a deadline.

Québécoise?
Her accent wasn’t Parisian, even if her style was. Grace bit her cheek to keep from smiling when the woman let loose a particularly creative string of insults, then snapped her phone shut midsentence to order.

Grace perused the pastry selection through the glass-fronted case until the woman began to rummage frantically through her satchel.

“
Oh là là!
I can’t believe I left my wallet in the hotel.”

The cashier gave an impatient sigh and swept the woman’s coffee off the counter.

Grace stepped forward. “Just ring us up together, please. I’ll have a café au lait and one of those chocolate croissants.”

The woman looked at Grace, startled. “Please, that’s not necessary.”

“Morning caffeine is very necessary. Besides, it’s the least I can do for teaching me a few new phrases in French.”

The woman chuckled. “I’m Monique. And
merci.
”

“Grace.
De rien.
” The woman behind the counter exchanged the coffees and pastry for a handful of pound coins, and Grace took her order. “Have a lovely day, Monique.”

Monique scooped up her coffee, then fell in with Grace, dodging oncoming patrons as they wound toward the door. “Won’t you sit with me for a moment? I can at least offer you a few more amusing French phrases.”

“I’m heading back to the Tube if you’d like to walk with me.”

“Which way?”

“Bethnal Green. Do you know London well?”

“Well enough. I’m in town for a conference, but I like to come here if I stay over on a Sunday.” Monique indicated the paper-wrapped bouquet sticking out of her shoulder bag.

“So do I,” Grace said.