There but for The (3 page)

Very many thanks indeed and I/we look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Gen Lee

(Genevieve and Eric Lee)

Who was Miles Garth, again?

Miles.

Yes.

When we went to Europe.

Anna read it through again.

He is refusing to speak to a singe soul.

Later that evening she found that instead of thinking (as she did every night as the dark came down and every morning as the light came up) about work, and about the faces, one after the other, of the people she had failed, she was preoccupied with this notion, a lightly burnt soul, its scent of singed wool.

Before she went to bed she tapped out the following, and sent it.

Dear Mrs. Lee,

Thank you for your email. What a strange predicament. I’m afraid though that you might be on to a wild goose chase with me, since I don’t really know Miles Garth or anything about him, having met him only very briefly and quite a long time ago now, back in the 1980s. I am not at all sure I can help you. But if you think I can, I’m willing to give it a try. What would you like me to do?

All my best,

Anna Hardie.

Now it was two days later.

Miles,
she said to whoever was behind the door.
Are you there?

Where exactly was Anna, then, who had travelled in on the packed train that morning next to a man in a Gore-Tex jacket who was watching porn on the screen of his phone? She’d crossed the capital past the posters on the tube station walls advertising
This Season’s Atonement
and under the ads in the tube carriage with the picture of the kitchen bin with the speech bubble coming out of its mouth saying
It’s My Right To Eat Tin Cans
and the words beneath which said
Deny Your Bin Its Rights.
She’d gone for a walk between stations and seen St. Paul’s rise to the surface on the riverbank like a piece of old cartilage. She’d ridden a train through a place that looked like the future had looked when she was a child. Now she was walking up a hot summer street of beautiful buildings and shabby-chic houses trying to remember what Greenwich meant again, which was something to do with time. When she got to the right address, a child wearing a bright yellow dress over the top of a pair of jeans was sitting on its top step picking little stones out of a fancy border of pebbles at each side of the door. She was whistling a repetitive strip of tune a bit like the Judy Garland song from The Wizard of Oz and throwing the stones at a drain in the road, presumably trying to get them down the grate of it. The drain cover and the road around it were dotted with little white stones.

Hello, Anna said.

I’m broke, the child said.

Me too, Anna said.

Really? the child said.

Yes, Anna said. Almost totally. What a coincidence. Aren’t you hot in all those clothes?

Nope, the child said reaching up to the doorbell. Because I feel that I am not doing myself full justice if I don’t wear them all.

But it was a white woman, dressed in summer whites and beiges, who answered the door. She pushed the child to one side and held her hand out to shake Anna’s hand.

Genevieve Lee, she said. Call me Gen. Thank you so much for coming.

She led Anna into the lounge, still holding her by the hand. When she let go Anna folded her jacket and put it on the arm of the couch, but Genevieve Lee stared at the jacket there for an unnaturally long time.

I’m sorry. It makes me afraid, Genevieve Lee said.

My jacket does? Anna said.

I now have a horrible fear that people who take their coats off in my house might never leave my house, Genevieve Lee said.

Anna picked her jacket up at once.

I’m so sorry, she said.

No, it’s fine, you can leave it there for now, Genevieve Lee said. But as you can tell. We really are at the end of our tether with your friend Miles.

Yes, well, as I said, he’s not really my friend, Anna said.

I promise you, we can’t take much more of our oh you tea, Genevieve Lee said.

Sorry? Anna said.

Our Unwanted Tenant, she said.

Oh, I see, Anna said.

No. Oh you tea, Genevieve Lee said.

No, I meant—, Anna said.

Also, oh you tea spells out, Genevieve Lee said, which makes it what Eric, my husband, and I call a positive thinking exercise.

Genevieve Lee was currently a freelance Personnel Welfare Coordinator for people who worked in Canary Wharf. When they had problems, financial, emotional or practical, their companies could contact her and she’d tell them what kind of help was available in both the public and the private sectors.

As you can imagine, work’s been off the scale recently, she said. What are you currently doing yourself?

I’m currently unemployed, Anna said.

I can help you with that, Genevieve Lee said. The main thing is, it’s very, very important to talk about it. Here’s my card. What’s your field?

Senior Liaison, Anna said. But I’ve just given it up.

Gosh, given it up, Genevieve Lee said. Presumably something better on the horizon.

There’d better be, Anna said, or I may kill myself.

Genevieve Lee laughed a knowing laugh.

She told Anna that Eric worked at the Institute for Measurement and Control and that he’d be back at three.

The child, who’d followed them in, was sitting in the retro-modern armchair at the window, batting her bare heels off the front of the chair.

Stop kicking that, Brooke, Genevieve Lee said. It’s Robin Day.

Robin day? the child said. Today?

Brooke, we’re busy, Genevieve Lee said.

You would think robin day would be a day that it would make more sense to be nearer in time to Christmas, the child said. It is a very good idea for a day and everything. But the fact is, it’s the summer not the winter now, which is therefore probably why robin day hasn’t caught on yet and nobody knows about it like we know about Valentine’s day and father’s day and mother’s day and Christmas day.

Anna noticed again how surprisingly polite and old-fashioned the child sounded.

I’m sure your mother’s calling you, Genevieve Lee said.

I can hear nothing that resembles what you suggest, Mrs. Lee, the child said.

Let me put it another way, Brooke. I think you’re wanted elsewhere, Genevieve Lee said.

You mean I’m not wanted here. Words words words, the child said.

She jumped up and down. Then she did a handstand by the side of the couch, next to Anna.

That’s from Hamlet, she said upside down from underneath her dress. A play by William Shakespeare, but you probably already know that.
Words
words words. Words
words
words. Words words
words.

She kicked her legs in the air. Genevieve Lee got up and stood pointedly at the door. The child upended herself on to her feet and straightened her clothes.

Would you like to walk the tunnel later, right, maybe? the child said to Anna. It was built in 1902 and it goes underneath the river, have you ever walked it?

She told Anna that if she’d been here three years ago she’d have been able to see the actual Cutty Sark.

Because I don’t mean see the
station,
she said. But you probably already know how the fact is it was originally a ship, not just a station, and before the fire on it, it was still there, therefore if you or if I had come out of the
station
called Cutty Sark, and we’d turned the right way at the exit, by which I mean turned to our left, we’d have seen the
ship
called it. The point I’m making being, the thing is, I didn’t actually come to live here till last year. So I can’t see it until it is restored to its former glory. But maybe you saw the real original when you were my age or a bit older, I mean before it burned down.

I missed it, Anna said. I never saw it in real life. I’ve seen it in pictures. And film of it on TV.

It’s not the same, the child said. But it’ll do, it’ll do, it’ll have to do.

She did a wild joyful dance in the doorframe.

Brooke, Genevieve Lee said. Out. Now. And leave my stones alone. They cost money. Scottish river pebbles, she said to Anna.

Very expensive, Anna said.

She winked at the going child.

Bye, she said.

Brooke was nine, apparently, and lived round the corner in the student flats. Her parents were research fellows or postgraduates at the university.

Obviously not ours, Genevieve Lee said. Very cute, though. Quite precocious.

Genevieve Lee poured the coffee and told Anna about the night of their annual alternative dinner party, which was something she and her husband, Eric, usually held at the beginning of the summer before everybody disappeared for the holidays. Once a year they liked to invite people who were a bit different from the people they usually saw, as well as the friends they saw all the time, Hugo and Caroline and Richard and Hannah. It was always interesting to branch out. Last year they had invited a Muslim couple; the year before they had had a Palestinian man and his wife and a Jewish doctor and his partner. That had resulted in a very entertaining evening. This year an acquaintance of Hugo and Caroline’s, a man whose name was Mark Palmer, had brought Miles Garth with him.

Mark is gay, Genevieve Lee explained. He’s an acquaintance of Hugo and Caroline’s. We thought Miles was Mark’s partner, but it seems not. Probably for the best, because if they
were
partners there’d be an outstanding age difference between them, twenty years, more maybe. They apparently go to a lot of musicals together. Mark Palmer loves musicals. They tend to, don’t they? He’s in his sixties. He’s Hugo and Caroline’s friend.

Genevieve Lee went on to tell her that Brooke’s parents, the Bayoudes, had been invited too, and had also come along, though they’d recently moved here not from anywhere in Africa but from Harrogate.

Anyway, we were all having a lovely supper, Genevieve Lee said. Everything was going really well, until after the main course, he just stood up and went upstairs. Well, we thought, naturally, that he was going to the bathroom so I waited the sweet course, which was complicated in itself, because I needed to torch the brûlées. But he didn’t come down. Fifteen minutes at least. Possibly more, because we were quite happy, just drunk enough to be happy; that’s another thing about him, he wasn’t drinking, which always makes you self-conscious if you go to dinner or if you hold a dinner and someone’s not drinking and we all, I mean everyone else, is. Anyway, I put the coffee maker on, did the scorching, served everybody else, left them to get on with it, popped upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door and asked him was he all right. Of course he didn’t answer. Of course he wasn’t in the bathroom at all. Of course he’d already locked himself in our spare room.

He really virulently disliked what you’d served for starter and main, then, Anna said.

Genevieve Lee got quite excited.

He’s like that, is he? she said. Other people eating scallops and chorizo would have upset him that much?

Ah, well, I’ve no idea, no, I was just, you know, making a joke, Anna said.

It’s no laughing matter, Genevieve Lee said.

No, Anna said. Of course not.

You have no idea how awful this is for us, Genevieve Lee said. There is lovely, lovely furniture in there. It is a really outstanding spare room in there. Everybody who has stayed there has told us so. This last thirteen days has been hell.

Hell on earth, yes, I can imagine, Anna said.

She looked hard at the wood of the floor.

So then Eric went up, Genevieve Lee said. He knocked on the bathroom door and had the same response as I’d had, no response at all. When the coffee was poured and we were all, all nine of us, actually getting a little worried about him, his friend Mark, the man who’d brought him here in the first place, went up. Then he came down saying he’d tried the bathroom and that its door wasn’t locked, and that there was actually nobody
in
the bathroom, the bathroom was empty. So Eric went up to check, and then so did I. Completely empty. So we all assumed he’d just gone home, just left, you know, slipped out the front door without saying goodnight, although why he’d be that rude. And why he’d leave his jacket behind, which we realized when we were all saying our goodbyes and there it was just lying there on the couch.