There but for The (4 page)

Genevieve Lee gesticulated towards the couch. Anna looked at the couch. So did Genevieve Lee.

They both looked at the couch.

Then Genevieve Lee continued.

And Mark, who’s gay, she said, he’s an older man, was most upset. They can be hysterical, in a good way
and
a bad way. Anyway, after coffee, and a very nice orange muscat that Eric dug up in an Asda, which nobody could believe, everybody went home happy, except for Mark of course who was clearly a bit perturbed. And Eric and I went off to bed. And it wasn’t until the morning that we saw that his car was still in the Resident’s space and had actually already been ticketed—which I’m not paying for—and Josie, that’s our daughter, came downstairs and asked us why the spare room door was locked and what the note she’d found on the floor meant.

What did the note say? Anna asked.

Fine for water but will need food soon. Vegetarian, as you know. Thank you for your patience.

It was the child’s voice. It came from behind the armchair. She hadn’t left at all. She’d crept back into the room without them hearing or noticing her.

I thought you said in your email you’d been feeding him ham? Anna said.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Genevieve Lee said.

They don’t want him to get too at home in there, the Robin Day chair said.

Genevieve Lee ignored this.

Clearly he’s not all there, she said.

He
is
all there, the child behind the chair said. Where else could he be?

Genevieve Lee ignored this too, as if the child simply wasn’t there. She leaned forward, confidential.

We’re only glad to have been able to find a contact, she said. Mark hardly knows him at all, certainly not well enough to persuade him to open the door. He’s a bit of a loner, your Miles.

Anna told her again about how she hardly knew Miles Garth, that the only reason she knew him at all was fluke, in that they’d both won a place nearly thirty years ago on a European holiday for teenagers from all over the country, a competition organized through secondary schools and sponsored by a bank. She and Miles had spent two weeks in July of 1980 on the same tour bus, along with forty-eight other seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds.

And kept in touch for years afterwards, Genevieve Lee said.

Well, no, Anna said. Not really, hardly at all. I kept in touch with six or seven people from the group for a year or two, then, you know. You lose touch.

But a beautiful memory, one that meant everything to him all those years ago, Genevieve Lee said.

Nope, Anna said.

A painful break-up, the first time his heart broke, and he’s never been able to forget, Genevieve Lee said.

No, Anna said. Honestly. I really don’t think so. I mean, we were vaguely friends. Nothing else. Nothing, you know, meaningful.

Which is why he’s carried your name and address with him all these years, for no meaningful reason at all, then, Genevieve Lee said.

Genevieve Lee was getting red in the face.

If there’s a reason, I don’t know what it is, Anna said. I mean, I can’t imagine where he got my email address from. We haven’t been in touch for, God, it must be well over twenty years. Way before email.

Something very special. On your trip thing. Happened.

Genevieve Lee was shouting now. But Anna’s job had trained her well when it came to other people’s anger.

Sit down, she said. Please. When you sit down, I’ll tell you exactly what I remember.

It worked. Genevieve Lee sat down. Anna spoke soothingly and kept her arms uncrossed.

The first thing I remember, she said, is that I got food poisoning at a medieval banquet they laid on for us in London right at the beginning of the fortnight. And I remember seeing Paris, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré Coeur, for the first time. I remember there was nothing to do in Brussels. We found an old closed fairground and wandered around it. I hated the food in the Heidelberg hotel. There was a wooden bridge in Lucerne. And all I remember about Venice is that we stayed in a very grand hotel that was very dark inside. And that a bomb went off in a railway station somewhere else in Italy, in the north, while we were in Venice and it killed a lot of people, and that there was a small mutiny among some of the boys in the group because the hotel staff were sharp with them after this happening, you know, told them to make less noise. I remember there was quite a row about a beer bottle or a beer can being thrown out of a hotel window. I can’t remember if that was Italy or not.

From France to Germany Genevieve Lee had been passing a pencil she’d picked up off the little table next to her from one hand to the other. By Italy she had started tapping the table with the pencil.

So, Anna said. I had a look through my photos after your message came, but I don’t have many, only twelve, I obviously only took one spool, and there’s only one photo with Miles Garth in it. I mean,
I
know it’s him,
I
can look at the photo and be sure it’s him, but you can’t see his face, he’s looking down in it so you can only see the top of his head. There’s a group photo, of all of us, they took one outside the bank before we left. It’s too far away to see anyone very clearly, but he’s there, at the back. He was tall.

I already know he’s
tall,
Genevieve Lee said. I already know what he
looks
like.

I remember he tied little bits of french bread on to bits of denim thread he pulled off the frayed ends of his jeans, Anna said, and we used these to try to catch the goldfish in a lake at Versailles. That’s what he’s looking down at in the photo. He’s tying a knot round the bread. And—that’s all.

That’s all? Genevieve Lee said.

Anna shrugged.

Genevieve Lee snapped the pencil she was holding in two. Then she looked down at the pieces of pencil she held in each hand in surprise. She laid the bits of pencil down neatly together on the table.

That’s when they’d gone upstairs.

That’s when Anna had stood with her fist up ready to—to what, exactly?

Miles. Are you there?

Silence.

Then—bang bang bang—the child, hammering on the door.

Tell him who you are, for God sake, Genevieve Lee hissed at Anna then.

Miles, it’s Anna Hardie, Anna said.

(Nothing.)

From Barclays Bank European Grand Tour 1980, she said.

(Silence.)

Tell him about when you fished for the goldfish with the bread and that, the child said.

Miles, I think the Lees would really like you to open the door and leave the room, Anna said.

(Silence.)

I think the Lees would like their house back, she said.

(Nothing.)

Tell him it’s
you.
Tell him it’s
Anna K,
Genevieve whispered.

Anna looked at her own fist still stupidly raised. She rested it against the wood of the door. She lowered it. She turned to Genevieve Lee.

Sorry, she said.

She shrugged.

Genevieve Lee nodded. She made a tiny precise gesture with her hand to indicate that Anna was now to go downstairs again.

At the foot of the stairs the two women stood, nothing left to say. Anna looked through the door at the lounge. It was like a contemporary chic lounge in a theatre performance would be. She looked at the geometric arrangement of logs next to the fireplace. She looked at the ceiling, at the huge beam of wood which ran all the way from the back of the lounge and above her head into the hall.

An amazing piece of, uh, wood, Anna said.

Genevieve Lee explained it was believed to be a piece of a ship which had fought at Trafalgar, and it was why the lounge had never been renovated and extended. As she explained all this, she visibly calmed. She opened the front door, held it open. The day’s heat came into the cold old hall.

Though we’ll be upgrading to Blackheath, she said, soon as the market picks up sufficiently. Eric will be home at three. I know he’d like to talk to you.

You mean, you want me to come back here again at three? Anna said on the doorstep.

If you would be so kind, Genevieve Lee said. Just after would be ideal. Ten past.

The thing is, Anna said, if I go now I can catch the less expensive train home, but if I stay it’ll cost me twice as much.

We appreciate it, Genevieve Lee said. It’s very kind. Thanks very much indeed.

She went to shut the door.

Just one thing, Anna said.

Genevieve Lee paused the half-closed door.

It’s the Anna K thing, Anna said.

I’m sorry? Genevieve Lee said.

In the email. Dear Anna K. And again, up there, Anna said. You called me Anna K. It’s not my name. My name’s Anna H. Hardie.

Genevieve held up her hand. She backed into the hall. She came back with a black jacket. She took a mobile phone out of its inside pocket and held it up.

It’s in the memory, she said.

Then she dropped the phone into the jacket pocket again and threw the jacket through the door straight at Anna so that Anna couldn’t not catch it. She spoke sweetly.

You are now responsible, she said. When this is all over I do not want, and will not accept, I’m making it clear right now, any accusations about usage of any bank or credit cards which happen to have been left in a jacket which happened to be left in my house.

Then she shut the door, click. Anna stood on the doorstep.

Eric and Gen. Gen and Eric. Jesus. She’d invite them to her own special annual dinner party, the one she annually gave for generics. Who knew what was going on between Genevieve Lee and Miles Garth, or Eric Lee and Miles Garth, or their daughter, or whoever, and Miles Garth? Who cared? Who cared whether Miles Garth had invented the perfect rent-free way in a recession to be regularly fed, at least for a while? Who cared why he’d chosen to shut himself in a hateful room in a hateful place? She was going home. Well, to what passed, for her, for home right now.

She turned on her heel on the pavement in the direction of the station.

The child was at her side, skipping.

Tunnel? the child said.

Should you not be in school? Anna said.

Nope, the child said. Closed early. Swine flu. You talk in a really funny accent.

Thanks, Anna said.

I like it, the child said. I don’t dislike it.

A long time ago I was Scottish, Anna said.

Been there, the child said. Done that. I mean, I liked it there, man. I didn’t dislike it. Therefore, I’d go again. There was a great number of trees in it.

She handed Anna something. It was a piece of pencil, the pencil Genevieve Lee had broken in two, back in the lounge. The child held up the other piece.

Thanks, Anna said. But you got the end with the point. That’s not fair.

Yeah, but you are an adult and can afford to buy a sharpener at, like, a stationer’s, or in a supermarket, the child said skipping ahead and talking to the rhythm of her own skipping. Or just
take,
a sharpener, and put it in, your pocket if, you wanted it, and therefore then, you wouldn’t have, to pay at all, because you know, pencils should always, come with sharpeners, because what use, is pencils without, a sharpener? We should all, be able to, help ourselves to, free sharpeners.

Now that’s what I call anarchy, Anna said.

And that’s when she remembered.

(Europe. Land of InterRail. Place known as Abroad. Visited by Cliff Richard and some boys and girls twenty years ago on their double decker bus, though right now, at the very start of the 1980s, Cliff Richard is singing about a girl who’s missing, has maybe been murdered, used to room on the second floor, left no forwarding address, left nothing but a name on a payphone wall.

Europe. Place of the Grand Tour for fifty British teenagers from up and down the country—of which Anna is the one from furthest north and the only Scottish one—who’ve each won a place in a publicity event organized by a British bank by writing
a short story or an essay of not more than 2000 words
about
Britain In The Year 2000,
which is twenty years from now.

1980. Year that Anna Hardie, a prizewinning writer about what life will be like in twenty years’ time, unbends the leg of a paperclip and threads it through one of her ears in Versailles, France, infecting the ear, giving herself a slight fever and having to start a course of antibiotics three days and a couple of countries later, in Brunnen, Switzerland, where the views of the mountains and the lakes, and of the mountains in the lakes, are stunning.

But first: London, Paris, Versailles. The fifty prizewinning writers about the future are on their fourth day. On day two every-one woke up to find that he or she was now one of

the party-people, or

the weirdo swots, or

the total outsiders.

Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old weirdo swot (who, in twenty years’ time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what’s happening; the inexplicable pain between her buttock and her thigh and the red-haired blushing boy-man with bad eczema behind her seem in no way related, though later in the fortnight she will see him stand close to the back of one of the other girls and see the other girl leap in the air away from him, and then she will understand. Already the nastier of the party-people have got another of the weirdo swots drunk by spiking his drink at supper in the Paris hotel, have held him down drunk in one of the bedrooms and have shaved off one half of his little RAF-war-hero moustache. He is wandering lopsidedly about in the summer haze at Versailles Palace today, a single-winged recording angel. Why would he not just shave the whole thing off? she wonders. Is it so that the people who did it to him will be made to face their meanness every time they see him? Or because he doesn’t want to lose the half he’s got so he can reconstruct the other exactly? Anna doesn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to him. (She has hardly spoken to anyone.) She knows his name is Peter, and that he had announced to everybody at the Medieval Banquet on day one in London that he was especially looking forward to Versailles, to seeing the historic mirror room where the peace treaty was signed at the end of the First World War. Ironic, the thought of him seeing his own war-wound in every one of those huge tarnished mirrors.