The Lost Child

II. FIRST LOVE

Towards the end of her second year at university, Monica Johnson listened as her father told her that he had given the matter a great deal of thought, but sadly he couldn’t be expected to tolerate her behaviour for a moment longer. He cleared his throat and wondered if he had soft-soaped things by using the word “sadly”; she was staring at him with those large, unblinking brown eyes of hers and waiting for him to continue. He had misjudged things, for he had anticipated tears, but instead of a torrent of emotion his twenty-year-old daughter continued to grimace and wait for him to explain himself. Being a schoolmaster in one of the most highly considered grammar schools in the north of England, he was, of course, used to making advanced concepts intelligible to young people. However, they both knew that this was a subject upon which there really was no need for him to expand any further. After all, standards were standards, and although it disappointed him to have to take such a stance, Monica knew full well that once he’d made his mind up that was it.

They sat together in her room at the top of a narrow nineteenth-century staircase in the back quad of one of Oxford’s smaller and less prestigious women’s colleges. Between them a fully laden tray sat atop a rickety wooden table, which rose little more than a foot above the threadbare rug. Two untouched pieces of Dundee cake decorated a white china plate, which was flanked on one side by a bright red teapot and on the other by two ill-matching cups stacked one on top of the other. She had thought long and hard about what to wear and had assumed that her father, who had fixed ideas about how women should present themselves, might even be expecting her to be decked out in her tutorial garb — a nice dark sensible skirt, black stockings, and a crisp white blouse. She had chosen instead to wear a sloppy grey pullover and tan slacks but further confused the issue by tying back her long, straight hair with an incongruously cheerful yellow ribbon. Although she knew full well that she wasn’t much to look at, this year men had begun to notice her and even if she couldn’t prove it scientifically, she was sure that the more she dressed like a townie, the more attention she received. But she certainly didn’t want scrutiny from this warped man, who had already bullied his wife into near-mute submission. By the time Monica was a teenager she was fairly sure what type of person she was dealing with, and it was she who had decided to generate a distance between them, which she closely monitored, carefully widening the gap with each passing year.

Having ushered him into her room and hung his overcoat and hat on the back of the door, she directed him to a chair that offered a view, out of the sloping attic window onto the somewhat hideous modern red tiles that crowned the college annexe. The four-hour drive from Wakefield had provided him with the opportunity to reflect and choose precisely the right words, and once he was seated he came straight to the point, which he knew would leave them ample time for debate or, if his daughter so wished, time for debate and refreshment. But as she continued to stare at him with that particularly rebellious sneer she seemed to have cultivated in her sixth-form years, he began now to question his tactics and wondered if he should have taken a cup of tea and a piece of cake before easing his way into the assignment.

She looked at him, fully aware of the fact that to open her mouth right now would only result in her coming out with angry and resentful words, so she bit down hard on her bottom lip. Monica wasn’t in the habit of revealing emotional vulnerability to this man, for she knew that the end result of such stupidity was having your wings ripped off. As she tasted the first sting of blood, she reminded herself of her promise to keep things nice and steady.

“So that’s it then? You’re washing your hands of me?” She swallowed hard but didn’t take her eyes from him. “Well?”

He raised a warning finger. “Now then, there’s no need to take that tone with me.” And then he realized how he must appear, with his finger dangling foolishly in midair, and so he quickly swivelled his wrist and opened his palm. “I could pussyfoot around, but to whose benefit would that be?”

“So that’s it then?”

He looked at the pot and imagined that the tea must now be cold. Why did Monica always have to be so bloody wilful? No matter what he did she seemed set against him. She’d been stubborn as a girl, but nothing out of the ordinary — as far as he could tell — until she started budding. That’s when his daughter went from diffident to downright disobedient. One day she was prepared to answer his admittedly tedious questions about what classes she liked best at school or if she’d be interested in coming with him to a musical concert at the Town Hall (the answer was always no), and then the next day it was as though all communication between the two of them had totally broken down. He knew that she liked Wordsworth, so he broached the idea of a walking holiday in the Lake District, just the two of them, but Monica rolled her eyes and said, “No thanks.” And then after she’d been accepted at university, when he made it clear that he’d love to motor down and explore the place with her, she just laughed and carried on watching a programme on the newly purchased television set.

“Well,” she said, breaking off a piece of Dundee cake with her fingers. “Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”

He wanted to smack the girl, but it was too late for this. As usual, her attitude was entirely regrettable, but he knew enough about young people to understand that he had to continue to exude assertiveness and control, and so he climbed to his feet.

“So it would appear, Monica. So it would appear. I’ve no desire to fight with you.” He paused, and for a moment their eyes locked. “Listen, I’d best be off before the traffic starts building. And Monica, I’m sorry.”

His daughter heard his bumbling apology, but she said nothing and simply unhooked his overcoat, then his hat, and handed them to him. He looked at his child, but for him to say anything further would involve stepping too far outside of himself, and so he simply offered her a weak smile. Then he caught a glimpse of himself in the small mirror on the wall to the side of the door and realized that this afternoon’s effort had put five years on him. As she picked up a small bunch of keys, Monica broke off another portion of cake.

“I’ll show you the way out of the college.”

They crossed the quiet, shadowy quadrangle and then traipsed their way through a narrow archway and out into the sunlit brightness of the front quad, where two clusters of students shared the lawn, playing separate games of croquet in neighbourly proximity to each other. As they walked together, he felt a momentary surge of panic, knowing that this final act of his performance would be improvised. They stepped through the huge wooden door and out onto the street, and then he stopped and gently held Monica’s arm through a handful of grey jumper.

“You will keep in touch, won’t you?” His daughter looked at him but said nothing.

He let go of Monica’s arm and fished in his jacket pocket for his car keys.

“I’m parked just down this road and around the corner. No need for you to trouble yourself. I can find my own way.” Why, he asked himself, couldn’t he add “love”? I can find my own way, love. But he knew that it wouldn’t do to confuse her. Once he turned the corner and passed out of sight, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and discreetly blew his nose and then dabbed at his eyes. Mission accomplished.

* * *

Soon after Monica’s birth, his wife had dropped a few broad hints that she wouldn’t mind having a second child, but Ronald Johnson had determined that one would suffice. After all, there was a war on, and it was incumbent on all English families to make sacrifices of some kind. Monica had arrived in 1937, when it looked as though Chamberlain, whom Ronald greatly admired, was well on the way to securing some semblance of peace. Three years later, any mention of his affection for the former prime minister caused him to go beetroot red, and so his wife knew full well to avoid this topic. By 1940 the whole country was hunkered down and silently preparing for the worst, so he thought it unnecessary to engage with Mrs. Johnson on the question of a second child, and the idea was quietly dropped.

A teenage bout of pneumonia had left him with a shadow on his chest, and so he was deemed unfit for active duty and therefore able to continue with his career teaching geography to boys, whose only real interest in their studies seemed to relate to troop movements in various corners of the globe. At a time when the duties and obligations of war were causing many families to temporarily break apart and accustom themselves to the novelty of female leadership, Ronald Johnson was able to continue to exercise a benevolent patriarchal authority over his household and therefore take a keen interest in the development of his daughter.

From the moment she was born he had tried to please Monica. During the day he often found himself ignoring the rows of pupils ranged before him, preferring instead to stare out the window and ponder what trinket or sweets he might bring back for her that evening. Even in the most austere of times there were shopkeepers who knew how to track down scarce commodities, and he had forged a good relationship with one or two of them who seemed to be able to get their grubby paws on chocolate or licorice. As soon as he reached home and pushed his way through the door, there she would be staring up at him and patiently waiting for her goody. When she was a little older, and her school held a VE Day pageant, it was Monica who wore the Union Jack robe and tinsel crown and proudly held aloft the placard proclaiming “Peace,” and he almost burst with pride when he read the letter from Monica’s headmistress that confirmed that his daughter was one of the three “specially talented” girls chosen for music lessons.

Ronald Johnson had carefully mapped out a postwar career path for himself that would accommodate only fee-paying or grammar schools, for he was sure that his spirit would wilt in the barren world of the new secondary modern schools that the local council, in keeping with government guidelines, was rapidly establishing to accommodate those who had failed the Eleven plus examination. However, despite his achieving some success and securing a junior master’s position at the local Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, money remained tight. Nevertheless, when Monica was ten, he declared that this was the right time for the family to buy their first house, a small terraced affair in a better part of town, but he wasn’t prepared to put Monica’s future, to say nothing of her happiness, at stake. This being the case, he funded her piano lessons with extra money that he earned giving Saturday-morning instruction to the twin Shadwell boys, who he knew stood absolutely no chance of passing the Eleven plus. Monica, on the other hand, sailed through her examination, and she began to win certificates and the odd trophy at music festivals all over the north of England. The mantelpiece and sideboard in the new living room supported a sequence of expensively framed photographs of his daughter flowering into a beautiful girl, and late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, he liked to sit alone and marvel at the images that showed off her poise and self-belief to best advantage, although occasionally he did find himself irritated by the seemingly nonchalant path that his daughter seemed to be steering between his own indulgence and his wife’s silent pride.

“Daddy,” she had once asked him, “are you happy?” She was barely twelve at the time and was balanced carefully on the arm of the settee with her legs dangling over the side. The question disturbed him, for he didn’t know just what it was that his daughter was seeing that prompted her to ask such a thing, but he simply swirled the ice in his drink so the cubes tinkled together like the percussion section of a band. Then he leaned over and snaked his hand around her midriff and tried to tickle Monica, but she pulled away, and the unanswered question hung in the air between them.

His daughter seemed to take it in her stride that an Oxford college had accepted her without any stipulation that she achieve a particular set of grades. It had been her own idea that in addition to applying to redbrick universities she try both Oxford and Cambridge, but her headmistress had called him in and warned him that the school had no history with either university. She also reminded him that familial ties appeared to count at both places, and Monica would not be able to point to any relative who had attended either institution. Nevertheless, he let the headmistress know that he fully supported his single-minded daughter in her application, although he never mentioned anything to Monica about going into the school. On the morning she received the letter announcing her acceptance, Monica reluctantly shared the news with her parents over tea and toast and then trotted off to school as though this were just an ordinary day. Her father, on the other hand, drove to work with his briefcase deftly balanced across his knees, and he utilized the whole journey planning how he might break his news to the staff room in a casual manner so it wouldn’t come over as though he’d joined up with the boastful brigade. However, by the time he began the long walk down the corridor towards the staff room he realized that it was going to be impossible to contain himself. When Miss Eccles, the French mistress, asked him if he would like a cup of instant coffee, he just blurted it out: “Our Monica’s going to Oxford.” He immediately felt his face colouring up, for after all, he spent most of his working day trying to exhort boys to speak grammatically correct English, and now listen to him. “Our Monica.”

Miss Eccles beamed. “Well, Mr. Johnson, that’s marvellous news. Just marvellous. Congratulations.”

Given all her advantages and ability, it made absolutely no sense to him that Monica should be throwing everything away by getting involved with a graduate student in history nearly ten years her senior who originated in a part of the world where decent standards of behaviour and respect for people’s families were obviously alien concepts. She never bothered to send letters or postcards home to them, and so once again he had been forced to write asking how she was, and by return of post Monica had given her parents the disturbing news, delivered, unsurprisingly, as a fait accompli. Naturally, he had little choice but to share the disconcerting information with his wife, and then he began to make plans to undertake the four-hour drive sometime in the next few days in order that he might lay down the law. When he eventually knocked at the door to Monica’s college room, he discovered his daughter, far from giving out any impression that she might be pleased to see him, to be in a particularly truculent frame of mind.

He had stared out of the queerly shaped window that afternoon and listened to Monica’s increasingly strident voice as she talked openly of being with this man. Quite unexpectedly, he realized that her flat vowels had, if anything, become more pronounced, as though she were now trying to flaunt her northern origins. In fact, were he to close his eyes he would no longer be able to swear that it was his own child speaking.

“Look, you haven’t even met him. How can you judge somebody that you don’t even know?”

“I want you to understand that your mother and I are concerned about you, not some Tom, Dick, or Harry. I haven’t motored all this way to waste time talking about somebody else.”

“Okay then, why have you come all this way? It’s not like you to take a day off school.”

And so there it was, she had put him on the spot before any tea could be poured or cake eaten, and it looked as though he was going to have to tell her that it was either this man or her parents. Monica was going to have to make up her mind. He drew himself upright and began by letting her know that he had given the matter a great deal of thought. Inwardly he was devastated, for this wasn’t how he wanted it to go. He had hoped that there might be some preliminary discussion in her room, with perhaps a glass of sweet sherry, and then a walk around the college grounds or maybe down along the banks of the Cherwell. In his most optimistic moments, he pictured her excitedly begging him to hire a boat and smiling at his attempts to punt. That would be something, punting down the river with his daughter, the Oxford student. But now there would be none of this, for things had rapidly collapsed. When she once again insisted on introducing her friend’s name into the proceedings, he had little choice but to deliver his prepared statement that contained the word “sadly,” and thereafter they both had plunged into an abyss of silence. It had all happened too quickly. He wasn’t naive: he knew that girls of her age went giddy over romance and probably talked extensively about the opposite sex; no doubt a small number of young women, finding themselves beyond the parental home, were quite possibly active and prepared to risk the ignominy of landing themselves in the family way. But nothing in Monica’s upbringing had ever led him to imagine that his daughter might turn out to be loose.

Whenever he thought the blubbing was over, the tears would come again, each time with a greater vigour. He now found himself clinging to the steering wheel with his gloved hands in an attempt to stop shaking, but he realized that this was no good, and he would have to pull over into a lay-by. He sat perfectly still as a platoon of lorries thundered by and shook the Wolseley, and then he reached for his handkerchief and blew his nose with a loud, messy snarl. He would have to sort himself out, for he couldn’t allow his wife to see him like this. Alone in the house, she would be eagerly anticipating some account of their child’s situation, and it was his responsibility to report the events of the day with a sobriety tinged with an appropriate degree of sorrow. He dried his eyes and quickly checked in the rearview mirror to make sure they were not bloodshot. He adjusted his tie and then took one, two, three deep breaths, and each time he was careful to exhale slowly. Then he lowered his head onto the steering wheel and began once more to sob.

* * *

After her father left her standing outside the oversize door to the college, Monica decided to go to Julius Wilson’s basement flat and tell him what had happened. Having assumed that he would have the whole afternoon to revise the footnotes to his doctoral dissertation, he was clearly surprised to see her, and for a moment she couldn’t tell if he was pleased or put out. He was wearing that enigmatic grin she couldn’t always read, but he was not the type of man to play games, so she guessed that he would tell her if he needed some more time to himself, and she would happily read until he was ready. However, once she had kicked off her shoes and curled herself up in his cosily padded armchair, he began to relax and carefully placed his papers in a large grey box file and then turned off the desk lamp. He crossed the room and perched on the edge of the armchair before slowly unfastening the yellow bow so that her hair tumbled out across her upper back and shoulders.

“Would you like me to make you a cup of coffee? Or I could go out and get something stronger.”

She looked up at him and offered a forced smile, but it was still too soon for her to talk.

Julius Wilson was a tall, gangly man who had spent the greater part of his short adult life cultivating a patina of gravitas that might belie the boyish smoothness of his face. In his private moments, when he felt safe, he was capable of a giggly skittishness that suggested one drink too many, but he would never let this aspect of his personality out in public, having invested too many years perfecting his air of studious severity. “I am not here to play; I am here to make the most of this opportunity” was his stock answer to his fellow students who pointed to the fact that, as secretary of the Overseas Student Association, he might wish to take advantage of his position and socialize a little more often. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I have no interest in chasing girls. I had plenty of girlfriends before I came to this country, and if I am lucky, I might have one or two more before it is time to renounce my bachelorhood.” Julius would offer a brief chortle, yet deep down he would wonder why these people didn’t understand that he had sought the position as secretary of the association as a way of making contacts that might aid him in years to come. But six months ago his world had been shaken when, at the association Christmas dance, a curious-looking undergraduate actually approached him and asked if he would care to take the dance floor. At first he thought there might be something wrong with the girl, for she had a lethargic, expressionless gaze that was a little off-putting, but he didn’t want to be rude so he took her hand, knowing that she would soon discover she had chosen an uncoordinated man who didn’t really dance. By the end of the number it was discernible that she too took no real pleasure in dancing, so he offered to buy her a drink and they found two seats at a table near the bar and she prevailed upon him to tell her all about how he had come to be in England as a scholarship student. Throughout Christmas and New Year he had found it impossible to banish strange Miss Johnson from his thoughts, and by the time students were once again rattling through the city’s broad streets and narrow lanes on their clanking bicycles and readying themselves for the new term, he had made up his mind that this oddly intense northern girl had the right resources of strength and courage to make the journey with him.

During that first wintry night in his bed, he admitted to her that something about her quiet generosity and ability to listen made him feel safe and anchored in England. He whispered: “This is what you have given to me.” As she once again enticed him to cuddle under the blanket, he didn’t tell her that never before had he experienced what it felt like for a girl to be hungry for him and eager to please but equally keen to attain her own satisfaction. He had been in the country for seven years now, but possessing Monica Johnson signalled an arrival. They both wriggled out from beneath the blanket and listened to the sudden commotion of hectic, scurrying footsteps up above on street level, and then she pulled herself onto one elbow and simply looked down into his dark eyes.

“Monica Johnson,” he said, “you are a remarkable young woman.”

“Thank you, but I’m just being myself.”

She pecked his lips before rolling back onto the pillow and staring up at the cracked plasterwork of the ceiling.

“And your other romances, Monica? Is it alright if I ask about them?”

She smiled to herself and remembered the one boy, a new student like her, whom she’d let go all the way. After he’d left her room to shin over the back wall of the college, she sat up in bed and could feel that her lips were swollen where he’d had a good go at the open pouch of her mouth. Is this what he wanted to know about? She continued to gaze at the ceiling but said nothing as she didn’t want to talk about anything to do with her miserable, lonely first year as a student. Eventually he’d come to understand that her silences weren’t always to do with him. He wasn’t the only one with stuff going on in his head.

By the end of the second week of Hilary term, Monica had decided that scooting through the quad at dawn and then dashing up the narrow staircase to her room no longer held any appeal. Having carefully arranged things so that it might appear to the college servant that she had simply slipped out on some trifling errand, she packed a small suitcase and moved into Julius Wilson’s basement flat. He couldn’t have been happier, for this young Englishwoman seemed to take enthusiastic pleasure in cooking, cleaning, and studying, as though each activity flowed naturally into the next. Her simple rearrangement of the furniture created more space, and replacing the heavy curtains with cheap blinds brought light flooding into the flat. Not a day went by without his looking up from his desk and delighting in this alluring barefoot creature who moved silently through his world. Often, late at night, he would steal a glance at her as she slept and feel the urge to beg her not to leave him, but he knew these words must never cross his lips. Four years ago, during his divorce proceedings, his wife had made a statement through her solicitor claiming that it was his selfish insecurities — to his face she used the word “immaturity”—that had caused the breakdown of their marriage. “My husband,” she said, “doesn’t understand that I too have needs.” But this Monica Johnson never agitated for more visibility in the relationship, and she appeared to be content to anticipate his desires and protect him from the world.

As he neared the completion of his dissertation, Julius began to evaluate the idea of marriage, for he felt that he ought to offer Monica some form of security in order to convince her to remain by his side. After all, she seemed to have made a complete break with her parents, and it was therefore his responsibility to provide this young woman with something solid and dependable in her life. The day her father drove down to deliver his ultimatum, she had come running to his flat and, having gathered herself, began to explain how wrong she felt her father was about Julius and what her father called “his kind.” As soon as she opened up on the subject of her father, however, Julius detected anxiety beginning to rise inside her, and she retreated into a silence that quickly became strained and, for a moment, threatened to overwhelm them and poison the atmosphere in his flat.

Julius waited until the end of the academic year before taking her out to the pub for a drink and bringing up the question of marriage. Monica heard him out, and once he’d finished she couldn’t think of any reason not to get wed to him, and so a few weeks later they were married by a visibly agitated registrar in a dull office that reminded her of a dentist’s waiting room. Having already received worrying reports from two of Monica’s tutors about her often flighty state of mind and proclivity to wander in her head, the principal of her college readily granted Monica’s request to take a leave of absence from her studies. As a result, when Julius accepted a junior lectureship at a new polytechnic on the south coast of England, in a seaside town that appeared to cater to retirees, Monica was free to join him. The newly married couple rented a small flat on the first floor of a detached brick house near the campus, and to celebrate their move, they opened a bottle of red wine and tried to drink themselves into frivolity. The landlady, a small grey-haired widow, whose behaviour was informed by old-world Eastern European manners, lived downstairs, and once they had made the decision to take the place she made a grand to-do of announcing that she hoped they would be comfortable. Then she fixed the pair of them with her wearily bagged eyes, and offered them whispered reassurances that they must not worry, for should they be unable to produce a marriage certificate this would in no way jeopardize their rental arrangement.

While Julius settled in on campus and made a few cautious stabs at friendship with his new colleagues, Monica walked the blustery seafront and scoured secondhand furniture shops in search of small items, such as wooden stools or table lamps, that might signal the permanence of their shared adventure and put a personal stamp on the characterless flat. During the third week of term they invited a fellow junior lecturer and his mousy fiancée to a spaghetti and wine dinner at their now moderately homelike abode, and although the tipsy couple obviously enjoyed the evening and even stayed for a second cup of coffee, Julius found the stress of receiving visitors difficult to tolerate. He knew enough to understand that when hosting he mustn’t always be the centre of attention, but he really couldn’t bear to have these people in his place, who acted as though their trivial complaints regarding the weather or the town’s lack of telephone boxes might be of some interest to him and his wife. Later that night, as Monica was completing the washing-up, he looked up from the table and told her he would prefer to keep his work and his everyday life separate, and although Monica wasn’t quite sure where this would leave her in terms of things to do, she said nothing.

Despite his misgivings about both the town and the polytechnic, Julius adjusted easily to the new business of lecturing. As he often practised in their cramped living room, Monica was able to observe him quickly mastering the art of the theatrical pause, the rhetorical question, and the self-deprecating humorous anecdote, all carefully calculated to enhance an already burgeoning reputation as a popular teacher. When he wasn’t giving a lecture, most of Julius’s energy was devoted to the founding and leadership of the Anti-Colonial Club, but by the end of the first term its success among lecturers and students alike was causing him to regret his involvement. Long nights in disagreeable pubs debating whether the struggles of Hungary and other countries under the jackboot of Moscow should also be on the agenda for discussion were, to his mind, torturous. Why not include them? he insisted. Oppression was oppression. But what was he to make of the argument that the Anti-Colonial Club should view the struggles of people trying to avoid being beaten up by English teddy boys as part of an ongoing problem whose roots lay in colonial exploitation? His tolerance for lacklustre, drawn-out evenings waned as rapidly as his interest in warm English beer, and all too frequently he found himself staggering back along a chilly, windswept promenade, listening to the powerful engine of the sea, and then tiptoeing up the ill-lit backstairs to their small flat before sliding into bed next to his young wife.

Sunday afternoons had a tendency to drag for both of them. Julius would often finish folding the pile of clothes and then slump down onto the settee and watch as Monica continued to iron the shirts and skirts that needed special attention. Playing the part of a husband was something that he had taken on in order to make Monica feel more secure, but after only a few months in this role he was already unsure if he truly possessed the stamina, or the desire, to continue with the drama. He had no idea what the secretive and inscrutable Monica did with her time while he was on campus and no clear understanding if she possessed any goals in life, either short or long term, for she appeared to be reluctant to speak of herself. Once again Monica asked him to get up from the settee. Julius accepted a large paper bag full of rubbish, while Monica grabbed a fistful of empty milk bottles, and together they tramped their way down the stairs. As they descended, Julius realized that even though he had no idea of what lay ahead for them both, he should perhaps at least try and talk to his wife about his uneasy feelings. He pitched the rubbish bag into the dustbin and replaced the lid with an earsplitting clatter. Monica shot him a disdainful look. “Sorry.” He paused. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.” When they returned upstairs, Julius poured a small finger of whisky and began to pace the room, while Monica carefully draped one freshly ironed shirt after another over wire hangers and hung them, one by one, in the small cupboard by the front door that served as their wardrobe. He could feel Monica watching him out of the corner of her eye, but as usual, neither of them said anything, and so once again he reached for the whisky bottle and took up a seat on the settee.

* * *

Julius wrote to a young law student at Cambridge, a fellow countryman who was the latest recipient of the same island overseas scholarship that he had been awarded. He asked the young man if it was true that Lloyd Samuels, his former high school classmate, had formed an opposition party. The young man replied and confirmed that shortly before his own departure for England, the newly qualified Dr. Samuels had returned from his studies in Canada and opened a general practice in the poorest part of the capital. Apparently he had also formed the People’s Action Party, among whose earliest recruits was the would-be lawyer, who was thoughtful enough to enclose the details of both Lloyd Samuels’s place of business and his private residence.

Dr. Samuels was pleased to hear from Julius, and his first letter was notable for an excess of excitement, which reminded Julius of his friend’s laughable attempts to make his stuttering, overly verbose points during classroom discussions. On more than one occasion, he remembered looking across at Lloyd and wondering just what would become of the jovial, plump boy who held his pencil like a spike, and who by the time he donned long trousers was astute enough to have given up any ambitions of the island scholarship. Young Lloyd’s accent was already beginning to be seasoned with a slight American affectation, which suggested the direction in which his mind was starting to drift, but a medical school in a provincial Canadian university, as opposed to an East Coast Ivy League establishment, was probably the right level for his friend. Dr. Samuels’s second letter encouraged Julius to meet with the chief party organizer in London, but after a day-long excursion to the capital, during which Julius spent much of a frustrating afternoon and early evening sitting in a noisy London Transport depot tea room, waiting for this busy bus driver to discover time between shifts to discuss the matter of their country’s road to independence, he wrote to Lloyd and wished him well with his political endeavours. A week later, Julius received the telegram suggesting that he leave the south coast of England, move to London, and take over as chief party organizer in Britain, with a salary that would be drawn from whatever subscriptions he could raise and supplemented by sales of a projected monthly newspaper to be called The People’s Voice, although Lloyd made it clear that Julius was free, within reason, to use whatever title he wished.

* * *

“Eventually I’ll have to give some talks and go out on the road, but not now, not during summer, for people are either away or just relaxing.”

His wife was standing by the window and staring across the street at a café outside of which a few small metal tables, surrounded by a random assortment of chairs, were arranged on the pavement in a manner that blocked the flow of pedestrian traffic. It was Monica who had organized their move to London and found this single bed-sitting-room in Ladbroke Grove, a down-at-heel but affordable location whose chief virtue was its proximity to the tube station. Travelling up to London by train and scanning cards in newsagents’ windows had finally given her something to do, for although she had not let on to Julius, she was not sure how much more she could have endured of her aimless existence on the south coast. Once she had set up their flat and explored every nook and cranny of the drab seaside town, she had quickly come face-to-face with the dispiriting reality that beyond Julius, she had no community.

“Right now I have to identify nationals working or studying here so that when the time comes, we have a caucus of votes to draw upon.”

“But you’re not independent yet.”

She said this without turning from the window to face him, and although he wanted to admonish her, he said nothing.

“When the cross-party delegation arrives in London, I figure I’ll accompany them to Whitehall for the independence discussions. But all of this is in the future. Right now we need to know who we can count on for what comes afterwards.”

He watched as Monica crossed the room to the bulky electricity meter by the door, pushed in sixpence, and then turned the key. They both heard the rattle of the coin as it dropped into the metal box, and then the lights flickered to life, but Monica turned them off and took up a seat at the crowded kitchen table and pushed the newspaper out of the way. The early-evening sunset was illuminating the small room, but she knew that this was just a momentary prelude to the gloom that would follow. While her husband was talking, it had finally become clear to Monica that the real problem with the room was that it had been painted an ill-chosen mauve. To further compound the issue, there was nothing on the walls, no pictures, not even an old calendar or a mirror, so tomorrow she would begin the now familiar project of going out to the shops and street markets to see what she might find to liven up the place. Secondhand prints, cheap posters, anything would do, so long as they could be tacked up on the horribly coloured wall and would stay up, then at least they would have something uplifting to look at. Down on the street she could hear the noisy scraping of the tables and chairs being dragged back into the café as the owner prepared to lock up for the night. It was so oppressively hot, and she had already learned that if she kept the single window open, there was noise and soot to contend with, but if she closed in the window the room would soon become stifling. Either way, she couldn’t win.

* * *

On the first Saturday morning of each month, Julius travelled by tube and then bus to an unsightly part of South London. Moving to the city had made this ghastly journey far easier in practical terms, but for some time now the ordeal of fulfilling his parental obligation to the child from his first marriage had been taxing his dwindling reserves of goodwill and optimism. The eight-year-old girl had been born shortly after he’d arrived in England and made her first appearance during a blizzard-ravaged winter that people seemed keen to continually inform him was “unusual.” The girl was slow, and he feared she might have been affected by English weather, but whenever he raised these concerns with the girl’s mother, she looked angrily at him, which served only to stoke his resentment towards the woman. Until the girl was three, he commuted to university from their South London council flat, but when he finally packed his bags and resolved to leave London and scout for his own place in Oxford, a part of him wanted to miss his daughter. Five years later, however, he still feels uneasy that he has never, not once, been touched by any sense of guilt or loss.

The child is always neatly presented, as though ready for church, but some kind of skin condition causes her to constantly twitch and scratch, and her glum disposition merely confirms his suspicion that she is in perpetual discomfort. What worries him most, though, is that when she deigns to smile, she does so with an openness that he feels sure some man will exploit before she is too far into her teenage years. For the first hour of each visit the girl’s mother retreats to her bedroom and closes in the door behind her in order to give father and daughter time together. This suits him, for somewhere beneath her swollen face and bloated waistline he can still detect the woman he married, and he has no desire to look at her. Back home he rescued this woman from a life working as a shop assistant in a haberdashery on Liverpool Row that was run by the Lebanese Sahaley brothers. He offered her the choice of forty more years serving customers, with the fresh sea breeze cooling her through the open jalousies, or marriage and a trip to England and a new and exciting beginning. She had waited dutifully for him during the three long years he had dedicated himself to his coursework and earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University College on the larger island to the north, and when he returned, it was to claim the island scholarship and sweep her off her feet and onto a ship bound for England. But she had country values, and whereas most women would have considered the possibility of a life in England to be a lavish reward for simply waiting faithfully for a fiancé, he soon discovered that their arrival in England served only to stimulate the woman’s materialistic cravings, about which he had hitherto been ignorant. After he had rejected her and found a basement flat in Oxford where he felt he could live and work for the four remaining years of his scholarship, she hired a lawyer and began to harass him. Mercifully, and with help and advice from the University Overseas Office, he was able to quickly secure a divorce and put this marriage behind him. He speculated that perhaps some years hence, when she had finally grown up a little, she might well make some man a loyal and decent spouse, but this would be in the future and would be none of his business.

As his former wife emerged from the bedroom, he looked from mother to daughter, and again he wondered how he could have miscalculated so disastrously. The place contained not a single book, and as the woman began to speak, he was once again reminded that her conversation never ascended above the banal: their daughter’s life at school, her new job as a cleaner at a local hospital, her friend the nurse who minded the girl when she worked the night shift. He had read about such people, but it didn’t seem fair that he should be connected to them. His former wife had, as always, prepared rice and peas and chicken for him, and he watched as she carefully spooned out his food onto a plate, and then she and the girl sat and stared as he ate, and he knew that this charade would end only when he handed over the slim brown envelope of money that they were expecting. Until then he forced himself to appear amicable, all the while stealing glances at the girl, who, when she opened her mouth, exposed teeth that had already been attacked by sugar.

Sometime later he sat on the tube and stared at his reflection in the smudged mirror that was the glass, and he knew it was essential that he empty his mind of the events of the day. He had made a mistake and he was paying for it and that was all there was to it. Once he got off the tube, instead of going straight home, he made his way into a noisy pub next to the underground station and stood by the bar and began to order drinks. Once the landlord called time, and the pub began to let out, he wandered into a small park and sat alone on a damp bench with a slat missing. Monica needed help, he knew this, and in fact he had begun to worry about her before they had even moved to the south coast. It was not just the blank stare that perturbed him, for the truth was she had always displayed a tendency to lapse into these trances; what alarmed him the most was her ability to withdraw completely from him yet continue to function as though nothing were happening. It was clear that at such moments she wasn’t listening to him, and when she finally came back to herself, she seemed to have no understanding that she might have been behaving oddly. He knew that Monica couldn’t be happy, but how was he supposed to know what to do about it if she wasn’t prepared to talk to him? He sighed. Really, when all was said and done, this wasn’t the ideal moment for him to be dealing with this. Not now.

By the time he was ready to stumble home he had no clue how late it was and no idea how his life could have taken such a depressing turn. He quietly pushed the key into the door of the bed-sitting-room, hoping that Monica would now be asleep. He eased the whining door shut until he heard the reassuring click of the Yale lock, and then he stepped on the back of first one shoe and then the other and silently slipped out of his jacket and trousers, leaving them pooled on the floor. He watched as his increasingly mutinous wife extended a thin arm out over the side of the bed. He stood half undressed in the doorway and continued to look across the bed-sitting-room at Monica, who stirred and then, with her exposed arm, lifted the blankets over herself and turned away from him and onto her side.

* * *

When Monica understood that she was pregnant, she began to visit the local library and borrow poetry books and novels; apart from trips out to the shops, or to the odd matinee at the local cinema, these were about the only times she ever left the room. She spent long mornings and afternoons folded up on the settee, reading as she had done throughout her first perplexing year at university, when she had found everything vexing to cope with, be it making friends or simply handling the heavy silver knives and forks in the college dining hall. Now that she was expecting, however, she realized that reading aside, she seemed to be investing countless hours trying to anticipate the sensations that she suspected would soon be overpowering her. She had been alarmed by a few early-morning episodes of vomiting and nausea, and she continued to suffer from an ongoing inability to find a truly comfortable position in which to sleep at night, but beyond these inconveniences she soon came to the conclusion that, far from confounding her, the experience of being pregnant was fairly boring. As she began to show, Londoners nodded and made eye contact when they passed her in the street, and passengers on the bus actually stood up and offered her their seats. All of a sudden she was visible, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about this. With the onset of winter the weather turned bitter, but it annoyed her that she could still feel herself blooming, a peculiar northern flower in an ominously arid southern landscape.

“You know,” she said, looking up from the settee, “unlike other mammals, our babies spend far too little time in the womb. They come out helpless and unable to run from predators, and that’s just not right.”

Julius set down the cup of coffee that he was cradling in both hands.

“Really, I don’t know what you are reading, but these days your mind is full of all sorts of craziness.”

“I’m feeling fine, Julius.” She patted her stomach somewhat forcefully. “And I wouldn’t say no to an extra three or four months of this if it meant the kid might stand a chance of coming out walking.”

They called their son Ben, a name that she convinced Julius suggested some substance. He quickly agreed, but they both knew that he did so in order to avoid causing a scene of any kind. As far as Monica was concerned, their one room was now impossibly small, and a basket of unwashed laundry seemed to be permanently calling out to her from its hiding place underneath the table. And then there were the exquisitely fusty smells that, to her husband’s bemusement, spurred Monica to start walking around the room with a white handkerchief tied over her mouth and nose. However, when spring finally arrived, she was able to crack the window and release the accumulation of sour mustiness into the street, where the clattering noises from the café, like the bells of a village church, heralded the start and close of each day. Eventually her husband learned to touch her again, at first tentatively, and then with more confidence as he tried to reintroduce an intimate routine to their lives, but Monica was forced to acknowledge that, at some point during the late winter or early spring, they both appeared to have abandoned the ability, or desire, to converse with each other on any topic beyond the minutiae of daily coexistence, which, these days, generally related to the needs of their son.

Monica soon ran out of books that she wished to take out of the local library. She had methodically worked her way through the small poetry section, and she had also read most of the contemporary novels that she thought might interest her, but having moved on to short stories, which was a form she particularly loved, she had to admit that none of the collections aroused any elation in her, and more often than not, the volumes were returned unread. Monica knew what the problem was — discussion, somebody to talk with about the books — and once she had accepted that such exchanges were unlikely to occur she fell into the habit of going out into the world without her borrowing card. Sitting by the Serpentine watching the ducks seemed to amuse her young son, until she realized that it mattered little to the child whether he was looking at a duck or a double-decker bus, for all he saw was movement. She had discovered the free museums and tourist attractions of central London, but the hardship of navigating such a vast city with a child, and with precious little money, did nothing to increase her affection for the capital, whose thunderous indifference to her, now that she no longer looked like an expectant mother, was matched only by her progressively detached husband, who, with each passing month, seemed to be investing greater amounts of time attending to his efforts on behalf of Dr. Lloyd Samuels.

One afternoon, while sitting on a crowded Metropolitan Line train with her sleeping son in her arms, she abruptly opened her eyes and was shocked to discover that she had missed her stop. She quickly gathered her belongings, but when she tried to stand up in order to get off at the next station, she felt as though two hands were pushing down on her shoulders and pinning her and the child to the seat. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to five, then opened them, and as soon as she heard the unoiled grating of the doors, she shoved her way off the train and up the escalator and out into the daylight. The sun was blazing hot, but the thought of reentering the underground or getting on a bus made her head spin. She threaded her slow way through the seemingly endless maze of pedestrians, but the torment of drumming in her head receded only when she came to a junction and could momentarily feel space around her. The child began to cry with an initial whimper that soon grew into a wail, and by the time she turned into her street Ben’s arms and legs were thrashing, which suggested he was in the throes of a fully fledged panic attack. Her eyes began to brim with frustration, and although she could clearly see the scruffy house that held the room in which they lived, with every step she took the building seemed to be receding farther.

The sweet-smelling man guided her gently into one of the café’s metal chairs and placed a glass of water before her. She relinquished the squirmy child without protest and watched as her son looked into the foreigner’s face and stopped kicking.

“I think it is too hot to be carrying a child.”

“I’m sorry.”

She tried to guess the man’s accent, but she immediately gave up. No doubt he hailed from some exotic location, but having never travelled abroad she couldn’t pretend to know more than this. He was staring directly at her with an overly kind smile that she knew was meant to reassure her that there was no need to say anything further. She imagined that perhaps the man already understood that she was pregnant again. If so, maybe he wanted her to come and live with him in his country, and if he did, why didn’t he just ask her?

Monica was lying full length on the settee, and letting the hot air and noises of London wash over her through the open window, when Julius ambled through the door. He had long ago given up insisting that she listen to his boring talks about the future of his nonsensical stupid country, but as he sat down, she found herself once again dismayed by the gaudy African shirt and leather sandals he had taken to wearing. Why on earth had he not sought her advice before adopting this costume? His once trim and neat hair was now wide and ludicrous, and when it first began to assume this unshapely form, he had quizzed her as to whether she thought it suited him. Not really believing that he could be asking this of her, she simply laughed and then asked him why he had started to wear sunglasses when there was no sun in the sky? In fact, why did he sometimes wear them inside of the house?

As Julius slipped his feet out of his sandals, she understood that her husband didn’t actually care what she thought of his hair, or his attire, or anything, for it was all part of a larger transformation that was taking place that neither required nor depended on her approval. Julius appeared to be casting aside his studious aspect and making some clownish attempt to entertain worldliness. Last week she had found some rumpled notepaper in the wastepaper basket and could see he had been trying out a new name. The evidence pointed to two preferred options: Dr. J. Livingstone T. Wilson or Dr. Julius L. Terrance Wilson. Of course, she didn’t know either man. She watched him bend over and begin to ransack the canvas bag that he had deposited on the floor. He finally discovered what he was searching for and plucked an LP out of the bag, which he then nudged unceremoniously out of his path with the outside of one foot. He took two short steps to the record player and, as he slipped the disc out of its inner sleeve, handed her the LP cover and urged her to read the notes on the back. His laughter seemed to bubble up from deep inside, and it was punctuated with his constant repetition of “Oh, man, you’ve got to hear this.” Jazz was a new passion of Julius’s, although he had balked when she called it a passion.

“Monica, jazz is the only category of music that you can really study. It has a theoretical intent.”

She had looked at him but didn’t want to argue. Perhaps he had forgotten, but once upon a time she had been regarded as musically proficient. However, as her father’s pride in her achievements increased, her interest in playing the piano had fallen away to the point where it had now been many years since she had perched herself on a piano stool.

“Anyhow, just because you can theorize about the music doesn’t mean that you can’t also be passionate about it.”

“And miss seventy-five per cent of what’s going on?”

Julius had looked at her with palpable contempt, and Monica couldn’t help herself as she began to laugh. These days the ponderous weight of self-regard seemed to infuse Julius’s whole body; it affected how he stood, how he walked, and how he held himself when he was getting ready to make an announcement.

He took the LP cover from Monica without giving her a chance to read the notes, and then he closed his eyes as the shrill saxophone opening began to blare out. “Oh, man.” Monica stood up and went to the fridge for a bottle of beer, which she handed to him, hoping he might understand that small gestures like this were about all she had left to offer in the way of a deposit on some kind of continued future together. But it was beginning to feel futile. As he took the beer, she picked his bag up off the floor and stared at her ridiculous husband. She had been waiting a long time for them to perhaps turn a corner in their relationship, but she now realized that they both were navigating a long, hopelessly unforgiving bend, and she was tired.

“I bought this LP at a new secondhand place on Baker Street.”

“Can I have some too?”

He looked puzzled, and so she pointed at the bottle of beer, which he then handed to her.

“Well, do you like it?” he asked. “Are you digging it?”

“Julius, please give Ben a kiss.”

“Jesus, you act as if I’ve forgotten my own son.” He looked at her as though she disgusted him. “Just let me finish listening to the music, okay?”

“And could you please turn it down? You’ll wake him up.”

* * *

One early winter’s afternoon they both returned in silence from their unscheduled visit to the doctor’s surgery. The man confirmed that despite Monica’s slipping on a patch of black ice outside the tube station, everything seemed to be alright with the baby that she was carrying, and he dismissed them without making any further comment. While Monica implored Ben to take an afternoon nap in the cot to the side of their bed, Julius poured a tumbler of whisky and slumped onto the settee in a manner that let her know he would not be going out and speaking at a meeting tonight. Ben appeared to be settled now, so she edged her way to the sink and started to fill the kettle with water while making as little noise as possible. Having turned on the stove, she looked down at Julius.

“Don’t you sometimes think a television set would be nice?”

“I don’t think so.”

Of course, a friend would be a better alternative to a television set, and a part-time job would be a godsend, but she knew that with this erratic man she should tread carefully around the word “lonely.” She would find some other time to raise the idea of her perhaps going back to university, for clearly this was not going to be an easy conversation.

“I don’t mean now, Julius. Look at us, we’ve got to get out of this room first and get ourselves a bigger place. I just mean later on. In time.”

“Later on when?” He slammed the whisky down on the coffee table and woke up Ben, who began to cry. “I’m doing the best I can.”

He stood now, the toes of his bare feet curling into the mangy rug and his face radiating anger, the source of which was not understandable to her. She picked up her son and tried her best to comfort him in her arms, but she continued to stare directly at Julius. After a minute or so her agitated husband began to finally relax, and he reached behind himself in order that he might master his balance as he sank back down onto the settee.

“For Christ’s sake, Monica, why do you insist on provoking me in this way?”

She continued to rock Ben in her arms and waited for him to finish.

“You know I couldn’t give a fig about the television set, don’t you?”

“I know.” She paused. “I know.”

“We don’t have the money for another child, you know that, don’t you?”

“I know.”

When their second son was born, Monica considered asking Julius if he minded if they named him William, after her favourite poet. However, they left the understaffed local hospital and returned to their disheartening bed-sitting-room with their new child still nameless.

* * *

Outside, the snow continued to fall gently, while two men sat in the window seats of the café nursing cups of tea that had long ago gone cold. She looked down on them and could see that one man had on a khaki jacket that looked like part of an army uniform, but nothing else about him brought to mind the notion that he might have any familiarity with military discipline. His short hair was uncombed, his shoulders were hunched, and occasionally he would slap his gloved hands together and then tuck them back into his armpits. His friend was swaddled in an overcoat that was clearly two or three sizes too big, and his face was half hidden beneath a trilby hat that was set at an improbably jaunty angle. An overstuffed shopping bag occupied the third chair, but it wasn’t immediately apparent to which man it belonged. The ashtray was full and looked as if it hadn’t been emptied all day, but it was pushed to one side, for neither man showed any inclination to smoke. Without warning, as though receiving a prompt from the wings, the man in the overcoat produced a folded newspaper from inside his coat and with a pencil began to circle various items before tossing the newspaper down in front of his friend, who displayed no interest in the offering. The gesture seemed designed to goad his companion to please look for a job — or perhaps a room — but the colder man hugged himself and stared out of the window, where a light drizzle had begun to fall and was already making an icy grey soup of the thin layer of snow that had settled overnight. The more generous man stood and slowly buttoned up his overcoat. As he left the café, it became clear that the shopping bag belonged to the military man, whose head didn’t move, but whose cold, rheumy eyes followed the tall man out onto the street and then tracked him as he flicked up his collar and began to trudge away from the café.

Standing by the bedroom window and looking down at the two men in the café had kept Monica busy for most of the past hour while her two boys slept peacefully on the bed behind her. Last year, after three problematic years in the cramped bed-sitting-room, she and Julius had finally scrambled together enough money to move one floor up into a one-bedroom flat that offered the same view over the café, but this time from both a bedroom window and a window in the living room. At night the two boys slept head to toe on the settee in the living room, but during the day, if they needed a nap, she let them lie out on the double bed. She sometimes worried that the acrid fumes from the paraffin heater might be harmful, but she assumed not or somebody would have written an article in one of the posh Sunday papers, which was most likely how she would know. She moved across to the bed and looked down at the boys, but they both seemed alright. She remained unconvinced that she would ever grow comfortably into the role of a mother, for the speed and ease with which her body had dealt with pregnancy suggested a lack of any real engagement with the process. And of course, part of defining herself as a mother involved watching and appreciating the role of the father, but not only did Julius continue to behave indifferently towards his wife, these days he also appeared to be increasingly removed from his two children.

Monica passed quietly into the living room and felt sure that the two men seated on the settee would have some understanding of the scene in the café, but she also knew they would have nothing to say to her on the matter. Were she to try and describe the situation, Julius might glare to let her know that she should be quiet, but the other man would most likely be insulted that a relatively young Englishwoman was addressing him, and of course, offending this man might make life difficult for them all. Their talks were not going well, this much she knew, but Lloyd Samuels seemed unconcerned. There was an air of quiet arrogance about him that didn’t match up with what Julius had told her when he returned from the trip he had made back home. His supposedly charming and charismatic school friend had funded Julius to fly out and deliver a full report on the situation in England, but the conceited man sitting in their living room was definitely smaller and more rotund than the man Julius had described. Furthermore, Julius never mentioned Lloyd Samuels’s insecurities, but from the moment she had opened the door and welcomed him into their flat she could see vulnerability in his darting eyes.

Once again the snow was falling, but this time it was not settling. The café was closing up, but the semiuniformed man was still sitting at the table with the two discarded cups in front of him. He must have picked up the newspaper, for it was now jutting out of the top of the shopping bag like a chimney pot that was about to topple over. Julius stood up and snapped on the lights, which made it challenging to see out, and she realized that the few hardy souls wandering the snowy streets could now look up and enjoy the theatre of their lives. As she pushed back the sleeves of her cardigan, her full attention returned to the window, where she found herself longing to see a flower or a tree. Gardens were the missing factor, and she thought of her childhood friend Hester Greenwell, whose family had a large spread of a garden behind their detached stone house, but her father was the local doctor, so such extravagance was to be expected. Her own father always seemed uncomfortable whenever she went around to play at Hester’s, making it clear that she couldn’t stay for tea because Hester’s mother insisted on calling it supper. “Invite her over to our place,” he said. “After all, we’ve got a garden too.” And so Hester started to visit Monica’s house, and more often than not she would stay for tea.

Monica sat down at the table and tried to busy herself so the men wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping. Thanks to Julius, there was now enough light to read the newspaper she had bought last weekend when she took the children to the park. If there was a match on, she would go to the top of the hill and look down into the distant football ground and try to convince Ben to remember the names of the players and take a general interest in the game. She knew it was the kind of thing that a dad should be doing, but there was no point bargaining on this from Julius. However, because there was no match, she had sat apart from everybody else by the playground and watched Ben enjoying himself on the slide, while she let Tommy hurdle over her knees and pass from one side of the bench to the other. Her attention was suddenly seized by the wind combing through the trees, and then she looked up to the heavens and watched an aeroplane drawing a desperately slow line against the sky. Almost imperceptibly, she could feel herself striking out on one of her puzzling journeys into make-believe, and she knew she had to get a grip on herself. As Ben left the playground and began to run towards her, she saw he was in danger of being swallowed up by a group of Japanese tourists who were chatting incessantly and taking photographs. They parted abruptly and opened up like a river flowing around a protruding rock, and once they had passed on their way they left behind her bemused son all fresh and clean and standing before her.

“Of course, I understand.” She listened to Julius trying gently to press his own case. Now that the island appeared to be moving closer to independence her husband wanted the promise of a government position, or a title of some description, but this was beginning to seem unlikely. As Monica stood and moved back to the window, a quick glance revealed that the men were now angled towards each other on the settee, but she once again gave them her back.

She heard Julius laugh unconvincingly. This was the second time that Lloyd Samuels had visited their flat, but unlike earlier in the week, when he had scarcely crossed the doorstep, this time it was clear that he intended to stay awhile, and Julius had asked Monica if she would make coffee for them both. She thought that the men might talk for an hour or two before moving on to the pub and then go on from there to their evening meeting, but she now found herself wondering if their meeting had been cancelled because of the weather. It was perfectly possible for her to make more coffee, but she concluded she should wait until asked, for these were men who didn’t like to be interrupted.

“If the two parties merge, and you take the deputy seat, will you be in a position to offer me a role?”

She could hear unease in Julius’s voice.

“My friend, these people are better funded, they have resources, and there is no need for the opposition to be split like this. We must seek and greet consensus.”

It was typical of Julius to be so caught up with himself that he was ignorant of what was going on. She already had a powerful intimation of her husband’s fate, for she felt sure that his vain, overweight friend was the type of man who would happily go to the grave in his own embrace. A third visit would be unlikely.

As Monica continued to stare down into the street, she thought again about the upsetting truth that Julius had never once offered to take her and the children across the road to the café as a treat. In fact, since she’d had the boys, he had never exercised himself to take her anywhere, and she suspected that it embarrassed him to be seen in public with her. The poor man had probably exaggerated his knowledge of women, and while she couldn’t claim to have a great deal of experience with men, she knew enough to be aware that his colleague Lloyd Samuels was once again stealing clumsy glances at her. Her legs were bare, and her slender feet encased in tight pumps that were neither slippers nor shoes, but she fancied they made her movements appear graceful. When she bent over to look down out of the window, her cardigan rode up and exposed a thin band of flesh that drew the man’s eyes in. She could feel the inelegant weight of his gaze, but as long as he respected the fact that she was not available to him, and never would be, there was really nothing for her to do except adjust her cardigan, which she did.

“After Notting Hill,” said Julius, “it’s just one problem after another.”

“And the police?”

“The police and the teddy boys are as bad as each other.”

Her husband was chased once, but he would never speak with her about what had happened. It exasperated her now that she could hear him talking about the incident to this man. She had held his head over the sink and dabbed at the cut on his cheek and stopped the blood, but he wouldn’t even make eye contact with her. That night a morose and wounded Julius had had the same abject look on his face as the poor man who had spent the greater part of the afternoon sitting alone in the café with only the shopping bag for company.

She turns, having decided that she should once again go and check on the children. As she steps towards the bedroom, she sees that their guest has begun now to use his hands as he speaks, but he has modified his voice, which suggests that they have moved on to some new issue that makes them both feel a little more at ease. However, this new sense of comfort with each other will be only temporary, for Julius has told her that this evening he will ask for more money to help with the children. He will tell Dr. Samuels that it is no longer possible for him to manage in the absence of a proper wage and without guarantees of some sort. She closes in the door to the bedroom behind her and can see that her two children are still sleeping peacefully. Then she turns off the lights and goes and stands by the bedroom window and looks down at the now shuttered facade of the café and waits for the snow to stop falling.

* * *

Shortly after the talks between the British government and the delegation from his country collapsed, Julius applied for a job as a lecturer at the institution that had awarded him his bachelor’s degree. There was no need for him to inform Dr. Lloyd Samuels, for relations between the two of them had finally broken down one wet Monday night in the lounge bar of London’s Grosvenor Hotel. That night, despite his obvious distress at Samuels’s duplicity, Julius remained in the hotel bar long after his former friend had cleared off and downed one drink after the other. He knew there was no way he could share the news of their falling-out with his wife and give her the satisfaction of being proved right. If it had just been he and Monica alone, he felt sure that they would have put an end to their misery a long time ago, but the presence of the sullen-looking boys seemed to elicit some unspoken guilt in them both, so they had lingered on across months and years in their cramped flat with little money, and without any coherent idea of where life was taking them. But that night, alone in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, Julius looked around, and it finally dawned on him that he had no real interest in giving anything to this country that had now been his home for over a dozen years. After all, what had he received in return from these people? A late-night beating from some hooligans, and the problem of an increasingly sloppy wife who insisted that the children call her Mam as opposed to Mommy, or even Mama, and who long ago seemed to have relinquished any appetite for improvement or accomplishment.

To begin with, Monica had given him security and purpose as he struggled to finish his dissertation, but she had never really shown full appreciation for his reciprocal gift of marriage. For some reason, she seemed to have grown to resent him, and over the years she had made no effort to claim a role and had simply deposited herself as a burden at the centre of his life. Whenever he tried to talk to her about what she might do, she stared abstractedly at a point somewhere over his head. Of course, what really infuriated him of late was her new habit of using the children as a shield behind which she hid from any real discussion with him. “Please, Julius, keep it down. You’ll wake the children.” The one time he proposed that she seek help, and even consider some kind of a reconciliation with her parents, Monica snapped at him that he didn’t know what he was talking about — which was true, but at least he was trying. As he paid for his drinks at the hotel bar and reached for his coat, he knew full well that things between them could no longer go on in this fashion. If she and her boys wanted to begin a new adventure with him, then he was willing to continue to make an effort, but only if she assured him she would start to pull herself together.

* * *

Julius had received a short, enthusiastic telegram in response to his application for the lecturer’s job, and he now held in his hand the official letter confirming his appointment. It was an early spring day, and he and Monica were sitting together at the living room table. The opportunity to go home and make a contribution, and perhaps try again to revise his dissertation and turn it into a book — this, he told her, was his true future.

“You still have faith in the book, don’t you?” He moistened his dry lips with a quick circle of his tongue.

“Julius, it’s some time since I read the manuscript.”

“Well, what are you saying? Do you feel I should write a new book?”

“Who knows what you should do?” Monica began to laugh and ran both hands back through her stringy hair. “In fact, who knows what you will do from one moment to the next.”

He watched her closely as she poured some milk from the bottle into a teacup and then lifted the chipped vessel to her lips. Having drained the cup, she fumbled at her blouse and undid the top button, for the weather was unseasonably warm. Monica had started to buy presliced white bread, and so she thought about toast, but almost at once the idea seemed too complicated. She put her feet up onto a chair and proudly exhibited her unpolished toenails. Julius seemed confused.

“Can I have some milk?”

Monica poured some milk into the same teacup and passed it to him.

“Back home we drink Carnation milk, but I know you’ll soon get used to it.”

“No, we won’t.” Again Monica laughed, and she began to push up her sleeves, first one arm and then the other. “You’ll be going by yourself, Julius. I’m moving back north.”

“To do what?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Monica stared at this sad dreamer of a man she had married, and shook her head. Did he truly imagine she was going to just sit around for the rest of her life waiting for him to make all the decisions? Really, just who did he think he was? After the break with his friend, he started to have a go at England, which she knew was just another way of getting at her, but that was it. She knew that she had to take the boys away and make a fresh start. Wake up, you spaz, I’m not going to follow you around. We don’t have much money, only what I’ve been able to save up from the housekeeping, but I’ve got myself a job, and we’re off, okay? I came to you, Julius, because I thought you might be a better kind of man than my father, but you were never really interested, were you? I’ve made a bit of a twat of myself, haven’t I?

“Listen, Julius, tomorrow morning I’ll be taking the boys and leaving, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. Leaving to go where?” He looked angrily into her face. “Why are you doing this to me? To us?”

She pointed to the open window. “Please keep your voice down.”

“For crying out loud, you cannot tell me what to do.”

She watched as he threw himself back into the chair and kicked one leg over the other in what she guessed he probably thought was a study of calm repose. She looked closely at him and wanted to giggle, but she knew this would be mean. After all, she didn’t dislike him; she just felt sorry for him. Seriously, did he think she was barmy enough to pack up her life and her two kiddies and follow him halfway across the world? Julius, Julius, Julius, I’ve already taken charge of the situation and made my own plans.

“Let me ask you, Monica, do you know what love is? You have made a commitment.”

“You need somebody else, Julius.” She wanted to add: perhaps you should buy a dog.

He sprang to his full, lanky height so that he now hovered over her. She could see that he wanted to shout, but as she stared up into his knotted face, a slow ripening into resignation began to smooth out his features.

“For Christ’s sake, Monica. Really, where the hell do you think you’re going? What on earth is the matter with you?”

What’s the matter with me? Nothing, Julius, except I’m tired, poor, and worried that because I don’t know how to be myself, I don’t know how to be a mother to these two boys, who deserve a damn sight more than we’ve been able to give them. I’ve lost myself, you buffoon, which is pathetic, given how much effort I put into looking out for myself before I met you. You didn’t come banging and knocking and demanding; it was me, I came to you, and I now reckon that I shouldn’t have: that’s what’s the matter with me, Julius.

He moved across the room to the settee and sat down heavily.

“So, we’ve come to this. You’ve got nothing to say? No discussion, no nothing, and you’ve made up your mind, and tomorrow morning everybody will know that we’re a failure, is that what you want?”

“I made a mistake, Julius.” She paused. “Sometimes it occurs to me that maybe I’m not worth loving. I know I’ve not got the looks, and I’m hardly the outgoing, vivacious type.” Again she paused. “Anyhow, I’ve got to try and do what’s right for these children.”

“But I love you, Monica. Don’t you remember?”

Monica began to smile. “I’m sorry, Julius, but you never really loved me.”

“And you think running away with the children is going to help you? You know you’ve already run away once. You think you’re strong enough to do it again, this time with two children?”

* * *

The success of being promoted to deputy headmaster had encouraged Ronald Johnson to buy a brand-new semidetached home on an estate on the northernmost extremity of the town, out past the dejected jumble of half-empty warehouses and run-down factories. Once you’d gone through the last roundabout, and just before the start of the Outwood Road, you made a sharp left into a country lane that quickly opened up and revealed a maze of modern houses. They all were laid out like a child’s model playground, with neatly trimmed lawns and freshly planted trees that still needed to be supported by upright sticks and bits of tented string. Ronald Johnson’s house was situated at the end of the first cul-de-sac, and through the window he could see an ever-changing cast of birds flitting about the wooden feeder that he had struggled to assemble one Sunday morning. Spread out before him on the desk in the corner of his bedroom were various pieces of paper whose contents he was trying to collate and then précis into a short, but comprehensive, report of the school’s achievements, both educational and sporting, during the past academic year. Part of his increased responsibilities included making a short annual presentation to the board of governors and then passing around a copy of his report to each person present.

His wife knocked and opened the door at the same time, a habit that irritated him no end as the abrupt rudeness of the second gesture rendered the first pointless.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I expect we ought to be making our way to the station.”

Ronald Johnson slowly replaced the cap on his fountain pen and carefully laid it down on top of the foolscap notepad.

He stood before the bathroom mirror and meticulously dusted the dandruff from the lapels of his jacket. He didn’t feel as though he had aged, but when she looked into his face, what would she see? A greying man who was still moving upwards in his chosen career, and with whom she would now agree that discipline and effort are the twin paths to success. Or would she see a stubborn man, with a solemn expression, who continued to refuse to accommodate her waywardness?

That afternoon, when he arrived home from school, he was surprised to see his wife sitting at the dining table with a letter open and visible next to a carefully slitted envelope. She looked up, as though in possession of news that might disturb him.

“Monica’s got a job in Leeds, and she’s coming back.”

He sat down and picked up the letter and briskly read it through for any references to him, but there were none. He had assumed that his wife and daughter maintained some pattern of contact, and while he didn’t necessarily approve, it at least afforded him the opportunity to conjecture that they both still enjoyed a relationship of sorts with their only child. But out of the blue, in his hands, there was the possibility of a potential reconciliation, and he immediately convinced himself that he ought to make an effort for the sake of his wife. But Monica’s timing was awful, for the governors’ report would be his first real test, and now his wife was rushing him before the pair of them had even had the opportunity to discuss the dilemma of where to put the two boys. He turned away from the bathroom mirror and decided that at some point on the drive to the city centre he would raise the problem, although he took it somewhat for granted that Ruth would have already anticipated the quandary and prepared the back bedroom to accommodate all three of them.

He saw them huddled together on the platform like evacuees, and all that was missing were their name tags. Monica looked like a big sister who had been placed in charge of a large suitcase and her two little brothers, but as he and his wife walked towards them, he could see the exhaustion on his daughter’s harried face. Ruth stood to one side while he quickly kissed Monica’s bloodless cheek and then attempted to muss the hair of the older child, before self-consciously touching the nose of the younger one with his forefinger in the manner of a drill sergeant inspecting for dust. His daughter looked tense, as though she had arrived for a prearranged Christmas holiday already burdened with a resigned sense of obligation. He could see that his wife was holding back the tears, and he prayed that she’d continue to do so; the last thing they needed was waterworks.

He sat alone in the bedroom hunched over his desk and continued to work on his governors’ report while giving mother and daughter time to reacquaint themselves. The drive home was stressful, and if it hadn’t been for his own valiant efforts to make small talk and try to fill in some of the events of the past six years, Monica, it seemed, would have been happy to pass the time in silence. Clearly she wasn’t ready to take any responsibility for her reckless choices, and her chippy behaviour implied that she still believed that there were no consequences for the decisions you made in your life. Why did the girl always seem so intent on making him feel uneasy by steadfastly refusing to share any thoughts? He put his pen to one side and remembered that it was only after his wife had assured him that she had spoken with Monica about the birds and the bees, and that he would therefore face no ticklish questions on this front, that he tried in earnest to engage with his daughter on a wide range of subjects, including music, but she was impossible to reach. And then, sometime after her sixteenth birthday, it became apparent to him that beneath her fierce intelligence and studious determination Monica possessed a wayward, slightly ethereal streak, and he started to fear for his child and wondered if he should put her down for counselling.

As they started for home, he began to steal furtive glances at her in the rearview mirror, and he wondered if he was being hasty. Perhaps her recent experiences had finally chastened her into a new appreciation of his way of thinking, and the evidence of the transformation would become tangible only after she had recovered from the journey. However, every time he glanced up Monica was staring moodily out of the window, seemingly lost in her own dreamworld and giving away nothing. As for the two children, he had difficulty seeing who would be kind to them now that their father had completely failed to value his daughter’s affections and disowned them all and run off back to wherever it was he came from. He felt sure that at some point somebody would have to plead with his obstinate daughter to accept the introduction of the word “adoption” into her vocabulary.

Monica returned from the bathroom and took up her seat at the dining table, and he could tell she had washed her face. It even looked as though she had applied a bit of makeup, but he couldn’t be sure about this, for his wife had never stooped to cosmetics, and tarting oneself up was not sanctioned for the female teaching staff. But, painted or not, a little blush had certainly returned to his daughter’s cheeks.

“I suppose it will be different for you living back up here after all that time in the south. It might take a bit of getting used to.”

“I don’t see why. I’m from here.”

“No, well, you’re right there,” he said, eager to agree with her and avoid any guise of confrontation, although he wanted to remind Monica that it didn’t cost anything to be affable. Her letter to her mother had explained that having been successful in her application for a job as a junior librarian in a small branch library in Leeds, she had made the decision to break off with London and leave her so-called husband.

“But you’ve never worked in a library, have you?”

He saw what he assessed to be a frown starting to crease his daughter’s face, but as it grew, it revealed itself to be a look of bewilderment.

“You mean for money?”

“Well, yes.”

“No, I haven’t.” She paused. “Have you?”

“Well, not as such.”

He would have liked to have offered to help financially, but he already knew what her response would be. He also wanted to ask about this man Wilson and ascertain if he’d made any provision to send her some kind of an allowance, and suggest that if it would help her in any way, then he would happily set his solicitor on the bugger, but he elected not to trespass. Having had some smattering of conversation with her and successfully avoided the use of the phrase “begin again”—as in “so you’ll be beginning again”—he knew that he shouldn’t push his luck.

Ruth backed her way through the door with a tray laden with crockery, a teapot snug in a colourful cosy, and two packets of ginger biscuits. Monica stood up to help, and he wondered whether he ought to offer to wake up the two children, or if this was something that his daughter, or his wife, would prefer to do, so he erred on the side of caution and said nothing. As Ruth poured, he tried to determine what he would have made of this Julius Wilson now that he felt free to think about him in the past tense. But the man had never made any attempt to write and advocate for a meeting at which he might explain himself to his senior, perhaps fearing that having already walked out on one marriage, he might well find it testing to justify why he considered himself a fit and proper person to start another. And now look what the fool had gone and done: he’d abandoned his only child with this permanent stain on her reputation.

His wife began to admit how much she missed the old terraced house and her few friends, while careful to point out all the modern conveniences of the new semi and stress the fact that there were plans afoot for a whole row of shops to be built on an undeveloped parcel of land to the back of them.

“Eventually the number twenty-four and twenty-six routes will be extended so that we’re the terminus, but they’ve not said when.”

She could feel her husband closely scrutinizing her, and she began to feel oafish in herself. However, Ruth knew that there was still plenty of time before she would be collecting her pension, although she had to admit that she sometimes looked, and even acted, like a lady whose Tuesday mornings were spent lining up at the post office to get her book stamped. Her hair had turned prematurely grey a decade ago, but rather than colour it, or at the very least have it cut into a borrowed style that might change the shape of her face, she had begun instead to bunch it on top of her head and hold the hysterical tangle in place with an assemblage of carefully placed hairpins. She imagined it was her ever-ripening plumpness that was causing both a little arthritic slowness and shooting pains in her feet and ankles, so much so that these days she wore only carpet slippers, and had even bought a pair for outdoor use, but her husband had drawn the line at this vulgarity. She didn’t argue, but that was pretty much how she had managed to maintain what she assumed was a tolerable marriage, by not arguing and locking away all her talk inside of herself.

Thirty years ago Miss Patterson had been a vivacious, buxom young shopgirl who, from the time she left school at fourteen, had taken the eyes of the local lads, all of whom fell over themselves trying to get her to agree to go out with them. He’d known that if he was going to stand a chance, he’d have to somehow conquer his ineptitude and give over yanking at doors marked PUSH, or forgetting which pocket he’d put his bus ticket in when the inspector got on. Once he had acquired enough discipline to stop betraying himself, he started to woo her, and as he hoped might be the case, it was she who began to ask questions of him when he stopped in for his Yorkshire Post and ten Woodbines on his way to his very first teaching job. He imagined that the briefcase and suit helped rouse her curiosity, plus the fact that he eschewed a cap and chose to go about bareheaded, but whatever it was, it was soon obvious that the curvaceous Patterson girl in the shop was going to be his bride even though people, including his own parents, might well be surprised to see him stooping down to the bottom drawer and marrying a girl without his advantages.

She peeled off her apron and carefully draped it over the back of a chair as she spoke. “When I was younger, I’d have killed for the kind of kitchen facilities you lot have at your fingertips. I mean, you don’t know you’re born really, do you?” It was with some surprise, and alarm, that she found herself jabbering away to her daughter, for whom she had once happily baked and even encouraged to lick the cake mix from the bowl. However, one day teenage Monica suddenly turned her nose up in the air at such foolishness, and she did so with a flash of meanness that convulsed their relationship into a premature formality that made her mother want to weep for her loss. And now, she wondered, what does our Monica see beyond a pudgy woman whose poor neck is little more than a wide set of stairs descending from her ears down to her shoulders, and whose bust contains the secret of a growth that her doctor claims is “well under control”? “But remember,” insisted Dr. Owen, “it’s only a fool, Ruth, who tries to push open the door to the future.” She looked closely at Monica, and wanted to clutch her daughter to her bosom and confess to her the source of her fretting, but she was shaken out of her abstraction by a sudden storm of footsteps up above, which could mean only one thing.

“I’m sorry, love, but I should have said. You will be stopping here tonight, won’t you?”

“I can’t. I’ve made arrangements for lodgings.” Her mother looked dumbfounded, so Monica continued. “We can stay for another hour.”

“But surely you don’t have to go up to Leeds today? It’s Saturday. And the kiddies should nap some more. They need their rest.”

Ronald Johnson sat upstairs in the bedroom at his desk, but he was finding it impossible to concentrate, for he could hear the pair of them in the kitchen. He threw down his fountain pen with more force than he had intended and watched as the gushing ink described a near-perfect semicircle, which began boldly at one end and tapered to a thin italic whisper at the other. He made a gavel of his hand and noiselessly pounded the desktop and demanded silence, for he needed to concentrate. For Christ’s sake, what’s with all this ruddy carrying on? He didn’t like to consider it too deeply, but in nearly thirty years of marriage his wife had completely failed to introduce a single topic into their table talk that had either surprised or even interested him. Was that too much to ask for, a question that he might research, or an issue that it was possible for them to exchange ideas about? And now what was she trying to do to their daughter, whose education should have placed her beyond Ruth’s influence? Was this to be his legacy, two gossiping women and two misfit children? He stared at the defaced fair copy of his report and silently shook his head. It troubled him to admit that at some point he had made a decision to marry a shopgirl who wouldn’t even be able to take charge should an emergency be forced upon them. As he opened the desk drawer to search for some blotting paper, the unfairness of the situation continued to darken his humour.

At just before seven, he dropped Monica and her two children at the train station. He removed her hefty suitcase from the boot of the car, and then he and his wife followed their daughter, whose boys clung to her, one to each hand, down the full length of the platform. Monica was hurrying, like somebody who’d heard the five o’clock whistle, and he could see that her slip was showing, but he knew that it wouldn’t do to say anything. For a moment it crossed his mind that perhaps there was some mystery man with whom she would be rendezvousing when she stepped down from the train in thirty-two minutes’ time? Or maybe she really did have an unnamed coworker who had agreed to meet her and the children and take them to their new flat. Monica temporarily released the two boys, and she gave her father an unenthusiastic hug, which made him feel foolish. She then kissed her silent mother on the cheek and moved away before her mother could grab her arm.

“Take care,” he said as he hoisted the suitcase up and onto the train after her and the children. She looked down at him with a puzzled expression. “Of yourself, I mean.”

“And you take care too,” she said. “Of yourself.”