The divide, p.4
The Divide, page 4
I didn’t really know what was supposed to be the point of it. ‘What can you do? Take them out? Put them in a state school?’
‘With forty-five children in a class? With teachers falling asleep on the job because they have to work two shifts in a day, every day?’
I understood that. Why would you put your children through that if you had the money not to?
‘But it’s illegal, surely. Can you report the school to someone?’
‘Who, though? Without making it all worse.’
She had a point, and I was about to say so when I heard a crunch of twigs. We froze. My breathing might have stopped, but my mind continued to swirl with thoughts of the vanished. People told stories of other people who had been overheard by the Subgarda, and then these other people would just vanish.
Eventually we crept out of the den, once we were certain there was no one around. Most of our walk back to the museum involved surreptitiously picking bits of undergrowth and leaves from each other’s hair and jackets. It was while we were pausing to cross the road and I was plucking a dead leaf from under Suyin’s collar that I glimpsed the sleeve of a black jacket with a green stripe. Someone slipping into an alley. It was just a flash. They had gone into the passageway down the side of the Lamb and Flag. I opened my mouth to mention it to Suyin, but I could not burden her with my worries, not while she had such problems of her own. And what could I actually say? What did I actually know?
As soon as we were back in the museum, I sent my official request off to the Fitzwilliam, asking for Hercules.
How to write a message to Jasmine that would be understood by her and no one else? I wandered amongst my over-life-sized companions in the cast gallery. They are exact plaster replicas made from figures created long, long centuries ago. They stand gazing out with their blank eyes. The Greek and Roman Mediterranean was a world full of statues, figures of bronze or marble that honoured the gods, the heroes and the rulers. What do they know? What have they learnt and what could they tell me? I stroked the leg of the Nike of Samothrace. Victory with wings. Wet, wind-blown marble garments cling to her body. She originally stood, proud, on the marble prow of a sculpted warship, a monument to a naval victory. Grounded now, she still manages to give off powerful feelings of vigorous action and purpose. She would have known how to do it.
Back at the apartment that evening, I found the kitchen surfaces wiped so clean no microbe would dare to have survived. I picked up my jacket and bag from where I’d dumped them and put them away in the cupboard in the hall. As Noah would say, that’s what cupboards are for. I did not know where he was, but it was good to have time, in silence, and in the fresh-smelling atmosphere of eucalyptus spray cleaner, to calm my thoughts, because I could not have come bursting into the apartment, all guns blazing, and blurt out my plans to Noah, like a box of fireworks that has had a match dropped into it. But as I poured myself some juice, sat on the sofa and stared at the ceiling, I asked myself why not. Don’t most people tell their partners everything? Well, of course they don’t. They never did. No relationships would survive the reality of frequently waxed chins, huge amounts of uncontrolled flatulence or the full reality of ear wax. But this whole doubt about the other side – this urge to know what was really happening in Anglia – had become fundamental to my whole existence now.
I looked around the room, sparse of furniture because, according to Noah, minimalism was good, unnecessary clutter was bad; according to me, because we could not afford more. A rare reversal of our traits, as we discussed when we both realised it, with him making the most of the situation and me yearning for more. I liked things, objects. Not the possession of them, necessarily, just having them around me. I liked to look at them, take pleasure from shape, form, texture and colour, to stroke them, run my hands over them. My favourite thing in this room was the Navajo rug, sent to me by my auntie in California for my twenty-first birthday back in ’41. I slid down from the sofa and sat, cross-legged, on that rug now. My fingers traced the geometrics, feeling the different thicknesses of the wool. The strands of different colours had different feels to them; the dark red came from alder bark, the pinky-brown from wood lichen.
Surely a fundamental problem should be discussed with one’s partner? Yet I would not dream of pouring it all out to Noah. Was it because he was too prosaic, too scientific? He would call it flights of fancy, overripe imagination, my artistic side; all those phrases that, if I were in uncharitable mood, I would call passive-aggressive or micro-aggression. Or was it more than that – that I believed him to be too much a party-line man? He did work for Aayan Andras and the government, after all, though just in statistics.
I heard his key in the door and jumped up. Would he notice my excitement? I needed to calm it down a little. It would only make him tetchy if I was bouncing off the walls for no apparent reason. I put my arms round his neck and kissed him. He smelled faintly of stale sweat and tiredness. His shoulders sloped not just with fatigue, I soon realised, but because they were weighed down with two heavy-looking briefcases.
‘What’s all that?’
He lowered them to the floor.
‘They give you too much work to do,’ I said.
‘No, it’s fine. Just routine paperwork I need to look at.’
I went to run him a bath, debated whether I should swirl into it some of my precious pink Himalayan bath salts but decided he would probably not appreciate them. While he was in the bathroom, I cooked the dinner. Noah liked to pin up on the corkboard a menu for the week. It stopped me just grabbing out random ingredients from the fridge and trying to create something new and tasty. I had to agree my creations were often a waste of time and money, though the ricotta and marmalade tart had been a triumph, and the beef dripping in the pastry had been no problem. Today’s entry on the list stated baked potato with leeks in white sauce. Fine. We all knew the spring was ‘the lean time’. Just about everything home grown from last year had run out, so anything interesting, or tasty, had to be imported.
After we had eaten and chatted a bit about nothing in particular and washed up, I crashed on the sofa to watch some old movie. Noah was behind me, at the table, opening his briefcases. I heard clunking noises as he put things down; it didn’t sound like paperwork to me.
I went to bed before him, drifted off, then had a bizarre dream about dogs of different breeds all lined up and someone was saying to me, which one would you trust most? And all these dogs were crowding round me and pawing at me and trying to lick my hands and looking at me with soulful eyes. There were black and white ones, brown ones, short-haired, long-haired, curly-haired, and I simply could not choose, so I ran away. I woke up sweating and thirsty, so headed for the kitchen.
Noah was still at the table, and he was playing with a gadget, the briefcase open beside him. It was a chunky metal thing, like the distributor from an old-fashioned car, and as I came up behind him, I could see that on the front of it, between his thumbs, were rows of moveable wheels that were whirring round, and each wheel had tiny rows of numbers or letters on it. Stamped into the centre of it was a striking design, two snakes intertwined, their heads rising vertically.
‘What have you got there?’ I yawned.
His head jerked up. He looked round at me. ‘What are you doing up?’ He looked at the thing in his hands. ‘It’s just a multiplying machine. It works out…’ he looked down at it, ‘logarithms.’
I was heading for the sink to find a glass. ‘Looks like a codebreaker to me,’ I said. It was supposed to be a joke.
‘Of course it isn’t! Don’t be so stupid.’
Blimey. Snappy or what?
4
The Code
I remembered all this as I veloed into work the next day, weaving in and out of the traffic, waiting at stop signs while I watched other velos and bike wheels whirring. I did not know why I had called Noah’s gadget a codebreaker; it was just a word that had dropped into my mind. The thought of the pedantic and, I had to admit, straitlaced Noah being some sort of sexy, undercover secret agent was hilarious. But it was giving me an idea. My message to Jasmine must be in code, in one that only she and I would understand. Just like the code we devised in Cornwall that summer when it rained for almost a whole week non-stop.
We had flown down from Kidlington to Penzance. This was back in the day when fossil fuels were burned like there was no tomorrow, when nobody seemed to care if there was no tomorrow. Mum and Dad had booked a small cottage on the edge of the town quite near a beach. It was not a pretty beach, not the best beach, but Jasmine and I did not care in the least. It was the seaside! We rushed to get into our solar-suits, to grab our bodyboards and get down to the surf. And that first day was glorious. We had fish and chips for supper, and Mum and Dad were happy and relaxed and told stories of how, so they said, their parents used to eat fish and chips out of newspapers back in the last century. And they talked about how when they were little, their parents never really took them on the idyllic seaside holidays they might have hoped for. Mum’s parents were historians and dragged the family round cities in Italy or Austria. Dad’s parents sounded like they worked all the time and did not take their sons anywhere apart from day trips to Blackpool.
The next day it rained, and the day after that. Jasmine and I started making little jokes behind their backs about Mum and Dad and writing notes to one another with jokes or silly comments like, I just heard Dad fart. Sounds like he’s playing the trumpet! I was delighted with the amount of attention that Jasmine was paying me. Back at home, she was more aloof, going off with her own friends, disdaining the kid sister.
It was Jasmine who suggested making a secret code that Mum and Dad would not understand. It was so exciting for me. She took one of my books and showed me how to find a word and turn it into code. She flicked through the book and on a piece of paper wrote out a series of numbers. My job was then to search the book by page, then line, then word number in that line and so decipher it. Parents are boring was her very first message. I loved it!
And it was a boring day in the museum. Restlessness is not conducive to quiet research. I was grumpy when I got back to the apartment. It is at the top of a hill, a very short hill but nevertheless a bit of a grind, particularly when the battery runs down on my velo, which it did halfway along the Cowley Road. It was a muggy spring evening. The trams were nose to tail along the middle of the road, stuffed full of people straining to escape work or university. The bars and restaurants were spilling their tables and chairs across the walkway, so people could sprawl in the early evening sun like cats stretched out, opening up their bellies to the warmth. By the time I had weaved through them, then pushed the dead velo up the hill, all I wanted was a shower. And maybe one of Noah’s special cocktails. My mouth went dry with anticipation as I fantasised over the possibility of one of his concoctions. Ever since I had known him, Noah had come up with his cocktail of the month. It always featured seasonal fruit and whatever alcohol we could afford at the time. The April one had contained pear and vodka. This time, we might have the first of the strawberries. Oh yes, strawberries, gin, mint; I could almost taste it already.
I locked up the velo – it just fitted in our ground-floor storage space – and climbed the stairs to the apartment, where I was mortified to hear not the clink of ice on glass, or the glug of liquid into shaker, but the banging of drawers and doors in the bedroom. Noah had his large holdall on the bed beside an unruly pile of shirts and mismatched socks.
‘Hi, Pet.’ He looked up at me and then back down at his packing. ‘Change of plan for the weekend, I’m afraid. I have to go to a conference in Cardiff.’
He never went to conferences. ‘You hate them. Can’t you get out of it?’
‘This one’s important. New algorithms being set up, so people need to get together to establish protocols.’ Then he looked at me properly. ‘Why are you wet?’
I thought of mooching up to him and pinning him to the wall with my sweaty body, but he did not really look in the mood.
‘Sweaty day,’ I said. ‘Need a shower.’
By the time I was out, he was all packed and ready to go. He put his arms round me.
‘Bye, babes. Be good. What’ll you do with yourself?’
I had not thought. I shrugged. ‘Might catch up with some friends. Or spring clean.’
In the end I did neither. I went over to Mum and Dad’s. I still had one permission-to-stay overnight pass left, though I had no idea when I might be able to afford any more. The house in Sunningwell, the village in which I grew up, had not changed a lot. It was easier to get there from Oxford, though, on the cable car. They ran every hour across to Boar’s Hill and beyond and there was a drop off quite close to my parents’ house. It cost as much as a leg of lamb, or ‘an arm and a leg’, as my Dad would say, but I didn’t see the family often and it was the simplest way to do the journey.
As I stood in the pod, which was really little more than a giant bucket, I looked down on the streets of the south side of the city laid out below me. It used to be that the city ended and the countryside began, but in the last ten years or so, the desperate need for new homes had forced the council to get off their backsides and build. They were lightweight wooden boxes, prone to storm damage and fire, and row upon row of them filled what I suppose once had been fields cropped by sheep or cows. As I looked ahead, I glimpsed a hint of countryside, the Downs and the Ridgeway beyond.
My bucket jerked to a stop, and I stepped out and made my way up the road to the family house.
Gran moved in after the last pandemic because Mum and Dad were fed up with dropping off food parcels at her door and having shouted conversations through the windows. And as one epidemic seemed to morph into the next one, they all decided it would be better if they were under one roof. It worked quite well, especially if she regularly baked her signature rhubarb upside-down cake. And the white chocolate and raspberry cookies. And the apple crumble. And the millionaire’s shortbread. I was drooling at the thought as I walked up the front path and opened the door. I took a deep breath; it smelled promising.
‘Hi, sweetie. They’re in the kitchen,’ said Mum, drifting past me carrying a tall, quivering pot plant. I followed my nose; the scent of warm butter, melted sugar and hot fruits dissolving into jam was almost visible, a stream of rich colour floating on the air.
‘Ah, Petrichor,’ said Dad. ‘Hazelnuts or almonds? We can’t decide.’
‘Almonds? Where did you get almonds?’ I had not seen an almond in years.
‘Sam along the road got some and let us have a few, so we thought we’d make Bakewell tart.’
‘And of course we are putting the almonds in,’ said Gran. ‘Whoever would put hazelnuts in a Bakewell tart?’
Who indeed. Obviously not Gran.
Mum came in, following her nose as well. ‘Noah not with you?’ She really liked Noah. Dad was neutral.
Gran was not so sure, as she quite often said to me if we were alone together. ‘I’m not so sure about that young man,’ she would say. ‘Don’t burn all your boats, I’m not sure he’s the right person for you.’ I would just nod.
My old room was now designated ‘spare bedroom’, but it still contained relics of my teenage years; the pictures I had chosen, the mirror, the chest of drawers. The room that was Jasmine’s, though, had now become Gran’s. I was vaguely aware that the stuff Jasmine had left behind had been boxed up and put in the attic, so later in the afternoon I made some excuse to my parents, pulled down the folding ladder and climbed up. I switched on the light and looked around for spiders, but if they were there, they were hiding. Some old paintings leant in a tired way against the rafters. There was a copper coal scuttle, a real antique – they should sell it – and my dad’s dumbbells from the days when he cared what shape he was. Not too much junk, then, so Jasmine’s gear was easy enough to find: a neat row of boxes with the remains of her old life in them. I scrabbled them open. Clothes – jeans, tops, scarves – in one box and three others containing books. I searched through methodically.
‘You looking for something up there?’ Mum’s voice drifted through the hatch.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I replied. But in truth I was not seeking a book; I was seeking the absence of a book. And I was satisfied, because the book I was looking for was not here. Which meant she had taken it with her.
The weekend passed, as they do, timeless as a randomly trickling stream. I reached home well after nine on Sunday evening, yet there was still some light in the sky. Mid grey over the dark grey of the rooftops. As I walked along the road towards the apartment, I could see an even darker figure, graphite, half merged into the hedge across the road. As I approached, it seemed to melt away. I stood under the light which lit up our security gate and peered across. Nobody. As the gate clanged shut behind me, I turned again. Surely there was the shape of half a man, as still as a gate post yet with the moulded edge of a human form, in the darkness opposite. I hurried indoors.
This book – this book is a thing of great beauty, though to anyone else it would appear a tatty old thing of no merit. On the birthday I received it – my eighth, maybe – I remember holding it in my hands, feeling its shiny cover, the red of poppies, with the twisting depiction of the creature, gold and shiny as a buttercup. In those days, they went in for flashy, brightly coloured, embossed paperback covers. And I loved it. I loved the feel of it, the smell of it when I carefully fanned the pages and put my nose to them.
‘I hope you like it,’ said Mum. ‘Jasmine said she thought you would – it was her favourite at your age.’
