Sean Gabb: The Break

Jennifer sat down on the other side of the table. She’d already seen the opened wine jar and the half-empty glasses. Mummy would never have gone to bed with these left out. She could feel the blood draining from her face. She wanted to get up and run through every room in the house, checking that this wasn’t some bizarre home-coming joke. But Mrs Maggs had now put her cigarette onto the table, where it would soon leave a burn mark. Her job, every Monday and Thursday, was to come in and clean. That she was now careless about creating a mess left nothing to be said.

“It’s a funny old world,” she said after a long cough. “You know, my boy studied hard on his Financial Services degree. He done his MBA and all. Now, instead of a cushy job up in London, what’s he doing? He’s out in them fields, digging fourteen hours a day to keep body and soul together. Found us a dead rabbit on Sunday, and we was glad of it. And what’s it all with them that wasted their time on old things and dead languages? Why, aren’t they just living the life of Riley from dealings with them nasty Outsiders?” She looked down at her cup. “Do you know when it was,” she asked menacingly, “when I last even saw real coffee? Your mother wasn’t never a generous woman in that respect.” She cleared her throat and spat onto the brick-tiled floor.

It was time for the siren above the Town hall to sound. In a moment, the morning electricity would come on. The interruption gave Jennifer time to pull herself together. Had the old woman grassed her parents? She got up and went to the cutlery drawer. She took out the biggest carving knife. “Get out of here!” she said with quiet passion. “Get out before I kill you.”

If Robert had seen how she flourished the knife, he’d have taken it as an invitation to foreplay. But Mrs Maggs scraped her chair back as she got quickly to her feet. “Now, don’t you go threatening me, little lady,” she said defensively. “Unlike where you’ve just come from, there’s laws in this country. Even in kitchens, steel knives ain’t allowed no more.”

“Get out of my house!” Jennifer shouted. She picked up one of the glasses and threw it across the kitchen. It missed, but smashed loudly on the wall. She stepped forward and shoved the old woman in the chest. Still holding the knife, she got her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. All that kept her from bloody murder was the competing urge to sit down and cry.

Mrs Maggs looked back from the street. “Don’t think you’ll be left alone in this place,” she sneered. “The police will be back here later to seal it up. Then they’ll take you as well.” She laughed and brushed ash off the front of her dress. “You’ll see your mum and dad again if you’re lucky. But, if I’m told right, it’ll be in Ireland—where there’s work a plenty for them that’s set to it.”

Jennifer slammed the door shut and locked it and slipped the chain into place. Then she ran upstairs. Her parents’ bedroom was as neat and clean as ever. The bed hadn’t been slept in. The indoor clothes were carefully folded and put on their usual racks. She pulled open a drawer in the dressing table. Her mother’s jewellery was untouched. So too the purse of gold coins they had been filtering from the normal takings of their business. Jennifer pulled open one of the walk-in cupboards. The leather bag that Daddy always used for his French trips was still there. If she looked in any of the drawers, she’d surely see where socks and sweaters and other clothes hadn’t been removed for packing. She bent to look under the bed. Probably still loaded, the illegal shotgun was in its usual place.

There was no denying her parents were gone, nor any point in doubting the assurance that they’d been taken away. All that was missing was any sign that the police had been in the house—no smashed in front door, no scattered and trampled chaos of a search, no blood from the sadistic beatings that accompanied an arrest. Whoever had come had scooped them off as if for drinks round the corner, though giving no time to pack, nor to clean things away.

And Mrs Maggs—why hadn’t she gone through the house? Jennifer bit her lip again, this time so hard it nearly bled.

Suddenly, all the lights came on, and there was an expectant whirring of the electric typewriter in the upstairs office. Down in the kitchen, the wireless played the closing bars of Elgar’s Symphony in A flat , before giving way to the staccato voice of the presenter. She crept back downstairs and sat in the kitchen. The Radio 3 presenter was reading the authorised news bulletin. This carried an announcement from the National Government about another try at getting the Heart of Oak platform into the North Sea. “British ingenuity” might at last have found a way round the shortage of things from an abroad that no longer existed. But Jennifer seldom bothered with the news. Daddy only paid attention when he wanted to poke fun at the lies. Instead, she pulled the leather bag towards her. Using the knife she still had in her hand, she cut the knotted cords that had closed it and let the stream of coins fall onto the table. Seven pounds of silver, at a street price of £800 to the ounce. Daddy usually brought more than this. But he always took more than the tampons and paracetamol she’d gathered up when her parents were fussing over a piano key that had stopped working. Still, this would have been enough to pay for electricity and water and Community Levy and food, and all the appearance of a normal life.

She noticed an oddity in the dull and misshapen heap. She picked up the bright disc and looked at it. Daddy had brought a couple of these back from his own last trip. “It’s a gold solidus of Isaac I Comnenus,” he’d said learnedly. “He was Emperor between 1057 and 1059. Quite unusual, you know, to see anything Byzantine this far away.” He’d then set them aside for adding to the purse upstairs.

Remembering his voice, Jennifer felt a lump come into her throat. But the BBC was playing something by Eric Coates, and she was aware again of the smell of coffee. She got up and turned off the bottled gas stove that Mrs Maggs had left burning. She cleared away the fragments of broken glass and dabbed at the patches of red on the wall. She took out her own special cup and filled it to the brim with coffee. Sitting in her usual place at the table, she reached inside her sweatshirt for the letter that Count Robert had given her. It was easier to read than she’d supposed. Most children pass into adulthood as insensibly as the outside scenery changes on a long railway journey. For all she’d thought herself so very grown up in France, Jennifer now realised that this had been no more than the descending rhythm that closed a sentence in Latin. Here was the real full stop in the story of her life so far—here the paragraph break.

When Jennifer finally got up from the table, it would be as a woman. For the moment, she leaned forward and cried and cried. She cried like a child who knew she’d suffered an inconsolable loss. She felt as if she’d cry forever.

She knew, however, that she wouldn’t.

Like any cautious diplomat, his uncle had been sceptical right up to the last moment. But Michael had believed everything the Flemish barbarians told him. And why not? It only confirmed what had had been drifting for months into Constantinople. He got up from the bench for a better look at the large boats that were coming out at incredible speed from the shore.

“Sit down, you stupid boy!” the pilot croaked in a semblance of Latin. “Those long tubes poking at us can take your head off before you’d even draw breath. Just sit down and let me do the talking.”

“Do as he says,” Uncle Simeon added in Greek. “We are envoys of the Great Augustus. These people will surely respect that.” Michael sat down with a bump and looked into the reflection cast by the now reasonably still waters. Boys don’t have beards, he told himself. He resisted the urge to put up a hand to feel the glossy brown growth that would, in due course, be full answer to his prayers. But he looked down only for a moment. He was straight back to looking over the prow of the open boat at the unimaginably vast and magnificent docks that seemed to have been built out from the shore of Britain. Behind these, all the way to the high, foliage-covered cliffs, there was a mass of buildings hardly less astonishing in their size and design.