Miranda Emmerson - Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

That evening, after the other waitresses had left for home, Anna sat down with Ottmar over coffee and cake and told him she was running away to join the theatre. Ottmar extended his large dark paws and cradled Anna’s hands between his. When she looked, a little fearfully, into his eyes they were tired and dark and wet.

‘Will you still come and have lunch with us sometimes, little Anna?’

‘I’ll be living just upstairs.’

‘I know. But life. It rushes by and then you think you’ll see people … You think you’ll do things and have time for this and time for that … And then there is never time. This is what I have learned, Anna, I have learned that there is never as much time as you think there is.’

‘I’ll come and have coffee with you every evening if you’ll promise not to be so maudlin,’ Anna joked.

‘Am I maudlin?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s mostly tiredness.’

‘I know,’ she said and she reached across and briefly touched his cheek. ‘I know it is.’

Tuesday, 9 November

Leonard’s sitting room was large and white and somewhat bare for Anna’s tastes. There were two blue sofas and a tall white bookcase holding what looked like a double layer of paperback books. A record player and speakers stood on the floor against a wall that held one gold-framed picture of the Buddha and an alarming poster for Genet’s The Balcony . The low coffee table was decorated with orange and turquoise tiles and piled high with papers and files and notes.

‘Sit down. I’ll fill the coffee maker.’

Anna studied the bookshelves and called through to Leonard who was getting dressed somewhere else in the flat. ‘What’s happened to Benji’s sister?’

‘She’s in hospital for … women’s problems.’

‘Right.’ Anna was never really sure what this meant.

‘They phoned his parents two hours ago. She lost a lot of blood when they operated. They’re saying they all have to go in and be with her. We weren’t really expecting … It just came out of the blue.’

Anna slumped into a ball on one of the sofas. ‘Everything seems to come out of the blue at the moment. The policeman was nice enough but he didn’t have a single idea what had happened to Lanny and he’s meant to have been looking for her for a week.’

‘If there are no clues, there are no clues.’

‘Well, she’s gone somewhere. What about that boy that got taken from the station in Manchester? The one the Brady couple beat to death. If the brother-in-law hadn’t gone to the police would he have been found? And the little girl in the moor? She’d been missing ten months. Why did no one find her sooner?’

Leonard was back now, dressed and peering into the little silver coffee pot that perched on the stove. ‘No one’s suggesting she’s dead.’

‘Well, why aren’t they? Just because there isn’t a body doesn’t mean she’s okay.’

Leonard frowned at her. ‘Anna, come on. We’re all a bit scared but really … She’ll turn up. It’s just a horrid time.’

‘It’s a horrid time for us, but what about Lanny? What if we’re all sitting round saying, isn’t this awful, this worrying is so exhausting, and in the meantime someone’s doing something to Lanny? What if they’re hurting her? What if she’s trapped?’

Leonard shook his head and set out cups.

‘I was thinking of going down to the club tomorrow, the one she talked about in the interview,’ Anna said, though really it had only occurred to her just now. ‘I mean, what was she doing there? Was she meeting a man? Was she buying drugs?’

‘Depends on the club.’

‘I’m going to start with Roaring Twenties.’

‘See, no,’ Leonard said, putting a couple of teacakes under the grill to toast, ‘I don’t see Iolanthe in there. They’re playing reggae and ska and all sorts of weird Caribbean stuff. It’s mostly a club for coloured kids.’

‘I’ve never been in. What’s it like?’

‘Not really my kind of place. I’m not a nightclub man. It was white when it started. White-owned, white-run. You know … Jewish kids down from Hampstead pretending to be cool. Coloured musicians on the stage, whites only on the dance floor. Not overly popular with the musicians, as you can imagine. I went there a couple of times in the early days and it was fine. Quite small. Good for a night out and an ounce of weed. Few years went by and it shifted. Musicians hated the colour bar, got antsy. They got themselves a coloured manager for real. Count Suckle, playing all this Caribbean music from his enormous sound system. Honestly, it was the size of a car and the floors would shake underneath you, the whole place bouncing and rolling. He disappeared a while back. I heard he got sick of all the drugs being sold and got himself another gig up on Praed Street. So now it’s Duke Vin but very popular with the pop music lot. Ringo Starr’s been seen drinking there, Daltrey, Keith Moon, Freddie Garrity. Whoever owns it must be raking it in.’

Leonard carried over plates of teacakes and tiny black enamelled cups of coffee, while Anna shifted in her seat. She herself had long ago learned to avoid any mention of a person’s skin or nationality, and she wondered at the carelessness of Leonard’s language.

Leonard was talking again. ‘You know the big coloured guy on the door, Charlie Brown? He was John Christie’s landlord.’

‘At Rillington Place?’ Anna asked.

‘London’s much smaller than you think. Everyone is somehow connected to everyone else. Even if they do all hate each other.’

There were no curtains at the windows, only offices overlooked the room and Anna searched the sky for signs of light. She hated winter mornings, that irresistible pull back to bed. ‘Do you really think we all hate each other, Leonard?’

‘D’you know what I think?’ Leonard plonked himself down on the sofa next to her. ‘I think it’s all about money. I think we all come for the same reason and we call it jobs or houses or culture but what we really mean is money. Money makes places shiny. It makes them glitter. The rich come flooding in because they have things to do with their money. They can spend, show it off, make more of it. The poor come flooding in because poverty is terrifying and they gravitate to the place where there’s the most work. The immigrants come here because if you don’t head for where the money is you’re going to be going back on the next boat. My parents came here because the pogroms laid waste to their town and there were Jewish boarding houses and Jewish companies. Why’s Ottmar here? Why are you? We all come looking for the shiny and then we find that there isn’t very much to go around. And if all that’s binding you together is a search for shininess … well … those are very dangerous ropes to bind any group of people together.’

Anna stared, perhaps a little too intently, at Leonard’s face. ‘You never said you were Jewish.’

Leonard looked taken aback. ‘I assumed you knew.’

‘I think I thought you must be but then you never mentioned it.’

‘I don’t practise.’

‘There just … there weren’t any Jewish kids at my school. I think sometimes I just assume everyone who seems English is English.’

‘I am English,’ said Leonard. Pointedly.

‘I know … but I meant Anglo-Saxon Protestant English. Fruit scones; Book of Common Prayer; Henry-the-Eighth-had-six-wives English. You know. English English.’

‘You’re eating a bloody teacake; what more d’you want?’ Leonard worked a currant out from between his teeth. ‘Nothing can ever be too English, can it? Nothing can ever be too pure. It’s like there’s an entry test for Englishness and only twenty people pass it every year. Are you clever? Are you virtuous? Are you kind? It doesn’t fucking matter. All that matters is that you’re English.’