Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars. Miranda Emmerson

10 November

      Ottmar’s eyes followed every woman who walked past the cafe window. Samira had not come home from school and it was dark already. She’s still so small, he thought, my baby girl. He could see her at once as a baby and a five-year-old and a young woman of thirteen. He saw every part of her, every stage, every moment of strength and rage, determination. She was her mother’s daughter.

      Ever since she’d turned sixteen, she’d been going out in the evenings, staying out late, school nights, every night.

      ‘Where have you been?’ they asked her as she wandered up the stairs to the flat at midnight or one o’clock.

      ‘Becky’s house.’ ‘Mary’s house.’ ‘I went to the late show with Bernie.’

      ‘Who’s Bernie?’ they asked.

      ‘Short for Bernadette.’

      ‘Where does she get the money?’ Ekin asked and Ottmar shook his head, too scared to suggest any of the possible answers that presented themselves.

      Back in February, during Ramadan, Sami had told them that she would no longer be attending the mosque. Ekin, the only one of the family who bothered to fast during the day, screamed at her daughter: ‘Idiot! Do you want to burn in hell?’

      ‘I think I want to be a Marxist,’ Samira told her.

      ‘Then be a Muslim and a Marxist.’

      Samira thought about this for a moment. ‘I don’t think I can.’

      Ekin’s hands rose in the air and marshalled a heart suspended in space. ‘How can you turn your back on the love of Allah when nothing in the world is more beautiful?’

      Her daughter stared back at her with a look of sheer bemusement.

      Ottmar thought of Rashida in her posh girls’ school. And Samira, poor clever Samira, who hadn’t quite made the grade. He blamed himself, he blamed Ekin, he blamed the whole world. Neither Ekin nor he had been able to read English when they arrived so Sami had had to pull herself through school. Struggling and failing and making all the mistakes so that Rashida might succeed after her. Yet she was the clever one, Ottmar always felt this – Samira was the talker, the thinker. It was their fault she’d failed the eleven-plus and a piece of supreme injustice that Rashida had passed. Samira, who would have loved that girls’ school so much, who would have sucked up every piece of knowledge available, who would have carved a greater path in the world than the one she would carve now.

      She’s only sixteen, he told himself: there’s time. But a terrible, sick part of himself said it was already too late. He’d had a clever uncle and a good mind but without the right education, without the private income, he’d had nothing to protect him. When the hard times came he had lived without a shell. He told his girls that in the Alabora he had built himself a little world from his dreams and that was – in part – true. The Alabora, with its turquoise walls and sunset-coloured chairs, its silver-framed mirrors and red and gold embroidered bunting was a vision from a dream he had; but it was a dream of childhood. It was a dream of visiting his uncle in Istanbul and sitting in the coffee shops watching the men smoking and playing chess. It was not, as Ottmar would have them believe, a dream that he wished to recreate in adult life.

      He was a cafe owner – little more than a serf, what with business partners and taxes and the local council. His daughter did not tell her fellow students what her father did, though she did sometimes mention her great-uncle who had lectured on the epic poets in the great university at Istanbul. He would, he thought now, become the forgotten generation. Oh, Ottmar – he was the one who came from Cyprus to England. His great achievement: a boat ride across the sea.

      ***

      Aloysius insisted on paying both their fares. ‘I’m dragging you across London. It’s the least I can do. Really. We’ll have a little walk at the other end unless we change but I love this journey, there’s this view over the river and … You don’t mind a little walk?’ Anna shook her head with a smile, the bell clanged, the 2A drew into a stream of traffic and they went to find themselves seats upstairs.

      For the first few minutes neither of them spoke. In that strange and hurried conversation on the corner of the Edgware Road Anna had found herself caught up in the excitement of chasing Iolanthe. At last she had a clue, a lead; she knew something Sergeant Hayes did not. She had sped through the streets to Baker Street, Aloysius taking her arm as they crossed each road. She had felt daring and unconstrained. A single woman running through the darkness with a handsome black man at her side. She hoped that people would see them and wonder who they were. She hoped that people thought they might be lovers.

      But now, under the unromantic glow of London bus lighting, she felt sweaty and unkempt. The two men travelling at the front of the bus had turned round and stared at her and Aloysius and then they’d laughed a hard and dirty laugh that had no hint of generosity about it. Aloysius himself seemed much more uncomfortable now that they had settled in for the journey and when the men started making monkey noises he asked her: ‘Would you like me to go and sit in the seat behind? Then no one would think anything about it.’

      ‘No!’ said Anna, though a little part of her wanted to answer ‘Yes’. Aloysius touched her hand very briefly then he picked up his briefcase and slid quietly into the seat behind her. Anna turned, knowing that she should say something but Aloysius smiled a weary smile at her.

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We can still talk.’

      Anna turned in her seat so that they would be face to face and she’d feel less ashamed in her acceptance that they should sit apart.