Chapter 27
You have three minutes , the operator said. After that the pips will go and you’ll be cut off. Is that clear?
‘Yes,’ said Tom, his fingers winding around the telephone cord.
‘Yes – thank you.’ He looked around anxiously at the sound of footsteps outside, below the drawing-room window.
He prayed Uncle Henry would not suddenly return from wherever he usually spent his days.
Overseas calls were fiendishly difficult to make but also fiendishly expensive.
The line crackled, passing through the thousands of miles of copper cable at the bottom of the ocean, a telephone ringing in a house on the other side of the world.
Valhalla, Orchard, Hudson River, New York .
He could hear the ghostly ringing of other telephones, the tinny, reflective sound of other conversations.
The telephone rang, and rang. He knew then that his mother would not answer.
And then – suddenly – a voice, more crackling static, so distant he could barely hear them.
‘Hello?’
It was a woman. ‘Hello?’ said Tom. ‘Is that – is that Teddy Kynaston?’
She laughed. ‘Teddy’s not here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. It’s quite important I speak to her. I’m calling from England.’
‘I can’t hear you. England, did you say?’
Her voice was like waves of sound coming towards him, then retreating. But he could hear her.
And then – suddenly – waves of static.
‘Yes! I’m afraid the line’s terrible. I am sorry, but do you mind my asking if you know where she is?’
‘Why would you want to know that?’
Her voice: it was so near, as though she were in the next house, and then it almost disappeared. But when he could hear her, her voice was husky, like gold, slightly out of breath, as though she’d been running. He cleared his throat.
‘I have a friend who wants to find out. Very much.’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ she said, ‘but she’s here all the time.’
‘Forgive me … Something’s getting lost in translation, or maybe it’s the line. Is she there?’
‘Oh, she’s here,’ the girl said, and she gave a gentle sigh. He remembered Aunt Jenny saying time was not linear, it was seasons, and cycles, and he wondered where Teddy was, and whether he wanted to find her at all.
‘Who’s with her?’
‘She lives with her brother,’ she said, and her gilded husky voice hardened. As though she’d had enough. ‘Listen, what do you want with her?’
‘I can’t say. Not over the telephone. I think it could change everything but – I say – her brother? Is he – cruel to her?’
‘Teddy’s worth ten of him. Oh biscuits,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry but I have to –’
‘Oh! Don’t.’ Tom knew he couldn’t let her go. ‘Are you all right?’
She gave a great, whooshing sigh and said, ‘I’m not all right, no.’
‘No, you don’t sound it, even taking into account your accent.’
‘I don’t have an accent,’ she said, and she laughed, and he realized he’d do anything to make her laugh again. ‘You do. Who are you? Why are you trying to get hold of Teddy?’
‘A friend from England said I should find her. And that I’d learn the truth if I did. And help her too.’
‘Who’s the friend? How does she know Teddy?’
‘It’s rather a long story, I’m afraid.’
‘I haven’t got time for a long story. Or a short story,’ she said, and the static between them crackled and he thought she’d gone for a moment but then he heard her say, ‘… don’t come looking for Teddy. You won’t find anything here. Good luck.’
‘What’s your name?’ said Tom suddenly. ‘Please, just tell me your name.’
‘My name’s Alice. Alice Jansen,’ she said.
‘Where are you going, Alice Jansen?’
‘I’m going to St Mark’s Place. In the city. No. 5, St Mark’s Place, The East Village. It’s safe there.’
‘In New York City?’ he said, feeling like an idiot. She gave another gentle laugh.
‘I really like your accent, sorry,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right. New York City.’
‘And do you know anyone, in St Mark’s Place?’
‘I have a friend from home living there. He’s run away too. I have to get away from –’ She stopped. ‘I don’t know.’
Tom found himself holding his breath. He knew she understood. ‘The mess the older generation made?’ he said. ‘Something rather like that?’
He was delighted when she gave a small laugh. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it,’ she said. ‘I have to get away from them. I need to be someplace other than here and the world’s on fire, and it’s all happening in New York. I want to figure out what to do next, you know?’
‘I do know.’
‘Listen, what’s your name? How old are you?’ she asked him, and he felt this extraordinary certainty that she wanted to know, that she cared who he was and how he was, that he could tell her anything, he who hadn’t told Celia so much because he was too scared.
‘I’m Tom,’ he said. ‘I’m Tom Raven, and I’m twenty-one and I feel like the world’s on fire. I had my head in the sand before. Alice – it’s weird, I feel as though I know you.’
‘You won’t believe me, but I was thinking the same about you,’ she said, and he thrilled at her saying this. But then her voice changed, and she said, ‘Hey, I’m not at home, I’m in someone else’s house, and I might have to hang up. Tell me something about yourself in the meantime.’
‘I grew up in a two-room cottage in the Scottish hills. I love Calypso music, all music, really, and I love drawing, and I have a tiny wooden house my father carved for me that’s my dearest possession in the world.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if I have this straight. Scotland. Calypso, that’s groovy. Wooden house. So I lost my dad two and a half years ago. And I have a collection too. Of treasures. Animals, and figurines, and keepsakes. But I keep breaking them by accident.’
‘There are no accidents.’
‘Sometimes there are,’ he heard her say, her voice catching a little. ‘Sometimes. Tell me something else. Have you been in love?’
‘Yes. How about you?’
‘Yes,’ he heard her say.
‘Alice,’ he said.
He could hear the line crackling and fading, and she was silent. ‘Alice?’
‘Yes?’ she said faintly.
‘I have to find her,’ he said. ‘Teddy, I mean.’
She was moving around, her voice muffled. ‘There’s no point. Don’t come here looking for her. I wish you could, but Teddy doesn’t like visitors. I’m sorry. You understand?’
‘I understand,’ he said, though he didn’t, but he could hear the pain in her voice and he understood that. ‘Alice? Good luck. I hope everything turns out okay for you. And the treasures.’
‘Thank you. And you, Tom Raven.’
Then she said softly, ‘They’re back. I have to go, Tom Raven. I’m sorry. Goodbye –’
The line went dead, but the sonorous waves of sound, the chatter of other lines and wires thousands of miles away, continued for a few seconds, and then the pips sounded, and it was over.
Tom sat back on his haunches, waiting for a sign.
He thought about the girl leaving Valhalla, whoever she was.
He thought about Jenny’s hair, and Celia’s face, and Henry, downstairs.
He took up one of the pencils on the desk and started writing on the wall.
Eighteen pounds a week wages. Flights were at least three hundred pounds.
There was a travel agent he passed on Ladbroke Grove on his way up to the building site.
Carefully, scribbling on the wall above his drawings, he calculated how long he’d need to work, how much he had to pay Henry, and when, precisely, he could go to New York, to No.
5, St Mark’s Place, to find the girl on the other end of the phone, the one who knew about Teddy, the one who knew what he didn’t.
Of that much he was certain. Alice. My name is Alice Jansen, she’d said.
She collected treasures and her father was dead and she said, ‘Oh biscuits!’ when she was flustered.
Henry died in the summer of 1981, in his filthy, faithful armchair, probably watching the Royal Wedding, though no one was sure when exactly as it was several days before his charlady found him.
Other than the removal men who cleared the house when it was sold after Henry’s death, another living soul did not enter Tom’s room after he flew to America, in March 1968.
The day he left, Tom stood in the doorway, his kitbag already too heavy on his shoulder, and had one last look round. Henry, slumped in the drawing room, raised his hand to him, but Tom went in, knelt down, shook his hand.
‘I’ll write to you. I’ll come and see you when I’m back. Thank you, Henry,’ he said, trying not to stare at his uncle’s lined, scaly, pale face. Henry looked at him.
‘We don’t need to pretend any more, Tom. Good luck to you, old thing.’
Then he picked up the paper and disappeared behind it. Tom heard the slosh of whisky as Henry drained his hipflask. He picked up his kitbag again and went downstairs, shutting the door carefully behind him.
When the house was eventually sold to a family in 1982, the youngest child, Clare, dancing into her new bedroom at the top of the house, flung open the door and gasped, then cried out, causing her mother to run up the stairs, thinking she’d hurt herself.
But, no, she was standing in an empty room, its walls covered two thirds of the way up with drawings of hills and mountains, the sea, the scudding clouds, rays of sunshine shooting across the landscapes, and, at the centre of it all, a tiny square house, and a man outside it.
Then, above it, in clear black writing, 4/2 + 3 + 6/2 – sums, and sums, every coin, every last shilling, penny and pound Tom earned in those five months, added to the drawings on the wall, the final pages of the story of Tom’s final months of the years in that room, in that house, in that life.
What is it? Clare asked her mother, jumping up and down.
Can I keep the pictures? What does it mean?
But her mother, tired after the long, dreadful day of moving, worried about the area they had moved to, disgusted by some of the magazines the horrible old man who’d died there had been storing under the floorboards, shushed her and told her of course she couldn’t, and the drawings, the record of Tom’s strange, vast childhood, were painted over.
Clare, the little girl, was happy in that bedroom.
She remembered the drawings only once, when she was older, watching a documentary about cave paintings, and suddenly laughed to herself, as the image of the scribbled walls popped into her head, dredged up – from where?
She told herself it was a dream, that her childhood bedroom, now also dated and worn, peach-coloured paint and trimmed with stickers and Blu-Tack stains, had been a blank canvas when she moved in, not the dreamscape of a small, scared and determined little boy.