Where to Find Me Page 16

  For all I knew, I had been transported into a poorer suburb of Istanbul, where Az and I had just spent a few days. And I loved it. I had the strange sensation that this was the place I had been looking for all along: close enough to what I needed, and far enough from what I knew – namely my mother. However hard I tried, and despite the years having gone by, our relationship was still tangled, like a skein of yarn. At least to me it was. I’m not sure how my mother viewed it. We pretended the problem wasn’t there, but I knew better. This is how I had come to view my mother throughout the years. My love hadn’t receded, but my trust in her had. And having her live in close proximity to me, in Notting Hill, hadn’t made matters easier.

  Here in N4, a few miles away from West London, everything appeared different. I stood on Green Lanes and watched an elderly Mediterranean couple argue in front of a shop, Yaser Halim, in a foreign language (Turkish? Kurdish?). The woman’s bright-yellow headscarf matched her gold front teeth, and her husband smoked an unfiltered cigarette, his features weathered like a Dardanelles fisherman. He smiled at me as he caught me staring, and I smiled back. The way he stood and spoke to his wife made me want to hug him. I told Sheila I wanted to find out more about the neighbourhood, perhaps look at a few houses next time I came to visit. “Forget next time,” Sheila said. She dragged me to an estate agent she knew, and one hour later I was staring at a three-bedroom Edwardian house on Cavendish Road. It needed work, and the garden was a forest of bramble bushes and ivy. There was a bedsit across the way, “about to be closed down”, I was assured. “But the neighbours are really friendly, and the area is gentrifying quickly,” the estate agent added, as if I needed to be reassured. But I didn’t, because the house was exactly what I was looking for. Peaceful, filled with light, much bigger than the cramped apartments I had seen for the same price. And, most importantly, it faced a river. The New River. I could see the afternoon light sparkle on the water from what would become my bedroom window. My sitting-room window. My study window.

  I made an offer, and by the next morning the house was mine.

  Az and I moved in a few months later. We varnished the wooden floor and polished the doors a deep mahogany. We decorated the house with eclectic furniture and rugs which my mother had stored away after selling the house in Bridport. Our neighbours, a Greek Cypriot and her husband, took to dropping by with homemade cakes and figs from their tree. Further up the road, another neighbour, Bo, a slightly downtrodden woman who wore enormous glasses and boasted of an illustrious past as a costume designer, took to knocking on our door for no apparent reason other than to say hello.

  We quickly understood that we had to adopt a sterner approach or not answer the door at all. Bo took it badly and left small pots of dead flowers on our doorstep. We confronted her and she became defensive. “Why would I ever do such a thing?” she said, her unsteady eyes peering at us from behind her enormous frames.

  Early one morning, we were awakened by the sound of her kicking our door with unexpected might. “I know you’re home!” she shouted, at which point I wanted to call the police. Az dissuaded me. “She’s crazy, that’s all. Totally crazy. She’ll stop soon enough.”

  Az tried to reason with her through the window, but in vain. Bo kept on screaming and kicking at our door. “I’m calling the police!” I shouted.

  “Sure, why don’t you!” Bo shouted back.

  But Az didn’t like the police. I learnt that quickly. Where he came from, it was associated with trouble. I had to accept it. I hadn’t grown up as he had. I knew nothing about Oran or the Algerian War, or the Pieds-Noirs, the FLN and the OAS, the right-wing secret armed organization which operated at the time. I became familiar with those acronyms as Az told me about his childhood, the death of his father when Az was still a small boy, which prompted his mother to leave for France. They eventually settled in the sink estate of Aubervilliers, outside Paris, where Az spent the first fifteen years of his life.

  So we didn’t call the police, but someone did it for us as the shouting increased in its volume. Two officers showed up, and Bo was taken away. We only saw her once more, standing next to a young man as movers loaded her belongings onto a truck. After that, we took to recounting the incident with near-melancholia, as if we had actually cared about this woman who had made our life difficult for a while.

  Az’s daughter Stéphanie came to stay with us at weekends. Her English wasn’t very good, and at first she was shy around me. She had auburn hair and big, grey, slightly worried eleven-year-old eyes. I took an immediate liking to her. I had never felt such a connection to a child before. She looked as if she needed protection, and I wanted to give it to her. But it took time to woo her. She was visibly wary around me, until one evening when Az was out and we watched a film together, one she had brought with her because she loved it. It was called Les Choristes and was about a school for difficult boys in 1950s France. I cried and laughed, and so did she, and by the time Az came home we were sitting on the sofa and eating homemade ice cream, and Stéphanie was making fun of my broken French. There was no looking back for either of us after that day, although her mother Agnès didn’t seem particularly enchanted by me or where we lived. I heard her and Az argue outside on the street. “T’aurais pas pu choisir un endroit moins loin et moins dégueulasse? Tu la vois prendre le métro toute seule ici jusqu’au lycée? Moi non.”

  Az translated for me. “Couldn’t you have chosen to live less far away and in less of a shithole? Do you think I’m going to let her take the Tube alone to school from here?”

  “I’ll walk her to the Tube. I’ll take her to school.”

  “It’s in South Kensington.”

  “So it is.”

  Az kissed me. “You’re a good woman. You don’t have to do it, and you’re a good woman. Just like my mother. No wonder she loved you. She couldn’t stand Agnès, but she immediately loved you.”

  “It’s reciprocal,” I told him.

  “If my father were alive, he would have felt the same,” he continued. “Even though I hardly knew him, I’m sure of it. We Algerians recognize good when we see it.”

  “You don’t need to be Algerian to recognize goodness, Az,” I said, smiling.

  Nuria had come to visit us a few weeks back – a small woman with deep brown eyes, skin like an old walnut, a wide-open smile. Az’s mother spoke no English, so we communicated in my passable French. She was simple, she was affectionate and she was wise. I understood that immediately, despite the cultural barrier. And she must have understood something about me too – namely that I needed a presence like hers in my life. Someone simple. In my family, we didn’t do simple. We didn’t think simple. Even my father had been complicated. But Az and Nuria awoke something in me which until then had been left unattended, like a plot of fallow land.

  *

  Ben, visiting from Los Angeles, had come to stay with us after having spent a few days with my mother. He arrived on a rainy evening, carrying his suitcase and a medium-sized, rather heavy cardboard box which he handed to me as he came in. “It’s for you,” he said, kissing me on both cheeks. “It was dropped off at Mum’s this morning.”

  “What is it?”

  “See for yourself,” said Ben, as he hung his coat on a peg. “I’m not saying anything.”

  I carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the counter as Ben wheeled in his suitcase. The cardboard was damp. My name and address were written on the top flap in dark-blue felt-tip letters. There was a rip on the side of the box, through which I could distinguish the spine of a book.

  I grabbed a kitchen knife and tore the box open. Crumpled newspaper met my eye. I glanced at a page. 12th December 2004. Four months back. What was this? Who had sent this to me?

  Ben looked at me. “It’s from Flora Dobbs,” he said. “Remember her? The old lady from Oxford Gardens? She died and left this for you in her will. Don’t ask me why, I have no clue. A man showed u
p at the house yesterday, wanted to make sure you still lived here, said he would drop it off this morning – and he did. Mum asked me to bring it over.”

  “What?” I gasped. “But why me?”

  Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. Mum says Flora left the street like nineteen years ago. So yeah, it’s weird. Like what the fuck?”

  “Like yeah.”

  I started looking through the box. I searched for a note or a letter, something personal, but found nothing.

  Instead, there were books. Eight of them to be precise. I removed them carefully and glanced at them, one by one. Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Jane Howard. There were also Victorian novels: used and possibly rare hardback editions of Trollope, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy – the books from Flora Dobbs’s library. It had to be them. Some covers were green or red cloth, with gilded spines. Silas Marner looked as if it had never been opened. As for Charlotte Brönte and Dickens, they were Oxford University Press hardcovers from the 1960s – well-read ones at that, judging from their crumpled, stained pages.

  So she had remembered our brief conversation then. Of course she would have. She wanted to leave me her books as a reminder of that moment we had shared. But she must also have felt some sort of guilt. She had, after all, cut me out of her life just as abruptly as she had allowed me in. Was this her way of apologizing?

  If it was, I accepted the apology. There had clearly been something preoccupying her at the time that had made her behave as she had. And what had stayed with me most was not so much the way she had disappeared, but the feeling, despite the short time we had spent together, that this woman had gained an insight into my character, possibly more than my parents could at the time. “She could become my French lady friend,” I had told my father.

  The memory of that cold, rainy afternoon came back to me. The way she had opened her door and handed me a towel. The baby grand piano. The Monet poster on her bathroom door. The way her dolls were dressed and how they sat. The way she sipped her tea and listened as I spoke. The way I had shown up at her house with my mother’s lemon cake, and how Flora had closed the door for ever behind me.

  And now she was dead.

  “Hey,” said Ben. “Can I see?”

  “It’s just books,” I said.

  Ben’s phone rang, and he answered it quickly. “Mum wants to talk to you,” he said, handing me his handset.

  “Hi Mum,” I said, grabbing it from him. “So I’m here with Flora Dobbs in a box.”

  “Yes, I know,” she answered quickly. “I should have warned you this was coming. A man – her solicitor, I think – showed up yesterday. I meant to call you but I forgot. It’s been such a crazy few days.”

  “OK. What did the man say?”

  “That she had died and been buried last week. I think he said she was eighty-three years old. She gave specific instructions in her will for the contents of this box to be left for you. Books, I think? Or did he say notebooks?”

  “Yes, books.

  “It is a bit ironic, isn’t it,” she said softly. “Your father banged on for so long about Flora Dobbs and next thing you know she’s leaving you her books as a goodbye gift.”

  “Yes,” I conceded, remembering how much time my father had spent speculating about her true identity. We both laughed, though her laughter was tinged with sadness.

  Anything to do with my father’s memory was tinged with sadness.

  He had suffered a cardiac arrest in 2002. It happened in broad daylight, as he was walking to the theatre. I had cooked him dinner the night before. He had been unwell, with some heart trouble he had dismissed as silly. But I knew better. No heart problem was silly. He just wanted to keep it from me. When pressed for details, he had been so vague about it that I eventually gave up. “I need to take some pills, is the gist of it,” is all he volunteered, despite my insistence. He had never been good at being ill, and was hardly going to change at the age of sixty-six.

  It was his Irish girlfriend, Ailis, who rang me that night to tell me. “He’s gone,” she repeated, her voice faltering. “He’s gone.”

  *

  I went to see him in the morgue. I didn’t recognize him. It was as if his insides had been drained out. His face was white and still, like a wax statue. His hands were clasped together. I wondered whether he had died in that position. My mighty father. Now the shell of a king.

  We buried him in Highgate Cemetery. Six feet under, surrounded by cold earth and forgotten bones.

  “I wish I could be there with you both, right now,” my mother said, her voice interrupting my thoughts. And something in her tone made my throat tighten.

  I could picture her, sitting at the kitchen table, gazing out of the window. She was still beautiful, but something had changed in her face, as if all her happiness had been sapped, leaving a hollowness in its stead.

  She suffered, and it showed. She had destroyed her marriage and would never forgive herself. She didn’t say so, but I knew it. I had to be gentler with her. More forgiving. Now that I had Az in my life, it was time to turn over a new leaf. I had punished her enough. And so had my brother, in his own way: years of diving in and out of a dark place, a place populated by people who lived on the fringes of society and who, like him, mistook recklessness for character.

  “You’ll never understand,” Ben would say, as if we were the ones to blame.

  And he was right: we didn’t understand my seventeen-year-old brother. The fact was that none of us was sufficiently prescient to interpret his behaviour as a cry for help.

  We found out later, when he confessed, its full extent: how he stole from my father, then my mother. How All Saints Road became his second home until his skunk dealer was arrested. How he bribed Hairy Mary to supply him with alcohol, and how he eventually got beaten up by her pimp. How he drank on his way to school, stuffing small vodka bottles into his satchel, finishing them by the time he got home, steadily progressing to a level of alcoholism which was increasingly hard to sustain.

  “It’s safer than heroin,” he once quipped, as if the lesser evil were worthy of a compliment.

  Eventually, he ended up in a rehabilitation centre. As soon as he came out, he enrolled in acting classes. “This is what I’m meant to do,” he told us.

  His talent became quickly apparent, and after two years got a small part in a Royal Court production. The suddenness of it all took us by surprise. “Vodka and poppers have been replaced by Miller and Pinter,” said my father, greeting this transformation with cautious enthusiasm. But we were happy for Ben. An American agent happened to be in the audience the night before the play closed. After the performance, he went backstage and introduced himself to Ben. There was a casting for a television series, he told him. It was for an important role.

  Ben went to the audition and won the part. By the following year, he was flitting between London and Los Angeles, and had become one of the lead actors in the television series, which, although it was met with a lukewarm reception, convinced him that Los Angeles was where he wanted to be.

  My parents watched and worried. Surely he wouldn’t be able to sustain this? And how was he going to support himself? California was expensive. And treacherous. He might relapse, fall in with the wrong crowd again. But their concerns proved unfounded.

  Today, although he still hasn’t found stardom, Ben seems to have settled into his Californian life. Despite promises of acting jobs which haven’t materialized, he hasn’t given up hope. “I’ll get there,” he told me. “I’ve found a part-time job, modelling swimwear. You never know. And I have a good agent. Watch this space.”

  I’m still watching, and I worry. Fame has no mercy on the broken ones.

  “So, what sort of books?” My mother’s voice came piping through the phone.

  “Victorian novels, beautiful editions. Some more recent ones too, but mainly Vict
orian. They look valuable,” I added, as I removed the newspaper from the last book: Jude the Obscure stared at me in gilded lettering.

  “Did she leave you a note?” my mother asked.

  “Not that I can see. I think that her books are meant to be the note.”

  “To each his own,” my mother remarked. “I would have left a note. Any normal person would have.”

  “I know,” I concurred. “But I’m not sure how normal she was.”

  We hung up. I made a mental note to check up on my mother the following day. Az hurried me. We were going to have dinner with some friends of his, in Kensal Rise. Ben was accompanying us. Traffic was bad, we needed to change and leave shortly. “What’s that?” Az asked, pointing at the box.

  “I’ll tell you in the car,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  I lifted the box and took it upstairs, to my study. I placed it on my desk, glanced at it again and went into my bedroom to get ready.

  2

  I met Az in 2003, at a dinner party in Islington. I was cooking for Valerie, a well-known architect I had met through Nancy. Valerie had short black hair, wore flares and white shirts. She wasn’t known for her sense of humour, and my godmother called her husband “the poodle”, because he did whatever she asked of him. “He’s terrified of Valerie, and so am I. But please do this for me, because she and the poodle have become collectors of my paintings. I’d like them to become even bigger ones. Blow them away with your chocolate fondant.”

  “All right,” I promised.

  As soon as I arrived at her modernist glass house and was exposed to her sharp, slightly condescending manner, I quickly understood that Valerie was not the type to be blown away by anything. But that didn’t matter, because I had an ulterior motive for being there. The dinner was in honour of Aziz Lascar, the photographer. I had been a fan of his work for a while. A show was opening at the Rouge Gallery, and I had read a fascinating interview with the photographer, where he recalled his childhood in the sink estates outside Paris and the source of his inspiration: “I’m fascinated by the unseen. I don’t like generic photography. I like to capture the transience of things. The ephemeral. Water, leaves, clouds. I work in shadows, not clarity.”