The Lost Child (4 page)

“Monica Johnson,” he said, “you are a remarkable young woman.”

“Thank you, but I’m just being myself.”

She pecked his lips before rolling back onto the pillow and staring up at the cracked plasterwork of the ceiling.

“And your other romances, Monica? Is it alright if I ask about them?”

She smiled to herself and remembered the one boy, a new student like her, whom she’d let go all the way. After he’d left her room to shin over the back wall of the college, she sat up in bed and could feel that her lips were swollen where he’d had a good go at the open pouch of her mouth. Is this what he wanted to know about? She continued to gaze at the ceiling but said nothing as she didn’t want to talk about anything to do with her miserable, lonely first year as a student. Eventually he’d come to understand that her silences weren’t always to do with him. He wasn’t the only one with stuff going on in his head.

By the end of the second week of Hilary term, Monica had decided that scooting through the quad at dawn and then dashing up the narrow staircase to her room no longer held any appeal. Having carefully arranged things so that it might appear to the college servant that she had simply slipped out on some trifling errand, she packed a small suitcase and moved into Julius Wilson’s basement flat. He couldn’t have been happier, for this young Englishwoman seemed to take enthusiastic pleasure in cooking, cleaning, and studying, as though each activity flowed naturally into the next. Her simple rearrangement of the furniture created more space, and replacing the heavy curtains with cheap blinds brought light flooding into the flat. Not a day went by without his looking up from his desk and delighting in this alluring barefoot creature who moved silently through his world. Often, late at night, he would steal a glance at her as she slept and feel the urge to beg her not to leave him, but he knew these words must never cross his lips. Four years ago, during his divorce proceedings, his wife had made a statement through her solicitor claiming that it was his selfish insecurities—to his face she used the word “immaturity”—that had caused the breakdown of their marriage. “My husband,” she said, “doesn’t understand that I too have needs.” But this Monica Johnson never agitated for more visibility in the relationship, and she appeared to be content to anticipate his desires and protect him from the world.

As he neared the completion of his dissertation, Julius began to evaluate the idea of marriage, for he felt that he ought to offer Monica some form of security in order to convince her to remain by his side. After all, she seemed to have made a complete break with her parents, and it was therefore his responsibility to provide this young woman with something solid and dependable in her life. The day her father drove down to deliver his ultimatum, she had come running to his flat and, having gathered herself, began to explain how wrong she felt her father was about Julius and what her father called “his kind.” As soon as she opened up on the subject of her father, however, Julius detected anxiety beginning to rise inside her, and she retreated into a silence that quickly became strained and, for a moment, threatened to overwhelm them and poison the atmosphere in his flat.

Julius waited until the end of the academic year before taking her out to the pub for a drink and bringing up the question of marriage. Monica heard him out, and once he’d finished she couldn’t think of any reason
not
to get wed to him, and so a few weeks later they were married by a visibly agitated registrar in a dull office that reminded her of a dentist’s waiting room. Having already received worrying reports from two of Monica’s tutors about her often flighty state of mind and proclivity to wander in her head, the principal of her college readily granted Monica’s request to take a leave of absence from her studies. As a result, when Julius accepted a junior lectureship at a new polytechnic on the south coast of England, in a seaside town that appeared to cater to retirees, Monica was free to join him. The newly married couple rented a small flat on the first floor of a detached brick house near the campus, and to celebrate their move, they opened a bottle of red wine and tried to drink themselves into frivolity. The landlady, a small grey-haired widow, whose behaviour was informed by old-world Eastern European manners, lived downstairs, and once they had made the decision to take the place she made a grand to-do of announcing that she hoped they would be comfortable. Then she fixed the pair of them with her wearily bagged eyes, and offered them whispered reassurances that they must not worry, for should they be unable to produce a marriage certificate this would in no way jeopardize their rental arrangement.

While Julius settled in on campus and made a few cautious stabs at friendship with his new colleagues, Monica walked the blustery seafront and scoured secondhand furniture shops in search of small items, such as wooden stools or table lamps, that might signal the permanence of their shared adventure and put a personal stamp on the characterless flat. During the third week of term they invited a fellow junior lecturer and his mousy fiancée to a spaghetti and wine dinner at their now moderately homelike abode, and although the tipsy couple obviously enjoyed the evening and even stayed for a second cup of coffee, Julius found the stress of receiving visitors difficult to tolerate. He knew enough to understand that when hosting he mustn’t always be the centre of attention, but he really couldn’t bear to have these people in his place, who acted as though their trivial complaints regarding the weather or the town’s lack of telephone boxes might be of some interest to him and his wife. Later that night, as Monica was completing the washing-up, he looked up from the table and told her he would prefer to keep his work and his everyday life separate, and although Monica wasn’t quite sure where this would leave her in terms of things to do, she said nothing.

Despite his misgivings about both the town and the polytechnic, Julius adjusted easily to the new business of lecturing. As he often practised in their cramped living room, Monica was able to observe him quickly mastering the art of the theatrical pause, the rhetorical question, and the self-deprecating humorous anecdote, all carefully calculated to enhance an already burgeoning reputation as a popular teacher. When he wasn’t giving a lecture, most of Julius’s energy was devoted to the founding and leadership of the Anti-Colonial Club, but by the end of the first term its success among lecturers and students alike was causing him to regret his involvement. Long nights in disagreeable pubs debating whether the struggles of Hungary and other countries under the jackboot of Moscow should also be on the agenda for discussion were, to his mind, torturous. Why not include them? he insisted. Oppression was oppression. But what was he to make of the argument that the Anti-Colonial Club should view the struggles of people trying to avoid being beaten up by English teddy boys as part of an ongoing problem whose roots lay in colonial exploitation? His tolerance for lacklustre, drawn-out evenings waned as rapidly as his interest in warm English beer, and all too frequently he found himself staggering back along a chilly, windswept promenade, listening to the powerful engine of the sea, and then tiptoeing up the ill-lit backstairs to their small flat before sliding into bed next to his young wife.

Sunday afternoons had a tendency to drag for both of them. Julius would often finish folding the pile of clothes and then slump down onto the settee and watch as Monica continued to iron the shirts and skirts that needed special attention. Playing the part of a husband was something that he had taken on in order to make Monica feel more secure, but after only a few months in this role he was already unsure if he truly possessed the stamina, or the desire, to continue with the drama. He had no idea what the secretive and inscrutable Monica did with her time while he was on campus and no clear understanding if she possessed any goals in life, either short or long term, for she appeared to be reluctant to speak of herself. Once again Monica asked him to get up from the settee. Julius accepted a large paper bag full of rubbish, while Monica grabbed a fistful of empty milk bottles, and together they tramped their way down the stairs. As they descended, Julius realized that even though he had no idea of what lay ahead for them both, he should perhaps at least try and talk to his wife about his uneasy feelings. He pitched the rubbish bag into the dustbin and replaced the lid with an earsplitting clatter. Monica shot him a disdainful look. “Sorry.” He paused. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.” When they returned upstairs, Julius poured a small finger of whisky and began to pace the room, while Monica carefully draped one freshly ironed shirt after another over wire hangers and hung them, one by one, in the small cupboard by the front door that served as their wardrobe. He could feel Monica watching him out of the corner of her eye, but as usual, neither of them said anything, and so once again he reached for the whisky bottle and took up a seat on the settee.

*   *   *

Julius wrote to a young law student at Cambridge, a fellow countryman who was the latest recipient of the same island overseas scholarship that he had been awarded. He asked the young man if it was true that Lloyd Samuels, his former high school classmate, had formed an opposition party. The young man replied and confirmed that shortly before his own departure for England, the newly qualified Dr. Samuels had returned from his studies in Canada and opened a general practice in the poorest part of the capital. Apparently he had also formed the People’s Action Party, among whose earliest recruits was the would-be lawyer, who was thoughtful enough to enclose the details of both Lloyd Samuels’s place of business and his private residence.

Dr. Samuels was pleased to hear from Julius, and his first letter was notable for an excess of excitement, which reminded Julius of his friend’s laughable attempts to make his stuttering, overly verbose points during classroom discussions. On more than one occasion, he remembered looking across at Lloyd and wondering just what would become of the jovial, plump boy who held his pencil like a spike, and who by the time he donned long trousers was astute enough to have given up any ambitions of the island scholarship. Young Lloyd’s accent was already beginning to be seasoned with a slight American affectation, which suggested the direction in which his mind was starting to drift, but a medical school in a provincial Canadian university, as opposed to an East Coast Ivy League establishment, was probably the right level for his friend. Dr. Samuels’s second letter encouraged Julius to meet with the chief party organizer in London, but after a day-long excursion to the capital, during which Julius spent much of a frustrating afternoon and early evening sitting in a noisy London Transport depot tea room, waiting for this busy bus driver to discover time between shifts to discuss the matter of their country’s road to independence, he wrote to Lloyd and wished him well with his political endeavours. A week later, Julius received the telegram suggesting that he leave the south coast of England, move to London, and take over as chief party organizer in Britain, with a salary that would be drawn from whatever subscriptions he could raise and supplemented by sales of a projected monthly newspaper to be called
The People’s Voice
, although Lloyd made it clear that Julius was free, within reason, to use whatever title he wished.

*   *   *

“Eventually I’ll have to give some talks and go out on the road, but not now, not during summer, for people are either away or just relaxing.”

His wife was standing by the window and staring across the street at a café outside of which a few small metal tables, surrounded by a random assortment of chairs, were arranged on the pavement in a manner that blocked the flow of pedestrian traffic. It was Monica who had organized their move to London and found this single bed-sitting-room in Ladbroke Grove, a down-at-heel but affordable location whose chief virtue was its proximity to the tube station. Travelling up to London by train and scanning cards in newsagents’ windows had finally given her something to do, for although she had not let on to Julius, she was not sure how much more she could have endured of her aimless existence on the south coast. Once she had set up their flat and explored every nook and cranny of the drab seaside town, she had quickly come face-to-face with the dispiriting reality that beyond Julius, she had no community.

“Right now I have to identify nationals working or studying here so that when the time comes, we have a caucus of votes to draw upon.”

“But you’re not independent yet.”

She said this without turning from the window to face him, and although he wanted to admonish her, he said nothing.

“When the cross-party delegation arrives in London, I figure I’ll accompany them to Whitehall for the independence discussions. But all of this is in the future. Right now we need to know who we can count on for what comes afterwards.”

He watched as Monica crossed the room to the bulky electricity meter by the door, pushed in sixpence, and then turned the key. They both heard the rattle of the coin as it dropped into the metal box, and then the lights flickered to life, but Monica turned them off and took up a seat at the crowded kitchen table and pushed the newspaper out of the way. The early-evening sunset was illuminating the small room, but she knew that this was just a momentary prelude to the gloom that would follow. While her husband was talking, it had finally become clear to Monica that the real problem with the room was that it had been painted an ill-chosen mauve. To further compound the issue, there was nothing on the walls, no pictures, not even an old calendar or a mirror, so tomorrow she would begin the now familiar project of going out to the shops and street markets to see what she might find to liven up the place. Secondhand prints, cheap posters, anything would do, so long as they could be tacked up on the horribly coloured wall and would stay up, then at least they would have something uplifting to look at. Down on the street she could hear the noisy scraping of the tables and chairs being dragged back into the café as the owner prepared to lock up for the night. It was so oppressively hot, and she had already learned that if she kept the single window open, there was noise and soot to contend with, but if she closed in the window the room would soon become stifling. Either way, she couldn’t win.