Breaking Light (14 page)

Continuing to avoid the pavement, Mr Askew hobbled along the street, past the churchyard with its old, reassuring stones that watched wisely over the valley to the east. The market was held indoors, in the Jubilee Hall by the pay-and-display car park.

He cursed himself for having agreed to help out at Mrs Sarobi's organic vegetable stall. What had possessed him? He had, at least, washed his best shirt in the bath the previous night and pressed his trousers under the mattress. The jacket was still good and the tie … The tie might be quite wrong for the occasion, but that idea had only just struck him. He pulled it out and looked at it closely. There was an old spot of grease – a vestige of a college dinner – béchamel, perhaps, or just ordinary gravy. Putting it back inside his jacket, he sighed and pulled at the belt of his trench coat. He wanted to look good today. At least my breath does not stink of cigarettes or some awful gum disease, he thought to himself as he entered the hall.

There were women everywhere and the decibel level was high. One or two prosaic-looking men hovered amongst the stalls, timidly waiting to give their opinion of some object they generally did not care for – or pull out a wallet. Children, balancing dangerously on the cusp of eagerness and boredom, were cluttering the passages and Mr Askew was beginning to feel
quite keenly that his being there was a mistake. Just then, he heard somebody calling his name. He looked up to see Mrs Sarobi waving at him from a stall at the back of the room. Her voice had given his name a gentle but distinct substance, for which he was grateful. She made it sound like a river, sleeked with silver and green.

Apologising as he went – but managing to avoid unnecessary attention – he made his way through the crowd towards Mrs Sarobi's table. There was sweat on his brow when he got there, but he achieved a smile. ‘This is quite something …' he said, feeling slightly less outlandish.

She laughed, but without irony or malice. ‘Yes, almost like a souk. You'd better come behind the table, where there's a bit more space.' She was wearing a white linen tunic and black slacks and her hair was swathed loosely in a bright ochre-coloured scarf.

He followed her advice and squeezed past the adjacent stall. Her vegetables were laid out in plastic baskets and labelled neatly with wooden plaques. To one side, there was a vase with posies of pink and white poppies. He admired them closely and smiled at her. ‘They are the simplest of joys, aren't they?' Her eyes, he saw, were very dark out of the sunlight.

She nodded. ‘Yes, they can be …' But sometimes, she felt, they represented the greatest of threats.

He looked at her curiously. ‘You're not so sure about them?'

‘Sure about them?' She laughed. ‘Oh, I don't know … Where I come from, the poppy fields used to be the most beautiful things you have ever seen.' She could see them now; each poppy was so fragile, but together they bled like silk through the valleys – a natural beauty that contained a threat so deadly and so
powerful that a succession of soldiers took charge of the cultivation, tainting it with the smell of metal. It was the greatest of ironies and, for a moment, the thought of it threatened to draw her back into that sheath of darkness. She felt she was losing herself. Not here; not now. These vegetables in their baskets protected her against all that.

‘Mrs Sarobi?' he said. ‘Are you all right?' He touched briefly the white fabric of her tunic, his hand resting on her back. That warmth.

‘Yes,' she said, steadying herself against the table. ‘Yes, of course.' She laughed brightly, feeling the touch of his hand.

He did not quite understand, but he had seen the shadow on her face and wanted to say something consoling. Instead, he uncovered himself, as if offering a kind of gift.

‘Last week, when I was up at the allotment … It was a very blowy day, if you remember?' He did not need a reply, but she nodded just the same. ‘One of my pink poppies had just come out – it was the first one – and it frightened me. Every gust of wind tore at it so that I expected it to lose all the petals.' He glanced at her to see if she thought him ridiculous, but her hands were busy with a broad bean, which she had snapped. ‘It was so unbearably fragile.'

Like the shapes we sometimes mistake for love, he thought. It had made him feel quite sick that day – the way one was repeatedly presented with a lesson in the symmetry of beauty and death. As if one needed to be reminded.

A cool breeze meandered through the room and brought them back to the Mortford village hall. But this was no longer isolation. They were standing in a patch of light and it was clear that their minds had touched. Mrs Sarobi realised that she had
been holding her breath. She felt she needed to say something pleasant and clever. Anything, as long as it seemed thoughtful; it was always easier, in a situation like this, to operate in the clarity of her intellect.

‘There's so much in Western culture which repeats itself,' she said. ‘Take Helen, for example – sister of the
Dioscuri
 – although utterly unique, she too had a double: a phantom other.'

‘You know a lot about Western culture,' he interrupted, admiringly, feeling suddenly very awake.

‘You have to, when you don't belong.' She smiled. Surely he must realise that trying to understand the culture – and the mind of one's neighbour – is the first task of the exiled? ‘Anyway, my point about Helen is that she too was into poppies. She extracted opium from the pistils and mixed it with wine so that anyone who drank it would be prevented from crying and feeling grief for an entire day, even if their most beloved family and friends died in front of their eyes. This was all she had to offer: beauty and deception – and yet she shaped the course of history as we know it. As
you
know it.'

‘Real power is often based on something as insubstantial as beauty – or fear, for that matter.' He knew this for a fact, as he had been under the spell of both. ‘This is what the poppy represents.'

‘Yes –' she nodded sadly – ‘and there are, of course, the fields of Flanders …'

‘Yes, yes,' he agreed, ‘obviously.'

There was an embarrassed silence between them, as if they had become too intimate, too quickly. Mrs Sarobi started fidgeting with the baskets, rearranging and tidying away a pea that had fallen out of its pod.

‘They are not buying your vegetables.' He had only just noticed.

‘No, I know. Perhaps they are too expensive?'

‘Perhaps … although they are good vegetables.' He wished he had more to offer.

‘Yes, and they sell for more in the deli … They probably think that I have poisoned the carrots – or that I'm going to blow myself up if they come too close.'

He looked up at her nervously, but saw that her eyes were smiling.

‘I think they are afraid of standing next to you, where their looks would inevitably be compared against your beauty,' he said, and reddened.

‘Ah, Gabriel, you're a true gentleman,' she said, laughing.

But he only heard his Christian name. He could not remember when he'd last heard somebody say his first name, but now it made him feel warm around the chest. Her mouth was pink inside, he noticed, like a kitten's – or a cat's, at any rate.

Just then, he heard a familiar voice cutting through the general babble and looked up to see Mrs Ludgate debating loudly with a woman who was cowering behind a small table of bric-a brac, embroidered cushions and crocheted babies' booties. Doris Ludgate stood deliberately, squeezing an oversized beige patent-leather handbag in her armpit. ‘Are you trying to tell me that this is an original Royal Albert plate?' She was waving a piece with a pattern of flowers at the owner of the stall, who muttered something inaudible in grumpy defence of her produce.

‘Well, I'll tell
you
that you won't sell
me
some old dross, pretending it's the real thing. Look – can't you see that the flower of the month is misspelt? It says
Decembel
.'

The bric-a-brac woman tried to protest, but Mrs Ludgate would not have it.

‘Ha! You have to give it to them, the Chinese – they are pretty excellent copyists, but, if they can't get their child labourers to spell properly, they are not going to fool
me
. Do they not teach them to read and write in China, eh? What about all those school books and pens we used to send them? Have they not been using them, eh? Eh? Or perhaps that was Africa …' Her cheeks were glowing; she could have been a painting by Caravaggio, had she not got herself so worked up. ‘Anyway, bloody waste of good charity, no? Somebody ought to tell the government.
Decembel!
Yeah,
right
.'

Several people had turned to watch the scene. The woman at the stall seemed quite intimidated and tried her best to appease Mrs Ludgate, if only to make her lower her voice somewhat.

‘At this rate, there will soon be nothing English left in this country.
Royal Albert
, my posterior,' Mrs Ludgate muttered loudly and clattered the offensive piece of crockery back on the table.

She was wearing a boat-neck top and, from behind, Gabriel Askew saw that her neck was bulging over her vertebrae, like something cetacean. Oh dear, he thought, I do hope she does not come this way.

But, of course, eventually, not even the Jubilee Hall was large enough to keep them apart. Mr Askew felt suddenly too hot and dabbed his brow with a large handkerchief, which might once have been clean. Mrs Sarobi noticed. ‘Why don't you take your coat off?' she suggested.

‘Yes, yes,' he muttered, self-consciously, once again regretting the tie. He turned his back to the hall, as if he was preparing to
undress for bed, bundled the coat on to a chair and patted his hair.

When, at last, he turned back to the room, he was dismayed to find himself face to face with Mrs Ludgate. However, for once, she did not seem particularly interested in him. She was sucking her teeth, looking doubtfully at Mrs Sarobi, as if she too somehow belonged to the category of fake crockery. ‘I have always been told,' she said, pronouncing every word slowly and with care, ‘that the people from Afghanistan – the real Afghanistanians, that is – wear those blue tents. Are you sure you're not Indian?'

‘Quite sure,' Mrs Sarobi answered sincerely.

Mrs Ludgate frowned. ‘Anyway,' she said, ‘I hear you're a
supplier
 – a fruit and veg supplier … like Mrs Thatcher used to be … But you're not like her, are you?' The idea had only just sailed up in her mind and it bothered her. Nor could she remember if Mrs Thatcher had actually been a supplier – or the daughter of a greengrocer. Same difference, anyway.

‘No, I would certainly not like to think so.'

‘Nah, I thought not.' She exhaled, relieved. ‘Anyway, just so that you know, I am all for it.'

‘For what?' asked Mrs Sarobi carefully, and cocked her head.

‘You being a supplier and all.'

‘Okay … Um … Well, thanks.'

‘You know, there are a lot of others – others like you – who don't supply anything, if you see what I mean.' Doris Ludgate winked in order to convey the kind of understanding she liked to believe existed between intelligent women – of all colours.

‘No. I'm afraid I don't.'

Mr Askew glanced anxiously at Mrs Sarobi, but saw that she
was so composed, she could have been carved out of marble. He cleared his throat and took a step forward.

‘Oh, hello; I didn't see you there. I don't usually notice men who skulk,' said Mrs Ludgate, coldly, and turned back to Mrs Sarobi. ‘The
professor
 –' she nodded towards Mr Askew – ‘will have told you that he's my employer. That is, I am an employee in his household.'

‘You don't say?' said Mrs Sarobi, and glanced sideways at Mr Askew, her eyebrows slightly raised.

‘Um, Mrs Ludgate comes up to Oakstone to do the cleaning on a Friday afternoon,' he explained, scowling with embarrassment, and was rewarded by a brief smile from Mrs Sarobi.

‘That's right. Oakstone is a big old chunk of a house – it's grade two listed.' She looked up to see if Mrs Sarobi had taken this in. ‘It's important that somebody – somebody professional – keeps it in check and makes sure it doesn't get itself degraded. We wouldn't want it to slip down that list to a one, would we?' She was so pleased with herself, she had to chuckle.

‘Hello, Doris; I'm pleased to see you so cheerful today.' A small, plump woman had come up to them. She must have been in her mid fifties, but her skin was as smooth as milk and prettily aglow. She had very pale blue eyes but her friendly smile put warmth into her gaze. ‘I was very sorry to hear about … everything.' As she put a smooth doll's hand on Mrs Ludgate's arm, it was clear that she really was sorry. Mrs Ludgate flinched, pulling her arm away and, for a moment, Mr Askew thought he saw something vulnerable swim through her gaze, like a detached duckling crossing a pond.

‘Not sure what you're on about. I'm just fine, myself.' She laughed hoarsely to emphasise.

‘But I heard—' The doll-woman suddenly stopped herself; perhaps she too had detected the flaw in the armour. ‘I must have got the wrong end of the stick,' she said, jovially.

‘I'd say so.'

‘Anyway, I actually came over to introduce myself to Mrs Sarobi.' She turned to face the Afghani woman, who had retreated somewhat, in spite of her previous stoicism. ‘My name is Ann Chandler; I'm the chair of the local Women's Institute.'

‘Nice to meet you.' Mrs Sarobi smiled softly.

‘And … Professor Askew, is it?'

‘Ahem …' He nodded and shook her outstretched hand. It was surprisingly firm, but moist like a child's.

‘I heard that an elegant gentleman from London recently bought Oakstone. Pleased to meet you.'