The Lubetkin Legacy (8 page)

Risk. Violet has never thought about it much before, except when it affects her directly. But now the world seems to be full of it. The CIA
World Factbook
, for example, paints a frightening picture of corruption and terrorism in Kenya which is at odds with her own idyllic memories.

The Nairobi shopping mall project is turning out to be more challenging than she imagined. The land the mall will be built on is to the east of the city, not a part she is familiar with, uncomfortably close to the Nairobi River where flooding or landslip could be a hazard, not far from Eastleigh with its Al Shabaab influences, and the Gikomba Market, a vast emporium of clothing from UK charity shops where fires are a regular occurrence. So many risks. If she had been setting up a major development, she would not have chosen this place. She wonders who owns the development company HN Holdings. Buried in the paperwork she finds the name Horace Nzangu. It rings a bell. Where has she heard it before? Has there been a proper survey or planning permission granted for this development, or did money change hands to get it approved?

Out of curiosity, she finds the Nairobi City Planning Department online, and telephones with her questions, slipping in a few friendly words of Swahili that she remembers, but after an hour of being transferred from one department to another, asked for details, and kept on hold, she finds she has gone around in a full circle and learned absolutely nothing – except that there is no apparent record of a planning application, nor
anyone available to talk to her who is responsible for planning in that area. She's fizzing with frustration when Gillian Chalmers emerges from her office with a pile of slip cases, clack-clacking on her high heels as she heads towards the lifts.

‘How's it going, Violet?'

She sighs, and before she can think of a suitably upbeat comment, Gillian reads her expression and asks, ‘Would you like to come out to Lloyd's with me this afternoon, and meet some underwriters?'

The Lloyd's Building, which is the hub of the UK insurance industry, is one of those too-tall, too-modern buildings the City of London is full of. It is designed by some architect guy called Richard Rogers, whom Gillian raves over. And sure, the view from the glass elevators is nice. But all that steel is too shiny and cold.

‘It's one of the great modernist buildings in the City of London!' Gillian's tone could be interpreted as either instructive or condescending. ‘Like the Pompidou Centre in Paris. See how all the essential services are located on the outside? It increases the space for business inside.'

‘Cool.' She pretends to share Gillian's enthusiasm, but she's thinking, for heaven's sake, it's only insurance, not a temple to some new religion.

But Gillian seems to come to life in that environment, cutting and thrusting as she puts her clients' needs to a series of slick young men in sharp suits, who melt under her offensive. While at GRM Gillian often seems severe and distant, in this setting she has a tigerish magnetism that fills Violet with reluctant admiration. Will she ever be able to perform like that?

‘It's all in the research,' Gillian says as they ride down in the elevator. ‘You have to be confident of your ground, Violet,
before you can win the best deal for your client.' Her eyes are sparkling, her cheeks flushed with her successes.

Suddenly Violet sees why Marc Bonnier was attracted to her. But is he still?

Turning this thought over again in her mind, she brews up a jug of coffee in her kitchen after work. Her friends have messaged to say they're meeting up at the Lazy Lounge, but she texts back that she's too done in. It's a relief to escape from the high-rise City echoing with the rush of traffic on to her quiet balcony. The stillness of the early evening washes over her like a wave of cool water. Her friendly pigeon flutters up and she crumbles up a chocolate biscuit for him. He gobbles it down, then thanks her with two minutes of chest-puffing and cooing before flying away. Cooo-coo, cooo-coo.

She's surprised how little she misses Nick. Sometimes she struggles to remember what it was she'd liked about him. His smile? His cheesy socks? His weird ideas about astral projection? He was just another messy immature male who shattered her heart as casually as dropping a beer glass. She's ready for someone more grown-up now, someone sensitive and intelligent, who will take her seriously. Someone with a good sense of humour. A bit like Marc Bonnier, perhaps. Until then, she's happy living on her own.

Far below in the garden, where fallen cherry blossom dusts the ground like snow, a man in a wheelchair is rolling along the winding path between the trees, turning the wheels with his hands. Now here comes the baldie from Luigi's making his way towards the flats. Their paths cross and they stop to talk. A lady in a purple coat comes along and joins in. What's that weird thing on her head? The old lady dressed in black, the one she saw arriving in a taxi the other day, has appeared on the scene too. They're all talking and shouting, but she can't
make out what they're saying. It reminds her of her grandmother's neighbourhood in Langata, when the air begins to cool in the early evening and the street comes alive with people hanging out. She decides to go down to the garden and see what's going on, but by the time she gets there the little group of neighbours has dispersed. The purple-coat lady is heading towards a raised vegetable garden that has been fenced off for the residents. The weird thing on her head that looked like a plastic bag turns out to be a shower cap made of clear polythene protecting a stiff arrangement of curled bleached hair, even though it isn't raining. The ladies in Nairobi wore hats like that in the rainy season when they'd had their hair straightened, chattering on the pavement like go-away-birds with their distinctive headgear, waiting for the taxi-vans to take them home. She says hello, and the shower-cap lady mutters something inaudible as she hurries off to the communal vegetable beds, letting herself in through a high mesh gate and disappearing like a
kivuli
into a wooden shed.

There are notices stuck on the lamp posts in the garden. She's seen them before: they're for a lost cat called Wonder Boy. Or are they? She looks again and sees they are not appeals for the lost cat but announcements of an application for planning permission. Town and Country Planning Act. Residential development. Area bounded by … All the street signs around here are missing, so she doesn't know exactly where it refers to, but it must be somewhere nearby. Remembering her frustrating morning trying to phone the Planning Department in Nairobi, she decides to let this one pass. But – fourteen storeys – why does everything need to be so high? Why can't they leave the sky alone for everyone to enjoy?

A familiar crooning sound above her head makes her look up. There is her friend the one-legged pigeon perched up in the branches of a cherry tree.

‘Hello, Pidgie.'

The pigeon lets fall a large glob of poop, which lands by her feet. A sign of luck!

She takes the bird's picture as it perches up among the blossom and posts it on her Facebook page with a joke about her new boyfriend, the one-legged pigeon.

She is just about to go back up to her flat when a large shiny black car draws up by the pavement. It's like the limos that Government officials in Nairobi drive around in. Everybody knows that nobody who just lives on their salary can afford to buy one, but they do it anyway. She expects the chauffeur to now get out and hold open the door for some big-shot, but instead the back door opens from inside and a schoolboy gets out, pink-faced and slightly plump, wearing a grey school uniform that is too tight in some places, and a bit baggy in others. He waves to the driver of the limo and steps out into the road, his head bent over his phone. An approaching car slams its brakes on. Oblivious, he ambles into the Madeley Court garden and sits on a bench by the path. The black car glides away into the traffic. As she gets closer, she can see the boy is still hunched over his phone, texting.

There are a few other kids in the garden, some are kicking a ball around, but no one comes and sits next to him or asks him to join in. It's easy to see why: all the other kids are wearing a navy-blue school uniform, whereas his is grey. But that isn't the main thing: all the other boys, even the little ones, are wearing long trousers. His are short. He looks ridiculous, poor kid.

A memory like a sudden wind whisks her back in time, whisks her up and sets her down in the playground of her primary school in Bakewell, where she is standing alone by the railings, painfully conscious of her wrong colour, her wrong hair, her wrong clothes, her wrong family, all her general
can't-put-your-finger-on-it wrongness, watching the groups of children playing together, pretending she doesn't care. Then Jessie, the same Jessie whose duvet she's been sleeping under this past week, comes up without a word and shoves the end of a skipping rope into her hand. And she turns it, turns with full concentration, while Jessie jumps over the spinning rope chanting, ‘My brother Billie had a ten-foot willy …' She thought a willy must be some kind of a boat.

While she is wondering whether to say something friendly to the boy, a man appears at the end of the path, a tall good-looking man in a high-end suit with a briefcase under his arm.

‘Come along, Arthur,' he says to the boy, and the boy, still without looking up from his phone, gets up and follows him towards the flats.

It was as I feared. Letting Inna go out in the cherry grove on her own was risky. Although she had obeyed my instructions to the letter by telling Mrs Crazy she was my mother, Mrs Crazy of course smelled a rat, and she was just the vindictive type to go telling tales to the authorities. She stopped me in the grove on my way to Luigi's.

‘Berthold, who is this foreigner impersonating your mother?' She pulled herself up stiffly; the polythene shower cap protecting her platinum bouffant sweated in the sun. ‘Your mother has gone through many changes, Berthold, and not all for the better. She may have embraced communism, but she never came from Odessa. I know, because Pastor Cracey and me went there on a deluxe cruise for our honeymoon.'

Bloody hell. Why did Inna have to mention Odessa? It took me a full twenty minutes of RADA-schooled performance with tearful eyes and quavers in my throat to persuade her that Lily was still in hospital and the twisted ankle had turned out to be a multiple-fractured leg – yes, with complications, Multi-Antibiotic-Resistant-Whatsit – and that Inna was, in fact, her sister, tragically struck with dementia, who had forgotten who she was. Yes, dementia made her talk funny. No, they didn't look alike, that's because they had different fathers. Yes, I do believe her father was actually of Ukrainian origin – really? Did Inna say she's from Odessa? Ha ha – I expect she's been watching travel programmes on TV. What she means is Ossett. Ossett in Yorkshire.

Ossett was a town lodged in my memory as the birthplace of my father, Sidney Sidebottom, Lily's ex-husband, but I doubted Mrs Crazy knew this. She eyed me with suspicion. Legless Len came to my rescue with a meandering account of his late wife's illness, which involved dementia, aphasia, amnesia, with a bit of mistaken identity and inappropriate behaviour thrown in, all of which he had endured with wisdom, wit and the occasional whisky. Len can vex the dull ear of a drowsy man, but sometimes it's useful.

‘Are you sure you're not getting just a little bit confused yourself, Mrs Cracey?' I adeptly turned the tables on her, and she flounced off to the communal potting shed.

Still, it was a bad omen.

When Inna came in later with her shopping bags from one of her long afternoon outings, I sat her down and told her we must practise some techniques to enable her to perform the part of my mother better.

‘You see, my mother was often confused,' I explained. ‘She didn't know who she was. That's what we must aim for.'

She looked at me acutely. ‘Lily like Soviet pioneer, Mister Bertie. No confused. I tell this crazy lady I am you mama, she tell me she seen you mother tooken in hospital wit ambulance.'

Bloody Mrs Crazy. She's the consummate curtain-twitcher. ‘So what did you say, Inna?'

‘I said I seen her in hospital.'

‘That's good, Inna, that's very good. I told Mrs Crazy you are my mother's sister, so naturally you would visit her in hospital.'

‘Aha! So I am mother or sister?'

‘Sometimes my mother, sometimes her sister. I tell you what, Inna, the best thing is to pretend that you are totally
confused. Pretend you don't know who you are. That should cover all eventualities.'

‘Oy, Mister Bertie! You are actor, I am not actor!'

She was beginning to cough and I could see a green phlegm moment coming on, so I grasped her hand.

‘You just have to talk about philosophy, while cultivating an absent expression. Like this.' I rolled my eyes upwards, revealing the blank whites. I have played many fools and madmen in my time, but my favourite is Lear's Fool, where the wisdom is concealed inside the madness. ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.'

And unless Inna learned her part, I was in danger of becoming unaccommodated.

‘What is mean un-commandant?'

‘It means homeless. But it also means that we derive our station and our place in society from where we live. Underneath our finery, we are all naked.'

She looked alarmed. ‘You want I be naked?'

‘No, Inna. Shakespeare is full of double meanings. Just pretend to be a homeless madman.' I flapped my arms and swivelled my eyes. ‘
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain!
Like you're listening to the sound of an approaching storm on the blasted heath.'

She listened, cocking her head. ‘I can hear no storm.'

‘The storm is not there. It's in your mind.'

‘Aha!' She looked at me beadily. ‘You are too clever for me, Mister Bertie. Better I not pretend nothing, better I just cooking golabki kobaski slatki.'

‘Don't lose heart.' I patted her arm. ‘You can do it. Just say anything that comes into your head, and listen for the coming storm.'

‘Like this?' She slid her eyes upwards and sideways, Kinski-style. I was impressed.

‘God is dead!' Flossie squawked from her perch.

‘Shut up, Indunky Smeet! Devil-bird! God is not dead, he is risen!' cried Inna.

It was perfect.

‘Let's take a break for dinner,' I suggested. ‘Bring on the globalki!'