Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

‘I’m sure I haven’t read a book since school. I just can’t get through twenty pages without wanting to throw it out the window and do something more fun.’

Anna would shrug and smile. ‘It’s not for everyone.’

Kelly stopped mentioning the books. She stopped commenting on Anna’s cleverness. She smiled and nodded but often her eyes were cold and still. She did not trust Anna – quiet, bookish Anna – and she did not want to be friends with someone she didn’t trust.

Anna was not overly sorry when Kelly withdrew from her attempts at friendship. She had dreaded having to share a flat with someone who would try and drag her out at all hours of the day and night, try to feed her drinks or marijuana and suggest they double-date with this man or that, his friend and his other friend. Men were obstacles to progress, the murderers of time and intellect. Anna did not do men, not in the romantic way at least.

The Turkish cafe two floors below their flat was the same cafe that Anna had waitressed in from the ages of twenty-three to twenty-six. She had, when she first arrived in London, worked as a receptionist in Forest Hill and before that she had lived in Birmingham while she trained as a secretary. Before that had been school somewhere, though no one was ever quite sure where. Anna’s accent was obstinately RP. Ottmar Alabora, the manager of the coffee shop, had always meant to pin Anna down on where exactly it was that she came from, but somehow the moment always eluded him, or he would get her on to the subject and then she’d be called away to service and he didn’t like to seem insistent. He tried not to pay too much attention to any of his waitresses, but particularly not to Anna.

‘We don’t need another waitress,’ his wife Ekin had told him when she caught him, in Anna’s first week, ordering a new uniform from Denny’s.

‘We’re struggling in the evenings. You’re not there. And then I was thinking of putting more tables outside in summer. If you don’t serve people they walk away. Or leave without paying.’

‘But it’s November. Who’s going to sit outside our cafe now?’

‘She’s a nice girl. She’s starting on evenings. You’ll like her. If you don’t like her we’ll let her go.’

So Ekin came and sat in the corner of the restaurant and watched Anna work. She had a nice way with people – Ekin could see that. She was attractive but not in a blousy way. She wore her skirt at the knee and her sleeves below her elbows. Her long hair hung in pigtails and she wore no make-up. When she served Ekin her coffee and cake she smiled and thanked her for the position. Ekin turned to look through the hatch at Ottmar, who raised his eyebrows at her. Ekin made a face, but only to let him know she wasn’t angry. Anna was nice enough; she could stay.

All the same Ottmar carried around a secret shame. He had offered Anna the job in a moment of temporary madness.

She had come in one Tuesday at half past one in her best suit and had ordered coffee – Turkish coffee – which she drank without sugar. She had carried with her a copy of the book she had treated herself to from the basement of a Charing Cross bookshop and Ottmar had read over her shoulder words he loved though hardly knew in English.

‘Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise

To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.’

Anna sat quietly, politely, as he read aloud from her book and then she turned and smiled at him and he felt unutterably foolish. He cleared her plate, though he never normally waited on the tables, and then he begged her pardon.

‘I got … I got carried away. Not so many people read poetry.’

‘Even here?’ she asked.

‘In my coffee house?’

‘In London. In Covent Garden. I thought it would have been full of poets.’

‘If it is they are not coming into my coffee house. London is full of …’ Ottmar waved his hands, tipping the spoon from Anna’s saucer. He bent down to retrieve it from under a table then knelt for a moment on the tiled floor. He looked up at Anna and she stared back at him. ‘London is full of … hare-brained people. Chancers. Gamblers. Opium fiends.’ He laughed to himself at his own exaggeration.

‘You make it sound Victorian.’

‘Do I?’

‘Like something out of Conan Doyle.’

‘I don’t—’

‘He wrote Sherlock Holmes.’

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles.’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘My uncle read me Omar Khayyám. In Arabic. Not Turkish or even English. I tried so hard to understand it. I would ask him what it all meant but he always said the pleasure was in the finding out … the discovery. He said you can keep some poems by you your whole life and they will only reveal parts of themselves to you when you are ready to hear them. So at twenty I would understand one little part of it and then at forty something else. I’m probably not making any sense.’

‘Not at all. You’re making lots of sense. I think … I think that would make me impatient. I don’t want to understand poetry when I’m fifty. I want to understand it now. What if I don’t make it to fifty? Do I have to be cheated out of all that understanding?’

Ottmar smiled apologetically. ‘I think perhaps you do. We can only grow old in days and weeks and months. There is not a short cut. Nobody can know the world at fifteen.’

‘When I was at school it used to drive me up the wall listening to the teachers go on about the folly of youth. If someone is ugly you don’t say to them: “Hey you, stop being ugly over there!” so why is it okay to mock the young for being inexperienced?’

‘I was not meaning to mock you, miss!’

‘No! Sorry. I didn’t mean you were. I meant that it sometimes feels hard to be young when no one has a good word to say about youth.’

Ottmar set down her cup and saucer. He frowned at someone out of her line of sight. ‘If we are grumpy it is because we had to leave the party and you are still there.’

‘And the party is a stupid party?’

Ottmar laughed. ‘Yes. A very stupid party. Very loud and drunken and disgusting.’ His eyes crinkled in all directions. ‘But so much fun!’

Anna laughed and Ottmar felt his heart glow in his chest.

‘Will you have anything else, miss? We have cake. We have sweets. We have baklava.’

Anna held her book at arm’s length and glared at it. ‘I spent my lunch money on something else to cheer me up. But your coffee was wonderful.’

‘Why do you need cheering up? Is it a stupid boy?’

‘A stupid boy of fifty.’

‘Too old for you. Forget him.’

‘I was called to interview at Jamiesons on Waldorf Street. And I borrowed five pounds from my landlady to buy this suit because it said: “Professional position. Business attire is requisite.” But when I got there, there were fifteen girls in the waiting room and I had hardly sat down when Mr Jamieson said: “You mustn’t be too disappointed. We had no idea we’d be so popular.” And that was that. With lunch and fares I’m out by six pounds and five shillings and I can’t conjure that kind of money out of the air.’

‘You need a job?’

‘I only have a short-term contract and it’s almost over.’

‘We have a job.’

‘Do you?’

‘Waitressing. It’s not professional, I’m afraid. I’m not sure what you’d do with the suit.’