collar and bright buttons down the front. He wore a peaked cap with a badge she did not recognise and carried a thin black stick. When he opened his mouth to speak she expected to hear a language other than English pass his lips.
‘I think the buses have stopped for the night now, miss.’
Anna peered at his face, which was hard to see, and shifted rather from glance to glance. He had red hair like that young man she had met … she couldn’t quite think where.
‘There are night buses. I always used to catch the night bus,’ she assured him in as definite a voice as she could manage.
‘Where to, miss?’
‘I can’t remember. I’m so sorry. I can’t remember where I live.’
The policeman smiled at her. ‘Well, how do you imagine you’ll get home if you don’t know where it is you’re going?’
The next moment they were standing together just north of St Martin’s near where she used to wait for her bus to Forest Hill. Anna felt an odd sensation of pinching in the palm of her right hand and looking down, she realised with horror that she was holding hands with the policeman. She pulled away quickly, though he seemed unwilling to let her go.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to get my bus.’
She walked north up Charing Cross Road without once looking back, but she found then that her stop had vanished and with it the statue of Edith Cavell. Anna stood in the spot where Edith’s monolith should have been and then gazed warily up at the sky in case perhaps the statue had been rocketed into space and would descend again at any moment, crushing her where she stood. Fifty yards away the policeman raised his hand and waved to her as if to attract her attention to some new emergency. He seemed to be calling to her and Anna strained to make out the words.
‘Your bus is coming, miss!’
Anna turned and there it was, a great red metal tower charging onto the pavement towards her as she stood watching, paralysed, already doomed.
Anna woke, the sheet around her clammy with sweat. She untangled herself and got out of bed. There was a thunder of feet coming down the stairs outside the flat and Anna could hear Leonard’s voice speaking quickly and urgently. The footsteps passed by and she stood for a minute in the dark living room listening for what came next. The street outside was quiet; no traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue at this time. Footsteps climbed the stairs again and paused for a moment outside the door of the flat.
‘Leonard?’ Anna spoke his name almost without meaning to.
‘Anna?’
She fetched a dressing gown from the back of her door and pulled it tight around her. Leonard stood on the stairs outside the door dressed only in pyjama bottoms, his hair sweeping madly to one side, his eyes bloodshot.
‘What happened?’ Anna asked.
‘Benji’s sister’s sick. We’ve been up for the last hour trying to call people and now he’s gone to find a cab. Can I come in? No. Sorry. Scratch that. You need to get back to bed.’
‘No. It’s fine. I was having a rotten night anyway. What time is it?’
‘It’s five or half five. Do you want to come up? I’ve got proper coffee. Might even manage a bun.’
Anna had no great desire to sink back into her clammy bed. ‘Not like there’s a show tomorrow.’
‘Well, quite.’ And Leonard led the way.
For the first few months after Anna took the waitressing job at the Alabora she hadn’t minded the toing and froing from Forest Hill to Covent Garden because it seemed romantic – London seemed romantic, with its twisting parks and grime-covered frontages; its dark-stained river flanked by rictus-mouthed fish who held with their tails a trail of softly glowing lights: the epitome of grand metropolitan strangeness. It was a shifting city of light and dark; of strange shadows cast across the Thames at twilight, of grimy dark underpasses and roads which shone like sheets of metal on a summer’s day. The players in the theatre moved in packs, now lightness and colour, now darkness and gloom. Women in white and red and blue, flowing like a moving tricolour along the riverbanks and shopping streets, handbags swinging, heels clicking and clacking like discordant castanets. Then the men of the city in their work attire, the endless bowler hats, mackintoshes and dark striped suits – the extraordinary conformity of the ruling class, as if bankers and lawyers and politicians were actually some great branch of the Army or police.
After the first few months the endless travelling started to take its toll. She never got to bed before four and the bathroom above her was busy with noise by half past six – jolting her from sleep, dragging her from her bed, so that her head banged with cold and tiredness at two in the morning when the night bus was running late and her feet were aching in her broken shoes. But that was before she met Leonard.
She had just started to work lunchtimes as well as evenings at the Alabora and so had been introduced to a whole new selection of regular faces. Leonard Fleet owned the flat at the top of the building and worked in a theatre on Charing Cross Road. At least three times a week he would pop home for something or other – a book, a script, a pound for a night out – and he would use this journey as an excuse to eat lunch at the Alabora. The Alabora served a strange mixture of Turkish and English food and most lunchtimes you could choose from egg and chips, spinach and pea omelette, kiymali ispanak or kofte with simit and yoghurt. Leonard was an egg and chips kind of man – most of the customers were – but he liked the smell and sight of the Turkish food and he would drink the coffee and eat the little baklava that Ottmar always popped onto his saucer when he spotted that Leonard was in.
This particular lunchtime he was seated at the back of the restaurant, away from the draught near the door, and chatting to Ottmar through the hatch. It was February and the restaurant was only a quarter full because the wind was bitter cold and the shoppers and theatregoers were staying at home. A family came to the door, dark-haired with olive skin: Romanian perhaps or Bulgarian. There was a younger woman, an older woman and a baby in a perambulator. Ottmar hurried forward to open both the doors and let them in. The grandmother thanked him and pointed to a table where they’d all sit. The baby was tiny, maybe only two weeks old and swaddled in at least three knitted blankets against the cold. Ottmar nodded to Anna and she went to take their order.
The grandmother was the only one who spoke. The baby in the perambulator snuffled and the younger woman rubbed her still-gloved hands together and perused the table.
‘Does the kiymali ispanak have lots of meat or just a very little bit?’
‘I think about half and half with the spinach, ma’am.’
‘Good. I will have a plate of that. And my daughter-in-law … My daughter-in-law does not like foreign food. She will have an omelette.’
At this the daughter-in-law started to protest but was quickly silenced by the older woman. ‘If you eat, the milk will come.’
She shot Anna a fierce look for reasons that Anna could not discern. Anna decided to ignore it. ‘And to drink?’
‘A pot of tea. We will have that first, please. My daughter-in-law is freezing.’
‘Of course.’
While Anna was waiting for the tea she became aware of a struggle going on at the table by the door. The younger woman was trying to stand up, presumably to leave, and the older woman was pulling and pushing her back into her seat.
Leonard leaned towards the hatch and asked Ottmar: ‘What do you think they are?’
Ottmar leaned heavily over the wooden sill. ‘Georgian,’ he whispered. ‘Very dark, the Georgians.’
Anna carried the tea over to the two women,