The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (8 page)

‘What’s your last name, Bakir?’

He sprinkled some more sugar on the walnut toast. Bakir had a very sweet tooth. ‘Ganis,’ he said.

I was loath to contradict him. With a good reason, he considered himself a member of the member. My father’s family. There was lump building in my throat. The poor man hadn’t just lost his looks, virility and lifestyle. He’d lost his entire identity.

On the way back to the flat we talked about chess. There was a chess club in Ealing and Bakir was taking time off every Wednesday afternoon to play chess there with his friends.

‘You taught me chess when I was little, didn’t you?’ The memory struck me suddenly. Chess was a rainy day game at Hartsfield when I had no one to play with and there was nothing on TV.

‘I tried,’ Bakir smiled. I knew he smiled because his cheeks rolled up.

‘I wasn’t attentive enough. Sorry.’

‘Not attentive enough,’ he agreed.

Back in my oversized pigeon loft I dashed off to the bathroom, stripped my clothes along the way and positioned myself in front of the mirror to admire my most intimate decoration. It was beautiful. The entire area underneath it was throbbing like mad.

And all that passion was going to waste.

It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.

My exultation of the morning was turning sour. Bitterly, I turned the dial on the shower controls all the way down and stayed under the icy spray until it killed the very urge to live.

Chapter 8

I had passed three of my mock exams with much better results than I’d expected. There was only one left – the maths.

I liked maths. I was crunching my way through the examples of questions from past exams, and Miss Zachary, my tutor lavished praise on me every week.

‘Have you chosen your university course yet, Sonata? What does your father say?’

In the world where she and I lived the one who held the purse strings made the choices.

‘He wants to see the results of the mocks first. But, I was thinking of economics. Not sure which field, but if I take the foundation course first... What do you think?’

She was nodding as I was speaking so I didn’t have to wait for her reply with bated breath. ‘Perfect. Go for it. I can’t see your parents objecting to that.’

I agreed with her on that. I was more worried about the forthcoming summer holidays. I just couldn’t bear the thought going back to the Hartsfield House without even the relief of riding. The alternative was even worse. Father was planning an extended trip to Japan where he could mix business with pleasure. What he called pleasure was a prospect of endless public displays of family unity, smiling for the camera and admiring one garden design after another with free ikebana tuition thrown in.

Me, my mother and our minders.

Some holiday.

The day after Miss Zachary’s tutorial, I gave myself a morning off.

Ours was a corner building. The top flat occupied the north-east corner, leaving a lot of space for the terrace. When the weather was good, people who lived normal lives would pull open the French windows to the living room and invite the whole world to a party by the swimming pool. Dressed just in their wet swimwear, they could watch the traffic on the Thames with champagne flutes in their hands. I’ve never needed much space. I was never allowed to ask over more than eight people, all of them girls, all of them spending most of the time watching American comedy series on TV or taking distorted pictures of themselves and others with their phone cameras and sending them to their friends not fortunate enough to be invited. My invited friends were invariably daughters of people my father was wooing at the time, in other words, they rarely included Rosie, Asha or Ela. The three of them stayed here a few times for a sleepover after a West End show, or an entire weekend or two, and those were practically the only good memories that I had of the place.

That morning, I swam for about half an hour, drank all the iced pomegranate juice that the Boys had left by the pool, and turned my lounger away from the harsh glare of the sun. The southern and northern walls of the terrace were waist high, perfect for admiring the vast cityscape below. The western wall that marked the border with building next door was as high as the roof and covered in wisteria and Virginia creeper. Once, years and years ago, I was about seven, something went wrong with the satellite dish. The repairman climbed up the ladder and I followed him. The cityscape didn’t look any different than from the terrace, but I caught my first glimpse of the penthouse next door.

Like ours, it also had a pool and a lot of open space. A lot more greenery that we had. The table under an open umbrella was a large wooden affair with dining chairs around it. Our floor was white marble, theirs was tiled in the same colours as the pool. I watched a young, slim Indian woman in a midnight blue sari, dry a little boy with a large fluffy towel with orange octopus pattern on it. I was soon ordered to get down and I never saw the neighbouring terrace again. I thought that I saw the woman and the child again a few months later when I was watching the street at the back of the building. They were crossing over from the gardens and they had a man with them. The boy was on a bike, and the man walked right next to him until they reached the opposite pavement.

At this height the sounds behave differently than at the ground level. The entire cacophony of the city life merges into a single canopy of noise and you stop hearing it altogether. Some still get through, of course, like the horns from the barges on the Thames, or the shrill and persistent whine of emergency vehicles, but I’d never heard the little boy splash in the pool or play with other kids as he must have been doing. I didn’t even know if they still lived there. We were quite an exception. My father had bought this place when I was still in prep school. Other people rarely stayed in flats like those for more than a year, usually as tenants who moved on when kids came along.

I was reaching the end of that trivial memory when another one floated up on its tail. Again, it dated back to when I was little, quite possibly to my first visit to the penthouse. Behind my closed eyelids I could quite clearly see a man in orange overalls passing through that thick end wall. And quite possibly, it wasn’t even a memory. Just a memory of a dream. I used to have very vivid dreams when I was little. All the same I left my seat, walked over to the party wall and led by the vague memory tried to penetrate the thick growth of the climbers. It took me all of a quarter of an hour to detect it. The door. A heavy, metal gate with a recessed handle. And a large key hole. A keyhole indicated a key. The key probably held by someone responsible for the maintenance of the building.

Great! Just great!

I could ask Vernon, the youngest and friendliest of the porters, about the maintenance people and it wouldn’t be too difficult to make him divulge the information, but what then? What possible plausible reason could I give them for wanting the key? In frustration I pulled at the handle and with a terrifying screech, it opened. Not by very much because the vine was growing all over it, but it opened nevertheless. I practically flew downstairs, made sure that there was no one in the kitchen, opened a few units and realised that I didn’t have a clue where to find it. The machine oil. There was a distinct possibility that there wasn’t any in the house at all. Why would anyone need machine oil? The Boys were watching TV in their room, they must have found a channel in their own language because the sounds coming out of there were unfamiliar. Bakir had gone to his chess club quite early and wasn’t due back for at least two hours. Feverishly, I looked around some more. On the shelf closest to the hob, among endless bottles of various oils and vinegars, there was also a large spray can. Spray oil. The kind advertised for slimmers and the health-conscious. I grabbed it quickly and dived into a drawer that contained all kind of culinary tools and devices. At the very bottom was a pair of kitchen scissors. It was meant to cut through anything thrown at it. I had no choice but to assume that it could cope with a mesh of leafy branches as well. My next thought was a stroke of genius. While searching for machine oil I’d discovered that in one of the drawers there was a large selection of accumulated tie-strips. The Boys were using them to tie the top of plastic boiling and roasting bags. I picked up a handful of the longest variety and made my way back to the terrace.

I liberally sprayed the hinges and the lock with oil first to give them time to loosen up, then set about removing the overgrowth. The scissors didn’t quite live up to their reputation, but I was nevertheless making slow and steady progress. It would have been much faster if I simply hacked through the greenery, but that wouldn’t have been very wise. Instead, I made a cut in each branch that stood in the way, taking care to cut nothing off. It occurred to me at some point that I was probably on a hiding to nothing. There had to be another gate on the other side and that one was bound to be firmly locked. With my bare hands I swept the debris under the foliage, moved the branches out of the way and pulled the door.

It opened smoothly and quietly to reveal the neighbour’s terrace in all its colourful grandeur.

I carefully pulled the door behind me until it was only slightly ajar and crouched in the shade of the arched doorway and the profusely flowering bougainvillea.

The patio door was wide open which meant that someone was at home. It was good ten minutes before I detected a movement behind the glass wall. Something light and floating. Feminine.

I waited.

Another ten or fifteen minutes later a woman stepped out, a rather tall woman in some kind of a short floral negligee. Her hair was hidden under a vivid pink terrycloth turban, her face behind very dark sunglasses. As she walked across the turquoise tiles I realised that some of her height was down to five inch heels. When she reached the sun lounger she kicked off her killer mules and slipped out of the flimsy wrap.

She was stark naked.

Once she was fully stretched out on the lounger I started my appraisal.

Slim, almost skinny, long well toned legs, naturally suntanned. Perky boobs, size D in my opinion, were in all likelihood held up by implants. Stomach flat under tout skin. The modesty bush, dull brown, was anything but modest. It was proudly shooting out in all directions. Apparently, if the dodgy websites on the internet are to be believed, some men love that look. I wouldn’t, but what did I know?

After a couple of minutes of immobility, she lifted her head and turned it towards the flat. I couldn’t hear anything but I had a feeling that she was talking to someone. Whatever she expected to happen didn’t. Eventually, she got up, stuck her feet back into the mules and hobbled indoors. When she came back she carried a tall misted glass in one hand and the mules in the other.

True, when I’d embarked on this idea there was a thought of some kind of introduction at the back of my mind. Having seen her, there was very little chance of that. I didn’t like her. It wasn’t her age that was closer to my mother’s than mine, nor the nudity, not even her notions of personal grooming. I think that what told me more about her than anything else was the footwear. Hoping against hope, I’d expected to find that pretty Indian lady on the other side of the wall. I didn’t see what she wore on her feet when I watched her cross the street with her family, but she walked tall, lively, confident and comfortable.

I would have trusted a lively and confident woman who felt comfortable in her skin.

I returned to my side of the wall, reconnected the cut through branches back to their original state or as closely to it as I could, slipped out of my tunic and dived into the pool.

I was bitterly disappointed.

Over the next few days I peeped in a few times again, but the place looked abandoned. Locked up. The woman must have lived on her own and held a position that involved travel. An air hostess, perhaps?

* * *

‘Sorry, darling. You father couldn’t turn down the invitation to Korea,’ my mother was given the task of apologising for yet another extension of their travel plans. ‘I’ve bought you some beautiful island jewellery. You’ll love it. And a large suitcase worth of divine batik fabric...’

‘In the meantime, my gaolers keep me a prisoner here. Bakir felt it necessary to accompany me to the beauty parlour. Why? I’m hardly the only rich heiress around...’ I felt myself flagging and I hadn’t even touched on the subject of virginity tests. It was no use talking to her. Even if she listened to me, he never listened to her.

On the other hand, she seemed to enjoy those lavish trips abroad. She looked rested, less dopey, with colour in her cheeks that wasn’t out of a jar. I was loath to begrudge her that.

I left her to it and went in search of a breakfast. Bakir didn’t believe in breakfast in bed. In my heart of hearts, neither did I. I was an early riser and a hearty eater.

It was very quiet downstairs. The Boys’ bedroom door was open, revealing an unmade bed and a large TV set at its bottom. I knocked at Bakir’s door. There was no answer and I pressed the handle. It was locked. I’d had no idea that Bakir kept his bedroom door locked. Probably to protect himself from the Boys’ pranks. It didn’t surprise me too much that all the three of them had left. Bakir sometimes needed help with his purchases, and the taller of the boys, the main cook, liked to choose meat and fish himself. I returned to the kitchen, filled the bowl with cornflakes and covered them with blueberries and pieces of chopped strawberries before pouring a small pot of Greek yogurt over them. With the bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, I walked out onto the balcony to eat my breakfast leaning over the railings in the sitting room and watch life passing me by on the street below.