Naomi’s Room Read online

  In return I read to her at breakfast and late at night, long passages of prose and verse in which the city was reshaped and reinterpreted. In the days we would walk for miles, searching for the things we had read about the night before. And every evening we would return to our hotel and close the great shutters of our room and lie naked in the copper shadows, our bodies throwing off the heat of the long day. First our hands would touch, then our lips, then our bodies, and on the mottled wall shadows coupled in the dim light. Naomi was conceived thus, to the sound of water eating stone.

  Yes, Naomi was conceived there. Naomi and something else as well.

  The ribbon was gone this morning. But it will be there again tonight. Or perhaps something else, something equally recognizable. She may be there at this moment, playing, singing, talking to her dolls. I think she wants the photographs, wants to prevent me burning them. They would be important to her.

  I have not moved all morning. I am still sitting in the chair I slept in. Is she capable of that, of sapping my will, binding me here until I promise not to burn the photographs? Very possibly. I do not really know what my darling is capable of.

  Christmas Eve was a Thursday. Term had finished a week earlier, and we had spent the days since then attending parties, shopping, visiting Father Christmas in Joshua Taylor’s. I caught up on some writing, an overdue review of Pauline Matarasso’s translation of the Queste de Saint Graal for a journal called Medium Ævum. Laura cut out angels from tinfoil and with Naomi’s help pinned them round the living room.

  Until that year, we had spent our Christmases either with my people or with Laura’s. Our decision to stay at home had been wholly on Naomi’s account, to let her enjoy Christmas in familiar surroundings. Laura’s mother and father planned to drive up to Cambridge in their old green Humber on Boxing Day. There was wine jelly in the refrigerator, a deep ruby red, and bottles of sweet sloe gin, purple and rich like a heavy bruise.

  Naomi was up early, her excitement at fever pitch. I have such a clear memory of her coming into our bedroom, her face flushed and her eyes wide.

  ‘Father Christmas has been! Father Christmas has been!’

  ‘What can you mean?’ I said. ‘It’s only Christmas Eve morning. He’s not due until tonight.’

  ‘But he’s been. He left his footprints round the fireplace.’

  ‘Did he indeed? And how do you know they’re his footprints?’

  ‘Of course they’re his, silly. Who else would come down the chimney?’

  ‘I think I’d better come and take a look.’ I turned to Laura. ‘What about you, love?’

  ‘Chimneys are your business. It’s too bloody early. I’m going back to sleep.’

  I got up and accompanied Naomi to her room. And there (as I knew there would be) were the telltale footprints in artificial snow all round the hearth.

  ‘These are tiny footprints, darling,’ I said. ‘I think they must belong to one of his helpers, one of the elves. He probably came as a spy in the night.’

  ‘What’s an elve?’

  ‘Elf, sweetheart. Do you remember I read a story to you about Rupert Bear? Just last week.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, that had elves in it. Little men with pointy ears.’

  ‘Oh, you mean gnomes.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No, I don’t. I mean elves. There’s a great difference.’

  ‘What sort of difference?’

  So we spent the first part of that morning talking about gnomes and elves and goblins, all the fine points in which they differed one from another.

  And Ich wulle uaren to Aualun, to uairest alre maidene . . .

  And I shall go to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens,

  To Argante, their queen, a most beautiful fairy,

  And she shall make whole all my wounds . . .

  But no elven maiden shall ever heal my wounds, neither here nor in Avalon.

  A little sunshine is creeping through my window. I feel less tired now, but I have telephoned the Faculty and asked Miss Norman to put a notice on my door saying I will not be in today. She knows nothing, of course, she is too young. I suppose she was still a child in 1970, perhaps even Naomi’s age or thereabouts. Christmas to her means horrid lights in the High Street and songs by Slade and Cliff Richard and inane game shows on the television.

  Christmas Day is only a matter of weeks away now. I see people coming home with heavy bags of shopping or small trees trailing behind them. There seem to be children everywhere. Someone sent me a card the other day, someone quite insensitive. My friends know better than to include me in their Christmas festivities. The card showed a jolly Father Christmas and some robins. Inside, it read: ‘Wishing you all the joy of the Season’. Joy? I have no joy, not at Christmas, not at any season.

  I have decided to go to church this afternoon. Candles will not keep her away, but they give me a sort of support. I became a Catholic ten years ago. The priest from whom I took instruction was a young man. He had not heard my name, knew nothing of my family, my past. I told him what little he needed to know and kept the rest where it should be kept, lodged deep in my own heart. I was received into the Church with the minimum of fuss or ceremony, which was how I wanted it.

  I attend mass regularly, at Our Lady and the English Martyrs on Hills Road. Nevertheless, I regret the passing of the old forms, the predominance of the vernacular. I am a more traditional Catholic than many raised in the faith. It is always that way with converts. But then, my grasp of medieval Latin is quite good: I can read Aquinas in the original. I should have enjoyed the aura of the old mass, its resonances, its nuances. If they ever perform an exorcism, I shall insist that it be in Latin.

  Naomi used to pray every night before she went to sleep. Either Laura or I would put her to bed. On her bedside table was a nightlight, a lamp with a train that rushed for ever through the night, soundless, never arriving. Her prayer was simple, a curious distortion of well-known words:

  ‘Now I lay me down to look, I pray the Lord my look to look. If I should look before I look, I pray the Lord my look to look.’

  We asked her what it meant, why she used such strange words.

  ‘I see eyes watching me,’ she said. ‘When I’m in bed at night. He says he has little eyes, that his little eyes are watching me. I don’t like him watching.’

  ‘Who is it, sweetheart?’ I asked. ‘Who watches you?’

  ‘Nobody,’ she said. And nothing more could be got out of her.

  After breakfast, Naomi and I kissed Laura goodbye and set off for the station in a taxi. I wore a heavy woollen overcoat, she her yellow coat and red scarf, the way I find her in all my memories, as though they were things she had always worn. The plan was for us to go up to London for the day, returning once the shops had started to close. Laura wanted us both out of the house so that she could concentrate on making things ready for dinner that evening and lunch the following day.

  We had friends coming for Christmas Eve dinner, a colleague from my department and his wife, Laura’s old tutor from Newnham, and my college bursar. Naomi would be tucked up in bed by the time they arrived, and the aim was to tire her out thoroughly so that she would stay tucked up.

  How she shone that morning. I had seldom seen her so happy or so enthralled. She had never been up to Town before, her eyes bulged at every new sight. We took the 10.02 to Liverpool Street, the slow train. I have often thought how different all our lives might have been had we taken a King’s Cross train, had we been earlier or later arriving in London.

  We clattered happily through sleepy station after sleepy station – Shelford and Whittlesford, Audley End and Elsenham, Stansted and Broxbourne. At every halt we picked up more London-bound passengers. Naomi’s sense of adventure was infectious. People smiled at her. A woman with a Scots terrier sat near us so she could stroke it.

  The weather favoured us. A clear blue sky showered light on fields made white with snow. The light lingered on everything it touched
: red-tiled roofs printed with starry frost, the edges of small frozen ponds, the eaves of Great Chesterford station, spiked with icicles. A snowman stood on a ploughed field, like a scarecrow out of season. Naomi clapped her hands and laughed at his crooked hat. She gave him a name. I remembered it in the middle of a sleepless night three days later: Magoo. He had melted when I next passed that way.

  We arrived at Liverpool Street at half past eleven, a few minutes early. There were plenty of taxis waiting to take all the last-minute shoppers to their destinations. Naomi had never been in a proper cab before. She sat on the edge of her seat, watching with wide eyes as we pushed through the heavy traffic into Regent Street.

  Naomi would have been content never to have entered a shop that day. We spent at least half an hour just walking round Liberty’s, gazing at the window displays, scenes from fairyland that were, to a child’s eyes, a species of magic. My memory is blurred now, overlaid by so much else; but I seem to remember crimson wings and tumbling dancers, pillars and domes and minarets, a box that opened and closed, revealing gold and jewels, a steam train that circled a mountain, a dragon breathing fire. If I lived again, it would be for that half-hour.

  Inside the store, we walked hand in hand from cluttered room to cluttered room. We were not rich, there was so much here we could not afford or ever hope to afford, but Naomi had no consciousness of that. She had never been a greedy child, had never wanted things she could not have. The mere fact that life held such abundance was enough for her. She enjoyed looking. I wonder now if he was watching her even then.

  We had lunch in Dickins & Jones, on the top floor. They have closed that lovely room now, replaced it with cramped and inelegant cafeterias. But when I took Naomi there it still had a certain grandeur. She had a huge lunch, complete with ice cream at the end.

  ‘Victoria would like this,’ she said. ‘She’s never had ice cream.’

  ‘Victoria?’ I asked. ‘Who’s Victoria?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said, hardly paying attention. ‘One of the little girls who lives with us. She and Caroline are my friends.’

  ‘And who is Caroline?’

  ‘Her big sister, silly. I thought you knew.’

  I shook my head and smiled. Oh, God, how charming we think our children are. How full of dreams and fantasies. I shook my head and looked at her and smiled.

  She wanted a proper toy fair. Laura had once mentioned the name Hamleys, so Hamleys it had to be. It was a short walk. Late though it was, the store was still crowded with parents and children, aunts and uncles. We started on the second floor with the dolls. Each counter held some new excitement, some fresh wonder. But by the time we had worked our way to the floor above, even Naomi was beginning to flag. I must have been tiring too. In a little while, I thought, it will be time to leave and find a taxi to take us back to Liverpool Street. The lights and noises and pushing, shoving people were making me cross and inattentive.

  I cannot have turned my back for more than half a minute. For all I know, it may have been a matter of seconds. We were at a large table watching toy trains make a circuit of plaster hills and dales. If I had turned round two or three seconds sooner, I might still have caught sight of her vanishing figure. But when I did turn, she was gone.

  I can still remember that stab of panic, tiny as yet, but distinct and accompanied by fear. I looked to right and left, but nowhere could I see a yellow coat. I called her name, but my voice was drowned by a thousand other voices. I pushed through the crowd that pressed in against me, sure she would be just a little distance away, unable to get to me through the forest of adult bodies all around her. I struggled round the huge table with its tiny, whirring trains, and arrived back at the point at which I had started. But no matter where I looked, no matter where I went, Naomi was nowhere to be seen.

  3

  There was an office on the first floor where missing children were reunited with their parents. As soon as I had given up hope of finding Naomi on the crowded shopfloor, I asked for directions from an assistant. The office was small, with several comfortable chairs and toys everywhere. The woman in charge was very reassuring. This sort of thing happened in the shop several times every day. It was nothing to worry about.

  There were already two little boys in the office, waiting patiently for mummy or daddy to find them and take them home. It was Christmas Eve. Nothing bad happened to children on Christmas Eve.

  ‘It usually takes a little while,’ the woman said. ‘She’ll try to find you, then give up and start crying. Before you can say “Father Christmas”, someone will be knocking on the door with an upset little girl in tow.’ A little girl with a yellow coat and a red scarf and bright red shoes. Every time there was a knock on the door, that was who I expected to see. And every time I returned my gaze to the wall in front of me, a little more anxious than before. There was a clock on the wall, a large clock with bold numerals and giant hands, the sort of clock a child could read. The hands moved so slowly I wanted to reach out and push them.

  Half an hour passed. Naomi had still not appeared, and I sensed that the woman in charge was becoming slightly anxious. The little boys had gone, their tears dried and their fears quieted. My fears were just beginning.

  ‘It’s such a hubbub out there today,’ the woman said in a kind voice. I thought of her as kind, I wanted her to be kind. The thought of Naomi alone out there was only supportable if I believed in the kindness of strangers. ‘Someone may very well have taken her outside to find a policeman. Not everyone thinks of looking for our lost child department. But I’ll put out instructions to members of staff to be on the lookout. She’ll turn up soon.’

  She made an announcement over the public address system. If anyone should see a little blonde-haired girl in a yellow coat and scarlet muffler, would they please bring her to the office? No one came. They repeated it. Still no one came. It was three o’clock. The shop was due to close in one hour. The floors were emptying now, the magic was dissipating. I could hear Jingle Bells playing every time someone opened the door, flat and unChristmassy. It seemed to go on for ever, like a bad dream.

  The manager was called. I went with him through each floor in turn. There was no sign of Naomi. A member of staff went outside to check the street. She came back shaking her head. No one was being jolly now, no one was pretending this was all in a day’s work. Someone stopped the tape that played Jingle Bells. The store grew silent. The manager rang West End Central police station, the nearest to the shop, in Savile Row. No, no one had brought in a missing child. No, none of their constables or patrol cars had reported a little girl lost in or near Regent Street. Yes, they would issue a description.

  Outside, the street was starting to empty. The lights had gone on, red and blue and yellow angels against a darkening sky. I remembered that I had promised Naomi we would stay until they came on. It was almost impossible to find a taxi anywhere, but the manager rang for one, explaining that it was an emergency. In the taxi I cruised up and down the street, now on the east side, now on the west. We went slowly, ignoring the honks and curses of other traffic. My anxiety communicated itself to the driver. He contacted other cabs through his CB radio. No one had seen a little girl in yellow.

  When I went back to Hamleys they were closing. The awnings had been pushed back above the windows, a metal gate had been drawn halfway across the entrance. All the lights had been turned off on the upper floors. It felt so final, that shutting down of things. The great street was almost deserted. I felt a wash of such great loneliness, a churning of such utter helplessness that, for a moment, I was the lost child weeping on a cold London street.

  The manager accompanied me to Savile Row. His name, I think, was Mr Moneypenny, a good name for the manager of a shop. I do not remember saying a word to him all the way from Hamleys. Perhaps I did, but my mind was a blank, I could not have made sense. He was a man in his mid-forties or thereabouts, a well-dressed man with gently curling hair and a carnation in his buttonhole. I think he was genu
inely upset by what had happened, not merely that it had occurred in his shop, that a child had been taken from her father there, but for the thing itself, for me myself.

  I showed him a photograph I carried of Naomi, one that had been taken the summer before, when she was a little younger. How much a few months matter at that age. I do not have that photograph now, the police took it from me, it was never returned. Perhaps they thought I would not need it. Perhaps no one really cared.

  But they were at least considerate. Enough time had passed by now for them to accept that something untoward had happened. They let me ring Laura. In all my life, I have never had . . . Of all things, I find these the most difficult to write about, that telephone call, that explanation, that sense of guilt. It has never left me, that feeling of personal blame, that conviction that I was responsible for our daughter’s disappearance, for what happened afterwards. Laura said she would leave for London right away, she would come by car. I asked her to drive carefully.

  It is easy to see what must have happened. Naomi got separated from me in the crush. Her abductor found her almost straight away, promised to help her find me, spirited her away in a different direction. If he had already been watching, he will have known who I was. By the time she suspected anything was amiss, Naomi was out of sight and out of earshot. Even if she started crying, even if she kicked up a fuss, who would have noticed a weeping or screaming child in a large toyshop on Christmas Eve?

  No, I do not mean ‘noticed’. Later, witnesses did come forward, saying that they remembered a little girl in a yellow coat crying as she was taken out of the store. Dozens of people must have noticed her. But they took no notice, that is the point. Why should they have? She would have been the sixth or seventh fractious infant seen by them that day. Some of them will have had bad-tempered or upset children of their own in tow. Too much excitement, too great a stimulus, too large a crowd: what more natural than that a child should weep or a parent drag her, in spite of her tears, out to the open street.