One Secret Summer Page 16

  ‘It was easy. Just as you said.’ Niela bent down so that her face was on a level with the boy’s. ‘And you must be Boris, right?’ He nodded, still too shy to speak. He was round-faced, with bright red cheeks and dark, almond-shaped eyes. Niela drew out the orange she’d been carrying and presented it solemnly to him. He looked up at his mother as if in confirmation. She smiled and nodded.

  ‘Better than sweets,’ she said approvingly. ‘Go on, take it. Say thank you, Boris.’

  He held the orange between his pudgy hands as though it might bite. ‘Fank you,’ he said softly. He was still shy.

  ‘Come,’ Anna said, turning to go into the house. ‘Come inside. It’s warmer in here.’ She led the way into the small living room.

  Niela followed her in. She looked around in pleasure. It had been so long since she’d been inside a home – a proper home, with pictures on the walls and children’s toys lying around, splayed-open magazines and a half-drunk mug of tea – she’d forgotten how much she missed it. Anna’s home was small but cosy. The dining room, little more than an alcove really, led directly into the kitchen. The room was filled with the scent of onions and basil. Niela’s stomach rumbled. She couldn’t remember when she’d had her last home-cooked meal.

  They ate quickly, all attention focused on Boris, who’d soon outgrown his shyness. He chattered away happily in his special mixture of Serbo-Croat and English, oblivious to the fact that Niela might not understand. At 7.30 on the dot, Anna picked him up and announced it was bedtime. Niela smiled to herself; she remembered the struggles the maids had had with Raageh when it was time to go to sleep. Boris had no such difficulty. He clambered on to Niela’s lap and gave her a wet, sloppy kiss of such genuine affection that Niela’s eyes misted over almost immediately. She felt his arms go around her neck; he touched the soft, curly mass of her ponytail in wonderment. Anna laughed and swept him off Niela’s lap. ‘He’ll be wanting you to read him a story in a minute,’ she said, tweaking his nose. ‘Come on, little man. Bedtime. You can play with Niela’s hair next time. He’s such a little flirt. I’ll be back in ten minutes or so. Just make yourself at home.’ She disappeared down the short corridor with Boris in her arms.

  Niela picked up her glass and wandered over to the bookcase at the other end of the living room. She looked through the titles with interest. There were a few she’d read – some texts she remembered from school: Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Wharton. But there were others – books in Russian, heavy-looking titles on economics and trade, a few girlish novels … she tugged a couple out, impressed. Anna was clearly a keen reader. As she, Niela, had once been. She thought for a second of the shelves in her own room in Mogadishu. What had happened to all the books?

  ‘Do you like reading?’ Anna had come back into the dining room.

  Niela turned around. She gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I used to … back at home.’

  ‘Where did you say you were from again? Somalia?’

  Niela nodded. ‘We left when the war broke out.’

  ‘Like me.’ Anna gave a small, tight smile. She picked up her glass from the table and came over. She sat down on the couch and let out a deep sigh. ‘I’m lucky,’ she said, taking a sip of her wine. ‘He goes to sleep easily.’

  ‘Who looks after him in the daytime?’ Niela asked.

  ‘My neighbour. She’s also from Bosnia. Without her, I don’t know what I’d do.’

  ‘What about Boris’s father?’ Niela asked the question delicately.

  ‘What about him?’ Anna gave a wry smile. ‘He took off the minute I told him I was pregnant.’

  Niela didn’t know what to say. ‘That must have been hard,’ she said finally.

  Anna shrugged. ‘I’m better off without him,’ she said simply. ‘What about you? D’you have a boyfriend back home?’ Niela’s face burned. She took a gulp of wine to cover her confusion. She shook her head, unable to say anything. ‘Pretty girl like you?’ Anna teased. ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘Wh … what about the rest of your family?’ Niela asked quickly, desperate to change the subject.

  ‘They’re still in Mostar. My brother …’ Anna’s voice faltered for a second. ‘My brother was shot. In the war. My parents won’t leave.’

  Again Niela didn’t know what to say. She looked across the table at Anna. Her face was closed off; there was a tightness around the mouth that she hadn’t noticed before. She wasn’t the only one to have suffered through hard times, Niela thought to herself suddenly. It happened to others too. To people you wouldn’t expect. She thought back to her first day at Sarafin’s. She would never have guessed that the efficient-looking secretary sitting behind her desk with a formidable array of pens and pencils and a large computer screen in front of her was a refugee, just like herself. That she had a three-year-old son whose father had disappeared or a brother who’d been shot. It just went to show … you couldn’t tell anything about anyone any more. Anna had no idea what had happened to Niela. A shudder went through her suddenly. Hamid on their wedding night. She pressed her legs together as if trying to physically block the memory.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Anna’s voice came to her, sounding concerned.

  Niela forced herself to relax. It was all in the past now. There was nothing Hamid or Fathia or her family could do to her now. It was behind her. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking … I have two brothers. I … I miss them.’

  Anna nodded. ‘It’s hard,’ she said after a moment. ‘I mean, English people are very nice, don’t get me wrong. I came here with nothing and they gave me everything. Papers, a place to stay, language classes … they were unbelievably kind. People talk about being a refugee now, but those were the hardest years of my life. And most people I meet,’ she waved a hand in the air, ‘they can’t relate to that, you know what I mean? My father was an accountant … I’m not someone who grew up in a refugee camp. But it doesn’t mean anything to them. They hear the word ‘‘Bosnia’’ and they think I’m some Eastern European mail-order bride.’

  Niela gave a small half-smile. ‘I would never have guessed, you know. You sound so English.’

  Anna smiled. ‘When I got here, I changed everything. My name, my accent, my past … everything. It’s the only way you’ll make it, I promise you. I don’t know what your war was like, but ours was terrible. I’ve seen things I shouldn’t have seen, I know about things that I shouldn’t have to know about, ever.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Oh, why are we sitting here talking about it … listen to us! We say we want to forget everything and then all we do is constantly bring it up.’ She shook her head. ‘Silly, really.’

  Niela was silent. She couldn’t articulate it the way she would have liked, but Anna was wrong. It wasn’t silly. It was necessary. In ways she was only beginning to grasp, the disintegration of who she was – Niela Aden, seventeen-year-old schoolgirl – which had started the moment they fled Mogadishu, might now be halted. She’d lived with it for so long … all those months of not knowing whether they were coming or going, where they would go, how they would get there, who they would be … it had become normal to her, just as the waiting had been normal, or the sense of impending doom. And that was the dangerous part. For the first time ever, on the strength of a few minutes of conversation with someone who’d been through it too, she grasped intuitively that there was hope. If Amra could reinvent herself so completely and succeed, so could she. It wasn’t a matter of luck or circumstance. It was a matter of will. What was it her mother always used to say? Good things come to those who wait. Her mother was wrong. Good things come to those who grab them.

  PART THREE

  27

  JULIA

  London, September 1996

  Julia made her way carefully down the path towards Gray’s Inn, conscious of her heels sticking awkwardly in between the stones. The line of clipped trees bordering the path fell away from her; in the distance, beyond the brick wall that separated Gray’s Inn from the main road, she could see the top decks of a long line of red b
uses, crawling along. A tiny shiver of excitement ran through her. She pressed the buzzer on the front door and stood back, waiting for the door to open. The discreet brass plaque gave little away. Bernard, Bennison & Partners. Barristers. The words sent a small thrill running through her. She was about to start her year-long pupillage with one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. The door opened; she walked in. ‘Can I help you?’ the receptionist asked pleasantly.

  ‘Er, yes. I’m Julia Burrows. I’m starting my first six today.’

  ‘Oh.’ The girl looked momentarily confused. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Burrows. We’ve got a name badge for you. If you don’t mind signing right here … ?’ She slid a piece of paper across the counter. Julia signed her name and tried not to think about the girl’s telltale slip. It was always the same, though not at the Oxford Pro Bono Publico where she’d worked for the past four years. In the shabby offices just off Turl Street there’d been lawyers like herself – working class, fiercely dedicated, a hundred per cent committed to what they did. But although she’d thoroughly enjoyed her time there, her heart was set on becoming a barrister. For that she needed a London-based pupillage, and after three interviews and a month of waiting, her dream had finally come true. She’d sold the small house in Elswick that her grandmother had left her and whilst it wasn’t exactly worth a fortune, it was the only way she could afford to continue her training. During the year-long pupillage, she’d be paid an absolute pittance – another one of the reasons why working-class girls like her rarely became barristers … they simply couldn’t afford to live and work in London on what was effectively a student stipend. It was harder than she thought to sever her ties with Elswick. The day the house was finally sold, she walked up and down the streets where she’d spent her childhood, looking at the rows of almost identical houses whose occupants she no longer knew, wondering if she would ever come back again. The cemetery where her parents and her grandmother were buried was on the other side of the Tyne. She tenderly placed the three bunches of flowers she’d brought with her on their graves and stood up, wiping away her tears. In all likelihood, she knew, she would never return. The following morning she caught the train back to Oxford, packed her bags and said goodbye to the three people with whom she’d shared a house in Headington for the past four years. Dom, ever loyal, drove her down to London. She stayed at the Barrington-Brownes’ Chelsea townhouse for a fortnight whilst she looked for a place to live. The flat she found in an ex-council block just off the Euston Road couldn’t have been more different from the Barrington-Brownes’ four-storey house on Cadogan Square, but she didn’t mind. Chelsea made her nervous, she told Dom when they went together to look at it. Claire and Alison, the girls with whom she would be sharing, seemed nice enough. Claire was a nurse at UCH, just up the road, and Alison was a postgraduate student in fine art. Dom wrinkled his nose at the tiny room and the state of the garden, of course, but Julia couldn’t have cared less. A new chapter in her life was about to start and she couldn’t wait.

  ‘If you’ll just come this way …’ The receptionist came around the desk. She looked Julia up and down quickly, sizing her up. Briefcase – too shiny; shoes – too new; suit – decent but hardly designer. In her own navy blue skirt and pink shirt opened at the neck to reveal an impressive string of pearls, she looked as though she was the trainee barrister, not Julia. She followed the bobbing blonde ponytail down one wood-panelled corridor after another. Men and women in suits floated in and out as they climbed the stairs to the office where Julia would be working. ‘Good morning,’ the receptionist murmured quietly to each one, for which she received a quick, pained smile. It was so different from the relaxed atmosphere at the OPBP; would she ever fit in? Julia wondered to herself, then quickly tried to suppress the thought. She was shown into a large office and given a desk by the window. There were two other trainee barristers in the room. She shook hands with each: Daniel, a tall, imposing man from Nigeria, and Christopher, a short, rather earnest-looking young man who seemed surprised to see a woman. She quickly stowed her things away and was led back down the corridor. ‘You’ll be working with Harriet Peters,’ the receptionist told her. ‘Third door on the left, just down the hall. She’s expecting you. Good luck,’ she said pleasantly and disappeared. Julia nervously smoothed down her skirt and tapped on the door.

  ‘Come in.’ She pushed open the door tentatively. Seated behind an impressively polished desk was a formidably stern-looking woman. She took off her spectacles and peered at Julia. ‘Harriet Peters. I’m the senior counsel in charge of the family unit. Gerald and I thought it would be a good place for you to start. We’re a new section in the firm. There are some who think family law is a complete waste of time – doesn’t bring in the sort of cash or cachet that corporate law does. I, of course, think otherwise. I’ve no interest in your own feelings on the matter except to say that whilst you work for me, I expect a hundred and ten per cent loyalty to the cause and nothing short of devotion. When you do your second six, assuming you get that far, of course, you can take your skills into whatever area of the law you choose. Now, I see from your CV that you spent a considerable amount of time at the OPBP. You’ll be familiar, therefore, with the sorts of issues we tackle. The case I’d like you to clerk on …’ Julia listened as Harriet outlined in exacting detail what it was she’d be doing for the rest of the week. After she’d finished, she handed over a stack of files. ‘Library’s on the fourth floor,’ she said briskly. ‘Report back to me after lunch.’ And that was it. Julia hastily got to her feet, aware that her heart was racing with a mixture of extreme excitement and extreme trepidation. One thing was abundantly clear: Harriet Peters wasn’t about to give anyone – least of all another woman – a break. A first from Oxford meant nothing, or so her expression implied. Julia Burrows was there to work.

  For the rest of the week, Julia did nothing but run from her office to the law courts, her arms piled high with Harriet’s legal briefs and notes. When she was asked to do something other than fetch and carry, she spent hours in the library on the fourth floor. The view over Fleet Street was the only respite from dusty tomes and leatherbound books that had been so well thumbed the gold lettering was gone from their spines. Harriet wasn’t joking. By the end of her first month, Julia was so tired she could barely stand. She’d never done as much reading in her life. Aside from doing the background legal research for Harriet’s briefs, she drafted skeleton arguments that Harriet invariably tore up anyway, checked facts and precedents, looked up rulings, edited and typed up case notes and did whatever else Harriet saw fit to throw at her during the day. In her second week she found herself struggling up Fleet Street with a mountain of Harriet’s dry-cleaning in her arms. Patsy, Harriet’s PA, smirked at her as she came in through the door. It was clear that picking up the dry-cleaning was one task she was only too happy to pass along.

  But it wasn’t all work. On Friday evenings, the pupils and other junior barristers met at the Cittie of Yorke pub just up the Gray’s Inn Road. Harriet was never to be found at any of the social events, not even the High Dinners. No one seemed to expect her either. From the little she was able to glean from others, Julia learned that Harriet was single, in her late forties, lived in a frightfully smart part of Chelsea and drove a frightfully smart car. Once a month she went to Ireland to a luxury spa buried deep in the countryside. Aside from a passion for horses – she owned two thoroughbreds – there was nothing else to know about Harriet Peters other than the fact that she was brilliant and one of the hardest taskmasters in the firm. Like almost everyone else, she’d been at Cambridge, done her sixes at one of the city firms and been at B&B ever since. She was practically part of the furniture. She was the only female senior partner although no one could ever accuse her of pandering to the fact. She had a trim, neat figure; wore her hair short and expertly cut. She applied the occasional dash of lipstick and, once, just the faintest trace of perfume as she walked by … There was certainly nothing overtly feminine about Harrie
t Peters. No one could ever have accused her of charm.

  One Friday evening after a particularly long day in court, Julia was crossing the quadrangle of the High Court, half-buried under the weight of documents, when Harriet, who was walking several paces in front of her, deep in conversation with someone else, turned.

  ‘Drink?’ she asked, causing Julia to nearly drop her case.

  ‘Drink?’ Julia repeated, frowning. She wasn’t sure what Harriet meant.

  ‘Yes, a drink. Would you care for a drink?’ The person Harriet had been speaking to quickly excused himself and the two women were left in the middle of the courtyard, Julia staring at Harriet as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘Um, yeah … smashin’,’ she said, wincing. Even to her own ears, the Geordie phrase sounded out of place. ‘That’d be nice.’ Was it her imagination or was there the faintest of smiles playing around Harriet’s lips? Julia couldn’t be sure. She staggered into the private bar in the basement of the High Court, too astounded to take in her surroundings.

  ‘Coat, madam?’ A flunky suddenly appeared. ‘And your documents?’

  Julia handed everything over gratefully and followed Harriet to one of the upholstered booths. She’d heard about the bar – open only to senior members of the Law Society, which included every judge, peer and law lord … and certainly not eager pupils a fifth of the way through the first six. She looked about her cautiously. She recognised half a dozen faces – over there in the corner by the stained-glass window was Lord Musgrove, the firebrand Labour peer … and there, standing by the bar with a large whisky in hand, was Anthony Chessington, the head of Libertas. And wasn’t that Grant Foster, the famous divorce lawyer? The sound of wine being splashed into a glass brought her abruptly back to her senses.

  ‘Cheers,’ Harriet said when the waiter had obsequiously removed himself. She took a long, measured sip.