The Greenstone Grail (12 page)

Nathan didn’t get a chance to tell Hazel everything for another fortnight. ‘It’ll be easier when the summer holidays start,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have more time together – time to find the missing injunction –’ they had barely begun searching ‘– and time to sort this out.’

‘Can it be sorted out?’ Hazel said doubtfully. It was daylight and the star was invisible, but they had no idea if that meant it couldn’t see them. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ve thought about that. Somehow, I have to find the man on the beach. If they think he’s an illegal immigrant I expect he’ll be held somewhere. I’ll pretend I’m doing a school project on asylum-seekers: people always want to help with school projects. Once we’ve found him, he can answer some of our questions.’ He had switched from
I
to
we
, Hazel noticed.

She said: ‘How will you talk to him? He doesn’t speak English.’

‘In my dreams, I speak his language,’ Nathan said. ‘Maybe – maybe when I hear it, I’ll understand. We’ll talk to him somehow. We have to.’

‘Sign language,’ Hazel said.

‘The first thing is to find him.’

With this object in mind, they went to talk to Annie. She was obviously gratified to see them so concerned about the issues of the day, but she wasn’t able to help much. ‘I’ve got a school project,’ Nathan said. He didn’t like lying to his mother, but he couldn’t possibly tell her the truth.

‘There’s probably some sort of Immigration Board,’ she said. ‘Look it up in the telephone directory.’

Nothing was listed under Immigration, but after Annie had considered the problem further she suggested they try the Home Office. Here, they found a listing for the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, but they couldn’t get through. ‘It’s bound to be closed at weekends,’ Nathan told Hazel. ‘You’ll have to try it in the week. I can’t make lots of calls from school.’

Hazel looked more doubtful than ever, tugging her hair over her face in the nervous gesture she hadn’t yet outgrown. ‘What’ll I say?’ she said. ‘It’s a government department. I can’t talk to a government department.’

In the end, Nathan decided to apply to Annie. ‘If it’s a school project,’ she said, ‘surely you can call from Ffylde?’

‘We’re supposed to do it in our own time,’ Nathan said, feeling uncomfortable. ‘I just want to know how to contact that man …’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Annie promised.

On Monday morning she drove Nathan back to school, and sat down at the telephone as soon as she returned home. By three o’clock she was frustrated and uncharacteristically furious. The Home Office – ‘building a safe, just and tolerant society’, according to their ad – proved far from helpful. When the Immigration and Nationality Directorate eventually answered the phone, after a succession of engaged tones and a long wait with classical music and recorded messages, they refused to give her any information whatsoever. ‘But it’s for my son,’ Annie said indignantly. ‘It’s a school project. He wants to know how his country works – what we do for refugees and people in trouble.’ At her insistence, the clerk departed to speak to a superior, picking up the call again after a ten-minute absence to tell Annie that she must write to another department, the Communications Directorate. ‘Can I speak to your supervisor?’ Annie asked. No. ‘Is there a
number I can call at this other place?’ Can’t give it to you. It’s confidential. ‘I’m a tax payer,’ Annie found herself saying in cliché mode (though in fact she paid very little tax due to the smallness of her income). ‘I pay your wages. I
employ
you. You don’t have the right to refuse to answer me.’ The clerk said in the voice of one accustomed to such tirades that there was no point in blaming her, it wasn’t her fault. Annie hung up and dialled Directory Inquiries, who promptly gave her the confidential phone number. The Communications Directorate, however, told her she would need to write to Immigration. She then worked her way through her local MP, the House of Commons, and even Scotland Yard, but no one would fill her in on the procedure for dealing with illegal immigrants, let alone assist her in tracking one down. Finally she abandoned the telephone, made herself coffee, and went on the Internet. Here she found the names of various support groups for asylum-seekers operating in the south-east. She wrote down more telephone numbers and decided to return to the attack the next day.

On Tuesday she had better luck. The support groups, unlike the bureaucrats, welcomed interest and were happy to dole out information. Talking to a voluntary organization based in Hastings, she struck gold.

‘The man on the beach?’ said her contact, a woman named Jillian Squires. ‘The mystery man? Why does your son want to know about him?’

‘Nathan heard the story on the radio,’ Annie explained. ‘I’m definitely a biased mum, but still, he’s got a very strong sense of social responsibility. When I told him the kind of treatment meted out to immigrants in this country, he got pretty upset.’ She added shrewdly: ‘I suspect he suggested the subject for his school project himself. He thinks about things, you see; he doesn’t just go away and forget.’

‘What school’s he at?’

‘Ffylde Abbey. I’m not well off, but he got a scholarship.’

‘I know of it. It’s got a decent reputation.’ Jillian Squires seemed to hesitate, then plunged. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I can’t give out details about anyone without their permission, obviously, but I’ll talk to the man. I’ve had dealings with him. He’s highly intelligent: spoke no English when he got here, but he’s learned amazingly fast. If he’s willing, I could give him your number, and ask him to get in touch with you.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Annie said gratefully. ‘But – I thought he would be in prison, or somewhere like that?’

‘No. They only put asylum-seekers in prison if they’ve committed a crime. Prison’s expensive: the state has to feed them. It’s cheaper to leave them on the streets. Anyway, they’re only allowed to register as asylum-seekers if they claim immediately – and that presupposes they know how the system works.’

‘If
I
couldn’t find that out,’ Annie said, ‘how do they?’

‘Precisely.’

Concluding the call, Annie resolved to scrape something from her weekly housekeeping to send as a donation. Nathan wasn’t the only one getting educated, she reflected.

She gave him the news at the weekend. ‘Your man hasn’t called yet,’ she said, ‘but perhaps he will. We just have to wait. If he doesn’t want to talk to you we can’t force him: even if that were possible, it wouldn’t be fair.’

With Bartlemy’s permission, Nathan, George and Hazel spent Saturday searching Thornyhill for the missing document. Nathan’s friends were unenthusiastic, but the prospect of Bartlemy’s cooking overcame their resistance. He produced home-made biscuits with cinnamon and chocolate chips for elevenses, grilled fish for lunch followed by his own wild
strawberry ice cream, and iced buns for tea, and in between the three of them tapped the panelling in the hope that it was hollow and rifled through the attics and some of the murkier closets. Bartlemy didn’t show them the secret cupboard in the chimney and Nathan didn’t mention it, he had a feeling its very existence was a private matter, but they found another one hidden under some stairs, big enough to conceal a man, and in the attics they unearthed part of a rusty suit of armour, a chest of antique clothing, some tarnished silverware and a set of porcelain tureens which must once have belonged to a far larger dinner service. Hazel was very taken with a grey fur muff which Bartlemy said was chinchilla, though she knew fur was immoral. (‘It’s a kind of rat,’ he explained, which soothed her qualms of conscience but also made the muff appear much less attractive.) They discovered something called an astrolabe – a sort of old-fashioned telescope – and an orrery, which was meant to be a model of the solar system, but Bartlemy remarked that either it was very inaccurate or it was a model of another planetary system altogether. And everywhere there were papers, in large boxes, in small boxes, in chests of drawers, in desks long unopened. Nathan found love-letters a hundred years old, tied up with faded ribbon, sepia photographs of simpering Victorian maidens, postcard nudes from the Edwardian era, menus, shopping lists, laundry lists. But there was no sign of the injunction. ‘Rowena had a hunt downstairs last week,’ Bartlemy told him. ‘She must have gone through most of the books, so you needn’t bother about them.’

‘If it isn’t at Thornyhill,’ Nathan said, frowning, ‘have you any idea where the document might be?’

‘Rowena asked me that,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I told her to trace the family solicitors from whenever the injunction was last applied, I think she said in the late nineteenth century. Of
course, you would find that very mundane. There could be a hiding place in the woods, I suppose, possibly on the site of the old house.’

‘But no one knows where that is!’ Hazel protested.

‘You can’t expect to have everything easy,’ Bartlemy said gently.

They left searching the woods for another day and went home, Hazel carrying the muff which Bartlemy had given her. ‘It’s okay to wear
old
furs,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s buying new ones that’s wrong.’

Back at the bookshop, Annie had bad news for him. ‘Jillian Squires called,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid the man on the beach doesn’t want to talk to you. She said he didn’t seem to understand about school projects. I’m sorry, darling, but you can’t press him, you know. He’s homeless, and penniless, and desperate: life must be difficult enough for him. We don’t want to make it worse.’

Yes, thought Nathan, life
must
be difficult. He’s in the wrong universe, for one thing.

He said: ‘Would you mind if I called Mrs Squires? I won’t push her, I promise. I just want to find out … how the system works.’

‘I suppose that would be all right,’ Annie conceded doubtfully.

That evening when it was dark Nathan climbed up to the skylight to look at the star. He had formed the habit of doing so every night when he was at home. He had borrowed George’s binoculars, but they didn’t show him anything more. He pictured the dim room with the revolving spheres, and the orb in the centre, its many facets coruscating with vanishing light. And then the image on the ceiling – his face, gazing at the star, perhaps right now, this moment – and the white mask tilted upwards to study it. It was unbelievable.

But he believed it. Dream and reality meshed too closely for him to deny them. He
had
to talk to the man on the beach, the man from another world …

With Annie’s permission, he telephoned Jillian Squires in the morning.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said politely. ‘Mum told me, the man on the beach wouldn’t help, but I wondered – would you say something to him? It’s going to sound a bit odd to you, but – but it’s
really
important. If he doesn’t want to talk to me even then, that’s okay. If you would just tell him …’

‘I don’t know what more I can say,’ Mrs Squires responded with courtesy but no enthusiasm.

Nathan checked that his mother was out of earshot. ‘Could you tell him – I’m the person who pulled him out of the sea? Please? That’s all.’

‘Tell him –? How extraordinary. Your mother never mentioned –’

‘She doesn’t know,’ Nathan said hastily. ‘I mean, she wasn’t there. I can’t – I really can’t explain everything now. But
please
would you tell him that?’

‘Are you making this up?’ Her voice had acquired an edge.

‘If I was,’ Nathan said, ‘it wouldn’t help, would it, because he would know it was made up? He wouldn’t want to call me if it wasn’t true.’

‘It’s a point,’ she said. ‘Very well, I’ll tell him. But –’

‘Thanks,’ Nathan said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and he hung up as Annie came back into the room.

There followed a week of school and suspense. Nathan dreamed of the cup, and the snake-patterns uncoiling from the rim, and hissing, hissing in his ear. He woke up shaking so badly he felt he had a fever, and was bitterly ashamed of himself for being so much disturbed by a dream. To calm
down, he tried to think of places the injunction might be hidden, and whether the man from the sea would agree to talk to him, and what he might say if he did. Finally, he resorted to thinking about the party Hazel wanted him to attend – the party with the disco – and how horrific it would be, perhaps having to dance, with girls huddled into groups giggling, and Jason Wicks, or someone like him, lounging against the wall sneering. By its very unpleasantness, the picture he drew was oddly steadying. Something about the thought of Jason Wicks had a toughening effect on his nerves. He could deal with Jason Wicks. Wicks, and discos, and giggling girls were very much of this world. It was the other worlds of dream and darkness which he couldn’t manage so easily.

On Saturday the man telephoned. Annie passed the receiver to Nathan, looking unsure. ‘He’s asking for you,’ she said.

Nathan took the phone. His heart had begun to thump rather hard, but he kept his voice level. This is it, he thought. This was where his imaginings had to pass the reality test. He said: ‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Squires tell me, you say you pull me from sea.’ His English, though strangely accented, was amazingly rapid and fluent for someone who must have learnt it in a matter of weeks. ‘I think, that is not possible. How you do this?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Nathan said, wishing his mother would go away for a few minutes. ‘I was dreaming, and I saw a man drowning. I had to save him. I grabbed his hands, and sort of – yanked, and there we were.’