the motherland’s seal of approval, the imperial sanction that my words were broadcastable.
The majority of the work was by men, but I would listen enraptured by the words and voices of Una Marson, Gladys Lindo, Constance Hollar – and Cynth would pipe up, ‘One day you be read out, Delly’ – and her little shining face, her bunches, she always made me feel like it was true. Seven years old, and she was the only one who ever told me to keep going. By 1960 that programme had stopped, and I came to England two years later with no idea what to do with my stories. Life at the shoe shop took over, so I only wrote in private, and Cynth, who must have seen the piles of notebooks which never left my bedroom, simply stopped her pestering.
She and Sam had found a flat to rent in Queen’s Park, and she’d transferred to a north London branch of Dolcis. Up to that point, I’d never really known loneliness. I’d always had my books, and Cynth had always been there. Suddenly, my thoughts were enormous in that tiny flat, because there was nobody to hear them and make them manageable, nobody cajoling or supporting me, or holding out their arms for a hug. Cynth’s absence became physical to me. Do you have a body if no one is there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind, floating around the rooms. How badly prepared I’d been for the echo and clunk of my key in the lock, the lack of her sizzling frying pan, my solitary toothbrush, the silence where once she hummed her favourite songs.
When you saw a person every day – a person you liked, a person who lifted you up – you thought you were your best self, without trying very hard. Now, I saw myself as barely interesting, not so clever. No one wanted to hear my poems except Cynth, no one cared or understood where I was from like she did. I didn’t know how to be Odelle without Cynth to make me so. Cynth had done so much for me, but because she was gone, I still managed to resent her.
Her work commitments and mine meant we were only meeting once a fortnight, in the Lyon’s on Craven Street round the corner from the Skelton. I barely credited Cynth for the fact it was she who always arranged it.
At the counter, the waitress had slopped our cups so the liquid had spilled onto the saucer, and the bun I’d asked for was the most squashed. When I asked for a replacement saucer, the waitress ignored me, and when I paid for it, she wouldn’t put the change in my hand. She placed the money on the counter and pushed it over, not looking at my face. I turned to Cynth, and saw a familiar expression. We walked to find a spare table, as far away from the counter as we could.
‘How is it at the work?’ she asked. ‘You still trailin’ after that Marjorie Quick?
‘She meh boss, Cynthia.’
‘So you say.’
I hadn’t realized how obvious it was, the impression that Quick had made on me over the recent weeks. I had tried to find out more about Quick from Pamela, who could only tell me that Quick had once mentioned the county of Kent as her childhood home. What she did between being a girl and a woman in her fifties was a grey sketch. Perhaps she had been destined for a genteel, Kentish life, a magistrate’s wife or some such, but she chose instead to find a different kind of fortune in the rubble of post-war London. Her name was not in Debrett’s: she was not a Skelton descendant, one of my initial lines of thought. Her impeccable sartorial choices exuded power, a care of herself that was for nobody’s benefit but her own. Each perfect blouse, each pristine pair of trousers, was a pre-emptive self-narration. Quick’s clothes were an armour made of silk.
I knew she was unmarried and lived in Wimbledon, just off the common. She smoked constantly, and appeared close to Reede in the sort of way that water is close to a stone that it has worn down over decades. Pamela said that Quick had been here as long as Reede had, when he’d taken the directorship of the Skelton in 1947, twenty years ago. How she had come to meet