First let me apologise for my long silence, Mary Ann. In answer to your question – I think I just needed a break. A few days in my own shoes. Mary Ann – it took something out of me, writing all that down. I was in danger of forgetting where my life ended and hers began. You might even say I was in danger of becoming her. You can see it even in my words. As anyone who knows me from my journalism can tell you – and a few of your colleagues at the Center for Democratic Change do seem to fall into this category – I don’t usually write like this. (Though I do have a tendency to over identify with my subjects.)
I discussed all this with Hector Cabot in November 2005. Let me place it for you – it was just after my visit to the garçonniere. I’d rashly asked Chloe what she remembered of the days leading up to the Trunk Murder. She’d answered sharply: ‘You want me to describe the days leading up to a rumour?’ I’d apologised. Relenting, she’d mentioned that her father had visited Jeannie in Northampton in June 1971, ‘id est not long after the murder-that-never-was.’ Perhaps to make up for her burst of irritation, she’d offered to drive me back to her house to see him.
Chloe lives in a multi-million-dollar villa in Emirgân – the glass palace, she calls it. Needless to say, it overlooks the Bosphorus. She and her stepchildren (‘the ingrates’) live upstairs. Her parents (‘the young ones’) live below, and Chloe thinks it is very silly that they insist on paying rent. Though she feels she has to take it (‘you know what a stickler my mother is’) she secretly pays it into an account in their name. ‘They’ll need it soon enough,’ she told me as we headed down the stairs that connected the two flats, reminding me, not for the first time, that her parents had ‘forgotten’ to take out pensions.
Forgetting is a fine art for Hector and Amy, and the bright, airy garden flat is their greatest work. To look at the pictures on the walls – children and grandchildren and stepgrandchildren, weddings and christenings and circumcisions, Amy and Hector in front of the Sphinx, the Parthenon, and the windy walls of Troy – you’d never know there’d been a twenty-five year blip in their marriage. They do not deny it – what unites them is their refusal to dwell on it. The past is a vast, disordered attic. They extract only what might look nice on a shelf.
It was teatime when we arrived, and (as was so often the case with my own parents at this hour) the room was full of visitors. One (a former student) was a physicist, now working in Denmark. Another (also a former student) had just purchased a budget airline in the American Southwest. With him was an English travel writer, in Istanbul to research a book about the travel writers who had come before her. After she’d left, we were joined by a Greek politician and a Turkish playwright. They’d come to discuss a cultural exchange that Hector’s foundation was helping to sponsor. When they discovered my line of work, they of course had things to say about the sins of the media, and most especially, the way their own countries were reported in the US and European press. ‘It is as if they have set out to kill all hope of peace!’
I tried to explain the problem from the other side: though there were some very good journalists out there, they weren’t always heard. Their readers had only the sketchiest knowledge of the Ottoman Empire and its troubled legacy. As a rule, they disregarded anything that did not confirm their prejudices. Then there were the gatekeepers – the editors, the advertisers and the long line of little people in between them – who decided what was news and what was not, who rarely thought something was important unless someone important had pronounced it to be so, and who between them had a thousand ways of burying a story.
Hector did more listening than talking, though he interrupted with a jabbing finger from time to time to say, ‘But this must stop! Europe or no Europe, Turkey needs to be back on the world stage!’ Or: ‘You have got to make them come to grips with history. They have got to see that the dividing line isn’t Islam!’ It took me back to my teens, when this man was close to being my second father. There were only about a dozen faculty families on the hill in those days. We’d all been in and out of each other’s houses, and there were no separate tables. Whatever the adults happened to be arguing about – the Balfour Agreement, the road to Damascus, or the music teacher who had rolled under the sofa at a recent party, never to be seen again – they were as interested in our views as they were in their own.
In those days, Hector was the life of every party. But late one drunken night, he went out into his garden to shoot a rabid dog and shot his own mother by mistake. There were no more parties after that. He gave up drink, found God in some form, and moved back to the US. I’d never quite forgiven him for his defection. But now, as he drew me back into a conversation we’d left off thirty-odd years earlier, I thought how lucky I’d been, to grow up surrounded by adults who’d taken us and our thoughts so seriously.
As the physicist and the budget airline owner rose to leave, they asked Hector if he’d had any news ‘on the Sinan front’. It emerged they were old classmates. They listened sadly to Hector’s update, and there was news in it for me, too. Hector told us that William Wakefield had been on the point of returning to the US to rescue little Emre. ‘He was so happy the last time I saw him. He’d finally found the right string to pull. He thought the problem was solved!’ Now that he was ‘no longer with us,’ they were ‘Back to Square One’, as no judge was going to release the child to a party, ‘however responsible,’ who did not maintain a residence in the US. But Hector did. So he and Amy would be flying back to the US that weekend to see if the authorities might agree to move Sinan’s young son out of fostercare and into their custody. ‘But of Jeannie, poor soul, we’ve heard nothing.’ Then Hector turned to me. ‘Unless you have something new to tell me?’
I shook my head. ‘Right now, I’m just trying to establish what happened. I’m hoping that might tell us where she went.’ I added that it was not just the recent past that concerned me, as every avenue of enquiry took me back to June 1971.
Chloe’s mother didn’t seem to like that.
‘Please do try and understand,’ Hector said, after she had left, somewhat huffily, to see to supper. ‘She doesn’t like to discuss that summer you mentioned, and with good reason. She was recently divorced, poor woman. She was dating a man who, however inadvertently, pulled her daughter, our daughter, into the middle of a murky political intrigue. Amy herself spent several weeks under house arrest, did you know that? But she’s a woman of courage – don’t you forget that. Police guards notwithstanding, she still found the courage to give shelter to your old flame when he was on the run.’
‘She hid Sinan?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t know that? Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Could you possibly pretend I didn’t? Listen. I’m going to be frank with you. I have some serious qualms about this digging you’re doing. I know your intentions are excellent – you want to find Jeannie. You want to help us get little Emre back and secure his father’s release. But I’m afraid that the very things that qualify you for this task – your intimate knowledge of the history, the place and the people involved – are what will rob you of the very thing without which you cannot succeed. Namely detachment. My dear, you just don’t have it.’
‘I think I do,’ I said.
‘You might think so, but for God’s sake, M, this woman nabbed your boyfriend!’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. I damned her to hell. Sinan too. But then they actually went there… Don’t you see? No one wants to have that much power.’
‘But my dear girl, you never had that much power.’ He reminded me that the Trunk Murder (‘the so-called Trunk Murder’) had nothing to do with me. Nodding in agreement, I explained that – nevertheless – Jeannie Wakefield and I shared a history. The fact that it was an invisible and unacknowledged history didn’t make it any less important. Because it wasn’t a one-off, I said. Just as she had stepped into my shoes in 1970, so too had I stepped into someone else’s shoes ten years earlier, ‘and to this day I have never known, never even asked, whose shoes they might have been.’ You could, I said, take this story back and back – back to the middle of the 19th century, if you were so minded. ‘Only when you line up all these shoes in a row do you begin to get a sense of who we are, and what we signify.’
‘By which you mean to say what exactly?’
‘By which I mean to say that Jeannie’s story is my story. Or mine to tell.’
He gave this proposition intensive thought.
‘Or think of it this way,’ I said. ‘Unless I come to some understanding of Jeannie – what she did with the life I left, and what it did to her – I cannot begin to understand the life I chose.’
Grimacing, his hands cupped around his chin and his eyes still closed, he asked ‘What do you think she would say, if she heard you say that?’
‘We’d disagree on certain points,’ I conceded. ‘But listen, Hector. I’m doing this because she asked me. She wrote me a fifty-three page letter, for God’s sake…’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But why?’ He paused again to think. ‘After steeping yourself in Jeannie’s words, what puzzles you the most?’
There were three things in particular. I began with the easiest: William Wakefield. What sort of man would treat his daughter the way he did that year? ‘He let her run wild and then he spied on her.’
‘I don’t find that puzzling at all,’ Hector said. ‘It was professional arrogance.’
‘You’d think he was God,’ I said.
And Hector said, ‘A little God. Drink had a lot to do with it, you know.’
I did. So I moved on to my second question. Sinan. ‘I hope you won’t discount this as sour grapes, but there’s so much he doesn’t tell Jeannie. And – barring the odd crisis – she seems to accept that. Crave it, even. Why?’
‘Marriage is a strange thing,’ Hector said. ‘Especially when it’s viewed from the outside.’
‘Especially,’ I added, ‘when your father is a spy.’
‘So they were both spies, were they?’ Seeing my confusion, he added, ‘I mean Sinan’s father, too.’ In fact, I hadn’t meant that at all. Though (as I now heard) there had always been rumours. ‘I suppose you know that Sinan’s father was an old army buddy of the formidable İsmet?’
I told him I did. Hector shook his head again.
‘İsmet. Now there’s a tough customer. Did I ever tell you about the time he dropped by at the office and told me chapter and verse about every party I’d wrecked and then forgotten between 1955 and 1969?’
Though it was a meandering tale with a several subplots, each featuring its own little god, he got to the end without forgetting that I had promised three questions and delivered only two. ‘So what is it?’ When I hesitated, he clenched his fists and said, ‘You’ve got to understand that I am asking you for your own good. If you don’t put your doubts into words, they eat you up, you know!’
So I phrased it as tactfully as I could. As much as I trusted her sincerity, as certain as I was that Jeannie knew no more about the so-called Trunk Murder than she had recorded in her journals and letters, I was still left feeling that there was something very odd about her story.