BERRAK THE TURK was busy smoking narghile and reading the newspaper while simultaneously dispensing hot sweet mint tea from the tarnished silver urn perched on the edge of the counter. He was dressed as always in a wrinkled white shirt and was seated on the long, low lumpy leather sofa that served as his office and command centre, old newspapers and his dictionary piled beside him, an enamel bowl of sugar cubes and bright green mint leaves close to hand. The wall behind him was exposed brick, painted a mottled pale blue, presumably intended to resemble a clear summer day. But the wall oozed and trickled silently with damp, making it look rather more like a mourning sky in autumn. The dusty bookcase beside the desk was piled high with worn and ragged towels and beneath the hiss and glare of the crooked gas chandelier hung a stained board marked with prices: the prices never changed and bore no resemblance to what you paid. The gramophone was playing a scratchy â78 of classical classics, the same record that was always playing, ever since I had been coming; there was no other record. Rachmaninoffâs Prelude in C-sharp minor; even I knew that the second movement of Mozartâs Piano Concerto No. 20 was about to follow. I wondered if Berrak ever grew tired of it. He showed no signs of doing so.
âSelam! Selam! Mr Sefton, you are back. You have returned! Nasilisiniz? We havenât seen you for so long.â
I had been away with Morley and Miriam in Westmorland, where things, it must be admitted, had not gone entirely to plan. For every good memory from those years there is always something else, something that canât be avoided or denied: some death or disaster, some terrible discovery or disappointment. Iâd learned in Spain that dread and despair are constant companions to adventure and during my time with Morley, for all its good, it often felt as though I were somehow being buried alive in yet more bad memories and that there was no escape. I had to do everything and anything to help me breathe.
âMr Sefton!â continued Berrak. âIt is very good to see you. Very very good.â He shook me warmly by the hand. At least Berrak never changed. âMy uncle was asking about you.â He offered me tea. âSmoke?â I declined both the tea and the smoke. âUncle will be pleased.â
Berrakâs uncle was not his actual uncle. He may well have had a dozen actual uncles back home in Turkey but his English uncle was a Mr Klein, the owner of the Russian Turkish Baths and Berrakâs employer. I had met Klein on a number of occasions. Weâd got on well. He was an educated man â neither Russian nor Turkish nor indeed English but from Poland, via Hackney â tiny, barely feet five tall, and fascinated by literature and by art, and with almost as many opinions as he had business interests. Klein made and sold his own rouges and fragrances (âKleinâs Perspiration-Proof Make-Upâ), he made and sold wigs (formed of real human hair), he ran a chain of haberdashers and hairdressers (patronised by the stars of British cinema), he rented properties and owned part shares in cinemas (including the beautiful old Capitol cinema in Winchmore Hill), he sold furs and jewellery, and he had the baths. He was a businessman in the very broadest sense. When I had first returned from Spain he had been kind enough to offer me work in the import and export branch of one of the businesses based down at St Katharine Docks, but I had been unable to take him up on the offer â not being in a fit state at the time to do anything but patronise his baths and go drinking. Sometimes I wondered what my life might have become if I had thrown in my lot with Mr Klein rather than with Morley. Things might have worked out better â or maybe not. Different, certainly.