Throwback Thursday: ‘The Seven Swans: A Mystery in Time’ by Mel Anastasiou

The April sun listed at a five-o’clock angle across the London rooftops and in through the window by my battered desk in the tutors’ room. And, on this day of all days, wherein everything I had known, loved, or endured for forty years teetered atop a precipice, I sat with the sun’s glow on my cheek and told myself stories. These last few weeks I’d felt too worried, restless, and impecunious to think about the endings, or even what sort of hero I would like to be. 

But I love a mystery, and I try to rescue a heroine in it if I possibly can. On the day my imaginary worlds collided with real life, I had last seen the heroine of my stories forty years before, if you didn’t count her picture hidden in my wallet behind the National Health card you are issued when you move permanently from Canada to the UK.

As for my wife Angelica’s photo, I kept that out in plain view on my desk out of affection and appreciation for her good looks. At our desks where we interviewed our students, all we tutors at the Cheapside College of English as a Second Language displayed caringly framed photos of our spouses. It gave the young girls in their flippy little skirts something to look at while they tried to raise their grades by wishing out loud. My wife’s picture was an excellent one. In it, Angelica, in linen top and trousers, sat posed upon a beach ball outside Wordsworth’s cottage at Grasmere, holding a cup of coffee in the rain. She glowed. Our old friend Byron — Angelica’s ex-husband — had taken that photo. He’d captured her high-beam smile and shining dark curls. 

My desk picture of Angelica was an object of envy for most of my fellow tutors. I must add that it was just about the only thing they envied me; that and my desk by the window, attained not through promotion but by outlasting all previous occupants of the room.

In fairness, Angelica at sixty could not be expected to compete with the twenty-year-old Holly, whose photo I had carried with me for forty years.

At the sound of cheering, I looked up from my imaginings and Holly’s picture. Two desks over, my colleague Albie was grading his papers by tossing them towards the door to the stairs to see which travelled farthest. But the cheering of the rest of the room stopped short when a delivery man unfamiliar with young Albie’s evaluation process walked in holding a large tape-wrapped carton, slipped on the papers, and thudded to the floor. The box landed among the compositions beside him, wrong way up.  

The delivery man was a fellow of about my own age. I ran over and helped him to his feet, while my colleague Glory rescued the carton and set it right side up.  

“You came down pretty hard,” I said.  

One hand on the small of his back, the delivery man said, “I’ll outlive the lot of you.”

“I know about bad backs,” I said.  “Shouldn’t you get something for yours?”

He screwed up his face. “Maybe. Once I get the rest of these bloody boxes lugged up those effing stairs.”

“I’ll help you out. And my fellow tutors will give us a hand.”

They did: Albie led our colleagues in an ironic round of applause.

“Ah, the old jokes are the best,” I said tolerantly.

“You should know, Spencer,” Glory joked back.