Kitabı oku: «A Woman of Our Times», sayfa 4

‘I’m all right.’

‘Shall I fetch your mother?’

Kath made an imploring face. ‘No, please, unless you want to see me get a telling-off.’

‘You’d better come in with me, then. That leg needs a dressing.’

He wheeled her crippled bicycle into his garden and propped it behind the tall hedge. Kath had hobbled after him, up the path to the front door.

Inside, the house was bare and not very comfortable, but quite clean. Her rescuer made her sit on a wooden chair in the cream-painted kitchen, with her leg up on a low stool.

‘Dear me,’ he murmured. ‘Now then, first aid kit.’

Kath looked around, trying to focus on something other than the stinging cut. There was an old stone sink in the corner with a single dripping tap, a blue-and-grey enamelled oven on bowlegs, an old-fashioned wooden dresser with a few plain plates and cups, and a table in the middle of the room covered with an oilcloth.

It was shabbier than the kitchen at home and different from it not so much in its furnishing as in its feeling. Her mother’s kitchen was warm, busy, and scented with cooking. This room was cold, and Kath guessed there wouldn’t be much food stored behind the zinc grille of the meatsafe. She wondered about Mr Archer as she watched him filling a small metal bowl with hot water from his kettle. She knew that he was a widower, because she had heard her mother mention it, and she also knew that he did small electrical and mechanical repair jobs for people. That was all. She couldn’t even remember when he had come to live in the corner house, although he hadn’t been there for ever, the way her own parents had.

When he carried the bowl over and knelt down in front of her, she studied him carefully. She guessed that he was almost, but not quite, as old as her father. He had fair, rather thin hair, with a high parting, and a tall forehead. He was rather handsome, she thought, in a Prince Philip way, except that his face was lined and greyish. He glanced up at her and she saw that he had pale blue eyes.

‘You’d better take your stocking off, before I bathe your leg. I’m afraid it’s ruined, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t mend a huge hole like that.’ As if he was a doctor, Kath drew up her skirt and unhooked her suspenders. There was a tiny bulge of white flesh above the brown mesh stocking top, and she knew that they both saw it. She rolled the stocking deftly down until she reached the graze, and then she winced. ‘It hurts.’

‘Here.’ He slipped his thumbs inside the nylon tube and eased the torn edges away from the oozing graze, then twitched the stocking over her toes. ‘Done.’

Kath noticed that he had small, precise hands. He washed the wound, dabbing away the fragments of grit, and then lifted a piece of antiseptic gauze from its tin of thick, yellow grease and laid it in place. He finished off the job with a roll of bandage and then sat back on his heels to admire his handiwork.

‘Thank you,’ Kath said. ‘That feels much better.’ She wondered if they ought to shake hands, now that the emergency was past and they were looking at each other in an ordinary, social way. But he had taken off her stocking: it had created an intimacy between them that couldn’t be handshaken off.

‘I don’t know your name,’ he said, as if he had been thinking the same things.

‘It’s Kath. Katharine, really.’

‘Katharine’s pretty.’

‘I’m always called Kath,’ she said firmly, shaking her head to flick the hair back from her face. It had come loose in the fall.

‘Simon,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Kath?’

She still felt shaken, and it was comfortable, sitting with her leg up on the stool.

‘Yes, please, I would.’

While he boiled the kettle and set out two cups and saucers, Simon talked to her. She liked the sound of his voice.

‘Are you still at school? I haven’t seen you in your uniform lately, so I suppose not.’

So Mr Archer watched her coming and going. Kath was surprised to find that she was pleased with the idea. She pretended to be offended by the question, but went on smiling at him.

‘I’m seventeen. I work in an office, typing invoices, mostly. Not very interesting.’

‘And what else do you do?’

‘As much as I can.’

That was how they talked. Kath would tell him about herself and laugh, and he would ask more questions. He was friendly, but there was a hesitancy about him, as if he didn’t enjoy many conversations.

That first time, she remembered, he had told her that he would repair her bicycle. She had promised to come back a few days later.

When it was time to go she glanced down at her legs, and saw one glossy and smooth and the other bare and bandaged.

‘Better take the other one off too,’ she had said. She had peeled off the other stocking and then dropped the two of them, one perfect and one shredded, into her pocket. Simon made no attempt to look away, nor did she try to be coy. He didn’t leer, as most men she knew would have done. He simply watched her, with an openness that she found flattering.

‘I’ll be back, then,’ she had said.

‘That’s good.’ He had held the door open for her to walk through.

They had become friends. He mended the bicycle and came out to see her ride away on it. She called on him again and sewed the hem of a pair of curtains in his living room, where before they had hung down in neglected loops. After the third time she visited him without pretext. It was understood between them that she came when she felt like it and that it wasn’t necessary for him to visit her at her own house in return.

Kath’s mother referred to him as ‘Kath’s friend’, with a touch of pride. Mr Archer was gentlemanly, he had been an officer in the war, and had lost his wife tragically young. She didn’t, as she often protested, have any idea why he put up with listening to Kath’s nonsense. But he seemed to enjoy it, and it would do Kath no harm to talk to someone with a bit more sense than the boys she was endlessly running off to the pictures with.

That was how it was. Kath’s friendship with Simon Archer lasted for less than a year. Towards the end of that time Kath’s full skirts were no longer concealing the bulge underneath them, and her pretty face had taken on a pinched, defiant look.

Kath stopped talking. Busy with the threads of recollection, she didn’t see that Harriet was sitting stiffly upright in her chair. Kath was remembering one winter afternoon, early on, when she had knocked on Simon’s door after walking back from shopping. She had been wearing a scarlet wool scarf, and a matching knitted hat. She had followed him into the kitchen, laughing about something, and had dropped her hat and gloves on the oilcloth. She had taken off her coat too, because she was warm after her walk. Simon had turned from the sink where he had been filling the kettle, and seen her. She knew that her cheeks must be rosy from the wind, because she felt the heat glowing in them.

Simon put the kettle carefully down on the stove. He came to her and put one hand on her waist. It rested very lightly, curving with the hollow. He lifted his other hand and touched her cheek, brushing it with tiny movements of the fingers, as if he wanted to feel the texture of her skin.

Startled, she jerked her head back to look into his face. She was still smiling, from what she had been saying before, but the smile didn’t widen or fade. It seemed to stiffen on her mouth. They had stood quite still, just like that, for one or two seconds. And then Simon had nodded, as if he was sure now of something that he had only suspected before. He had let her go, only he hadn’t really been holding her. He had gone back to the stove and she had chatted on, but watching the back of his head because she wanted him to look round at her like that again.

When he did turn, after quite a long time, she wondered if whatever it was had ever really happened at all. There was nothing in his face to show it, and she didn’t know how to tell him that she understood.

‘Where is he now? Is he still alive?’

Harriet’s voice startled Kath. She had forgotten that she was there.

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked, is he still alive?’

Harriet was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her knees drawn up against her chest. Her face had turned pale and her eyes shone. They were fixed on Kath.

‘Simon? I don’t know, love. I left home before you were born, because your grandparents wouldn’t hear of me staying. I came down to London, you know all this, and lived with my cousins until after I had you.’

Very quietly, Harriet asked, ‘Didn’t Simon look after you?’

She saw the light that had softened Kath’s face begin to fade. There were lines in the loose flesh around her eyes and beside her mouth; her hair was permed in greying ridges. Her mother wasn’t a girl of eighteen at all, although for a moment Harriet had glimpsed that girl. She wanted to hold on to her, denying the years.

‘Why should he have done?’ Kath answered. ‘It was my own problem. You were. I wanted it that way, once I knew I couldn’t marry the father. They’d have had me back, at home, if I’d let you go for adoption. But I wouldn’t let you go, so I never went up there again.’

Harriet knew about that. Kath had told her, often, it was part of her childhood creed, I wouldn’t let you go. Kath’s possessiveness had made her both father and mother. There was no need to speculate about him. He was faceless and nameless, an ejaculation. A physical spasm, like a yawn or a shiver. The father, Kath called him, not yours. Harriet couldn’t remember her ever having said even that much before.

But today she had seen something different in her mother. She had seen youth, but she had also seen sex, with its face scrubbed bare, clean and wholesome. She had caught sight of Kath as a girl, and that girl had emitted a powerful signal. Now, at once, Harriet wanted to know about the man who had intercepted and returned that signal. She felt the crackle of its electricity, even over the remove of years. She was hungry because she had never experienced that charge herself, jolting through her bones, not with Leo nor with anyone else.

She would have to find the man, because he belonged to her. It was important to know him as part of her own history’. Harriet felt herself both set free and dangerously adrift, and she needed a new anchorage before she could set a fresh course. Names, places, even the smallest details, if she was too late for anything more, would help her to fix herself.

She left her chair and went to kneel beside her mother, resting her head against Kath’s knees.

‘Harriet? Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Ever since she had been old enough to understand her own story, her father had had no name and no face, because that was how Kath had wished it. Harriet had felt no need for anything more, because her mother gave her all she wanted. The fierce exclusivity of their love had only been disrupted by Ken, and later by Lisa. But now, Harriet was certain that he had both a name and a face, and she understood what a chasm there was to be filled.

She was certain, without needing to ask, without changing the rule of years between Kath and herself, that Simon Archer was her father. Leo had gone, and it was both ironic and apposite that his disappearance should expose a deeper bond waiting to be uncovered.

In a light, clear voice Harriet had said, ‘I’d like to go and see where you grew up. Perhaps he … your friend is still there.’

‘He probably wouldn’t remember me, even if he was. It’s a very long time ago.’

Of course, all my lifetime.

‘I’d still like to go.’

‘But there’s no family left up there.’

There had been a reconciliation, naturally. From the age of five or six onwards, Harriet remembered visits to her grandparents. But by then they had moved away from the Midlands town, and then they moved on again. Now they lived in a retirement bungalow on the coast, with photographs of their two Trott granddaughters displayed on the mantelpiece.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harriet said. ‘Even if there’s nothing there at all. It’s where I began, after all. I can just walk along the streets and look at it.’

She stretched up and kissed her mother, then scrambled to her feet. Looking down at her she hesitated, and then asked, ‘Why did you tell me all this today?’

Kath answered dreamily, ‘You just made me remember it.’

Of course. Beginnings and endings, one separation and another coming together.

Harriet picked up the tea-tray from between their chairs and walked away down the garden, in through the patio doors.

She was going to look for her father. And when she had found him, from that point she could start again.

Four

The town had long ago been consumed by the city.

In the local train, looking out, Harriet imagined that in her mother’s childhood there might have been a green ribbon of woods and fields separating the last housing estate from the first filling station. Now there was no dividing line, of trees or anything else, and the backdrop of houses and shops and small factories flowed seamlessly past her.

At the station, she bought a local street map from the bookstall and sat on a bench to study it. The other passengers from the train passed her and crowded out through the ticket barrier. When Harriet looked up the train had pulled out and the platform was deserted. At once, she was aware of her isolation in an unfamiliar place. The place names on the train indicator above her head meant nothing to her, and she was ignorant of the streets that led away from the station entrance.

There was no sense of a homecoming. If she had arrived expecting anything of the kind, Harriet reflected, then she was being sentimental. But still she had felt herself irresistibly drawn here, and there had been complicated arrangements to make before she could allow herself the time off from her business. The urban anonymity she had glimpsed from the train was less than welcoming, and she allowed herself the irrationality of a moment’s disappointment. Then she stood up, closing the street map but keeping her finger in place to mark the right page, and briskly walked the length of the platform. Her heels clicked very loudly, as if to announce her arrival.

The ticket collector had abandoned his booth, and so Harriet passed through the barrier without even cursory official acknowledgement of her arrival. There were two dark-red buses waiting beside a graffiti-sprayed shelter, but neither of the destination boards offered the area she was heading for. There was also a taxi at the rank, and the driver eyed her hopefully. Harriet hesitated, and then passed him by. She didn’t want to arrive at the house on the corner by taxi, proclaiming her lack of familiarity to whoever might now live in Simon Archer’s house. If the house was even still there, she reminded herself. Her mother’s home town had changed in thirty years.

Harriet bent her head over the map once more, then hitched her bag over her shoulder and began to walk.

The scale of the map was deceptive. She walked a long way, more than a mile, and her shoes began to rub. It was a long time since she had drunk a cup of coffee on the InterCity train from Euston, and she thought of going into a pub for a drink and a sandwich. But she knew that sitting alone in a bar could only heighten her sense of displacement, and she walked on instead.

The road was busy with a constant stream of heavy traffic that left a pall of grime in the air, and over the houses and shopfronts. The shops that she passed were small, with meagre and faded displays behind the dirty glass, and the houses looked cheerless and hardly inhabited.

Harriet was disconcerted by the anonymity of the streets, and by their barrenness. There was nothing to tell her, You are here, a thin thread links you to us, Sam’s Superette and Madge’s Wool Shop and S. Walsh, Turf Accountants. The disappointment that she had felt on the station swelled, and to counteract it Harriet told herself that she hadn’t come looking for a place, only for the people it had once sheltered. As she plodded on, Kath’s astonishment at her pilgrimage seemed justifiable. Even Harriet found it hard to believe that she would discover her father in this grey, ugly and exhausted place.

To stifle the thought, she resumed her observation. The one place this could not be, she thought, of all defeated urban wildernesseses, was London. Even in its parts that were sadder than this, London had an unmistakeable spiny vitality. There was no liveliness here. Harriet felt a wave of affection for London, like the surprising warmth that had overtaken her on the crowded tube ride to Sunderland Avenue. There was home, after all, and there was everywhere else. Had Kath felt that, once, about these streets? Presumably not, Harriet decided. She had left and never came back.

The responsibility – was it responsibility, or simply need? – had devolved upon herself.

A dark red bus trundled past her, the board on the back bearing the same destination as the one she had rejected outside the station. Harriet quickened her pace, but the stop was in the distance and even as she half-ran it slowed, dropped a single passenger and gathered speed again. She stopped to consult her map for the last time, and saw that her goal was only a handful of streets away. She turned a corner, and then another, away from the main road.

There were houses here instead of shops. This was where Kath had lived, ridden home on her bicycle to save the bus fare. Harriet’s senses were all primed, ready for the impressions to crowd in on her, but now that she was here there was nothing to feel. The rows of houses were neither inviting nor as seedy as the ones that lined the main road. They were simply ordinary and insignificant.

Almost too quickly, she found herself at the right turning. She checked the street name and looked across at her grandparents’ house. It was the same as all the others, the windows masked with net curtains, a patch of garden separating the front door from the pavement. Harriet turned away from it to look at the house opposite. As Kath had described, it faced in a different direction, presenting a high, blind wall of reddish brick directly to the street.

Very slowly, she crossed the road and walked round in the shelter of the wall. She came to a dusty hedge, too high to see over, enclosing the front garden of the house. When she found the gate she had to push past scratchy branches to reach the path and the front door. As she looked for a bell to press she discovered that she was breathless, almost gasping. There was no bell-push. She pressed the flap of the letterbox and it snapped back on her fingers. The sound generated no answering echo within the house, and the windows remained sightless. Harriet knocked, hard, with bare knuckles.

Then she heard someone coming. She rehearsed her lines. A friendly smile, I’m looking for a man who used to live in this house. A long time ago, I’m afraid. How many years have you …

The door opened.

Harriet’s smile never materialised. She had tried to envisage all the alternatives that might confront her, the Bengali housewife with no English, the surly night-shift worker, the transitory bedsit dweller – absurdly, she had made no provision for facing Simon Archer himself.

The man who opened the door was in his late sixties, stooped but still tall, with strands of thin, colourless hair brushed back from a high forehead.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Archer.’

The man regarded her. Harriet felt half deafened by the blood in her ears, pounding like surf. I’m looking for my father. The enormity of what she was doing threatened her, made her wish herself somewhere else.

‘I am Mr Archer.’

‘Did you … were you living here thirty years ago?’

He didn’t like questions, Harriet saw that at once.

‘What relevance can that possibly have? Are you from the Social Services? I don’t want Meals on Wheels, or large-print books.’

‘I’m not from the Social Services, nothing like that. I just want to ask you about something that happened a long time ago.’

‘Department of Oral History at the Polytechnic?’

He did have a cultured voice, clipped and precise. Harriet understood Kath’s comparison with a radio announcer, but an announcer of the old, dinner-jacket days. The recognition drew her closer to the eighteen-year-old with the torn stocking, giving her the determination to press further. Harriet found her smile, although the warmth of it wasn’t reciprocated.

‘Nothing like that, either. I’m Kath Peacock’s daughter. Kath, who used to live across there. She was a friend of yours.’ And more. You must remember.

For a moment Harriet was afraid that Kath was right, and Simon Archer had forgotten her. Then, with an imperceptible movement, he let the door open an inch wider.

‘Kath’s daughter?’ There was a pause. ‘Come inside, then.’

She followed him into a dim hallway. She had an impression of cracked yellow paint, a narrow stairway with bare boards, a curtain with musty folds smelling of damp. At the end of the hallway there was a kitchen, with a small window looking over a garden at the back. In this room, Harriet thought, Kath had sat the first time, with her leg propped on a stool. She wondered what else had happened here.

Simon Archer jerked his chin at the room. There were piles of newspapers on every surface, jars with brushes stuck in them, tools and crockery intermingled, dust and a smell of mildew everywhere.

‘I won’t ask you to forgive the state of things in here. Why should I, and why should you?’

Harriet held her hand out. ‘I’m Harriet Trott.’

Simon took her hand, briefly and formally. His was bony and cold. ‘Harriet Trott,’ he repeated. ‘But you’re a grown woman.’

‘I’m nearly thirty,’ Harriet said gently. ‘It’s almost exactly thirty years since Kath left here.’

He looked at her, still unconvinced by her claim. ‘And you’re her daughter?’

‘Yes.’

Simon shook his head. ‘I forget. Kath can’t be eighteen any longer, can she? No more than I am.’

‘Next year she’ll be fifty.’

‘I suppose so.’ He moved away from her, edging around his kitchen, lifting one or two of the pieces of clutter and putting them down again elsewhere as if to establish his dominion over this much, at least. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

Harriet watched him lifting and filling the kettle, wiping two dusty cups with a matted cloth. She was studying the shape of his head and his hands, the set of his features, wondering if she might see herself. She could only see an elderly man in a green cardigan and oil-stained trousers, no more. Her neck and jaw muscles ached with the tension of her gaze.

‘Do you know why she called you Harriet?’ The abruptness of the question startled her, so that she only shook her head numbly. ‘Rather than Linda or Judy or something that was fashionable then? No?’

He put the cups into a clearing on the table, an old brown earthenware teapot beside them, with a clotted milk bottle. ‘Not very elegant. I don’t get many visitors. Well, she called you Harriet after Harriet Vane.’

She had been expecting a revelation, perhaps an admission that would connect the two of them. ‘Who is she?’

Simon laughed, a little dry noise in his chest. ‘You’re like your mother. She wasn’t a big reader either, but she did like detective stories.’

‘Still does. The shelves at home are full of Agatha Christie.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not really. I don’t read anything much. I work hard, I manage quite a big shop that sells fitness equipment, dancewear, things like that. In fact I own the franchise, so it’s my own business. I’m at the shop all day, and in the evenings there’s paperwork to do. There isn’t much time for anything else.’ The words came spilling out. She wanted to impress him, Harriet realised. Why else should she need to boast about her responsibilities?

‘How modern,’ Simon said. ‘To answer your question, Harriet Vane is a character in the Lord Peter Wimsey books written by Dorothy L. Sayers. I lent them to your mother, long ago, and she fell in love with Lord Peter. Her favourite was The Nine Tailors, although Harriet doesn’t appear in that one.’ There was a pause. ‘I remember her telling me that you would be either Peter or Harriet.’

Deliberately, Harriet said, ‘I never knew that. I think there are all kinds of things I don’t know about.’

Simon poured the tea. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best?’

She was certain that he was sparring with her. He must know why she had come. She took the cup that he held out and drank some of the tea. It had an oily film on the surface, with whitish flecks caught in it. Tell me, she wanted to say, but Simon headed her off.

‘What about Kath Peacock?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to hear what has happened to her. Who is Mr Trott?’

Harriet relaxed a little, some of the stiffness ebbing from her neck and head. ‘I can tell you all about Mum. She’s well. I think she’s very happy. She didn’t want me to come to look for you.’

‘I don’t know why you’ve come to look for me. Go on about your mother.’

‘She married Ken while I was still quite small. He’s an engineer, a nice man. As a hobby he likes buying houses and putting in new bathroom suites and building retaining walls and then selling the house and starting all over again with a different coloured bathroom.’

Simon raised an eyebrow and looked around him, and then their eyes met and they began to laugh. The laughter was spontaneous and easy, as if between friends. It warmed Harriet and it convinced her that, after all, she had been right to come. Simon took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘That gives me a very vivid picture. Carry on, please.’

In the beginning, Harriet just talked about Sunderland Avenue, Ken’s work, Lisa and her boyfriends and Kath in her kitchen. Simon Archer listened and drank his tea. Then, with more confidence, she went further back, to Lisa’s birth and her own furious jealousy, and beyond that to the arrival of Ken to rescue her mother and herself.

‘Not that we needed rescuing,’ Harriet said. ‘Kath and I were fine. I thought we had everything we needed, just the two of us.’

‘Yes.’

Simon’s responses were never more than a word or two. He watched Harriet closely as she talked, but his own expression didn’t change.

‘I didn’t want to share her with anyone. When Ken came, she wasn’t all mine any more. He had a car, and a house with proper plumbing and a garden and all that, but I’d rather just have had Kath to myself, like before.’

And then she told him about before, about the succession of furnished rooms, the times spent waiting for Kath to come home from work, and her unformulated but clear childish understanding that they must be everything to one another because there was no one else.

Simon’s eyes still held hers, shrewd, without any sign of distress. ‘Kath needed more,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question, the verdict of someone who knew her well. Harriet nodded, disappointed in him. She had expected more in return for her story.

Simon smiled, sensing as much. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It’s comforting to rejoin broken ends, or to have them joined for me, since I’m long past involving myself in anything of the kind.’ A small gesture indicated the chaotic kitchen, hinted at the decaying house beyond it, and told her that Simon was indeed past involvement in the common processes of life. She felt both sorry for him and angry at his withdrawal from the world. For the first time since she had arrived she saw him as himself, not illuminated by Kath or herself. As a result her need to know, father or not, released its choking grip on her a little.

She asked, ‘Why are you?’

He chose to ignore the question, but disarmed her. Talking almost to himself, he said, ‘Kath was unusual. She was alive, vibrating with life, like nothing else around.’ This time the gesture took in the extinguished town, as it must have been in the post-war years. Then and now, Harriet thought. ‘I used to love to see her, and listen to her. She lit everything up.’

‘I know. For a long time I haven’t bothered to see her as anyone but my mother. In the kitchen, cooking meals. Ordinary. Then all of a sudden I saw a young girl looking out of her face, when she told me about you. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to meet you. I came from London to find you.’

As soon as the words were out, she knew that they would have been far better left unsaid. That she had come at all was a threat all over again, to have come a long way, with a list of reasons, was too much of an intrusion.

Simon looked at an old kitchen clock, almost obscured on the mantelpiece by sheaves of yellowing bills and papers. Harriet knew that they had been sitting at the table for almost two hours. Stiffly, but deliberately, he stood up.

‘I’m glad you came. I’m pleased to hear that Kath is well, and happy. She deserved that.’ He had asked her in, and she had accepted his hospitality. His courtesy would continue, but it was clear that she couldn’t hope for anything beyond it.

He held out his hand now, and reluctantly she shook it. ‘Perhaps you’ll give her my best wishes,’ Simon added. ‘I don’t think any other greeting would be appropriate, after thirty years.’ If there was a twitch of a smile, it was gone before Harriet could be sure. ‘This way,’ Simon said. ‘I’m sorry the passage is so dark.’

There was the crumbling hallway again, the front door and then the empty street. Simon shook her hand once again, as if she was the well-meaning but unwelcome official he had first taken her for, then closed the door.