As the Crow Flies (54 page)

I
did quite well in other subjects and although I was not much good at games I
took up the cello and was invited to join the school orchestra, but my form
master said none of this was important because I was obviously going to be a
mathematician for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand what he meant at the
time, as I knew Dad had left school at fourteen to run my great-grandfather’s
fruit and vegetable barrow in Whitechapel, and even though Mum had gone to
London University she still had to work at Number 1 Chelsea Terrace to keep Dad
“in the style to which he’d become accustomed.” Or that’s what I used to hear
Mum telling him at breakfast from time to time.

It
must have been around that time that I discovered what the word “bastard”
really meant. We were reading King John out loud in class, so I was able to ask
Mr. Saxon-East, my English master, without drawing too much attention to the
question. One or two of the boys looked round and sniggered, but this time
there were no pointed fingers or whispers, and when I was told the meaning I
remember thinking Neil Watson hadn’t been that far off the mark in the first
place. But of course such an accusation could not be leveled at me, because my
very first memories had involved my mum and dad being together. They had always
been Mr. and Mrs. Trumper.

I
suppose I would have dismissed the whole memory of that early incident if I
hadn’t come down to the kitchen one night for a glass of milk and overheard
Joan Moore talking to Harold the butler.

“Young
Daniel’s doing well at school,” said Harold. “Must have his mother’s brains.”

“True,
but let’s pray that he never finds out the truth about his father.” The words
made me freeze to the stair rail. I continued to listen intently.

“Well,
one thing’s for certain,” continued Harold. “Mrs. Trentham’s never going to
admit the boy’s her grandson, so heaven knows who’ll end up with all that
money.”

“Not.Captain
Guy any longer, that’s for sure,” said Joan. “So perhaps that brat Nigel will
be left the lot.”

After
that the conversation turned to who should lay up for breakfast so I crept back
upstairs to my bedroom; but I didn’t sleep. Although I sat on those steps for
many hours during the next few months, patiently waiting for another vital
piece of information that might fall from the servants’ lips, the subject never
arose between them again.

The
only other occasion I could recall having heard the name “Trentham” had been
some time before, when the Marchioness of Wiltshire, a close friend of my
mother’s, came to tea. I remained in the hall when my mother asked, “Did you go
to Guy’s funeral?”

“Yes,
but it wasn’t well attended by the good parishioners of Ashurst,” the
marchioness assured her. “Those who remembered him well seemed to be treating
the occasion more as if it were a blessed release.”

“Was
Sir Raymond present?”

“No,
he was conspicuous by his absence,” came back the reply. “Mrs. Trentham claimed
he was too old to travel, which only acted as a sad reminder that she still
stands to inherit a fortune in the not too distant future.”

New
facts learned, but they still made little sense.

The
name of “Trentham” arose in my presence once more when I heard Daddy talking to
Colonel Hamilton as he was leaving the house after a private meeting that had
been held in his study. All Daddy said was, “However much we offer Mrs.
Trentham, she’s never going to sell those flats to us.”

The
colonel vigorously nodded his agreement, but all he had to say on the subject
was, “Bloody woman.”

When
both my parents were out of the house, I looked up “Trentham” in the telephone
directory. There was only one listing: Major G. H. Trentham, MP, 19 Chester
Square. I wasn’t any the wiser.

When
in 1939 Trinity College offered me the Newton Mathematics Prize Scholarship I
thought Dad was going to burst, he was so proud. We all drove up to the
university city for the weekend to check my future digs, before strolling round
the college’s cloisters and through Great Court.

The
only cloud on this otherwise unblemished horizon was the thunderous one of Nazi
Germany. Conscription for all those over twenty was being debated in
Parliament, and I couldn’t wait to play my part if Hitler dared to plant as
much as a toe on Polish soil.

My
first year at Cambridge went well, mainly because I was being tutored by Horace
Bradford who, along with his wife, Victoria, was considered to be the pick of
the bunch among a highly talented group of mathematicians who were teaching at
the university at that time. Although Mrs. Bradford was rumored to have won the
Wrangler’s Prize for coming out top of her year, her husband explained that she
was not given the prestigious award, simply because she was a woman. The man
who came second was deemed to have come first, a piece of information that made
my mother puce with anger.

Mrs.
Bradford rejoiced in the fact that my mother had been awarded her degree from
London University in 1921, while Cambridge still refused to acknowledge hers
even existed in 1939.

At
the end of my first year I, like many Trinity undergraduates, applied to join
the army, but my tutor asked me if I would like to work with him and his wife
at the War Office in a new department that would be specializing in
code-breaking.

I
accepted the offer without a second thought, relishing the prospect of spending
my time sitting in a dingy little back room somewhere in Bletchley Park
attempting to break German codes. I felt a little guilty that I was going to be
one of the few people in uniform who was actually enjoying the war. Dad gave me
enough money to buy an old MG, which meant I could get up to London from time
to time to see him and Mum.

Occasionally
I managed to grab an hour for lunch with him over at the Ministry of Food, but
Dad would only eat bread and cheese accompanied by a glass of milk as an
example to the rest of his team. This may have been considered edifying but it
certainly wasn’t nourishing, Mr. Selwyn warned me, adding that my father even
had the minister at it.

“But
not Mr. Churchill?” I suggested.

“He’s
next on his list, I’m told.”

In
1943 I was made up to captain, which was simply the War Office acknowledging
the work we were all doing in our fledgling department. Of course, my father
was delighted but I was sorry that I couldn’t share with my parents our
excitement when we broke the code used by the German U-boat commanders. It
still baffles me to this day why they continued to go on using the four-wheel
enigma key long after we’d made our discovery. The code was a mathematician’s
dream that we finally broke on the back of a menu at Lyons Corner House just
off Piccadilly. The waitress serving at our table described me as a vandal. I
laughed, and remember thinking that I would take the rest of the day off and go
and surprise my mother by letting her see what I looked like in my captain’s
uniform. I thought I looked rather swish, but when she opened the front door to
greet me I was shocked by her response. She stared at me as if she’d seen a
ghost. Although she recovered quickly enough, that first reaction on seeing me
in uniform became just another clue in an ever more complex puzzle, a puzzle
that was never far from the back of my thoughts.

The
next clue came in the bottom line of an obituary, to which I wasn’t paying much
attention until I discovered that a Mrs. Trentham would be coming into a
fortune; not an important clue in itself, until I reread the entry and learned
that she was the daughter of someone called Sir Raymond Hardcastle, a name that
allowed me to fill in several little boxes that went in both directions. But
what puzzled me was there being no mention of a Guy Trentham among the
surviving relatives.

Sometimes
I wish I hadn’t been born with the kind of mind that enjoyed breaking codes and
meddling with mathematical formulas. But somehow “bastard,” “Trentham,” “hospital,”
“Captain Guy,” “flats,” “Sir Raymond,” “that brat Nigel,” “funeral,” and Mother
turning white when she saw me dressed in a captain’s uniform seemed to have
some linear connection. Although I realized I would need even more clues before
logic would lead me to the correct solution.

Then
suddenly I worked out to whom they must have been referring when the
marchioness had come to tea all those years before, and told Mother that she
had just attended Guy’s funeral. It must have been Captain Guy’s burial that
had taken place. But why was that so significant?

The
following Saturday morning I rose at an ungodly hour and traveled down to
Ashurst, the village in which the Marchioness of Wiltshire had once lived not a
coincidence, I concluded. I arrived at the parish church a little after six,
and as I had anticipated, at that hour there was no one to be seen in the
churchyard. I strolled around the graveyard checking the names: Yardleys,
Baxters, Floods, and HarcourtBrownes aplenty. Some of the graves were overgrown
with weeds, others were well cared for and even had fresh flowers at the head.
I paused for a moment at the grave of my godmother’s grandfather. There must
have been over a hundred parishioners buried around the clock tower, but it
didn’t take that long to find the neatly kept Trentham family plot, only a few
yards from the church vestry.

When
I came across the most recent family gravestone I broke out in a cold sweat:

Clay
Trentham, 1~C

1897-1927
after a long illness Sadly missed by all his family And so the mystery had come
literally to a dead end, at the grave of the one man who surely could have
answered all my questions had he still been alive.

When
the war ended I returned to Trinity and was granted an extra year to complete
my degree. Although my father and mother considered the highlight of the year
to be my passing out as senior Wrangler with the offer of a Prize fellowship at
Trinity, I thought Dad’s investiture at Buckingham Palace wasn’t to be sneezed
at.

The
ceremony turned out to be a double delight, because I was also able to witness
my old tutor, Professor Bradford, being knighted for the role he had played in
the field of code-breaking although there was nothing for his wife, my mother
noted. I remember feeling equally outraged on Dr. Bradford’s behalf. Dad may
have played his part in filling the stomachs of the British people, but as
Churchill had stated in the House of Commons, our little team had probably cut
down the length of the war by as much as a year.

We
all met up afterwards for tea at the Ritz, and not unnaturally at some point
during the afternoon the conversation switched to what career I proposed to
follow now the war was over. To my father’s abiding credit he had never once
suggested that I should join him at Trumper’s, especially as I knew how much he
had longed for another son who might eventually take his place. In fact during
the summer vacation I became even more conscious of my good fortune, as Father
seemed to be preoccupied with the business and Mother was unable to hide her
own anxiety about the future of Trumper’s. But whenever I asked if I could help
all she would say was: “Not to worry, it will all work out in the end.”

Once
I had returned to Cambridge, I persuaded myself that should I ever come across
the name “Trentham” again I would no longer allow it to worry me. However,
because the name was never mentioned freely in my presence it continued to nag
away in the back of my mind. My father had always been such an open man that
there was no simple explanation as to why on this one particular subject he
remained so secretive to such an extent, in fact, that I felt I just couldn’t
raise the subject with him myself.

I
might have gone years without bothering to do anything more about the conundrum
if I hadn’t one morning picked up an extension to the phone in the Little
Boltons and heard Tom Arnold, my father’s right-hand man, say, “Well, at least
we can be thankful that you got to Syd Wrexall before Mrs. Trentham.” I
replaced the headset immediately, feeling that I now had to get to the bottom
of the mystery once and for all and what’s more, without my parents finding
out. Why does one always think the worst in these situations? Surely the final
solution would turn out to be something quite innocuous.

Although
I had never met Syd Wrexall I could still remember him as the landlord of the
Musketeer, a pub that had stood proudly on the other end of Chelsea Terrace
until a bomb had landed in the snugbar. During the war my father bought the
freehold and later converted the building into an up-market furnishing
department.

It
didn’t take a Dick Barton to discover that Mr. Wrexall had left London during
the war to become the landlord of a pub in a sleepy village called Hatherton,
hidden away in the county of Cheshire.

I
spent three days working out my strategy for Mr. Wrexall, and only when I was
convinced that I knew all the questions that needed to be asked did I feel
confident enough to make the journey to Hatherton. I had to word every query I
needed answered in such a way that they didn’t appear to be questions; but I
still waited for a further month before I drove up north, by which time I had
grown a beard that was long enough for me to feel confident that Wrexall would
not recognize me. Although I was unaware of having seen him in the past, I
realized that it was possible Wrexall might have come across me as recently as
three or four years ago, and would therefore have known who I was the moment I
walked into his pub. I even purchased a modern pair of glasses to replace my
old specs.