September Song (4 page)

I found myself dawdling, as the edge of Wanstead Flats came into sight and the prospect of meeting a very sick Daff came closer. I stopped to watch a couple of placid cows dropping some impressive pats on one of the football pitches. The players would be cursing the laws that still allowed grazing on common land. Not that the cows would care: the cricket season was over, so the chances of being struck a resounding blow by one of those nasty hard red balls had diminished to nothing.

I checked the address, adjusted my tie and stepped up to Daff's dark-blue front door, coughed nervously, seized the black lion's-paw knocker and beat a little tattoo on the plate beneath.

Les had said that Daphne's older sister, Betty, was staying with her, so I was taken by surprise when Daphne herself opened the door, and I stood there in silence for a few seconds.

‘Come on in, you silly bugger,' Daphne said. ‘It's not catching, as far as I know.' She clocked the sad bunch of flowers – the last one there – I'd hurriedly picked out of the vendor's bucket at Leyton tube station and smiled. ‘They for me?' she said.

I nodded, and she took them from me as we entered the little hallway.

‘Betty,' she called, ‘can you find another vase, love?'

She pushed me into the front room and then disappeared with the flowers. I heard her coughing harshly in the back of the house.

She hardly needed my few wilted blooms. The room looked like Kew Gardens at the height of summer. Six white roses in a crystal vase were flanked by yellow chrysanthemums on the mantelpiece, and there was a potted geranium on the window sill, still trailing red flowers.

Daphne came in carrying an earthenware jug with my drooping dahlias and freesia thrust in it. She plonked it down on the sideboard, next to the small alabaster child with its arm wrapped around a large Alsatian dog, and then slumped wearily on to the sofa, pulling a shawl around her shoulders.

‘Sit down, you great useless lump,' she said.

I perched myself on one of the hard, wooden chairs and coughed nervously. ‘How are you, Daff?' I said.

‘Apart from dying, you mean?' she said. ‘Very tired, Tony. Very, very tired.'

I cleared my throat again. ‘It's a bit of a shock, Daff,' I said. ‘Is there really nothing they can do?'

She harrumphed. ‘It's too late,' she said. ‘Already spread. Liver. And brain, probably. They think. Still, they give me happy pills for the pain. At least I can stay at home for the moment.'

‘I'm really sorry, Daff,' I said.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘To tell you the truth, I never fancied growing old, anyway. Mind you, I did think I might have a few more years to get on Les's wick.'

‘He's really upset,' I said.

‘Crocodile tears,' she said. ‘He can't wait for me to drop off me perch.'

‘I don't think that's true,' I said.

She flapped her hand at me dismissively. ‘Enough about Les,' she said. ‘I'll be dropping off to sleep soon, so let's talk about why you're here.'

‘Les said you wanted to ask me something,' I said. ‘A favour.'

She leaned forward, and I suddenly saw how thin and tired she'd become. I tried to think how long it had been since I'd seen her. It was only six or seven weeks.

‘Yeah,' she said, ‘and I want you to promise that you won't breathe a word of this to Les.'

‘I'll try,' I said, ‘but you know he's going to ask.'

‘Yes he is, and he can be very persuasive. So I want your promise.'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘I promise.'

‘And make sure you keep it. Otherwise I'll come back to haunt you.'

‘Scout's honour,' I said, putting both hands up in a Churchillian victory salute.

She sighed and leaned back. ‘All right, then.' She paused and sighed again. She looked dreamily over my shoulder, out of the window, at Wanstead Flats, but she was really staring into the past.

And then she told me her story.

It was a bleak little tale and not an uncommon one. If the telling hadn't been quite as flat and matter of fact, it would have made a nice old-fashioned melodrama. Young girl, who is poor but honest, meets charming gent who, after he's had his wicked way, turns into moustache-twirling villain and leaves her in the lurch and, of course, in the family way. As Daff told it, she might have been young and poor, but she was far from honest, and the charming gent, the son of the owner of the laundry she worked in, was neither all that charming nor much of a gent. The baby, though, was real enough. Born in July 1928, named after her grandmother, Eugenia Higgins, and dumped without any ceremony into an orphanage somewhere. Daff thought it might have been run by a local convent. I could only think of one.

‘How—' I started.

‘I know what you're going to say, Tony. How could I? Well, I didn't have much to do with it. It was a hard pregnancy, a harder birth – in fact that was the reason Les and I never had children – and I was very ill and weak and in no state to stop it.'

‘Actually,' I said, ‘I sort of understand that. What I was really wondering was how you could call her Eugenia.'

She gave me a good, old-fashioned, Daphne look and sniffed dismissively. ‘That wasn't up to me either,' she said. ‘Mum took care of everything: registering the birth and all that. I hardly saw the little mite.' She paused. ‘I'm not much of a one for sentiment, Tony, but I've always wondered what happened to her. And I'd like to say sorry for not looking after her.' She paused again. ‘Do you think you can find her for me? Before I  . . .'

‘I can try, Daff,' I said. ‘I can try.'

She sighed and leaned back on the sofa. She looked exhausted. The bags under her eyes were green. ‘Thanks, Tony,' she said. ‘What will you tell Les?'

I shrugged. ‘A little bit of the truth,' I said.

She sat up again, looking anxious.

‘That I'm looking for a long-lost relative. He doesn't have to know any details. If he presses, I'll tell him it's a cousin or something.'

‘That'll do,' she said and fell back again. ‘Now bugger off, before I fall asleep on you.'

Les hadn't really done justice to the Barolo at lunch, which meant that I had, so I decided to walk from Daff's back to the Antelope to clear my head a bit. It also meant I could drop in at the Osborne Arms on the way and have a chat to someone.

The Osborne is a big, old barn of a boozer on the corner of Crescent Road and Church Road, a hundred yards or so from where my parents' house had stood. The bomb that took them must have rattled a few windows and smashed a few glasses there. It's not a particularly notorious pub or anything. Nobby Clarke, the local bookie, hangs out there with a few other local rascals, but the real villains drink a little further west, up Whitechapel way.

It was just after six when I pushed open the big, old green door and went into the almost empty bar. Nobby was already sitting in a dark corner, a glass of whisky in front of him, reading the
Evening News
. He'd carefully folded it over and wasn't so much reading it as annotating the sports pages with the stub of a blunt pencil, which he occasionally licked. He looked up when I came in and nodded, but we hardly knew each other and I had never been a client. His gold pinkie ring glinted, his bronze sharkskin suit gleamed in the gloom, and his bald, pink head reflected the dull yellow electric light.

I stood at the long wooden counter, by the glass partition that separated the bar from the Ladies' Snug, and peered around it. When Derek, the morose landlord, came over, I ordered a whisky and a bottle of Mackeson. He disappeared behind the jars of arrowroot biscuits and pickled eggs. When he reappeared with the drinks, I told him the Mackeson was for Mrs Norton in the Snug. He nodded and took it to her.

‘She says thanks,' he said, slowly walking my ten-bob note to the old wooden till. I remembered that he'd taken a machine-gun bullet in the knee in Sicily in 1944. Standing up behind a bar, serving drinks for a living, with a gammy leg must have given him cause enough to be miserable. I thanked my lucky stars, again, that I'd come out of the war pretty much unscathed. I lifted my glass to the memory of some of those who hadn't.

Derek handed me my change just as Mrs Norton's big, round, florid face peeped around the glass from the Snug.

‘Tony Gérard,' she said. ‘Long time no see.'

‘It can't be that long,' I said. ‘How are you keeping?'

Mrs Norton moved into number five Crescent Road when I was about ten. Her little yard backed on to our garden. Come to think of it, her back windows must have gone in the blast too. After her initial hesitation about having foreign neighbours, Grand-père's theatrical Gallic charm and generosity in the pub had won her over. Papa had been the really good neighbour, though, decorating her house and dealing with the regular infestations of mice from the rag and bone shop (my mother called the owners
les chiffonniers
) next door to her. Mama had remained cool, but even I'd run errands for her to the local shops.

‘Mustn't grumble,' she said. ‘The legs are playing up, but that's nothing new.' She paused to take a swig of thick, black stout. ‘What brings you down here? You drink at the Antelope, don't you?'

‘Not always,' I said. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to pop by and see you.'

‘Really?' she said. ‘What d'you want?'

‘Must I be after something?' I said.

‘You usually are,' she said and sniffed.

I sipped a little whisky. I don't know why I order it. I like it no more than I like beer. But it does at least have the virtue of coming in considerably smaller measures, and it isn't so unusual, or effeminate, as to draw unpleasant and unwelcome attention.

‘Before you moved into Crescent Road,' I said, ‘you lived in Beaumont Road, didn't you?'

She nodded. ‘What's that got to do with the price of fish?' she said.

‘I just wondered if you happened to know the Bakers back then,' I said.

‘Bert and Mavis Baker?' she said.

‘Daughter called Daphne,' I said.

‘Three daughters. And a boy. Lived next door,' she said. ‘Nice family. Good neighbours. Decent people, not common or nothing, but one of the girls – I think it was young Daphne – got into a spot of trouble, I remember.'

‘Really?' I said.

‘Yeah, she got in the family way and wasn't wed. Poor Mavis was at her wits' end.'

‘What happened?'

She swigged some more stout. ‘Oh, the usual,' she said. ‘The baby was put out for adoption. As a matter of fact, I seem to recall that they handed the poor thing into that convent place over the road there. You know, the one up by the school: run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. At least it wasn't to anything to do with the Immaculate Conception.' She gave a little shriek of laughter. ‘Wouldn't have been appropriate in this case, would it?'

I smiled politely at her slightly risqué joke.

She paused. ‘Someone told me the grandparents – the other ones – took the little mite.'

‘Oh?' I said. ‘Who were they?'

‘I don't know. Someone said it was that big scrap-metal merchant. You know, the one lived up Grove Green Road. He had an interest in the laundry the girl worked in. They said it was one of his sons had his wicked way with her. Though, from what I heard, she was no better than she ought to be.'

I did know who she meant and found myself thinking about the Mountjoys for the second time that day.

‘How's Albert, by the way?' I said.

‘Don't go changing the subject by asking after my useless son. What do you want to know about the Bakers for?'

‘Oh, no reason,' I said. ‘Just happened to hear someone mention them.'

She harrumphed. ‘Well, good to see you,' she said, ‘and thanks for the drink, but I can't stand up here much longer. Not with my legs. I've gotta go and sit down.'

And she pulled her head back, like a tortoise, and I watched her shadowy, bulky figure, distorted by the dimpled glass, heavily resume her seat.

Behind me, the door banged open and four men came striding in. They saw Nobby and made their way over to him.

I recognized the young lout from Vic's and turned away as he thrust his betting slip out and Nobby wearily reached into his pigskin satchel for the money to pay him his winnings.

I reluctantly swallowed down my whisky, thinking that it might be better if English pubs served it in the tumblers that French cafés used for red wine, rather than in the little bowls with stems they used, and carefully placed the glass on the bar. I nodded a farewell to Derek, who was completely engrossed in counting the pickled eggs in the jar in front of him and clearly unaware of the illegal transaction taking place on his premises, and headed for the door.

The kid stepped back from Nobby's table at just the same moment and moved in front of me, a surprisingly large number of soiled pound notes clutched in one hand.

‘Hello, again,' he said and smirked.

I nodded and made to step past him.

He moved in the same direction, blocking me again. I stood still.

‘I been asking about you,' he said. ‘You're the frog, ain't you?'

‘No,' I said, ‘you've been misinformed.'

His three companions had drifted away from Nobby's table, towards the bar. He looked across at them, his tongue flicking quickly across his thin lips. He really did look a lot like Dave Mountjoy.

‘If you'll excuse me,' I said, indicating the door, ‘I have somewhere to go.'

‘Do you?' he said, looking down at my feet.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘and I'm going to be late.'

‘I don't want to see you in here again,' he said.

‘You probably won't,' I said. ‘I don't often drink here.'

‘You'd better not,' he said.