A Murder in Mayfair (3 page)

That is not quite true: my constituency is Milton in South Yorkshire, and my home—the home where I grew up—is in the nearby village of Bardsley, which has become over the years a sort of dormitory suburb of Milton, but which lies in a neighboring constituency. However, I represented the place where I had gone to school, where all my oldest friends were, where I had seen my first films and plays and concerts, where all my early memories were. It is a matter of pride that they chose me.

It was natural that in the train I should think about that, and about my early years. I hadn't been born in Bardsley, but my parents had moved there when I was only a few weeks old. My father had had a job in local government in Milton, in the planning office. He had retired ten years before, and he and my mother had had a happy time pottering, doing charity work, and watching my political ambitions bearing fruit. This last made them very happy. I know neither of them sympathized with my views, but nevertheless the day I was elected to Westminster was the proudest of their lives, and the village joked about the fact that they could only with difficulty be persuaded to talk on any other subject.

Then, two years ago, my mother had been diagnosed as suffering from cancer, which had been mercifully fast in its progress. After her death my father had been a lost man, and had declined mentally so badly that six months before he had had to go into a nursing home. It was there I would go to visit him the next afternoon, tell him my news, and know that he would nod and understand almost nothing. Seventy-five is too young to be in that state. I asked myself if, had I been living at home, the decline would have come more slowly.

I slept in my old bed, in the house I grew up in, then I held a
“surgery” at my party headquarters (half the people seemed to come along not with a problem, but to tell me how delighted they were with the change of government). Then the local party chairman drove me to the Ivies.

I did the best I could for my father, and the Ivies was it, granted that he wanted (in so far as he could formulate a preference) to stay in the area that had been his home for thirty-five years. The street frontage was a modest-sized Victorian home, the windows of which peered through trailing stems of ivy and other climbing creepers. Behind it, at the end of a long, well-stocked garden, was a modern annex, with big windows, better central heating, and every sort of provision for the disabled. I opted for the annex, for comfort rather than style. My father was not in a condition to care for style.

My instinct was always to walk straight through the place to my father's room. There is altogether too much of memento mori about these homes, however well run—or rather, not reminders of the horrors of death, but of the horrors of the approach of death. But I am an MP—and there were plenty of very spry people there, people with a lively interest in the great world around them. People with a vote, who would use it if possible. I'd got to know many of them, and they wanted to stop me, congratulate me, ask what it felt like to be in government, and so on. “I won't keep you,” they all said, as they launched into stories of what it felt like when the election results of 1945 came through, or how they'd once met Harold Wilson. It was half an hour before I could get to my father.

The sun was shining into his room, which was cheerful if inevitably slightly hospital in feel. He was half awake and half asleep, as he is for much of the time.

“Hello . . . Colin,” he said.

He always dredges up my name, eventually. It will be horrible when he finally fails to do so.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Still . . .
there?
”

By now I knew what he wanted to ask me.

“That's right,” I said, sitting down by his bed. “Still MP for Milton. We had an election last week. I got in with a much bigger majority. We're the government now.”

That was too much for him. His eyes glazed over and he just murmured, “Good, good.”

My father's face has always been rather gaunt—and his body, too. I've always thought of him as a rather splendid old Viking leader, though not a ravaging and pillaging one. When I was small he was keen to join in whatever game I wanted to play: he went at it with a will, but he was a little short on fun. He was just, he was dependable, he was undemonstrably loving, but I was always conscious that he was old. Older, at any rate, than other children's fathers. My mother was softer and sweeter, and it wasn't so noticeable with her.

“How's . . . Susan?”

Oddly enough he always remembered Susan's name. I'd told him a year ago that we had split up, but if it registered then it had been eradicated since. He'd liked Susan, and perhaps to him she represented the continuation of the line. Absurd that ordinary people should think in those terms, but they still do.

“Susan's fine, Dad.”

“You haven't . . . ?”

“No, Dad. No wedding plans yet.”

I'd toyed with the idea of lying to him about that, of inventing wedding plans to string him along. But it seemed to strip him of still more of his dignity (he'd been, in his later years, a very dignified old man). And in any case in his mental state he couldn't be said to
worry
about that or anything else—not, anyway, for more than a few seconds.

He nodded regretfully and then seemed to sink back toward
slumber, or at any rate toward that twilight state that is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness. I took his hand, which was lying on the counterpane, and a tiny smile from him registered my having done so.

I stayed there for a long time, his hand in my hand. A lot of my visits were like this—just my being there with him. I could have thought about all my departmental concerns, but oddly enough that day I could think only of the past: of cricket games on the beach at Bridlington, with Dad's splendidly gangling overarm bowling; all of us round the table at one of my mother's Sunday teas; coming home from school to tell them I'd won a scholarship to St. John's College. The light in their eyes was one of the things I could always bank on when I brought them good news of myself.

I was suddenly conscious that my father had opened his eyes. He was looking at me—his eyes bleary still, as they always were now, but in the back of them something of that same light, that irrepressible pride.

“We were so happy when you came,” he said.

Then, after a moment, the old eyes closed again, and I sat there pondering over that word “came.”

I
stayed with my dad for ten minutes, holding his hand, making sure he had left that no-man's-land where he was neither “here” nor “there” and was soundly asleep.

My first thoughts were that I was foolish to make anything at all of my father's words. It was all a matter of generations. To people of his age babies “arrived,” or more rarely “came.” It was, I supposed, a late survival of Victorian propriety. “I had to give up work when my son arrived,” a woman would say. Or “naturally things changed when my daughter came.” It neatly sidestepped all consideration of the messy process of conception and childbirth. Silly, maybe, but not something to put any weight on.

On the other hand I never remembered my father using any such genteelism before, and he used direct words. Babies were “born.” Though on consideration I never remember him or my mother saying anything about my birth—whether it had been easy or difficult, whether they had been frightened at the prospect of such a late first delivery (my mother was forty), whether my father had been in the maternity ward with my mother at the time of the birth (probably not in 1962),
whether there were any amusing or terrifying moments during labor.

Nothing.

That had never struck me as odd before. I had, so to speak, taken myself and my birth for granted. Surely most people do. And the average parent doesn't embarrass a child by stories of how he came into the world. Yet somehow that phrase still had a ring to me of something—what?—something that my father and my mother often discussed together when I was not there. “We were so happy when he came,” I could imagine them saying, and I could imagine too a look of complicity passing between them, as I sometimes saw it do when I had done something that pleased them—got into Cambridge, got the nomination for the Milton seat, got elected in the by-election. And in this case I imagined that look of complicity as meaning: “when he
came.
When he was delivered to us. When someone handed him over to us and our hearts soared with joy because at last we had a baby.”

I was getting fanciful. I had no evidence they ever did anything of the sort. Nevertheless I walked back to my old home in Bardsley, a matter of two miles, and in between greeting people and swapping the odd word about my new eminence I thought about it, about the implications of my vague suspicions if they were right, about what it meant to me—whether in fact it meant anything at all.

When I got home to Connaught Avenue I made myself two monster sandwiches with a tin of corned beef I found in the pantry and sat considering. My first and firmest conclusion was that I didn't give a damn if I was adopted. My dad was my dad. My mother, still vivid in my mind in spite of the two years since her death, was my mother and always would be. And my certainty was not just because no one could wish for better parents, but because they were the ones who had always been
there.

No suddenly discovered natural parent could trump that, or wipe out the love and gratitude it aroused in me.

And if that natural parent turned out to be some kind of wrong-un (was that what the postcard had implied?) it wouldn't faze me one iota. I didn't believe in “bad blood.” Still, on consideration, over a cup of strong tea, I had to admit it would interest me no end.

I shook myself. I was jumping the gun with a vengeance—jumping several guns, in fact. I decided I would go and have a talk with George Eakin, my father's best friend—the only friend he had who was still alive. It was George who had alerted me to my father's increasing vagueness and inability to cope, George who had made sure he was connected to my father by an accessible bell which could summon him at any time. I would have paid him a visit in any case, but the conversation would probably have taken a different turn if I hadn't been preoccupied with the postcard and its stark question.

George lived just around the corner, coping well on his own after ten years of widowerhood. The first years, I knew, had been rocky, because he had been born into, and accepted, a traditional working-class pattern of the man as breadwinner and the woman as homemaker. But George was nothing if not capable, and he solved problems of cooking, washing, and cleaning for himself with the same clear-eyed practicality as he had brought to problems at the mine where he'd worked. When he saw me on the doorstep his eyes lit up with pleasure, though not surprise.

“Colin! Thought you might come round. Have you got time for a cup of tea, lad?”

“I'm relying on you for one.”

“Don't give me that. Your mother wasn't so daft that she brought you up to be helpless.”

He was walking, slowly but firmly, down the hall to the
kitchen. I remembered George throughout my childhood as a well-set-up man: he'd made his way up the local ladder from working at the pit face to an administrative job in the mining industry, and at weekends he was a keen walker and an enthusiastic cricketer—something of a slogger, but a match-winner at his best. Now his frame had shrunk, but his spirit was still determined. He had made it to middle-class respectability, but he had never lost his humanity or his enthusiasm for experience. He was as traveled as any workingman of his generation, and he'd failed only by a whisker on his one attempt to get into Parliament, at the 1966 election.

“Won't take a minute,” he said, bustling round the square, family-sized kitchen. “Got a few biscuits here. Chocolate you like, don't you? Pretty poor celebration, but I don't keep whiskey in the house now I'm not allowed it. How's your dad?”

“Pretty much the same. All there is to hope now is that it doesn't go on too long.”

“Aye,” he said ruminatively, his sharp eye on me. “That's a hard thing to have to say.”

“It's wanting what's best for him, and what he would want for himself. He would hate not being in control, if he could realize it.”

“He would. And 'appen he does realize it, now and then, when the haze clears a bit. We both know your dad, don't we, Colin? But what I was meaning was that it's a hard thing for you. 'Specially at this time.”

“It is.” I nodded.

“But I'm forgetting my manners. I ought to have congratulated you properly.” He turned and shook my hand, making it something heartfelt rather than absurd, which it could have been. “I didn't write because writing's hard these days, and I knew you'd be round as soon as you could. Eh, lad, it's a right good opportunity for you, though, isn't it?”

“It is, George. I couldn't ask for better.”

“And getting opportunities for folk who've never had even the opportunities we had, which wasn't all that much. Tell me about how it feels to be a minister, Colin. And tell me what you're planning on doing.”

Those two questions were typical of George: the human side and the political side—they existed on a twin track in his mind. The conversation lasted us into the living room and through the first cup and several biscuits.

“Have you been to see Dad?” I asked, in a pause.

“Oh aye. Went a week ago—our Ray took me and waited. Always fond of your dad, was Ray. I told your father about you getting into the government, but he couldn't take it in—you know how it is.”

“I know. I tried to tell him too, but it didn't get through. He'd have been so chuffed!”

“He would. He and your mum were so proud of you always. Every other step has meant so much to them, and now this last, the best one of all comes along and your mother's gone and your dad's beyond rejoicing.
That
must be hard, too.”