Dying Flames (13 page)

“Terry Telford. He said he already knew who his natural father was, and it wasn't me.”

There was a silence. Sergeant Relf looked at him, eyes narrowed.

“Confusing for you, sir.”

“Very.”

“Upsetting? Would you have liked to be the father?”

“I'm a bit muddled on that matter. Think it over, Sergeant. You have a brief adolescent fling before your life has really started. Then twenty-five years later you find that the fling produced a son. Can you really care about him as you might do if you had known about him all along? I'm not sure that I can.”

“Was Mrs. Webster lying, or genuinely confused, do you think?”

“Sergeant, I only know one thing about Peggy: that you can never be sure about anything where she is concerned, and especially anything she tells you.”

“As I said, confusing for you, sir. Well, sir, I'm definitely interested, but I'm not sure if I'm interested as a policeman or as a man. If you'll leave us your details, I'll keep you informed if anything turns up. I'll treat you as temporary guardian of the children, who would in any case have to be informed.”

“You say if anything turns up. That implies inactivity on your part.”

“Not inactivity, though I can't see that the facts warrant very much zeal on our part. I'll do what I can. Shift the words around a bit: I'll keep you in touch if I turn up anything.”

And with that Graham had to be content.

Graham Broadbent was in a dream.

Not a sleeping dream, but a living, walking, seeing dream. He had taken Christa and Adam to see Kath Moores, whom they both liked. He left them in Bidford and then drove on to Upper Melrose. To the old Saxon church beloved of architectural historians where he had first met, properly met, Peggy Somers, and to the churchyard where they had first made love, and perhaps made Terry Telford. Back to the beginnings of that brief, unremarkable affair that seemed, like so many things unremarkable in themselves, to have had such strange and long-lasting consequences.

He had already been round the church, all those years ago, noting all the features that the books had told him of, and all the changes that the more sophisticated medieval builders had made centuries after it was built. Sometimes he made jottings in a little architectural notebook that he kept with him on his excursions. They had had special hours at school with the headmaster—hours that had ranged over many subjects but often came back to English architecture, one of the head's pet subjects, and the one closest to his heart.

Eventually, in that summer of 1979, Graham had gone out into the sunlight, and that was when he saw Peggy. They had swapped words often, particularly in the wings during that first scene of
St. Joan,
and he had thought how different, how wonderful, how unattainable she was. Now here he was in the churchyard, and here she was, sitting in the early evening light on a tombstone toward the farther edge of the churchyard: Peggy Somers, the star of the school play, alone with him.

Twenty-five years later, walking round the churchyard and looking for
that
tombstone, Graham wondered about that meeting. It had too much of the coincidence about it—the sort of thing that most readers hate in novels. It would have been easier to accept, in a work of fiction, if Peggy had rung his home and been told by his mother where he had gone. But their acquaintanceship was not like that. She had been friendly in their backstage encounters, but she had not shown the slightest interest in him—not
that
way. And there were plenty in whom she had shown that sort of interest. She would never have rung his home. Two weeks after the performances of the play she would probably have been hard put to it to remember his name.

Finding the grave was not particularly difficult. The mental picture he had retained all those years was not too far from the reality, and in any case there were not many graves that had the shape and appearance of a tomb. It was the grave of Jonas Braithwaite, born June 14, 1827, died November 3, 1893. And around the square structure the names of his wife, Mary Ann, and their children, those who had died young and those who had grown up to live in what Graham imagined would have been the formidable shadow of their father.

Beside this grave, in the gathering twilight, they had made love.

Before that they had made the obligatory tour of the church itself. Graham pointing out interesting features to Peggy, she bored, hardly able to throw her eyes briefly in the right direction. When Graham had said that the church was centuries older than Saint Joan herself, Peggy had as near as dammit shrugged. Saint Joan was in the past.

They had gone out again, back to the tombstone. Both knew that at dusk someone would have to come and lock up the church. When they saw a man with an officious walk approaching from the village, they had both, with unspoken unanimity, ducked down behind the tomb. They heard the door of the church open, imagined the inspection of the interior, then the door being locked.

“Hurry up, you silly old bugger,” said Peggy, which shocked Graham, but gave him certainty about what was to occur next.

They peeped round the corner of the tomb and saw him emerge into the sunlight. They listened to his footsteps down the gravel path that bisected the churchyard, then they heard the clink of the lych-gate. Then Graham's arm was around Peggy, she was looking up at the darkening sky, and they made love, and it was so much better, happier, more revelatory than it had been before for him that Graham almost fainted with happiness.

He realized at once that she was much more experienced than him.

Sitting now on the tombstone, Graham wondered anew at the coincidence of their finding each other in such a place purely by chance. Had she come to Upper Melrose to meet up with a girlfriend (or boyfriend, come to that) and found the friend had gone on holiday, or away for the day? Had she got a holiday job in the village and stayed on after the working day was over? That seemed unlikely. Even today, with attractive small villages mostly tea-shopped out of existence, Upper Melrose gave the appearance of having few jobs to offer even to residents. Saxon churches don't pull in the multitudes.

He wondered whether he had asked her at the time how she had come to be there. If so, he couldn't remember her answer. He rather thought he had merely accepted her presence as a glorious gift from heaven to mark the end of his adolescence. He wondered if he would ever have the chance now to ask her. If he did, he could imagine her response: a shrug, and “Good heavens, how could I remember
that
?” Or perhaps a lie about a fabulously rich and handsome lord of the manor whom she had been visiting.

Around eight they went into the village. Peggy phoned her mother and said she'd been with her friend Katy and had missed the bus, and now she'd have to get the last one.

“You know me. Never have any idea of time,” she said, and Graham got the idea this was an excuse used frequently with easily bamboozled parents. Graham phoned his parents and just said he'd missed the bus. His parents didn't need to be lied to. He was a steady, responsible lad and they trusted him.

Then they went to the one dreary pub, the Grey Heifer, where they had a half of bitter and a shandy (Graham reveling in the new freedom of pub visiting, Peggy looking round at the smoky, brown-painted bar with contempt), and then they went back to the graveyard and the tomb of Jonas Braithwaite and made love again.

If only he could remember what they had talked about. Because they talked, in the intervals between the glorious sex. Probably they had talked about their parents, their futures, even their politics, if Peggy had had any (Graham had canvassed for the Liberals in the last general election). Whatever it was, it had been borne away on the breezes of memory. Only their comings-together remained.

And that had been it, really—or almost. There was the bus ride home, and Graham did remember what they had talked about during its circuitous route to Bidford and Colchester. It had been the locals in the pub they'd just been in. Grim, elderly men on their own, swapping monosyllables, two young men with slightly pathetic swaggers, and two airmen from the nearby American base, drinking silently, probably used to dreary bars. Peggy had observed all of them and now took them off, endowing them with exaggerated Essex dialect, or an impossible American drawl, and putting preposterously gnomic utterances into their mouths. Graham thought she was wonderful.

“Is yer mum's raspberries roypened yit?” she would ask. Or: “The badgers be hot as billy goats this summer. 'Twill be a sad harvest.” Graham couldn't wait to see her again.

They did meet again, three more times. Twice in the Colchester Castle Park, once on the deserted Grammar School sports field, where Graham was more active than ever he had been on sports afternoons. Peggy never asked him home or even floated the possibility. In fact she answered his phone calls with the offhand efficiency of a doctor's receptionist, all but saying, “I think I could fit you in on Thursday afternoon.” It didn't act as a passion killer, but once the affair was over, it left a slight feeling of resentment.

It finished with Peggy saying she was busy for the next fortnight and she'd give him a call. She never did, and he never rang her. Over was over, and there never was an affair more over than theirs. He was very conscious that it had fizzled out rather than exploded, and he felt ashamed of the fact.

During what remained of the summer Graham rethought his decision not to go to university. He did that mainly because he couldn't think of what else to do. He secured a late place at London University, and that was his next three years decided. He was a good but not outstanding student, and his main impact was as editor of the student newspaper, which he transformed into something that the students wanted to read and actually enjoyed. By the time he went out into the great world he knew that what he wanted was varied experience, and why he wanted it was to transform it into fiction. He went into a management training program, had a year with Sainsbury's, another year with Christian Aid in Mali, and all sorts of little bits and pieces after that. By 1987, when his first novel was published, he had a fine stack of memories—places, people, situations, to be molded to his purposes.

He sometimes wondered whether his affair with Peggy had been more fateful than it had seemed at first. Had it set a pattern for his emotional life thereafter: short, sharp affairs with minimal emotional involvement? Only he did not see the one with Peggy as having been cold and distant. He had carried the image of Peggy with him for years, and the memory of her passion and her laughter came back at disconcerting moments. That was why as soon as Christa had mentioned the name in his hotel room in Colchester, he had been brought up short.

He sighed and wandered slowly out of the churchyard. The village pub was now called The Pink Cockatoo and proclaimed a varied bar menu. He ordered a pint of bitter and looked down the sandwich list, but when he tried to order, he was told that they didn't serve sandwiches on a Sunday. What the various locals in pastel-colored casuals were eating was “seared sea bass with Duchesse potatoes and chanterelles” or “pigeon breasts in anisette sauce with mange-tout and parsnip mash.” He'd almost have preferred the brown paint and the threatening-looking locals. He downed his pint and left.

It was one week before that the two boys had made their way from Hurst Green in Brightlingsea, down a narrow street on the far end of the small seaside town, then down a smelly lane and onto the mudflats where they played when they were bored or in disgrace at home. It was Sunday afternoon, and a watery sun was in the sky. Tim was the leader—not hyperactive, but active enough, his parents thought. Wayne was the follower and thinker.

Once they were down on the mudflats, they were in their element, jumping from one cake of mud, with its rough marine vegetation, to the next one, then farther and farther out toward the river. On their way they pushed each other over, paddled in the little streams, and shouted vaguely rude remarks at the people with their dogs who were doing a Sunday walk from the hard. It had been a dry couple of weeks, and the river had diminished to hardly more than a trickle. Some old boats were caught in a permanent dry or mud dock. Farther away there were the wrecks of small craft and rowing boats that had been abandoned by their owners long ago.

These boats were the cherished goals of Tim and Wayne when the river was low enough for them to attain them without getting too wet. Once over the side they would play around in them, fantasizing as pirates, mutineers, or boy adventurers on the high seas. Now the receding line of the river left only little rivulets and puddles among the flats and gave them effective leave to roam over the whole area, with protests only from the seagulls, whose all-purpose indignation was too well-known to frighten the boys.

Clouds were flickering, the light becoming more ambiguous, when they gained a decaying motorboat long since wrecked, with its structure becoming more and more exposed to weather and to whatever passing scrutiny there was. Tim jumped onto the prow and put out his arm to help Wayne up too. Wayne was smaller, and sharper.

“Tim!”

Tim caught the note in Wayne's voice. He saw nothing, but swung his head round in the direction of Wayne's finger.

“Fookinell,” Tim said. It was his father's ultimate expression of shock or disgust. Then he said, “It's a woman.”

“Course it's a woman,” whispered Wayne. “She's wearing a petticoat…. Is she dead?”

“She's dead all right,” said Tim, with pretended confidence. “Can you see her breathing? Come on—we've gotta get home. Keep quiet about this or we'll be in trouble.”

But it wasn't as simple as that. They sped back home, and Wayne was put in a bath and given dry towels while Tim's parents let him dry out and then hacked the mud off him.

“Tim's very quiet,” said his mother to his father.

“Makes a nice change,” said his dad.

But he was very quiet on Monday too, and at night his father heard him cry out in his sleep. On Tuesday his parents were going up to bed and heard him sobbing in his room, but the next day he said there was nothing wrong. It was only on Thursday that he said to his mother:

“We saw a body.”

She stopped what she was doing.

“What do you mean, a body?”

“It was a woman. In a boat down by the river. We thought she was dead.”

“Oh, darling, you've got it wrong. She must have been sleeping. You know all sorts get on the flats. Probably been drinking. Just put it out of your mind.”

“I don't like thinking of her lying out there.”

Soon both parents realized that he hadn't and couldn't put it out of his mind. By the next Sunday his mother said to his father, “You'd better go and take a look. Do it today. It'll be nothing, and it'll put his mind at rest.”

“But Manchester United's playing Chelsea this afternoon.”

“Go.
Go now. I'll hold up the dinner.”

So, led by Tim, his father took the path down by the sewage stream, then out onto the mud—still dry and overgrown—and out to the skeletal wooden wreckage of the small boat. This time it was Tim who pointed.

“F—” began his father, then thought better of it.

He swallowed, then decided what to do. He turned, put his arms around the boy's shoulders, and hastened back across the mud. There was to be no Sunday dinner that day till the roast pork was well dried out and all appetites were gone. As a rule the police presence in Brightlingsea was, in the locals' opinion, as useless as an answer phone, but after a frustrating series of transfers to one after another low-level policemen, a promise was made that a car would be sent. They picked up Tim's father, and he took them down to the river and pointed over the flats to the boat.

He was talking to them for the rest of the day, and from his window as he went to bed, he could see lights on the flats, a canvas arrangement, and the shadowy shapes of the SOCO men and women going about their grisly business.

 

Graham was beginning to wonder whether the children's grandmother had been as good as her word about telling her son Harry where Adam and Christa were, when he rang him.

“You don't know me. I'm Harry Webster. I was married to—”

“Peggy, of course. You're Adam's father.”

“Yes. My mother tells me you're looking after the children, and doing it very well. I'm enormously grateful.”

“I'm not sure I'm doing it well. I have no experience, and I'm sure to be making mistakes. But I'm doing what I can. Christa is not a child anymore, by the way.”

“No, of course not. I just meant Peggy's children…. I gather that she's taken off.”

“Yes. That's what we've assumed. I'm beginning to think it could be more serious than that.”

“I see…. Things are very difficult at this end.”

The words came out hangdog and embarrassed. Graham didn't take to the man.

“So I gather,” he said. “Would there be any less objection from your wife to your seeing Adam if she knew that Peggy's not in the picture at the moment?”

“Maybe…Just a little. But that's not the major objection. Shirley's not unreasonable, but we have our own family now. You can see she wouldn't want to be landed—”

“And you can see that Adam is unhappy at being regarded as a burden to be avoided or shunted off as quickly as possible.”

“Oh, I didn't mean—”

“Particularly as his mother generally had interests more pressing than her children.”

“Oh, she did. Peggy was a quite awful mother sometimes.” Graham left a silence. Some inklings of Adam's difficulties during his growing-up period seemed to dawn on Harry.

“I'm fairly free tomorrow.”

The voice sounded less than heroic, and even less than fully decided. But Graham seized on it.

“When could you come down? I'd like to have a talk with you myself.”

“Early afternoon? I could have a bit of time with Adam then, when he finishes school. I can tell Shirley I'm kept late.”

So Graham gave his usual direction—“three down from the general stores”—and rang off.

He was unsure what to expect from Harry Webster, but he certainly didn't anticipate a strong mind. Adam's force and obstinacy probably came from his Webster grandmother. When he told the boy to come straight home, Adam's face first lit up, but only for a second. Then the lowering expression that had recently disappeared from his repertory of looks took its place.

Harry rang the doorbell at ten past two on Tuesday, shook hands genially, and accepted Graham's offer of a cup of coffee. He had obviously had a pub lunch, along with the maximum allowed quantity of beer. He was slim, tallish, and naturally good-humored, but the lack of backbone showed in ineffectual gestures and an inclination to shy away from awkward questions as soon as they came up. Shirley obviously had an easy victim.

“I know of you, of course,” he said, sitting down with his cup. He didn't seem to mean primarily Graham's reputation as a novelist.

“Peggy told you I was Christa's father, I suppose?”

“Well, yes.”

“I'm not. Peggy's and my brief affair—if it's not dignifying it to call it an affair—was six years earlier.”

“But why did she?…Oh, I suppose she put that around because you're quite well known. She had to use and broadcast the fact that you and she had…been together.”

“That's right. Or rather that's what I guess. She was cagey on the subject when I talked to her recently. I think we both know Peggy well enough to take everything she says with a pinch of salt.”

“I suppose we do. And the children do too. They're under no illusions.”

“No. But I feel very sorry for them. It is confusing to have a mother who habitually fantasizes or tells downright lies.”

“Yes, I imagine it is. But my mother says they're taking her absence very well.”

“So far. But though they're skeptical about Peggy, I don't sense any downright hostility. So they're bound to be worried underneath.”

“I'm sure they are. Any idea who she's gone off with?”

“I've been out of her life for twenty-five years. I wondered if you might have more ideas.”

Harry thought about this, wondering whether to shy off and deny all knowledge. But by and by he decided it would be easier to face up to the question.

“I suppose she could have met up with anyone from her past life.”

“Or her present. But you'll know most about her past.”

“Yes.” His mind was searching in that past for names. “She slept now and then with Michael whatsit from the players, who was her favorite director. Oh, you know about that. There was a Romford businessman called…called Meyer, I think. There was the odd besotted fan, and a boy much younger than herself who played for Romford United…. I'm not being much help, am I?”

“I can't say at this stage. I'd like to hear about someone who really stood out. Someone whose affair with her was something special, for her or for him, or both.”

“Was there such a person? If so, I never heard of him. It was all brief flings, one-night stands or at most one-month ones. Nothing you could call serious.”

Graham was struck again by a resemblance to his own sex life.

“I did wonder about Michael Halliburton.”

“That's the name!” said Harry. “He was just one of two or three people in the RAPs who were directors. He was her favorite. But she probably slept with the other two as well. The RAPs haven't caught up yet with women directors.”

“I wondered about that. I thought it might be like Ingrid Bergman always sleeping with her leading man of the moment—only with directors instead. But then I wondered if Michael Halliburton could be Christa's father.”

Harry Webster considered this.

“It would tie up with one thing.”

“What's that?”

“She never received any maintenance for Christa.”

Graham thought for a moment.

“Until she got it out of you.”

“That's right. You could say I was a fool to adopt her—”

“I expect your wife says exactly that.”

“Over and over, and even though I've ceased having to pay. I liked Christa, thought she had talent. But if it was Michael, slapping a maintenance order on him might have soured the relationship, and Peggy relied on him for good parts, and for the sort of coaching and bullying that made her successful in them.”

“And Vesta could have taken the affair a lot more seriously than she pretends to.”

But Harry was dubious about that.

“Maybe. But I've never seen any sign of that. She works with Peggy in the shop, and surely it would have come out. I think it's a genuinely open marriage. As ours was.”

“On principle?”

“No, in practice. When Peggy started playing away, I felt I could do the same. It was messy, but it worked for a while.”

“But you had to be mother and father to the children, I would guess.”

“Something like that. I suppose Peggy cared about them both, in her way. But she never cared
for
them, never felt responsible for them.”

“And you can't take responsibility for Adam now.”

It was not a criticism, just a statement. An expression passed over Harry's face.

“No way. No chance at all.” He swallowed. “I love my wife. Don't get me wrong. But it wouldn't be fair on Adam. She'd make his life hell.”

“You have children, you and Shirley, don't you?”

“Oh, yes. But they're still young. They'll be kept on a tight rein. That's Shirley's way. Adam never has been. It simply couldn't work.”

They were interrupted by a key in the front door, and its opening. Adam rushed through into the front room.

“Dad!”

Harry had stood up. He raised his arms and Adam ran into them. Graham was surprised to note that Adam was as tall as his father. As he got up to go into the kitchen and leave them alone, he got a glimpse of the shot so dear to producers of soap operas: the shot of an embrace, one face seen above the other figure's shoulder, and the face showing doubt, or hatred, or obsession—some emotion that we know the other figure isn't aware of and doesn't share. The expression on Adam's face was doubt and disillusion. He was experiencing the lack of warmth in the embrace.