Dying Flames (17 page)

Terry's eyebrows rose. “I hadn't thought of that. But it does sound very like Peggy.”

“She had no private, real self. But looking at it the other way: didn't you talk about her with your father?”

“Not much. At one point, after we'd been discussing what my parents had been doing while they were in America, Ken said, out of the blue, ‘I thought Peggy brought you up herself.' That was when I realized she'd put her real name on the letter. So I said no, she'd given me up for adoption, and I was glad she had, because I had wonderful parents. That was true, but I suppose I also said it to assuage my conscience a little.”

“You felt you were going against their wishes in seeking out your dad, is that it?”

“Something like that. Though I'm going to have to do that more and more as I start being myself. Being myself and not just their son. Anyway, when I'd told Ken what had happened, all he said was, ‘She was such a lovely girl,' and the subject was dropped between us. We had two days of talking and swapping jokes, and him telling me about Vietnam and being in Britain, and his second marriage. His wife had died a couple of years before—cancer too—and he was living with his sister. We even talked religion.”

“That's something my generation scarcely ever did,” said Graham.

“He's a lapsed Catholic. I should think they often do. We didn't come to any grand conclusions. It was just a wonderful two days, and we knew we'd be wanting to meet up again and do the same sometime in the future. He was scheduled to be released from hospital in two or three weeks, and he said when his sister retired, he and she would come to Britain. That hasn't happened yet, but we keep in touch: ordinary letters, e-mail, postcards if we're in unusual places. We joke as if we'd known each other all our lives and know exactly what amuses the other, which in fact we
do.
I can't tell you what a revelation it's been. We both see it as a small miracle.”

“But when you came back, you decided to contact Peggy.”

“Yes…. I wasn't sure, but I'd had such a good experience with my father. I took my little piece from the Web site, rewrote a couple of sentences, and put it on the Find Your Family site.”

“And you got a letter pointing the finger at Peggy Webster as the likely mother.”

“Yes. It's the sort of thing that happens when you put things on the Web. A wonderful stroke of luck, but a bit mysterious.” A thought seemed to cross his mind, and he threw a quick questioning glance in Graham's direction. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, as I think you know, I got in touch with her, we met, and you'll have seen from the restaurant that we got on pretty well, on a certain level. I told all this to Sergeant Relf, the man from the Romford police.”

“Oh, yes, you said they'd been in touch.”

“That's right. There was someone higher up, but Relf seemed to be the most clued-up. Luckily when I got home that night—the night Peggy disappeared—I went to beg some coffee from a girl in the flat downstairs, and—well, one thing led to another and I was there all night. So I'm pretty much out of the picture.”

Outish, Graham thought. Testimony from a sleeping partner must be pretty much on a par these days with testimony from a wife. He was willing to bet that Relf still had half an eye at least on Terry, since he was so securely in the center of the picture.

“I don't really know how you and Peggy got on,” Graham said. “Only what I saw in the restaurant.”

“Ye-e-es,” said Terry, seeming to be faintly embarrassed. “I suppose you thought I looked more like a gigolo than a long-lost son.”

“Not quite that. But there seemed to be quite a lot of playacting involved.”

Terry frowned. “Even that's not quite it. We thoroughly enjoyed each other's company—had fun, basically. The odd thing was that fun was
all
it was. It was so unlike meeting my real dad. That was an emotional experience, something I'll remember, that will be part of me, for the whole of my life. But meeting my real mother was—turned out to be—just a few hours when we thoroughly enjoyed each other's company.”

“Was this because you were so similar?”

“Possibly…. To tell you the truth, I hope not. But we laughed, and she flirted, and I responded, and really it meant very little. Meant nothing, in fact. It never occurred to me that this was a relationship that would last beyond a few meetings. At best it would be a question of cards at Christmas and birthdays. Something to talk about, happily, with my grandchildren.”

“But what exactly was it you didn't like about her?”

Terry raised his eyebrows at Graham as if he were being stupid, clearly not liking the thing being put so brutally.

“Nothing. Well, hardly anything. I don't think you're understanding. We got on famously, but there wasn't anything
there
that made me want to have a real relationship with her. Unlike with the Telfords, who have their irritating sides—mostly sides they are quite unconscious of. But they are real people, and if I'd just met them on a train, I'd realize they were the sort of people who are worth knowing, and I'd hope that something would develop.”

Graham cogitated about this for a few seconds.

“But I think there must have been some reason why things seemed to go so well but really didn't gel. Something about her that made you uneasy about it developing into a deeper relationship.”

Terry got up and walked around the little room.

“Lack of sincerity, maybe? I knew perfectly well she would never have approached me of her own accord. Unless I'd been rich or famous, of course. When I approached
her,
the whole thing became part of a long, big production number that was her approach to life, particularly her own life, in her own mind at any rate. It was amusing being part of that number for a time, but the only person with any sort of star part in it was her, and always would be.”

“It's the actressy thing, is it, that you…that didn't attract you?”

“Oh, but it did! In the short term. Just as you can be attracted to a sort of girl that you know you would never consider for a long-term relationship—marriage or whatever.”

“You played up and played the game, whatever game it was she was currently engaged in, but it was a sideshow in your life?”

“Exactly. What I am most interested in at the moment is detaching myself just a bit from the Telfords, without hurting them more than I need to. That's a real problem, a real dilemma, and it calls for all sorts of skills that I'm not sure I have. But I will try to do it to the best of my abilities, and it's something real and important in my life. Compared to my relationship with them, that with Peggy was mere candyfloss.”

Graham nodded. “I think I'm beginning to understand now why you were so angry when Peggy promoted me to the position of your natural father.”

“I was livid! It was degrading something that was real and warm and nourishing in my life to the sort of sub-showbiz PR charade that she made of her life: ‘Congratulations! You've won the Peggy Webster Lottery! Here is your father—Graham, meet our dearly beloved long-lost son!' All through our relationship she conveniently ignored the fact that I wasn't long-lost so much as dumped as an inconvenient piece of baggage on her journey through life.”

“And I suppose I got my promotion to fatherhood because I've got some little repute as a fiction writer, and she was determined I should have a more central role in that life story than just a quickly discarded lay. I've faced up to that likelihood already. When she first suggested—not exactly
said
—that I'd fathered a child, a boy, I was bewildered and didn't know what to think. Now I'm just grateful that I didn't leap over the moon singing, ‘Yippee!' It's better this way, especially with you being so happy with your real father.”

Graham was watching, surreptitiously, Terry's face, and a quick shadow passed over it and was smoothed over by force of will. It puzzled him.

“There's nothing else you want to tell me, is there?” he asked. “About your father, for example?”

“No, no. Of course I worry about him sometimes. He's recovered from the cancer, but cancers recur. I would just hate to lose him so soon after I've found him.”

“Of course, of course. The last thing I'd want is to come between you. Let's take this as one of—no, as the last of—Peggy's lies. And I seem to have acquired her son and a benevolent general guardianship of her daughter, at least for the moment. So my hands are full, and I'm rather surprised to find that means pleasantly full. Heaven knows how it will turn out, but at least they have someone who cares for them, in all senses of the word. Maybe you and they will want to keep contact. Anyway, I'll leave you be and take myself off. I hope we can consider ourselves friends, and I'll leave you my card, just in case something occurs to you that you think I'd be interested to know.”

They shook hands, and that was that.

Many thoughts went through Graham's mind as he drove home. The first was that the young man he had just talked to and the young man he had observed at Luigi's seemed to be two different souls. He preferred the man he had just met, but he thought he could account for the disparity. Meeting up with Peggy was a sort of relief after the Telfords, admirable people though they were. Peggy was funny, flirtatious, outrageously egotistical—in fact she was a parody of a drama queen, one reduced to suburban life. Terry could breathe, be himself, come down from a moral high horse—as people sometimes give way to the temptation to be appallingly politically incorrect, just for the hell of straying for a time from the ever-narrowing path of acceptability.

But at heart he was the Telfords' child and always would be. Nurture had won out over nature—did it always? he wondered.

No, of course it didn't. Life was more mysterious and unpredictable than that. Peggy was surely a product of nurture too, though: the blind spoiling of her by her parents, love creating a monster, as it so often did. And when it came to Peggy's two children, Graham had to hope that they would transcend both their genetic backgrounds and their haphazard bringings-up.

Something was worrying away at the back of his mind: it was the old tragic business of the fatal flaw, and the consequences it could have. He could not rid himself of the feeling that Peggy brought her death on herself, and that it was probably the result of her inability to tell the truth—her preferring an invention to a fact, where it was more entertaining, more flattering to herself and her talents, more likely to bring her profit—any sort of profit: an access of glory or notoriety as much as financial gain.

And there was one piece of the jigsaw that was not yet fitted in—no, not a piece: the last piece always fitted in, if the rest had been put together properly. It was an area that had remained till last the uninvestigated part of the puzzle—a blue sky or a piece of deep shade. He was going to have to empty those pieces from the bag he had stored them in, sort them out as far as was possible, and then make them contribute to the total picture.

He had a sense that he needed to do it quickly.

“George?”

“Ye-e-es?” George Long's voice rose skyward in command, as if he were rehearsing a herd of prima-
donna camels for
Aida
at the Pyramids.

“Graham Broadbent here.”

“Ah! My most famous student!”

“What does that say about the rest?”

“Now, no false modesty, young Broadbent. I did also once have the man who designed the costumes for
The Last Emperor
in my class, but on the whole I think you have the better chance of becoming a household word.”

“Like Jiff and Persil, you mean?…George, I'm ringing about—”

“Poor old Peggy. I know. I've been expecting you to. And at Brightlingsea too. Not a place I'd associate with crimes of passion, though you may know better. It brought a tear to my eye, I can tell you. But of course I'd seen nothing of her since her Saint Joan. I had no idea how she'd turned out.”

“No…. I think I told you I had a chat with her soon after your last birthday bash.”

“You did. Were you…close to her during rehearsals?”

“Not at all. But I did meet up with her later, during that summer.”

“Really? Did you—?”

“Mind your own business. Oh, well, yes, if you must know. But what I'm ringing about is to see if you know who she was going with during those months of rehearsal.”

“I always make it my business
not
to know, old chap. Just think: if anything had come out, what would old Ulick have done—your revered head, if you remember. He'd probably have given the male sinner the boot from school, refused to allow the female one into school grounds, and suspended all school plays that needed female participation for a space of five years. It doesn't bear thinking about. We'd have been reduced to
Journey's End
and
The Quare Fellow.
”

“Can't you remember any of them? I remember a lot of conversation behind hands, sniggering and so on.”

“You can be quite sure, Broadbent old lad, that the sniggerers were the ones that got nowhere, and the ones that advanced their cause furthest, if we can put it like that, ignored her within the confines of the Grammar School and its grounds.”

“So who were they?”

“Good Lord, you expect me to remember after twenty-five years?”

“Was Garry McCartney an ignorer?”

“Can't imagine so. I vaguely recall that what he thought, he showed, but he didn't think much. He was a thug, and much too crude for a girl of Peggy's sophistication. I wouldn't be surprised if she kept all the Colchester Grammar lechers at bay, partly for sheer devilment, partly for the joy of tormenting them, and partly because she was fully occupied elsewhere.”

“Ah! How did you know that?”

“She was the only female part in the play, you remember, but she always came with another High School girl, assigned by the lady head of the place whose name has gone out of my head. Ostensibly she was Peggy's wardrobe mistress, but really she was a sort of duenna. She was a girl who exuded respectability, like a sort of Deborah Kerr, and she probably shed it on the beach with the local Burt Lancaster.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Whenever I managed to hear what they were saying when they were talking together, it seemed to be about American servicemen. But it wasn't my business, I desperately needed Peggy for Joan, and so I made sure I never talked about it on school premises.”

Putting down the phone after a few more minutes of reminiscences, Graham was pleased that he had been right about George being, once released from bondage, a superb gossip, with all the gossip's powers of card-index recall and barely concealed relish. He got less out of the next call he made because, where George had gained release from his job, Sergeant Relf was still very much inhibited by the police code, and perhaps by a natural secretiveness that made him want to keep the Peggy Webster murder as “his” case.

“You must understand that we're still at an early stage,” he said, his voice lowered as if the KGB were standing a foot away from him. “All options are still open. I'm sure you realize that we can't talk about the progress of the case with anyone who is at all central to the investigations. I realize this is frustrating.”

“Oh, I understand entirely,” said Graham. “What puzzles me is how Peggy got—alive or dead—from Romford to Brightlingsea. And of course who she was with.”

“We have a sighting in Brightlingsea,” said Relf. “She made enquiries about B and B at a house there, if the sighting is reliable. That is
all
I am telling you, and it's not definite. I'll say good morning, sir.”

“Are the children free to return to the house and fetch things?” Graham slipped this in before Relf had time to put down the phone.

“Yes. We're done with the place. They'll have no trouble getting in.”

The next day, when Adam had finished school, Graham drove him to Romford and they met up with Christa at Milton Terrace. It was several weeks since Adam had been there, and he became thoughtful as soon as he set foot in his old home. While the two went through their things and no doubt talked long and hard about their futures, Graham slipped off to Luigi's and talked to the proprietor, who was not called Luigi and did not add
a
s to the ends of every other word except sometimes when the restaurant was open.

“I talked to the police,” he said, “I think as formality only, not any special thing. They talk about other customers that night. I could tell them the names of regulars, and of those who pay with credit cards, which is most of them.”

“And the people who were eating at that table over there?” said Graham, pointing to one some way away from the table that had been reserved for Peggy's party.

“The Americans. He pay with American Express. His name was more like Polish name than American. You want me to check?”

“No. I don't need it checked. I'm pretty sure it was Poldowski.”

“That's it, sir! You're onto him—is he the one—?”

But Graham shook his head and smiled.

Booking a plane to the States was easy. The most timorous nation on earth had decided it preferred to remain in its own (highly dangerous) country for the time being, and the British had decided that the appeal of Disneyland was palling. Graham arranged for Adam to stay at the home of one of his friends for a few days (there was going to be none of Peggy's slapdash neglect of her children's well-being from now on), and on Friday he flew out from Heathrow.

When, after a long and unpleasant journey to Wyoming via O'Hare, Graham checked into the hotel in Cheyenne, he first had a good night's sleep. He then went down to have a consultation with the helpful girl at the reception desk, who advised him to telephone the local branch of the VFW, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, where he found a sympathetic voice. He explained that he was an old friend of a former airman called Kenyon Poldowski—they'd been friends in England back in the late seventies, and he was keen to look him up again.

“I couldn't usually give you his home address without asking Mr. Poldowski,” said the woman. “But I'm afraid the news is bad. He's back in the Everglades Nursing Home. If you call them, they could bring you up to date on his condition, and whether he'll be able to.”

“For the last time” was implied. For the first time, thought Graham. I do need to meet him.

On an impulse he decided to drop by, without using the hospital bureaucracy in advance. He was determined this was not going to be a wasted trip. It was midmorning. He told the taxi driver to leave him at the gates of Everglades, and he walked through half a mile of rolling lawns and flower beds. Land was cheap in Wyoming, Graham thought.

The reception desk at the home was not fazed by an unexpected visitor. Old service friends were apparently dropping in all the time, and a refreshingly permissive attitude prevailed. Graham claimed once again to be an old friend from Ken's English years—“I hope he remembers me,” he said as a sort of insurance—and his name was sent in. After a somewhat nervous two minutes, the word came back that Captain Poldowski would be pleased to see him.

“He's very ill,” said the nurse in a low voice. “He knows it, because we don't keep illnesses secret here. You can have as long as Ken feels up to it, and then we'll have to ask you to go.”

Kenyon Poldowski was lying in bed in a room to himself, with windows open to a long stretch of lawn on which the sun was shining. His face was gaunt, and Graham could only make out a square chin as something that recalled Terry Telford, and not much else. The hands were long-fingered, but veined and lacking force. The most vital things about him were his eyes, flashing with spirit and eagerness. He was going under, but not without a fight, and enjoyment of that fight.

“I don't recognize you,” he said, holding out his hand. “But then, I didn't expect to.”

“I suppose not,” said Graham, taking the weak, damp hand.

“I saw you walking across the grounds,” said Ken, gesturing toward the window. “Somehow your clothes said ‘Englishman,' and the slimness, and just the way you walk. Do English people still walk? We don't. We drive. Quite a few of the guys here have English friends from their service days, but I got it right, didn't I? You're the fellow who writes novels.”

“You're quite right. I didn't quite know how to introduce myself. It makes me seem a jerk to say, ‘We shared Peggy Webster for a week or so a long time ago.' ”

“It sure does. Or a
rotter.
I liked that word. Do the English still use it?”

“Not much. It would date someone who did.”

“Well, so far as Britain is concerned, I'm dated. Britain is Essex and Suffolk about 1975 to 1980. I don't suppose you can imagine what that was like for us, particularly for those of us who'd been in Vietnam.”

“Like a sort of rest cure, I imagine.”

“Yes. A physical rest cure, but mainly a psychological one. We'd been killing people at an age when we should only have been killing wasps or rabbits. ‘Kill or be killed' was the order of the day, and we sure as hell didn't want to be killed at twenty, twenty-one. And we'd kill for our buddies who'd gone that way: ‘Here's one for Garry,' we'd say as we shot an enemy coming out of the jungle with his hands up. It was a nightmare come true.”

“And then you got posted to Calton Heath?”

“Oh, not immediately. I was back in the States for a bit. Got married, then got divorced. That was the usual thing with 'Nam veterans. The wives couldn't stand the nightmares and the suppressed violence. Not their fault…not ours either. I was sent to Suffolk in 1975, and that's where the healing began. It was like another world. There were actually people who liked us there. Oh, there were others who hated us and wanted to get rid of us: antinuclear campaigners and plenty of young men who were jealous. ‘Overpaid, oversexed, and over here'—we heard all the jokes. But there were others. We were invited to people's homes—genteel little tea parties. They were churchgoing people mostly. For some of the black guys it was their first time in a white person's house—can you imagine? Even for us it was a different world…. That's how I met Peggy.”

“At a tea party?”

“Yes. At a place called Lower Melrose. Peggy had a friend there, and her parents were strong church people, just like my folks, only mine were Catholic. Peggy's friend was helping her with her costumes in some school play, which I heard plenty about in the next few months. This friend had a great act—all starch on the outside, which soothed any fears the parents might have had. But—boy!—did she have a reputation with the men at the base.”

“So Peggy was around at the tea party?”

“Yes—just happened to be there—I
don't
think. Demure as they come, asking all sorts of questions about our planes, life in the States, when our leave periods were…When she said good-bye, she said, ‘The church at Upper Melrose is very interesting, and the churchyard too.' I just whispered, ‘Thursday at eight.' ”

“Simple.”

“Oh, very simple.” He sighed and suddenly looked very ill. “And sordid, most people would think. Here's the grizzled old veteran, thirty years old, making a date for sex with a schoolgirl. Not nice, not gentlemanly, not British…And yet, that wasn't really how things turned out.”

“You fell in love with her?”

“Something like that. Or with the
idea
of her. Does that make sense? You're the literary guy.” Graham nodded. “I think now that I hardly began to know the real her. But then: here was this young girl—sweet, passionate, grateful, just happy to be with me, to give me what I wanted, demanding nothing more. Not one of the good-time girls, as the locals called them, who made themselves available to the guys at the base in return for expensive meals, nightclubs, good clothes, luxuries of any kind. She was so happy to see me, and so uncomplaining if I couldn't get away when I had promised to meet her.”