Postcards from the Past (13 page)

She bounds after it, scattering the envelopes, and he goes to rescue them, picking them up and taking them back to the kitchen. He drops them on the table and then turns to look again, his attention caught by the picture lying half-covered by an envelope. He picks up the postcard and stares at it in disbelief. It is a reproduction of Toulouse-Lautrec’s
Rue des Moulins Brothel.
The model stands with her back to the artist, her chemise hitched up, half-exposing her right buttock, her dark stocking rolled down to her knees. It is almost touching in its ugliness, its humanness, but Dom stares at it with the sense of having received a blow to the heart. He knows what he will see when he turns it over.

It is addressed to Dominic Blake. Opposite the address, Tris has scrawled: ‘Staying with friends in Roscoff for a few days. See you soon. Tris. PS I thought she’d be just your type.’

Dom turns the card over again and stares at the picture of the prostitute. He is so shocked, so angry, that he feels that he might explode. His hands begin to shake and with an enormous effort he takes control of himself. He sits down at the table, willing himself to be calm, telling himself grimly that this is exactly what would please Tristan most. If he were to have a stroke or a heart attack, how pleased Tris would be – especially if he were to be found dead clutching a postcard of a prostitute.

Dom almost laughs out loud at the thought. It is madness to allow this foolishness to drive him to the edge of an almost killing rage. He sits at the table and stares at the card, analysing his anger. Tris hits where it hurts most: at Dom’s deep-down insecurity. Despite the fact that he has been loved, successful in his field, has a thriving family, despite all these things, there is still a part of him that is unresolved, unhealed. He cannot come to terms with his father’s refusal to see him; he never spoke to him, never touched him. He supported him financially, provided generously for his future, but he rejected Dom as a person, as his son.

Silently he pieces the familiar jigsaw together. He knows now why it was only after his father died that he was allowed to visit his grandmother in Cornwall. Back then no particular reason was given for his mother refusing to accompany him on that first momentous journey; in 1952 children had much more freedom and independence, and it was seen as an adventure. Anyway, his mother had to work and there was cousin Susan to keep an eye on. Dom, just having celebrated his twelfth birthday, was old enough now to go to see Granny. He remembered how his mother hugged him on the platform at Temple Meads, giving him a kiss, telling him to be a good boy. He’d glanced round quickly to see if there might be any boys from his school, embarrassed by her emotion, and then he’d suddenly felt an uprush of love for her, a momentary pang at the prospect of being so far from home, and had hugged her too. Then the London train came roaring in, and they were enveloped in billowing clouds of steam, the sour stench of soot and the noise of screeching brakes, and his mother ran to speak to the guard to ask him to make sure that Dom got off at Bodmin.

Dom sits at the table, staring back across the decades at that boy in grey flannel shorts and a faded blue Aertex shirt, all set for adventure. He remembers he had a book specially for the journey, an Arthur Ransome –
Swallows and Amazons? Pigeon Post?
– and a bottle of ginger beer and a packed lunch: cheese sandwiches, an orange and a bar of chocolate.

‘Don’t,’ his mother cautioned, ‘eat the chocolate all at once. And try not to be messy with the orange. Got a handkerchief? Good, then. Don’t forget to use it.’

He’d stood at the window in the corridor, waving until he could see her no more, and then entered the compartment the guard had shown them. He was slightly overawed by the other passengers: two matronly, middle-aged ladies in smart tweeds on their way back from a few days in London, a young, sharp-faced man in a cheap suit who looked like a travelling salesman, and an older, military-looking man with a bushy moustache, who was half-hidden behind
The Times.
Tentatively Dom stepped amongst their feet – two smart pairs of court shoes, a scuffed pair of black lace-ups, and one pair of highly polished brogues – and hefted his shabby bag on to the shelf above his head. The two women stopped talking to watch him, their expressions kind, motherly.

‘Travelling alone?’ one of them asked brightly. ‘I expect you’d like a window seat. Move up, Phyllis. He can have mine.’

They moved along, ignoring his protests, whilst the young salesman winked at him and the older man frowned slightly, rattling his paper, as if implying that Dom was too old for such childish favours. The young man grinned, tipping his head towards the old soldier as if inviting Dom to join in the joke, and Dom cautiously smiled back. He sat down and stared out of the window, not wanting to be engaged in conversation, wishing he’d thought to get his book out of his bag. This journey was life-changing: his first step into an adult world. He’d begun to realize that there were other influences beyond the small world of home and school. At school he elaborated the story of his father’s death in the war so as to fend off questions about his family, but he asked his mother why he had no relations on his father’s side: no aunts or uncles, or grandparents or cousins. She was always vague: his father came from the north, he’d been an orphan. There was Granny, of course, and some distant relatives down in Cornwall.

Granny occasionally came to visit in the school holidays but never during term-time. She never came to hear him singing in the cathedral choir or to cheer him on athletics day, so that watching his school friends’ groups of family he’d feel oddly lonely, though there were several other boys whose fathers had died in the war. Often his mother was working and cousin Susan was deemed to be too old to attend school functions so he was used to being alone. But he had friends, good friends, who invited him to their homes – though very few were invited to the little house in St Michael’s Hill – but still he’d felt lonely until he’d met Billa and Ed in Granny’s cottage, and for the first time in his life he’d experienced an overwhelming sense of homecoming.

Dom stands up, fills the kettle and sits down again. Bessie settles on her rug, stretching out and sighing. He remembers now that the book had been
The Picts and the Martyrs
– his favourite of all Arthur Ransome’s books – and as he sits, remembering, the scene slips again into his mind.

The tweedy women were predisposed for conversation: where was he going? Who would be meeting him? How old was he? He answered politely but wondered how they would respond if he asked them the same questions. All the while he was aware of the unspoken partisanship from the young man sitting across from him. He was now studying a racing paper but Dom saw his mouth twitch into a smile, his eyelid drop in a brief conspiratorial wink. Dom was warmed by the sensation of friendship. It made him feel grown up. The military-looking man, on the other hand, reminded him of Major Banks who taught geography. Dom surreptitiously smoothed his hand over his newly cut hair and kept his feet in their rubbed leather sandals under the seat. He was confused by these tensions. He knew that if the young man and he were alone a conversation would start up, they’d joke together, and perhaps get out their sandwiches. Alone with the older man, he’d call him ‘Sir’.

Instead, he smiled at the two women and stood up to retrieve his book.
The Picts and the Martyrs: or Not Welcome at All.
He stared at the paper cover. He’d never noticed the second part of the title:
Not Welcome at All.
He thought of his arrival in Cornwall and how it would work being alone with Granny. They’d never been alone together before: how would it be? He felt anxious, and he studied the cover of the book to distract himself. It was a familiar, well-loved book and he tested himself by looking at the small printed photographs scattered over the pink paper cover and identifying them with those same pictures inside the book: here were Dick and Dot in the stone hut in the woods, and here was their little boat, the
Scarab.
And this one was the skull and crossbones over Dick’s bed. Dick was his favourite character, especially in this book about mining; Dom, like Dick, was good at chemistry and physics and fascinated by geology. Dom opened the book and began to read. The first chapter began with Dick and Dot on a train journey and its heading was ‘Visitors Expected’. Dom experienced another twinge of apprehension. He was the expected visitor and, just for a moment, he wished that he too was on his way to see Nancy and Peggy, and that Timothy would be meeting him at Bodmin station in a squashy hat, with lots of plans for his mining project up in the hills.

The amazing thing was that, almost as soon as he’d arrived at Granny’s cottage, he’d been catapulted into his own Swallows and Amazons kind of country. Ed and Billa appeared in the kitchen – ‘They live just up the lane,’ said Granny casually – and Billa had looked from him to Ed and back again, amazed at the likeness. ‘I think you’re related in some kind of way,’ Granny said, even more casually. He was never invited to the old butter factory – ‘Mother isn’t very well because of Daddy dying’ – and it didn’t really matter at first because Billa and Ed took him to their hearts and he felt at last as if he had a real family. He was home. He loved Cornwall, the moors and the mines, and that he – no matter how distantly – was related to a family who had been connected to mining for generations. The joy lasted. Puzzled and hurt though he was by the complete rejection of Elinor St Enedoc, the joy remained with him. She’d drive by in her Morris Minor Traveller, staring straight ahead, a hand briefly raised to Granny or to Mr Potts, if either should happen to be out at the front of the cottages. Ed and Billa would wave furiously from the back seat, as if trying to make up for her coolness, but everything changed when their mother married again.

Now, Dom remembers the scene in Granny’s potager; he relives his confusion when Billa, overcome with misery at the prospect of Tris as a stepbrother, flung herself into his arms. He remembers Granny leading her away and, later, how they sat in the sun while Granny told him the truth. How angry he’d been, knowing that for all those years he’d been lied to, and then Ed had come rushing down the lane followed by Billa, who was watching him apprehensively.

‘Mother couldn’t stop crying when she told us,’ Billa said later. ‘She said that your mother … seduced Daddy because he was rich.’

They’d walked in the wood where each holiday they’d made their summer camps, carefully not touching; Dom with his hands in his pockets, Billa’s arms folded beneath her breast. He was silent. It must be hard for Billa. She wouldn’t want to think that her father had loved his, Dom’s, mother. His mother must be seen as the villain of the piece: the witch, the whore.

‘So you’re the bastard’… ‘Your mother’s a whore.’

Dom picks up the postcard, crumples it in his fist, and then – just as suddenly – smooths it out again. He thinks of his anger, his shame; the rejection by his father that lies like a canker beneath everything he has achieved, waiting to destroy it.

And he thinks: I wonder what happened to Tris to make him like he is?

He turns his head away as if rejecting the thought; it is easier to hate than to understand: to judge rather than to allow compassion a foothold. Secretly he is shocked at the level of his rage. After all, fifty years have passed: why should this postcard, the foolish message, generate such terrible fury? Of course, there is something uncomplicated about such a reaction; something oddly pure and virtuous, almost self-righteous. Tris is insulting his, Dom’s, mother; he is making that simple, innocent act of lovemaking into something disgusting and evil. And he is smearing Dom at the same time; he is implying that Dom is less of a man, less worthy, less lovable because of it. Dom faces this implication. He believes it because it is how his father saw him; not good enough for his love or public acknowledgement. He and his mother were cast out because they were beneath his contempt.

‘So you’re the bastard’… ‘Your mother’s a whore.’

Dom turns his head again and looks at the card. Just why does Tris want to hurt, to destroy? Where did Andrew and Tris come from, and where did they go? He knew the potted history: Andrew met Tris’s mother in France, she’d died when Tris was four, and the two of them continued to live in France for the next six years. Andrew had just sold his business when he met Elinor at a party in London. He’d made some very good investments and he was looking for somewhere to live, having decided that he wanted to continue to educate Tris in England. The facts, such as they were, bore this out. Tris was at a prep school in Berkshire, both of them were bilingual, and Andrew never seemed short of money.

Dom puts his head in his hands. He wonders exactly what Andrew and Tris were doing in France for those six years of Tris’s life, and he thinks about how readily, how easily, Andrew walked away from his marriage to Elinor, snatching Tris from his school along the way. He thinks of the postcards of the bicycle, of Bitser. What did Tris see when he arrived at the old butter factory that had made him hate them all so much? Security? A family home? Stability? Was it just one step too far along the disjointed path of his young life?

Dom sits back in his chair, stretches out his legs and sticks his hands in the pockets of his quilted waistcoat. His fingers make contact with a small card and he brings it out and looks at it. There is a name, ‘Sir Alec Bancroft’, and a telephone number.

‘Come and see me,’ he said. ‘Come for coffee. Hercules and I enjoy having visitors.’

Suddenly Dom feels very tired; his anger has evaporated but he feels old and vulnerable. He stands up and reaches for the telephone.

‘Bancroft.’ The voice is calm, steady, confident.

‘It’s Dominic Blake,’ Dom says. ‘I know Billa and Ed have invited you to dinner for a return match, and I shall see you then, but I wondered if I might take you up on that offer of coffee.’

‘Splendid,’ says Alec at once. ‘I’d like that very much. When can you make it?’