A Habit of Dying (26 page)

Lydia arrived early in her office, intending to avoid a reception committee, but even so, she was not the first. No sooner was she at her desk than Gloria strolled over with exaggerated casualness and very deliberately perched on the corner, her raised eyebrows asking the questions unanswered since Thursday night at the Randolph.

‘Well?’

‘Well what, Gloria?’

‘You know jolly well what.’

‘I haven’t bought the cakes yet, I’ll get them at lunchtime.’ Lydia had not exactly rehearsed the conversation, but she had armed herself with a few mischievous ideas.

‘Cakes?! Oh, all right, yes, happy birthday Lydia. And what did mister Stephen Kellaway give you? Something nice to put a smile on your face?’

The temptation to correct her, to say ‘oh, you mean
Sir
Stephen Kellaway,’ was almost irresistable, but Lydia let the moment pass, after all, who was she to start flaunting his title. The thought produced a smile that Gloria took to be the answer she was looking for.

‘Ah! I knew it.’ Gloria was triumphant. ‘Come on then, tell all. Where have you been hiding him?’

‘Just a friend, Gloria. He was visiting Oxford and we met up. We had a meal, spent some time together on Friday and that was it.’ Yes, thought Lydia, that was it. When it was all pared down to the facts, that was it.

Not that Gloria would take that as an answer. She needed the when and the how and the where, his whole life story. Lydia also stripped these things, as much as she knew of them, down to their bare bones. And in doing so she realised how little she really knew of the man, maybe she should have googled him after all. She didn’t even know if he was married.

‘You don’t know? If you don’t know, didn’t ask, and he didn’t say, then he’s married.’ Something warmer in her tone, something confiding, gave Lydia the impression of having been admitted to membership of Gloria’s club. ‘If you didn’t ask then you know he is. They’re always married if they don’t say, trust me, Lydia, they’re always married.’ There was a resignation, a weariness, in her voice that spoke of a Gloria who Lydia had not seen before, would have doubted even existed.

‘Yes, maybe.’ She might have added ‘but it doesn’t matter’, but she had no wish to be drawn deeper into the discussion. Even if Lydia could have ordered her own confused thoughts about Stephen into something that she understood, she was not ready to discuss them. She was, after all, a mere novice in the sisterhood of single women and had been admitted on false papers.

For a few days Lydia waited in vain for some inspiration to strike regarding the sandcastles album. She told herself it was the right way, her way, to do things, even though she knew it was also an excuse to defer the resumption of the methodical enquiry into Bertie Myers and Albert and Hannah Joslin. They most probably held the key to progress, but they were her last unexplored lines and if they were exhausted without resolution she wasn’t quite sure how she would continue. Having come so far, and she was sure, got so close, conceding defeat would be a huge anticlimax. True,
she would still be able to give Dorothy her family, give her names and dates to go with photographs, but in her own eyes it would leave some business forever unfinished.

Albert and Hannah would provide the stiffer challenge, so it was for that reason Lydia chose to start with them. Albert Pelham Joslin, ‘Papa’ Joslin’s grandson who had squatted at his father’s feet on that baking summer day in 1911, married Hannah Brightside at Westminster in June 1928 at the age of twenty-five years. Hannah was nearly a year his senior. Such a healthy, well fed, middle-class couple in their prime would surely have produced children quickly and in numbers. Isolating those children from the great mass of other Joslins was the problem. At least the name was not Williams, had it been that common then her search would have ended before it had begun. Even so, the first results threw up no less than eighty-two Joslin babies for only 1929 to 1931. Somewhere in Essex would have helped narrow it down to twenty-five, but apart from the family roots and Albert’s birth there was no reason to do so. Hannah was born and married in London, and their babies could have been born anywhere, even abroad, beyond the reach of her search. But Albert had declared himself to be an ‘exchange dealer’ at his marriage, and where more likely than London would he carry on such a profession. Lydia examined each page of the index with great care, conscious of her previous errors and oversights. She was diligent in checking all the Joslins and the variations that she knew, then added another, ‘Josling’, when she found a Dianna of that name in June 1929.

The first to be found was Ethel Beatrice in the December quarter of 1929, registered in Wandsworth, mother’s maiden name Brightside. A certificate later would confirm the father, but Lydia had no doubt at all it would be Albert. An hour later and she had Violet Hannah, September 1934, also Wandsworth. Rose Elizabeth followed in the same place, June 1936. Lydia took her search on to 1950 without finding another Joslin baby born to a Brightside mother. The results were satisfying. To have found a boy child would have been slightly more encouraging, but she was content with the three girls - assuming that they had survived. For every
birth there is the inevitability of a balancing death, and Lydia’s next task was to see about killing off this happy south London family.

According to the absence of their names from the register, all three girls had survived those dangerous early years, but then they would have been confronted by war. Perhaps they had been evacuated, as tens of thousands of others had been, only to be recalled by their parents as the greatest dangers were perceived to have passed. Working through the war years Lydia found no mention of the girls or their mother, but slightly to her surprise found an Albert in the same district, with a death entry for the September quarter of 1944. She’d been looking for the children, not the parents. A casualty of war, or something more natural? A certificate would provide the answer and tell if this was her Albert, but in the meantime she wondered just how many Albert Joslins might have been in Wandsworth during that time. Certainly there were unlikely to be more than one who was an exchange dealer with a wife named Hannah. This dead Albert might have been simply a stray, a soldier on leave perhaps, run down by a lorry. Lydia smiled at her own fancies, far less likely than the chance that this was indeed her Albert. She pictured a solidly middle class family, father working somewhere in the city, mother not working, but doing her bit for the war effort, three house-trained girls, the eldest, at fifteen, still at school but without the modern ‘teenage’ label to live up to. Such a family, comfortably off and conscious of their place in the world, would probably have had a telephone.

Something had nagged at her ever since her day with Stephen. She had forgotten the telephone directories, as she most often did, despite her success with Pink2. They were a fairly recent addition to her armoury of research tools and cumbersome to use, but they could be extremely helpful, if only to turn the possible into the probable. Outside of London, there seemed little logic to the way towns were grouped together in the various volumes. Even with the right volume, the images of many pages had to be viewed before the correct one could be established. With patience and a little trial and error, her possible Albert became a probable with the discovery of ‘
Joslin, A. P, 16 Ansell Road S W 17 . . . STReatham 3507
’
in the 1942 directory. To cross check and improve the probability, Lydia then looked up Ansell Road to establish it was in Tooting. Then it was a short step to confirm that Tooting was part of the Wandsworth registration district. So, her Wandsworth family were really a Tooting family, or at least, her
Joslin, A.P.
was a Tooting man. She was confident she’d find Hannah, Ethel, Violet and Rose there too. But they would wait their turn for her searches until the facts were confirmed by their birth certificates.

Turning her attention back to the troublesome Bertie, Alethia’s stepson, the POW from Stalag Luft 3, Lydia found the information she sought almost immediately. In 1947 Bertie had married Helen Fox at Amersham, Bucks. Finding anything else proved to be more difficult. No children that she could see, no entry in any likely telephone directory, nothing to show a trace until a possible death in 1971 of a Bertram D Myers at Chesham, also in Bucks.

All of which left Lydia hanging on news of the Joslins from Tooting. Dorothy was overdue a letter to keep her up to date with news of her family, and the time had stretched out since Stephen’s visit to Oxford. Brought up to write a thank-you letter for every present received, Lydia’s guilt at not having written to Stephen grew with every passing day. An email would suffice, it did not have to say very much, but the longer it went on the harder the words were to find. If only she had dashed off a quick note the day after, instead of leaving it, but more than a week later a quick note would not do. A letter would demand even more of her, so she settled on a postcard, which by its public nature and restricted size would excuse her from anything but the briefest message. She could even leave out the apology that had been forming in her head and concentrate on the ‘thank you’ instead.

She chose a card with Magdalen Tower viewed from the bridge and wrote ‘
A really good day, thank you for inviting me for a glimpse of your world.
’ And signed it simply with her name. She thought the reference to ‘your world’ would remind him of their abbreviated conversation about titles, and thought too that Stephen would know that she’d remembered it. No sooner had she written his address on the card than she was struck forcibly by the fact that she
knew his home address. He had written it on the letter he had sent her, it was not a university address, a ‘department of ’ address, it was his home and she was about to send him a card. What married man would do so, however innocent the friendship, when the receipt of mail might need explanation? Lydia tried hard to see this message dropping onto her front door-mat when she was a wife, but the distance was too great, the possibility too remote. In the space that she had left above her name, Lydia carefully inserted ‘
Joslins and sandcastles going well
’. It would keep her pledge to tell him of progress, leave it open for him to enquire further, and, she was almost ashamed to admit, would certainly intrigue a third party.

Her letter to Dorothy required less thought: a simple statement of progress and of how helpful the kitchen drawer photos had been; a hint of what might yet be discovered; an updated box chart of Papa Joslin’s offspring showing Dorothy’s three newly acquired second cousins; and a brief description of her visit to the Botanic Garden. No doubt there would be a reply from Worthing in a day or so. As she thought of that seaside town and her walk with Dorothy along the promenade, another picture came to mind, that picture of ‘self’, the one by the sea with the pier in the background. Might that be Worthing? Before she sealed the letter Lydia carefully removed the photo from its album, quickly scanned and copied it, then slipped it in with the letter, adding a PS to explain its presence. Apart from the location, it might just jog another of Dorothy’s memories.

As she had the album in her hand, it seemed the right moment to spend a little time with it again. The balmy days of the start of the month had been overtaken by a cooler, wetter spell, so rather than sit outside in the evening air as she would have preferred, she had to be satisfied with her chair and the remainder of last night’s Chablis. Slowly she turned the pages, trying to empty her mind of all knowledge, to see the images for the first time, waiting for some detail, some incongruity to make itself apparent. No matter how important the pictures had been to the people in them, no matter what memories were brought to mind when ‘self’ - it was probably ‘self ’ and not Fred – lingered over them, they were simply a
collection of family photos. People played cricket on beaches, had picnics, lots of picnics, sat in deckchairs, paddled in the sea, built sandcastles decorated with paper flags, licked ice creams. Nothing in there like some of Lydia’s own childhood when her father had required her to pose with her brother in various staged scenes of make believe. There had been a spell when her brother had demanded that she be his victim in whatever game he was playing, whether it was cowboys and indians or knights and dragons. Just once it would have been good to have been the rescued princess, but Brian always cast her as the slain baddie. If her father was around during one of these times he would invariably have them re-enact a scene he thought suitable for a photograph, even if it meant Lydia had to be re-tied to a tree. Sometimes he would devise a tableau for the characters of the day and add some embellishment of his own like a lasso or a mask. No sign of such photographs here, but then Lydia’s mother never put them in her albums either.

There was the stray at the end of the album, the one she had copied and sent to Dorothy, that one had been more contrived than most. ‘Self ’ had been deliberately placed right there, half profile, looking past the camera to some unseen point. But even if it were Worthing or some other identifiable place, Lydia could not see there was more to be made of it. As she turned the pages again and took another sip of wine, a second picture took her attention. At face value it was unremarkable and easily overlooked amongst all the other snaps. The two girls, Susan and Linda, uncaptioned but certainly them, sitting on a dry stone wall somewhere in the Dales. They sat either side of a signpost, the old-fashioned country type, with arms that ended in pointing fingers to indicate the direction. The girls were looking at the camera but each was also pointing at the other. Susan, on the left pointed right at Linda, while Linda on the right pointed left at Susan. Lydia could not imagine any reason for such positions to occur naturally, they had certainly been asked to sit and point, but for what purpose? Whatever it was, they were happy to take their places, for the usual scowls were replaced with broad grins. They shared the joke, understood why they were sat there. Now they just needed to share the joke with Lydia.