Out of the Blackout (11 page)

‘What—what happened to them?'

Len's conversational flow suddenly dried up.

‘I lost them.'

‘In the blitz?'

Len had taken out a handkerchief, and was looking past Simon, down the ill-lit, half-empty bar. His naturally cratered face seemed about to crumble into total collapse.

‘That's right. I lost them both in the air raids. It's ironic, really. Things got so bad here . . . raids every night, fires raging all around, you can't imagine what it was like . . . so Mary found this place in Sussex, not far from Brighton. I wanted my boy in the country, out of the raids. We'd often been to Brighton on holidays, and Ma had some church contacts there—fellow Baptists, you know. That's how it came about. I used to sit in the shelter in Paddington during them raids, and I used to think: well, supposing I go, I know little David will be safe . . .' He wiped at his eyes, and Simon could see tears well up and begin to stream down his face. ‘And what happened? There was this German bomber, off course for home, and he off-loaded his bombs just before he got to the Channel. There was me, went through the war with hardly a scratch, and there was little David—direct hit, killed instantly.' He sobbed. ‘It's the tragedy of my life. I still can't bear to think about it. I tell you, I haven't been the same man since I lost the two of them. Not the same man at all.'

Simon watched horrified as the tears coursed down the man's hollow cheeks, unstoppable, overflowing. He felt in his stomach a heave of repulsion for the man who could cry so convincingly for an imaginary grief, who could act out sorrow in so abandoned a fashion when he had merely been retelling a fantasy. For surely it was not possible that Len was uninvolved in the disappearance of his son? Surely it was not possible that he had been fed a fake story? Yet the sobs that were racking his body were so heartfelt that Simon did, just for a moment, wonder whether Len Simmeter might not actually believe the story he had just told.

• • •

Later that evening Simon sat up writing in his notebooks, trying to put down every tittle of information he had gleaned from Len, and trying to recapture, when possible, Len's own words. Sometimes as he wrote he seemed to feel a twinge of memory: those little grey trousers; that blue blazer. But short grey trousers and blue blazers were common enough features of an English childhood. How could one distinguish memory from wishful self-deception? Even the things he was sure he remembered—the train arriving at Yeasdon Station, for example—had become hardened in his mind into a sort of snapshot, something he could flip through his mind to, at will. Did he remember? Or did he just remember that he had once remembered? Tentatively, aware of the pitfalls, he headed a page of his notebook ‘Memories', and collected everything from the beginning that could possibly come under that heading. The notebooks, he was pleased to realize, were at last beginning to assume a more solid, fleshed-out form.

That night he had a dream that he had not had for many years. The dream was a violent one, and he lay beneath the sheet in the warm night air threshing and tossing about, trying to wrestle himself back to wakefulness, but sinking back over and over again into a dim struggle of black shapes. Those shapes could not be seen clearly, but he knew they were a man and a woman. There were cries, sobbing, and there were shouted threats and insults. And there were blows. Not at first, but soon: repeated blows. Sometimes the people and the cries seemed to fade, but always it came back: the insults, the sobs, the struggle. He was conscious there was another reality to return to, and he struggled to rise to the surface, but he always sank back down—deeper, deeper, the cries more intolerably urgent. Though he could not identify the shapes, he knew that the other he, the smaller he of his dream, could have identified them, knew what they were fighting about. Though the blows were never aimed at him, they were
about
him. So it was a fight he was witnessing, but also one in which—small, helpless as he was—he was involved. Responsible. Someone was being mistreated because of him.

When he finally fought his way back to wakefulness he was no longer small and helpless, but his chest, his back and his forehead were wet with sweat, and he felt as though he had spent
the night wrestling under the sea with some dark aquatic monster with numberless entwining tentacles that choked and fettered him.

After some hesitation he entered this dream in his notebook under ‘Memories'.

O
ne area of bafflement left by his heart-to-heart with Len was unexpectedly illuminated for Simon before the end of the week.

He had been given the job of entertaining and showing round the Zoo a visitor of no great importance—a member of the scientific staff of the zoo at Cracow. As a rule at that time the Polish government allowed outside their borders only emissaries or delegates of the most dreary party-line respectability, but this man had unexpectedly turned out to be jolly, well-informed and inquisitive, so that once Simon and he had found ways of getting round the various linguistic trip-wires which such encounters entail, they got on very well. Simon lunched him moderately lavishly at the Zoo restaurant, and around half past two said that he'd take him back to his hotel.

‘Is little 'otel in Paddington,' said his guest. ‘Is no foreign currencies for better.'

So Simon found himself once more in Paddington. By the time he had paid off the taxi, in a dreary little side street ten minutes from the station, the afternoon was as good as gone. He toyed with the idea of going to have another look at Farrow Street, but he gave up the idea: there was no longer any point in trying to gain admittance, even if he could think up an excuse, and the exterior had certainly yielded up all its secrets. From neighbours he might, eventually, be able to prise more, supposing any still remained who had been there in the Simmeters' time, but would he get anything from them that he had not got already from Len or his mother? One other area of investigation, the Baptist church, it would be best to embark upon on a Sunday: Baptist churches in the suburbs of London were not likely even to be open on a Friday afternoon.

So Simon began making his way towards the Underground at the main line station, desultorily, hoping for memories or for a flash of inspiration from the ethos of the place. So indefinite were his intentions that he had walked past the Paddington Library and had done no more than register that that was what it was, when it struck him that a library in Paddington would be the very place to look for a notice of his birth. He had vaguely intended one day to cross the river and look it up at Somerset House, but the Simmeters, pillars of the church, would surely have announced it in some local newspaper. The actual date of his birth was no very urgent matter for him—he was happy enough to celebrate it as the day he had arrived in Yeasdon—but it was a way of passing the afternoon, and a way of getting a whiff of the period when he was born.

The day he arrived in Yeasdon was May 10th, 1941. He had generally been said then to be about five. The likeliest period for his birth, then, seemed to be the second half of 1935, or some time in 1936. Up in the Reference Library on the first floor the attendant was very helpful. There was no doubt, she said, that the most widely distributed local newspaper at that time was the
West London Recorder.
Oh yes, the files were easily accessible. Lots of local people, and historians, consulted them. Paddington had been a very lively, mixed community at the time, and its history had many aspects that interested sociologists and social historians. In a matter of minutes Simon was seated at a desk with two large and unwieldy volumes, containing all the copies of the paper for the relevant years.

The
West London Recorder
was a lugubrious paper by the standards of the 'sixties (when the slide towards tabloid hysteria was already well under way), but once Simon got used to the look of it he found it admirably set out for his purposes. The announcements of births, marriages and deaths were almost invariably on page five, opposite the main news page. The news, in the early summer of '35, when Simon started his search, was much taken up with celebrations of the Royal Jubilee. Preparations, decorations, official committees and planned festivities were reported and commented on in laborious detail. Pictures of King George V—dignified, sick-looking, slightly bemused—were printed on the slightest, or no, pretext. But this was May—too early, Simon thought, and he merely did a
lightning-quick check through the advertised births. The unusualness of the name Simmeter was again a blessing. Simon could flick from one week's issue to the next in no time, even though he also took a side glance for the name Spurling. In August 1935 he did in fact find the name Spurling: Thomas James Spurling, who had died on the 23rd, aged seventy-six, and mourned by children Alice, Arthur, Henry, Enid and Mary. Simon noted down the names, and all the details that seemed relevant, in the notebooks that he took everywhere in his briefcase, away from the prying interest of the Simmeters. Elsewhere in the same issue, which he examined with special care, he found a small news item which brought with it a little more sense of the personality of the man:

The death of Thomas James Spurling will be greatly mourned by the congregation of the Meachin Road Baptist Church. For many years Thomas Spurling was one of the churchwardens, a leader of the temperance group, and a pillar of the Sunday School. A man of fine presence and strong principles, his rich bass voice was an asset to the choir, and his solo performances at church functions gave great pleasure to many, even when he was into his seventies. Mr Spurling was born in Dumfries, and will be much missed by family, friends, and the Baptist congregation.

So it would seem that his grandfather had died around the time that he, Simon, was born. It was a pity he would apparently not have seen him as a baby, for Thomas James Spurling sounded like the sort of man who would take pride in grandchildren, particularly male grandchildren. Perhaps he had known of the approaching birth. Since Mary was the youngest child, and since he guessed from photographs that she was not young when she married Len, it was not surprising that his grandfather had not lived to see his Simmeter grandson's childhood.

Simon noted down the further details from the news paragraph, and in the red ballpoint which he used for further lines of inquiry he suggested: ‘older members of the present Baptist congregation?' and ‘other members of the Spurling family?' Staunch churchmen and churchwomen of Scottish extraction lived long—lived to an abstemious and censorious old age. Then
Simon went back to flicking through the
Recorders,
week by week, in search of some notice of his own birth. That death notice for Thomas Spurling, as well as the news item, suggested that the Spurlings at least were a family that set some store by their position in the community, that felt the need to memorialize publicly the additions, alignments and subtractions that occurred to the main familiar body. Perhaps the Spurling sense of their own worth had had to triumph over the innate Simmeter love of secrecy.

But it was when he got to the autumn of that year that he made a discovery that dwarfed the trivial matter of his own birth date. Starting on the issue for October 13th he turned as usual to page five, with hardly more than a glance at the news on page six. But the glance was enough. He swung his head back and peered close. In the centre of the page was a news picture of Mosley's blackshirts marching through Paddington. On they advanced towards the camera, right arms raised, at once menacing and slightly ridiculous: clerks and retired army men, thugs and respectable householders, the prosperous, the unemployed and the unemployable—that motley, unanalysable
olla podrida
that has made up all the movements, the factions and the splinters of Britain's right-wing activity over the past sixty years. And on the left of the picture—black-shirted, black-booted like the rest, his hand raised above his shoulder in salute—was Len Simmeter.

Was it really him? Simon bent down over the hefty volume and looked closely. It
must
be. The same sunken cheeks, the old-young face, the mean eyes, just as he had seen them in the wedding photograph. And just as he had watched the older version, sitting opposite him in the Colonel Monk. Len was of the kind whose face sets young, whom age and experience modify or imprint deeper, but never change. There might conceivably be doubles of Len, fortuitous replicas outside the family (for it was a face of no distinction or grace); but fortuitous replicas in the Paddington area would surely be carrying coincidence too far. Simon sat back, contemplative, in his chair.

Now he had seen that picture, now he had learnt of Len's grubby little commitment, so many other things began to make sense. That insistence on bringing up the ‘crooked nose' people on the Zoo board. The reference was an echo of so many jaded
political battle cries—to the wrong people being in charge. What, Simon wondered, had been the precise nature of Len's trouble at work that the girl next door had mentioned—trouble that had led to stoppages and the threat of a strike? He remembered Len's tired references to the law and order problem, and the fact that (he said) it had only cropped up in the last ten or fifteen years. ‘We all know who's to blame,' he had said.

Simon was willing to bet that behind the troubles at the Angel there lurked Len's racial attitudes: that the Jew-baiter of the 'thirties had become the immigrant-baiter of the 'sixties.

Suddenly he remembered, with shame, that he had referred to some of the Zoo board as ‘rich as Jews'. It was a casual, rural phrase he'd picked up as a child, but as stupid a thing to say as he could imagine, particularly since several of the board
were
Jews. In the musty privacy of the Paddington Reference Library Simon blushed. It was that casual phrase, of course, that had started things off, had made Len Simmeter imagine an affinity between them. That was the reason for all the oblique probing and hinting that Len had indulged in at the Colonel Monk; and that was the basis for the feeling he had got that he, rather than Len, was under investigation. Len was sounding him out to recruit him—not necessarily for any organization, but to join him in his nasty little racial antagonisms, to settle down to sessions of like-minded jeremiads about the state of the world and the inborn inferiority of certain sections of it. Simon felt demeaned.