Out of the Blackout (22 page)

‘Yes,' said Simon. ‘I am some sort of relative.'

He fumbled in his pocket, and could find only a five-pound
note. He handed it to the old man, and turned away, bewildered.

‘Well, that's very generous, sir. Very kind indeed. I'll see the grave is kept clean and tidy . . .'

Simon walked back to his children in a dream. He called them together and began shepherding them towards the car.

‘What's the
matter,
Daddy? Why do you look so white and funny? Are you ill?'

‘I don't think so, darling. Perhaps it was the pub lunch I ate.'

‘Pub lunches can be
very
strange and awful,' said Emily authoritatively.

‘Did you discover the life of the village from the gravestones?' demanded Martin.

‘Something like that,' said Simon.

‘That seems funny,' said Martin. ‘Since they're dead.'

‘All the dead were once alive,' said Simon solemnly.

‘Except stillborn children,' said Angela.

‘Which was the one you were looking at for ages?' asked Emily.

‘A little boy I once knew,' said her father, starting the car. ‘He is dead, and once had been alive.'

• • •

When Simon and the children got back on Sunday evening to the house in Highgate where they now lived, it was a long time before he could get the children to bed. First there were the pets to be collected from the neighbours. Then they demanded to ring their mother in Birmingham. All the children had to talk to her about their jaunt, and it was a long time before Simon could get a word in. Rosemary was feeling jaundiced.

‘The series will be appalling,' she announced. ‘The mixture as before, with water, and yet more water. Last time they had three good jokes per episode, plus a lot of dialogue you were supposed to say as though it was funny. This time it's two good or not-so-good jokes, plus acres of padding. The two principals are just going through the motions, and so, frankly, am I . . .'

Cheering Rosemary up took some time, and then he had to make Ovaltine for the children; they all insisted on taking their pets to bed, because they said they were moping. Finally he let them, turned off their lights, heard their last calls to each other
and their laughter, and went downstairs and poured himself a whisky.

When he had sat thinking in a chair for some minutes, he got up and went into his study. The notebooks he had kept in 1964 were at the bottom of a desk drawer—underneath a sheaf of Zoo committee minutes, administrative memos, financial statements. He had not looked inside the notebooks since the family had moved house in 1970. Then, he remembered, he had flicked through them, shaken his head at his intense absorption of six years before, and then gone on with the task of getting the house in order. Could he not treat them in the same off-hand manner now? But the exercise books looked up at him—browning, faded, musty: a laborious record of a maladroit exercise in detection.

One thing had become incontrovertible, he thought, since his visit to the churchyard. If David Simmeter had been born in 1938, then he could not be that David Simmeter. Nobody had been very sure of his age that day when he arrived on the platform at Yeasdon Station, but he most certainly had been more than three. Between five and six, Dot had thought, and Dot knew about these things. He felt himself, when he thought back to that memory of arriving, to be more than three; he
knew
himself to have been older than three. And as he leafed his way through the notebooks he began to remark on things he should have picked up at the time.

‘Everyone's talking about someone younger than I would have been,' he said to himself.

The man who had known Len in the 'thirties, the fellow Fascist, had talked about a meeting Len addressed just before the war: he had said that Len had made his mother—David Simmeter's mother—hold him up before the crowd. And he'd been ‘hardly more than a babby', the man had said. But he, Simon, would have been decidedly more than a baby. He noted that Len had said the picture of mother and son that adorned their living-room was taken after the war began. But the little boy clinging to his mother's skirts was too young to be him, Simon, if it was taken in, say, May 1940. Of course David Simmeter must have been born in 1938. ‘Worrying times to bring a new soul into the world,' his mother had said when she was pregnant. She would hardly have said that so feelingly back in
1935 or 6. In fact, thinking back on it, the tone of everyone's remarks about Davey Simmeter was the tone of someone discussing a little boy, not the serious five-year-old Simon himself had been when he arrived in Yeasdon.

Simon remembered the anguish in Len's voice when he had talked about his little son, killed when he was little more than three; he remembered the wail as he said, ‘Talk about punishment!' The anguish, the wail, had been genuine.

‘I suppose Fascists have feelings,' said Simon.

He went and poured himself another drink, and put Mahler's Fourth on the gramophone. Walking round the room, as the music yearned around him, he said to himself: ‘I must get rid of preconceptions. I must wipe the slate clean. I must think things through from the beginning.'

Then he sat down and went back to his notebooks. He went through them once more, word by word, from the beginning. He read his account of what he had learned from the old man in the Paddington pub. ‘He'd come out after watching
Coronation Street,
' Simon remembered. ‘I expect he still does.' He read over his account of his talks with Connie and Teddy, the long chat over coffee in Paddington with the Mosley admirer from way back, then his much scrappier account of that last dismal party with all the Simmeters together. ‘I was losing interest then,' said Simon to himself.

The notebooks were nearing an end when he came to Mary Simmeter's letter from Cattermole. I tried hard with that, Simon remembered. It had been in his old hotel near New Oxford Street; he'd checked in there after banging out of the house in Miswell Terrace. He had sat next morning over his notebooks, trying to set down the letter as nearly verbatim as he could manage. His memory had been well-trained by then: it had honed itself to highlight every detail that he heard or saw that might be of relevance to the questions of Mary and David Simmeter. He thought he had got down that letter very nearly as Mary Simmeter had written it.

And as he sat there in his chair, with an ethereal soprano voice singing of the paradisal delights of childhood filling the room, he had the glimmering of an idea. He thought he saw. At last he thought he understood.

I
slington had changed beyond recognition. Stone by stone it might not be very different, but in all the inessentials it had undergone the sort of face-lift that restores an uncertain glamour to elderly Americans. As with the face-lift, the effect was oddly nonplussing (for what does one say, after all, to a woman who has renovated her face since one last saw her?). Everything was familiar yet unfamiliar. Simon had been back for the opera once or twice, but since the company had moved from Sadler's Wells to the dreary and unwelcoming vastness of the Coliseum he had not been there at all. Islington had bloomed. Doors and window-frames were flaunting bright colours, window-boxes and tubs of flowers abounded, bright floral curtains and bold Scandinavian ones graced the windows, and sharp dressers walked confidently up to their front doors, to be greeted by precocious children in neo-Victorian outfits. Grafted on to the native Islington stock, it seemed, was a new shoot of media people, of intellectuals, and fringe upper-classes. One would not be surprised to come upon Margaret Drabble whitening a front doorstep.

Next door to 25 Miswell Terrace—Simon hugely enjoyed the development—lived a West Indian family. The incredibly smart lady who came out of the front door of No. 23 just as he was ringing the bell of 25 had a face he vaguely remembered: did she front a programme for immigrants on Channel 2? She had the sort of confidence (Simon knew it from Rosemary) that comes from possessing a face that people feel they know.

‘She'll be down the Colonel Monk,' the woman said. ‘Always is in the early evening.'

Did people talk to their neighbours now?

Simon said experimentally: ‘Connie?'

That's right,' said the woman over her shoulder. ‘Likes her three gin and t's in the evening. Buy her one of them and you're a friend for life.'

She marched off towards the tube, all brown leather and shiny brown skin. Simon looked at his watch. He had got about
two and a half hours. A neighbour was taking his and her own children to a rerun of
The Railway Children,
and though it was the sixth time of seeing in the case of his own brood, he could rely on their enjoying an hour's discussion of the finer points afterwards before they would want to get back into their own home. He set off in the direction of the Colonel Monk.

Change in the Colonel Monk could only be for the better. Simon looked without disapproval at the green imitation leather, the bogus brass, the prints of Restoration London, the photocopied broadsheets and Wanted notices. Anything that chased away the dimness that was there before had to be an improvement, and the buxom Australian girls behind the bar were un-Restoration but much to be preferred to the surly Mine Host he had known. Less of an improvement were the clientele. Glossy smartness was the norm, and voices were sharpened to command attention. ‘As I said to the D.-G.' floated through the smoke and fumes, and, ‘Margaret's made a good start, but Willie thinks she needs to be kept on a tight rein.' Above the clinking of glasses could be heard the clinking of dropped names—the counterfeit coinage of asserted self-importance, the banners flourished against the ignominy of knowing, and therefore being, nobody.

In such company it was not difficult to pick out Connie Simmeter. Even her age marked her off, for the Colonel Monk was no longer territory for old people. Her size did too, for the pub was full of pencil-slim people who converted food and drink into instant energy for self-advancement. Connie Simmeter, on the other hand, had followed the example of her mother and grown mountainous with age. She would have looked fat anywhere, but here she looked like a sack of potatoes in a field of corn. The sort of synthetic-fabric smartness she had once affected was impossible for her now: the hoops and bulges of her fleshiness could no longer be constricted into order and form. They simply had to be covered, and Connie seemed no longer to take any interest in the covering. She sat over her gin and tonic, but if Simon's first thoughts were of her mother, he realized quickly that there was a difference: Connie seemed to gaze out on the world with complacency, even with amiability. ‘I am mingling with Names,' her demeanour seemed to proclaim, ‘or at any rate observing them from the sidelines.' From behind
pudgy cheeks the eyes darted about, but they passed over Simon with no sign of interest or recognition. He paid for his glass of wine to the girl with the Broken Hill accent, and made in the direction of her table.

‘It's Miss Simmeter, isn't it? Connie?'

She was sitting at a little table on her own, her bulk spread over the cushions of a window seat. She looked up expectantly, as if prepared to welcome any diversion, forgive any intrusion.

‘I don't think I—wait a minute. Goodness me—I
do
remember you. Give me a moment . . . You weren't one of the young men at Peter Jones's, were you? No—they'd have called me Constance. Wait. It's coming back to me. You were one of the lodgers. Of course! Mr Cutheridge! To think of me forgetting. I mentioned your name so often after you left. I suppose you can guess why. To turn the screws on Len, of course! What laughs I had about that! Fancy you catching up with Len after all those years . . . But there, I called you Mr Cutheridge, but I suppose Cutheridge isn't your real name, is it?'

‘Your glass is empty,' said Simon, side-stepping, and conscious of the neighbour's injunction. ‘Won't you let me get you another? It's gin and tonic, isn't it?'

‘How kind. Very gentlemanly. But you always were. Not many gentlemen around these days. Yes, gin and t, please. Catches up with all of us in the end, doesn't it?'

Unsure what this last remark meant, but suspecting it was the gin and tonic that did the catching, Simon fetched her another. He sat down companionably opposite her, and watched her put the tonic in, which she did with a careful hand.

‘Mustn't drown it,' she said, leaning back contentedly. ‘In the neighbourhood, are you? Visiting? Where do you live now? Highgate! Oh—a very nice address. I had a gentleman friend in Highgate once. I'd like to move myself, but you can't get up the energy when you're my age. Still, I must say the neighbourhood is looking up. I expect you've noticed. Some of the people who come here are
very highly placed.
And I've got everything as I like it now in Miswell Terrace.'

‘You're on your own there now, are you?'

‘Oh yes, long since. Apart from the lodgers, of course. Very useful the money is, now that we can charge an economic rent.
The old age p. wouldn't keep me in the style I expect, I can tell you.'

‘So the rest of the family died, did they?'

‘Except Teddy. Mother went not long after that night you were there, the night she fell. Something internal—I forget the details. She lasted a few months, in and out of hospital, but she was a complete invalid. Her time was up, even she knew that. Well into extra time, if you ask me, but then Ma and I never did hit it off. Then there was Len. It must have been—let me see—about '69 or '70 when Len went. Well, not so much went as was pushed, in my opinion.'

‘Pushed?'

‘Officially it was an accident.' Connie edged her bosom confidentially forward over the table, looking immensely knowing. ‘Fell in front of a Tube train. The coroner didn't seem to have any doubts, so who was I to raise a stink? I got the money from Ma and the house from Len, so I was laughing. But I ask you: Len had worked in the Underground most of his life. He wasn't going to fall accidentally in front of a train. Of course, there was the possibility of suicide: Len hadn't been happy those last years of his life.'