The Cuckoo's Child (19 page)

“Wouldn't be, would there? I think they knocked down all the old buildings after the war. I had to move into a flat in a big block in Bermondsey, more room, mind you, but thin walls, you could hear a nit cough in them places. I missed my little house, even if it didn't have an inside loo and hot water tap, I can tell you.

“But there I go, you don't care about that, do you, love? What happened to Sarah? I have an idea she moved down to the seaside somewhere. Littlehampton perhaps? Hastings? Tell you how I know, she was friends with a woman I knew did the odd bit of dressmaking, and I was talking to her one day about all the changes round about, and she says to me, ‘Talking of changes, did I tell you I heard from Sarah?' and she fishes out this postcard with a picture of this fancy place on the front, and on the back she'd written, ‘Like my new house? Ha, ha, just joking!' and on the bottom there was something about a pavilion, and I said, ‘That's a funny sort of place to keep sports stuff in, isn't it? They must be a funny lot there.' She laughed and laughed, did Beryl.”

“You don't happen to know why she went there, or what she or her husband were going to do there, to earn a living?”

“I couldn't say. Chances are with that Murphy fellow it wouldn't be on the up and up. I did hear he'd lined his pockets on the black market. But what would you do at the seaside? Run a boarding house? That would suit Murphy, having his wife do all the work so he could sit back and rake in all the profits!”

So. There I was, cast down one minute, encouraged the next. Admittedly, it was a very tenuous lead. I looked at the old lady opposite me. Her face was flushed, but her eyes were bright and knowing.

“Still here?”

Once again the director had materialized unheard. I wondered how often she startled the residents the same way.

“This lady—I'm sorry,” I said, “I don't even know your name.”

“Enid.”

“Enid
did
remember Sarah Murphy. She was telling me about her. Wasn't it lucky we met?”

The director smiled indulgently.

“Enid's been telling you some of her stories, has she?”

Was it my imagination, or did the director lean ever so gently on the word? Enid scowled.

“They're not
all
stories,” she insisted. “She didn't want stories.”

“Time for lunch, now,” said Miss Warner, shaking her head at me ruefully as the old woman levered herself out of the chair. “I'm sorry we couldn't be more help.”

I watched them slowly making their way between two potted palms. Miss Warner was diverted by an altercation at a card table, and Enid stopped and swivelled awkwardly.

“Not a story,” she said. “Why would I tell you a story about that?”

Without waiting for an answer she shuffled away.

She had a point, don't you think, Stephen? Why
would
she tell me a story?

I struggled with her question through the dreary outskirts of London. Was Enid a liar? Had she simply been amusing herself? Was the whole tale a product of aged malice? But she hadn't struck me as senile. Old, certainly, but fully aware and competent. Maybe just the kind of person who
would
fabricate to make a boring life more interesting? Apparently, she had a reputation for invention; if you found yourself with all your faculties intact among contemporaries who were mostly gaga, bossed about by well-meaning but insufferable youngsters, wouldn't you keep your brain sharp by making up plausible stories and seeing what you could get away with?

“But then,” I explained later to the three ladies round the Aga, “there were some details that were so convincing, like Sarah's accent, for instance. How would she have known I might want to hear Sarah was a country girl? And the postcard thing. Why bother with all that? I'd have accepted any place she suggested.”

Isobel had already explained that Enid's funny place to keep sports stuff was likely to be the Brighton Pavilion, George IV's eccentric seaside palace.

“Well,” said Miss Plover, “it's my experience that really accomplished liars would do something exactly like that. You're prepared to believe her simply because she was more involved than strictly necessary—so she obliged you with a complicated story, ‘remembering' what was on the back of the card even, and making fun of her own ignorance. It does sound very convincing, but it might just be the mark of a very talented actress.”

“But she was so put out when the director hinted that she might be spinning me a line. She was
annoyed
.
Offended.
Not embarrassed, or rueful, or laughing it off as you'd expect if she'd been caught doing something naughty.” I warmed to Enid's defence as I remembered something else. “And she said, ‘about that.' Why would she tell me a story
about that
. Almost as if she's admitting she does make things up but not about important things.”

“So she was annoyed because her habit of storytelling got in the way this time of being believed?” Miss Hoar said thoughtfully. “That rings true, I must say.”

As usual, Isobel put her well-manicured finger on the point.

“It's all you've got, isn't it? You
have
to follow it up. What other choice is there?”

Even Miss Plover agreed with that observation. She had another question, though.

“Am I missing something? Why do you think your mother might have come from the country somewhere?”

For answer I went upstairs to fetch the gas mask case and spread the shabby contents across the kitchen table. They looked forlorn lying there on the wide, well-scrubbed wooden surface. Hopelessly inadequate. I explained the possible significance of the seed packet, and realized again how thin the connections seemed. Isobel exclaimed over the Mickey Mouse gas mask.

“Good Lord, it's a museum piece!”

I showed the ladies the name written on the strap.

“And you think that may be your real name?” asked Miss Hoar.

I shrugged. “It's possible. It was with me, and there was no other child around.”

With a pang I remembered Olivia, that other lost child, and with that memory Daniel suddenly filled my mind. It was painful to tear my attention back.

“It's a pity you have no idea as yet where your mother may have come from. Without that you couldn't hope to get any information out of Somerset House, though it's not Somerset House any more, it's gone to Wales or something.”

I must have looked blank. Miss Plover came to the rescue.

“The Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths,” she said succinctly. “They'd be able to tell you if such a birth had been registered around 1940, but a name without a place of birth or a parent's name would be a needle in a haystack.”

“So I need to investigate Brighton.”

Isobel was peering at the seed packet through the glasses she always kept folded and dangling round her neck on a beaded chain.

“I can't make this out,” she said. “I can see what might be ‘Park,' but the first part is too faint.”

“Let me see,” said Miss Plover, taking the packet and dragging Isobel's glasses closer to her own eyes.

“Wascot?” she said after a long pause during which she angled the tiny envelope into a better light, towing Isobel with her. “Nescot?”

Miss Hoar stiffened.

“That rings a bell somehow. Why is that name familiar?”

The other two looked blank, shaking their heads.

“Never mind,” said Miss Hoar, “it'll come to me.”

“It will too,” whispered Miss Plover as she returned the envelope to me. “Evelyn's got a splendid memory!”

But you know, I was beginning to have reservations about memory. How many of our recollections are myths of our own making? In the elaborate, unconscious filing system we carry about with us, how much is real, and how much wishful thinking or embroidery, theft or suffocation, excuse or justification? Even the big things must suffer erosion eventually, a gentle blurring of outline and feature, not enough to disguise the original completely, just to soften and blunt the harsh angularities into Sphinx faces the Pharaohs would barely recognize.

Daniel's disappearance remains as stark in memory as the day it happened, but what about Daniel himself? I know his face and the colour of his eyes and the tender hollow at the nape of his neck, but could I swear to the way his hair swirls on the crown of his head? The exact shape of his earlobes? The design of his navel? And if this much has blurred in eleven years, what could my family possibly remember of me and my biological mother after all this time—or even
want
to remember—that would be of the slightest use to me?

Stephen, you would have approved of the practical approach I took to Brighton. Directory Enquiries were no help on a Murphy without an address, but they gave me the phone numbers for tourist information and the local council offices. A woman at the council office, sounding adenoidal and put upon, reluctantly told me there were several S. Murphys on the electoral roll but declined to reveal their addresses. She sounded quite pleased to be able to refuse.

“Oh no,” she said firmly, “that would be quite against regulations. More than my job's worth. So sorry.” I didn't point out that the local phonebook would give me their addresses if I could get my hands on it. I didn't want to give her a second opportunity to say no.

The Tourist Information Office was more outgoing, or less righteous, but not much more helpful. The girl who answered the phone soon realized that she was too recent an addition to the staff to have the answers I was seeking and chirpily summoned up an older colleague. I waited, listening to the rustles and background noises, and then the barely audible voice of the girl making a rapid explanation to someone else and the noise of the handset being transferred. A quiet voice sounded in my ear.

“How may I help you?”

I explained.

“There's no Sarah Murphy on our lists at the moment running any sort of hotel or boarding house or
B&B
, but you know, there used to be. She had a boarding house somewhere near the station if I remember correctly. There was something about it that's nagging at me, something odd, but I can't . . . Anyway, she retired, I suppose, some years ago. I've no idea whether she's still in the same house or moved elsewhere. I couldn't even tell you what street the boarding house was on, and I don't have any of the old lists to refer to. I'm sorry I can't be more helpful.”

“But you've helped a lot. At least I know there was once a Sarah Murphy there. You don't know if she came from London, do you?”

“That would have been before my time, I'm afraid.”

“Never mind. It was a long shot.”

“Cats!”

“What?”

“Cats! I've just remembered what was odd about the house. She kept cats too, dozens of them. Anyone who stayed there had to be able to put up with the cats. Caused a little bit of a stir with the health inspectors, I seem to remember. And the neighbours. May even have been why she gave up taking in
PG
s.”

I caught the train at Clapham Junction. I was armed with a very old
AA
map of the Brighton Hove area, donated by Miss Hoar, and from Isobel, a bag of crusty ham rolls, a slice of Dundee cake, two apples, and a quarter-pound of sherbert lemons in case I got peckish on the journey. Maybe she was remembering the expeditions to the seaside of her youth or some outmoded form of transport so leisurely that iron rations were a must if one were not to faint for lack of nourishment.

“You never know with public transport,” she said darkly, “and even if you don't actually
need
it, the sherbert lemons will be nice and refreshing. Trains are always so stuffy, don't you think?”

Her precautions lay like a stone in my bag along with the gas mask case. The train bucked and skittered its way to the right line across the maze of tracks at Clapham Junction and then gradually picked up speed through the suburbs until the stations became illegible stammers as we rocketed past. The countryside opened out, the farther south we went, into green hedged fields, cows and sheep grazing, the land gradually undulating to rounded hills. These were the Downs, covered with the short turf and thin pale soil of chalk uplands, forming a barrier between the city and the sea.

We stopped at East Croydon and Redhill, skirted Gatwick airport, and rattled finally into the terminus at Brighton. After the serenity of the hills and the open skies, Brighton was disappointingly ordinary, at least round the railway station, lines of identical houses that could have come from any suburb, faceless streets with names like Trafalgar Terrace and Kensington Gardens and Cheapside, as if they yearned to be somewhere more cosmopolitan but had settled instead for imitation as a more realistic substitute. The sea might have been a hundred miles away.

But a salty, iodine, seaweedy smell was in the air, and I followed my nose to find its source. The Channel was heaving up and down, grey and white, as far as the eye could see. The old West Pier, like an Edwardian conservatory on stilts, sat in the water to my right. The other pier, much longer, edged out into deep water on my left. There was a stiff breeze coming off the sea, and soon my face felt sticky and I could taste the salt on my lips.

A sudden vision of my house on the water at Davis Bay overwhelmed me, and I felt a clutching pang of homesickness. What was I doing in this strange town on the southern edge of England when I could be walking with Neil along our beach, idly looking for shells and driftwood, watching for eagles and osprey, laughing at the sandpipers running as if on wheels in and out of the final reaches of the waves? What did I hope to find here that could be any more important to me than that?

What
was
I doing? Wasting time, obviously.

In the Lanes I found a pub that had once been a chapel, ordered a half of bitter, and borrowed a phonebook. The Murphys took up a column. I could see no quick or sure way of eliminating any of them, so I jotted down all the numbers, putting all the S. Murphys at the top of the list. I hefted the rolls of ten-pence coins I'd provided myself with for a marathon session at a public phone. Time for some dogged detective work.