Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
‘What an unbelievable coincidence, Mr Minsky.’
‘Indeed, I thought so, too. But it is a very small world.’
‘And when you got to England from Prague, what did you say
you did next?’
‘I enlisted in the British army.’
‘In which regiment was that?’
‘It was not a regiment, more of an irregular unit.’
‘I don’t understand. Where did you serve?’
Bea interrupts this time. It is clear Francis’s aunt does
not like or trust their guest.
‘Arie served behind enemy lines in Europe, Lavinia. It was
the most dangerous work imaginable.’
‘So you were a saboteur, Mr Minsky. How brave of you.’
‘You’re too kind but I was simply a linguist, a liaison
officer really.’
‘But Bea just said – ’
‘No Lavinia, it’s Arie’s turn to be modest, now. We must
respect our guest’s wishes.’
‘I do, dear. I was simply expressing an interest in Mr
Minsky’s extraordinary life.’
Francis watches at the margins like a line judge but says
nothing.
Mrs Bishop fills their coffee cups and they move to easy
chairs by the inglenook. Lavinia soon excuses herself and retires to bed. Bea
pleads tiredness, too. She kisses Francis and holds out her hand to Arie who
takes it and bows from the waist. Francis pours two decent measures of cognac.
Bea closes the drawing room door and hears her men toast each other.
‘Cheers, old chap. Here’s to friendship.’
‘L’chayim, Francis – to life.’
Upstairs, Bea lies on her marriage bed. Through the window,
the moon is a thin yellow feather curling between the clouds. Two worlds are
passing perilously close. She feels the magnetism of both – one mundane and
secure, the other unpredictable and fast. Each in its own way sustains her. But
which would she choose – or is that very thought a prelude to destruction?
Bea rolls across the bed to Francis’s side where their
favourite wedding photograph stands on his cabinet. She looks again at how they
once were, held in time under a swirl of confetti, laughing at the fates. On
the floor below is the black leather briefcase she had bought him for his new
job. It is not locked and would normally be in the safe downstairs. The voices
of Arie and Francis are barely audible from the far end of the landing. Bea is
tempted.
She slips off the bed and crouches in the shadows and undoes
the case. Inside are classified documents about Palestine. One says a Jewish
terrorist group called Irgun is behind a campaign of sabotage and murder aimed
at destabilising the British mandate to rule the territory. Another is a copy
of a briefing note for Mr Attlee, the Prime Minister.
Our agent in Jerusalem says that Irgun have set up
a cell in London along the same lines as the IRA.
Clipped to it is an MI5 memorandum.
Irgun is made up of desperate men and women who
regard their own lives cheap. They have been training selected members for the
purpose of travelling to Europe to assassinate a prominent British politician.
And there in bold type, Bea sees the name of their target –
Ernest Bevin.
McCall found Francis kneeling by his hospital bed, plucking
flowers off the carpet pattern. He did it slowly and with loving care,
arranging each invisible bloom into a bouquet only he could see. A male nurse
brought him a plastic beaker of tea with a spout so it would not spill.
‘Still gardening, squire?’
It was McCall who felt the hurt of this mockery.
‘His name is
Mr Wrenn
.’
Not all the contempt in McCall’s voice was for the nurse. It
hid the self-loathing at what he himself was about to do. He gathered Francis
close and helped him to his feet. Beneath the blue hospital-issue pyjamas, the
bones of his skeleton were hard to the touch.
‘Come on, Francis. Let’s have a talk.’
‘Are you the ambassador?’
‘No, I’m Mac.’
‘Mac?’
‘Yes. You and Bea brought me up.’
‘Did we?’
He led Francis towards the communal sitting area, past other
etiolated patients lying on beds by lockers of photographs of families they
could not remember in homes they did not know. McCall took a long white
envelope from his pocket.
‘This is an important document, Francis.’
‘Is it?’
‘The ambassador needs you to sign it.’
‘Never liked him... never told him everything...’
‘Really?’
‘...some things it was best for him not to know.’
Then Francis slowly turned his gaze on the barred windows
that imprisoned him. In that exact moment, McCall felt sure a faint light of
understanding passed across Francis’s eyes, as if some tiny function in his
brain had miraculously repaired itself. Francis had woken up in his own
nightmare and was seized by panic.
‘Get me out... I must get out.’
‘Francis? What is it?’
‘Help me, Mac. Help me.’
He rose up and gripped McCall’s arm then stumbled towards
the door. McCall could not imagine which was worse – Francis being lost in his
world or found in this.
‘They’re going to kill me.’
‘No one’s going to kill you.’
‘They will. They’ve done it before.’
‘What do you mean, Francis? Who’s tried to kill you before?’
McCall tried to keep him talking.
‘They want me dead.’
‘Who does? Who wants you dead, Francis? Who?’
Yet as quickly as his eyes had filled with understanding, so
they died back to indifference.
‘Say something... please, Francis.’
But the resurrection was over, the real Francis gone. McCall
had no choice now but to betray this innocent, mannish child. He put a pen in
Francis’s hand and guided it to make his signature. McCall felt only disgust
with himself.
‘I want my flowers...’
‘All right, Francis. You can show them to Bea this
afternoon.’
‘Yes... such beauty.’
Francis returned to his secret garden, barefoot and feeble.
McCall bent down on the patch of carpet with him. He put his head close to his.
‘I always loved you, Francis...’
McCall could hardly hear his own voice.
‘...you know that, don’t you?’
But Francis just kept on picking the prettiest flowers he
could see.
*
McCall parked near Mr Fewtrell’s office across the street
from the ruins of Ludlow Castle. Edgar Fewtrell had always acted as Francis’s
solicitor. They had been grammar school boys together – Francis, physically
strong, intellectually lazy, Edgar shy and bookish, limping in a heavy metal
calliper on his left leg after infantile polio.
Francis was his protector. Whoever would torment Edgar had
Francis to deal with first. Fewtrell would not know how to retire. He sat
behind his father’s old desk, head sunk between his shoulders like a turtle in
glasses, peering at the document Francis had just endorsed.
‘Good, good. All seems in order.’
Both knew that was not true. Francis lacked the mental
competence to sign over his financial affairs to anyone. Nevertheless, Fewtrell
added his witness signature. Bea was owed a duty of compassion in all her
troubles.
‘Beautiful she might be but Beatrice never had Francis’s
head for business.’
‘It’s the roof that’s worrying her.’
‘Well, it needn’t now. You’ll soon be able to bring the
builders in.’
McCall was about to drive away when Fewtrell emerged on the
pavement carrying three black box files tied with string. He said they were not
important – just unwanted papers Francis had long since forgotten about.
‘Put them on a bonfire if you want because I will if you
don’t.’
*
McCall was due to meet Evie at Ludlow Station next day. She
had a week’s holiday and suggested they both needed to get away for a break.
‘It’ll blow our cobwebs away, Mac.’
She had become anxious about him, adrift on his own in
no-man’s land where Francis lay dying and the father he replaced was beyond
reach.
McCall found space for Mr Fewtrell’s files in the dacha with
all the other boxes, books and paper trails of a man’s life. Here was
ambiguity... the living, the half dead and the dead who lived in the heart. Not
for the first time, it struck McCall how little he knew, how little he
understood.
*
‘Was my other Daddy brave?’
‘The bravest of brave men, yes.’
‘Tell me all about his job in the war again.’
‘Well, he had to shoot down the horrid Germans before they
could shoot us.’
‘But why didn’t he sit at the front of the aeroplane with
you, Francis?’
‘Because we all had different jobs and he was the gunner at
the back of the aeroplane.’
‘Where was my other Mummy then?’
‘I’ve told you. She was like Bea, working with the other
ladies to get the aeroplanes ready.’
‘What was my other Mummy like?’
‘As beautiful as the loveliest princess you’ve ever seen.’
‘Like Bea?’
‘Yes, that’s right. As beautiful as Bea.’
‘And are they coming to get me one day?’
‘Who?’
‘My other Mummy and Daddy.’
‘No, little friend. I don’t think they’ll be doing that.’
*
It went dark. The stars came out and the canopy of Garth
Woods trembled in the gentlest of night winds. A farm dog barked and beyond the
soughing trees, the waters of Pigs’ Brook ran black over its cobbled bed. All
of nature seemed subdued.
‘Come on, Francis. Let’s play a game.’
‘All right. What game shall we play?’
‘Cowboys and Indians.’
‘Good. Got your bow and arrow?’
‘Yes. Have you got your gun?’
‘It’s right here. Now, I’m counting to fifty then I’ll be
after you.’
‘No you won’t. I’ll get you first.’
‘We’ll see – one, two, three, four...’
Now he is running and slapping his thigh like he’s on a
horse and dodging the bullets of the white man’s six-shooter. All his senses
are heightened and he can smell the mushroom rot of decaying beech and the musk
of ferns as he slides into a hollow by the muddy brown banks of the stream. He
is panting for breath from the hard ride but no one will find him here. The
stream is a roaring torrent cascading down from the high mountains where his
Indian braves are trapped unless he can escape. He crawls on his front and sees
the white man getting nearer. But he is not alone. There is another man with
him. A stranger. He cannot make out his face. The sun’s in his eyes. But they
are closing in and they have both got guns. He must get to safety.
Yet the day is so hot. He stops and looks again. There is
nobody there... only insects, floating amid the grains of pollen and thistle
seeds drifting between the meadow sweet and moon daisies, all swaying in the
soft, warm wind and lulling him to sleep and dream.
Then there is a shot – a gun shot, so loud, so near that it
echoes inside his skull and explodes out of his eyes. There is another and he
does not know where he is, only that he is lying in a field of corn... a field
of corn swaying with poppies.
Deep, red poppies with petals that drip and soak into the
bloody earth.
*
Everywhere, there was Francis. A fingerprint in the dust on
a shelf, the hint of fading aftershave, strands of silvery hair caught
forensically in the teeth of his ebony black comb. McCall could hardly bear to
look. He untied the files Fewtrell gave him – more boxes of film, more
documents.
McCall felt himself sinking between fatigue and inertia,
wanting no more reminders of what he was soon to lose. He would stay in the
dacha overnight, a vigil of sorts, stretched out between Francis’s two old
armchairs.
Tomorrow, there would be Evie.
He switched off the desk lamp. The blackness was sudden and
total and he knocked into the table. Fewtrell’s box files banged to the floor.
McCall found the light switch and started collecting up the fallen papers –
accounts from tradesmen, carbon copies of Foreign Office reports, old passports
belonging to Bea and Francis. There was also a block of five cheque book stubs,
held together by an elastic band so perished it snapped when he touched it.
These were from Francis’s Number Two Account at the District
Bank in Castle Street, Shrewsbury. McCall flicked through them. They covered
the period from just after he was born in September 1946 till June 1950.
Francis had made payments every week – sometimes more often – starting at £4,
rising to £7. Each stub was dated and detailed in his scrivener’s hand.
The payee was always the same – McCall’s mother, Elizabeth.
Evie saw McCall from the approaching train, alone against
the platform railings in a waxed jacket and jeans, thin body closed against the
world and lacking its usual insouciance.
She was coming to understand the depth of McCall’s
depressive side. It lay hidden in grief unappeased since childhood. A shrink
would call it
attachment loss.
The fear of losing Francis was
disinterring what had been buried and long forgotten.
McCall clung to her as they kissed. He needed a shave – and
a haircut. They went hand-in-hand through the narrow shuts between Ludlow
Station and
The Feathers
for a Saturday lunch of beef casserole. At
least he was eating... even if he was not saying much.
Bea had gone
to visit Francis by the time McCall and Evie arrived back at Garth. It was a
cold, clear day and a tide of bluebells washed through the woods to the door of
Francis’s dacha. Evie wanted to look inside. It smelled of creosote, wood ash
gone damp and a faint hint of the brilliantine her own father sometimes used.
On the shelves were internal Foreign Office reports she suspected should never
have left Whitehall.
McCall seemed preoccupied as he lit the little stove and
made coffee. Evie sensed he had something to tell her, something he needed her
to hear. She waited for him to break the silence.
‘I don’t know why but I think Bea and Francis have been
lying to me.’
‘Lying to you? In what way?’
‘About my mother and father.’
He told her of Edward McCall being in the wedding footage
they had kept from him, how Francis sent his mother cheques but Bea denied
Elizabeth had ever been to Garth – despite what Mrs Bishop now said.
‘But McCall, these are all elderly people. They’re not well,
they get things mixed up in their minds after all these years.’
‘Yeah, I know, but I think there’s something more to it – ‘
‘– only because you’re down in the dumps at the moment.
You’re only seeing the black side of everything.’
Evie got him to rig up the Eumig. She wanted to see Arcadia
herself, to witness Bea’s wartime marriage, its beauty and simplicity and the
dead being resurrected. Neither spoke for the four minutes it lasted. Then
McCall laced in the seaside reel – him as a boy playing cricket, Francis and
Bea dancing a can-can. Evie felt herself being pulled ever closer into these
stories she did not fully understand.
‘How fascinating, McCall – starring in your own life. Do you
feel any connection to that kid on the screen?’
‘I know it must be me but I don’t know who I am, if you can
understand.’
‘That’s your trouble, isn’t it... not knowing?’
‘Yes... I look at these people and they’re all strangers.’
‘Don’t you remember that day?’
‘No. It’s fallen between the cracks. If Francis hadn’t taken
his cine camera everywhere, I’d have nothing of it in my mind.’
‘So you don’t remember who else must have been with you at
the seaside?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s a sequence where all three of you are shown
together. There must have been a fourth person to operate the camera.’
“Probably just someone passing by.”
They walked back to Garth and Evie told him again he needed
to find his real family and put them to rest – as he would have to with Francis
before long.
‘You’ve got to do what you’re afraid of, McCall... start
digging up the past.’
What she left unsaid was her fear that if he didn’t,
depression would stalk the rest of his life, just as it had done with the
husband she had so recently left.
*
If photographs cannot lie, neither do they reveal the entire
truth.
A shutter closes on an instant of existence and those
captured within become their own little mystery. Beyond the frame and out of
shot, what tensions, what secrets lie between them? McCall examined the blow-up
he’d had made of the tiny Box Brownie print Mrs Bishop sent him all those years
before. This was the only image of his mother, the only evidence of his
otherness.
He had no recollection of voice or scent or touch connecting
him to her. Francis said she had been artistic like Edward. But of her origins
or relatives, he knew nothing, still less of the lottery of attraction that led
to McCall’s creation. Elizabeth stood between the sunshine and the shade, a
pace apart from her Edward. She was attractive not beautiful. Just doing her
best. Her eyes were dark like her son’s but subdued, allowing no hint of
emotion.
McCall looked at the belly wherein he would have grown, the
breasts that had fed him, the hands which once held him close. All her clothes
were mismatched and shabby like Mrs Bishop’s church fête cast-offs. Her coat
was missing some buttons and the open blouse beneath looked creased and needing
to be ironed. The poverty of it all saddened him. No wonder Francis sent her
money.
As McCall stared into the enlargement of his mother’s lost
face, so he slowly began to realise hers were the features he had crawled
across like an insect in the desert in that recurring nightmare of childhood.
He recognised at last that this was the unmapped landscape of his infant
subconscious, a place of fear without end that he had never understood then –
and still didn’t.
Evie took the picture from him. She allowed herself the
gentlest of smiles. McCall’s mother had been as impoverished as her own. There
was comfort of sorts in that.
*
The sea beyond the register office at
Weston-super-Mare churned brown and a salty breeze pulled at the plastic macs
of trippers making pilgrimages from one gimcrack entertainment to another. It
was a vulgar, dismal place. McCall and Evie waited their turn to see the duty
clerk.
When she came, McCall said he wanted copies of his parents’
death certificates and gave their details. The woman went through the 1950
register.
‘You’re sure that’s the year they died?’
‘Yes, in June or July.’
‘I’m sorry but we’ve no entries for anyone called
McCall
dying
in 1950.’
‘That can’t be right. That’s when they died.’
‘I’ll look again but – ’
‘– it was a road accident... near Churchill. That’s in your
patch, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but there’s nothing about people of that name dying
then.’
This did not make sense. Bea and Francis became his
guardians soon after his parents were killed. That is what they had always told
him. The crash happened about three months before his fourth birthday. He still
had Bea and Francis’s card – a golliwog riding a toy train with a big red
number 4 on the front. It was in his memory box.
‘I’ll try the registers for1949 and ’51 just in case.’
But they were blank, too. Evie suggested they check McCall’s
local newspaper story about the accident. The cutting Francis had given him was
undated but torn from the
Weston Mercury & Somersetshire Herald.
They went through the town library’s bound copies for 1950. The paper was an
old fashioned weekly broadsheet with a gothic masthead and a front page of
classified adverts for whist drives, faith healers and ex-soldiers offering to
dig gardens. Not a single road fatality occurred anywhere in the
Herald’s
circulation area that year.
In the twelve months either side, a boy was knocked off his
bike and died and a farm worker got crushed under a tractor. These were
tragedies but not the ones McCall wanted to read. His unease grew.
Both the cutting and McCall’s birth certificate gave his
family address as Mendip Cottage, Churchill. The village was ten miles inland,
straddling a crossroads beneath a wooded escarpment. The post office was closed
but a woman mailing a letter said the postman always had lunch at
The Crown
.
They found the pub at the bottom of a stone track rising
over a hill pitted with old lime workings and colonised by scrubby trees, bent
by the winds from the Bristol Channel. The postman sat smoking a pipe in a
corner seat. He remembered
Mendip Cottage
but said it had been pulled
down long since and a new house built on the site.
‘Wasn’t fit for pigs to live in, that hole.’
‘Did you know the people who lived there around 1950?’
‘Can’t say I did, no.’
‘They were called Edward and Elizabeth McCall. He’d been in
the RAF during the war... in bombers.’
‘No. Lots of people lived in that place at one time or
another.’
‘But this couple were killed... in a car crash, here
in Churchill.’
McCall put his
Herald
cutting on the table in front
of them. The postman read it and shook his head.
‘I’m born and bred here and I never knowed anything of
this.’
He told McCall how to get to where the cottage had
stood, along a back lane to a farm, a mile away. The new place was called
Mendip House and had a conservatory full of cane furniture and pot plants.
Whatever humble signs of habitation McCall’s parents might have left had
disappeared. He and Evie stood at the white wicket gate, trying to work out
where Mrs Bishop’s photograph would have been taken. A woman in her late
sixties and dressed for gardening came from a greenhouse and asked what they
wanted. He showed her the picture of himself as a baby with the parents he
never knew. She softened and invited him to look round.
‘Bits of the old cottage are still visible.’
They followed her to an orchard of leggy apple trees hung
with ivy. Close by, McCall could see the archaeological remains of his family
home... a bumpy outline of grassed-over foundations like those of a hovel in a
village emptied by plague.
He stepped into where the two main ground floor rooms had
been. They were lawns now, with circular rose beds and a wooden bench on a
square of red clay tiles by where the chimney once stood. McCall thought how
small it was... so cramped and mean and damp. Yet this was his first world, the
place where he would have learned to walk and run to the people in the
photograph who would have picked him up and felt joy that he was theirs.
He tried to imagine his mother preparing meals here or his
father framing the pictures Francis said he painted so well. But McCall’s own
canvas had neither shapes nor colours. Only the cottage’s lean-to scullery
remained intact under a roof of orange pantiles. McCall put his hand to the
thumb latch of the door, worn smooth by those long gone.
The woman went inside and brought back a photograph of the
original cottage, derelict and abandoned. The windows were covered over by
sheets of corrugated iron and the front door nailed up with planks.
The caption underneath read:
Mendip Cottage June 1949
.
McCall looked closely and said the date could not be
accurate. The woman bridled slightly.
‘I can assure you it is because we moved into the new house
in the June of 1950.’
‘No, that’s the month when my parents were killed.’
‘I’ll show you our deeds if you want.’
‘But that’s when we were living in Mendip Cottage... the
three of us.’
‘You can’t have done. It was already demolished and the
stone used for this house.’
McCall looked at Evie, unable to understand how twelve
months of his life story had gone missing. She had no explanation, either.
*
McCall still had not figured out sex. Not properly. You
search and find, couple up and pleasure away, panting and promising. It is all
a lie but your fingers are crossed so it doesn’t matter. Then it is over. You
wash and dress and do something else till the next time. What did it truly
mean? McCall knew what it was supposed to mean but that was with her. To have
died in those moments after... those moments after with Helen, that would not
have been so bad. But she had been crossing her fingers so where did that leave
him? He hardly knew anymore. Now, on his back in a cheap seaside guest-house and
holding onto the iron bars of a strange bed, he didn’t much care, either. It
was not Evie’s fault. But as she tried to take him with her lips and her tongue
and her little white teeth, he could only lie wounded and damaged like a
warrior on the field being finished off by the enemy.
She told him not to worry. It did not matter. It was not
important. They drifted away into the night.
*
Think back, McCall... interrogate memory
.
He is a child again, in a wheat field sprinkled with
poppies. The flowers wave in the wind, redder than a sunset, back and forth,
back and forth. And as they do, so the moist petals are shaken off and fall
into the yellowing corn. It seems as if the flowers themselves are bleeding –
onto his bare legs, his hands and face and clean white shirt, into the very
soil itself. He gets up and runs away to cower in fear in some dark place. The
air he breathes smells of decay, of more dying petals and the sweet rot of dead
birds and rabbits, tied by their feet to a nail on the wall. Then he sees a
long, low box made of pale wood and grown-ups he has never met before who
incline their faces to his, mouthing words beyond his understanding.
He wants only to get out, to escape, but there are no doors
and his eyes are drawn again to the box that is lifted up and carried away by
the strangers. Women kiss him. His cheeks are wet with their tears. Then he is
alone in the back of a big car, driving through a place of statues and stones
where jackdaws clack and swoop about his head.
And all the time, a voice in his head keeps asking
questions.
Who is in the box, little boy?
He doesn’t know.
Tell us... tell us now or we’ll nail you in there
instead.
He cannot answer. It is all a flickering newsreel
from long ago. Nothing is in the right order so he is adrift in all his
memories and the shadows they cast.