Authors: Barbara Vine
Amused by its proprietor calling Teds Café a business, Goshawk asked him if he could recall ever having seen the dead man before.
“Well, I wouldn’t,” Ted said. “Most days I’m not here. I’m the boss, see? It’s my daughter as is here most days, waiting tables like. What’s it to you, anyway?”
Goshawk produced his warrant card, and the man’s manner immediately became more affable, not to say fawning.
“Anything I can do to help, you’ve only got to ask.”
“First, I’d like to know if you ever saw this man?” Goshawk produced the poor quality sepia snapshot of John with Sybil and Ethel taken in the Goodwins’ Bristol garden that Mary Goodwin had given to the police.
“Dunno. Might be anyone. You’d have to ask my daughter.”
Ted added, “She got married at Christmas, though,” as if matrimony might adversely affect a woman’s memory. “I can tell you one funny thing that’s come back to me. There’s an old boy used to come in here for his dinner. Not every day, mind, but as often as not. He had a dog with him, big black bruiser. I’ll tell you how he made his living. He lived up there just before you get to the cemetery, had a bit of garden and a greenhouse he said he put up himself. Used to grow vegetables and bring them down the canal in his boat to deliver to the houseboats in the Basin. Folks’d put in orders, and he’d bring the stuff next day, put it through their window in a box. Then he come back here and have his dinner, leaving a bit for the dog.
“Well, I don’t know when this happened, long time ago, years maybe. He had his dinner and the dog had his, and off he went, but he was back in a minute, shouting the place down about his oar.”
“His what?”
“His oar, the thing he rowed the boat with. Or one of them. He was shouting the place down that someone must have had a lend of his oar without by-your-leave, and when he’d bring it back, he’d chucked it in the bottom of the boat instead of putting it in that thing, what d’you call it?”
“A rowlock,” said Goshawk.
“That’s him. Now there was no harm done, but for days afterwards, maybe a week, he went on about that oar, who’d taken it and what for, who’d chucked it back in his boat and so on and so forth, making a right hullabaloo, saying he’d have the law on whoever it was, but I don’t reckon he did.”
“No,” Goshawk said, while wondering if it would ever have reached his ears if the man had. “You heard all this?”
“Me? No, not me. Whatever gave you that idea? It was my daughter, my Reenie, her what lives in Elkstone Road.”
“The old man, what’s his name?”
“You mean what
was
his name. He’s dead now. That was another funny thing. His dog found him and set up howling till someone came. But the dog died next day too.”
Ted launched himself into what threatened to be a long account of all the animals he had known who had died when their owners did, leading him to all the married couples among his relatives and neighbours who had died within days of one another, but just as he was starting on his uncle William and auntie Rhoda, Goshawk made his excuses and left.
He had been wasting his time. The incident with the oar was probably the only piece of excitement which had come Ted’s way in years, and such as it was it hadn’t even happened to him but to his daughter. He had never even encountered Goodwin, never seen him. Wondering if anyone would remember that far back, Goshawk called at those houses which backed directly onto the canal, their footings in the water, but he was right about the tenants’ memories. Either they had forgotten or else those who might have remembered had moved away. Only one elderly woman said she could recall a couple of “young lads larking about” on the opposite bank and one of them falling in. It had stuck in her memory. This seemed promising until she said that the reason she remembered was that the one who fell in was “a darkie” and you saw few of them about.
G
OSHAWK WASN’T
the kind of man to give up. Unrewarding as Ted had been, it might be a good idea to go back to the café and get Reenie’s address. When he could make the time. But returning to the canal bank some two weeks later after there had been more bombing of West London, he found the windows of Teds Caff boarded up and a heavy padlock on the door. Whether this closure was the result of bombing was impossible to say, but Ted was gone. Another week went by before Goshawk could make
time—his own time of course—to go looking for Reenie in Elk-stone Road. With no young police constable to help him, he began on one of those house-to-house calls that had been such a frequent chore of his youth.
This task was made all the more difficult because many of the houses were divided into rooms or flats, and he had knocked on nearly thirty doors before he found Ted’s daughter. She was living with her husband, who was at work in a glass-bottle factory, in two rooms and a scullery, the lower half of a house in Elkstone Road. The district was poor but not a slum, and Reenie Davis, though she looked malnourished and downtrodden, was clean and neatly dressed.
Her father was all right, she said, but he had been bombed out of his house in the Harrow Road and gone to live with his sister in Basingstoke. She showed what Goshawk called “the sentimentality of the working class” when he asked about the old man whose dog died with him. No, she never even knew what the man was called, but it was a crying shame him dying like that, all alone but for his dog, it brought tears to your eyes. Reenie suited the action to the word and gave a little sob.
The young man in the photograph? She might have seen him and she might not, she couldn’t say. She remembered the incident of the oar put back in the wrong place, the poor old man shouting and yelling and the dog running up and down and barking, but she couldn’t have said when it happened. A lot of fuss about nothing, if you asked her. Now if he’d asked her about another young man who often came into Teds Café, she could have told the inspector about him. He was so good-looking, he looked like Leslie Howard, but she wouldn’t want her husband to hear her talk like that, he was that jealous.
“This other young man, the handsome one,” said Goshawk, “did he ever come in the café with anyone else?”
“Of course he did, but only men. All the girls’d have been after him, but he steered clear of them. Didn’t want to get tied down, if you ask me.”
Goshawk referred to the photograph. “Did you ever see him with this man?”
Reenie couldn’t say. She might have. She couldn’t remember everyone who came in. “Only the good-looking ones, eh?” said Goshawk, and she giggled.
“I can tell you where he lives. It’s Bourne Terrace off the Harrow Road. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m a married woman. It’s my auntie lives down there, that’s how I know.”
None of this was much help to Goshawk. He went to Bourne Terrace but it told him nothing. What did he expect this grim, dirty street to tell him? He had no reason to suppose, anyway, that the good-looking young man had any connection with drowned John Goodwin. The rest of his week’s holiday he spent calling at houses on both sides of the canal, but so many streets had been devastated by bombing that his quest inevitably came to nothing. For the time being, he had to leave it. A big murder case in Clapham near where he himself lived occupied all his time and attention. It was bombs falling near Paddington station where Goshawk’s sergeant lived in one of the houses that escaped the destruction that brought John Goodwin’s death again to mind. Goshawk took a walk along Bourne Terrace, relatively unscathed but for a damaged house here and there, to come out into a scene of terrible devastation, a whole district flattened but for remnants of little houses, sliced in half by bombs, here and there an exposed wall with a fireplace still in it and patterned paper on the part that remained. He wondered if Reenie’s aunt had survived and, come to that, the handsome young man. What he should do, he told himself, what he should have done two years before, had such an action not been forbidden, was to have a couple of detective
constables conduct a house-to-house enquiry in Bourne Terrace. Perhaps he should do it himself on a day off just as he had performed a similar exercise in Elkstone Road. For what purpose, though?
He had no name, no photograph, no date, and no evidence, but something had haunted him across those years, a question he had forgotten to ask Reenie. He went back to her home after six months, doubting if she would still be there. But she was, and to his surprise she recognised him. Her husband, she said, was in the army, he’d been called up in the over-thirty-four intake.
“There’s been a lot of bombing in back of here,” Goshawk said. “Was your auntie all right?”
“Fancy you remembering! Well,
she
was, but her house took a direct hit. Auntie was in the Anderson shelter in the garden, and who d’you think was in there with her? A girl that’s called Dot and that young chap I told you about, the good-looking one. They was all in there and they was all okay. His place wasn’t touched.”
Goshawk went home, where he reread his brother-in-law’s letter. Albert Edward Webber of 43 Bourne Terrace, Paddington. He had been living in Devon, it appeared, living with a woman who was either John Goodwin’s widow or his sister.
M
AUD NO
longer read a newspaper, and though she listened to her wireless set, it was never to news bulletins. Coming home from school one day in late November, Hope told her mother she had heard that Bristol had been heavily bombed on the night of the twenty-fourth. Although Hope had never met any of them, she knew that her mother’s parents and sisters lived there.
“I don’t know why you’re telling me,” Maud said. “They’re nothing to me.”
She was far more concerned and shocked by the news brought to her by Guy that Bertie had been sent for trial to the Central Criminal Court for the wilful murder of her brother, John. And he had stayed here, in her house! She had given him money! Because of him, everyone thought she was a loose woman! As for her parents, she had almost forgotten their existence, and when she had a letter from Sybil two days later to tell her that their father had died on the night of the bombing, she threw it away without replying. Nor did she go to the funeral, though Sybil had written again to tell her when and where it was. And when Elspeth showed that she was shocked by her refusal to go, Maud told Elspeth how she had changed since her marriage from the unconventional, bohemian creature she used to be.
Patiently bearing her mother’s moods, on a day in the school holidays just before Christmas, Hope changed. Maud hadn’t
taken to her bed but had been silent all morning. Heavy rain was falling, and Hope had had her usual recourse to books. She had been reading for three hours when suddenly she laid down her book and said, “What happened to Daddy?”
Maud was startled because Hope had given up calling him Daddy a year before he went away. “Your uncle, you mean.”
“Well, I never really knew, did I?”
“He was your uncle, my brother. He died.”
“If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask Elspeth. She knew him.”
“All you need to know is that he went to London and drowned in a canal. You weren’t particularly fond of him, were you?”
Hope made no answer. “You’ve never told me who my real father was. You’ve never told me anything.”
“Don’t speak to me like that, Hope. You should have respect for your mother.”
They had both been invited to River House for Christmas, and this time Maud agreed to go. She had made sure that Alicia Imber would not be there. Hope asked if she could stay on over Boxing Day and the next day, when she heard that the Imber boys were coming.
“If Mrs. Harding will have you,” Maud said. She expected Hope to call Maud’s friend that, though Hope never did. She was fast learning to disobey her mother because in her opinion Maud made such ridiculous rules. “Those boys are men now. They won’t have time for a little girl like you.”
There was some truth in that. Hope had just become eleven while Christian reached seventeen. He had a car of his own now and drove his brother to River House, where the two of them took part in grown-up conversation and drank sherry along with the adults. Hope played with baby Adam while longing to be alone with Christian, Julian making a third if need be (if absolutely need be). When they had gone, she too went home. She felt she had lost her only friends, for the children she had known
in Dartcombe had been missing from her life for several years now. At school she liked a lot of girls and they seemed to like her. Most of them lived in Ashburton, and she had gone home to tea with some of them. One good thing about having a mother who was a “semi-invalid,” as Hope was instructed to tell people, was that Maud noticed less and less whether Hope was at home or not, but asking a friend back to tea—even if she got the tea ready herself—was not allowed. The two girls would make a noise while Maud was having her afternoon sleep. She was twenty-seven years old, but she led Hope to believe she was thirty-one. To reveal her age at all to her daughter—any age—was hateful to her, but even worse would be to let her know that Maud had been only fifteen when the child was born. Eighteen was respectable—let her believe that.
Much as Maud wanted nothing to do with her family, her upbringing died hard. She had taught Hope the difference between right and wrong, or what Maud thought was the difference. One thing Hope’s mother had never told her was where babies came from, but Maud was already anxious to keep her daughter aloof from the dangers of men’s company so gave her some limited sex education. As Hope was to tell a friend many years later, it was “how babies came out but not how they got in.” The girls at school took the opposite line. Childbirth interested them not at all, though they were saturated in biology lessons with diagrams of the female reproductive system and encouraged to watch pet rabbits giving birth. Fertilisation was another matter. Those confident enough to instruct the others correctly called sexual intercourse
fucking,
in their innocence having no idea that this was the worst of all possible “swear words,” unspeakable in society, never heard or uttered by most of their parents, and unprintable for years to come. The process it defined was described by an embarrassed teacher as getting married, loving your husband very much, and sleeping beside
him “in a special kind of loving embrace.” If Hope wondered what married people did, a couple such as Elspeth and Guy, for instance, her curiosity was soon satisfied by one of the confident ones, who gave her a graphic account, very different from the “loving embrace” version.