The Cuckoo's Child (17 page)

“Yes.”

“Splendid! When would you like to move in?”

I thought. I would have to pay for that night at the hotel, but did I really want to spend another sleepless night with the traffic? There was plenty of time to get back there, pack and return to Wimbledon.

“Tonight?”

It was Miss Plover's turn to look surprised, but then she smiled.

“Splendid! Let's go down and have that cup of tea, shall we?”

So the final arrangements were made around the kitchen table by the Aga, the usual living area, I gathered, because it was the warmest place in the house. I learned they were all retired teachers from the same girls' grammar school—“Gone now, such a dreadful pity, all those comprehensives”—and I told them why I was in England, setting them all twittering at the romance of it all. The ginger cat, who obviously had a short memory or no tendency to bear grudges, jumped up onto my lap and settled, and I was formally introduced to Mao, the white cat, and Fergus, Miss Hoar's ferret who lived upstairs in her workroom but was, they warned, perpetually on the run.

Isobel plied me with ginger snaps and Earl Grey tea in weightless flowered bone china, and Miss Hoar stopped barking monosyllables when she learned I taught science. I felt like the head girl invited into the staff room, but they were artlessly friendly and kind in their old-fashioned, fussy way, and I loved them on the spot. All three crowded to the door when I left and waved me off as if I were departing forever instead of returning that same evening.

It took longer than I expected, of course, but I accomplished it in a happy haze and finally closed the door of my room, after many offers of help and cocoa from the ladies, just as the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall announced ten o'clock far below.

I leaned against the door for a while, drinking in my domain. The windows were black, and I could see myself reflected, a small figure in an island of light, suspended in air.
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came
 . . . Quickly I disposed of my few possessions, setting the gas mask case on the end of the window seat, where I would see it when I woke.

Then I got ready for bed, turned the light out, and curled into the hammock-like curve of the bed. Now the fitful moonlight cast wavering shadows from the tree into the room, and I could hear the faint scratching of the branches on the glass as they tossed in the wind. Just what young Catherine would have heard when she sat in her little closet bed at Wuthering Heights, scratching out the different versions of her name, dreaming of the person she would become, the possibilities her life held.

Tomorrow
, I thought drowsily,
I will find Morocco Street
.

Strange how sleep can muddy resolution. You go to bed one night with a decision made after endless anxiety—your path clear, downright obvious—and somewhere in that dreamless night the buoyancy deflates, so that you wake up the next morning still with the same plan but with niggling apprehensions attached. You must have noticed that yourself, Stephen. Of course you have. Remember telling me one night, after weeks of misery, that you were going to beat up Larry Smedley and never let him push you around again? That was the first night you slept right through without nightmares for ages. But next morning, you weren't so sure, threw up at breakfast, and convinced Mum you were too sick for school! You were only about seven, but it's the same no matter how old you are.

I wasn't so sure of myself either as I got ready to leave the next morning. Miss Hoar inquired in her bluff way what I intended to do. I showed her the torn scrap from the address book and explained why I thought it was important to go there and find Sarah Murphy if I could. She looked doubtful, and my confidence wobbled.

“That area of London has changed a lot,” she said. “Much of it has been rebuilt. You have to be prepared to find that nothing is left of the old street. Those old buildings, slums in Dickens's time I shouldn't wonder, could have been razed after the war, replaced by tower blocks and people relocated all over the place. It may not be at all straightforward, you know.”

I made my way to London Bridge Station and walked down St. Thomas Street past the sprawling bulk of Guy's Hospital toward Bermondsey Street. I tried to imagine my mother hurrying down this road in the dark with me clutched in her arms, assailed by a different kind of noise, not the sound of a bustling metropolis unwinkingly pursuing life but the menacing wails and drones and explosions of a deadly war. I couldn't.

Ahead of me, there was a white enamelled plate on the wall:
FENNING STREET, SE1
. I turned down the narrow street and stood. The buildings stared back. I couldn't see a seed merchant in any of the likely buildings, nothing that looked like a warehouse, no covered doorways. There was nothing to tell me exactly where she had taken shelter and died, but I stood near the end of the road in the middle of the sidewalk for some time. A couple who had to separate to pass me stared curiously as they went by, then shrugged. Stranger things were to be seen on every corner, every day.

I soon found Morocco Street. From a confluence with Leathermarket Street it curved away and became Leather Court. Number 14 was an office block. There were some apartments above stores, but no houses, and all the buildings looked fairly new despite the layer of London grime each one wore.

At the end of Leather Court I found a small newsagent. It hadn't taken me long to realize that these stores were the centre of many communities in the city. Their proprietors were on familiar terms with a lot of the residents, knew where they lived, because of delivering newspapers, knew their history and all the gossip. This one looked hopeful. It was not modern. In fact, it could have survived unchanged from the turn of the century.

A young Indian woman in a sari was tidying the magazine rack. I bought a local paper and casually broached the subject of Number 14.

“Dunno,” she said, ignoring my outstretched hand and slapping the change down on the counter together with a wrinkled till receipt, “there's never bin no 'ouses there, not since I've bin 'ere, anyway.” Her Cockney accent was startling, and her tone implied that nothing before her occupation could possibly be of the slightest interest. But I persisted.

“Have you ever heard of anyone called Sarah Murphy living anywhere around here?”

She was concentrating on the innards of the till by then, installing a new tape. She looked as if she held the till personally responsible for running out of paper. “Nah,” she said finally, “never 'eard of 'er.”

I stood outside for a moment, baffled. I think it was pure shame at being so easily stopped that got me moving again. But it was aimless, and so was my decision to enter a grubby little café down the road. I bought a cup of execrable coffee, poured from two large jugs, one filled with a black liquid, one with white, which turned out to be hot milk, and resolved to drink nothing but tea thereafter. The owner shook his head when I asked about Sarah Murphy. For want of anything better to do I turned to the paper I'd bought.

I found it on page three under the headline
STILL GOING STRONG
!
LOCAL RESIDENT HITS 100
. There was a photograph of an old woman stuffed in an armchair, glowering mutinously at the camera while a younger woman twinkled over the chair back. A large cake covered with candles stood on a table beside the old lady. “Director of Southwark Lodge, Hilda Warner, congratulates the oldest resident, Mrs. Jessie Blacklock, on reaching her centenary today,” read the caption. The article was predictable enough, but there was one detail that leapt out at me; for many years, including the 1940s, Mrs. Blacklock had lived on Leather Court. Wasn't there a chance this old lady might remember something of the people who lived in the neighbourhood at the same time? I could phone the Lodge.

I felt buoyed by this tenuous lead. The euphoria at a small clue took me out of the café and well down Bermondsey Street before it occurred to me that public phones were in short supply. One I found outside an off licence had been vandalized, panes of glass shattered, the phone cord dangling with frayed ends and no mouthpiece, the instructions smeared with something dark and unspeakable, and an overpowering reek of urine in the shabby claustrophobic cabin. There was no phonebook, of course. Why hadn't I asked the café owner if I could look at his? Stupid, stupid!

The mistake cost me a lot of time. I finally found somebody willing to lend me a phonebook in the bookstall at the station but only after a series of rebuffs, including one from a man behind the steaming counter at a crowded café who listened to my request, hands on hips, then leaned over a vat of bright orange baked beans and said, “It's lunchtime. I sell food. What d'yer fink this is, bleeding Directory Enquiries?” The man at the bookstall was much more polite, even cheerful, but his helpfulness led nowhere. The relevant pages had been ripped out.

But I was fired up and not about to let vandals and rudeness stand in my way. The article! If I phoned the paper, surely they would be able to tell me how to get in touch with Southwark Lodge?

One of the phones in a line outside the station actually worked. Staff at the newspaper passed me from one extension to another, but eventually I was talking to the reporter who had written the piece on Mrs. Blacklock. He was wary, reluctant to give me any information. Maddening, except that the rational part of me was saying,
Well, what do you expect? Here you are, a complete stranger ringing up out of the blue with some cock and bull story about lost relatives. How does he know I'm legit? I could be some demented wacko, or somebody who can't wait for an inheritance, or a burglar, or one of those freaks who thinks it's her mission to end the suffering of the old.

“Look,” I said finally, “if I could find a phonebook that hasn't been vandalized I wouldn't need to bother you. I'm not asking for anything that's classified. Suggest someone else I can ask and I'll leave you alone.”

“No,” he said, “okay, just hang on a sec . . .”

I could hear rustling, and I visualized him at his untidy desk, rooting through the layers like a pig after truffles. A few seconds later I had the address and phone number.

But that was the end of my luck for the day. A call to Southwark Lodge duplicated my experience with the newspaper; transferred from one official to another like the parcel in the kid's game, layer after layer of my over-elaborate story torn off, it seemed to me, until it was reduced to an impossibly bald question.

“May I talk to Mrs. Jessie Blacklock?”

The director, for I had at last penetrated to the inner sanctum, sidestepped with a question of her own.

“Are you a family member?”

“No, I don't know her at all.”

“We have to be very careful not to overtire her,” said the director. “She's very frail, and she's had a lot of excitement this week. May I ask what is your purpose in visiting an old lady who is a stranger?”

I explained. The director's voice had lost some of its caution when she spoke again.

“Now that
is
interesting. She represents a possible shortcut, doesn't she? I'd hate to have to go through all the Sarah Murphys in the country! Mrs. Blacklock would probably help if she could—she prides herself on her memory, on her good days, that is. How accurate she is, I can't say. Not too many around to contradict her, are there?”

“Depressingly true.”

“Well, let me see. I don't see why you shouldn't come. She'd probably enjoy a visitor. Today's out of the question, she'll be off to bed soon, and what's today? Friday, mmm. I think we'd better give her the weekend to recover from all the attention she had for her birthday. Why don't you plan for Monday morning, round about ten-thirty. She'd be resting in the lounge then. Call me first, so we can be sure she's up to it. Really, this is quite exciting! I
do
hope it isn't a wild goose chase for you.”

So did I. The weekend yawned ahead. I saw it as a void to be filled, somehow, with waiting for the encounter with the old lady. The possibility that she knew nothing, or did know something and wouldn't be able to remember, nagged at me. Suppose she wasn't well enough to see me on Monday? Suppose she was so exhausted by her triumphant scaling of centennial heights that she had to rest for the rest of her days? And
days
was the operative word. You couldn't have that many left when you got to a hundred. Suppose I rang up on Monday and they said, “Oh, we're sorry, she just died.” What
would
I do about sifting through all the Sarah Murphys in England? Just how many of them would there be, for God's sake?

My landladies rescued me from my funk. They were in the kitchen as I went down to make myself some tea. Miss Hoar was dismantling a toaster, Isobel was knitting something pale pink, and Miss Plover was turning the pages of a magazine with her big ugly hands. They all looked at me expectantly.

“How did you get on, then?” Miss Hoar said impatiently. “We're dying to know.”

I told them.

“Splendid!” said Miss Plover. “You
have
done well.”

I felt unreasonably cheered, as if I had come top in a French test against all the odds.

“Going back on Monday, then?” asked Miss Hoar. “Just have to hope the old girl doesn't kick the bucket before you get there, won't you?”

There was a flurry of reproachful remonstrances from Miss Plover and Isobel, but I was grateful for the bluntness that laid my chief concern out in the open. Exposed like that, it dwindled.

“She's made it to a hundred,” I said, filling the kettle at the old brass tap, dull and rough from long use. “She's tough.”

There was a metallic thud as Miss Hoar whacked compacted crumbs out of the bottom of the toaster. Miss Plover hurried for dustpan and brush.

“Might as well leave it until I've finished, Mildred,” said Miss Hoar. “There'll only be more. Why it's so difficult to remember to empty out the crumbs
before
they all get stuck on the bottom and start fires, I don't know.”