The Cuckoo's Child (20 page)

I stared through the grimy windows of the phonebox, listening to the double rings at the other end of the line. I'd exhausted the S. Murphys and was into the Ds. Hope was flagging. I watched a man, hunched against the wind, tugging a reluctant Jack Russell down the street. Both looked miserable. The handset pressed to my ear smelled bad. I visualized the thousands of mouths opening and closing, the invisible spray of saliva hitting the black plastic, the ears in clammy intimacy with mine, the hands building up a thickening film of sweat. I was about to put the phone down, retrieve my money, and tumble out into the air when the ringing abruptly stopped and a female voice spoke, amazingly close, as if her head were alongside mine, whispering into my ear.

“Hello.”

I told her my name and went through the explanation for my call. I had refined this over the last dozen failures, learning that a full explanation was a waste of time and would only have to be repeated.

“I'm trying to trace a woman who used to live in Morocco Street, Bermondsey. In London. During the war. I was told she moved to this area and maybe ran a boarding house. Her name is Sarah Murphy. Do you know of her at all?”

There was a profound silence. For a moment I thought we had been cut off, but it wasn't the sort of deadness on the line that tells you immediately that all the electronic connections have been severed. It was more the silence of those disturbing phone calls late at night where the caller never speaks, and after bellowing, “Hello? Hello? Who's there?” you listen in your turn, controlling your noisy breathing to catch the slightest sound, and there you both are, at either end of the line, waiting for the betrayal of a single sigh or rustle, waiting for the tiny click or the furtive slide of the handset back onto its rest so that you can leave your own phone off the hook and prevent your persecutor from making any more calls for the time being.

“Hello?” I said at last. “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Why do you want her?” The voice was thin now and strained.

“She may be able to tell me something about my mother. I think my mother may have been on the way to see her when she was killed. I've only just discovered this.”

It sounded lamer to me every time I said it. But the voice came again, flat.

“My mother's called Sarah. We used to live in London. But she can't tell you anything.”

“I'd really like to talk to her if I could. She might be able to remember something, just a little thing maybe. I've come this far on very small clues.”

The voice was stronger now.

“Wouldn't make any difference. She died yesterday in the hospital. Cancer.”

It was my turn to fall silent. With dismay, in my case. As I tried to collect my thoughts, another sound came over the wire, distant but unmistakable. Cats yowling.

“I am so sorry. I'd never have bothered you if . . .”

“You weren't to know.”

She sounded almost brisk now. I took the plunge.

“Look, I know it's the worst possible time, and I'll just go away if you want me to, but do you think I could come and talk to you instead some time? Not now, obviously, but in the next few weeks, when you're not so overwhelmed?”

“Overwhelmed? What makes you say that?”

“Well, all the arrangements to make, the shock, you know.”

“The funeral's all in hand. Made her own arrangements ages ago. Nothing for me to do, really. It's not as if it wasn't expected. Where are you?”

“Down near the Pavilion, at a public phone.”

“If you want, you could come now. Might as well. I've got nothing better to do with myself.”

She wasn't exactly welcoming, but I couldn't pass up the chance. She gave me directions to her house on Tidy Street. As an afterthought, I asked her name.

“Deirdre,” she said, “Deirdre Murphy.”

So she wasn't married. And the phone was in her name.

“See you in a bit,” I said. Another cat mewed, but Deirdre made no reply.

The house on Tidy Street was tall and thin, crowded on both sides by newer homes of pallid brick, semi-detached clones differentiated only by the colours of their front doors and the efforts their owners had made at individuality: brass carriage lamps, wrought iron gates, window boxes, and a startling array of front yards, cultivated, hidden by hedges, lawned, concreted, asphalted, gravelled, crazy paved, most with at least one car parked on the road or crouched by the front windows if the garden had been abandoned to vehicles. The Murphy house by contrast was an older, darker brick, and it stuck up like a rude finger among the others. All the drapes had been drawn, and the house looked blind. There was no car, but a bicycle leaned against the railing of the front porch, manacled to it by a padlock and chain. There was a privet hedge along the wall by the road, but no other sign of horticulture.

I crunched across the gravel to the front door and rang the bell. It was one of those bells that give no sound, so you have no idea if it is functioning or not. A brass plate by the door read
SEAVIEW HOUSE
in curly copperplate, but the metal had acquired a dull patina in the salt air. Nobody had polished it in a long time. I was just about to try the bell again, or give the dolphin knocker a thump, when I heard shuffling steps on the other side of the door and faint mewing. The door opened.

“Come in,” said a voice. “Mind the cats.”

The house reeked. I'd experienced the smell in that concentration only once, when I visited a dotty old woman in Halfmoon Bay who bred Siamese cats and allowed them the run of the house. Holding my breath and hoping I'd get acclimatized soon and not notice it so much, I edged in and followed Deirdre down the dark hallway. I half expected the whole house to be shrouded and plunged in gloom, but Deirdre flung open a door at the back of the house, and I was blinded for a moment.

We were in a sunroom. But obviously lived in. There was a dining room table on one side, and the rest of the space was filled with shabby armchairs, the worn patches covered with crocheted squares, protruding springs buffered by lumpy cushions, old ottomans and stools, small tables littered with newspapers and magazines, rolled-up knitting and half-empty chocolate boxes. Sharing all these surfaces were cats of every size, shape, and colour. Their collective unblinking gaze was unnerving.

“How many are there?” I asked.

Deirdre looked about her.

“I'm not absolutely sure,” she said doubtfully, as if it had never dawned on her to count. “Twenty-five, maybe?”

She was about my age, a few more years on her perhaps, but immeasurably older in some deepseated way. If an artist were to draw her, all the lines and pencil strokes would tend downward. Her limp, ear-length hair, a faded greyish blond, emphasized the smallness and narrowness of her head. The outer corners of her eyes, which were a muddy brown, tilted down, and the line was echoed by the pouches under her eyes and the deep runnels that gouged trenches from her nose to the corners of her mouth, where they formed little curved hooks in imitation of the contours of her lips.

She was short and stocky, barrel-like, an impression accentuated by a shapeless brown garment that belled out from her narrow shoulders and hinted at padded hips and a massive belly. Its droopy hem sagged around mid-calf, and peeping out from below it were two tiny feet, lumpy with swollen veins and bunions, in black cloth shoes with ankle straps. She reminded me of a candle that had burned to extinction, its wax melted in rivulets, puddled and heaped at its base.

She motioned me awkwardly to a chair, inhabited already by a round-faced tabby with a fierce yellow glare who seemed disinclined to move. I squeezed in beside him, and Deirdre lowered herself with a thump into a sagging basket chair that squeaked in protest. There was a silence. Obviously she felt no compulsion to play hostess, but I decided her ungraciousness was the result of lack of practice, not indifference or malice. I floundered ahead.

“I was right, then? Your mother came here from London?”

“Yes.”

“And she lived on Morocco Street? Number 14?”

She shrugged.

“Couldn't tell you the number, but that was the name of the street, I think. I don't remember much about that.”

I pulled the gas mask out of my bag and showed her the torn fragment from the address book. She fingered it absently while I explained how I had come by it, and my theory for its presence in the case. She listened, but her attention was caught by the mask.

She picked the grotesque little thing up and smiled, running her finger over the snout-like filter.

“I had one just like this,” she said. “Never used it, but we had to carry them about all the time.”

She turned it over to investigate the inside, lifting it to her face to inhale its rubbery smell. I saw her freeze, a moment of utter stillness in which I swear she did not breathe. I was suspended in the same tension, waiting. Then her breath gushed out, and she looked at me, an awed expression on her face.

“Goodman,” she said slowly. “That was my mother's maiden name.”

We stared at each other. In her eyes I saw a reflection of my own wild surmise dawning. Could it be . . . ? Are we . . . ? I hardly dared to ask another question, in case the fragile thought should crumble under the weight of one more fact.

“Tell me,” I said at last, “did your mother have any sisters?”

“She had a younger sister. I never met her.”

“Is she still alive?”

“She died, that's all I know for sure. I can remember asking Mum about her, round about the time Dad scarpered. I don't know why I would have. Mum kept a picture of her on the mantelpiece.”

Her voice trailed off. I had no difficulty imagining why a child would want to know about other members of the family when her father disappeared from her life, and I felt a pang for the bewildered little girl who had grown into this plain, stunted woman.

“Maybe you just wanted to populate your world,” I suggested, and she looked startled, and then speculative. I tugged her back.

“Do you know
how
your aunt died?”

Deirdre thought for a moment.

“Not really,” she said. “I asked Mum how come her sister died if she was younger, and Mum said that sort of thing happened in the war. You never knew, she said, who was going to cop it in the night. She never said outright, but you know how kids pick things up. I always assumed she was killed in an air raid.”

“I was found sitting beside the body of a young woman during an air raid, not more than a few blocks from your home. This stuff was with me.”

“My God,” she breathed, “it's like one of those mysteries on the tele. Are you going to tell me we're
cousins
?”

“It looks that way, doesn't it?”

“Wow,” she said, “the long-lost cousin returns! It's like a fairy story!”

It was the first sign of emotion she had displayed and it transformed her. The planes of her face tilted upward as her mouth stretched into a wide grin, pushing up her cheeks and crinkling the corners of her eyes. I felt myself grinning hugely too.

“Well,
coz
,” I said, “tell me more. Are you the only one?”

“Oh,” she replied, suddenly serious, “I'm a one and only, and Uncle Magnus never married . . .”

“There's an
uncle
?”

“Oh, yes, I've only met him a few times myself, when he came down here. We never went there, of course.”

More mystery?

“Why ‘of course'?”

Deirdre shifted in her seat. The basketwork creaked and two cats abruptly lifted their heads from their paws, alert for trouble.

“There was a falling-out, long ago. It's funny, you asking. I only found out about it a few days ago. I think it was on Mum's mind, just before she . . . you know.”

A tear sneaked out of Deirdre's right eye and she smeared it away quickly with the heel of her hand.

“Anyway,” she continued, “apparently she ran away from home, to marry Dad. Her parents were so angry, at least her mother was. They said they washed their hands of her, told her they had no daughter called Sarah any more. She said she wrote, but she never got a reply. She never went back. Never spoke to them again.”

“But why? Why were they so angry? She got married, after all.”

“Yes, but Dad was Catholic, wasn't he? And Irish.”

I was appalled at this evidence of intolerance, but something else had struck me.

“So did you ever see your—our—grandparents, then?”

“Never. I don't think they even know about me. Uncle Magnus used to come on the sly, I think. He wouldn't have said anything. And Mum told me she'd never take me there. ‘I'm not letting you get anywhere near the old witch,' she used to say. ‘She's not going to poison you with her nastiness.'”

This was intriguing enough, but my ear had caught another nuance.

“‘
Know
'?” I asked. “They're still alive?”

“What? Oh no, leastways the old man's dead, died years ago now, early 1960s, something like that. Mum always had a soft spot for her dad, said he was a nice old thing. I found her in the garden crying her heart out not long after Uncle Magnus rang up to tell her the news. They found him lying outside in the rain. Had a stroke, poor old love. He hung on for a few days, but . . . And Grandma wouldn't let Mum go and see him, told the hospital they weren't to let her in if she went there, spiteful old cow. Mum was that upset. It was his funeral that day, when I found her crying.”

“But that's awful! Wicked!”

My mouth formed this trite response with no help from my brain, which was churning. I
was
appalled; even though I had never known my aunt, I still felt an automatic outrage at the treatment she'd received, indignation that this sad-sack cousin of mine had had to witness her mother's grief and exclusion and adopt it as her own.