‘I’ve checked, but can’t find a number. You could write. Or just knock on their door.’
‘Are you crazy? This is London. People don’t open their doors to strangers.’
‘They can only turn you away, and if they do you could write instead. But in my experience if people haven’t got anything to hide, they are usually quite generous. They might just invite you in, you never know.’
‘I’m not sure …’ I dithered.
‘Would you like me to come with you? It could be less threatening if we turn up on their doorstep together, and safer for you in case they turn out to be axe-murderers,’ he laughed. It seemed unlikely, but he had a point. ‘I could come on Saturday.’
‘What about Tom’s football?’
‘I’m free from dad duties this weekend,’ Ben said. ‘He’s off on a school trip. What about visiting your mum?’
‘Not a problem. I can go on Monday. I’m my own boss now.’ I repeated the words in my head:
my own boss
. I could do what I liked, to hell with being cautious. ‘Come on Friday evening,’ I said quickly, before I could change my mind. ‘I’ll cook. It’ll make a nice change from pulling out tacks.’
‘Perfect.’
It had become clear that the chair’s upholstery was in a terminal state and would need to be stripped back to its wooden frame before completely rebuilding. By Thursday, it was a skeleton, cleaned and stripped of old tacks and staples, but my spare room looked as though a cyclone had hit it, with wadding, horsehair and webbing scattered all over the floor. Years ago, at college, I’d completed an evening class in upholstery and we had tackled something similar, but then we were working in pairs, in a fully-equipped workshop, with an experienced tutor helping at every stage. This was an altogether more daunting task.
I wrote a list of the basic kit that I would need:
This lot could cost well over a thousand pounds, I figured, on top of what I’d paid for the chair and stool, and this first commission would never make a profit. But I tried to reassure myself that all new businesses have to operate at a loss to start with, and there must be a value in my designs, or why would Justin and his clients been so interested in them?
On Friday morning I examined myself in the mirror and decided that I needed to invest in myself, as well as in the business. First, a trip to the hairdresser’s for highlights to conceal the ugly stripe at my parting, and a cut which shaped without shortening too much. I watched happily as she feathered the ends, softening my face and taking years off me. Then it was off to the beauticians for a manicure to sort out my work-roughened hands, and to get my eyebrows shaped and lashes and brows tinted.
I spent a blissfully domestic afternoon cooking a nut roast for me and a lamb shank for Ben – he’d told me this was his favourite meal. It was so long since I’d cooked anything significant and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. Even so, for a vegetarian, handling hunks of raw meat is a sign of true friendship. I hoped he would appreciate it.
‘Mmm, that smells delicious. I’m starving.’ He stood back to appraise me. ‘Like the new look.’
‘Thank you.’ He’d made an effort, too. The leather jacket and stonewashed blue jeans had gone, replaced with black trousers and a fitted V-neck sweater in deep purple that instantly made him appear slimmer, less bulky. Who advised him on this new style? His ex? More likely a friend or work colleague. Whoever it was had done a good job.
‘Food’s nearly ready. Why don’t you pour yourself a glass of this while I light the candles?’ I handed him the bottle of Burgundy that had been warming on the mantelpiece and I’d already started.
At that very moment my phone rang.
‘Miss Meadows?’
‘Speaking. Who’s that please?’
‘My name is Arun. I’m the manager of the King’s Cross night shelter. You emailed us about your stolen quilt? I think we may have found it.’
‘It’s the night shelter,’ I whispered to Ben.
‘Have they found it?’ he mouthed.
‘Sounds like it.’
‘Are you there, Miss Meadows?’
‘Sorry it’s just … I am almost speechless,’ I gabbled. ‘Thank you so much! When can I come and collect it? Do I need to bring anything to exchange it with?’
‘It’s not quite so simple I’m afraid,’ the man said. ‘Let me explain. We had a meeting of our volunteers this morning and I mentioned your friend’s request. One of them remembered talking to one of our regulars, a man called Dennis, about his bedroll. It was unusual, she says, because it was made of patchwork.’
Surely there couldn’t be too many tramps in central London with patchwork quilts in their bedrolls? ‘Is he there now?’
‘Sorry, I should have explained. They only come for the night and have to leave in the morning. But you can speak to our volunteer if you like. Just a sec.’ He shouted away from the phone, his voice reverberating in what sounded like a large room. ‘Leylah? Can you come and talk to Miss Meadows about Dennis’s quilt?’
A tentative voice with a strong Jamaican twang: ‘Hello, can I help you?’
‘I hear you recognised the quilt. Thank you so much.’
‘I didn’t see much of it. When I offered to get it laundered he told me to bugger off.’ Her smoky chuckle reminded me of Maria’s.
‘What about colours?’
‘Well, there was a lot of blue,’ she said, ‘with flowers. And a design like a sunrise. Hard to see, the thing’s pretty grubby.’
My heart danced, remembering the grandmother’s fan. ‘That sounds like the one. Thank you so much. By the way, if he does give it to you, please don’t wash it, because it’s very delicate and might damage the fabrics.’
‘No problem.’
She handed the phone back to Arun. ‘It sounds like my quilt,’ I said. ‘I wonder where he found it?’
There was a hushed conversation at the other end, before he came back on the line. ‘He’s adamant that he didn’t steal it – he found it on a piece of waste ground.’
‘Would he agree to part with it, do you think? Perhaps I could offer something to replace it: a new blanket, a winter coat perhaps?’
‘We can certainly ask him when he comes back,’ Arun said.
‘Is he there every evening?’ My imagination was fast-forwarding to the happy moment of exchange; the tramp delightedly trying on his new coat, me returning home with my precious quilt. The vision was instantly dashed.
‘He’s not one of our regulars, I’m afraid. He often disappears for weeks, or even months. But as soon as we see him we’ll get in touch.’
‘It’s so frustrating,’ I wailed to Ben after ringing off. ‘For a moment it felt as though I was almost close enough to grasp it, but now it’s gone again.’
‘Dennis will turn up again, somewhere,’ he said calmly. ‘If not at King’s Cross then somewhere else.’
All we could do was wait.
Over breakfast next day (croissants and real coffee, of course), we chatted easily and planned our trip to the East End. The meal had been a success, and our previous awkwardness seemed to have evaporated. As Ben bent his head over his phone to check the route, the back of his neck looked so vulnerable my fingers itched to stroke it. Or bury my head in it. Or even take him straight back to bed.
But first, we had a mission to achieve.
Bethnal Green is in the throes of a patchy process of gentrification. Skips litter its narrow residential streets, where Audis jostle with ancient Astras and neglected motorbikes. Among the DIY replacement doors and windows, some frontages have been restored to Edwardian glory, with glimmering Farrow & Ball paintwork and brass fittings. Many of the tiny front gardens are just dumping grounds, others have been landscaped with Yorkstone pathways, box hedges and other tasteful adornments.
The Kowalskis’ house, a three-storey, bay-windowed Edwardian terrace, was somewhere between the two extremes. It had a comfortable, lived-in look: by no means gentrified but in a reasonable state of repair. The paintwork was fresh and, although they were now dead and frosted, the window boxes had once been bright with geraniums. Unlike many of its neighbours, the house had not been converted into flats and there was a single button for the bell, which sounded hollowly inside the house. After a short pause, the gaunt face of a middle-aged woman peered through the lace curtains.
I waved in what I hoped was a friendly and non-threatening gesture. The face disappeared and we heard a shout: ‘Andy! Are you expecting anyone?’ There was another pause, then the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and the door was opened by a tall, bony man in his fifties with a wild crest of wavy grey hair and an overnight growth of stubble.
‘Yes?’ he said suspiciously, his frame blocking the doorway.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you. Are you Mr Kowalski?’
‘Who wants to know?’ A strong Cockney inflection.
‘My name is Caroline Meadows and this is my friend Ben. I think our grandmothers may have had a friend in common. Was your granny’s name Nora? Nora Kowalski?’
‘Possibly.’ His eyes narrowed with mistrust.
‘And I think she was friends with a woman called Maria Romano?’
The fierce expression cracked into a snag-toothed grin. ‘Maria, the fruitcake? Your granny was her friend?’ He swivelled his head and shouted into the house, ‘Trace? People here knew Nora and Maria.’ The person we had seen at the window, another slender, wiry fifty-something, appeared beside him in the doorway wearing a flowery apron, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
I explained again that my granny had known Maria, who we believed was also a friend of Nora’s. ‘I’m trying to find out a bit more about her. Is there any chance we could talk?’
‘Sorry, loves, we’d invite you in but right now we’re in a bit of a pickle with Andy’s old dad,’ she said. ‘He’s very lame, you see, and I’m trying to get him sorted.’
‘Perhaps we could come back,’ Ben said, ‘at a more convenient time.’
They both hesitated, and then the woman nudged his arm. ‘You go, Andy. Take them down the Queens. I’ll get Sam sorted and follow you down.’
‘You sure, Trace?’
‘Off you go,’ she said. ‘Have one for me.’
From the way he told it, Andy Kowalski, grandson of Nora, East Ender and jack of all trades, spent his life ducking and diving, making a bob or two here and there while his wife Tracey ‘brought in the reg’lars’ as a cleaner at the nearby Royal London Hospital. He confirmed that his grandmother was Nora Kowalski, née Featherstone. He had barely known his grandfather, Samuel Kowalski, son of a Polish refugee, who died long before Nora. Andy’s father, who he confusingly referred to as old Sam, Sam junior, or sometimes just Sammy, was the only survivor of Nora’s two sons, the other having died in the war. After his wife died, Andy and his wife Trace had moved in to look after him.
Yes, it was hard having the old boy around all the time, he said, fussing about his food and what powder he wanted his clothes washed in, but what could you do? He couldn’t go on living on his own, what with his legs gone, and the rest.
I nodded sympathetically, sipped my glass of wine and tried to banish guilty thoughts of Mum. These good people had thought it perfectly natural to move in with their widowed father, perhaps because they could afford no alternative, and they seemed to be managing just fine.
‘So what was it you wanted to know, then?’ he asked.
I explained about Helena Hall, the tapes, and what Maria had said about having worked with Nora at Buckingham Palace. ‘Did Nora ever tell you any of this?’
‘We all knew Maria was a bit of a nutter, to be honest,’ he said. ‘But she wasn’t lying about Buckingham Palace.’
‘She really did work there?’ I gasped, catching Ben’s eye across the table. He was grinning from ear to ear.
Andy hesitated, taken aback by my reaction. ‘Leastwise, far as we know. Nan was tight-lipped about it, of course, they was sworn to secrecy I ’spect. But we knew in the family that she and my grandpa both worked there, long ago. Maria was there for a while, too,’ he went on. ‘They was seamstresses, I seem to remember. She was always good with a needle.’
‘That’s incredible,’ I whispered. ‘In the hospital they said she was making it all up.’ His words felt like a gift. If only Maria could have been here to celebrate with us – she’d have loved it.
‘Did they ever talk about the Prince of Wales?’
‘Our Charlie? What was she up to with him, then?’
‘No, Charlie’s great-uncle, the one who married Mrs Simpson and resigned from the throne, back in the nineteen thirties. He would have been about the same age as Maria and your nan. Maria said she knew him … you know, erm, personally.’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, don’t recall any talk of that, but we can ask Dad when he gets here. Not that he remembers much these days. Nan used to say she was quite a looker when she was young, that Maria, but I can’t see her catching a prince.’
‘What do you remember about Maria?’ Ben prompted.
‘I was too young to know her properly, like,’ Andy went on, getting into his stride. ‘We was just kids when she left. Mum and Dad said they never knew what to make of the woman, to be honest. They was already married when she arrived and Nan – Nora, that is – told him she was just a friend, come to stay ’cos she had nowhere else to go. Besides, old Nora was that lonely after her hubby died and she said it was nice to have company, doing their needlework and that.’
‘Do you remember Maria sewing patchwork? My granny left me a quilt she made.’
His eyes lit up, bright as a child’s. ‘Bloody hell, that’s something I
do
remember. I was only a kid but I loved them lovely little ducks and flowers,’ he mused, ‘and the dragon, I remember that, with the flames coming out its mouth. I used to tell her it was a dinosaur. Nan said they had worked on one of the sections together, the one with the flowery patterns, because they used to love them flowers when they was girls. You still got it, then?’
‘Sort of,’ I improvised. ‘We lent it to someone but hope to get it back soon.’