Max poured us another drink from the beautiful decanter.
“You know more about me than anyone alive Susannah, does everything you have learned make you like me more or less?”
It was an odd question.
“It’s not a question of ‘like’. I want to ‘understand’. You have had such an interesting life it would be a shame if the story wasn’t told.” Perhaps he had told me his story to deflect me from asking about David. I was not going to let him.
“You talk of the time before the war, before you met David and before you became one of his Fishermen.”
“You have been doing your homework.”
“David told me quite a lot before he died, I have been learning more since.”
“Come back tomorrow. I’m tired now”
“I wanted to ask you about Vijay Thakersey?” I pressed him but Max appeared undisturbed at hearing the name. “You know he was behind your burglary don’t you?”
“Vijay was behind a lot of things. I am tired. Come back tomorrow.” I was dismissed.
Monika was waiting for us in the sitting room. She stood up as if impatient to see me gone.
I aimed an air kiss on either side of Monika’s face, making sure no contact was made, and we said goodbye.
She could not know she was Max’s daughter.
Walking back up the long straight road towards my hotel I looked across at the lights of the houses on the other side of the golf course. I picked out Millcourt, my home when I was a child and which had been since divided into flats. Ted had lived there for many years. But he had now left it too and I didn’t know where he was. I wondered if the new occupant would have an address, perhaps he would give it to me if I asked him in person.
Standing at the door of Millcourt I looked at the array of bells. There was a new name on the label to Ted’s old flat but I couldn’t read the name on the sodden piece of card. I rang the bell anyway.
I could hardly hear the man’s voice which crackled through the door phone so I briefly explained that I used to live in his flat and that I had first lived there when it had been an undivided house. The voice changed, he sounded young and enthusiastic. “Oh I’d love to hear about it then, come on up.”
The buzzer went and the door clicked open.
As I was ushered into the living room I remembered my mother, another ghost, sitting in the window seat. I hadn’t realised how much it would affect me to see this room again, it had barely changed. In that window seat I had sat listening hour after hour as she had recorded and re-recorded a song and a poem that were played at her funeral so soon afterwards. I could hear her voice I’ll see you again, whenever Spring breaks through again. She had been sitting in that window seat when I had read my step-mother’s death notice to her on the morning she died. Five years later I had been sitting there when Ted had told me so many things I had not known. ‘It took far too long,’ he once said, ‘I should have told you earlier. Truth can be painful and shocking, people run away from it but it catches up with them in the end.’ But he did tell me how my parents had lied to me to protect themselves. Perhaps he should have let that truth stay buried.
The young man offered me a cup of tea “or perhaps a glass of wine? It must be very cold out there.”
I accepted the wine and watched as he walked across the room. I was not too old to appreciate the looks and body of this young man in his dark blue jeans and grey wool polo-necked sweater.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know your name, I couldn’t read it on the bell.”
He didn’t answer immediately, instead establishing who I was. “You’re the lady who called for Ted Mottram, yesterday, on the phone? I recognise your voice.”
“Yes. That was me.”
“I’m Jim, James Parry, just call me Jim.”
I barely heard what he was saying, I assumed he was asking me my name and I answered “Susan…” I cut off before the end, wondering briefly if he noticed, I couldn’t say Susannah. Just in case.
Parry. He was a Parry. I looked at him again and saw the same nose and blond hair. Parry was not an uncommon name in this part of the world but I realised he was one of the Parrys. I knew Joe had brothers but I had barely met them, Joe had made sure we mixed in different circles as he tried to distance himself from the fishermen and casual labourers that made up most of his family. This young man must be the son of one of them, the family resemblance was too striking for him not to be. Yet he seemed respectable enough.
Jim handed me a glass of red wine and indicated for me to sit. I couldn’t fault his manners.
He sat opposite me and began the conversation easily, “You said you used to live here?”
So I told him. Little by little I explained how my parents had moved here during the war, how we had left when I was in my early teens, how this room had been part of the nursery suite, how I had spent so much time here with my brother and another boy who I believed was a sort of cousin. Jim listened as I described the house and the garden as it had been then. I tried not to look at him, he was so very like what I would have liked Joe to be.
“And then I came back to live here after it had been divided into flats.” I found it easy to tell Jim about those months, I think I probably told him more than I needed to. I had given too many hints about my life and Jim had put them together.
“Your name isn’t Susan is it? It’s Susannah.” He was standing with his back to me, opening another bottle of wine, I couldn’t see his face and I didn’t know him well enough to interpret the inflexion of his voice. Was he curious, or triumphant?
“Yes. I’m Susannah, Joe was my husband.” There was no point in lying.
“I thought you must be. When Gran knew it was a flat in this house I was buying she told me all about you, none of it was very flattering. That was the first I knew that Uncle Joe had been married. It’s been fascinating listening to your side of the story.”
“Have I told you so much?”
“Enough to know you a bit I think. Would you like to stay for supper?”
All that evening we talked. Jim knew names and would ask who the people were and how they fitted into the family, and it was only a matter of time before he had produced a large sheet of paper and some felt tipped pens and was encouraging me to draw a family tree.
As I drew the complicated network of lines and names I surprised myself by telling Jim details I never thought I could speak freely about. But I didn’t put everything on that diagram. There were some things Jim had no right to know.
It was nearly midnight when I realised the time.
“I’ve got to go, good grief I had no idea it was so late.”
“Stay.”
It would have been so easy to agree, so easy to stay in the warm and open another bottle of wine. It would have been so easy to be undressed and made love to by this strangely attractive man, because that was what he wanted to do.
But, attractive as he was, I had known him for only a few hours. I was the older by at least fifteen years and for the first three years of his life I had been his aunt. Two years ago these things probably wouldn’t have mattered and I would have stayed. But now they did and for the first time in my life I didn’t sleep with someone because it wouldn’t have been right.
My hotel room was cold, made even colder by the sound of the wind. It was beginning to blow fiercely and I remembered nights spent at Sandhey when such a wind blew. I wondered how many members of the Parry family were members of the lifeboat crew, whether Jim would be getting a message to leave the warmth of his flat and go out onto the sea. I hoped no one was stupid enough to put others at risk by being out in the storm.
The progress I’d made with Max didn’t compensate for my sense of loneliness. What good would it be to learn all about Max if my life was still a mess?
Soul searching wasn’t something I usually went in for but that night I spent time looking at my life as if it were someone else’s. I didn’t like what I saw.
For so long I had blamed others for ruining my life. Charles, my mother, my father and Kathleen had all stopped me from being with Carl. No one had stopped me marrying Joe and that had ruined my chances of a career. It was all someone else’s fault. But Jonathan, who could I blame him on? Ramesh? Ramesh had only put me in the position to make such a mistake. No one had made me marry him.
Now I was really alone. Ted, Charles, my children had all moved, Max had made that clear, but where to? I went back to the carrier bag of letters and read them all carefully. There was nothing in them to give an address, postmarks were unclear.
It was time to take some responsibility for myself. In a way I was glad Maureen hadn’t been in as I would simply have run back to her and, despite everything, she would have welcomed me back and saved me from making any decisions. But I would have loved to have found Ted.
He would have helped me. Just as he always had.
I didn’t go back to see Max the next day.
As I sat in the freezing cold dining room drinking a miserable, obviously instant, coffee and looking at the worst egg and bacon I had seen for some time when an apologetic waitress came in with an envelope. Inside were a bundle of papers and a letter.
Susannah,
Perhaps I have to admit to not having been entirely honest with you. On the morning after your mother’s funeral I had a long talk with David Redhead.
We had thought to use Carl but for all his success he is not as bright as you and we felt he would have been too condemnatory. That morning we decided you would be the one and we sought to prepare you. It would be necessary to give you the correct background so you could understand why we did what we did so you would not judge us too harshly. Maureen was reminded of her obligations to us. I knew her husband during the war, he was a good chap but died before he could really be of any use to us. Our talk yesterday proved to me that we made the right decision, though it has taken far longer than we had thought. You will use the enclosed papers to help complete your work. We hoped you would find Vijay Thakersey before he had a chance to wreak any havoc on the family but it is too late for that. But it is still necessary for you to find him to convince him that we did not betray him. Another generation will suffer if you don’t.
On another, more personal, matter. Your mother would be saddened that you haven’t found the man who will make you happy. She despaired of Charles, she had no understanding of him whatsoever, perhaps he was too like his father, perhaps it was because she blamed him for many things, but she worried about you. ‘She will cling to the wrong people, she will need men but, like me, she will never find the right one.’ Find that ‘right man’ Susannah. The right man is strong and he is patient. He loves you and he is waiting for you to find him. This man is not Carl Witherby.
Maximilian
Do not judge us too harshly for things we could not know.
“Who brought this?” I had finally managed to attract the attention of the waitress thinking that only a day earlier I had been at the Savoy, my every need anticipated and the breakfast faultless.
“An old man dropped it into reception. I thought he was a tramp he was that dishevelled.”
“An old man? Did he say anything?”
“I dunno I didn’t talk to him. Do you want me to ask?”
“That would be very helpful.” I hoped there wasn’t too much sarcasm in my voice.
She came back a few minutes later.
“The man said to give it to the beautiful lady from London. He didn’t seem to know your name.”
Perhaps now I would know where to start. Perhaps now, finally, if it wasn’t too late, I would do what David had wanted me to do.
I did not appreciate Max’s comments about my life. It was far more important for me to find a place to live and a way of earning some money, to divorce Jonathan and learn to cope with having no friends and no family.
As the taxi driver drove me back across the Wirral to Lime Street Station everything that I owned was in his car. There were two brand new suitcases packed with, possibly technically stolen, clothes; my two briefcases containing all my research material and computer disks. In my handbag was about £1,500 in cash, I had destroyed all my credit and bank cards, they were all Jonathan’s.
I was going to start again.
But this time Annie Donaldson was going to do things right.