Spencer’s List

Iris, standing outside the library with her petition, didn’t bother to target the two men who were strolling out of the covered market and along the pavement towards her, but instead turned her attention to a studenty girl who had just crossed the road and was heading towards the post office. The three successive Saturdays that she had spent collecting signatures had turned her from a nervous rookie, plastered against the library façade bleating ‘Can I possibly interest you in…?’ at people’s backs, to a focused assessor, skilled in predicting the exact response of a given passer-by, homing in on the keen and the weak with ruthless accuracy. She felt she could publish a leaflet on the subject.

The girl was in her early twenties and was wearing a jacket that looked vaguely ethnic. This was a good sign, as were her clumpy lace-up shoes. Other items of clothing that seemed inexplicably linked to an interest in the fate of the library were zipped-up anoraks, hats with brims (this included flat caps) and knitted scarves. It had been a chastening moment when Iris realized that she simply had to look out for people who dressed a bit like her. On a broader scale, there was little point in approaching males under twenty-five (unless they were actually entering the library), women under twenty-five in packs of three or more, anyone with a shaven head and anyone who hadn’t put their teeth in that morning.

‘Would you like to sign a petition against library closure?’ She had learned to start with a statement and keep the clipboard half-concealed at her side until the person had stopped moving. Beginning with a question and an outstretched biro sent people veering away as if repelled by an invisible force field.

‘There’s been a steady reduction of opening hours which means that fewer and fewer people can use the library, which then gives the local authority the ammunition to cut the service entirely.’ (Alison Steiner had invented this wording which – as Iris had pointed out at the Save the Library committee meeting – actually translated as ‘No, it’s not closing.’ ‘It’s a pre-emptive strike,’ Alison had said. ‘We’re saying, “It’s not closing yet – but if we don’t act now then the philistine right will shut every library in Britain and sell them off for yuppie flats.” ’)

‘And it’s the best library in North East London.’ This was Iris’s own addition, one she’d taken on trust from her father who used to claim that he’d cycled round every library in the area, comparing stock, staff and architecture. Admittedly that had been in the late 1940s, but it had become a tenet of family lore, together with her mother’s ‘nothing beats a nice cup of tea’ and her Auntie Olive’s ‘three prunes a day and you’ll live to be a hundred’, though she herself hadn’t made it past seventy-seven.

The girl took the proffered pen and clipboard and started to fill in her details, while Iris scanned the street for the next potential signatory. The last couple of weeks had awakened a competitive side of her nature that she had never known existed, and she was keen to beat last Saturday’s total. A couple of hundred yards up the street, lingering beside the rack in front of the Pound Store she could see a sure-fire bet – one of Dov’s patients who was, moreover, wearing a natty (brimmed) Homburg.

‘Thanks very much,’ said Iris, taking back the clipboard and then starting violently as someone tapped her on the shoulder.

‘God, you’re jumpy, Mum.’ It was Robin and Tom, and she realized with a mental lurch that they were the two men she’d seen just a moment ago, distance turning them into unrecognizable adults. Close by they looked reassuringly unchanged, but she felt unsettled, as if something important had happened while she wasn’t looking, and she had yet to catch up.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised. ‘Yes please.’ Neither had been keen library users for at least a decade, and when she had first mentioned the campaign Robin’s response had been, ‘Oh, is it still open then?’ They had been hugely amused at the thought of her standing in the street ‘soliciting’, as Tom had put it.

Now he took the clipboard from his brother and started filling in their address with his usual speedy scrawl.

‘I’ve been practising,’ he said, finishing his signature with a huge full stop.

He started writing on the next line. ‘Different signatures. I can do you about fifteen extra people.’

‘No, Tom.’ She tried to grab the clipboard but he turned his back protectively and stuck out his elbows.

‘Honestly, I’m really good’, he said over his shoulder, ‘and they’re all real people.’

‘Mum.’ She recognized the warning note in Robin’s voice, and turned to see a bulgy young woman holding a large camera.

‘No. Oh, I see – you’re a bit early. Alison takes over at two o’clock.’

‘Yes,’ said Iris, reluctantly, seeing what was coming. The Advertiser was notoriously so short of journalists that almost any unsolicited article was printed, and Alison had recently submitted a rabble-rousing six hundred words.

‘Well I just need a photo, to illustrate the piece. You know, standing in front of the library.’

‘Oh. You’re her son?’ said the photographer, her face brightening. ‘Well, it would be nice to have both of you in the shot.’

‘God!’ Lara looked as if she’d hit pay dirt. ‘You’re identical! Fantastic! And you’re all involved in the campaign?’

‘Yup,’ said Tom, handing the clipboard casually back to Iris. She glanced at it and spotted the signatures of her aunts Myrtle and Olive as well as those of Fran, Peter, Sylvie and Mr Tibbs. Tom put his arm around her shoulder and smiled dazzlingly at Lara. ‘Where do you want us?’

By the time Alison arrived, Iris had been dropped from the line-up altogether, and Tom and Robin were standing on the steps of the library with Lara crouched on the pavement below, angling her camera near-vertically.

‘They’re going to look about forty feet tall from there, aren’t they?’ said Iris, sotto voce.

‘Any publicity’s good publicity,’ said Alison, ‘and they can do a headline about giants of literature. Are you off home now?’

‘No.’ Iris remembered the task she had set herself and her stomach gave a nervous little skip. ‘I’m going to the reading room, I need to write a letter.’

She sat for a while with the blank pad in front of her, biro in hand. Since the parents’ evening, the idea of the letter had been a fishhook, tugging gently but persistently at her consciousness. She had thought about the Conrad of her image, the one standing in front of the pillared façade of a Southern mansion, and had realized that he was still a student, sideburns fuzzing the edges of his face, his lanky frame clad in denim; if she focused hard enough she could almost see the acne scars on his cheekbones. The mansion itself, she knew, had no basis in fact – he had once referred to ‘the old family place’ and she had invented the rest from the Deep South of her imagination. There was no real Conrad there; she knew nothing about him, nothing at all. He could be a senator, he could be in gaol, he could be living the sort of unexceptionable middle-class American life about which she knew very little, since it was rarely described in novels. The twins had caught up with him now; all three of them were eighteen and if they had stood in a row, Conrad would have been the shortest and youngest-looking. The thought made her uncomfortable – there seemed something vaguely incestuous about hanging on to an image of a lover who was younger than her sons. What she wanted was an update, a new picture that she could superimpose over the old one. And if that picture showed someone who was living a decent, admirable, successful life then so much the better. If the twins ever asked she would have a template to show them.

She had secured her favourite seat, a buttoned, viciously upright leather chair positioned so that light from the frosted window fell across the table in front of it. The reading room was a remnant of sombre Victoriana, held in aspic while the rest of the library had been lightened, brightened and knocked through. It held a couple of leather armchairs, three desks with inkwells attached, their porcelain interiors still a profound blue, and a row of tables, smooth-topped from a century of elbows. The room was jealously guarded by those who had stumbled across it, tucked away behind the upstairs stacks and blessed with a sign on the door which read:

Horace Saddler Reading Room

No Talking

No Children

Iris had studied for her A Levels in here, had used it as a sanctuary during the last few weeks of her pregnancy after she had moved back to London, and had saved it as a treat for those rare, fleeting and widely separated intervals during the twins’ childhood when she was neither at work, nor looking after them, nor in transit between the two states. It was as familiar to her as her own kitchen, and far warmer in winter; the walls were lined with enormous brown radiators that looked like pieces of obsolete farm machinery, and which clanked when they moved up a gear during cold snaps. In the summer, the sash window was raised a discreet two inches, admitting the roar that filtered through the glass roof of the indoor market next door, and during periods of almost tropical heat (three times within her memory) the fan on the ceiling was switched on, and the room seemed to gain a touch of colonial grandeur. There were rarely more than half a dozen people in there, all on nodding terms with one another; today there was only one other occupant and he was deeply asleep. Iris found that the occasional snore only added to the comforting ambience.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am hoping you can help me with an enquiry…

It seemed a sufficiently bland opening. She had obtained the address of the Bethesda Christian College Medical Faculty from international directory enquiries, but had decided to write rather than phone, as being both cheaper and less frighteningly immediate. She also found it far easier to lie on paper than in person.

I am organizing a reunion of Cardiff University medical graduates, class of 1977, and wish to extend an invitation to the members of your university who, in 1972, spent a pre-med term at our school as part of an exchange plan, namely Julie-Jane Vitelli, Lyle Kraviz, Donald Moray Strachan Junior and Conrad Blett.

She had found the other names on the tiny contact sheet that had been issued as an aide-memoire during the first week at medical school. The students had been herded one by one in front of a box camera and the resulting black-and-white images printed in tiny rows, in alphabetical order. She had hung on to it as the only photo she had of Conrad, though he was almost unrecognizable in a Zapata moustache which he had shaved off only days after term had started; like all his compatriots he was wearing a Bethesda College sweatshirt with ‘In God We Trust’ printed in large letters above a coat of arms; like all his compatriots he had binned his Baptist morals almost as fast as his sweatshirt. Hysterical with freedom, far richer than any of the British students, the Americans had become the wild and dazzling centrepiece of Barton Hall’s social life, the hosts of a hundred parties, the open-handed distributors of Jim Bean and joints, and Iris – lucky Iris – had been in the room next door to the master of revels – his right-hand maiden, the thrilled recipient of his generosity both in the sack and out.

In the event, as she’d discovered after they’d gone back to Virginia and student life had reverted to a dull round of thumping discos and warm beer, it wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d been on a different floor altogether – Conrad had apparently slept with almost every woman in the entire hall of residence, regardless of proximity. There had been three rumoured pregnancies; only Iris, her bump already palpable at ten weeks, had not opted for an abortion. The confirmation that it was twins had come the same week that she’d spotted the clipping from the Bethesda Clarion on the medical school noticeboard, announcing Conrad’s engagement to his childhood sweetheart.

I would be grateful if you could send me any information on their current whereabouts or, if more convenient, details of your alumnus association, who may have kept track of them.

When the twins were small, she had dreaded and planned for the moment when they would start asking about their father. She had borrowed books on single parenting and even on adoption to find a form of words that would soften the explanation, while still conveying the truth. She had weighed the advice, jotted down ideas, adapted and pruned and tailored until she had two versions poised in readiness: a full one, and one that would cover her if the subject came up for the first time in public – in the dentist’s waiting room, say, which was where Tom had first enquired what bosoms were for.

The years had gone by, the explanation had rusted gently in her subconscious, and the boys had never once asked the question, never evinced the slightest curiosity about the subject.

‘We haven’t got a dad,’ she had once heard eight-year-old Robin inform a friend.

‘Dunno,’ Robin had said, unconcernedly. There had been other single parents at their junior school; she could only conclude that they viewed fathers as an optional extra. Or perhaps their lack of concern was the result of their twinship and the sort of natural self-sufficiency it gave them. Together, they were a closed circuit.

In the end she’d raised the matter herself, during the summer holidays before they started at the comprehensive. She’d asked for a ‘little chat’ and they had sat through it in silence, wearing expressions that tempered deep embarrassment with disbelief. Then, with a degree of hesitation, not knowing what emotions might be unleashed by the sight, she had shown them the photo. And the reaction had been not resentment, or angst, or puzzlement, or grief, or anger or any of the textbook predictions. No, they had looked at the photo of Conrad and exploded into laughter. The ludicrous moustache!! The stupid surname!!! Blett!!!! It was, apparently, the funniest name ever in the history of the universe, and became an instant term of inter-twin abuse: ‘you stupid Blett’, ‘you’ve got a face like a Blett’, ‘you’re a right Blett’.

She had wondered for a while whether the information simply hadn’t sunk in, whether it was too big a topic for an eleven-year-old to absorb in one go. She’d waited for some kind of sequel – a volcano of brooding resentment, a volley of unanswerable questions – but the only follow-up had come from Robin, who had wandered into the kitchen one day when she was making a crumble.

‘Mum, you know Conrad Blett?’ he’d said, taking a piece of apple from the dish.

‘Yes?’ she’d said, bracing herself, aware that he’d avoided the use of the f word.

‘I don’t know. He went to college in Virginia so he might have stayed in the area.’

‘Oh.’ He’d wandered off again, and she’d followed him a few steps up the hall, her hands dropping flour onto the lino. ‘No,’ she’d heard him say to Tom in the living room, ‘he’s miles away from either of them.’ Disneyland, she’d suddenly realized.

No further enquiries came her way. ‘Blett’ was gradually dropped as an insult, and aside from a bout of sniggering when they saw she was reading a book by Joseph Conrad (‘Hey, Mum, you must really like that name.’) the subject had stayed closed. There seemed no way of finding out what they were really thinking, though she imagined – hoped – that they had discussed the whole issue between themselves, in that private world to which adolescence had simply added another layer. Certainly they appeared completely unchanged by the revelation. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not; it was as if the defining episode of her life had been dismissed as a piece of minor information, on a par with (or, probably, slightly below) the latest signing for Spurs.

I very much hope you can help me – it should be a really good bash!

Thanking you in anticipation,

yours sincerely,

I Unwin

She re-read the letter, realized that she had left a ‘t’ out of Lyle Kravitz’s surname, and turned to a blank sheet to write it all out again, rather more neatly this time.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am hoping that you can help me with an enquiry…

The heavy brass doorknob of the reading room gave a familiar rattle and she glanced up and stayed looking, transfixed. Round the door trotted a small, white-haired figure carrying a tartan holdall.

‘Here you are,’ said Mrs McHugh, ‘I was beginning to think you were hiding from me!’

‘Are you busy?’ The neat heels were already clicking across the floor towards her.

‘Er, no, I’ve just finished.’ She hastily folded the letter and scoured her brain for some tiny clue as to what might be going on. Her father was still maintaining radio silence about his relationship, and Iris’s last exchange with Mrs McHugh had consisted of the words ‘Happy Christmas’, spoken after a carol concert several weeks ago. Mrs McHugh had been rattling a bucket for charity while dressed as the angel Gabriel.

‘I’ve just bumped into your lovely boys outside Woolworths. Of course I’ve never actually met them before but I’ve seen photos and I think they got the shock of their lives when I called their names out across the street. I said, “Tom! Robin!” I said it quite sternly, just as a joke – of course, I didn’t know which one was which. I said, “I hope your mother knows you smoke!” and for a moment they looked a wee bit sheepish, but then I introduced myself and they had to laugh.’ I bet they did, thought Iris, diverted even in the midst of her confusion.

‘So then I said, “I’ve been meaning to have a little chat with Iris but I never get to talk to her because she’s always so busy, and we’ve got something we really need to discuss” ’ – Iris’s heart sank – ‘and so they told me you were in the library – but they didn’t say where!’ She wagged a finger in roguish admonition. ‘I’ve been up hill and down dale and in my lady’s chamber and I was just about to give up when the man at returns asked if I’d tried the reading room, and I said, “You just show me where it is, young man, and I’ll call the reels at your wedding.” So, here I am!’ She settled herself in a chair opposite Iris, clasping her hands over a bouncily crossed knee. She was so short that her chin was only inches from the table top. ‘All the years I’ve lived here and I’ve never realized this room existed. Mind you, it’s just the place for a chat.’

‘We’re not supposed to talk in here,’ said Iris, waving a straw at a hurricane.

‘Och, and who’s going to tell them?’ There was a snore from the easy chair. ‘He looks out for the count. But we could go somewhere for a snack instead – my tummy certainly thinks it’s snack time.’ She patted her stomach. ‘And what about your tummy?’ she asked, coyly.

‘It could do with a cup of tea,’ said Iris. Or a very large gin, she thought.

Mrs McHugh seemed to know everybody in North London. In the three hundred yards that separated the library from British Home Stores, she stopped four times for little chats, all of which extended to quite long chats, as Iris was introduced, explained (‘Ian’s daughter’) and included in a conversation that was conducted at a rolling boil, one topic succeeding another in rapid succession until Mrs McHugh happened to glance at her watch. ‘Whoopsy! Is that the time? Iris and I are on our way for a little chat, aren’t we Iris? Can’t linger as much as we’d like!’ and off she’d skitter down the street again, like a tugboat that happened to be dragging a lighthouse behind it.

‘Honestly, Iris, sometimes I don’t know how I ever get anything done,’ she said, as they walked through the automatic doors and past the vast red banners advertising the January sale. ‘When Hammy and I moved down here in 1957 people said I’d find London unfriendly but you know it’s quite the opposite. Have you seen that, Iris, wool coats for under thirty-five pounds? And they’ve got some lovely colours – I’d like to see you in a nice royal blue. That would really bring out your eyes.’ They stepped onto the escalator up to the café and Mrs McHugh raised her voice to reach Iris’s great height on the step above her. ‘No, I think people who say London’s unfriendly just haven’t made the effort. It doesn’t matter if someone’s black, white, yellow or green, if you say “hello” they’re always pleased to say “hello” back.’ Iris tried to avoid the eye of the stony-faced black teenager standing just behind Mrs McHugh. ‘One “hello” – that’s all it needs to kick-start a friendship, and I’ll say “hello” to anyone. Do you know that saying, Iris, “a stranger is a friend you haven’t met”?’

It occurred to Iris, as she selected a teacake and listened to Mrs McHugh tell the stranger that she’d only just met on the cash register that English cooks never seem to use enough soda in their scones, that although Mrs McHugh talked even more than her father, their styles were completely different. His phone monologues were an attempt to fill a horrible silence, whereas her chat seemed to be the overspill from a bottomless vat of bonhomie.

The scone conversation had now spread beyond the queue to include the woman who was clearing the tables, and a bottleneck was developing by the stack of trays. No one within earshot seemed to mind too much but those towards the back of the queue were getting restless. ‘Cold hands for pastry, warm hands for dough,’ said Mrs McHugh, deep into baking techniques. She was fishing around in her holdall as she spoke.

‘No, no, this one’s on me.’ She drew out a bulging wallet and opened the purse section. ‘Now,’ she said, turning back to the woman at the counter, ‘you won’t mind if a lot of it’s in coppers, will you?’

After half an hour they were on their second pot of tea, and Iris still had no idea what Mrs McHugh’s little chat was supposed to be about. At the moment – and she couldn’t remember how they had got onto the subject – they were talking about porridge.

‘My mother,’ said Mrs McHugh, ‘used to put a lump of butter right in the middle, and a sprinkle of salt. It had to be unsalted butter, and sea salt, and then she’d stir the whole thing, round and round and round with a little horn spoon. I always found it rather greasy.’

Iris had been dragged across a lot of conversational ground – Scottish education, the ingredients of white pudding, getting stains off suede, how to tell the twins apart – and she had learned to use the word ‘Tammy’ without choking on her Earl Grey, but there had been no hint from her kidnapper that there might be a weightier subject on the agenda, or a more complex relationship between them than that of pourer and drinker. All was bubble and froth, an unstoppable fountain, deluging the listener with goodwill. The ridiculous image that for months had been floating at the back of her mind – Mrs McHugh as houri temptress, luring her father from his family, ensnaring him in the nets of her lust – popped with the finality of a burst balloon.

‘Yes, of course their grandpa’s a bit of a sweet tooth as well, isn’t he? The Cough Candy King I call him.’ Mrs McHugh gave her a jolly, red-lipsticked smile. ‘Speaking of whom…’ she added, unzipping her holdall and taking out a diary. ‘Twenty-seventh of March! That’s what I wanted to talk about.’

‘Dad’s birthday,’ said Iris, feeling a great wash of relief. This was a topic that she could cope with.

‘Uh huh. His seventieth, which I always feel is a significant one though I’m sure to a young thing like you it just seems terribly, terribly old.’

Iris, who had not felt like a young thing since 1972, shook her head in polite and automatic deprecation. Her mind was already jumping ahead. A present. Mrs McHugh was going to ask her advice on a present. She started mentally running through the possibilities – a really good pair of secateurs, perhaps. Or a couple of deckchairs. She had already, on her own account, started checking out lawnmower prices.

It took a moment for Iris to catch up. ‘You what?’ she said, using a phrase she’d spent sixteen years trying to eliminate from the twins’ vocabulary.

‘What, for Dad?’ She realized how loudly she’d spoken when the three people on the next table all looked round.

‘Nary a word from you now!’ said Mrs McHugh to them, miming a zipped lip. ‘We’re talking secrets!’ They smiled rather uncomfortably and turned away again.

‘I’ll tell you my plan,’ said Mrs McHugh, patting Iris’s hand, ‘and then you can say what you think of it.’ She leafed through the diary. ‘It’s on a Wednesday, you see, that’s midweek bowls, so I could think up an excuse for not going myself – I might say I’ve just got a little tummy upset – and then we’d have the whole afternoon to prepare. I can invite the people from the church but I’d need your help for a few others, his cousin – Kath, isn’t it? – and he’s mentioned an old army friend in Wales –’

‘There, you see –’ she scribbled a note in the diary ‘– Peake. You’ll have to give me his address. So we could assemble everybody in the kitchen, and when he comes back, not suspecting a thing – or perhaps just expecting a little birthday tea, nothing out of the ordinary – he’ll open the door and… there we’ll be!’ Her face was suffused with enthusiasm.

For a moment, Iris saw it all: the covered buffet on the table, Mrs McHugh in a frilly blouse trying to light seventy candles without setting fire to her cuffs, Tom and Robin pink with suppressed hysteria, their eyes fixed on Leslie Peake’s bizarre hairstyle, the sound of the front-door key, the excited shushing of the party guests, the footsteps in the hall, the door opening, and then…

What? Who would come through the door? The man who kept his tins of vegetables in alphabetical order, who stood anxiously on the pavement if Iris arrived more than five minutes late for an evening visit, who still allocated time for the television to ‘warm up’ before Coronation Street, who winced if she used the word ‘bloody’, who had chosen the same shade of beige with which to decorate the living room every five years for the last thirty, who regarded spontaneity as simply a case of bad planning? Or the one who’d just bought himself a video recorder, been out to the cinema every Wednesday since Christmas and answered to the nickname of Cough Candy King?

‘Well,’ said Mrs McHugh, eagerly, ‘you know him best – what do you think?’

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