13

As Tom stares at the chambermaid she takes a picture from her pocket.

“Look. I been carrying this around now for more than forty-five blinking years.”

Tom misunderstands her.

“No, I don’t mean always in my overall. I live here, you see. Got a tiny bedroom on the top floor.”

“Well—good God—this is great! I don’t know where to start.”

He smiles.

“Oh, first by asking you to sit down, obviously. My name is Newman, Tom Newman. And this is…well, this young man is a good friend of mine who may have some connection to the lady in the photograph…” I nod at the chambermaid, who by now is seated, a little stiffly, in a small armchair with a striped cover. “It’s all a bit complicated, but… Well, now then, you are Ms—?”

“Morris. You can call me Trixie if you like.” She folds her arms, unfolds them. She lets her hands rest limply in her lap. They look stringy and uncared for.

“Right. Trixie. And the name of your friend there?” The photograph is safely back in Trixie’s pocket. “At least I take it she’s your friend?”

“Oh, yes, we used to be—quite close we were—you see, we both worked on the land. Land girls. That’s where we met.”

“And her name.”

“Rosalind. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Rosalind Farr. We called her Roz, though, and she didn’t mind—she was never stuck-up or anything.” But then a touch of asperity enters a tone that in any case is slightly shrill. “Though probably the Farr bit got changed to Cassidy—and that’s what I hope it still is, of course.” She adds: “Well, naturally.”

“Then you’ve lost touch with her?” I can hear Tom’s disappointment.

“And that’s putting it mildly! Haven’t seen her since 1945. There were a couple of letters after that but she’d even stopped writing by early ’46. I suppose she went off to America; forgot about her old friends.”

“America?” Tom gives me a meaningful glance.

“There was this Yank she was in love with.”

Trixie pauses and seems to be struck by the undercurrent of disapproval she catches in her own voice.

“Well, I don’t know if I ought to say this, not to strangers, though I suppose it can’t do no harm. Water under the bridge and all that. She got herself knocked up. And so I thought…well, maybe you’re too young to know about it but there was this American war brides scheme…”

Tom nods. He bites his lip. “And the American’s name, you say, was Cassidy?”

“That’s right. Lieutenant, he was. Lieutenant Matt Cassidy.”

“Matt? Matthew…” Tom repeats the name in full, slowly. He looks at me with hopeful eyebrow raised.

I only shrug and shake my head.

Trixie also looks at me. It’s the first time she’s given me her close attention. “You’re a Yank too,” she says, rather matter-of-factly. “That right?”

I haven’t spoken up till now and I suddenly become aware of it. “How’d you guess?”

“Because you all seem to have that special sort of look. I can always tell. You and him, now. If it wasn’t for the differences in clothes and hairstyles and the like…yes, I’m not being daft…the pair of you could almost be related.” (Tom, behind her, raises his arms in a boxer’s gesture of victory.) “I’m right, you know. And I can prove it to you. Upstairs I got another photo.”

After a minute she gets up to fetch it. Tom says: “And by some miracle you haven’t saved those letters which you mentioned? But no. No one could be that far-sighted!”

On her return she carries a battered-looking album. The three of us stand in the centre of the room, under the main light, Tom and I on either side of her, while she, with a forgivable air of self-importance, turns its pages.

“There,” she says. “That one at the bottom.”

And we all look at the likeness.

It’s after midnight and we’re in our beds.

“Well,” Tom says, “back to the embassy on Monday. There may be hundreds of Matthew Cassidys living in the States but there can’t be too many who hail from New Haven in Connecticut and whose families worked in the meatpacking industry.”

He laughs.

“And, into the bargain, a handful of bonuses—i.e., the dates your father was over here, the bases where he served, even the name of his American fiancée and the fact he’d had an older brother, who died in ’42. Good old Trix! What a memory! And good old Herb Kramer, also—none of this should take too long to sort out—you’ll soon be shinning up your noble family tree and waving to all those cheering relatives on board the Mayflower!”

Then why don’t I feel more optimistic?

Why, in fact, do I have the jitters?

I try, as best I can, to fight them back.

“Tom, tell me something. Do you think I ought to go to that address? The one she wrote her letter from?”

“Yes, why not? If you want to. Though after all this time I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone there to remember her. To remember your mother,” he amends, as though it’s impolite to use the pronoun.

Want to? No, ‘want to’ isn’t quite the phrase that I’d have picked. “You don’t think you’re jumping to conclusions?” I ask.

“Why?”

“I just don’t get the feeling she’s my mother. No flash of recognition like the one I got when I saw that picture of my dad.”

“But that was different. You were recognizing yourself, not him.”

“Even so.” I’m lying on my back, hands clasped behind my head, staring at the branches of a horse chestnut that are still visible in the moonlight—it would be good if they could tap me out a message. “You know what I believe? I believe my father’s just died and my mother, knowing about this woman in England, knowing about…Rosalind…sent me here to trace her. It might have been a promise she made him. Or one that I did. Or it might have been the carrying out of something in his will.”

In the semi-darkness I turn my head in Tom’s direction with a slow smile.

“In other words, you crazy dick, it’s pretty much what you said last Tuesday. But I still don’t feel I’d have been carrying around a pinup picture of my own mother…which was definitely not one of your better notions, I submit. With respect.”

“Okay. What you say does sound…well, I suppose it does sound feasible. Apart from anything else, I’d think your mother might be a good deal younger than Rosalind. Actually, Rosalind could quite easily be her mother. Perhaps it’s your granddad whom you look like?”

“But then, can’t you see, my objection still applies. Pinup of my grandmother? I don’t think it changes things.”

Tom sighs and I interpret this as being a reluctant form of assent.

“In which case,” I say (implying a logic which I’m not certain actually exists), “maybe we had better go to Hampstead. Or I had. You’re probably right about there not being much point but…”

“Why just you?”

“Because we’ve found out who I am. More or less. Like you said, it’s only a matter of time now. Soon we’ll have the name of the hotel where I stayed in London—my identity, my money, my documents. I can’t go on forever keeping you from getting on with your work.”

By ‘identity’ I suppose I mean merely my given name, or names. Cassidy! That, too, may take a bit of getting used to!

“Yet there’s still something that worries me,” says Tom. “How you came to be wandering about a capital city without even a penny piece in your pocket, let alone a credit card.”

“Perhaps I’m naturally extravagant and this time I’d simply gone out for a stroll, determined not to part with so much as a nickel. Not so much as one red cent.”

“Perhaps.” But, again, he doesn’t seem convinced. Any more than I do. I’m sure that to both of us my theory comes across as being enormously far-fetched. Not to mention (unless I make a habit of behaving so bizarrely) enormously coincidental.

In the morning we find a message from Trixie that’s been pushed beneath our door. It’s folded around an enclosure.

“I told some fibs last night. I loved Roz but I was jealous. It just didn’t seem fair. I told you how she got pregnant. I didn’t say how she’d already had the baby by the time I stopped hearing and how full of it she was. That’s why I pretended I couldn’t find this second letter—not even sure now why I kept it. It was me who didn’t stay in touch. You see, I never answered her, not either of her letters, just couldn’t face the thought of it. And also, what was really mean, I never told her that I had that picture of her boyfriend, perhaps she never knew I’d taken it. But I didn’t for one second think he’d gone and ditched her—not like she did—knowing old Roz it was probably just some silly hiccup, not that blinking Marjorie she always talked about, and nothing like my own case where I knew I didn’t stand a chance. Anyhow I thought I’d got over all this long before last night. But I can’t pretend as how I got much sleep…”

Her message finishes by saying she won’t be at work today, or tomorrow, because she’s off to Yorkshire for a short break. She asks us to give Roz all her love when we finally find her.

“When?” I say. “I guess she means if.”

I’m pretty certain Tom will contradict me. But he doesn’t. He remains silent.

“Should we leave Trixie some flowers?” I ask. “Or wine? Or chocolates? I mean, as well as a bit of cash, naturally.” I feel happier now about suggesting further outlay.

Anyway, Tom would soon have come up with the same suggestion. “Yes, we’ll definitely find her something.” He means alongside the originals of my father’s snapshot and the letters, all of which he wants to get photocopied.

I’m surprised.

“Photocopying on a Sunday?”

“No, but I was wondering. If the room isn’t taken, why don’t we stay over until Monday? That would mean we could enjoy a nice relaxed Sunday by the sea, yet still get back to London in plenty of time to see Herb Kramer…” But here his voice tails off; his attention elsewhere. He has now opened Rosalind Farr’s second letter—which, to some extent, I seem to have been fighting shy of.

“This one,” he says, “is dated March 5^th, 1946.”

As Trixie had implied (but I’d forgotten) it’s a happy letter. Yet the penultimate sentence possesses a poignancy that leaves us silent for a moment.

“‘It will be wonderful to see you and we’ll have tremendous fun, just make it soon.’”

I’ve been standing at the window, staring again into the branches of the horse chestnut. “Oh, hell,” I say.

“Well, it wasn’t your doing.”

“No. Then why do I feel as though it were?”

“Because you’ve got a name like Cassidy. Which probably means you’re a Catholic. Which probably means you have a Catholic conscience.”

He puts his hand round my shoulder.

“Which probably means, in short, that all of it—absolutely all of it—is your doing!”