DANIEL WENT STRAIGHT TO his mother’s little study. Then he began sorting through the stacks of files and papers. He was looking for something which had a link with the past.
On the way there he had been working out what he knew about his mother’s life. All of a sudden, it seemed strange that, before this, he had asked very few questions. Of course, he had always wanted to know more about his father, but his mother had always been there. In his mind she had always been the same.
When she got married he had been jealous and angry, but after a while he had learnt to get along with the man, and they began getting to know each other. George’s first wife had died some years before, and he had no children. He was good-tempered and friendly towards Daniel, took him to the park so he could ride his skateboard, went with him to the movies and the video rental at weekends. Daniel never saw him angry. That was the sort of person he was. All he wanted, he told Daniel once, smiling, was a quiet life.
Daniel took the hint. The trouble was that he could never forget that George had come between him and his mother. The other problem was that George was a white man, fair haired like his mother. Daniel could never pretend that he was his real father, or even forget that he was not. He could never confide in George, either, about some of the feelings he had as he grew up. In spite of all this, though, he began to treat the man as a friend. George, in his turn, kept out of any quarrels between mother and son. The problem was that the way they were was a kind of surface.
When Daniel thought about it he always remembered one occasion when he had almost screamed at George. This was when he had been told that George was going to marry Sarah. They had taken him for a lunch at a nearby restaurant. This was an unusual event, so he knew something was coming, and he had time to prepare himself. On the way home, they were walking past the tube station and saw a scuffle. There were two black youths standing against the wall of the station being searched by two policemen. There were another six policemen standing around. A couple of police cars were drawn up behind them. Suddenly one of the youths threw himself sideways and tried to run. In an instant four or five policemen had thrown him to the ground and were on top of him. They pinned his arms behind him. The other boy was screaming with all the strength of his lungs. There was a group of young black men standing around and they were shouting too. It was like a wall of sound, the background to the deadly struggle in the middle of the crowd. The last thing Daniel saw as they walked by was the police forcing the two boys flat against the wall.
The scene made Daniel upset and angry. He had no idea what the boys had done or why they were being arrested. It was the sight of the crowd of white policemen, the look of rage and despair on the boys’ faces, the way they struggled, and the shouts of the crowd. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to see the boys escape. It didn’t matter who they were or what they had done. In normal times Daniel would have talked about the scene with his mother. In front of George, though, there was nothing he wanted to say.
Inside the house he stood in the kitchen with his mother as she put the kettle on.
‘Did you know those boys?’ she asked him.
‘How would I know them ?’ he said sharply.
‘I thought maybe school. I would guess they come from around here.’ She paused. ‘I shouldn’t say it but I’m glad you don’t know them. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw something like that happen to you.’
She looked as if she was about to cry.
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he said. ‘I keep out of trouble.’
Before she could answer George came through the door.
‘It was a very unpleasant scene, that,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure they must have done something.’
‘You don’t have to do something,’ Daniel told him. His tone was sarcastic and George raised his eyebrows. ‘They stop you, and if you don’t keep your temper anything can happen.’
George was about to answer and Daniel saw the warning look that his mum shot across the room.
‘Maybe,’ George said.
Right away Daniel knew that George didn’t believe him. He also knew that George would never grasp how he felt about what he had seen. From that time Daniel knew how things would be.
It was a bit like the way that he felt about Louise’s parents. When he met them he had to put on a kind of polite act, which meant that everyone could keep their real feelings to themselves. Daniel had lived like this for most of his life. Almost all of the white people he knew had an idea of one kind or the other about who he was. By the time he was a teenager he was already fed up with having to explain that he was someone different. He was fed up, also, with having to explain that who he was meant that he saw the same things from a different angle. With Louise and most of the girls he went out with, sex had been a sort of bridge between knowing and not knowing. With other people, like his fellow teachers and his stepfather, he had learnt to keep a distance.
Standing in the empty house Daniel wondered whether George knew about the puzzle he was trying to solve. For a moment he thought about asking, then he put the idea aside. George would take his mother’s side, or simply say he didn’t want to be involved.
For the rest of the afternoon he sat at his mother’s desk looking at the papers he had stacked up on the floor. Most of them were bills or business letters. There were a few letters from friends, but none of them went back twenty-five years to the time when he was born.
In the drawer where he had found the photo he also found his mother’s and stepfather’s passports. Then he found their wills, which left everything they had to him.
All this had taken him a couple of hours. By the time he began looking through the photo albums in the front room the day was nearly over. He rang Louise to tell her he would be home soon.
‘Why don’t you leave it now? You haven’t found anything.’ She sounded anxious.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said.
The photos seemed to be no more help than the papers had been. There were several snapshots of Daniel as a baby. In some of them Sarah was holding him, but there was no sign of Chris, or anyone else who might have been his father.
Daniel put the albums away and stood up, thinking about the final place where he could look.
Somehow he hadn’t wanted to look in the chest of drawers in his mum’s bedroom where she kept her clothes. He knew she sometimes used to hide things there. In the old days when his birthday was coming up, he always knew where the presents would be, wrapped neatly in birthday paper.
He walked up the stairs slowly. In the bedroom he opened the big bottom drawer and began digging into the neatly folded piles of his mother’s underwear, feeling like a thief. The cloth was soft, clinging to his fingertips, and he found himself looking away, not wanting to see his hands touching his mother’s bras and pants.
He was about to give up when he struck something hard. Another photo album.
He sat back on the floor next to the chest of drawers and opened it. The first pages were full of wedding pictures. He had a vague memory of seeing these pictures long ago, but now he looked at them as if it was the first time.
At a quick glance the bride looked like his mum, then he realized that it was his Aunt Nancy. She looked happy and excited. His mum stood beside her in some of the pictures, the same flush of pleasure showing on her face.
Seeing them together like this gave Daniel an odd feeling of sadness. He was now older than they must have been at the time. How much his mother must have missed her sister, he thought. He was an only child so he couldn’t imagine what it was like, but he could guess how lonely and sad she must have been when Nancy died.
He looked at the guests in the background of the pictures carefully, but there were no black faces in the crowd. He started to shut the album, then he noticed that the photos on the next page were different. These were photos from the time his mum had graduated from college. There was a big picture of her in a gown and a flat hat holding a scroll. The other pictures were groups of her classmates dressed in the same way. In two of them the black man Brownjohn had called Chris was standing in the middle.
In one photo he had his arm round the girl next to him. In the other photo he had his hat in his hand as if he was going to throw it up in the air. He looked handsome and a little bit reckless, as if he knew he was cool and on top of everything.
‘Chris,’ Daniel whispered. ‘Chris.’
He couldn’t guess why his mother had kept it from him, but he felt now that he knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was his father. This was the proof. These pictures were things his mum meant to hide, without a shadow of a doubt. ‘Chris,’ he whispered again.
Suddenly he felt his eyelids sting and before he could even try to stop it there were tears rolling down his cheeks. ‘My dad,’ he said, right out loud this time. ‘You’re my dad.’