Arue Women’s Prison. April, 1990
HENDERSON’S FIRST NOTEBOOK ENDS THERE at the warlord’s feet, as if he meant to leave his reader panting. An odd thing to do for one who hopes he’ll never be read; he wasn’t quite out of pages.
As I go through these photocopies, typing them up for you, I remember the originals back in Vancouver with my stolen life—their look and feel, their covers of black or green or pinkish marbling, their cellar mustiness and tang of horsehoof glue. New decipherments still leap out, the mind pulling a squiggle into focus, a stranger recognized, so obvious that I smack myself.
Reading Frank in this way makes me feel that I know him (insofar as you can know anyone by what they write!). Is it fever, or pain, or an articulate madness in his giddy loops and lines? I like him. I like his affection for his wife and friends, his open-mindedness, his freethinking sense of the absurd, his painting—especially that he never claims to be much good at it—and his love of the tropics.
Years later, when he retired after the Great War, he built a steam-heated conservatory against the Suffolk house, filling it with orchids and hibiscus, bromeliads, strangler figs. As blight and winter claimed the orchard outside, he’d retreat to this tiny jungle, sink in a rattan armchair and talk old times to a scarlet macaw who flew down to eat grapes from his hand.
Whenever I feel too sorry for myself, I reread his captivity in Africa. I am merely inconvenienced, I have friends nearby, assurances that this will end, and I’ve my health. Henderson had none of these, yet he went on, a man from a hardier time.
Like you, he’s a comfort to me now.
I’m locked up in a historic building, a tropical Bastille built by the last king of Tahiti. Picture a stone fortress scrambling up a hill, spacious and old-fashioned, no razor wire or swivelling cameras. Over the main gate, where you half expect to see Abandon hope, are the words POMARE V REX 1879. It used to be the mens jail, the only jail, until things started going wrong in these islands and the French had to build a new one. That’s overflowing, but we female crooks are rare.
My cell has aquamarine walls and red tile floor. No rug—they worry about people unravelling rugs and hanging themselves with the twine—but they provide a pink curtain in my tiny window, a poster of Bora Bora on the wall, and they allow a few personal things, some photos, a calendar. I even have a small TV, high in a steel cage bolted to the ceiling. This is an extra I pay for. Not much worth watching except the news, but it helps me pick up Tahitian, and my French has improved no end. Above all, they’ve let me keep my papers and my clothes (I had horrid visions of striped pyjama suits).
My fellow inmates are what you might guess: pickpockets, druggies, hookers, wives who topped their husbands with a breadfruit pounder. Only three or four whites. The rest are Tahitian, Chinese, various mixtures, and homesick girls from outer islands—from Rangiroa, the Australs, the Marquesas. A sad rather than a vicious lot, yet I often hear them laugh.
No one laughs more than Pua, who knifed a sailor in Quinn’s Bar. She admits it cheerfully (he deserved it). She’s nineteen, slight and graceful, wavy hair to her waist, the very image of a vahine. I never believed her capable of violence until one day I glimpsed a mongoose quickness in her wrist and eye.
Twice a week she teaches us Tahitian dance, a flowing semaphore of hips and arms: marama the moon, anuanua the rainbow, mata’i, the wind. We do this at the top of the yard, where we can look out over the parapet and rusty roofs and flame-trees to the sea and mountains, our only sight of the world. Down there is Matavai Bay, where the Bounty anchored; Point Venus, where Cook tried to measure the distance of the sun; and a strange tower beside the water containing the pickled bones of the last Pomare, builder of this place, who gave his kingdom to the French and slowly killed himself with Benedictine.
On Sundays, if the winds onshore, the hymns of Cowper and Wesley waft up above the traffic, faint tunes I half remember sung in old Tahitian at a frumpy royal chapel built by Methodists from Wapping.
But you don’t want to hear my prison memoirs. When I was free, I hardly had a moment. Now I’m getting long-winded. This will land on your doormat with a thud.
Your father. I must be careful what I say, and how. I’ve promised you the truth and you shall have it, but there’s no need to make it any bitterer than it is. For me, Victor Lumley is a sour memory in a shallow grave; for you … well, he’s your flesh and blood.
Until lately, until your note, your father was seldom on my mind. Usually he’s underground, a sort of troll or goblin, which is as close as I come to banishing him altogether. But he gets out and about when my guard is down, as it was on the flight here, a long haul through the night from Los Angeles. In those shiny cocoons of rancid air and rushing noise, where life hangs on a single flaw or stroke of malice, I often think over the inches burned from my candle of unknown length. On the ground, dazzled by the steady flame consuming time, we live as if our light will burn forever. But eight miles high above the world, where humans have no right to be, the flame sinks and I see it as it is, faltering in the gale of chance.
So Lumley came to visit me in that close darkness, the other passengers asleep (all but a scatter of insomniacs in yellow pools). He appeared, smiled, lowered himself onto me. An incubus.
• • •
In the spring of 1966 this letter arrived at Tilehouse Street on Ministry of Defence writing paper:
Dear Mrs. Wyvern,
Certain evidence has recently come to our attention which we would be pleased to be able to discuss with you. While we do not wish to raise hopes more than is warranted, it would greatly assist our continuing investigation into the disappearance of your husband and other persons missing in action during the Korean Emergency if you would kindly consent to a visit from the undersigned at your convenience.
Yours sincerely, V.C. Lumley, Wing Cmdr. (ret.)
Such an innocuous name, Lumley, Wing Commander, retired. We imagined a moon-faced jovial fellow, maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the owner of a splendid handlebar moustache. And those gallant initials, V.C.—how easily we fell for false suggestions—a brave man, a hero, coming to see us.
“Oh, Liv! We mustn’t let ourselves. … Of course it’ll be nothing. Just some War Office mistake—the Ministry—whatever they call themselves now. How I wish your sister were here. That silly girl isn’t even on the phone.”
Lottie was on the phone. Of course she was. You don’t get modelling jobs without one. But I was sworn to secrecy—she’d never forgive me if Mother rang up and heard the row she lived in. I’d already visited my sister at her “flat,” only twice the size of her bed (a mattress on the floor), the smallest inhabited room I’d ever seen. It was in a Clapham terrace with a greasy kitchen and a bathroom shared by eight. Her walls were draped with melting psychedelic posters: Jefferson Airplane, OZ, sundry gigs and clubs. She was barefoot, in a long Indian-cotton skirt and sheer blouse revealing pink rosettes. I didn’t dare—still owned a bra, always wore pullover and jeans. Bursts of music and laughter came from upstairs doors. Hollow-chested men strolled about as if I wasn’t there. There was a smell of joss-sticks and fish on the landing, and another smell I didn’t know until that night, when I smoked a joint for the first time. (Coughed like hell and didn’t get high.)
At dawn came a clopping of hooves outside, and I thought I must be stoned after all, but it was a real rag-and-bone man with a horse and cart, sleepwalking between the Minis and Vespas parked along the street. London! Half Dickens, half Swinging, and my sister here living it all, and I so impressed, so envious, and I’d have given myself away to any of those young hairies if they’d asked. But none did, and the only one who even gave me an up-and-down look was Lottie’s boyfriend, Art, who shook his locks at me and said, “Lottie’s little sister! You two are so different. Far out.” And Lottie said, “Mitts off, Art. She’s not even legal. You can sod off and doss somewhere else tonight. See you.”
All this I’d kept from Mother, who thought I’d gone up with the school English class for Romeo and Juliet.
So it was just my mother and myself there to greet V.C. Lumley, Wing Commander (retired), when he turned up on a wet afternoon in the spring of 1966.
I remember opening the door, dizzy with longing and apprehension, to a tall man, a friendly face, square bone structure like a Scandinavians. He stood there in a damp tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, an open-necked white shirt and spotted burgundy cravat, a gust of March at his back. No moustache. A grey drift at the temples. Dark hair and clear grey eyes that seemed to look into my heart, twinkling, roguish, pleading.
“Come in.”
I got the tea things and a plate of biscuits, catching:”—bored stiff since I retired, so I run errands for the Ministry. Enjoy it immensely. Gets me out and about, and I meet charming people like yourself.”
“A biscuit with your tea, Wing Commander?”
“Just plain Lumley now, I’m afraid. Victor Lumley. Silly to use ones rank so long after. Korea did it for me, too, Mrs. Wyvern. Though my troubles are trifles compared to … to yours. Health bother. Something in my tum. Still there. Doctors haven’t a clue. Ever had Korean food? Don’t—that’s my advice.” He accepted a jammy dodger. “I regret to say I never met your husband. We were there at slightly different times.”
“I’m sorry …,” Mother said.
I was watching him. He looked fit enough to me. A vigorous man in his forties, as Jon would be. What really had forced him to retire? Were some bits and pieces shot away? He was fascinating, though I wasn’t sure I liked him.
Mother noticed me for the first time. “This is my daughter, Olivia.” We shook hands, his large and muscular, the hand of someone who makes things or plays an instrument.
“What really happened to you? In Korea?”
“Liv! That’s very rude. Sorry, Mr. Lumley. She’s only a child. She looks older. People don’t realize.”
“You don’t want to hear about me. You ladies’ll be wanting to know why I’m here.”
I liked being a “lady.” He’d brought a tan dispatch case with RAF wings stamped on the pigskin. From this he took a folded cloth. Inside it were a few small objects wrapped in tissue paper. Moving his teacup to the carpet, he laid out cloth and contents on the table.
“Bloody bought it, poor chap! Bloody bought it, poor chap!” called a maniacal voice from the pantry.
“Heavens! Who’s that? Sorry. Not my business.”
Mother laughed nervously. “No need to apologize. It’s only Lord Jim. The parrot. Something in your voice must.…” She fell silent, fingering her necklace.
“A parrot! My auntie had a parrot—her late husband’s. Navy man. Torpedoed in the Med. That bird said frightful things whenever the vicar came to tea.” Lumley laughed easily, then composed himself. He had a generous mouth, good teeth, the lips full, a perfect Cupid’s bow.
“Let me say at the outset that there’s nothing conclusive, one way or another. We still can’t say whether your husband survived the downing of his plane in ’53. There’s still no wreckage. We haven’t a shred of evidence to support—or dismiss—the speculation that he or others might have been taken alive. What I’ve brought are these. I can’t tell you exactly how they came into Ministry hands. Don’t know the answer myself—those Whitehall types have lockjaw. But they have asked me to ask you to take a look. Can you bear to?”
Lumley unwrapped the things and passed them to Mother. They were small. Corroded and pitted. Like ancient coins.
“Condition’s poor, I’m afraid. More or less what you’d expect for the soil conditions over there.” He lowered his voice. “They grow everything with nightsoil, you see.”
Mother clenched her fist around them suddenly. She was crying.
“Take your time.”
She sat up on the edge of her chair, dabbing at her eyes with a lace hankie she always kept in her cuff. “I remember buttons like these on my husbands uniform. There’s a uniform upstairs. We could check if they’re the same. But surely these could have come from any RAF officer of the time?”
“I’m afraid that’s so.”
“Then why come all this way to show them to me? I’m sorry if I sound ungrateful. I just can’t see the point.”
“I … we have no wish to distress you, Mrs. Wyvern. But we feel it important to include you in any findings. Some people in your position have told us that we go about things too … quietly.”
“Can I see, Mummy?” She poured the things unsteadily from her palm to mine.
Two brass buttons and a cap badge. Heavily verdigrised, as if they’d been in the ground for centuries, like Roman coins.
“There’s one thing more. The most important, actually. It is rather fragile. I must ask you not to take it out of the wrapper.” From the dispatch case he withdrew a small document sheathed in cellophane. Mother examined it, looked up at me with watery eyes. She passed it over, turning quickly away.
It was a fragment of my fathers handwriting. I recognized it from old birthday and Christmas cards I kept with my jewellery. I didn’t understand what it might mean. It was just a scrap—not much bigger than a cigarette paper—crumpled and stained. I could read five words: … recce SW quadrant and report…
“Where did you get this?” Mother asked. “And when? Surely you must have some idea.”
“Then it’s authentic?”
“Yes. Unless. …”
“You have any doubts?”
“There’ve been false trails before, haven’t there? Cruel hoaxes. …” She began to cry again.
“I know.… I can’t imagine how one copes. If I may say so, you strike me as a very brave woman, Mrs. Wyvern. And so do you, Miss Wyvern. Other people I’ve seen recently have responded—how shall I put it?—irrationally. People need to believe.” He sat quietly for a moment. “I can tell you only what I know. These things have come from overseas sources we believe to be reliable. As to what their appearance, or release at this time may mean, I’m as much in the dark as you are. I’m awfully sorry if my coming here’s upset you. As I said, there’s been a change in policy at the Ministry under the Labour government. They feel that next of kin should be kept abreast of developments. That hasn’t always been the case.”
“You mean there’s other information—kept from us?”
“I honestly don’t know. Probably nothing of substance. As you perceive, even physical evidence like this is open to a number of interpretations.
“I’d better be getting along. Here’s where you can reach me. Though don’t be surprised if you have trouble getting through. The right hand never knows what the left hands doing up there. They won’t even tell you if it’s raining outside in case it’s a state secret. Speaking of which, I must ask you both to sign this. Silly. Just routine.”
Lumley produced a form entitled Official Secrets Act. We read and duly signed. Though it seemed so pointless. Thirteen years ago was an age to me. Most of my life. The images of Jon in my mind—real ones, not photographs—were fleeting, indistinct. He’d died. … He’d “gone missing,” as Mother insisted, when I was three, an age when you can’t distinguish between the height of your father and the height of a tree—I remember thinking that the crown of his head and the treetops were equally far out of reach. I’m left with bits of him. Big hands clasping my waist as I learnt to ride a trike. A stern face and a spanking when I chased a neighbour’s chickens. The sandpaper of his cheek at bedtime. His smell of wet tweed, jet fuel, pipe tobacco. Now, of course, I can see how recent it still was in 1966, how to Mother it must have seemed that Korea had ended only yesterday, that the trail was warm, that her husband could still come back.
“Good Lord, that’s rather fine. Looks terribly old. What exactly is it? Suppose I ought to know. Never much good at history.” Lumley laughed. Mother made her usual little speech: “I believe it’s called an assegai. An ancestor of my husbands brought it back from Africa.”
“May I?” He stood up and approached the spear, ran a caressing hand along the polished wood. “People used to make things so beautifully, didn’t they? Reminds me of a wooden propeller we had in the mess. Same craftsmanship. Fascinating.”
He opened his case, gathered the things he’d shown us. “If it was up to me I’d leave these with you, but I’m afraid the Ministry won’t allow it. Force of habit. They’ve a grip like Scots on a ten-pound note. On anything at all. What I can give you is a photo of the small finds—here—and a copy of the paper fragment. I’ll be in touch the minute I hear more.”
That evening we had a cold supper of bread and cheese. Mother drank several whiskies, something she rarely did. She even gave me a small glass.
“You know what’s odd about those things, Liv? I wish I’d thought to ask that man before he left. Those buttons and the badge, they’re from Jon’s—from someone’s—dress uniform. Why would he have been wearing, or carrying, a dress uniform on a mission? It doesn’t add up.”
It wasn’t long before she had a chance to put that question. About three weeks later Lumley rang, said he was nearby, thought he’d pop in. I was at school. He told her nothing new. Had no idea why dress buttons had been recovered from a combat zone. But she was tipsy when I got home. Mother and Lumley had had a rather cosy afternoon. He’d revealed why he had to leave the service: malaria and deafness as well as an “uppity amoeba.” And as for her, it was just so marvellous to talk about things with someone who’d been there, who understood, who remembered. Who hadn’t forgotten what we’d fought for, and who wasn’t out in Trafalgar Square chanting from Mao’s wretched little book.
Mother loathed the sixties. “Everything I’ve believed in,” she used to say. “Everything I’ve paid dearly for is now held cheap and ridiculed.” I tried to persuade her that it wasn’t like that. That she and Jon, and their parents before them, had fought those terrible wars to end all war, and my generation was agreeing with them, saying hell no, we won’t go; make love not war. But our style put her off—the music, the hair, the clothes—too big a step from ration cards and Vera Lynn. I always won the argument, but she never changed her view. She’d throw up her hands and say, “Olivia, darling, you could talk the hind leg off a donkey.”
Throughout that summer Lumley came to see us every few weeks. He said he lived nearby, in Royston, which is why he’d been given our “case.” He took us there once to see the Royston Cave, a vault hollowed down into the chalk beneath the town centuries ago. The bottle-shaped cavity was dank and smelt vaguely of pee. By the light of a dangling bulb I saw writhing figures and cabbalistic symbols, scratched crudely on the pale stone. A creepy place, more dungeon than cave, where witches and heretics were said to have hidden in the Middle Ages, or been imprisoned, or tortured.
Afterwards Lumley drove us past a house he said was his—quite grand with a circular drive, barely visible from the road behind curtains of rain—but he couldn’t ask us in because of his old mother. “I feel I know you ladies well enough by now to be perfectly frank. You see, the dear old thing’s off her rocker. Senile dementia.”
Embarrassed by this disclosure, neither of us thought to question it, slumped as we were in the warmth and soft leather of his Alvis after the crypt-like chill of the cave.
Were Lumley and my mother lovers? I doubt it, but I think she was tempted. Mother was a heavy smoker in those days, though she gave it up later on. It used to be “Run down to the corner and get me twenty Seniors, will you, dear? There’s a good girl.” Now she was smoking a Turkish job with a gold ring round the filter, and there were no more errands to the corner shop, which didn’t stock exotic brands. They were his. I would come home to find a dozen in the ashtray, six on one side, six on the other with scarlet daubs.
Later I wondered if he came to me because she turned him down. I’ll say one thing for the cad: he didn’t kiss and tell. Discretion was his stock in trade. He was as secretive by nature as that Ministry of his.
He was, I suppose, what is nowadays called a sexual predator, with a taste for widows and daughters. Though predators a bit strong. In my book seductions an art, not a crime. As far as I know he never used force, only deceit. He knew exactly what he was doing: not a finger did he lay on me until I turned sixteen. Perhaps confidence man is the term. Lovable rogue? You decide. (I’m cutting him all the slack I can for you.) He even gave a sort of warning that wasn’t a warning, like a cobra that mesmerizes before it strikes. He said, as if advising in a fatherly way on boyfriends, “All’s fair, little Liv, in love and war. Remember that.”
A stroke of genius, little Liv. From a shorter man I’d have suspected sarcasm, but I believed him because he was tall. It was the afternoon of the World Cup final, the one when England beat Germany and the Germans said we cheated. Perhaps we did. Perhaps dishonesty was in the air that day.
I’d gone to the Saracens Head with three or four friends. Kenny Watt for one, showing off his red motorbike, taking those who dared for a quick burn-up round the block until he got too pissed for anyone to risk it. Sarah and Jane turned up in a back-seatless Beetle with two boys I didn’t know.
It was a bright long late summer day, and people had spilt out around the country pub like drunken bees. Indoors, on a shelf, a TV was blaring live from Wembley Stadium to a rolling surf of cheers and jeers. You couldn’t move or speak. The mood was tribal, one big boisterous family: England. England was going to beat Germany. Again. Just to remind them who won the war. And to hell with all their money and Mercedes-Benzes and that Common Market rot.
Songs arose, peaked, died away. “Rule Britannia,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Deutschland über Alles.” Not that there were any Germans present. The Nazi hymn, with its sublime music and mad words, was belted out mockingly, out of time and tune. Two gins down my throat and I was singing it too.
Commotion somewhere over my shoulder, Lancashire vowels. “I didn’t lose five of me best mates to a U-bowt to coom in ere and hear poncey long-haired pups like you singin’ for fookin’ Hitler!”
“Sorry, mate. Don’t mean nuffink. Just sarcastic, like.”
GOAL! Germany scores! A simian howl. Yellow submarine, yellow submarine … And so it went on until the referee’s call. Pandemonium, the floor awash. Rattles ratcheting. Whirling dervishes in England scarves. I was dressed up for once, Kenny’s arm around me, hoping he wouldn’t throw up on my Mary Quant. Everyone’s arm around me, all of us singing, singing. Land of Hope and Glory.
“My God! It’s little Liv! Does your mother know you’re out?”
“What are you doing here?”
“You do sound pleased to see me. Actually, I was looking for your mum.”
“She’d never come down here. If she did I wouldn’t. She’s at home, glued to the telly like the rest of the country.”
“I can’t bear that song, can you?”
“‘Yellow Submarine’?”
“The one I really hate’s the ‘Deutschland.’ Lost a brother to Adolf.”
“Was that you? Were you one of them making all the fuss over there?”
“No. But I’m with ‘em. You young have no idea.… Buy you a drink?”
“So here we are, all on our high horse about the war, trying to corrupt a minor?”
“I mean a Babycham. How old are you, Liv? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen last month. Old enough.”
“Not for drinking.”
“I bloody work here two afternoons a week! Pulling pints. One of my regular’s a copper. Nobody checks. They think I’m twenty. And don’t you dare blow my cover! I’ll have a gin and lime, thanks.”
Outside, dusk now, the crowd thinned.
Cars driving by blowing horns, bursts of song:
I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it,
It’s just like a bit of velvet….
Summer sounds calling back from shadows, crickets in the grass, rooks squabbling in the churchyards blighted elms. (All gone now. I can hardly remember what an elm tree looks like, and I bet you’ve never seen one in your life.) Kenny wobbles over, asks if he can give me a lift to Sarah’s place, “Party’s moving over there. Her old man’s away.” He winks. Lumley and I (I will not call him Victor) look at each other and smirk.
“If I were you, young man, I’d toddle off and come back for that bike of yours in the morning. I’ll bring Liv along presently.” Kenny leaves, suggestible.
“Your boyfriend?”
“Just a friend.”
“That’s the idea. Keep ‘em guessing.”
Mist rising off the river.
“I’m getting cold.”
Lumley’s smoky tweed around my shoulders. “Have you eaten?”
“Not hungry. Full of bloody gin.”
“You swear too much for a nice young lady.”
“Who says I’m nice?”
“I think you’re sweet. I’m sure it isn’t easy, being you.”
“You should meet my sister. She’s the pretty one.”
“I don’t believe that for a second. I’ve seen your mother’s photos. I think you are.” Flirting with me! Should I have been flattered or outraged? Of course, being me, tall me—twenty at sixteen, far too old for twerps like Kenny—I was flattered.
Did I find him attractive, this man old enough to be my father? Maybe. But it wasn’t really about being attracted. I can see that now. He never claimed to have known Jon (he knew better than to play that card, too easily called) but he’d known the ground, that faraway land that had swallowed my father. Victor Lumley’s grey eyes had seen what Jon had seen. His nearness to that mystery drew me to him, gave him power. And his coming back alive made it seem less impossible that Jon might do so, made Lumley an envoy from the past, my fathers proxy. And even though he’d returned with only minor scars, he had my admiration and my pity. A woman’s pity sinks her every time.
He was going to buy me dinner. Somewhere in town. My choice. No man had ever asked me to dinner before, not like that—long-stemmed glasses, candlelight, glances across a red carnation. I saw myself very elegant, hair up, in my Mary Quant. (It had black and yellow bands, like a wasp.)
Out along the lane in his sleek car with its walnut trim, green leather, and smell of an old glove. Leather and strong outlandish tobacco—the exotic smell of Man.
“Christ! A copper. Why isn’t the bugger home watching the match?” Lights off. Lumley did something clever with the hand-brake that turned the car half-circle. Tyres sowing gravel, snarls from the big engine.
“Don’t you need lights to drive?”
“Didn’t need ‘em to fly. Eyes like a cat, I have. I’ll shake him behind the turnips. He should be going after the likes of your friend Kenny.”
“All’s fair, little Liv, in love and war. Remember that.” The car rushing on in the night, Lumley driving by the sky’s glow, braking and turning, hedgerows hurtling past like unlit trains. He was good.
“Slow down. Please.”
“Soon.”
“Please. I’m frightened.” I may have put a hand on his knee.
Bumping down a track. Slower.
“Stop here! I think I’m going to be sick.”
It was a good place for it. A gravel pit in a wood. I got out and retched. I thought, That does it. That’ll cool him off, a puking girl. At least that’s what I think I thought. I hadn’t been so woozy since the night at Lottie’s. But did I want to put him off? Why not get it over and done with, become a woman and make an old man happy? Now that I’m telling you this it makes no sense at all, but it made sense that night. It made sense to the person I was at sixteen.
“Hold me up, or I’ll fall over.”
Lumley’s arms around me. “You’d better lie down.”
“I know your sort. My mother’s warned me about men like you.” The sandpaper of his chin. He was kissing me, and I was thinking, How can he bear to do that?
“Because I love you.”
“You can’t. I’m a mess. I’m at my worst.”
“I’ll always love you, Livvy, at your very, very worst.”
And so it happened, on the back seat of an Alvis. And that was only the first time. Being desired seemed to feed desire. I loved him, thought of him all the time, thought of ways to see him, to please him. We’d meet twice a week, around three, when I finished serving at the pub. We usually went to the gravel pit. When school resumed it wasn’t so easy to get together, but my uniform drove him crazy when we did.
He bought me “the Pill,” as we called it then, a ring of twenty-one days. “More infallible than the Pope, Liv,” and I found that very funny. The pills made me keener—though whether it was the hormones or the freedom, I don’t know. Perhaps it was simply that he had got them for me, a secret calendar of love.
Once a week, once a fortnight, once a month. As the weather cooled, so did Victor Lumley. His work, he said, hardly a moment to himself. Each wait seemed an age; I became sad, suspicious, angry. My schoolwork suffered. And I got careless with the plastic wheel of fortune. I was on Sunday when it was Wednesday, didn’t know if I’d taken too many or too few. I “missed.”
One day Mother said, “Pop round to the corner for twenty Seniors, would you, Liv? Be a dear.” He was slipping away from us both.
By the middle of November I knew about you. I was sure. I told him. And of course that was the end. He took it calmly, like a thief who’s always known he’ll be caught. We wriggled into our clothes on the back seat of his leathery car. He drove me home. Said nothing. Nothing until he pecked me on the cheek. Goodbye, little Liv.
You were born in a discreet nursing home in Harrow. All winter and spring I tried to believe a message would come, or the bell would ring and there’d be Lumley on the doorstep: Get your hat and coat, little Liv, I’m taking you away from all this. Or at least a solicitor’s letter in Dickens mode, saying an anonymous benefactor had made provisions for your upkeep. (The things one imagines at sixteen!) But by June, as I waited to burst like an over-watered melon, I’d faced the obvious: your father had vanished from the Earth.
There’d been no sign of him whatsoever since the November day I told him my news. I kept it from Mother for another six weeks—until she made a remark about my figure: “I think you’ve had too much Christmas, dear. You’re looking rather plump.” I burst into tears. It was Twelfth Night. We were going round the house gathering up cards and decorations. Lottie had just gone back to London. Mother used to say the Christmas magic turns bad if you leave decorations up after Twelfth Night.
She guessed immediately who it was. “Oh, Livvy,” she said, “you’re not! How could you? Oh Livvy, if only you knew! If only.…” (At the time I thought she meant nothing more than if only I knew the consequences.) There were scenes, tears, late-night conversations. And anger. How I’d let her down. Let down my father. “What will I tell him if he walks in that door tomorrow? What will you tell him? Go on, Olivia. Answer me that!” I felt kicked. And I fancied that you spun inside me, a dolphin somersault of fear, though surely it was much too soon. Then Mother turned her anger on herself. “Where have I gone wrong? I ask myself that every night, wide awake at three in the morning. I should have foreseen this with fatherless girls. I should have been stricter. I should have sold this house and raised the money and sent you to boarding school.” And she’d looked at me with swimming eyes, “Oh, Liv. Not you! Not you. With Lottie I … I shouldn’t say this, but your sister’s.… She’s flighty. But not you. Not my solid, sensible Olivia!”
“You mean your big frumpy Olivia. Who’d want her? Isn’t that the real reason you’re so surprised? Go on, say it! Anyway, I seem to remember I wasn’t the only person in this house rather charmed by the cad in question.…” I was full of tearful apology as soon as I’d let that out.
Lottie should have been the one in trouble. And part of me was glad I’d beaten my sister to something, even heartbreak and disgrace. Mother had never said so, but we knew that in her eyes Lottie had the looks and I was the brain.
I remember reaching the age when one first becomes aware of looks, of lonely selfhood staring from its cave of flesh and bone. Lottie had taken off her dressing-gown at bedtime and was studying herself naked in the bathroom mirror: a northern blonde with narrow hips and our father’s level sapphire gaze. I joined her: a tall Mediterranean brunette, darker and more strongly built, with a nose like the sharp edge of the number four. Straight and classical, Mother said, but I knew it was too big. Lottie said I must have been switched by Gypsies, or adopted. (That will strike you as ironic.) She meant, of course, I am lovelier.
I found consolation in the puddly old looking-glass beneath the spear. Unlike the bathroom mirror, this was a lens of magic possibilities. If I stared hard enough I could see an African girl gazing back at me: her dark eyes, full lips, pantherine body, the ripple and spring of her hair. I would never grow up to be one of these English with their cracked-meringue complexions. I was the fruit of Henderson’s love for a native queen, descended from people who fought lions and tigers, tamed elephants, tossed assegais. Mine was the dark beauty of the spear.
Years later I learnt there were no tigers in Africa, and no blood line between Henderson and us. Now, when I look at photographs of Lottie and me in our teens, it seems silly to have been so insecure. If my sisters looks hadn’t been so exceptional, I wouldn’t have felt outshone. I was leggy and coltish, not plain. I drew my share of stares from men who should have known better. Men like Mr. Lumley.
We got beyond recrimination and began to talk over what to do. Mother pestered the Ministry until there was no room for doubt: the RAF had never had a Victor Charles Lumley, wing commander or otherwise. Who he was, how he’d found us, and how he forged Jon’s handwriting, we never found out. I suppose he went through public records. In those days handwriting was in wider use; it can’t have been hard to dig up a licence application, a building permit.
The buttons were explained by a dealer in militaría who’d moved to Hitchin from the Portobello Road. “I’ve ‘eard it said, miss—you didn’t get this from me—that if you want to age a bit of metal you bury it in a chicken run. Don’t know what it is those birds eat, but a couple of months in there is good for two ‘undred years.” The Royston house with the grand drive turned out to belong to a stockbroker who spent half his time in Spain. And I’d never thought to note down the number of the Alvis that smelt like a glove.
Mother was too embarrassed to approach the police until some time after our own investigation stalled. An inspector listened sympathetically. “If your daughter had been under sixteen at the time, madam, we could do him for offences against a minor. You might consider a civil suit, breach of promise for example. But unless you’ve got physical evidence—a letter making explicit undertakings, a ring, preferably inscribed—breach of promise is a hard one. Paternity suit might be an option, once the child’s born and you know its blood type. Also difficult to win.
“Fraud, however, is a criminal matter. Sos impersonating an officer of the Crown. I’ll check and see if that applies to retired officers. It may not. Our friend seems to know what he’s doing. And we still have to catch him first.” Then he brightened. “But there’s a good chance this gentleman may be ‘known to police,’ as we say. You’ll be hearing from me in due course.”
He did ring two or three times to say he was still on the case. I think he felt sorry for us. But it was the sixties—drugs, sit-ins, Vietnam demonstrations, the crime wave. How much police time would have gone to tracking down a confidence man whose only loot was a woman’s self-respect?
“Whatever decision you take, Livvy, I’ll support you in it.” Mother was hard to read. Was this support, or fence-sitting? It was already a bit late in the day for the first option. You may not believe me when I say this, but I never considered it. I can’t say why. It wasn’t religious scruples. Or even ethical ones. I just knew it wasn’t something I could do. Perhaps you owe your existence to nothing loftier than my dread of hospitals.
So, keep you, or give you up? Picturing life after you, with or without you, took a stretch of imagination I couldn’t manage. In the small hours, those four o’clock oh-my-God awakenings, I’d be ruled by the heart: how could I even think of giving up my flesh and blood? But in the day, struggling with school, I’d harden. You were still a hypothetical being. (Until you got too big to ignore, till the heartburn, the itching, the sweats.) My life as a mother was as hard to conjure from the future as my life on the old-age pension.
There was also Lottie. I hesitate to say this because I don’t want you to blame her. If you blame anyone it must be me. Perhaps you’ve had a happy life so far, a better upbringing than I could have given you. Perhaps the decision I took was for the best. (How often I’ve told myself this!) But I feel I owe you a full account. Lottie did not sit on the fence. “Liv, understand. You’ve got to ask yourself what kind of life you and the child will have. If you keep it you can forget about university, film, career. You can say goodbye to marriage, or any kind of live-in man. Men don’t take on other peoples brats. The few that do are nutters and diddlers, most likely. Come to London right away, there’s someone you ought to meet.”
This person was Annette, a former housemate of Lottie’s who’d made the same “mistake” as I and taken the high road. She was living on National Assistance in a tower block. There I saw a future all too clearly. No sleep, no job, no friends for more than half an hour, an endless round of noise and nappies. And other women in the building—five, ten years further down the same road, their children like vicious monkeys, and tales of pederastic babysitters, loopy social workers, court orders, foster homes.
Mother offered help, of course, and if we’d been closer she might have swayed me. But the thought of being cooped up in Hitchin for the next twenty years, dependent and beholden, frightened me as much as Annette’s tower block. I decided there was no life for you and me together. My course no longer seemed selfish, merely the best thing.
The nursing home people knew exactly what to say. An older, financially secure, childless couple “from a good background.” Able to offer you the best in life. A fresh start on both sides. Complete anonymity and confidentiality. Your existence legally erased from my life; mine erased from yours. Once you left my body we would never meet again. And no, Mrs. Wyvern—we call everyone here “Mrs.” by the way—no, we always find it’s best for all concerned if you don’t hold the baby. Not even for a moment.