Once upon a time in Chinatown

by Robert Ronsson

  Beyond were the banks of shelves. These extended to the end of the room some fifty feet away. The shelves were stained dark brown and high as a man. The frayed ends of manila files and envelopes were visible where they had been half-pushed back into place. The distinctive smell of filed paper wafted across on the dust motes.

  The man and woman who tended the records walked up and down with clickety-clackety steps swerving past haphazard heaps of files that lay in their paths like the droppings of some elephantine beast. The minders cradled bundles of papers and occasionally stopped, and stretched or stooped to insert them into place.

  A woman entered from behind a partition to the left. She wore a pinched-waist jacket and the bulk of her body above and below the straining buttons made me think of Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia With Love. She tapped her crimson nails on the counter-top. Her fingers were stained with nicotine. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’d like to trace someone in the World War II Army Roll of Honour.’ I chunked out the words to be sure I put them in the right order.

  ‘Of course.’ She reached across to a stack of pigeon holes and her talons closed in on a pile of forms. She slipped one out and passed it across the desk. ‘Fill this in.’ She signalled behind me. ‘Pens are over there.’

  I turned to face a narrow shelf equipped with quill-shaped, ball-point pens. I took the form and filled in the details I knew – my father’s surname Kellie-Smith, first name Anthony, date of death 6th June 1944. There were other spaces for his date of birth, regiment and rank that I had to leave blank. But there wouldn’t be more than one with that surname that died that day, would there? I handed the form back to Rosa.

  ‘Mmm. Is this all? No date of birth?’ She peered at me over the top of spectacles. There was a waft of antiseptic perfume as she turned to a card index. She spoke over her shoulder. ‘Are you sure of this surname – Kellie-hyphen-Smith?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Her head dropped forward and she sighed. ‘Could it be plain Smith?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ My lack of knowledge was shameful.

  ‘I’ll order up Hulton to Kepner. Have a look at that first. You don’t want to look at the Smiths unless you have to.’ She filled in the lower section of the card and signed it with a flourish. She handed it back. ‘Take it through to the reading room and sit at a desk. We’re not busy. It shouldn’t take long.’ Muscles worked in her cheeks and stretched her lips across her front teeth. It took a moment before I realised she was smiling.

  I turned and hesitated. Was I to go through the door? I looked back and Rosa shooed me towards it with the back of her hand.

  The young man click-clacked over as soon as I sat down. He gave my card a cursory look and said, ‘I’ll bring it down.’ He returned to the safety of the stacks, walking the long corridor with an athlete’s roll of the hips.

  I put down my briefcase and wished I’d brought something to read. Too nervous to tuck into the lunchtime sandwich in my bag, I sat and waited.

  After a few long minutes, the young man returned with a leather-bound foolscap book about three inches thick. A lot of death. He put it down in front of me. ‘Hulton to Kepner,’ he said. ‘Alphabetical. You’ll find Kellie towards the end.’ He stood with his hand on his waist. It looked awkward; his thumb pointed forward. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ he asked, flashing his teeth.

  But I didn’t find my father. There was no name between Kellhuy, Andries and Kellifer, Percival. No Kellies at all. Perhaps he was in the register but misspelt as Kelly. I flicked on and found a list that stretched to three pages. None of the Kellys was coupled with Smith. I sat back and considered what this meant.

  Firstly, the names were of all the British army’s WWII dead. It wasn’t important that I may have been mistaken about his date of death.

  What did Rosa at reception say? ‘Could he be plain Smith?’ I looked around. The young man was sat at another desk between the shelves about halfway down the room. I picked up the heavy volume and scraped back my chair.

  He looked up and hurried over. ‘Stay there,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I’ve drawn a blank,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He took the book in both hands and tossed back his fringe waiting for me to say more.

  ‘I wonder whether I should have looked at Smith. The name I’m looking for is Kellie-Smith, you see. Double-barrelled.’

  ’That would be Slaney to Szarkow, he said. ‘All the Smiths are there. Pages of them.’

  ‘Could I see it?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, as he turned away, hugging Hulton to Kepner to his chest. ‘You need to ask Miss Turvey for the correct card.’ He nodded towards the door I had come through earlier.

  I repeated the card process with Miss Turvey, who was less hostile second time around. She didn’t even remind me that she had predicted I would need the Smith book. When I returned to the reading room, the young man was waiting by the door. He took the new card and nodded towards the table where I’d been sitting. The required volume was already on the desk.

  ‘Very kind,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Any time,’ he said as he strode away towards his station.

  I had to check more carefully. There were 33 lines of Smith, Anthony Only one was Anthony K Smith – the others with the same initial had full middle names – Karl to Konane – none of which was ‘Kellie’. The Anthony K died in France in May 1940. It wasn’t him. There were no other possibilities.

  I scraped back my chair so my minder knew to come back.

  ‘Not there?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t help you.’ He cocked his head to one side as if he expected me to respond – as if we should make a conversation out of my disappointment. I mumbled something about only having an hour for lunch and left him with the book.

  As I hurried back to Scotia Mutual, a seed of hope germinated. If Dad wasn’t in the Roll of Honour, he either hadn’t been in the army or he didn’t die in the war. Could he still be alive? My heartbeat sped and a surge of electricity tingled at my fingertips. I urged myself to calm down.

  My christening certificate was the only proof of Dad’s existence but equally, the same certificate was the only proof of his death. I now knew that the man named as my father hadn’t died in Normandy. If he still lived, had Mum perhaps told me a story to hide the fact that he’d run off?

  Suppose the third-party money that helped her buy the house had come from my father or his family as some sort of pay-off. If the war brought together two people from completely different social spheres, had my father run away from the idea of an inter-racial marriage as the clock struck midnight? The jewellery shops he used were way out of my mother’s experience. She was a black cockney, brought up in a succession of children’s homes with no airs or graces. How would she have been received by the presumably middle class Kellie-Smiths?

  In one train of thought, my father had died a hero. The jewellery made him as real as the diamond on Mum’s engagement ring. At the other extreme he was a snob who couldn’t go through with the marriage and his death was my mother’s cover story. I already felt guilty about the manner of her death. I hated myself for being thankful that she was no longer a burden to me. Now, I was in danger of resenting her for inventing the hero-father I thought I had. There was only one way out of this. I wouldn’t give up the search.

  4

  Some days after my disappointment at the Records Office, I stood in the doorway of Mum’s bedroom after the clearance men had removed the furniture. I’d been in a deconsecrated church once. It was emptied of pews and at the far end there stood a cuboid of empty space where the altar should have been. Then as now, I had only seen the things that weren’t there.

  Mum’s deterioration had started 13 years before. Now, in the last decade of the 20th century, who else did I live this life for but myself? But when I thought about my future, all I could predict was retirement with a generous Scotia
Mutual pension. What of the intervening twenty years?

  Why not move out of this house? If it was sold I could easily buy a good-sized flat further out. In Chelsea, perhaps, close to the football ground. I could re-kindle my affiliation to the football team.

  The glum room stared back. Would I be able to entertain women here – in Mum’s room? I’d had women friends before 1977 but I was a slow starter – not unusual for a young man who had gone to single-sex schools and whose only female close acquaintance was his mother. It was only after I joined Scotia and had a bit of money in my pocket that I started going out with a girl I’d met through work. We clung to each other for too long and it finished when I had an affair with an older woman who was married. She gave me the confidence to play the field which mostly involved me asking girls for dates only after they had shown an interest in me. Nothing developed into anything meaningful because, if the girl started talking about the future, I broke it off. I could never imagine how sharing my life would be better than being alone.

  After Mum moved upstairs, I exploited my sole use of the ground floor with a few dalliances. I had affairs with two married colleagues in the post-pill seventies – free and easy Gloria and giggly Maz – but, after the firework fizz of the initial naughtiness, both spluttered out. Perhaps with a flat, I could cut a rakish dash. I smiled grimly – me, rakish. My life had become constricted by responsibility. Caring for Mum had confined me, compressed me into a tight bud of thwarted ambition and it was too late to break through its skin and blossom – not at my age.

  Before Mum, I used to take my girlfriends up the West End to see films at the Empire Leicester Square only a day or two after their premieres. There were still traces of the sticky-tape where the red carpet had been. The films were epics like Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia. Later there was The Godfather trilogy, others: Jaws and Taxi Driver. I peered into the mirror-shaped, non-faded area of wallpaper. ‘You talkin’ to me?’ I said out loud. ‘You talkin’ to me!’

  Even though Mum hadn’t lived in the house before my dad died I imagined him standing where I was, looking at his reflection in the recently removed mirror. A pale version of my face looked back at me out of the rectangle. Perhaps I would never know if he was dead or alive.

  Action! I needed something to snap me out of this. I looked down at the nylon carpet. Stupid! I should have asked the clearance men to take it even if it was so obviously fit only for the dump. The stains between the oblong of deeper colour, where the bed had been, and the doorway, where I stood, said it all. I bent over and picked at the edge by the faux-grained skirting. My hand jerked back with pain. One of the teeth of the carpet gripper had pricked my finger. I examined the minute hole and sucked off a bead of blood. It reminded me of the brooch I’d given Mum. With a pang of regret, I remembered tossing it out.

  Further along, almost at the corner with the outside wall, the carpet edge looked frayed. Loose strings of plastic thread stuck out. I knelt and shuffled on my knees across, picking up thick rolls of dust on my Levi’s. When I reached the other side, I flicked the dust away and sneezed – once, twice. I tugged a tissue from my pocket and blew my nose.

  The ragged edge of carpet parted company with the gripper easily. It had been pulled away before. Using it as a starting point, I soon had the carpet free all along the wall. With more effort, I’d folded a quarter of it back into the middle of the room. Scabrous patches of desiccated underlay clung to the floorboards. I picked idly at one of the newspapers lying haphazardly. The headline was: Moorgate – 43 Feared Dead. The date was March 1st, 1975.

  Back where the carpet had been loose, there was a knot-hole in the centre of a section of plank about four-to-five inches square, its edges askew. I pushed my finger through the hole and prised the square of plank upwards. A small cotton-wrapped bundle nestled in the gap between the joists.

  I picked up the package. The dust-flecked wadge of… something… fitted easily in my palm and had a little heft to it. What could it be? Had Mum secreted another jewel? Some money? I estimated that it weighed about the same as my wallet. Was it a roll of £20 notes put by for a rainy day before she was ill?

  Still on my knees, I picked at the edges of the handkerchief. It revealed a pocket-diary sized book with a faux-leather cover. The embossed silver writing told me it was The Book of Common Prayer. I opened it. The crisp paper was tissue-thin with heavy black print that showed through both sides. The edges were silver-blocked. A dark line about half-way in betrayed that either one of the pages was folded over or someone had inserted a bookmark. I allowed the book to fall open at the page. A blank card was marking the start of a section entitled: The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony.

  The bookmark had the stiffness of a photograph and my hand trembled as I turned it over – a man alone in a military uniform. He was posed in front of a neutral, swirling backdrop, the sort used by professional photographers. The name of the studio JA Alonzo was printed across the bottom right-hand corner. This and the picture’s size made me think it was a proof sample for a bigger, professional portrait.

  The man had his cap tucked under his arm and his forehead and hairline bore an eerie similarity with the man I had confronted in the imaginary mirror moments before. His eyebrows met in the middle as mine did. Unlike me, his hair was straight, his nose narrow and his lips thin but there was something in the self-consciousness of his smile and his pose that made me think of my first photograph in school uniform. The wings emblem on the front of his cap and above the left breast pocket of his jacket made it clear that Dad was RAF not Army. Why did Mum lie?

  I looked down into the gap between the joists to see if there was anything else there – another clue. I scrabbled to the sides blindly and reached along as far as I could but the space was empty. Nothing else. But why hide this? I could only theorise that she always regarded my father as her secret. She never spoke to me directly about him. Even when I asked she would only answer obliquely. The onset of dementia must have made her fearful that she might inadvertently let the secret go – let him go – so she had hidden him away, to keep him for her alone.

  With the handkerchief – his perhaps – the book and the photo in one hand, I stood up and flicked at my dusty knees with the other. I was cold and shivery. The search for Dad was on again. Somebody who knew these things would be able to tell me his rank. Perhaps the original photograph could be traced through the studio’s records? Maybe Mum hadn’t lied about him being in the army. Just as she hadn’t lied about him dying on a beach in Normandy. Her only sin was omission. As I grew up, I had accreted layers of my own made-up stories to build a shell that protected me from my ignorance. My one certainty was that my father had died. But if I’d been wrong about so much else…

  My mind was a jumble of unknowns that pointed to futures I dared not anticipate. I turned away from that desolate room and closed the door on the past.

  The photograph was on my desk as I waited for Mr Thurslow to arrive. When Scotia Mutual wanted to dispute a claim that we thought might be dodgy, we employed an investigation firm in Leadenhall Street to look into the circumstances. The man we dealt with at City Investigations was invariably Mr Thurslow and I’d asked him to come in so we could talk about ‘a personal matter’.

  When he entered my office, he was even more solemn than usual. ‘How are you today, Mr Cross?’ he said as he deposited his bowler hat on the surface of my desk. It squatted there as if it was hiding something.

  ‘Tea or coffee, Mr Thurslow?’

  ‘Coffee. Excellent!’ He stroked his thumbs along the sharp creases of his striped undertaker’s trousers.

  I lifted the telephone handset. ‘Coffee for two, please,’ I said.

  Thurslow stayed silent. He was waiting for me to unburden myself. He was probably expecting me to ask him to follow my cheating wife.

  ‘This is rather a delicate matter,’ I said, relishing the idea that I was keeping him on the wrong foot.

  There was a knock on the door and the new
girl came in balancing a tray with two cups of coffee on saucers, a milk jug and a sugar bowl. She placed it alongside the bowler hat and I slid a coaster across to Thurslow. Julie – or was it Tracy? – shifted one of the coffees to Thurslow’s coaster. I reached across for mine.

  Thurslow waited for the girl to leave. ‘You were going to tell me about a delicate matter.’

  ‘Yes.’ I leant back in the swivel chair. ‘It’s a family matter.’

  ‘You can rely on my discretion.’

  ‘It goes without saying.’ I shifted forward. ‘The thing is, my mother wasn’t married.’

  Thurslow’s face stayed blank. ‘I see…’

  ‘I’ve only recently discovered who my father was. I had always thought he was killed during the war – on the beach in Normandy – on D-Day but I tried the Public Records Office and he’s not on on the army Roll of Honour. Having drawn a blank I thought I’d hand the job over to a professional.’

  Thurslow’s grey eyes were as impenetrable as smog. He must have learned neither to react nor to lead. He waited like a buzzard, hunched atop a telegraph pole its eyes fixed on a point below – a vision conjured by his greying eyebrows and hooked nose.

  ‘His name was Anthony Kellie-Smith…’

  I paused while Thurslow reached into his jacket pocket for a notebook. It was inside a black leather cover that he flipped open. It reminded me of the police officer on the night Mum died. A small silver biro appeared between his finger tips and hovered over the page. ‘Kellie Smith,’ he said, ‘hyphenated?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. And the Kellie part is spelled with ‘i-e’ at the end, not ‘y’.

  He crossed out the name and rewrote it.

  ‘As I said, I’d always thought he was in the army but I’ve discovered this photograph…’ I passed it across.