The Cuckoo's Child

  “Good Lord, it’s a museum piece!”

  I showed the ladies the name written on the strap.

  “And you think that may be your real name?” asked Miss Hoar.

  I shrugged. “It’s possible. It was with me, and there was no other child around.”

  With a pang I remembered Olivia, that other lost child, and with that memory Daniel suddenly filled my mind. It was painful to tear my attention back.

  “It’s a pity you have no idea as yet where your mother may have come from. Without that you couldn’t hope to get any information out of Somerset House, though it’s not Somerset House any more, it’s gone to Wales or something.”

  I must have looked blank. Miss Plover came to the rescue.

  “The Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths,” she said succinctly. “They’d be able to tell you if such a birth had been registered around 1940, but a name without a place of birth or a parent’s name would be a needle in a haystack.”

  “So I need to investigate Brighton.”

  Isobel was peering at the seed packet through the glasses she always kept folded and dangling round her neck on a beaded chain.

  “I can’t make this out,” she said. “I can see what might be ‘Park,’ but the first part is too faint.”

  “Let me see,” said Miss Plover, taking the packet and dragging Isobel’s glasses closer to her own eyes.

  “Wascot?” she said after a long pause during which she angled the tiny envelope into a better light, towing Isobel with her. “Nescot?”

  Miss Hoar stiffened.

  “That rings a bell somehow. Why is that name familiar?”

  The other two looked blank, shaking their heads.

  “Never mind,” said Miss Hoar, “it’ll come to me.”

  “It will too,” whispered Miss Plover as she returned the envelope to me. “Evelyn’s got a splendid memory!”

  But you know, I was beginning to have reservations about memory. How many of our recollections are myths of our own making? In the elaborate, unconscious filing system we carry about with us, how much is real, and how much wishful thinking or embroidery, theft or suffocation, excuse or justification? Even the big things must suffer erosion eventually, a gentle blurring of outline and feature, not enough to disguise the original completely, just to soften and blunt the harsh angularities into Sphinx faces the Pharaohs would barely recognize.

  Daniel’s disappearance remains as stark in memory as the day it happened, but what about Daniel himself? I know his face and the colour of his eyes and the tender hollow at the nape of his neck, but could I swear to the way his hair swirls on the crown of his head? The exact shape of his earlobes? The design of his navel? And if this much has blurred in eleven years, what could my family possibly remember of me and my biological mother after all this time—or even want to remember—that would be of the slightest use to me?

  SEVENTEEN

  Stephen, you would have approved of the practical approach I took to Brighton. Directory Enquiries were no help on a Murphy without an address, but they gave me the phone numbers for tourist information and the local council offices. A woman at the council office, sounding adenoidal and put upon, reluctantly told me there were several S. Murphys on the electoral roll but declined to reveal their addresses. She sounded quite pleased to be able to refuse.

  “Oh no,” she said firmly, “that would be quite against regulations. More than my job’s worth. So sorry.” I didn’t point out that the local phonebook would give me their addresses if I could get my hands on it. I didn’t want to give her a second opportunity to say no.

  The Tourist Information Office was more outgoing, or less righteous, but not much more helpful. The girl who answered the phone soon realized that she was too recent an addition to the staff to have the answers I was seeking and chirpily summoned up an older colleague. I waited, listening to the rustles and background noises, and then the barely audible voice of the girl making a rapid explanation to someone else and the noise of the handset being transferred. A quiet voice sounded in my ear.

  “How may I help you?”

  I explained.

  “There’s no Sarah Murphy on our lists at the moment running any sort of hotel or boarding house or B&B, but you know, there used to be. She had a boarding house somewhere near the station if I remember correctly. There was something about it that’s nagging at me, something odd, but I can’t . . . Anyway, she retired, I suppose, some years ago. I’ve no idea whether she’s still in the same house or moved elsewhere. I couldn’t even tell you what street the boarding house was on, and I don’t have any of the old lists to refer to. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

  “But you’ve helped a lot. At least I know there was once a Sarah Murphy there. You don’t know if she came from London, do you?”

  “That would have been before my time, I’m afraid.”

  “Never mind. It was a long shot.”

  “Cats!”

  “What?”

  “Cats! I’ve just remembered what was odd about the house. She kept cats too, dozens of them. Anyone who stayed there had to be able to put up with the cats. Caused a little bit of a stir with the health inspectors, I seem to remember. And the neighbours. May even have been why she gave up taking in PGs.”

  I caught the train at Clapham Junction. I was armed with a very old AA map of the Brighton Hove area, donated by Miss Hoar, and from Isobel, a bag of crusty ham rolls, a slice of Dundee cake, two apples, and a quarter-pound of sherbert lemons in case I got peckish on the journey. Maybe she was remembering the expeditions to the seaside of her youth or some outmoded form of transport so leisurely that iron rations were a must if one were not to faint for lack of nourishment.

  “You never know with public transport,” she said darkly, “and even if you don’t actually need it, the sherbert lemons will be nice and refreshing. Trains are always so stuffy, don’t you think?”

  Her precautions lay like a stone in my bag along with the gas mask case. The train bucked and skittered its way to the right line across the maze of tracks at Clapham Junction and then gradually picked up speed through the suburbs until the stations became illegible stammers as we rocketed past. The countryside opened out, the farther south we went, into green hedged fields, cows and sheep grazing, the land gradually undulating to rounded hills. These were the Downs, covered with the short turf and thin pale soil of chalk uplands, forming a barrier between the city and the sea.

  We stopped at East Croydon and Redhill, skirted Gatwick airport, and rattled finally into the terminus at Brighton. After the serenity of the hills and the open skies, Brighton was disappointingly ordinary, at least round the railway station, lines of identical houses that could have come from any suburb, faceless streets with names like Trafalgar Terrace and Kensington Gardens and Cheapside, as if they yearned to be somewhere more cosmopolitan but had settled instead for imitation as a more realistic substitute. The sea might have been a hundred miles away.

  But a salty, iodine, seaweedy smell was in the air, and I followed my nose to find its source. The Channel was heaving up and down, grey and white, as far as the eye could see. The old West Pier, like an Edwardian conservatory on stilts, sat in the water to my right. The other pier, much longer, edged out into deep water on my left. There was a stiff breeze coming off the sea, and soon my face felt sticky and I could taste the salt on my lips.

  A sudden vision of my house on the water at Davis Bay overwhelmed me, and I felt a clutching pang of homesickness. What was I doing in this strange town on the southern edge of England when I could be walking with Neil along our beach, idly looking for shells and driftwood, watching for eagles and osprey, laughing at the sandpipers running as if on wheels in and out of the final reaches of the waves? What did I hope to find here that could be any more important to me than that?

  What was I doing? Wasting time, obviously.

  In the Lanes I found a pub that had once been a chapel, ordered a half of bitter, and borrowed a phoneb
ook. The Murphys took up a column. I could see no quick or sure way of eliminating any of them, so I jotted down all the numbers, putting all the S. Murphys at the top of the list. I hefted the rolls of ten-pence coins I’d provided myself with for a marathon session at a public phone. Time for some dogged detective work.

  I stared through the grimy windows of the phonebox, listening to the double rings at the other end of the line. I’d exhausted the S. Murphys and was into the Ds. Hope was flagging. I watched a man, hunched against the wind, tugging a reluctant Jack Russell down the street. Both looked miserable. The handset pressed to my ear smelled bad. I visualized the thousands of mouths opening and closing, the invisible spray of saliva hitting the black plastic, the ears in clammy intimacy with mine, the hands building up a thickening film of sweat. I was about to put the phone down, retrieve my money, and tumble out into the air when the ringing abruptly stopped and a female voice spoke, amazingly close, as if her head were alongside mine, whispering into my ear.

  “Hello.”

  I told her my name and went through the explanation for my call. I had refined this over the last dozen failures, learning that a full explanation was a waste of time and would only have to be repeated.

  “I’m trying to trace a woman who used to live in Morocco Street, Bermondsey. In London. During the war. I was told she moved to this area and maybe ran a boarding house. Her name is Sarah Murphy. Do you know of her at all?”

  There was a profound silence. For a moment I thought we had been cut off, but it wasn’t the sort of deadness on the line that tells you immediately that all the electronic connections have been severed. It was more the silence of those disturbing phone calls late at night where the caller never speaks, and after bellowing, “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” you listen in your turn, controlling your noisy breathing to catch the slightest sound, and there you both are, at either end of the line, waiting for the betrayal of a single sigh or rustle, waiting for the tiny click or the furtive slide of the handset back onto its rest so that you can leave your own phone off the hook and prevent your persecutor from making any more calls for the time being.

  “Hello?” I said at last. “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “Why do you want her?” The voice was thin now and strained.

  “She may be able to tell me something about my mother. I think my mother may have been on the way to see her when she was killed. I’ve only just discovered this.”

  It sounded lamer to me every time I said it. But the voice came again, flat.

  “My mother’s called Sarah. We used to live in London. But she can’t tell you anything.”

  “I’d really like to talk to her if I could. She might be able to remember something, just a little thing maybe. I’ve come this far on very small clues.”

  The voice was stronger now.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference. She died yesterday in the hospital. Cancer.”

  It was my turn to fall silent. With dismay, in my case. As I tried to collect my thoughts, another sound came over the wire, distant but unmistakable. Cats yowling.

  “I am so sorry. I’d never have bothered you if . . .”

  “You weren’t to know.”

  She sounded almost brisk now. I took the plunge.

  “Look, I know it’s the worst possible time, and I’ll just go away if you want me to, but do you think I could come and talk to you instead some time? Not now, obviously, but in the next few weeks, when you’re not so overwhelmed?”

  “Overwhelmed? What makes you say that?”

  “Well, all the arrangements to make, the shock, you know.”

  “The funeral’s all in hand. Made her own arrangements ages ago. Nothing for me to do, really. It’s not as if it wasn’t expected. Where are you?”

  “Down near the Pavilion, at a public phone.”

  “If you want, you could come now. Might as well. I’ve got nothing better to do with myself.”

  She wasn’t exactly welcoming, but I couldn’t pass up the chance. She gave me directions to her house on Tidy Street. As an afterthought, I asked her name.

  “Deirdre,” she said, “Deirdre Murphy.”

  So she wasn’t married. And the phone was in her name.

  “See you in a bit,” I said. Another cat mewed, but Deirdre made no reply.

  The house on Tidy Street was tall and thin, crowded on both sides by newer homes of pallid brick, semi-detached clones differentiated only by the colours of their front doors and the efforts their owners had made at individuality: brass carriage lamps, wrought iron gates, window boxes, and a startling array of front yards, cultivated, hidden by hedges, lawned, concreted, asphalted, gravelled, crazy paved, most with at least one car parked on the road or crouched by the front windows if the garden had been abandoned to vehicles. The Murphy house by contrast was an older, darker brick, and it stuck up like a rude finger among the others. All the drapes had been drawn, and the house looked blind. There was no car, but a bicycle leaned against the railing of the front porch, manacled to it by a padlock and chain. There was a privet hedge along the wall by the road, but no other sign of horticulture.

  I crunched across the gravel to the front door and rang the bell. It was one of those bells that give no sound, so you have no idea if it is functioning or not. A brass plate by the door read SEAVIEW HOUSE in curly copperplate, but the metal had acquired a dull patina in the salt air. Nobody had polished it in a long time. I was just about to try the bell again, or give the dolphin knocker a thump, when I heard shuffling steps on the other side of the door and faint mewing. The door opened.

  “Come in,” said a voice. “Mind the cats.”

  The house reeked. I’d experienced the smell in that concentration only once, when I visited a dotty old woman in Halfmoon Bay who bred Siamese cats and allowed them the run of the house. Holding my breath and hoping I’d get acclimatized soon and not notice it so much, I edged in and followed Deirdre down the dark hallway. I half expected the whole house to be shrouded and plunged in gloom, but Deirdre flung open a door at the back of the house, and I was blinded for a moment.

  We were in a sunroom. But obviously lived in. There was a dining room table on one side, and the rest of the space was filled with shabby armchairs, the worn patches covered with crocheted squares, protruding springs buffered by lumpy cushions, old ottomans and stools, small tables littered with newspapers and magazines, rolled-up knitting and half-empty chocolate boxes. Sharing all these surfaces were cats of every size, shape, and colour. Their collective unblinking gaze was unnerving.

  “How many are there?” I asked.

  Deirdre looked about her.

  “I’m not absolutely sure,” she said doubtfully, as if it had never dawned on her to count. “Twenty-five, maybe?”

  She was about my age, a few more years on her perhaps, but immeasurably older in some deepseated way. If an artist were to draw her, all the lines and pencil strokes would tend downward. Her limp, ear-length hair, a faded greyish blond, emphasized the smallness and narrowness of her head. The outer corners of her eyes, which were a muddy brown, tilted down, and the line was echoed by the pouches under her eyes and the deep runnels that gouged trenches from her nose to the corners of her mouth, where they formed little curved hooks in imitation of the contours of her lips.

  She was short and stocky, barrel-like, an impression accentuated by a shapeless brown garment that belled out from her narrow shoulders and hinted at padded hips and a massive belly. Its droopy hem sagged around mid-calf, and peeping out from below it were two tiny feet, lumpy with swollen veins and bunions, in black cloth shoes with ankle straps. She reminded me of a candle that had burned to extinction, its wax melted in rivulets, puddled and heaped at its base.

  She motioned me awkwardly to a chair, inhabited already by a round-faced tabby with a fierce yellow glare who seemed disinclined to move. I squeezed in beside him, and Deirdre lowered herself with a thump into a sagging basket chair that squeaked in protest. There was a silence. Obv
iously she felt no compulsion to play hostess, but I decided her ungraciousness was the result of lack of practice, not indifference or malice. I floundered ahead.

  “I was right, then? Your mother came here from London?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she lived on Morocco Street? Number 14?”

  She shrugged.

  “Couldn’t tell you the number, but that was the name of the street, I think. I don’t remember much about that.”

  I pulled the gas mask out of my bag and showed her the torn fragment from the address book. She fingered it absently while I explained how I had come by it, and my theory for its presence in the case. She listened, but her attention was caught by the mask.

  She picked the grotesque little thing up and smiled, running her finger over the snout-like filter.

  “I had one just like this,” she said. “Never used it, but we had to carry them about all the time.”

  She turned it over to investigate the inside, lifting it to her face to inhale its rubbery smell. I saw her freeze, a moment of utter stillness in which I swear she did not breathe. I was suspended in the same tension, waiting. Then her breath gushed out, and she looked at me, an awed expression on her face.

  “Goodman,” she said slowly. “That was my mother’s maiden name.”

  We stared at each other. In her eyes I saw a reflection of my own wild surmise dawning. Could it be . . . ? Are we . . . ? I hardly dared to ask another question, in case the fragile thought should crumble under the weight of one more fact.

  “Tell me,” I said at last, “did your mother have any sisters?”

  “She had a younger sister. I never met her.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “She died, that’s all I know for sure. I can remember asking Mum about her, round about the time Dad scarpered. I don’t know why I would have. Mum kept a picture of her on the mantelpiece.”