Last Post

by Robert Barnard

  “At the time I think I did. Or was beginning to. But when it came to that last bit, I began to think she had been too clever. Why had she not told me about my father going abroad before? She easily could have done. And was what she told me true, or truish, or meant to mislead entirely? Even her advice about jobs I began to find suspect.”

  “What advice was that? I don’t even know what you do.”

  “I’m PR to a medium-size supermarket chain. She advised me to get a new job before I packed in my old one.”

  “Perfectly good advice. Are you getting a bit too suspicious?”

  “Probably. I’ll try to guard against it. It was just that—oh, never mind. Rani, I’ve been going through cupboards and drawers and finding all sorts of things, but so far I’ve found none of the ‘official’ things I thought must be somewhere in the house.”

  “Birth certificates, passports, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes. I thought they’d be sure to be somewhere accessible like a hall cupboard or a desk drawer rather than up in the attic, where I haven’t ventured yet.”

  “I think you’re right. In my experience—in my job, I mean—there are cupboard people, and they slip these official papers under something or other in an otherwise disorganized drawer, or somewhere in a pile of games. And then there are the filing cabinet, or just files, people. Is there a filing cabinet in your mother’s house, by the way?”

  “Yes, a two-drawer job in Mother’s study. I looked at it, and it seemed to be mostly about school: photocopies of reports in the local newspapers about special days: mayoral or royal visits, parents’ days and so on. Useful if I’d been writing her biography, but not much to my present purposes.”

  “Keep at it. Examine all the files—don’t miss one out because it sounds unpromising. There’s a real chance you’ll find the documents all together somewhere there. There should also be deeds of the house and other things you’ll find useful before long. Your mother sounds a methodical person to me. I’d be very surprised if you found documents like that in a black plastic bag in the attic.”

  “Right. When I can spare a couple of hours, I’ll get down to it. I’ve started to worry whether my mother and father really were married.”

  “At that date, and remembering the sort of woman your mother was, I’d be pretty sure that they were. She was a cut-and-dried person. And the people who appointed her would have made sure that she was . . . Eve, are you thinking of giving up PR work?”

  “I’ve certainly thought of it. Without, unfortunately, coming up with any alternative that appealed to me. I must admit I’ve got bored with the ‘uniform-shaped apples and pears’ and the ‘fatless pork’ type of newspaper story that I waste hour after hour on. But that’s what you get if you work for a supermarket chain.”

  “It’s just that the Leeds headquarters of the West Yorkshire Police has got its civilian PR office in chaos at the moment. Rumor has it that the man they appointed to head the unit two or three months ago is turning out to be a blabbermouth who will talk to the press about any and everything in the most unbuttoned fashion, with disastrous consequences. Now, nobody is going to listen seriously to a detective constable from one of the minorities, but would it be all right if I floated your name?”

  “Well, the work would certainly be more interesting than what I’m dealing with at the supermarkets. At least I wouldn’t mind going to talk to someone about it . . . On the other hand, would it be wise? When I’m poking about, investigating, on my own account at the moment?”

  “Wise? Wise? I’m fed up with always being wise. Where has wise got me? Into a marriage which is no marriage . . .” There was a pause while he tried to calm down. “Though of course I would not want to harm innocent people, or distress anyone. And I would absolutely not want to harm you, Eve.”

  “I’m the last person you need consider, Rani.” They were silent for a moment while they both reflected on what he had just said. Rani’s frequent, obsessed mentions of his family caught Eve on a raw nerve. “Drop my name into the conversation at headquarters. But I may be away for a day or two, searching for any traces my father may have left of himself in Glasgow. You can leave a message on my answer machine.”

  “I will. Don’t get your hopes too high. And good luck in Glasgow.”

  “Good-bye, Rani. Thanks for the good advice.”

  But what she really felt thankful for was that her feelings, and Rani’s feelings, had taken a step forward, perhaps two or three steps forward, toward the light of day. And she was willing to risk the possibility that she would turn out to be his bit on the side, his bit on the rebound. She did not think Rani was that sort, a superficial and changeable character, but she was willing to risk anything if, just for a time, he would be hers and she would be his. But there still forced itself into her mind, often, the image of a little girl, and one of a bewildered, unhappy woman who was as much a victim of clashing cultures as Rani.

  CHAPTER 7

  Old Pals

  It was two days later that Eve set out for Glasgow. She drove over to Keighley and caught the train to Carlisle that had begun in Leeds. She had done the journey once, many years ago, with her mother. She had been told it was “one of the great train journeys in the world” and she had dimly appreciated it then, and had not found any that toppled its supremacy since. She settled down to enjoy something she might not be able to experience much longer, if the mass sellout to air and global pollution continued.

  The train was full of walkers, who seemed to Eve to be a race of men and women apart. They talked about their favorite pubs, ramblers’ rights, points of special difficulty in the walks ahead and bed-and-breakfast places with notably unwelcoming habits. Eve could see that to find notes pinned around the bedroom with such messages as GUESTS WHO WASH THEIR SMALLS IN THE WASHBASIN WILL NEVER BE WELCOME IN THIS HOUSE AGAIN was to feel unwanted, but the discussion of such horrors meant the walkers never once felt the need to look out the window at the majestic scenery through which the train was traveling. Perhaps they somehow did not count landscapes viewed from a train. Or perhaps scenery was not the point of their activity.

  In Eve’s luggage was her mother’s birth certificate and the marriage certificate of May and John McNabb. They had been found in a file marked PARENTS’ EVENINGS, which she had ignored when she first went through the filing cabinet, and with them were the deeds of the house, which her mother and father had acquired in the autumn of 1971. She herself had been born the year before, eleven years after her parents’ marriage, which had been solemnized at the Durham Registry Office on the eighth of March 1959. Eve wondered what the connection was between either of them and Durham. Presumably it was John’s childhood home, or that of his parents, because May had been Glasgow both by birth and upbringing before her father and mother had moved to Melrose.

  The train reached North Lancashire, with ramblers getting off being replaced by others getting on, all full of stories, and all with emotions ranging from rhapsody to outrage. At Carlisle, Eve changed trains, and by teatime she was settling into her Glasgow hotel and looking for a place where she could eat alone without being chatted up. She was well acquainted with the city from childhood visits with her mother—shopping and art gallery visits after trips to Melrose to see her grandparents. She chose a restaurant, not too wisely, because she still got alcoholic approaches. Glasgow had changed in the intervening years, but in that respect it was unchanged.

  She had contacted Hilda Wantage, the archivist of the Glasgow Tribune, before setting out, and they had discussed what she wanted. Eve had simply said she hoped to understand as much as possible about her father, whom she’d never known. They had agreed she could leaf through a few years’ copies of the paper to get to know his pocket cartoon about the McTavish family, and also his presumably more ambitious political and one-off cartoons. Then she had asked for anything in the way of information that the archivist could find in company records.

  Hilda was a comfortable, motherly figure in her earl
y thirties. She gave the impression she would have preferred to be home washing her son’s football gear or her daughter’s ballet skirts. On the other hand she seemed excellent at her job, and had a selection of old issues for Eve to browse in, and assured her she had only to ask for anything else.

  “Are they divorced then, your parents?” she asked.

  “My mother has just died. Cancer.” There was the automatic sympathetic shake of the head. “She told me when I was a child that my father was dead, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve her.”

  But you do, Eve saw that Hilda was saying to herself.

  “Well, I’ve found nothing in the records, one way or the other,” she said. “He was employed on a contract basis, and he ended that in June 1973 ‘for medical reasons’—unspecified, but I’ve talked to one of the older employees and he said your father had had a series of chest complaints and was recommended to try a warmer and drier climate, at least for a time. He said the cartoons were popular, struck a cozy note that was appropriate for that time, and it was generally hoped that he could return.”

  “But he never did.”

  “No. I’ve found no explanation or letter severing the connection with the Tribune, but there was no reason why there should be, since he was not a regular employee. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it, but I’m around if you have any questions.”

  She went up to her desk by the door, and Eve settled down to her pile of newspapers. She suddenly realized that she did not really know what she was looking for. There was no reason why there should be any news item about John McNabb. Cartoonists, with one or two exceptions, remained in the background, and were simply known by their creations: people loved Giles cartoons, but they had no idea what the man himself looked like, or what kind of personality lay behind Grandmother and those fiendish children.

  But in default of better material she had to begin with the cartoons. She found that the domestic ones appeared twice a week, usually on Monday and Thursday, but could be shifted if a sensational news item broke on that day. The look of the cartoons was unusual and, Eve thought, attractive: a mixture of sharp lines and wash. The humor was less to her taste, indeed at times it hardly seemed to be humor at all: Andy (the father figure) shouting to Maggie (the mother) in the kitchen, she invisible, he standing over the cat vomiting on the carpet. The balloon read “Maggie, the cat’s no so fond of spaghetti Bolognese either.” An early response to Elizabeth David’s promotion of Italian cuisine perhaps, but hardly hilarious. Or, one New Year’s Eve, there were the regulation two children (Betsy and Jock) gazing at their father stacking up bottles and asking, “Dad, why do you celebrate Hogmannay when you say every year things get worse?” She thought the problem was the tyro cartoonist with too little experience of life to screw a variety of humor out of it. She jumped forward to 1963 and found the two children, still roughly the same age, standing outside a bedroom door looking at each other with a bubble coming from the inside: “Mummy and Daddy are just playing Profumo and Keeler, darlings.” Not even marginally better.

  Looking at more of the later ones, she saw that the traces of Scottish dialect in the early ones had been more or less abandoned for standard southern English as the time went by. Perhaps that was a sign that the cartoons had started to get published in newspapers south of the border as well. Or possibly a sign that John McNabb was only Scottish by name and adoption, and had gradually let his Englishness take over.

  He called himself McCrab, both for the pocket cartoons and for the occasional political one-offer. These Eve much preferred. There was one at the time of Harold Macmillan’s resignation as prime minister that was typical. The apparently failing statesman is lying in a hospital bed, with R. A. Butler at the bedside. In the next room there is an array of racks, thumbscrews, whips and gibbets, with masked tormentors at the ready and a line of terrified Tory MPs stretching far down the corridor. “I assure you, RAB, I have no intention of influencing the party’s choice of my successor” the old fraud is telling the eternal political bridesmaid. Later, when the earl of Home had become prime minister, the series of McCrab cartoons on the subject showed the newspaper’s delight at a Scot succeeding a Scot, along with a distinct implication that the man was by no means so unworldly and untainted by ambition as his reputation at the time suggested. McCrab was showing claws, and Eve liked his work all the better for it.

  But there was a limit to what she could learn from forty-year-old cartoons, whether lethal or cozy. Before lunchtime she was up at the reading room’s desk talking to Hilda.

  “I’ve reached a bit of an impasse,” she said. “I noticed when we were talking before, you mentioned one of the older employees. I think I might get a better idea of John McNabb if I tried to talk to him.”

  “You might well,” agreed Hilda. “He’s perfectly compos mentis, and probably willing to have a chin-wag in return for a few drinks or a meal. Pensioners of this company usually are.”

  She had turned to her screen and gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  “Got something?”

  “Yes. His name is Harry Fraser, and his telephone number is 0141 7659 766. When I talked to him yesterday he was in the canteen—they never quite leave us, old journos. We’ve got quite a bit on him in the records because he was a regular employee. His memory is pretty reliable, though you may have to make some allowance for exaggeration and embroidery—those are in a journalist’s bloodstream.”

  “I can imagine,” Eve said wholeheartedly. “Did he mention anyone else who knew my father?”

  Hilda thought.

  “Now you remind me, he did mention someone called Jamie. What was it he said about him? That’s right: he said Jamie and he were John McNabb’s best friends, one inside the Tribune offices, the other in the big world outside. I didn’t follow it up because I was getting all the information I thought you would need from Harry. I don’t imagine there would be anything about Jamie in our indexes, but you could ask Harry about him. Do you need to use the phone here?”

  “No—I need a bite to eat and time to think. I’ll ring him from my hotel later.”

  Eve calculated that lunchtime would probably be a couple-of-pints time for a retired journalist and that Harry might be too old for mobile phones, so she had a bar snack in her hotel and then went up to her room to make the call. The voice that answered sounded well oiled.

  “Harry Fraser here.”

  “Oh, Mr. Fraser, you don’t know me, but my name is Eve McNabb.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Now, you wouldna be John’s daughter, would you?”

  “I would, yes.”

  “His name came up yesterday, otherwise I’d no have thought of it. He’s a long time gone, your da’.”

  “All my lifetime, almost,” said Eve. “I have no memories of him. Would you be willing to come out with me tonight for a meal and a pint or two, so that you could share your memories of him with me? He left a great hole in my life that I wasn’t aware of until recently.”

  “Aye, your mother died, I heard recently. I never saw the wee lady after she moved south, but everyone said, and I wasna surprised, that she turned out to be a cracker—just the best teacher you could ever imagine.”

  “She was, Harry, she was. A cracker. But it’s my father I want to get some idea of. Did he have any other friends in Glasgow who might come along for a bite with us, and share their recollections?”

  Perhaps Eve imagined it, but the silence this time seemed loaded.

  “It’s that Hilda, isn’t it? She’s been yapping. Yes, there is Jamie Jewell. He’s still in the land o’ the livin’. But I’ve no got his address, and—”

  “You sound reluctant. Why the doubts?”

  She could imagine Harry Fraser pursing his lips.

  “We-e-ell, the truth is, he’s no verra reliable. Takes a drop too much, and then another. Just talks awa’ for the sake of talkin’.”

  “Do you know where to get hold of him?”

  “Oh aye. Early evenin’ he’ll
be sittin’ in his usual place in the Highlander, swappin’ tips for tomorrow’s racin’. If I can lay hold o’ him, I suppose I could get him along to you, supposin’ he’s not already on to his third pint and on the road to bein’ totally useless. If I do, you should be a bit sparin’ of whatever he asks of you—and ask he will, that’s as sure as death and taxes.”

  “Where would you recommend we went?”

  “We could try the Spotted Hound. Food’s their specialty, and they’ve a lot o’ rooms—wee ones and mediumsize ones, on three floors, so we could be pretty private, supposin’ that’s what you wanted.”

  “I don’t know about that. You’re the best judge. Is there likely to be anything come up that calls for privacy?”

  “Naw, naw, nothin’ in the world. Nothin’ that I know of, anyway. But your da’ left your mother and disappeared to Australia—you never heard from him again to this day, so Hilda in the library told me—”

  “Australia!” Eve took a deep breath as she absorbed this new bit of information. “I’ve never heard from him. And my mother believed him to be dead, or told me so all that time I was a child, and after.”

  “Aye. So mebbe you wouldn’t want all this to be talked about wi’ too many prying ears in the vicinity.”

  “I suppose not. Look, I’ll be in the Spotted Hound at half-past six, and we’ll have a meal, and you’ll try to bring Jamie along. Oh, and I’ll get a table with a bit of privacy if I can.”

  She didn’t, as she said it, think that privacy was a high priority, but when she thought about it she began to change her mind. Harry Fraser had had a slight reserve about him as soon as the topic of Jamie came up, and the drunkenness and loose tongue of the man seemed an inadequate motivation for it. In any case she was not inclined to think a loose tongue was a drawback in her present situation. Did he imagine Jamie knew something he, Harry, didn’t, and that it was discreditable? Already Harry had told her something new, no doubt under the impression that she knew it already.