I tried to do some math in my head, but that never works for me, or at least, I make horrible mistakes, so I fished out a pencil and did some subtraction. Edward Senior had been seventy at his death and had been evacuated to Canada during the Second World War, when his father was a Royal Air Force pilot. If he was the child of very young parents, let’s say in their twenties, they might both be in their nineties if they were still alive. If Becker’s deceased grandmother had a younger sister, Edith, she could be anywhere from seventy to ninety—I knew some families had aunts and uncles that were younger than their nieces and nephews, or the same age. It all depended on the longevity and fertility of their parents. This family tree stuff was alien to me. I had never researched my own roots, choosing instead the path of least resistance, denial and selective memory loss. I didn’t have any living relatives in Ireland or in Canada except Aunt Susan. She had told me so, and my curiosity went no further.
So, I was looking for a seriously senior citizen, Edith Taylor, who lived at 52 Mossy Lane, in Eastbourne. There was no telephone number. I went to a public telephone kiosk (not one of the famous red ones, I’m afraid. I still hadn’t seen one and feared they must really be extinct) and looked her up in the phone book. She wasn’t there, at least there were three Taylors, a C., a Fred and a Dr. K. I didn’t bother trying them, as none of their addresses was Mossy Lane. But an elderly lady might choose not to be in the book, or she might even choose not to have a phone. I decided to risk an unannounced visit, anyway. If I couldn’t find her, I would still scatter her nephew’s remains. I just thought she might like the chance to join in. It would feel strange to do it by myself, considering that I’d never even met the man. I hailed a cab and gave the address to the cab driver [the license on the back of the seat said: Hassan], who nodded silently and did not speak a word for the entire journey. It began to rain. The cab was stuffy and the windows steamed up at once, as Hassan had the heating set on tropical. I was obviously destined to arrive at every place I visited in England in the midst of a downpour, so I couldn’t see where I was going, nor where I’d been.
The cab stopped, and Hassan turned around and glowered at me.
“Is this Mossy Lane?” I said, inanely. He nodded and growled “two pound.” I handed over a two-pound coin and a fifty p. tip—not that he’d been a delightful travelling companion, but driving a cab in Eastbourne, or anywhere, has got to be a drag, and tips make it easier.
“I’ll wite if y’wonk,” he said. This surprised me, until I wiped a clear space in the passenger window and looked out. The street was taken up by a long row of council houses (I knew the term from watching EastEnders), what we’d call projects or municipally subsidized housing. Each front door was about nine feet from its neighbour, which I figured would have made the interiors indescribably narrow and probably very dark. The front doorsteps attached directly onto the public sidewalk. There were no front gardens, and no privacy either, although most of the front windows were covered in lace curtains, football flags or blinds. The sidewalk was littered with broken children’s toys and dustbins. What had prompted Hassan’s offer to stick around was the obvious fact that nobody was living at number 57. The windows were boarded up, for one thing, and the sooty marks above the windows indicated that there had been a fire. The houses on each side of 57, oddly, didn’t seem to have been damaged by the blaze, though, and I saw a flicker of movement at number 59, next door.
“Oh, I see. Thanks. Yes, would you mind waiting? I’ll need a ride back to, well, I don’t know, but I’ll need a ride somewhere, and it’s not a day for walking.”
“Beastly out, innit?” Hassan said. “Corsall wite, luv.” His Cockney accent was so thick, it took me a moment to understand him. I gave him a cheery grin and squelched out onto the street. I knocked at the door of 57, more for form’s sake than anything else, and listened for any movement inside, but there was nothing, and anyway, the hiss of the rain on the street and the sound of children’s wails coming from next door were too loud to have been able to hear anything else. A small pane of glass had once graced the door, but it was boarded over, too. I peered through a crack where the wood didn’t quite meet the frame and saw nothing but blackness beyond. As I moved my head away, I caught the distinct whiff of burned things, a wet and horribly lonely smell that caught at the back of my throat.
My knock at the door of 59 was answered immediately by a young, thin-lipped woman with unlikely red hair scraped back from her face into a ponytail. She looked tired and defeated, and the two small children hanging from her like limpets suggested the reason.
“Looking for Miss Taylor, are you?” she said. “I figured you was. Nobody takes taxi rides round here.”
“There was a fire, I take it,” I said.
“Last month,” the woman said. “Luckily, she had one of them smoke alarms, and they got it in time, so the whole row wasn’t burned up in our beds.”
“And Miss Taylor?”
“Oh, she’s all right, though by rights she shouldn’t be. Daft as a brush, that one, and better off where she is now. She left a pot on the cooker, didn’t she? Could have killed us all.”
“I’m glad you’re all okay,” I said. “Where is she now?”
“You American?” I experienced that familiar bristle that Canadians feel when accused of being a U.S. citizen, but I suppressed it and spoke gently.
“No, Canadian.”
“Relative, are you? She was always going on about her nephew in Canada. You ought to have visited before she went barmy, though. Not much use now. She won’t know you.”
“She wouldn’t know me anyway,” I said. “A friend of mine’s her great-nephew, that’s all.”
“Well, she’s in Fairview Hospital,” the woman said. “And she’s not long for this world, so you’d better hurry. And if you came expecting anyfink out of her, you’re wasting your time. She lost the lot.”
“I was just hoping to talk to her,” I said.
“Well, best of luck,” she said. “I’d ask you in to tea, but our Doug has got the flu, and I’ve got my hands full.”
“No, I see that,” I said. “I, er, thanks for telling me about Miss Taylor. And I’m glad the fire wasn’t worse.”
“You’re not the only one,” she said. “The National Health ought to have taken her away long ago—she was a danger to herself and the rest of us. Still, she was right enough before she went dotty. Refined, like. Used to have us to tea.” A masculine roar came from the back of the house, along with a waft of cat’s pee and the smell of cooked cabbage. “That’s Doug,” the woman said, rolling her eyes. “Be seeing yer.” She closed the door and I stepped back, placing myself directly underneath a cold cascade of water from the little roof over the front step.
“Where to, then?” Hassan said, when I climbed back into the welcome warmth of the taxi, where I immediately began to steam, like a pudding.
“Fairview Hospital,” I said. Not that I expected much of the visit. In the course of a five minute conversation, my redheaded informant had referred to Miss Taylor as daft, dotty and barmy. I didn’t need Brent’s lexicon to figure that one out.
Twenty-Five
There will be trouble for the pregnant woman who attends a funeral.
-From the “Superstitions” section of Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
I don’t like to mention it,” Hassan said, “but I thort you’d like to know that there’s some bloke bin following us since I picked you up at the station.”
I twisted around to see, but the rear window of the cab was all fogged up.
“White van,” Hassan said. “Tosser’s bin on my tail, waited round the corner when you was at the door of that house, and he’s still there.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “Can you lose him?” Hassan gave me a most beautiful smile, as if he had been waiting all his career for a line like that. “ ’Ang on,” he said. The next fifteen minutes were some of the most frightening of my life. Hassan obviously had experience as a stunt driver in the mo
vies. He floored it, spinning his tires, deked into a back alley, deked again into what seemed to be somebody’s private courtyard, knocking over a potted plant, and then back out on the street again. He hopped curbs. He did loop de loops in side streets, and I lost all track of where we were (not that I know downtown Eastbourne at all, but you know what I mean). Eventually he ended up down by the beachfront, in front of an imposing, Victorian brick building. I uncurled my hand from the handle-thing thoughtfully provided above the rear window and flexed my fingers.
“Orl right?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Lost ’im back there somewhere,” Hassan said. “And this is Fairview. ’Op out quick, and I’ll see if I can find him again and give him another bit of a chase.”
“You are a prince among men,” I said and pushed a lot of money into his hand.
“If you need a cab again, call this number and ask for me special,” he said, handing me a card.
“I will. Thanks.” I hopped out quick, as instructed, and he screamed away in a shower of pebbles and water. I scanned the horizon for white vans and didn’t see any. Instead, I saw a genteel neighbourhood, full of elegant houses set back upon landscaped lawns. This was a posh district, and I wondered if I’d been directed to the right place. A sign certainly informed me that this was The Fairview Hospital, but if this was a “National Health” institution, a government funded place, it certainly didn’t look it from the outside. It was a sprawling building, set in the middle of an extensive property. There was a brick wall, shielding it from the street, and beyond it, trees and shrubs, not overly manicured, but kept presentable, probably to keep the upper-class neighbours happy.
The entrance was forbidding, with a massive front door, but as soon as I was inside, I recognized that this, for all its external dignity, was a warehouse. No amount of disinfectant and cleaning fluid can mask the smell of the ill and elderly, no high ceilings or marble floors can hide the depressing atmosphere that gathers around a bunch of people waiting to die. I was directed by a uniformed receptionist down a long, echoing corridor and into a public ward. There were beds lined up in rows on each side of the ward. Curtains provided for privacy of a sort, but most of them were open, and the people lying in the beds were all very old, most of them motionless. There was the occasional mumble or cry, which was amplified, echoing like the sound track for some film about Bedlam. In the distance, I could hear the clatter of dishes. It must have been nearly lunch time, and there was the smell of soup in the air—institutional soup, mixing with the smell of age and illness. Between each bed, tall, narrow windows reached from waist height to ceiling, letting in the grudging grey light from the February rainstorm outside. I felt like I’d been transported back a century or more. The nurses all wore the kinds of uniforms with those apron things across the bosom and stiff white caps.
“Can I help you?” a nurse asked, touching my shoulder from behind me.
“Yes—um. Yes. I’m looking for Edith Taylor, please.”
The nurse nodded, once, and led me down the rows, coming to rest at a bed like all the others, the curtains open, and a very small, white-haired figure lying perfectly still upon it, her hands folded on the sheet which covered her. Her eyes were closed, and she was snoring.
“Edith’s not had any visitors since she arrived,” the nurse said. [Name tag: Nurse Hopkins.] “She’s lucid today, so you’re in luck. We’ll just wake her up, then. Are you a relative?”
“Her great-nephew’s a friend of mine. I came to ask her something. Is she able to go out, at all?”
“Oh, no, miss. She fell, you know, in the fire. Her hip’s gone, and she can’t get about.”
“Too bad. She’s lucid, you say. What’s she . . . er, got?”
“Well, she’s not all there, you know. Senile dementia, really.”
“Alzheimer’s?”
“Similar, though that’s not quite it. Edith? Edith, there’s someone here to see you, dear,” Nurse Hopkins said, gently touching the sleeping woman’s shoulder. At least she wasn’t shouting, so maybe Edith Taylor’s hearing was okay. That was good, I reflected, a trifle selfishly. I didn’t want to have to bellow at her.
The woman’s eyes flew open at once. They were a pale, milky green, with a sparkle in them that made me think of Becker in a frisky mood. “Someone to see me? Nonsense. Who on earth would want to see me?” she said. Her voice was strong and imperious, with a refined accent, as the red-haired neighbour had suggested. She sounded like the Queen Mum.
“Henrietta? What have you got yourself up in that outfit for, you silly girl? And where’s my tea?”
“She sometimes thinks I’m her maid,” Nurse Hopkins whispered to me. “I just go along with it. It makes her happy.” Aloud, she said, “Your tea is just coming, Madam. You have a visitor.” Then she nudged me.
“Miss Taylor, my name is Polly Deacon,” I said. Miss Taylor sat up slowly, helped by Nurse Hopkins, who plumped up her pillows and settled her comfortably, making pleasant little nursy-noises the while. For all its dreariness, the Hospital at least had caring staff. I wondered how long Edith would have lasted on a stone platform in the undercroft of the Eastbridge hospital, back in the days of Thomas Becket.
“Polly Deacon,” Miss Taylor said. “I don’t know you, do I? Where’s your calling card?” She squinted at me and cocked her head to the side, like a white-haired terrier.
“No, we’ve never met. I—just a sec.” I rummaged in my purse for one of my cards, and then handed it over. She took it impatiently and glared at it.
“This should have been presented on a tray, you know. You can’t get good help any more.” She tossed the card down on the bed. “So—speak up, girl. What do you want?”
“I’m a friend of your great-nephew, Mark Becker, in Canada.” Something slid away from her eyes, as if they had been a set of windows, and someone had drawn the curtain back. Her face changed, softened.
“My sister’s grandson? The policeman? Fancy that. I’ve not seen him since his mother’s funeral. Lovely woman, his mum. Is he here, too?”
“No, but he asked me to get in touch with you. There’s some sad news that you might not have received.”
“I’m eighty-eight years old,” Miss Taylor said with some spirit. Whatever past moment she had been reliving was gone, I thought. She was here, now. “There’s no sense putting on that special voice for my benefit. Someone’s died, I expect.”
“Well, yes.”
“Hmmph.” She made a little snorty noise through her nose, the kind Mr. Fogbow on the plane had made. And Cedric, too. It must be an English thing, like that conversational tic “sort of” (pronounced as one word—sootuv, with the double ‘o’ as in book), that everybody seemed to use, adding it as a filler for a pause, like our interrogative “eh?”. “There’s hardly anyone left that’s not dead,” Miss Taylor said. “Who is it this time?”
“Your nephew, I guess. Edward Becker. He died in October.”
“Oh, yes. I expect I was told about that,” she said. “I went over there, you know, when his wife, Emily, died. Lovely woman. She wrote such delightful letters, and I wanted to see Canada before I popped off. It’s a very flat country, isn’t it?”
“Parts of it,” I said. Miss Taylor was hardly what I’d call dotty, I thought. A bit repetitive, perhaps, but sharp as a tack, otherwise. At least, some of the time.
“My sister, Gertie, always wanted to go to Canada after her boy emigrated, but she never quite managed it,” Miss Taylor said. “I went for her sake, really, though at eighty-five, it was a bit of a palaver. Nephew Edward was done up with grief over his wife, poor dear, but wouldn’t let it show, of course, being a Becker.”
“Becker men are like that,” I said.
“And he did so hate everything English, you know. Including me, I’m afraid to say. It was rather awkward.”
“He hated England? Didn’t he always want to come back and visit?”
She snorted again, which set off a fit of coughing
that made me glance around for Nurse Hopkins, who had glided away on crepe-soled feet. Miss Taylor waved a very thin, claw-like hand in the air to tell me she was okay. “No, no,” she gasped. “I’m all right. Just pour me a glass of water, there’s a dear. You made me laugh, and that always brings on the old dreaded lurgy.” I did so, and she took a swig. After a moment, she took a deep breath and settled down into her pillows again. “Edward Becker most certainly did not want to come and visit,” she said. “Why, he wouldn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, although I offered to pay his way. I was,” she added, fixing me with a beady eye, “quite well off in those days, you know. Before I lost it all on the stock market.”
“That’s odd,” I said. “Mark—your great-nephew—said his dad wanted his ashes scattered at Beachy Head. That’s why I’m here, and why I came to see you, actually, to see if you wanted to come with me. I never met him, eh, and I feel kind of funny doing it by myself.”
“Nonsense,” Miss Taylor said. “That little lad was terrified of heights. He hated the cliffs around here. I remember we took him up to the head for a picnic the day before he was evacuated, and he had the screaming ab-dabs and had to be taken home. He was about eight, then. A very peculiar little boy. He never really forgave Gertie and Horace for sending him away, I think. Went back to Canada after the war just as soon as he could.”
“Becker said he used to play up on Beachy Head.”
“Hmmph. Not on your life. He liked fields, did little Edward, fields and cows. He was always very fond of cows. Which I suppose is why he liked your big, flat Canada so much.”
“That’s very weird,” I said. “He could have, you know, changed his mind about it. Maybe a bit of nostalgia?”
“I don’t think that boy would be capable of changing his mind about anything,” Miss Taylor said. “He wouldn’t know a bit of nostalgia if it bit him on the bottom. Else he’d have come over when Gertie died. And when Horace did. And he would have answered my letters, which he never did. His wife did, instead. Dear Emily. No, you mark my words, he wouldn’t come back while he was alive, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to come back when he was dead.”
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