by Rosie Thomas
Harriet was disconcerted by the anonymity of the streets, and by their barrenness. There was nothing to tell her, You are here, a thin thread links you to us, Sam’s Superette and Madge’s Wool Shop and S. Walsh, Turf Accountants. The disappointment that she had felt on the station swelled, and to counteract it Harriet told herself that she hadn’t come looking for a place, only for the people it had once sheltered. As she plodded on, Kath’s astonishment at her pilgrimage seemed justifiable. Even Harriet found it hard to believe that she would discover her father in this grey, ugly and exhausted place.
To stifle the thought, she resumed her observation. The one place this could not be, she thought, of all defeated urban wildernesseses, was London. Even in its parts that were sadder than this, London had an unmistakeable spiny vitality. There was no liveliness here. Harriet felt a wave of affection for London, like the surprising warmth that had overtaken her on the crowded tube ride to Sunderland Avenue. There was home, after all, and there was everywhere else. Had Kath felt that, once, about these streets? Presumably not, Harriet decided. She had left and never came back.
The responsibility – was it responsibility, or simply need? – had devolved upon herself.
A dark red bus trundled past her, the board on the back bearing the same destination as the one she had rejected outside the station. Harriet quickened her pace, but the stop was in the distance and even as she half-ran it slowed, dropped a single passenger and gathered speed again. She stopped to consult her map for the last time, and saw that her goal was only a handful of streets away. She turned a corner, and then another, away from the main road.
There were houses here instead of shops. This was where Kath had lived, ridden home on her bicycle to save the bus fare. Harriet’s senses were all primed, ready for the impressions to crowd in on her, but now that she was here there was nothing to feel. The rows of houses were neither inviting nor as seedy as the ones that lined the main road. They were simply ordinary and insignificant.
Almost too quickly, she found herself at the right turning. She checked the street name and looked across at her grandparents’ house. It was the same as all the others, the windows masked with net curtains, a patch of garden separating the front door from the pavement. Harriet turned away from it to look at the house opposite. As Kath had described, it faced in a different direction, presenting a high, blind wall of reddish brick directly to the street.
Very slowly, she crossed the road and walked round in the shelter of the wall. She came to a dusty hedge, too high to see over, enclosing the front garden of the house. When she found the gate she had to push past scratchy branches to reach the path and the front door. As she looked for a bell to press she discovered that she was breathless, almost gasping. There was no bell-push. She pressed the flap of the letterbox and it snapped back on her fingers. The sound generated no answering echo within the house, and the windows remained sightless. Harriet knocked, hard, with bare knuckles.
Then she heard someone coming. She rehearsed her lines. A friendly smile, I’m looking for a man who used to live in this house. A long time ago, I’m afraid. How many years have you …
The door opened.
Harriet’s smile never materialised. She had tried to envisage all the alternatives that might confront her, the Bengali housewife with no English, the surly night-shift worker, the transitory bedsit dweller – absurdly, she had made no provision for facing Simon Archer himself.
The man who opened the door was in his late sixties, stooped but still tall, with strands of thin, colourless hair brushed back from a high forehead.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Archer.’
The man regarded her. Harriet felt half deafened by the blood in her ears, pounding like surf. I’m looking for my father. The enormity of what she was doing threatened her, made her wish herself somewhere else.
‘I am Mr Archer.’
‘Did you … were you living here thirty years ago?’
He didn’t like questions, Harriet saw that at once.
‘What relevance can that possibly have? Are you from the Social Services? I don’t want Meals on Wheels, or large-print books.’
‘I’m not from the Social Services, nothing like that. I just want to ask you about something that happened a long time ago.’
‘Department of Oral History at the Polytechnic?’
He did have a cultured voice, clipped and precise. Harriet understood Kath’s comparison with a radio announcer, but an announcer of the old, dinner-jacket days. The recognition drew her closer to the eighteen-year-old with the torn stocking, giving her the determination to press further. Harriet found her smile, although the warmth of it wasn’t reciprocated.
‘Nothing like that, either. I’m Kath Peacock’s daughter. Kath, who used to live across there. She was a friend of yours.’ And more. You must remember.
For a moment Harriet was afraid that Kath was right, and Simon Archer had forgotten her. Then, with an imperceptible movement, he let the door open an inch wider.
‘Kath’s daughter?’ There was a pause. ‘Come inside, then.’
She followed him into a dim hallway. She had an impression of cracked yellow paint, a narrow stairway with bare boards, a curtain with musty folds smelling of damp. At the end of the hallway there was a kitchen, with a small window looking over a garden at the back. In this room, Harriet thought, Kath had sat the first time, with her leg propped on a stool. She wondered what else had happened here.
Simon Archer jerked his chin at the room. There were piles of newspapers on every surface, jars with brushes stuck in them, tools and crockery intermingled, dust and a smell of mildew everywhere.
‘I won’t ask you to forgive the state of things in here. Why should I, and why should you?’
Harriet held her hand out. ‘I’m Harriet Trott.’
Simon took her hand, briefly and formally. His was bony and cold. ‘Harriet Trott,’ he repeated. ‘But you’re a grown woman.’
‘I’m nearly thirty,’ Harriet said gently. ‘It’s almost exactly thirty years since Kath left here.’
He looked at her, still unconvinced by her claim. ‘And you’re her daughter?’
‘Yes.’
Simon shook his head. ‘I forget. Kath can’t be eighteen any longer, can she? No more than I am.’
‘Next year she’ll be fifty.’
‘I suppose so.’ He moved away from her, edging around his kitchen, lifting one or two of the pieces of clutter and putting them down again elsewhere as if to establish his dominion over this much, at least. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
Harriet watched him lifting and filling the kettle, wiping two dusty cups with a matted cloth. She was studying the shape of his head and his hands, the set of his features, wondering if she might see herself. She could only see an elderly man in a green cardigan and oil-stained trousers, no more. Her neck and jaw muscles ached with the tension of her gaze.
‘Do you know why she called you Harriet?’ The abruptness of the question startled her, so that she only shook her head numbly. ‘Rather than Linda or Judy or something that was fashionable then? No?’
He put the cups into a clearing on the table, an old brown earthenware teapot beside them, with a clotted milk bottle. ‘Not very elegant. I don’t get many visitors. Well, she called you Harriet after Harriet Vane.’
She had been expecting a revelation, perhaps an admission that would connect the two of them. ‘Who is she?’
Simon laughed, a little dry noise in his chest. ‘You’re like your mother. She wasn’t a big reader either, but she did like detective stories.’
‘Still does. The shelves at home are full of Agatha Christie.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Not really. I don’t read anything much. I work hard, I manage quite a big shop that sells fitness equipment, dancewear, things like that. In fact I own the franchise, so it’s my own business. I’m at the shop
all day, and in the evenings there’s paperwork to do. There isn’t much time for anything else.’ The words came spilling out. She wanted to impress him, Harriet realised. Why else should she need to boast about her responsibilities?
‘How modern,’ Simon said. ‘To answer your question, Harriet Vane is a character in the Lord Peter Wimsey books written by Dorothy L. Sayers. I lent them to your mother, long ago, and she fell in love with Lord Peter. Her favourite was The Nine Tailors, although Harriet doesn’t appear in that one.’ There was a pause. ‘I remember her telling me that you would be either Peter or Harriet.’
Deliberately, Harriet said, ‘I never knew that. I think there are all kinds of things I don’t know about.’
Simon poured the tea. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best?’
She was certain that he was sparring with her. He must know why she had come. She took the cup that he held out and drank some of the tea. It had an oily film on the surface, with whitish flecks caught in it. Tell me, she wanted to say, but Simon headed her off.
‘What about Kath Peacock?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to hear what has happened to her. Who is Mr Trott?’
Harriet relaxed a little, some of the stiffness ebbing from her neck and head. ‘I can tell you all about Mum. She’s well. I think she’s very happy. She didn’t want me to come to look for you.’
‘I don’t know why you’ve come to look for me. Go on about your mother.’
‘She married Ken while I was still quite small. He’s an engineer, a nice man. As a hobby he likes buying houses and putting in new bathroom suites and building retaining walls and then selling the house and starting all over again with a different coloured bathroom.’
Simon raised an eyebrow and looked around him, and then their eyes met and they began to laugh. The laughter was spontaneous and easy, as if between friends. It warmed Harriet and it convinced her that, after all, she had been right to come. Simon took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘That gives me a very vivid picture. Carry on, please.’
In the beginning, Harriet just talked about Sunderland Avenue, Ken’s work, Lisa and her boyfriends and Kath in her kitchen. Simon Archer listened and drank his tea. Then, with more confidence, she went further back, to Lisa’s birth and her own furious jealousy, and beyond that to the arrival of Ken to rescue her mother and herself.
‘Not that we needed rescuing,’ Harriet said. ‘Kath and I were fine. I thought we had everything we needed, just the two of us.’
‘Yes.’
Simon’s responses were never more than a word or two. He watched Harriet closely as she talked, but his own expression didn’t change.
‘I didn’t want to share her with anyone. When Ken came, she wasn’t all mine any more. He had a car, and a house with proper plumbing and a garden and all that, but I’d rather just have had Kath to myself, like before.’
And then she told him about before, about the succession of furnished rooms, the times spent waiting for Kath to come home from work, and her unformulated but clear childish understanding that they must be everything to one another because there was no one else.
Simon’s eyes still held hers, shrewd, without any sign of distress. ‘Kath needed more,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question, the verdict of someone who knew her well. Harriet nodded, disappointed in him. She had expected more in return for her story.
Simon smiled, sensing as much. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It’s comforting to rejoin broken ends, or to have them joined for me, since I’m long past involving myself in anything of the kind.’ A small gesture indicated the chaotic kitchen, hinted at the decaying house beyond it, and told her that Simon was indeed past involvement in the common processes of life. She felt both sorry for him and angry at his withdrawal from the world. For the first time since she had arrived she saw him as himself, not illuminated by Kath or herself. As a result her need to know, father or not, released its choking grip on her a little.
She asked, ‘Why are you?’
He chose to ignore the question, but disarmed her. Talking almost to himself, he said, ‘Kath was unusual. She was alive, vibrating with life, like nothing else around.’ This time the gesture took in the extinguished town, as it must have been in the post-war years. Then and now, Harriet thought. ‘I used to love to see her, and listen to her. She lit everything up.’
‘I know. For a long time I haven’t bothered to see her as anyone but my mother. In the kitchen, cooking meals. Ordinary. Then all of a sudden I saw a young girl looking out of her face, when she told me about you. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to meet you. I came from London to find you.’
As soon as the words were out, she knew that they would have been far better left unsaid. That she had come at all was a threat all over again, to have come a long way, with a list of reasons, was too much of an intrusion.
Simon looked at an old kitchen clock, almost obscured on the mantelpiece by sheaves of yellowing bills and papers. Harriet knew that they had been sitting at the table for almost two hours. Stiffly, but deliberately, he stood up.
‘I’m glad you came. I’m pleased to hear that Kath is well, and happy. She deserved that.’ He had asked her in, and she had accepted his hospitality. His courtesy would continue, but it was clear that she couldn’t hope for anything beyond it.
He held out his hand now, and reluctantly she shook it. ‘Perhaps you’ll give her my best wishes,’ Simon added. ‘I don’t think any other greeting would be appropriate, after thirty years.’ If there was a twitch of a smile, it was gone before Harriet could be sure. ‘This way,’ Simon said. ‘I’m sorry the passage is so dark.’
There was the crumbling hallway again, the front door and then the empty street. Simon shook her hand once again, as if she was the well-meaning but unwelcome official he had first taken her for, then closed the door.
The autumn afternoon was already almost over. There were yellow lights showing in two or three of the windows opposite, and in contrast with the cosiness Simon’s house seemed morbidly chilly and dark. Angry with herself, smarting with the rejection, Harriet began to walk away.
A small boy on roller skates rattled over the uneven paving stones, wobbled, and almost fell. He grabbed at her arm to save himself.
‘Be careful,’ Harriet warned, and he gaped up at her, dirty-faced and cheerful.
‘You’ve never been in there, have you?’ He jerked his head at Simon’s gate.
‘Yes, I have. Why not?’
He whistled, pretending admiration. ‘Cos he’s mad. My sister said. You want to watch he doesn’t get you.’ Delighted with his dire warning he launched himself off again.
Harriet watched him almost collide with Kath’s lamp-post. Even in her girlhood, Kath had said, the little children tended to avoid Simon’s house. Now, a solitary old man existing in a nest of newspapers and rubbish, he was a bogeyman to frighten another generation. Sadness for him overcame Harriet’s bitterness and hungry curiosity once more, and made her want to know about him for his own sake. She looked up at the house but it was obstinately dark.
Harriet turned away without any idea where she was heading. She walked the length of her grandparents’ old street, looking through the still-open curtains at the blue eyes of television sets, tea-tables, homework. She rounded a corner, went on without the intention of going anywhere.
At length she came to a park with elaborate railings, and took a tarmac path under some trees. A boy and a girl in school uniforms stood against the peeling bole of a plane tree, arms wrapped around each other, faces pressed together. Harriet passed them, came to a bench next to an overflowing litter bin. She sat down on the bench and dead brown leaves scuttled like insects around her feet.
She sat on the bench for a long time, without moving. She didn’t even think of going back to the station and the conclusion of the London train. The boy and girl drifted by, white faces turning to peer at her in the dusk, frightened of being spied on. Harriet waited until they were out of sight, then sto
od up and shook herself. She was cold, and swung her arms to warm her fingers as she headed for the sound of traffic on the main road.
In the centre of a parade of shops she came to an Indian restaurant. It was opening as everything else closed up, and Harriet peered past the menu, mounted in an arched wooden frame and set off with plush drapes, into an interior of white cloths and twinkly lights. She was hungry as well as cold.
The restaurant was completely empty. A waiter in a white jacket came forward, beaming at her, and they went through a pantomime of deciding which table would suit her best. She chose one beside a green-lit tank of morose tropical fish, and ordered a bottle of wine to go with her food, because there were no halves.
Harriet couldn’t remember ever having sat down alone to dinner in a restaurant. It seemed appropriate that she should do it here, where she had felt her isolation so strongly. Her awareness of it was just as strong, but it seemed to matter less now. She thought about Leo, and the hundreds of dinners they had shared. Her memories were affectionate, but Leo himself seemed a long way off. She didn’t wish that he was here with her, or that she would be going back to him.
The smiling waiter brought her lamb pasanda, paratha and sag ghosht, and poured out the wine for her.
‘You are living near here?’ He had a very dark face, and a gipsyish gap between his top teeth. Harriet smiled back.
‘No. I’ve come from London.’
‘Nice place,’ he told her. She wasn’t sure whether he meant here or there, but it didn’t matter. She suddenly felt comfortable, wedged between the fishtank and the tablecloth that looked purple and green under the multicoloured lights.
She ate everything, and drank most of the wine because she was thirsty and because the food was so spicy it made it seem innocuous. Afterwards, while she was drinking a cup of watery coffee, some other customers filtered in. A young couple stared covertly at her, and two businessmen talked in loud voices. The feeling of being at home vanished at once. She called for the bill and hurriedly paid it. Her waiter shook her hand as she left. ‘Come back again.’