The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

  I thanked the postman and his mother, and went back to the car, got in and drove straight through the village and out the other end, and kept on driving till I came to a squat, white farmhouse on its own. It had an L-shaped, one-storeyed wing to one side, and a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn where the farmyard must previously have been. On the paved edge of the pool there was a table with a sun umbrella in the middle, and by its side, in twin loungers, a grey couple in happy clothes.

  Pulling up at the roadside, I got out and approached the couple, trying my French on them, but mercifully they replied in English, inviting me to take a garden seat under the shade of the umbrella, where the man poured me an orange drink. A nice couple, as the postman’s mother had said, Dutch and retired senior schoolteachers. I told them of my quest, but they couldn’t help me as far as Pidgeons went, as they’d no idea who’d occupied the farmhouse before they’d bought it. All that had been arranged before they’d finally upped sticks from the Netherlands. Nor had any of the locals mentioned the name to them. They were hoping to run the outbuildings as gîtes, but it was early days and they were still learning.

  Something occurred to me: I hadn’t noticed a church in Balmes: was there one nearby? The man told me that there was a village church of sorts in Trelles, about a kilometre up the road, but it was getting late, and wouldn’t I be needing accommodation for the night, or at least a meal? Just then I felt I could have murdered a square meal, and my weariness was like a weight on my back. I fell in readily with both the couple’s suggestions: they evidently were learning the art of hiring out gîtes . . .

  Next morning, Sunday, I checked out of my gîte and drove along to the next village, Trelles, which turned out to be very much like Balmes, in fact, only a tad smaller, but with the added distinction of a small village square, set in from the road in front of the mairie. There was an obelisk affair in the middle of the square, which I guessed must be the inevitable war memorial. If the Vickybird had had children, the boys could hardly have missed the war.

  I got out of the car, and walked up to the stone obelisk, which turned out to be the 1914–1918 memorial. There were far too many names on it for a place this size, but it was too early for my purposes. Ah, over there on the wall of the mairie – a bronze plaque. I walked across the little square to the plaque and examined it: Morts pour la patrie – 1939–1945. There was a fair muster of names, though nothing like the number on the First World War obelisk. I looked down the list till I came to the P’s: Paulet, Lionel; Pétiot, Roland; Pézanas, Albert; Piccini, Louis-Philippe, then, there it was: Pidgeon, Georges . . .

  Galvanized and frustrated at the same time, I looked impatiently up and down the drowsy, late spring street, until logic came to my aid, and I took out a biro and a stray checkout receipt and copied down the thirty-odd names on the plaque. Now for the shop fascias and house fronts . . .

  It was, I supposed, testimony to the social mobility of the age that I could only connect three modern features with the names on my improvised list. The first was with the name of a tyre depot, which was closed, the second with a young resident who turned out to be a swimming instructor, and who could only shrug and say ‘Connais pas’ in response to my enquiry about Pidgeons, and the third – eureka! – a Madame Paulet, who was a jolly old lady pastrycook. I joined the little queue of locals in her shop for the time-honoured ritual of buying the after-Sunday-lunch cake, chose a scrumptious-looking strawberry tart and asked about Pidgeons in the vicinity.

  Yes, she’d known Georges Pidgeon slightly when she’d been a little girl. He’d been a small, thin, dark type – all head. He must have taken after his mother, Odette, then, I thought. No, Madame Paulet couldn’t remember his parents – well before her time – but if I wanted to know about the war, I might call in at the corner bistro, where the local codgers hung out. It was just two doors down.

  I followed her advice, and ordered a beer in the main bistro, but all the action seemed to be in the back courtyard, where a boules game was in progress. I asked the patron who among the senior citizens might best fill me in with the history of the village, and he laughed and jerked his head towards the open door that led into the yard.

  ‘Old Alibert – the one in the checked shirt and white cap at the table there. He knows everything about anything!’

  I paid the extra on my beer for waiter service, and took my glass into the cool, chestnut-canopied courtyard, where I made for the little wrought-iron table indicated and excused myself into the chair opposite Monsieur Alibert, who was a big-featured old man in dark glasses, and asked him if he’d take a drink with me.

  ‘Willingly!’ he boomed, then the Midi accent rolled out in all its glory with: ‘English, hein? Are you touring the region?’

  I nodded and waved through the open door to the patron, who came out and took my order for Alibert’s beer, the old man shouting his thanks. His loud way of speaking must no doubt have been a pain for the other clients, but it was a boon for my understanding of his French.

  ‘Back in England,’ I explained, ‘there’s a tradition in my family that a friend of my grandfather lived near this very village.’

  ‘Is that so? Another Englishman?’

  ‘Yes, he married a local girl after the 1914 war and had a son, but that was way back – well before your time, monsieur . . .’

  It was like a red rag to a bull: rapping his glass back on to the metal table-top, old Alibert leant forward and, after setting his heavy jaw for a moment, accepted my challenge to his local all-knowingness.

  ‘Give me his name!’

  ‘Pidgeon, Laurent Pidgeon.’

  The old gaffer settled back in his seat with a triumphant smile on his face, then took a long swig of beer before answering.

  ‘That would’ve been Georges Pidgeon’s old man – died way back in ’26 or ’27 – I can’t really remember him – but I was at school with young Georges . . .’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  A nod and another swig on the part of my opposite number.

  ‘When all the crap started up again in ’39, we were in the same call-up year: I’ll be eighty-six in June . . .’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Right enough: when the war broke out I got a posting to Toul, but poor Georges was killed in front of Sedan in 1940. Hardly twenty-one, poor bastard, and with a wife and kid already: God knows what happened to them . . .’

  My guess was that Georges Pidgeon’s ‘kid’ had grown up and had a son of his or her own, a son who wore his hair in a Tintin quiff, and whom I’d recently caught in England trying the door of the Hagues’ boathouse. A son, moreover, who’d plugged into the background of Carrie Bugle’s French family, the Barres, and was even at that moment posing as Philippe Barre as he sniffed around for the scent of Julian Rawbeck’s lost masterpiece, The Ruffian on the Stair. But I kept quiet amid the metallic clicking of the boules on the paved courtyard, and let old Alibert get on with his story.

  ‘Georges was a dreamer,’ the old man went on with a faraway smile on his face. ‘He had a tale for everything. You’ve just mentioned his father . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, agog to hear something about the Vickybird, ‘please go on.’

  ‘Well, Georges used to come in for quite a bit of chaff at school about his dad’s being an Englishman – a rosbif – you know what kids are – but he used to put a brave face on it – bluster a bit. Did we seriously think his dad would’ve settled in a dump like Balmes unless he’d had a good reason? That sort of style . . .

  ‘Why, his dad had been a Mr Big in the London underworld, until a toff had blackmailed him for something or other, and he’d had to deal with him. He’d done a runner to France, joined the Foreign Legion, and been sent back up the trenches, where he’d copped a packet, then, later, he’d married his nurse and settled down quietly here. Georges’s dad had had to keep a low profile after all that: you had to understand, the flics at Scotland Yard had a long arm etc., etc. Talk about shooting a line.’

 
; Alibert wheezed with gravelly laughter for a moment or two, and I sat riveted to my chair: judging by the potted version of the Vickybird’s CV my vis-à-vis had just related, young Georges Pidgeon had been no fantasist.

  ‘Did you know Georges’s mother, Odette?’

  ‘Poor woman, she was a shadow – a ragged shadow – she used to fight the shopkeepers for bruised fruit and pork that had gone off. To think the scumbags charged for it! The Spanish War was the time when we could’ve settled with the bastards – I’ve always said that, to raise the working class to a proper level of political consciousness, the first requirement is . . .’

  We were getting off-subject, so I asked if Alibert had known a family by the name of Barre.

  ‘Barre?’ the old man muttered, clearly irritated at my having interrupted him in mid-lecture. ‘Once knew a loco driver in Toulouse called Barre – no, it was Barelli . . . Now he was an anarcho-syndicalist . . .’

  I seized the hand of the veteran of labour, and told him how much I’d enjoyed our conversation, then got up and made my way to the door, and so back on to the yawning Sunday street. I now knew I was on Pidgeon home territory, but what had passed down the Pidgeon family line about Carrie Bugle and her London adventures? From my conversations with her French descendants, the Barres, in Berneval, it was clear they knew nothing about her relations with Laurence Victor Pidgeon in England, or later in Paris, where he’d upset my grandfather’s apple cart with Carrie. But the man I felt sure was the Vickybird’s most active modern descendant – Tintin Quiff alias Ramier – certainly knew a lot about the Barres. And the thing I was most sure of: the Vickybird’s heir knew all about the legend of the lost Rawbeck masterpiece, as well as my grandfather’s connection with the artist – his snooping in Jersey proved that, if nothing else.

  I went back over the square and got into my car, carefully laying my strawberry tart on the back seat, then started to pull out of the square, meaning to make for the Charente crossing, then I remembered what the Dutch couple I’d stayed with on the previous night had said about there being a church near Trelles, about a kilometre down the road from churchless Balmes. If Laurence Victor Pidgeon had had a Christian burial, it would presumably have been in the churchyard there. Still short of the kilometre, I turned right and drove down the road till I spotted a low, nondescript stone structure to one side of the verge. There was a squared-off forepart of the building, with a cross on top. I pulled up opposite, and got out of the car.

  It was one of those low, shapeless French country churches – now clearly disused – with bits dating from most of the periods of the Christian era. You could see the joins, too, in the shape of cracks and slips in the stonework, but it was the graveyard I was interested in. It lay, all overgrown, behind a tumbledown stone wall along the side of the road. I stepped through the gateless opening and into the weeds, then started to examine what graves were marked and visible. Here and there I found cleared patches, one or two even with withered flowers on the slabs. Picking up a dead branch to sweep aside the more rampant undergrowth, I started to cover the graveyard, from top to bottom, until, ten minutes later, I uncovered a pathetic, rusted metal plaque, with the words, in raised letters: Odette Pidgeon – 1885–1952 – Tout s’efface hors le souvenir. ‘Everything wears away, except the memory.’ I felt a knot form in my chest as I stood before the grave for a minute or so: a woman of sorrows . . .

  Another five minutes brought me to what I’d been looking for: a rather smart marble block – paid for by my grandfather, perhaps, after he’d been too late to help the Vickybird in his last illness? – with, in deeply cut, gilded lettering: Laurence Victor Pidgeon – 1877–1927 – Resurgam. I murmured the translation to myself: ‘I shall rise again.’ Suddenly, in spite of the growing warmth of the morning, a shiver ran through me: it was as if somebody was looking over my shoulder . . .

  Chapter Twenty

  With much food for thought, I got back into the car and drove on, eventually crossing the Charente at the big Saintes intersection, then it was the open road again, as far as Bordeaux, where I hoped to catch a flight back to England. I reflected on how tiring it was to be speaking a language you weren’t master of, even after only a couple of days. Then I wondered how Duzko had managed with French – Duzko, who hadn’t made it across the Pyrenees with Philippe Barre and Bernard Marti in 1940. And if they’d all been inseparable, as old Marti had suggested, why hadn’t Philippe Barre told his family about Duzko?

  And then a light began to dawn on me: Philippe Barre, by all accounts, had come over to England in the summer of 1955, and then had simply vanished. We could trace the date of his disappearance through the cancellation stamp on the postcard he’d sent old Marti from London in that year.

  But it hadn’t been the first time Philippe had chosen to disappear: there’d been the time, not long after the end of the war, when he’d split with his wife and joined the French Merchant Navy under a false name, so that they couldn’t – as customary – dock his pay and send her maintenance. But then old Marti had blabbed to the Barres and given the game away. Still, Madame Barre hadn’t claimed against her husband, so the false name wouldn’t have been an issue: Philippe could have gone on sailing the seven seas under it.

  Came his second – seemingly final – disappearance in England in 1955, and Philippe Barre would still presumably have been using the same false ID. Whose? Preferably that of someone dead, I’d have assumed, and ideally someone he knew was no longer around. Duzko’s ID would have done fine . . . What if, up on that frozen Pyrenean pass fifteen years before, Philippe had taken on the task of looking up Duzko’s people after the war, and possibly returning his few effects – including his ID papers – only to be unable to trace the hapless Third Musketeer’s family? It all fitted, and from now on I’d be working on the assumption that Philippe Barre had disappeared in England under Duzko’s name and details. But had Philippe chosen to disappear there, or had it happened against his will? And had he just gone to England in the line of his work as a merchant seaman, or for some other reason? Who had been his contacts there?

  In 1955 I’d been three years old, Grandfather had been dead for five years, Nanny in Malmesbury still had three years to live, Dad was still alive and in full vigour, and Mother still – more or less – at home. If it had been my grandfather Philippe had come over to see – he may not have known that he was dead – it wouldn’t have been the first time, for hadn’t he been taken by his mother Carrie to Jersey in the 1920s to seek help from Grandfather? When you’re in a jam, who better to go and see than the family benefactor? It was a theory, anyway.

  At Bordeaux airport I managed to squeeze on to a flight which got me back to England at some unearthly hour in the morning, and I didn’t land up again in my lighthouse in Essex till around eight o’clock, when I just staggered upstairs to bed and crashed out till after two in the afternoon. I then wolfed down a scratch meal before getting up to date with the contents of my Inbox, and then, early in the evening, I rang Leah at the university before driving over to her flat there to give her an eager account of my adventures in Jersey and France.

  ‘This Tintin guy you saw at the auction,’ she commented. ‘The one you caught trying the Hagues’ boathouse door handle and who you now say’s the Vickybird’s descendant . . .’

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure of that, now.’

  ‘I think the place he’d have made for after sussing out you east coast Rolvendens would’ve been Malmesbury, your grandfather’s last address on earth, after all.’

  ‘If he hadn’t been snooping around down there before he came up here,’ I qualified.

  ‘Let’s assume he arrived from France through Stansted, and started from there.’

  ‘Mmm . . . but how would he have known about the Malmesbury connection? When I talked to Carrie Bugle’s great-grandson in Berneval, he didn’t mention anything about this Pidgeon guy’s having asked him about that aspect of our family history, though he’d tried to pump him on just about eve
rything else.’

  ‘If Tintin-Pidgeon had gone round to the nearest library, any halfways competent assistant could’ve directed him to an old Crockford, where he’d have found out what diocese covered your grandfather’s last living in Jersey.’

  ‘Winchester – yes, you’re right: he could’ve rung up the Church authorities there and found out my grandfather’s last retirement address. Or enquired at Church House in London.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me that an aunt of yours was living in the house in Malmesbury now?’

  ‘Yes – Aunt Hertha – or Dr Hertha Perowne, to give her her full honours. She’s the great-granddaughter of Nanny’s younger sister, Maud, who married a Malvern music master called Gilchrist. They had a daughter, Faith, who married Frank Perowne, a doctor specializing in tropical medicine. Faith wandered all over the world with him in his various postings. They had a daughter – Aunt Hertha – also a doctor, and a rolling stone for most of her life. Frank Perowne died in what was then Malaya in 1953, and Faith came back and moved in with her Aunt Cecily – Nanny Rolvenden – herself a widow by then, until Nanny died in 1958, leaving the Malmesbury house to Faith, who in turn left it to Hertha, who lives there now.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Leah prescribed in her brisk fashion, ‘you know who to contact to find out whether our Pidgeon friend’s been down Malmesbury way since you last saw him.’

  On that note, I was chased away dinnerless, Leah having a date somewhere else, so I returned to the lighthouse, and, after a meal, spent a reflective evening thinking of Pidgeons, sealing-wax and string. I recalled that I’d written to Hertha in 1996, when I’d first learnt that she’d moved into the old family home in Malmesbury, and asked if she’d known my grandfather personally. I was sure I’d kept the letter she’d written back, and went upstairs and had a rummage in my files for it. I eventually found it, and brought it downstairs to my armchair.