Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  ‘I’ll leave you to yourselves,’ he said. ‘As Teddy said, keeping yourselves to yourselves could be the Simmeter family motto. Perhaps it’s that that’s really your punishment.’

  Half an hour later he had packed his cases, and stuffed things into a couple of carrier bags he had picked up in shops. They represented all of himself that he’d brought to the Simmeters’. As he left the house he heard raised voices from back in the living-room. The recriminations were just starting. The Simmeters had turned in on themselves.

  Twenty minutes later he was booking into his old hotel, off New Oxford Street. When he put his head on his pillow, he went straight off into the soundest and most trouble-free sleep he had enjoyed for weeks.

  CHAPTER 15

  In the week that followed Simon spent all his free hours looking at flats. He was happy and busy; his mind became imperceptibly adjusted to thinking of the future, and occupied itself less with the Simmeters. When he went to bed on Thursday night he was surprised to realize that he had not thought of them once that day. On Friday he got the key for a flat in Swiss Cottage, where he was to remain very happily until 1970, three years after he had married Rosemary.

  That weekend he went down to Yeasdon. He had phoned often since he came down from Leeds, but he had never been home. Home had never meshed in his mind with what he had been doing: embedded in his mind was the idea that his investigations held the seed of disloyalty to the Cutheridges. Now he was done with them, and the awkwardness was gone. He had a warm and delighted homecoming, and Dot Cutheridge was over the moon that he looked fit, happy, and well over the miseries of his marriage and separation.

  ‘You look a new man,’ she said. ‘Practically a teenager again. I bet you’ve met somebody.’

  ‘Well, there is somebody,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t suppose it will come to anything, so don’t start building castles. I’m certainly not going to rush in this time.’

  ‘I didn’t notice you rushed in last time,’ said Dot, with a countrywoman’s tartness. She had never let that incredible gift of a family rob her of common sense in her treatment of Simon.

  The only sadness of the visit was the accelerating failure of his father. From being head stockman he had declined after his accident to being a jobber around the estate, and as he had been able to do less and less, his mental agility had gradually left him. Now he spent much of his day in a dream or a doze. Dot and Simon told him things, drew his attention to changes in the garden, or the approach of autumn; he would nod, or venture a comment, but soon he would retreat quite happily into his dream world, which seemed warm with happy reminiscence, leaving mother and son to talk to each other from their positions on either side of him around the open fire.

  ‘You’ve been looking into this business of who you are, where you came from, haven’t you?’ said Dot on Saturday night.

  ‘I don’t know why we bother to talk,’ said Simon, smiling. You always know without asking.’

  ‘And you found out?’

  ‘Yes, I found out . . . most things. I found out as much as I need to know.’

  ‘Were they a nice family?’

  ‘No,’ said Simon emphatically. ‘Not nice at all.’

  ‘I suppose it wasn’t likely they would be. Though your mother had looked after you, I’ll give her that.’

  ‘Oh, Mother was different. She must have been quite different. But she died . . .’

  ‘Died in the war?’

  Simon did not want to distress her needlessly.

  ‘Yes—died about the time I came here. That must have been why I was sent away.’

  ‘Thank God, at any rate, that I didn’t steal you from anybody. I’ve often wondered whether I didn’t put difficulties in the way of them finding out who you were. The thought that I might have robbed some poor soul was awful—but not so awful as the thought of giving you back. I always said to myself that if she’d wanted you back she’d have made some effort. I’ll offer up a prayer of thanks in Church tomorrow—and a prayer for her, poor soul. Well, Dad—you’ll be wanting your supper, won’t you?’

  Simon went with his mother to the Methodist Church next day. Dot Cutheridge’s prayers for the dead natural mother of Simon were perhaps rather a departure from orthodox Methodist practice, and Simon too stepped out of Wesleyan line by telling his mother after the service that he was going to call on his friend Mick Malone and take him for a drink before Sunday dinner.

  Mick was now married, and Simon was well-known to the three exuberant, attractive and none-too-clean children who made his council house a continual happy bedlam. Mick, predictably, had married a strong-minded girl who kept him well under control.

  ‘Mind you’re back by quarter past one,’ she shouted after them. ‘I need you to carve. And bring me a bottle of light ale.’

  They sat outside the Hound and Hare on a bench in the sun, and began picking up the pieces of their lives since they had last met. Simon could talk to Mick about the Simmeters as he could not talk to his mother. But he found that what Mick was interested in was the process by which he had found it all out. The emotional resonances meant nothing to him, but the story had the same sort of appeal to his mind as tracing the causes of a fault in an engine. Simon thought his wondering admiration for his cleverness altogether misplaced.

  ‘It all goes back to the day when I recognized where I had lived,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have done anything if that hadn’t happened. And when I decided to follow it up, everything led naturally from there. Even then, if I’d had a name like Smith or Jones I’d never have got anywhere at all.’

  It was only when they were finishing their second pints and preparing to get off home that Micky asked:

  ‘And what were they like, then, these Simmeters?’

  ‘I was wondering when you were going to ask that. Horrible.’

  ‘Well, so what? I told you years ago, I don’t think it’s important. Any more than it’s important that my mum was a foul-mouthed harridan. All I think about her is: Thank God I got shot of her, and was brought up here. If she’d had the bringing up of me a bit longer, she’d have made me something else; but luckily she didn’t. I don’t think there’s any part of me that’s hers—nor my real dad’s, whoever he may be. If I found out my real dad was Winston Churchill it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to how I thought of myself. I’m me.’

  Now Micky’s attitude seemed nothing but common sense. Simon had never found anything of himself in the Simmeters.

  ‘I suppose I ought to think of it like mongrel dogs: you never quite know who the father was.’

  ‘It’s not only strays like us who’re in that position,’ said Mick. ‘There’s plenty of kids in this village who think they know who their dad is, but they couldn’t be more mistaken. You can take my word for that, because in one or two cases the real dad is me.’

  ‘Still,’ said Simon, ‘with mongrel dogs you always know who the mother is. And I’m glad I know who mine was, and what happened to her, however terrible. I’m quite happy to think that I came out of Len’s past like the figure of Revenge. I hope the bastard is writhing at the thought that I might have changed my mind and gone along to the police.’

  And when Simon, walking home, had given Mick a brief account of Len, Connie, Teddy and their mother, that was virtually the last of the Simmeters in his life for quite a while. That night he went back to London, to a new flat, a new kind of life. Of course he told Rosemary, when he had dated her a few more times. It was a memorable day, but mostly because later that same evening they slept together for the first time. By then the story of his origins had lost much of its importance for Simon, and Rosie docketed it in her mind as a piece of information about her husband-to-be, but something much lower in her scale of values than what he told her about the Cutheridges, whom he not long afterwards took her to meet. It was many years later, and then almost by accident, that the Simmeters came into Simon’s life again.

  CHAPTER 16

  In May of 1979 Simon Cuthe
ridge took his three children on a motoring tour around Sussex. He took Friday off from the Zoo, where he was now one of the two or three most senior members of the scientific staff. He had promised the children a trip of some kind while their mother was away, and the free Friday made it a leisurely long weekend. Rosemary was now an actress—not exactly a famous one, but the sort of face that, seen on the box, makes people ask: ‘Where have I seen her before? What else has she been in?’ There had been some rocky and dispiriting years after drama school, but work was now, as she put it, regularly irregular: there were never too many months in a row when she was out of a solid job. And if the worst came to the worst there were television commercials for dog foods or bedtime drinks.

  Rosemary’s work at the moment was filming a second series of a BBC sit. com. that she had first appeared in three years earlier. Having run the gamut of black boy married to white girl, white boy married to black girl, older man married to younger woman, older woman married to younger man, boy batching in a flat of girls, girl batching in a flat of boys—having run, in fact, through all the drearily predictable ideas that ever were thrown up in script conferences, the BBC had caught its breath and looked through its records to see which of them could possibly justify a second series. Luckily one of the ones they came up with was Rosemary’s. This was a sit. com. about a newly divorced couple still living in the same street. Rosemary played the wacky friend of the family who lived in the house in between. Unluckily the series was set—for no apparent reason, except that the writers seemed to believe that a mere mention of the name would produce a laugh—in Stoke-on-Trent. It was filmed in the BBC Midlands Studio. Rosemary had to be away for three solid blocks of three weeks at a time.

  ‘It’s crumby, but it’s bread, and it keeps my face before the great British public,’ she said philosophically, as she went through the script of the first episode, trying to sharpen up her wacky wisecracks.

  So that May Simon took his children through the Downs and villages of Sussex. The car was in a state of continual song, laughter and uproar. Mrs Thatcher had just become Prime Minister, and his second child, Emily—the apple of his eye, and the one who most strikingly took after their mother—was making a speciality of imitating her. ‘Where there was strife, let there be concord,’ she would intone, in high, breathy tones of manifest insincerity. It was a performance that Simon thought by no means bad for a ten-year-old.

  It was Saturday afternoon, a blowy, exhilarating day, and Martin, the youngest, was navigating because he said it was the boy’s job to. For once this was not disputed, since nobody else wanted to do it, but Martin made his job more difficult by continually reading the maps the wrong way up. Luckily none of them had any clear idea of where they wanted to go.

  ‘We go where the fancy takes us,’ said Simon.

  ‘We go where Martin’s lousy map-reading lands us up,’ said Angela, the eldest. ‘What’s the signpost say?’

  ‘It must be Lytton Magna,’ said Martin.

  ‘Well, it isn’t: it’s Cattermole,’ said Emily.

  Simon swerved to the left, and took the road to Cattermole.

  ‘What did you do that for, Daddy? I don’t think I like the name Cattermole. Is there anything special there?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it somewhere,’ said Simon. ‘What does it say in the AA Book, Martin?’

  After much hedging and muttering Martin found the entry and read out: ‘A village of no special charm or character. Pop. 1,700.’

  ‘Those are the best kind of villages,’ said Emily wisely. ‘They’re not all spoilt and touristy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being touristy?’ demanded Martin. ‘We’re tourists. And at least you get good ice-cream in touristy places. Why should we go to a village of no special charm or character?’

  ‘To see if we can spot the charm or character the man who wrote that missed,’ said Simon.

  As it turned out the children were easily placated, once they’d parked the car and found a sweets and ice-cream shop that satisfied even Martin’s exacting requirements. Before they’d been in Cattermole long they became preoccupied with some business or game of their own, and Simon was free to stroll on ahead of them, trying to remember the scraps of detail about Cattermole that he had learnt so long ago.

  Blenheim Avenue—that was it. The number he could not for the life of him remember. But when he found Blenheim Avenue, most of it had been rebuilt in matchstick-Georgian style by a firm of wholesale home-packagers who had made shoddy whole tracts of Southern England. The house that his mother had come to, prospecting for a refuge for him from the bombs, was no more.

  Simon walked curiously through the village. Of course it aroused in him no memories—how could it? He certainly hadn’t been with his mother when she wrote, because she had sent him her love. But it was curious to think that—but for the exceptional and unlucky violence of Len that May night—it was here that he might have spent his early years, rather than Yeasdon. Cattermole had a dry, elderly, uninspiring whiff to it: it reminded him of a candle that has never burnt well, and shows signs of shortly going out. Simon, not for the first time, felt he had been lucky. In every way Yeasdon had been preferable to this.

  The church was a little apart from the centre of the village. It was a standard, solid, Perpendicular construction, which the AA Book would doubtless also say had no particular character or charm. Simon turned aside from the road and wandered into the churchyard.

  ‘What are you going in there for?’ demanded Emily.

  ‘If you want to get to know a place, you have to look at the churchyard,’ pontificated Simon.

  ‘How? Why? What do we look for?’

  Simon was a bit nonplussed.

  ‘You look at the gravestones,’ he said.

  Luckily the children returned to their game, and let him wander and browse. The dutiful wives and mothers, the dearly beloved husbands, the sons and daughters of the above, passed across his vision—many of them of exemplary piety, some long-suffering in illness, others steadfast in faith. ‘All the little lies of village life,’ said Simon to himself. Surely gravestones held the highest proportion of written untruth, outside of the popular press.

  ‘Looking for someone special?’ said an old voice behind him. Simon jumped and looked round, surprised out of a dream. It was a gnarled, ill-shaven face, with sharp, bright eyes, and wearing labourer’s clothes—the trousers tied round the cracked boots with string.

  ‘David Simmeter,’ said Simon.

  ‘Over there,’ said the old man, pointing. ‘Down by the east wall. Through there, see. A bit to your left. I know them all, I do. Further left. There he is. That’s him.’

  Like a somnambulist Simon had walked on. Past more dearly beloved husbands, spinsters of exemplary piety, sons and daughters who had died in childhood. And then he stood, shivering in the blustery wind, down by the east wall—the voice of the old man, and the voices of his laughing children, coming to him across the churchyard. And he knelt down in front of a squat, square tombstone, with incrustations of moss at its foot, dry bits of twig and leaf clinging to it from last autumn. And on the stone he read:

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  OF

  DAVID SIMMETER (1938-1941)

  CHERISHED SON OF

  LEONARD AND MARY SIMMETER

  KILLED IN AN AIR RAID ON THIS PARISH, JUNE 1941.

  TAKEN EARLY.

  Simon stood in the wind, looking on and on at this witness to his own early death.

  ‘Little boy a relative of yours?’

  The old man had come over, and stood looking curiously at him from a few feet away, with an air of respectfully wondering whether there might be anything in it for him.

  ‘I—yes. Yes, I think so. Do you remember him?’

  ‘Not him. Not the little lad. But I remember the burial. Naturally I do, because I dug the grave. Didn’t go to the war, on account of my chest.’ The old man wheezed, as if to give evidence, but he chuckled proudly. ‘Hasn’t stopped me living
to seventy-five, though, has it? ’Course, nowadays I only tidy up the place a bit. Arthritic—terrible place for arthritis is Cattermole. But I dug all the graves, nigh on, from ’forty to ’sixty-nine. I’m the man to come to if you’ve a fancy to find out about graves!’

  ‘So you dug this one?’

  ‘Like I said. This was one of my first. I remember because we didn’t have so many air raid deaths here in Cattermole. We were that bit off the routes them Narzi bombers took. But that time we were for it. That time we had the three.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘There was the elderly couple as were looking after him. Over there, they are. All killed by the same bomb. He’d only been there a couple of months, the little kid. And by all accounts he was a nice, well-spoken lad—not like some. Dirty, foul-mouthed little ruffians we had down here, and some of the mothers were no better. The Templetons were going around saying they’d been very lucky. And then they all gets blown to smithereens. Makes you think, don’t it?’

  ‘Do you remember the funeral?’

  ‘Oh aye. They were all the same day. The Templetons had children and grandchildren, and they were there for the funeral, or some of them were. But for the little boy there was just the father. He nearly wasn’t there either, because he’d recently moved house, and they had difficulty contacting him.’

  ‘You remember him, do you?’

  ‘I do that. Because he were in such a taking on. Thin, nervy type—not the sort you’d take to. Twitching and shaking he were, right through the service. And when we started heaving the earth in, he burst out into such a cry—sobbing and shaking he were. But there—they said the gent had lost his wife, similar, only a few weeks before, so it’s not surprising he took on. I always remember that funeral, because it was one of my first, and because we didn’t have many air raid victims in Cattermole, like I said. And then the father being so shook up, like he was close to a breakdown. Did you say you were a relative?’

  ‘Daddy!’ came imperative voices from over by the church. ‘What are you doing? Come on. There’s nothing here.’