‘OK. Well anyone can go along to Somerset House – no, it’s St Catherines House in Kingsway now, but it’s the same thing – pay a few quid and get a copy of any birth certificate, it doesn’t have to be your own. And you don’t have to give a reason. But if you’re trying to pinch someone else’s identity, it’s not much use picking one at random because he’ll almost certainly have been using his identity himself, so to speak. I mean, he’ll have a National Insurance card and very likely, these days, a passport as well, so if you try to use his birth certificate to get either of those you’re likely to get found out.’
‘Yes, I can see that … So what do you do?’
‘You visit a graveyard,’ said Lewis.
I looked questioning.
‘A graveyard,’ he said firmly.
Some people, since Simone’s death and much more since Marigold’s, have tried to avoid, in my company, any flippant mention of the trappings of death. I have watched them blundering near the subject and then retreating from it with awkward tact. Lewis had more sense than that.
‘You look for the grave,’ he said, ‘of someone the same sex as yourself.’
‘Ah – and the same sort of age?’ I began to see.
‘You’re getting it – but not your present age, not a recent grave. Because, in that case, you’d be likely just to run into the same trouble – I mean that the DHSS would come back to you smartly saying that they were paying a pension to your widow and what were you doing still alive and wanting a new card or whatever? No, you have to find the grave of someone born about the same time as you who died before he could reasonably be expected to have had identity documents beyond his birth certificate. A child’s grave, in other words.’
‘So then you’ve got a name, and a date of birth –’
‘Exactly. It’s then that you go to St Catherines House and you order up his birth certificate. And you use this to get a passport in his name, which won’t be queried because, if he was pretty young when he died and that was many years ago, he’s most unlikely ever to have had a passport.’
‘The Passport Office won’t check that he isn’t still alive?’
‘I hardly think so, unless their suspicions were aroused. There wouldn’t be any simple way of their doing so, and when you think how many routine applications for first-time passports they receive … You’d have to forge the counter-signature by a JP, doctor or whoever, but that’d be no problem. Like that, you’d have a valid birth certificate and a valid passport. That’s the basic kit for all other documents. Easy, once you know.’
‘If a bit ruthless,’ I said.
An image came into my mind, clear but small as if seen from some distance away, of a man wandering alone in a hillside cemetery, trampling the rank grasses round old gravestones, sole evidence of brief existences, long-extinct griefs. He was scrutinizing this headstone and that, kicking aside an empty jam-jar, then finally stopping in one place and noting something down with an air of achievement.
‘Yes. Taking the name of the dead in vain, you might say,’ said Lewis heavily.
There was a short silence in which we probably both thought the same thing. I had never envisaged the dead as being vulnerable in this way before. The offence, however obscure, struck me as abhorrent.
‘Is it done much?’ I asked.
‘Probably not – but if it’s done successfully then by definition it wouldn’t come to light. Oh I suppose a certain number of people know about the trick now because it’s been used by a couple of well-known crime writers. So I’m afraid it’s not an original idea I’ve given you – for your own best-seller, I mean.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, finding this fantasy of myself as a writer useful. ‘Let me just clear up another point, though. You did say the DHSS would be surprised if they got a request for a card from a grown man who never seemed to have had one?’
‘Yes. I’m not sure of the answer to that myself. Maybe your chap’ll have to kid them he’s been abroad since he was eighteen, herding sheep in Australia or something.’
‘– Or maybe,’ I said, ‘having got his passport, he goes abroad. Maybe that’s what the passport was for – to set up a new life abroad with a clean record. Especially if he was known to foreign police as well under his own name.’
‘Yeah, maybe … I can see you’re getting quite into the swing of it.’
‘Yes. Thank you, Lewis.’
‘You must let me know,’ he said, fixing me with his mock-fierce bushy-browed look, ‘when you’ve worked out a bit more about your chap. I’d be glad to help.’
‘I will.’
‘Mmm … How’s the insomnia, anyway?’
‘The what?’ I genuinely had not heard.
‘Insomnia – I thought you were planning to use your spare hours in the middle of the night to write this tale.’
After a moment I said: ‘It’s you that puts his mind to crime stories in the middle of the night. Not me.’
Lewis said promptly:
‘You told me you wake in the night and think about what’s-his-name, your Russian. I recommended reading as a more productive alternative. I thought you’d decided that writing would be more productive still –’
‘Oh yes, that reminds me, I wanted to speak to you about Piotr Mihailovitch,’ I said, grabbing with relief at a new topic of conversation.
Lewis let me. But I don’t think he was fooled. At any rate, several times in the next few weeks he rang me, always late at night. He would chat companionably, apparently inconsequentially. But when, on one occasion, I asked him what he had actually rung for, he said:
‘Just checking up on your insomnia, Tom.’
It is, I suppose, a measure of my preoccupation with my own idea that it did not occur to me till long after what form Lewis’s anxiety about me had taken. From my questions – and perhaps from endemic strains within his own life – it had crossed his mind that I might be planning to disappear. Or at least that I might be playing with the fantasy of doing so. He evidently sensed that something odd was working in me these days, and there I have to say that he was right.
He felt that he ought to keep an eye on me. I was not a bit grateful.
It was July before I got to St Catherines House. I had taken the day off work for this venture, which turned out to be just as well.
It was as Lewis had said: there was no problem about my consulting the registers; they were all available, year by year. It was simply that there seemed to have been many more people born, even in one country within a defined period, than I had ever graphically envisaged. This was foolish of me, but historians tend to deal either in population millions or in recognizable individuals, and do not make the great leap of imagination necessary to bridge the two. At the lists of closely printed names, the births of so many unique human creatures, a sense of claustrophobia came over me. Not on my own behalf, but on theirs, confined as they were into column upon column, reduced to hieroglyphs: no means of knowing anything about any of them but the mere record of their being.
Before coming to St Catherines House, I had wondered if Lewis’s information might be out of date – if perhaps everything would now be on microfilm and cross-referenced, henceforth forestalling illegal tricks and making my own work of detection easy. Now I could see, however, that all this material, growing inexorably in volume year by year for ever, would never be put on computer: it could not possibly be cost-effective to do so. The vast majority of the names, once listed, would never be looked up at all for any reason. No wonder the lists, passing barely read under my seeking eyes, exuded an insistent, hopeless appeal: Notice us; we existed, as you; we were made and went into the world and suffered and worked and made other human beings in turn and went into the void – and you? And you too? By what special claim or act will you make yourself visible? Want to justify your existence, do you? Well, well.
I did not make my job easier by having to hunt down a relatively common name. ‘Daffyd Huws’ may seem exotic when it is placed b
efore you in London, but Wales has known a great many of them, even – I soon established – in the 1920s, when ethnic or chauvinistic names seem to have been less in favour than in recent decades.
Had I looked for the name under its still commoner anglicized spelling, probably I would have given up before the great, replicatory multitude, an anonymity of sheer numbers. But, thinking about the matter beforehand, I had decided that it was the name in its Welsh form that I had initially to seek.
Births are listed by years, and the place of birth is given. By and by I compiled a shortlist of Daffyd Huwses born in Cardiff between 1923 and 1927: memory, and my own age, suggested that these years would be the appropriate span. Few imposters would willingly adopt as their own a birth date more than a year or two different from their real one, because of the risk of betraying inappropriate knowledge or the equally inappropriate lack of it in some casual mention of childhood events: one should have been old enough for Army service when one did in fact do it, and have left school in a feasible year.
I initially began to list all those born in those years from other parts of Wales too, but numbers soon made me limit my plan. I would have to work within the most likely scenario, even if I thus risked missing what I was after.
Then I turned to the Deaths, and here my problem was greater. I needed now to find a Daffyd Huws dying, probably still in Cardiff, as a child. Fortunately the Death Registers for the inter-war period also gave the date of birth, otherwise my task would have been impossible: as it was, however, I might hope to establish a reasonable link of probability between a deceased Daffyd and one or more of the births I had already noted down. In fact, as I laboriously realized, I need not have looked at the Birth Registers at all to find my likely candidate, but I was feeling my way not just toward a dead child but to one whose whole brief life would have been comprehended within one place.
But how brief? Childhood lasts many years. A dead baby or a dead fourteen-year-old could equally have been the basis for an assumed identity. Logically, I should look through all the Death Registers from 1923 to the late 1930s. However it seemed to me that if one was attempting to steal an identity, the risks of discovery would be the less the briefer the life of the original owner: I therefore concentrated my search on the late 1920s.
I knew, after all, that I was not following in the footsteps of a fool, but of a calculating, imaginative man. I was trying to use my own guile, my own imagination, to reason as he would have reasoned.
For what else, at this stage, was I doing but attempting to follow in his footsteps to see if the potential steps were in fact there? And I had had to start at a different point in his itinerary, working backwards from the unknown to the known. By these means, I eventually settled, arbitrarily – it seemed the most suitable candidate – on a boy born in Cardiff in 1925 who died in the same town at the age of two, in the year of my own birth. My imposter could even have known of him, this sickly, transient child, through family or street tradition.
I left St Catherines House with a sense of achievement, as if my detective work had really brought something to light. But in fact what I had done was no more than an academic exercise. I had established to my own satisfaction that Evan Brown could have purloined the brief existence and name of a real Daffyd Huws. I had not proved that he did: at best, what I had located was a suggestive coincidence.
Nor had I yet even embarked on the far greater task of exploring what further logical evolution in identity might have taken place over the years. Though this, of course, was the heart of my idea. My Idea. Originally a mere grain of irritant, random fact, it was now slowly accreting like a black pearl in an oyster: the Idea, to which I was now giving the status of a theory. At this point, I believe it had still to develop into anything resembling a plan.
It needed more substance on which to feed. For the time being, nothing further was forthcoming. Yet, oddly, I do not think I felt frustrated. I believe that I was getting used to my Idea, handling it mentally, even deriving some obscure, perhaps perverse strength from it. I was, you might say with hindsight, biding my time, even if I did not yet know it.
Ann and I went on holiday to the United States, to Massachusetts where she has cousins. Then, in the late autumn, I crossed the Atlantic again on my trip to Canada: a conference, lectures to give, meetings with my equivalents in the Canadian Department of Education. In Quebec, a city where I had never been before, my French was called into action again. Perhaps it was this, combined with the oddness, to me, of the setting – the familiar, vivid phrases in flat, unfamiliar accents, the dislocating combination of the Gallic and the Transatlantic – that caused something to shift in the speculative depths of my mind. At all events, I woke one morning in my hermetically sealed hotel room high above the city, and knew that I had dreamed, for the first time in many years, of Jacquou.
He told me, casually, while moving about the mill-house kitchen, that one can look things up in France too – ‘Our French police have their uses. After all, many of them are not bad lads at heart. Matters must take their course. Justice needs to be seen to be done.’
Ostensibly his remark referred to the aftermath of the Resistance – to the need to track down a former colleague, as in the story he had once told me about the maquisard he suspected of having killed a British agent entrusted to his care. But as I shaved, in the brilliantly lit cell of a bathroom, the essence of the dream still enveloped me. Presently I understood that it had another, more specific meaning.
I stopped shaving for a bit and looked at myself in the mirror. Myself looked back: only a little wary, in spite of everything; lined, solid, greying, apparently dependable. Not, you would say, paranoid, not a man given to unwarranted assumptions or rash campaigns. Jacquou himself was the same sort of age, and with much the same build, when he first talked to me, a young man in his house, about rough justice.
I think now that it was during those few minutes in front of an irrelevant looking-glass in Quebec that I came to understand much more about the Idea that was developing within me and its possible outcome.
In the unreal space between Christmas Eve 1983 and January 1984, the dark but artificially illuminated turn of the year, another year, Ann and I went to Paris. We had not been there together before.
Paul and Hermione had hospitably suggested the visit, perhaps without any great expectation that their offer would be taken up. However, I turned it over in my mind for a while before mentioning it to Ann and it finally seemed to me a good idea.
She was, I knew, wary of Paris: it was ‘my’ place, one of those locales of my past in which she feels an intruder. But I found I had become tired of her thin-skinned tact on the matter (perhaps my hidden Idea was now making me braver or merely more reckless), and in any case the prospect of our both spending the rest of our life avoiding ever passing through the nearest European capital together struck me as tedious and impracticable.
She, poor love, took my sudden enthusiasm for a week in Paris with her as a sign that I was ‘better’ from whatever had been wrong with me, unmentioned, the previous winter. She was also encouraged by the information – which, with my usual crass uncommunicativeness about the past, I had apparently failed to impart before – that Hermione was American: she, Ann, would not therefore be expected to talk in French. I forbore to tell her that Hermione, so intelligent and adaptable and with Paul now for so many years, had long since shed most signs of her original identity, including almost every trace of her gritty New York accent. I trusted that this same adaptability and perception would lead Hermione to realize that Ann needed emotional nursing in Paris. Sure enough, Ann was further emboldened by a charming note from Hermione telling her how much she and Paul were looking forward to our visit and advising her, sisterly, to bring a warm coat – ‘Paris is often freezing in the winter, and damp with it. Don’t believe its PR image: it’s worse than London!’
Of course there were other good reasons, spoken and unspoken, for our trip. Neither Ann nor I had any relation
s in London for whom we felt we must perform Christmas rituals (though Ann would willingly have done so), and the fact is that, for those who have no child, small or grown, the long British Christmas holiday is a desolate one. (It also held, for me, an anniversary, though I don’t think Ann knew that.) Far more fun, we said to each other, to be in a city where shops and restaurants remain open and the public transport runs as usual.
Perhaps I should add another, private reason of my own: I had something now to pursue in Paris, my further investigations. But I did not think directly about this till we were on the ’ plane on Christmas Eve, enjoying two free glasses of British Airways champagne ‘with the compliments of the season’ from a hostess unreassuringly dressed as a Christmas clown.
At some point in the last five years Paul and Hermione – who had remained childless for reasons they never discussed, or at any rate not with me – had inherited a sizeable apartment in Passy, to the west of Paris. They were not poor: Hermione probably did not earn much as an editor with an historical journal, but Paul was employed by an international organization; they could certainly have afforded to have the flat redecorated and refurnished. However, true to the French tradition that was Paul’s by birth and Hermione’s by adoption, they had simply moved into the place as it was, casually inhabiting a repository of family history, even as Jacquou had taken over the cluttered mill-house. They had imported a few opulently modern objects – a new shower in the bathroom, a freezer cabinet in the hall disguised with a tapestry, tape-deck, turntables and speakers among the Louis Seize furnishings of the double living room – but otherwise they conducted their blithe and busy existence apparently unaffected by the family presses full of books and linen, and the family portraits looking down on them.
It was not that they were mean. They spent money without seeming to count it: on meals in restaurants, on a good car, on skiing holidays and trips to New York. Their clothes were elegant and expensive – not that I had noticed this myself, but Ann did, silently pointing out to me that Hermione’s coat had the name of a famous couture house in it. And of course they spent money readily on my mill-house, whose ancient roofs constantly required attention and whose river meadow had recently needed new ditches cut for drainage.
Give Them All My Love Page 20