“Careful! Two more might have brought us to screaming point!”
So in a way, although the film undoubtedly had entertaining moments (which we conscientiously acknowledge), we have more fun pulling it to pieces than we got out of watching it.
“Anyhow, despite all that, it was a good night out at the pictures. A very good night,” I add on impulse.
“For me, too. Though I’d have to say not entirely on account of the movie. I don’t know if you gathered that.”
“Thank you for treating me.”
Then we talk about how wonderful it is that the last blackout restrictions have finally been lifted and that the streetlights are on again; no more being obliged to carry torches which could only be directed at one’s feet. No more need, even, for headlamps to wear a covering—nor traffic lights—although admittedly there isn’t much traffic now except for bikes. It’s like a glimpse of El Dorado to see the light from the pub spilling out across the pavement.
Through the open door there comes the welcome of a singsong,
“Yes, we have no bananas,
We have no bananas today,”
which suggests that dealings in contraband must be at a remarkably low ebb, since a bent old seaman with a beard and runny nose tells me while we wait for Matt and Walt to do battle at the bar—well, he tells Trixie too but she plainly isn’t listening—that the Lord Nelson has a dormer window on its seaward side, from which signals could be flashed to smugglers coming in below the cliff, and that there’s many a whispered tale of blocked-up passages which once led from the cliff into the cellars. Matt gives the man one of the two glass tankards he’s brought, and heroically returns to fetch himself another. By the time he comes back, Walt and Trixie have been able to muscle their way onto a crowded bench—she’s sitting on his lap—and the seaman has swallowed his drink and has moved off in search of some other sucker (Matt’s phrase). “The artful old lush—well, good luck to him,” he says.
We then decide to join the group around the piano; yet just as we get there it disbands. So we eventually manage to edge into a corner, holding our glasses up high, apologizing as we go and meeting with cheerful reassurance. We could of course have taken our drinks outside and sat on a parapet overlooking the sea but, despite the cardigan I’m now wearing, the night feels chilly. Besides—it’s exciting to be part of a good-natured crowd that’s soaked up the warmth of the day, even if at times it’s a little difficult to hear what each of us is saying. He asks where Trixie and I are putting up in Southwold and I tell him about Mrs Herbert’s guesthouse.
“It’s simple but seems luxurious compared to our farm-worker’s cottage—where the plumbing is so primitive it’s sometimes hard to get rid of the day’s caking of mud.”
“No wonder you need to escape.”
“But it’s a good life, being a land girl.”
“Will you be in Southwold next Saturday?”
His question takes me by surprise. “Well, usually we only get away once every—”
“I wish you would,” he says. “We could meet earlier in the day and go for a picnic—fit in a swim. I think I could probably wangle us a jeep.”
“It sounds fun. I—”
“And I’ll take care of the picnic. I mean it. No arguments.” He looks round briefly. “I guess Walt’s probably making similar plans with Trixie…aiming to get off on their own.” I glance round too; we both smile. “But Rosalind?” Suddenly he seems embarrassed.
“Mm?”
“I don’t quite know how to put this, without sounding bigheaded. But, you see, back home… Well, back home I’m engaged to be married.”
A slight dip of disappointment—silly, I suppose, on the strength of merely a six-hour acquaintance. Come to that…not such a slight dip, either.
“Congratulations, Matt.”
“You’ll still come out next Saturday? Maybe even Sunday as well?”
“I’d like to.”
“I damn well wish that I was free tomorrow. You’re just about the nicest person I’ve met in England. And that’s not to say England isn’t very full of nice people.”
“Thanks. And you must tell me about your family and your fiancée and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that the weather next weekend is at least half as good as today’s.”
I laugh.
“Especially if you’re serious about that swim.”
3
The detective takes the snapshot from my hand. “I think it’s time we shut up shop,” he says.
“I can’t help wondering who she is.”
“Naturally you can’t.”
His apartment is on Finchley Road, over a bakery called Grodzinski’s. “I like this area,” he tells me. “Bus conductors cry, ‘Get out your passports, we’re coming to Golders Green!’ But that’s what’s good about it. Jewish. Cosmopolitan. Lively.”
“Maybe. But my trouble is—can I really believe in any private eye who doesn’t come from Southern California?”
“I know. I sometimes have the same problem.”
I ask about his average day.
“It may not inspire you with confidence.”
“But I can’t take my business anyplace else, can I? Especially when you’ve just bought me a toothbrush and washcloth. Did Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe ever do as much for any of their clients?”
So he mentions process-serving. Debt-collecting. Surveillance work. Investigating cases of pilfering for a company which doesn’t want to call in the police. Carrying out a lot of grindingly tedious research. “I’m not sure what’s average. Certainly not becoming involved with missing heiresses and stumbling upon fraud and ancient unsuspected murder. Probably just sitting in the office and hoping for business.”
“Like this afternoon?”
“Like this afternoon. Your timing was impeccable.”
I ask him other things, more personal things. “No,” he says, “no wife nor family. Obviously I’ve never met the right girl. Not yet.”
However, although his tone is light, I get the feeling he’d rather not talk about his private life. Well, fair enough.
We listen to Elgar and drink Scotch while waiting for the supper to be done; he’s boiling some potatoes and has put the contents of two packets of Lean Cuisine into the oven: fillets of cod with broccoli in a white sauce. He’s also put some Riesling in the fridge.
After supper we channel-hop: half-watch, amongst other things, ten minutes of a programme on Pirandello. I scarcely take in any of it, but Tom says, “Sometimes I feel I might be a character in search of an author. Or may have existence only in the minds of others.” He smiles at me. “God knows how the world works!” he says.
One thing is fairly certain. He’s drunk far more of the wine than I have. I go to bed quite early.
This could be a mistake. For the first time in several hours I’m alone with all the haunting speculation. Just what is it, exactly, I’m so anxious to forget?
Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. Maybe I’m a guy with a broken marriage, a failed career, a smashed ambition; with a terminal illness, a kidnapped child, a dead wife. Maybe I’m wanted by the police. Wanted on a charge of tax evasion, drunken driving, manslaughter, murder…
Surprisingly, I eventually manage to sleep.
Tom wakes me with a cup of tea.
“And…?” He sounds too eager. “Has anything come back?”
“You mean, anything apart from ‘I tort I taw a puddy tat’ or ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows’?” This morning I’m finding it hard to hide a growing note of bitterness.
But he ignores it. “Do you want to shower before or after breakfast? And how do you like your eggs?”
While we’re eating he says:
“About that snapshot. During the night I had an idea. Suppose your father was over here in the war? Long before he thought of marrying your mother he met this English girl. The war ended and they lost touch. But now, when he heard that you were coming to London, he asked you to try to trace he
r.”
“Why?”
“Nostalgia, perhaps?”
“Yes, but I mean if he cared that much why didn’t he come himself? The guy’s had forty-five years in which to look for his little buttercup.”
“What I’m saying is—suddenly he has this strong desire to take stock; to come to terms with his past.”
“And this is the sort of thing you’d get your son to do for you?”
“Depends,” says Tom. “Whenever he’s here himself he’s probably with your mother. And maybe it’s something you could speak of more easily to your son.”
“Well, I don’t know… I don’t know if I buy that.”
“It’s just a theory.”
After a moment, though, I give a shrug and do my damnedest not to sound perverse. “And I suppose it’s the only one we have. Okay, then. Why not?”
Tom stirs his coffee. “Actually I’m hoping there could be another woman somewhere. A bit more contemporary.”
“Meaning a wife?”
“A wife or partner. Anyone who—by this time—might have raised the alarm.”
I pause in the act of buttering toast. My God, I’m a bastard! (And perhaps that’s why I’ve got amnesia: simple self-disgust.) Oh, yes, I’ve certainly wondered what sort of wife I may have left behind. But up to now I haven’t thought there could be someone not so very far away who’s maybe feeling desperate; who, apart from having a missing husband, could be seriously unsure of how everything operates in a strange country—could be worried about funds—could be encumbered by a worried child, or even worried children. Oh, Christ! I’ve been thinking only of myself.
My possible wife, child, children, parents…presumably I have parents, who at some point will need to be notified? All these begin to acquire, not faces, not personalities, but at least some sort of real and suffering existence. No longer simply adjuncts.
I also start to wonder about my father and that girl.
4
At last it’s Sunday morning!
And at any minute now I shall be seeing him!
But, heck, I was being far too optimistic, hoping to do so yesterday, hoping to contrive two Saturdays off in a row.
Quite late into the evening, in fact, I was still busy with my milking after what would have been, in the normal way, a dreary day of weeding and hoeing and muck-raking—dreary, I mean, if I hadn’t had this morning to anticipate, plus the bliss of a soak in the Crawfords’ own bathtub to wash away not only the grime but the smell: muck-raking is a chore which permeates! (And, shamelessly, I had every intention of ignoring—for once—those regulatory five inches.)
At any rate he’d been easy to contact at Halesworth and very understanding about the necessary change in plan; we must have spoken for over half an hour, which in itself made up a little for the lost day. (He’d rung me back, after the first set of pips.) Though even after half an hour I’d found it difficult to say goodbye. On the other hand, this hadn’t prevented my cycling away from the box in the village singing at the top of my voice and speeding down hills—well, slopes!—with my feet off the pedals and my hands off the handlebars.
His voice had sounded just so nice; and his conversation had been so easy and so civilized. We’d even mentioned Shakespeare’s birthday, which had fallen on the previous Monday. And there, as Trixie would have said, there was culture for you!
Because although I like the people I mix with—they’re kind and helpful and I learn from them some fascinating lore—their talk is never what you’d call relaxing, mainly on account of the dialect; and with our German prisoner-of-war it’s not merely the dialect, it’s the whole wretched language barrier; we smile and nod and mime (and the mime often makes us giggle) but it’s not a conversation. Trixie of course is usually full of chat, yet recently she’s been thoroughly moody, since she too had planned on having yesterday off and not all her wheedling could accomplish it. (“I’ll do a bunk!” she’d said “To hell with them!” But her ‘bunk’ didn’t take place till nearly nine o’clock last night, when anyway she was perfectly free to go. However, she ran out waving her crimson-painted fingernails—not so much in farewell as to get them dry—and it was the bounciest I’d seen her since the previous Sunday. “Now don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Roz!” Followed, naturally, by its inseparable and very boring rider.)
And now I’m feeling pretty bouncy myself, waiting in the lane and savouring the smell arising from the earth, the gossamer on grass and hedges, the stillness which surrounds me: a stillness only deepened by the gentle cry of a ringed plover—or is it perhaps a stone curlew? Savouring, too, the sheer pleasure of my yellow coat.
This, a Christmas present from my mother (the kindest mother imaginable: she must have used up every coupon she could save, swap, steal or scavenge), is fastened with a tie belt and a single button at the neck and has a nice jaunty swing to it. Because I haven’t worn it very often it still feels special. With that and my best frock—actually the one I was wearing last weekend, which is a bit of a shame but can’t be helped, a print of green leaves on a white background, eye-catching without being gaudy—with those and my leather gloves, classic black shoes, Jacqmar headscarf and carefully painted legs (it was Amy Crawford who drew the line down the back for me, taking a lot more trouble than Trixie ever does), I feel today that Vogue is more my spiritual home than Picture Post. I wonder if this will instantly occur to Matt. Will he draw up, jump down, give a deeply felt whistle and sigh for his disloyal abandonment of Rita Hayworth? Poor Rita Hayworth.
Amazingly, he doesn’t. He jumps down from the jeep all right but forgets to give that whistle. And although he tells me I look nice, he adds far too soon for someone genuinely dumbfounded that he hopes he hasn’t kept me waiting.
“No, you’re extremely punctual. You had no trouble finding us?” It’s been a journey of some twenty miles.
He shakes his head…a bit absently? (Certainly he doesn’t appear to be dumbfounded; but is it merely wishful thinking that makes me see a look that might be construed—very loosely—as appreciative?) “All I had to do was follow your excellent instructions.”
“And your still more excellent Ordnance Survey?”
He grins. “Well, that helped a bit.”
“I hear they’re talking about starting to replace the signposts.”
“Oh, where’s their spirit of adventure?”
I observe drily that I’d better call him Marco Polo; or Dr Livingstone if he’d prefer. He glances at the sky. Pulls up the collar of his raincoat.
“Better call me Scott of the Antarctic! What happened to all that warmth we had a week ago?”
“And just now you sounded so courageous. Don’t let me think that, after all, they breed them lily-livered in Connecticut! Oh, but talking of which…”
We are going to spend the day in Cambridge—yet I’m wondering if, before that, he’d be interested to see Groton. John Winthrop, the man who became an early governor of Connecticut, was born in Groton.
“I’ve been doing my homework for you.” And, yes, it’s almost as if I’m getting ready for some test. “John Winthrop sailed for North America in 1630, on board the Arabella, along with seven hundred Puritans, two hundred cows and sixty horses. However, by the time the ship reached Massachusetts Bay, two hundred of the immigrants had died at sea—well, either at sea or shortly after landing. Then another hundred decided to return to England.”
We are still standing in the lane—a lane that’s twisting and leafy, full of cowpats and tractor ruts.
“Those, I’d say, were definitely the lily-livered ones!” He nods, decisively.
“You think so? After the voyage out I’m not so sure they mightn’t have been called the braver element…no matter how base. And, by the way, seventy of the animals had died as well.”
“Thank you for doing your homework. And you’re right, I’d sure be glad to see where it began. In New London County there’s a town called Groton that was named for Winthrop’s birthplace. But I didn’t re
alize he came from round here.” He adds after a moment: “Come to think of it, how did you?”
I tell him that when he’d spoken of Connecticut last Saturday, something had stirred at the back of my mind. But I hadn’t been able to pinpoint it.
“Gee, I’m impressed.”
“Gee, I’m pleased that you’re impressed. Actually I’m quite impressed too. Well, let’s face it: it is impressive.”
Yet first, even before Groton, I want to show him Polstead.
So we get in the jeep, which is fun, I’ve never ridden in a jeep before (although later it will prove a little cold) and off we drive to Polstead. There I show him the pond where witches used to undergo their trial by ordeal and into which somebody, allegedly spellbound, once drove a coach and four horses. The site must have been a bit jinxed: by the early nineteenth century there were so many ghosts roaming about it that an exorcism came to be thought desirable. But poor Reverend Whitmore could have been a forbear of Will Hay: after death he was himself seen driving a horse and trap along the lane to the rectory—and presumably not a man to be outdone by anyone, it was claimed that he was headless.
“Headless?” cries Matt. “My God! But why?”
“Obviously an arch-bungler.”
“Then how was he identified? Was his head sitting there on the seat beside him? Wasn’t there a danger it might roll off?”
“I think you have a gruesome streak.”
“What tosh!” (More British than the British but I don’t at this point comment.)
“And if you have”—I give a kindly smile—“in Polstead we can pander to it.”
“That’s nice.” He asks if I believe in ghosts.
We have left the jeep at the bottom of the hill and are now walking up a pleasant footpath to the top of it, from where I want him to see what must be one of the prettiest village greens in England.
“I don’t know. I certainly believe in an afterlife—in the survival of the spirit—if that’s of any help.”
Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart Page 2