The Red Oak (The Searight Saga Book 3)

by Rupert Colley

  ‘You never talk about your brother. He was older than you, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, only by about two years.’

  ‘Did you get on?’

  ‘You mean Clarence and me? Yes, we got on. Clarence was always the golden boy; he could do no wrong. My father never kept it secret that Clarence was his favourite. And that was the problem, the thing that blighted my whole childhood and my relationship with my father. It wasn’t Clarence’s fault, it wasn’t as if he tried to curry my father’s affection; in fact, he used to try and stick up for me. But you see, Father adored Clarence. People would ask him how Clarence and Robert were getting on, and it was always Clarence is doing this and Clarence did that. And how about Robert, they’d ask. Oh, Robert, well, he’s just Robert. He never beat me or anything, I was just ignored. Sometimes the only times he’d talk to me was when I’d done something wrong.

  ‘And Clarence was undoubtedly good at things – he was naturally clever, good at school and good at sports which counted for a lot with my father. The only sport I was any good at was the high jump, and that was only because I was unusually tall for my age, but Father didn’t really consider that a proper sport. I remember one sports day at school – Clarence got second place in the hundred-yard dash, but I got first place in the high jump. My mother was thrilled for me, but Father? No, it was “just” the high jump after all, hardly counted. Perhaps he gave me a half-hearted “well done”, I can’t remember, but the real praise was for Clarence, beaten only by a boy a good half-foot taller than him. I suppose the hundred yards has more clout, doesn’t it?

  ‘And then the war came. 1939. Clarence and I joined up – the merchant navy. He signed up to be an officer. I had a job in a bank; I didn’t want to make a career out of being a sailor so I was happy to remain a lowly seaman. Then Clarence got himself killed – I was there. Our ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat. I’d been granted some extended leave and I returned home to a little cottage in a Devonian village which Clarence and I shared. I went to visit my parents. I’d lost a lot of weight so I’d starting wearing some of my brother’s clothes. Clarence had been killed a few weeks beforehand. I just walked straight into the drawing room and Father, although he was expecting me, had dozed off. I made him jump. He saw the jacket, Clarence’s jacket, and for a moment his eyes lit up, and in that moment I saw something in Father’s eyes I’d never seen before. Of course, he thought I was Clarence, didn’t he? And then he realised it was just me, just old Robert, and the disappointment was too much.’

  Robert paused and looked down; his eyes damp and carefully focussed on the remote control. ‘I suppose after the war I thought things would be different. We made up but I was still never able to compete – not with Clarence the martyr. I left the navy and moved to London, married your lovely mother and got a new job in another bank. For years, I rarely saw my parents. I felt very bitter, you know, knowing as I did that in my father’s eyes the wrong son had been killed.’

  ‘Heck, Dad, that’s one hell of a thing to say.’

  ‘I know, I know. Funny thing is though, that during his last few years, and after my mother died, his attitude slowly changed. Alec was a baby. Perhaps having given him a grandchild, he sort of finally accepted me. Of course, he never got over Clarence’s death but perhaps in those last few years, he felt the need to make peace with me. I was, after all, his only remaining child. It was still painful though, seeing him as a grandfather reminded me of how he was with Clarence. He died just before you were born – the same year.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘I know.’

  Robert took another sip of his tea and placed the mug carefully back on the occasional table. ‘Didn’t like that at all,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ve never told anyone about all this, you know. Your mother knows my father and I didn’t get on, but she doesn’t know the full extent of it.’

  ‘You never thought of telling her?’

  ‘No, there’d be no point now. You see, I always saw it as a failing in me. Not the sort of thing one wants to brag about.’

  ‘Your father – he was called Lawrence, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So presumably, Guy was his brother.’

  ‘Actually, no. Like I said, Guy had a brother, but Lawrence was his cousin. But we called him Uncle Guy, or sometimes Uncle Hobbly, because of his leg.’

  Tom laughed. ‘Did he mind you calling him Uncle Hobbly?’

  ‘No. He was always very decent to me and Clarence. You know, after my experience I was always very careful not to show any favouritism between you and Alec.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘I should’ve got a couple of medals.’

  ‘Really, what for?’

  ‘My time in the navy. Just a war medal and something called the 39 – 45 star. Fairly routine stuff. Never claimed them though.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Well, just the two medals by themselves, lowly ones at that, I just thought it’d look a bit silly, especially next to all the men with their rows of war medals. Uncle Hobbly got a few, including the DCM.’

  ‘Is that good?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I’d say. It’s a gallantry medal, Distinguished Conduct Medal, he did something to deserve it, but what, I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to ask.’

  Tom suddenly thought of an idea. ‘Dad, is it too late to claim your medals now?’

  ‘Of course it is. We’re talking almost sixty years here.’

  Tom was wondering how one went about claiming an overdue medal when his mother reappeared.

  ‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘turned the TV off then.’

  Robert looked at Tom. It’d been the first time they’d made eye contact since Robert began his sorry tale. A flicker of acknowledgement passed between them and Tom understood it perfectly. He’d just been allowed access into part of his father’s life that no one had ever ventured into before and he felt touched at the thought.

  His mother grinned. ‘Fancy another pot of tea either of you?’

  Chapter 8: The Unforgiving Sea

  Robert lay in bed. Alice was already fast asleep, her gentle breathing the only sound bar the branches of the trees rustling outside in the wind. The hands of the luminous clock showed half eleven. Tom’s visit and his talk about the past troubled him. The past was a place he never voluntarily ventured to, but increasingly, as the years passed, he found his mind drifting back. Often, as he lay in bed, he’d hear their voices, usually just for a minute or two before sleep claimed him. But tonight, following Tom’s visit, he knew they’d be waiting for him – all of them. He knew resistance was pointless; he might as well resign himself to hours without sleep. A streak of moonlight filtered through the gap in the bedroom curtains. He heard a flurry of feline activity as a couple of cats got into a tangle, a yelp and a screech and it was done. He smiled. Silly things. And then it came – the sound that had accompanied his nocturnal wanderings for so many years – the lapping of water against the boat. June 1944. A German submarine. A torpedo. The ship sinking, plunging into the abyss, taking so many lives with it, his brother among them. But it was rarely Clarence he thought about; instead he remembered the ten of them on that lifeboat drifting for days on end aimlessly on the Indian Ocean. And that sun, that cruel, unrelenting sun, the cold, cold nights, the unforgiving sea. They knew, all ten of them, that without sufficient food and water, they were vulnerable but they had hope – hope that rescue would soon come. And hope, as every man knows, is a huge provider of strength. But like an early morning mist on a summer’s day, hope soon evaporated. The first day passed, the second, the third. He saw them in his mind, the ten of them, his younger self included, standing together, wearing only their baggy navy-supply shorts, arms round each other, friends together like a team of footballers. They are smiling, some are flexing their muscles, playing up for the camera in Robert’s memory, others sharing a cigarette, but all smiling. The youngest was John Clair, only a boy, jet-black hair, tall, lanky and a
wkward, as only teenagers can be. Robert remembered the boy asking, ‘Are we almost there yet?’, his voice as soft as a nervous child. He never got over the trauma of the sinking. He called for his mother, and dreamt of home-cooked dinners, mutton and spuds. He was the first to go, the day of his nineteenth birthday. Second Mate Miles Hodgkin was the most senior man on the boat, so naturally, he took command. His wife, back in the Lake District, was pregnant. Robert could remember him waking up on one of the last days, declaring that his wife had given birth – he could feel it in his bones. And on that same day, he was murdered by Beckett.

  After the war, Robert planned to seek out the relatives all those who perished on that boat. Armed with addresses given to him by a navy clerk in Woolwich, he started by finding Hodgkin’s widow. He paused outside a flat in a Tottenham housing estate in London, and had to fight the urge to turn tail and run. It was June 1948. She came to the door, a little girl clinging on to her skirt, sucking her thumb. She was a slight woman, her features drawn, her hair wrapped up beneath a headscarf. She eyed him suspiciously while using her foot to prevent a ginger cat from escaping. ‘Yes, what do you want?’ she asked him brusquely.

  ‘Who is it?’ he heard a man shout from within the flat.

  ‘Mrs Hodgkin? Hello, I sorry to disturb you. My name–’

  ‘Just a salesman, Ted,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘It’s not Hodgkin any more.’

  ‘Oh yes, right.’

  ‘If you’re looking for my first husband, he’s dead. Now, if you don’t mind...’

  ‘I know, it’s just that–’ He glanced at the girl and felt a sudden pang in his throat – she had her father’s eyes, the same colour, the same intensity.

  The woman gripped the girl’s hand more firmly. ‘Look,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t know what you want but I’m not interested.’ She stepped back, about to close the door.

  ‘I knew your husband.’ She paused a moment and considered him, her eyes penetrating his. ‘I was with him when.... when–’

  ‘I told you – I’m not interested.’

  The silhouetted figure of the man appeared behind her a second before she slammed the door shut.

  ‘Who was that?’ he heard him ask.

  He stared at the door, its green paint flaking off, the copper letterbox smudged by years of fingerprints. And he stepped away.

  He lay in his bed, clinging onto his duvet, trying to shake the memory from his mind. He never worked out what he hoped to achieve by visiting the relatives. He fancied they’d appreciate knowing that someone, him, was with their loved ones at their ends. But he felt so sullied by Hodgkin’s widow and her distrusting expression and her anxious tone, he never tried it again. That girl would be sixty now. He wondered if she ever knew that the man called Ted was not her father, that she had a real dad who’d died on a lifeboat. Too bad Hodgkin hadn’t been able to slip away like John Clair and many of the others; too bad that Harris Beckett took a knife to his throat. He’d hated Beckett for years, hoped he’d found himself in Hell where he undeniably belonged. But with time he came to see that Beckett had been as much as a victim as the rest of them. The man had been a carpenter back home in Cardiff when the war had snatched him away. He dreamt of starting all over again. But he never got back. Instead, the waters of the Indian Ocean claimed him, as it did with all of them – all except Robert Searight.

  The time was almost one o’clock.

  Being back at home in Devon was difficult. He’d been welcomed home as a hero – everyone knew he’d survived the sinking. Why, he’d even been greeted back with bunting and fanfares and a party and a speech. But once the bunting had come down, once everyone had returned home, he never felt so alone. No one wanted to know, no one understood. Least of all, his parents. The death of their older son had hit them hard, naturally. He remembered too well returning to his parental home, that morning in July 1944. The first thing his mother, Mary, asked was what day Clarence had died – she didn’t know. Did it matter, he wondered, it was just a date. But of course it did matter; we all need to know where to put the final full stop. Second June 1944, he told her. That was the date the German torpedoes had smashed into the Academic, destroying her in the time it takes to eat one’s dinner. That was where Clarence met his end, engulfed in a ball of flames. He found his father napping in the drawing room, the curtains drawn. Robert had lost weight over the course of his ordeal, hence his wearing a jacket that had belonged to his brother. His presence was enough to stir his father, who, squinting, opened his eyes on sensing a figure before him. ‘Clarence? Clarence, is that you?’

  Feeling sickened, Robert said, ‘No, Father, it’s me, Robert.’

  ‘No, it can’t be,’ said his father with a nervous laugh. ‘Don’t be daft. Oh, God, I thought... Oh my, it’s you. Oh, my Lord. Clarence, Clarence, Clarence...’

  His mother came in, saw the distress in her husband’s slumped figure, saw the anguish in her son’s eyes. ‘Lawrence,’ she said, ‘it’s not Clarence; it’s Robert.’

  Sixty years on, Robert would still tremble as his father looked at him with a fury within his eyes. ‘I can bloody well see who it is. It’s Robert. Welcome back.’

  Over the years, he’d slowly come to terms with the ordeal on the boat, of losing his brother and so much more. But it was that one moment, the moment he realized that in his father’s view, the wrong son had survived, that had tormented him day after day, day after day. And still.

  The only person who could relate to his experience was his uncle, Guy Searight. He saw him occasionally over the years. Guy had fought in the Great War, had lost a leg and, like him, had survived a sinking ship and, again like him, had lost a brother. He too had fired his rifle in anger, he too had seen men mangled for life by war, had seen young men slaughtered in their prime. Lawrence, his father, had never seen action. Guy and his wife, Josephine, had settled near his parents in the Devonian countryside. Guy, bless him, had lived to a ripe old age. Robert went to see him in his final days. It was October 1966, Guy had just turned 78. But he was delicate, having already suffered two heart attacks.

  ‘The next one will finish me off,’ he told Robert at that final meeting.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Uncle.’

  He was sitting in his living room, propped up on several cushions, with his black Labrador, Wilkins, at his feet. He looked pale, had lost some weight, but otherwise looked his usual jolly self, loose strands of hair scraped over his head, his tortoise-shell glasses perched on the end of his nose. It was a cosy space – low beamed ceilings, decorative brass rubbings on wooden pillars, a thick carpet. It reminded Robert of a country pub. The autumnal sun shone through the net curtains, giving the place an almost ethereal feel. Josephine came in bearing tea and cake, refusing Robert’s offer of help.

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ said Guy. ‘We all have to go sometime. And I’ve had more time on this earth than many I’ve known.’ His eyes drifted away.

  Josephine and Robert exchanged glances. They knew whom he was thinking of, his younger brother, Jack, killed in action exactly a year before the war ended – 11th November 1917.

  ‘Don’t get all maudlin, Guy,’ said Josephine in her lilting Irish accent. ‘You don’t want to be depressing Robert.’

  ‘Hmm? Sorry. You’re quite right. Oh, not so much milk, Jo.’

  ‘Now, I’ll leave you boys to it.’

  ‘Thanks for the tea, auntie.’

  ‘Robert, you’re quite the old man yourself. You don’t have to call me auntie.’

  ‘Leave him be. He likes to.’

  It was true – he did.

  Guy reached down and patted Wilkins as he watched Josephine leave, straightening a framed painting on the wall as she left.

  And so it was that Robert and Guy drank their tea, nibbled on a biscuit or two and talked. They talked children, grandchildren and holidays, they talked medal collecting, cars and lawn mowers, they talked dogs, inflation and football, after all, it was 1966, England had just won the World Cup
. But they didn’t talk about war, either war, they didn’t talk about brothers or fathers. Robert wanted to. He wanted to ask about Jack, about the uncle who’d been killed before he’d been born. But he couldn’t; couldn’t bring himself to ask the question.

  The arrival of the post shook Wilkins from his slumber.

  ‘Silly boy,’ said Guy, shaking his head. Wilkins wagged his tail and, trotting up to his master, peered up to see whether there were any biscuits left. Guy obliged. ‘Don’t tell your aunt,’ he said with a wink.

  It was time to go, thought Robert; he’d kept his old uncle talking too long. He’d tired him out.

  ‘Well, Uncle Guy, it’s been lovely seeing you again.’

  ‘And you, Robert. Give my love to Alice.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Robert, listen, I’m... what I mean to say, I’m sorry if I haven’t always been straight with you down the years.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I... I guess... You’ve been a good nephew to me over the years. Perhaps... perhaps you ought to leave before I get all sentimental.’

  Robert smiled, patted the dog.

  He never saw his uncle again. Guy Searight did suffer a third heart attack, and, like he predicted, this one proved fatal. Aged 80, Guy Searight, veteran of the First World War, recipient of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, died on 1 December 1966.

  Chapter 9: The Presentation

  Friday, the day of the presentation, and Tom felt nervous. He had only a ten-minute slot, but he was all too aware that the new library was to be the centrepiece of the council’s multi-layered and multi-faceted leisure complex. The firm had one hour with which to present its case. Claudette would open and conclude the presentation, and in between the Project or Assistant Project Managers each had a slot starting with Clive Doherty’s proposal for the theatre – a piece of cake compared to the library, thought Tom.