‘I’ve told you. She was like Bea, working with the other ladies to get the aeroplanes ready.’
‘What was my other Mummy like?’
‘As beautiful as the loveliest princess you’ve ever seen.’
‘Like Bea?’
‘Yes, that’s right. As beautiful as Bea.’
‘And are they coming to get me one day?’
‘Who?’
‘My other Mummy and Daddy.’
‘No, little friend. I don’t think they’ll be doing that.’
*
It went dark. The stars came out and the canopy of Garth Woods trembled in the gentlest of night winds. A farm dog barked and beyond the soughing trees, the waters of Pigs’ Brook ran black over its cobbled bed. All of nature seemed subdued.
‘Come on, Francis. Let’s play a game.’
‘All right. What game shall we play?’
‘Cowboys and Indians.’
‘Good. Got your bow and arrow?’
‘Yes. Have you got your gun?’
‘It’s right here. Now, I’m counting to fifty then I’ll be after you.’
‘No you won’t. I’ll get you first.’
‘We’ll see – one, two, three, four...’
Now he is running and slapping his thigh like he’s on a horse and dodging the bullets of the white man’s six-shooter. All his senses are heightened and he can smell the mushroom rot of decaying beech and the musk of ferns as he slides into a hollow by the muddy brown banks of the stream. He is panting for breath from the hard ride but no one will find him here. The stream is a roaring torrent cascading down from the high mountains where his Indian braves are trapped unless he can escape. He crawls on his front and sees the white man getting nearer. But he is not alone. There is another man with him. A stranger. He cannot make out his face. The sun’s in his eyes. But they are closing in and they have both got guns. He must get to safety.
Yet the day is so hot. He stops and looks again. There is nobody there... only insects, floating amid the grains of pollen and thistle seeds drifting between the meadow sweet and moon daisies, all swaying in the soft, warm wind and lulling him to sleep and dream.
Then there is a shot – a gun shot, so loud, so near that it echoes inside his skull and explodes out of his eyes. There is another and he does not know where he is, only that he is lying in a field of corn... a field of corn swaying with poppies.
Deep, red poppies with petals that drip and soak into the bloody earth.
*
Everywhere, there was Francis. A fingerprint in the dust on a shelf, the hint of fading aftershave, strands of silvery hair caught forensically in the teeth of his ebony black comb. McCall could hardly bear to look. He untied the files Fewtrell gave him – more boxes of film, more documents.
McCall felt himself sinking between fatigue and inertia, wanting no more reminders of what he was soon to lose. He would stay in the dacha overnight, a vigil of sorts, stretched out between Francis’s two old armchairs.
Tomorrow, there would be Evie.
He switched off the desk lamp. The blackness was sudden and total and he knocked into the table. Fewtrell’s box files banged to the floor. McCall found the light switch and started collecting up the fallen papers – accounts from tradesmen, carbon copies of Foreign Office reports, old passports belonging to Bea and Francis. There was also a block of five cheque book stubs, held together by an elastic band so perished it snapped when he touched it.
These were from Francis’s Number Two Account at the District Bank in Castle Street, Shrewsbury. McCall flicked through them. They covered the period from just after he was born in September 1946 till June 1950. Francis had made payments every week – sometimes more often – starting at £4, rising to £7. Each stub was dated and detailed in his scrivener’s hand.
The payee was always the same – McCall’s mother, Elizabeth.
Chapter Nineteen
Evie saw McCall from the approaching train, alone against the platform railings in a waxed jacket and jeans, thin body closed against the world and lacking its usual insouciance.
She was coming to understand the depth of McCall’s depressive side. It lay hidden in grief unappeased since childhood. A shrink would call it attachment loss. The fear of losing Francis was disinterring what had been buried and long forgotten.
McCall clung to her as they kissed. He needed a shave – and a haircut. They went hand-in-hand through the narrow shuts between Ludlow Station and The Feathers for a Saturday lunch of beef casserole. At least he was eating... even if he was not saying much.
Bea had gone to visit Francis by the time McCall and Evie arrived back at Garth. It was a cold, clear day and a tide of bluebells washed through the woods to the door of Francis’s dacha. Evie wanted to look inside. It smelled of creosote, wood ash gone damp and a faint hint of the brilliantine her own father sometimes used. On the shelves were internal Foreign Office reports she suspected should never have left Whitehall.
McCall seemed preoccupied as he lit the little stove and made coffee. Evie sensed he had something to tell her, something he needed her to hear. She waited for him to break the silence.
‘I don’t know why but I think Bea and Francis have been lying to me.’
‘Lying to you? In what way?’
‘About my mother and father.’
He told her of Edward McCall being in the wedding footage they had kept from him, how Francis sent his mother cheques but Bea denied Elizabeth had ever been to Garth – despite what Mrs Bishop now said.
‘But McCall, these are all elderly people. They’re not well, they get things mixed up in their minds after all these years.’
‘Yeah, I know, but I think there’s something more to it – ‘
‘– only because you’re down in the dumps at the moment. You’re only seeing the black side of everything.’
Evie got him to rig up the Eumig. She wanted to see Arcadia herself, to witness Bea’s wartime marriage, its beauty and simplicity and the dead being resurrected. Neither spoke for the four minutes it lasted. Then McCall laced in the seaside reel – him as a boy playing cricket, Francis and Bea dancing a can-can. Evie felt herself being pulled ever closer into these stories she did not fully understand.
‘How fascinating, McCall – starring in your own life. Do you feel any connection to that kid on the screen?’
‘I know it must be me but I don’t know who I am, if you can understand.’
‘That’s your trouble, isn’t it... not knowing?’
‘Yes... I look at these people and they’re all strangers.’
‘Don’t you remember that day?’
‘No. It’s fallen between the cracks. If Francis hadn’t taken his cine camera everywhere, I’d have nothing of it in my mind.’
‘So you don’t remember who else must have been with you at the seaside?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s a sequence where all three of you are shown together. There must have been a fourth person to operate the camera.’
“Probably just someone passing by.”
They walked back to Garth and Evie told him again he needed to find his real family and put them to rest – as he would have to with Francis before long.
‘You’ve got to do what you’re afraid of, McCall... start digging up the past.’
What she left unsaid was her fear that if he didn’t, depression would stalk the rest of his life, just as it had done with the husband she had so recently left.
*
If photographs cannot lie, neither do they reveal the entire truth.
A shutter closes on an instant of existence and those captured within become their own little mystery. Beyond the frame and out of shot, what tensions, what secrets lie between them? McCall examined the blow-up he’d had made of the tiny Box Brownie print Mrs Bishop sent him all those years before. This was the only image of his mother, the only evidence of his otherness.
He had no recollection of voice or scent or touch connecting h
im to her. Francis said she had been artistic like Edward. But of her origins or relatives, he knew nothing, still less of the lottery of attraction that led to McCall’s creation. Elizabeth stood between the sunshine and the shade, a pace apart from her Edward. She was attractive not beautiful. Just doing her best. Her eyes were dark like her son’s but subdued, allowing no hint of emotion.
McCall looked at the belly wherein he would have grown, the breasts that had fed him, the hands which once held him close. All her clothes were mismatched and shabby like Mrs Bishop’s church fête cast-offs. Her coat was missing some buttons and the open blouse beneath looked creased and needing to be ironed. The poverty of it all saddened him. No wonder Francis sent her money.
As McCall stared into the enlargement of his mother’s lost face, so he slowly began to realise hers were the features he had crawled across like an insect in the desert in that recurring nightmare of childhood. He recognised at last that this was the unmapped landscape of his infant subconscious, a place of fear without end that he had never understood then – and still didn’t.
Evie took the picture from him. She allowed herself the gentlest of smiles. McCall’s mother had been as impoverished as her own. There was comfort of sorts in that.
*
The sea beyond the register office at Weston-super-Mare churned brown and a salty breeze pulled at the plastic macs of trippers making pilgrimages from one gimcrack entertainment to another. It was a vulgar, dismal place. McCall and Evie waited their turn to see the duty clerk.
When she came, McCall said he wanted copies of his parents’ death certificates and gave their details. The woman went through the 1950 register.
‘You’re sure that’s the year they died?’
‘Yes, in June or July.’
‘I’m sorry but we’ve no entries for anyone called McCall dying in 1950.’
‘That can’t be right. That’s when they died.’
‘I’ll look again but – ’
‘– it was a road accident... near Churchill. That’s in your patch, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but there’s nothing about people of that name dying then.’
This did not make sense. Bea and Francis became his guardians soon after his parents were killed. That is what they had always told him. The crash happened about three months before his fourth birthday. He still had Bea and Francis’s card – a golliwog riding a toy train with a big red number 4 on the front. It was in his memory box.
‘I’ll try the registers for1949 and ’51 just in case.’
But they were blank, too. Evie suggested they check McCall’s local newspaper story about the accident. The cutting Francis had given him was undated but torn from the Weston Mercury & Somersetshire Herald. They went through the town library’s bound copies for 1950. The paper was an old fashioned weekly broadsheet with a gothic masthead and a front page of classified adverts for whist drives, faith healers and ex-soldiers offering to dig gardens. Not a single road fatality occurred anywhere in the Herald’s circulation area that year.
In the twelve months either side, a boy was knocked off his bike and died and a farm worker got crushed under a tractor. These were tragedies but not the ones McCall wanted to read. His unease grew.
Both the cutting and McCall’s birth certificate gave his family address as Mendip Cottage, Churchill. The village was ten miles inland, straddling a crossroads beneath a wooded escarpment. The post office was closed but a woman mailing a letter said the postman always had lunch at The Crown.
They found the pub at the bottom of a stone track rising over a hill pitted with old lime workings and colonised by scrubby trees, bent by the winds from the Bristol Channel. The postman sat smoking a pipe in a corner seat. He remembered Mendip Cottage but said it had been pulled down long since and a new house built on the site.
‘Wasn’t fit for pigs to live in, that hole.’
‘Did you know the people who lived there around 1950?’
‘Can’t say I did, no.’
‘They were called Edward and Elizabeth McCall. He’d been in the RAF during the war... in bombers.’
‘No. Lots of people lived in that place at one time or another.’
‘But this couple were killed... in a car crash, here in Churchill.’
McCall put his Herald cutting on the table in front of them. The postman read it and shook his head.
‘I’m born and bred here and I never knowed anything of this.’
He told McCall how to get to where the cottage had stood, along a back lane to a farm, a mile away. The new place was called Mendip House and had a conservatory full of cane furniture and pot plants. Whatever humble signs of habitation McCall’s parents might have left had disappeared. He and Evie stood at the white wicket gate, trying to work out where Mrs Bishop’s photograph would have been taken. A woman in her late sixties and dressed for gardening came from a greenhouse and asked what they wanted. He showed her the picture of himself as a baby with the parents he never knew. She softened and invited him to look round.
‘Bits of the old cottage are still visible.’
They followed her to an orchard of leggy apple trees hung with ivy. Close by, McCall could see the archaeological remains of his family home... a bumpy outline of grassed-over foundations like those of a hovel in a village emptied by plague.
He stepped into where the two main ground floor rooms had been. They were lawns now, with circular rose beds and a wooden bench on a square of red clay tiles by where the chimney once stood. McCall thought how small it was... so cramped and mean and damp. Yet this was his first world, the place where he would have learned to walk and run to the people in the photograph who would have picked him up and felt joy that he was theirs.
He tried to imagine his mother preparing meals here or his father framing the pictures Francis said he painted so well. But McCall’s own canvas had neither shapes nor colours. Only the cottage’s lean-to scullery remained intact under a roof of orange pantiles. McCall put his hand to the thumb latch of the door, worn smooth by those long gone.
The woman went inside and brought back a photograph of the original cottage, derelict and abandoned. The windows were covered over by sheets of corrugated iron and the front door nailed up with planks.
The caption underneath read: Mendip Cottage June 1949.
McCall looked closely and said the date could not be accurate. The woman bridled slightly.
‘I can assure you it is because we moved into the new house in the June of 1950.’
‘No, that’s the month when my parents were killed.’
‘I’ll show you our deeds if you want.’
‘But that’s when we were living in Mendip Cottage... the three of us.’
‘You can’t have done. It was already demolished and the stone used for this house.’
McCall looked at Evie, unable to understand how twelve months of his life story had gone missing. She had no explanation, either.
*
McCall still had not figured out sex. Not properly. You search and find, couple up and pleasure away, panting and promising. It is all a lie but your fingers are crossed so it doesn’t matter. Then it is over. You wash and dress and do something else till the next time. What did it truly mean? McCall knew what it was supposed to mean but that was with her. To have died in those moments after... those moments after with Helen, that would not have been so bad. But she had been crossing her fingers so where did that leave him? He hardly knew anymore. Now, on his back in a cheap seaside guest-house and holding onto the iron bars of a strange bed, he didn’t much care, either. It was not Evie’s fault. But as she tried to take him with her lips and her tongue and her little white teeth, he could only lie wounded and damaged like a warrior on the field being finished off by the enemy.
She told him not to worry. It did not matter. It was not important. They drifted away into the night.
*
Think back, McCall... interrogate memory.
He is a child again, in a whea
t field sprinkled with poppies. The flowers wave in the wind, redder than a sunset, back and forth, back and forth. And as they do, so the moist petals are shaken off and fall into the yellowing corn. It seems as if the flowers themselves are bleeding – onto his bare legs, his hands and face and clean white shirt, into the very soil itself. He gets up and runs away to cower in fear in some dark place. The air he breathes smells of decay, of more dying petals and the sweet rot of dead birds and rabbits, tied by their feet to a nail on the wall. Then he sees a long, low box made of pale wood and grown-ups he has never met before who incline their faces to his, mouthing words beyond his understanding.
He wants only to get out, to escape, but there are no doors and his eyes are drawn again to the box that is lifted up and carried away by the strangers. Women kiss him. His cheeks are wet with their tears. Then he is alone in the back of a big car, driving through a place of statues and stones where jackdaws clack and swoop about his head.
And all the time, a voice in his head keeps asking questions.
Who is in the box, little boy?
He doesn’t know.
Tell us... tell us now or we’ll nail you in there instead.
He cannot answer. It is all a flickering newsreel from long ago. Nothing is in the right order so he is adrift in all his memories and the shadows they cast.
Chapter Twenty
‘You’re getting quite friendly with Arie, aren’t you, Francis?’
‘He’s a very intriguing chap and that’s a fact.’
‘How do you mean?’
They are in Garth Woods, clearing brambles and saplings so Francis can build a shack like those the Russians call dachas and live in during weekends in the country. He straightens up and holds the sickle loosely by his side.
‘Well, for a start... to find a man as cultured and urbane as Arie Minsky working hand in glove with a gang of murdering terrorists is intriguing, don’t you think?’
Bea stops what she is doing, exactly as she is meant to. She had already guessed Arie was up to something dubious, dangerous even. But it does not lessen the shock of being told what it is. Francis says he has proof Arie is in the Zionist underground. They have just blown up British military headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and left ninety people dead and many more injured.
A Place Of Strangers Page 12