The Secret Starling

by Judith Eagle

  Clara thought of the ballet shoe they’d found under the floorboards. Christobel must have left it behind when she’d come to close up the house. She’d only been six years older than Clara was now.

  Cook reached across the table and grasped Clara’s small hand in her plump one, warm and comforting and a bit rough in places from years of scrubbing pots and pans. ‘I moved to the village just before Mr S returned and set himself up as lord of the manor – only eleven months old you were. My Burt had just passed away …’

  ‘Our grandad,’ explained Amelia-Ann.

  ‘Babs had moved back in with that littl’un,’ she nodded at Amelia-Ann, ‘and her Tom, who was an absolute terror. Mr S advertised for a housekeeper and he got me. I needed that job.’

  ‘Well, what did he say to you about Christobel?’ Clara burst out.

  Cook took a long breath and squeezed Clara’s hand. ‘Not much, ducks, except that the cause of death was unexplained. It was a mysterious old business. Your uncle told me that Christobel had to keep you secret – something to do with the reputation of the ballet company. Stuff and nonsense, I say.’

  ‘But,’ said Clara, trying to remove her hand from Cook’s, but failing because Cook clung on, ‘why’d you go along with Uncle’s lie? That Christobel died when I was born?’

  Now Cook did release her hand and got up and left the table. There was an extra-loud crash by the sink, and then a sniffle. ‘A condition of the job was my “discretion”. I think that’s what he called it. And that if I gossiped or speculated, he’d sack me. He said it would be easier for you if the past was kept simple, that no child should suffer such uncertainty about their mother’s death.’

  Clara stared at Cook’s back in disbelief. She had thought Cook was her friend!

  ‘Oh! I forgot,’ Cook turned around. ‘There’s been a man in the village asking about you and your uncle. Talked to Mrs Price, he did, in the shop.’

  ‘Nan! Why didn’t you say?’ cried Amelia-Ann.

  ‘I’m sorry, ducks, what with this, that and the other, I haven’t had a minute to collect my thoughts. Now what did Mrs Price say his name was? Ah, that’s it. Jackson something.’

  * * *

  ‘What on earth does that Jackson Smith want?’ said Peter when they were safely on the train to London. Amelia-Ann had taken them to the station on Dapple, all squeezed together in a row. Now it was just the two of them. Stockwell had kicked up such a fuss, hissing and spitting, that Peter had reluctantly agreed to leave her in the care of Luci and Curtis.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Clara said. The carriage was empty and she had her feet up on the opposite seat. She was still smarting at all the secrets Cook had kept from her.

  As the train rumbled towards London, they discussed their plan. They would go straight to the Colindale newspaper library and search for any articles they could find about Christobel. After that, they would go and see Granny. She was getting better, Stella had said, and Peter thought they should ask her advice.

  ‘Stella says!’ said Clara. ‘Do you believe her? She locked us in the turret, Peter.’

  They had barely slept the night before, so for the rest of the journey they dozed and chatted and ate the cheese sandwiches Cook had made for them with doorstep-sized slices of crusty white bread. They played the minister’s cat and I spy, and then Peter showed off, claiming he could name every single ballet that Nureyev had ever danced in: ‘La Sylphide, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle …’

  A bell rang in Clara’s head.

  ‘Giselle!’ she interrupted. How could she have forgotten? ‘That postcard you found on the first day, the one from Rome. It must have been written by Christobel! Have you got it with you?’

  He had. It was folded into a tiny square so that it would fit in his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Sorry it’s a bit creased.’

  Carefully Clara unfolded it. The Colosseum looked very grand, even if half of it was falling down. She turned the postcard over and read the message again.

  ‘Dancing Giselle tonight. Wish me luck x.’

  So her mother had been on good terms with Uncle. She had liked him. Otherwise why would she have written him a card?

  Clara turned her attention to the postage stamp stuck neatly in the right-hand corner. It was pretty, blue, with white boats on it. In the corner was a date. She peered at it. The numbers were very small. But there was no mistaking it. 1966. Clara stared, confused. That wasn’t possible! She, Clara, had been four years old in 1966. And yet Cook had said she had arrived at Braithwaite Manor when she was eleven months old, which would have been 1962. In 1966 her mother was already dead!

  Clara put the postcard in her pocket. It seemed that every time she thought she was getting closer to the truth, something else made it more complicated!

  Either Christobel was sending postcards from beyond the grave, or this was from someone else.

  Chapter Twenty

  If Clara had thought Leeds was busy, she was almost dumbstruck by London. How to describe the enormity of it all when all she had ever known was an eerie quietness reaching for miles and miles, that endless stretch of sky and moor?

  The city was teeming. Teeming with people, buildings, traffic, noise. An endless barrage of sights, sounds, smells; a flickering screen of constantly changing images. Everything was here. Everything! Something caught in Clara’s throat. A sense of – what? Of promise? Fear? Whatever it was, it felt scary and exciting, dangerous and exhilarating. This was where her mother had come to ballet school all those years ago! Had she been bewildered by the hustle and bustle of it all, far, far away from home for the very first time?

  They caught the tube at King’s Cross because the newspaper library was situated in a suburb called NW9, which meant right on the edge of north-west London. The Northern Line would take them all the way there, and then back afterwards, across the city to the south and Kennington, where Peter and his granny lived.

  The train was a deep dark-maroon colour, with sliding doors, a rackety wooden floor and velvety red-and-green checked seats. Dangling from the ceiling were rows of straps with black light-bulb-shaped things hanging from them.

  ‘Look,’ said Peter, jumping up and catching hold of a light-bulb thing in each hand and swinging like a gymnast.

  ‘Is that what they’re for?’ asked Clara.

  ‘They’re for when the train’s jam-packed and there are no seats,’ said Peter, swinging energetically. ‘People hang on to them so they don’t fall over.’

  At first, the noise and the utter blackness of the tunnels terrified Clara. The carriages rattled like old bones, and it was so dark outside the windows, she worried the train might fall off the rails. The stations that they passed through – Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, Chalk Farm – were tube-shaped too, with curving tiled walls and long, sometimes deserted platforms; it was a relief when, after Hampstead, they burst into daylight and remained above ground.

  * * *

  The newspaper library at Colindale was in a flat-fronted brick building with elegant slabs of white stone framing the doorway. A board outside read ‘British Library Newspaper Collection’ and there was a thin strip of grass running between the building and the pavement. ‘That’s where we had our sandwiches when we visited with the school,’ said Peter. ‘I made my own ’cause Granny was ill. Everyone else had ham or cheese, but I had jam.’

  He sounded cross. Did it matter if you had cheese, ham or jam, Clara wondered? But then Peter added bitterly, ‘They teased me – said jam was for poor boys.’

  ‘It is not!’ said Clara hotly, indignant on Peter’s behalf.

  Inside the library there was a velvet hush, the kind of all-enveloping quiet where you can hear every creak and sniff. They approached the information desk, the soles of Peter’s plimsolls squeaking noisily on the polished floor.

  ‘Yes?’ The man behind the desk looked up. He blinked in a surprised way. Probably not used to unaccompanied children, Clara thought.

  ‘Please could we look at e
very copy of The Guardian published in umm …’ Peter paused and looked at Clara. She had worked out the calculations on the train.

  ‘October, November and December 1962,’ said Clara.

  ‘That’s a fair few newspapers. Seventy-eight to be accurate. Are you sure you want all those?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Clara.

  ‘I’ll fetch you out ten at a time then,’ said the clerk. ‘Wait in the reading room please.’

  In the reading room there were rows of desks topped with easel-type things, tilted wooden frames the size of broadsheet newspapers with little overhead lights attached. Peter and Clara chose a desk near the window and waited for the man to come back.

  ‘Are you sure those are the right dates?’ whispered Peter.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Clara back. ‘I was born in January 1962.’

  Peter nodded.

  ‘And I arrived at Braithwaite Manor when I was eleven months. That would’ve been in December. Christobel must have died just before that. That’s why we have to look at the obituaries for October, November and December.’

  They sat and waited. It was very quiet and all the other readers looked very serious. A man sitting near them glared for no apparent reason. ‘Can I help you?’ Clara asked, ignoring Peter’s nudge.

  The glaring man glared harder and said ‘Sssh,’ which made Clara want to laugh and be noisy on purpose, just to annoy him a little more.

  ‘Watch it, we’ll get chucked out,’ whispered Peter, trying not to laugh himself. Clara stared very hard at the desk top and clamped her mouth shut too. She could sense Peter wriggling his ears. She wriggled hers. She daren’t look at Peter because if she did the laughter would explode and then the glaring man would go and get the clerk and they’d be asked to leave.

  At last the information-desk man brought out the first ten newspapers and showed them how to mount them on the easel things.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ he asked.

  ‘The obituaries please,’ said Clara.

  ‘Ah … opposite the letters page.’ The man carefully paged through the paper until he found what he was looking for. ‘There you go.’

  They took five papers each and worked their way through them. It was easy to get sidetracked because lots of interesting people seemed to have died in 1962, poets and playwrights, actresses and inventors. When they had paged through the first ten papers, the clerk replaced them with ten more. Clara read about a gangster called Lucky Luciano, a sculptor called Yves Klein and a lady called Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been the wife of an American President.

  ‘What if she’s not in here?’ whispered Clara when they were on their sixth set of newspapers.

  ‘But she is!’ said Peter, hopping up and down in his seat. ‘Look!’

  And there it was. 15 November 1962.

  Clara got up and walked out of the reading room, past the information desk and out of the library. She looked at her hands. They were trembling.

  ‘Clara, wait!’ Peter had followed her. ‘Are you OK?’

  Clara didn’t know how to explain what she was feeling. Part of her was reeling with this new piece of knowledge about her mother and the man called Sergei Ivanov. The other part was experiencing the unpleasant sensation of feeling almost invisible. A non-person. Like something floating in space, or cast adrift at sea.

  ‘Peter, there was nothing about me,’ she said eventually. ‘Nothing at all. It’s as if I don’t even exist.’

  ‘Remember Cook said that Christobel had to keep you quiet because of the snooty ballet company,’ said Peter. ‘Perhaps whoever wrote the obituary either didn’t know about you, or was keeping you a secret too.’ He laid his hand gently on her arm, like an anchor, grounding her, giving her the courage to think the other, bigger thought.

  Was Sergei Ivanov her father? And if he was, did he know about her? Could he still be in Russia? Russia was thousands of miles away!

  But just as Clara pictured herself embarking on an epic journey, a firework exploded in her head, blasting everything else away.

  ‘Peter!’ she yelped. ‘The poster, in Leeds library, remember?’ The fiery reds and yellows, the ballerina with the cat’s eyes, the other dancer leaping, in full flight.

  She saw the realisation spread across Peter’s face, his excitement match her own.

  ‘The Kirov Ballet!’ he said. ‘The same company that Sergei whatshisame was with. And they’re coming to London!’

  ‘We can find out where they’re performing and see if anyone knows anything about him,’ said Clara.

  And then Peter spoke out loud the bigger thought that was ricocheting round Clara’s head.

  ‘Clara! This is the best clue yet. This Sergei bloke. He might actually be your dad!’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They went over to the newsagent’s opposite the library and bought two Curly Wurly bars, two triangular cartons of orange juice and a copy of The London Evening Standard. Peter knew exactly where to find the theatre listings at the back.

  ‘Look,’ he said, stabbing his finger at the page in front of him.

  ‘That’s tomorrow! said Clara, hardly believing their luck. They could go to the Opera House and find someone who knew Sergei, who may even have known Christobel. It was all slotting into place.

  * * *

  As the tube clattered back across London, Clara wasn’t bothered about the noise or the dark. All she could think about was tomorrow and what might happen. She hugged herself in anticipation. At last, she was going to get some answers to her mysterious past.

  Peter, meanwhile, was excited about seeing his granny. ‘She’s going to get the surprise of her life when we turn up!’

  At the Oval they got off the train and sailed up the escalator to street level, past rows of posters advertising sweets and cigarettes and theatre shows. Peter wanted to say hello to Stanley, the stationmaster who had found Stockwell, but he wasn’t there.

  ‘He clocked off at four, mate,’ said the man in the ticket office. ‘Come back tomorrow, he’d like to see ya.’

  The station was situated right by a massive road junction and after the relative quietness of Colindale, the noise hurt Clara’s ears. She followed Peter along the traffic-choked road, past the tangle of buses and lorries, cars and taxis, and wondered how they didn’t crash into each other. After a short while they turned into a quieter side street and then cut across a vast expanse of green that Peter said was Kennington Park.

  It was almost dusk. On the far side of the park, six giant tower blocks loomed into the purply pink sky. In the fading light they were like beacons, the last glimmers of wintry sun winking and glinting on the hundreds of windows that studded their sides.

  ‘That’s our block,’ said Peter, proudly, pointing to the one nearest them. ‘All the way up there on the eighteenth floor.’

  Clara gazed up. She had to crick her neck to see to the top. She had never seen anything like them. They looked like alien-fairy towers.

  Luckily the lift was working, because it didn’t always, Peter told her, and eighteen flights of stairs were a lot to climb. When they emerged on the eighteenth floor, Peter rang the bell of number sixty-four. There was no answer. ‘That’s odd,’ he said, retrieving a key from under the doormat and unlocking the door. ‘We only leave the key here when we’re out.’

  ‘Granny,’ he called, running in ahead of Clara. ‘Granny, I’m home.’

  Clara followed Peter into the flat and waited in the living room. It was neatly furnished with a nubby green three-piece suite, a round dining table with two chairs pulled up to it, a small TV and a gas fire. Above the gas fire was a mantelpiece, on top of which were framed photographs of Peter as a little boy and a small vase filled with dried flowers. It was comfortable and cosy and it was Peter’s home. It was easy to picture him here, snuggled up to his granny watching one of their favourite TV programmes.

  The most impressive thing about the room though was the window. It was floor to ceiling and through
it you could see the whole of London stretching away as far as the eye could see. There were billions of people out there, thought Clara. Billions and trillions, and they all had their own complicated, tangled lives. She imagined all their hopes and truths, all their secrets and lies twirling and swirling in an invisible mass above the city.

  ‘Clara, she’s not here! Where is she?’ Peter burst into the room and then out again in a whirl of anxiety.

  Clara followed him into his granny’s bedroom. Like the living room, it was very neat: not one wrinkle on the lemon-coloured bedspread; a silver-backed brush and comb on the dressing table; a pot of hand cream scented with lily of the valley, and a book – Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – on the bedside table. Everything was spotlessly clean. The bed didn’t look like it had been occupied for a while.

  ‘The Framlinghams!’ Peter spun round so quickly he bumped into Clara. ‘Stella said they were helping to look after her. Remember? Mr Framlingham is the lawyer who helped her to adopt me. She must be staying there!’ He smacked his forehead with his hand. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’

  * * *

  It was half an hour by bus to Herne Hill, where the Framlinghams lived. Clara and Peter walked back across the park to the road, which seemed even busier than before, the traffic nose to tail, crawling along at a snail’s pace. It was almost dark and the street lamps were on.

  ‘Rush hour,’ explained Peter. They boarded the number three bus and it was jammed full of commuters on their way home from work. Outside, more people sped along, heads down, coats buttoned up, hands grasping briefcases, newspapers and umbrellas.

  ‘Move down, move down,’ the conductor sang. He wore a machine round his neck and when he turned the little lever at the side, it made a whirring noise and a ticket shot out of the front. There were no empty seats, so Clara and Peter stood squished between the other passengers. As the bus trundled along, stopping and starting, the conductor chatted and sometimes even burst into song. Everyone seemed cheerful despite the crush.