The Caroline Quest

by Barbara Whitnell

  I turned and walked briskly up the steps of the hotel, head up, smile on face, doing my best to look like any girl returning from an enjoyable night out.

  So that was it, I thought, far from smiling on the inside. All those fireworks when we met; all that elation. Had I overexaggerated the excitement? Made a drama out of a simple encounter that meant nothing?

  Up in my room I stared at myself in the mirror. I still looked OK. No spot or blemish that I could discern. No lipstick stains on my teeth. No bolognese sauce down my shirt. What had I done to make Mr Stephen Maitland of Richmond, Surrey, drop me like a hot coal? Even the compliment he had paid me as we stood outside the hotel had a kind of dying fall, as if he had no intention of seeing me again.

  I could think of no reason for this other than the way I had spoken of my mother. Well, maybe I had been too harsh in my criticism. Disrespectful. Maybe it was the British way to put mothers on a pedestal, admitting to no fault in any of them. Indeed, I did feel a bit ashamed. On the other hand, my outrage at the cavalier way she had treated Caroline was something I had felt sure that Stephen would share, and I still boiled with rage whenever I thought about it.

  Well, the hell with him, I thought. Who needed Mr Stiff-Upper-Lip Stephen Maitland? He’d proved himself the worst kind of unemotional, uninvolved, passionless Brit, and I could do without any help he was likely to be able to give me. I’d go in search of that birth certificate first thing in the morning, and I’d ring the newspapers and put ads in all of them. And if that failed, then I’d hire a detective. Some friend he turned out to be, I thought, as I wiped off my make-up in swift, angry swipes.

  But once in bed, the light switched off, I couldn’t help remembering the way it had been at the start of the evening; the rapport and the ease and the feeling that I had known him for years. And yes, the excitement, the sheer sexual chemistry. He’d felt it too, I was certain. You can’t mistake that kind of thing. The thought that, no matter whose fault it was, we had somehow managed to make a hash of it made me more sad than angry.

  But then a thought struck me and, no matter what I told myself, there was no doubt that I found it offered a crumb of comfort. For all the feeling of finality, he hadn’t actually said goodbye, had he? Maybe, after all, we’d both get a second chance.

  Five

  I located St Catherine’s House without too much trouble and, though all was confusion inside, by asking various officials I finally found what I was looking for; an enormous tome listing all the births that had taken place in Britain in the first quarter of I99I.

  And there it was. The twentieth of January, a male child, to Caroline Bethany in Oxford. So it was a boy! We had both been right. But why Oxford, I wondered? And was it possible that she could still be there?

  I found a telephone and patiently tracked down the number I had to ring to contact Directory Enquiries. I felt very grateful to Caroline that she wasn’t called Smith or Brown, and it only took a few seconds to learn that there was a C. Bethany listed at an Oxford number, which I wrote down in my notebook with a considerable feeling of triumph. Suddenly, miraculously, it seemed that I was on the right track, and I congratulated myself on proving to be such a good detective. Maybe I could take it up full time now that it appeared my acting career had taken a nosedive! Almost trembling in my eagerness, I put coins in the slot and dialled the number I had been given.

  And it rang and rang. Unwilling to give up hope, I let it ring until long after it was reasonable to do so; finally I had to concede defeat and leave the telephone to the poor woman who had been waiting, more or less patiently, to use it after me. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me to find no one home, I told myself. No doubt Caroline had to work to maintain herself and her son. I would try again later.

  Meantime, I was left not knowing quite what to do. It was pointless to put ads in the papers or phone Greenway Development if I had truly found Caroline without doing so. I began to walk back along the Strand in the direction of Piccadilly. On the advice of Sue, the receptionist, I’d acquired an A to Z street guide and, as I studied it, I happened to see that I was very close to Covent Garden. I instantly decided I would go in search of it.

  I found it without difficulty and was at once captivated. The rain of the night before had stopped long since and now the sun was shining, making it pleasant to wander about, stopping every now and again to browse in shops or enjoy the street entertainers.

  I was drawn towards the far end of the piazza by the strains of classical music and sat down at one of the tables close by, both to enjoy it and to order a coffee. There were two musicians currently performing, I found: a girl playing the flute, a boy the violin. Students, I guessed, and was entranced by the sound they produced together. The music was beautiful, though unfamiliar to me, and their playing was of a very high standard. But what attracted me almost as much as the music was the beauty of the musicians themselves. They were so young, so I struggled to find the word so gloriously, innocently unblemished. And so much in love, I saw, as the music finished and they turned to smile into each other’s eyes.

  Call me a sentimental fool, but it was so piercingly sweet that a knife seemed to twist inside me and I sat there, watching and listening and sipping my coffee, envying the happiness that seemed to enfold them like some holy aura. Would it ever be like that for me? It never had been, not yet. Oh, I’d had lovers, of course. I’d been attracted to men, and men had been attracted to me. Some had sworn they were in love. But me? Never! Excitement, yes: love, no. I’d always felt just slightly detached.

  The night before, when I’d seen Steve, it had seemed for a little while as if for once things might be different; and it still hurt like hell to think how everything had changed, between one breath and the next, before I had lived long enough to know if anything could develop between us. It was hard to understand. Surely if he had felt even one-tenth of the attraction I’d felt for him, a few ill-chosen words regarding my mother wouldn’t have affected the issue? After all, he must have known from Jim that she wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with.

  Now, more than twelve hours later, I wondered if I had imagined that sudden cooling of the atmosphere. Maybe he was preoccupied — busy — tired. Oh, there were endless excuses and explanations for his behaviour for one who longed to find them.

  Maybe I’d phone him later on when he was back from his trip. After all, by evening I might have spoken to Caroline, and there would be a lot to tell him. I could even pursue the matter of the theatre ticket, or ask him to the hotel to dinner. Thank God, in this day and age a girl didn’t have to sit around sewing a fine seam while she waited for the male to take the initiative.

  For the moment, however, he was out of reach. Over a sandwich and yet another cup of coffee, I took Caroline’s letter out of my purse and read it again, and as I did so I had a sudden desire to go and look at the street where she had lived with Jim, and to see for myself the spot where Jim had been so cruelly mown down and left for dead. Laver Street, it was called. The name of it was carved deeply in my memory. Was it morbid, to want to visit the scene of this long-ago tragedy? Yes, possibly. Still it was something I felt I had to do before I left England, and now seemed as good a time as any.

  Outside the cafe I hailed a cab and told the driver I wanted to drive around Chiswick, just to look at one or two places. He professed himself willing to take me there and back, but looked loftily amused at my pronunciation of the name of the place. Not Chis-wick, he told me. Chizzick. Well, I said, how’s a poor ignorant American supposed to know these things? To which he shrugged his shoulders and continued to look amused.

  He assumed from the outset that I was interested in buying a property in the area, though I had said nothing to imply this. It so happened, he told me, that he lived in Chiswick himself, and he proceeded to deliver a non-stop rundown of the area’s many amenities as we drove towards the western suburbs.

  Instead of allowing him to continue, I was unwise enough to tell him I had no i
nterest in buying a house there or anywhere else, but simply wanted to see the place. There was something in the ensuing pause that seemed to say this confirmed all his suspicions I was definitely a few nickels short of a dime but it only look a few minutes for him to launch into conversation again. He supposed, he said over his shoulder, projecting his voice through the gap in the glass that divided us, that this was a sentimental journey of some kind. Americans were like that. Sentimental. They let it all hang out, like. Well, we couldn’t all be the same, could we?

  I allowed that we could not.

  ‘Take that Jerry Springer,’ he said. ‘And Oprah, and all that lot. You’d never get an English audience carrying on like that, all them tears and shouting and that. And confessing everything about their sex lives. I saw a telly programme the other day cor luvaduck, you’d never credit what they were saying, all out in public. You’d never get a Brit carrying on like that.

  ‘Oh dear me no. It’s the reserve, you see. We’re more, like, strong and silent.’

  ‘Really?’ I couldn’t help the note of amused surprise in my voice. Strong he might have been. Silent he certainly was not.

  He continued not to be it all the way to Chiswick, where he parked in a convenient place, allowing me thankfully to escape the sound of his voice while I wandered a little way along Cranleigh Road. Number I8 was attached to number 20 and was its mirror image. Indeed, all the houses in the street seemed absolutely identical, give or take the odd tree. All were built of yellowish brick, which seemed very popular in that part of London, and all had square bay windows, top and bottom. It made little sense for me to stand and stare at number I8, but still I did so, thinking of Jim alive and happy and loving Caroline. There was a bright yellow flowering shrub in a tiny strip of garden at the front behind a low brick wall. I wondered if it had been there ten years ago — if, in fact, Caroline had planted it.

  The door of number 16 opened and a woman with a child in a buggy bumped down the step, giving me a suspicious look, so I turned away and went back to the taxi.

  ‘Seen enough?’ the driver asked, eyebrows raised, his expression that of someone humouring a child.

  ‘Yes, thank you. I’d like to go to Laver Street now.’

  ‘Where?’

  Even though he was a resident of the area he had never heard of it and had to resort to looking it up in the A to Z he had in the front of the cab — A to Zed, as I must remember to call it. I could tell that these kind of verbal differences seemed to increase his irritating assumption of superiority.

  I assured him it couldn’t be too far away. I knew it was somewhere near the Thames, for it was in the fields bordering the river that Jim used to take an early morning run. Laver Street led down to these fields, or so it had been stated at the inquest.

  ‘You want to go there?’ he said incredulously, having found it on the map. ‘There’s nothing there, you know. I didn’t even know it had a name.’

  ‘I’d just like to see it, if you don’t mind,’ I said. Now more exasperated than amused, he swung the cab round and drove off through a few residential streets, clearly more doubtful than ever of my sanity. We crossed a kind of freeway (motorway, I guess it’s called over here) and went down to what looked like an industrial area, though one that definitely appeared to have seen better days. There was a derelict, abandoned air about it and as if to make it more unappealing than ever, a light rain had begun to fall once more. The buildings were smoke-grimed and forbidding, the windows broken, tall weeds growing around the gates where lorries had presumably once come and gone. In front of them were walls studded with broken glass to deter intruders.

  The taxi came to a halt.

  ‘There you are,’ the driver said. ‘Laver Street. The river’s down the far end.’

  I could see the name set high up in a brick wall. The street was narrow, barely more than an alley, potholed and stony, running between two of the derelict warehouses. No wonder the driver thought me mad! Why would anyone in their right mind want to come to a place like this?

  With my hands deep in my pockets and my collar up around my ears I got out of the taxi and stood looking bleakly at the ugly little street. It was no longer than fifty or sixty yards. On one side was the continuation of the wall with its pieces of glass along the top; on the other, a similar wall ran halfway down the length of the street, giving way after a while to a high wire-link fence. I walked down towards it, as if expecting it to be able to give some clue about what had happened to my brother.

  Of course, it did no such thing. It was just a fence, quite impenetrable, with a ‘Dangerous Chemicals’ sign fixed on it. Everywhere there was evidence of decay and desertion. If dangerous chemicals had once been stored there, then they were long gone.

  Exactly where had it happened, that long-ago tragedy? And why had it happened? There had been a river mist that morning, it had been stated at the inquest. Visibility had been poor. It had seemed some sort of explanation at the time, but now, seeing the location for the first time, I felt bewildered. What kind of vehicle would be coming down this narrow street in the early morning, so fast that it would hit and kill a solitary runner, on his way to the fields that lay beyond it beside the river?

  I carried on right down to the end. There were flimsy buildings here — sheds or garages, now as derelict as everything else. Beyond them, to the left, the road disintegrated completely into a muddy track and bent round behind the buildings to follow the course of the river. To the right, however, there were playing fields of some kind. I could see goalposts, a smart clubhouse in the distance, signs of regeneration. The river was glassy, with willow trees on its banks.

  As I looked, a police launch chugged from left to right, and as the noise of its engines died away I heard the sound of pounding feet behind me. I turned to see two men in running strip panting their way down Laver Street and I watched as they passed me on their way to the open fields. Runners still used Laver Street as a short cut to the river, then, just as Jim had used it that fateful morning. I felt chilled to the bone, as cold as I had ever been.

  ‘Seen all you want to?’ the driver asked as I returned to the cab. I nodded, unable to speak for a moment. Then, desperate to tell somebody — anybody I blurted it out.

  ‘My brother died down there.’

  ‘Blimey!’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  I couldn’t, at first, find the words to answer him, and when he saw my dilemma, he softened towards me.

  ‘You look like you could use a nice cuppa,’ he said. ‘There’s a place I know not far away from here.’

  I allowed myself to be taken there, and together we sat at a plastic table and drank tea out of plastic cups, the driver less voluble now. I felt rather sorry for him. How could he have known when he picked me up that he was being thrust into the company of someone as emotional as I was proving to be?

  The tea restored me a little and I managed to smile at him.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry about that. I didn’t realise how it would affect me.’

  ‘Recent, was it?’

  ‘No. It happened about ten years ago.’ Briefly I recounted the facts how Jim was in the habit of taking a short cut down Laver Street every morning to go running by the Thames, and how one morning he had been knocked down by a hit-and-run driver and left for dead.

  ‘And they never found the geezer what done it?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘What a bastard.’ he said.

  He took a few gulps of his tea, then looked at me. a look of mystification on his face.

  ‘Hard to understand, eh?’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it. I mean, a little road like that, why would anyone be in that kind of hurry, going down there?’

  ‘I was wondering that myself,’ I told him. ‘I suppose if those factory places were open then, there would be more traffic than there is today - ’

  ‘But it’s a sharp corner no matter which way you approach it. Anyone turning in there would have to slow down, stands to reason. How far down the road did it ha
ppen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I ever heard. Anyway, places change, don’t they? Maybe it was all different, ten years ago.’

  ‘Yeah, well — I s’pose that could be it. Must have been a lot busier then. Even so - ’ He broke off, still looking unconvinced.

  ‘At the inquest, they said visibility was bad.’

  ‘Yeah? What else did they say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was only young at the time. My mother came over from the States for it, but she never talked about it afterwards.’

  He took a few more thoughtful sips of his tea.

  ‘There are some villains about, and no mistake,’ he said. ‘Fancy not stopping! You wouldn’t credit it, would you? Maybe the driver was drunk,’ he added after a moment. ‘Or evil.’

  ‘Evil?’ I stared at him. ‘Of course he was evil! Anyone half decent would have stopped. If Jim had been rushed to a hospital he might have survived.’

  ‘What I mean is, really evil, like he meant to do it. You gotta admit, if you want to wipe someone out, it’s as good a way as any other. Didn’t have no enemies, your brother, did he?’

  I thought this question in lousy taste and was quick to deny it.

  ‘Of course not! It couldn’t have been anything like that. You watch too many cops and robbers programmes on TV. There was never any question of that, as far as I know.’ I waited until he had drained his cup, then got to my feet. ‘Thanks for bringing me here, but I really must get back to town.’

  The visit to the scene of Jim’s death might have depressed me even more than I had expected, but I cheered myself with the thought that I had actually found Caroline and would be calling her shortly. Suddenly I was more impatient than ever to get back to the hotel, but our progress towards Central London was incredibly slow. The thickening traffic all around us was evidence of the fact that the rush hour was in full swing, and I chafed at every delay. Still, it was reassuring to think that, like all the people around me, Caroline was probably on her way home at that very moment.