The Stranger House

by Reginald Hill

  That’s not vain, by the way. In math you know these things.

  I said yes, why not? It was only later the thought of traveling right across the world began to get to me. When I was eleven I’d seen this TV play about these kids who got shoved on a boat without a by-your-leave and ferried out to Oz to start a new life. It really got to me then, but I hadn’t thought about it for years. Now I recalled those poor kids in the play who’d made the journey the other way, not knowing what awaited them, and I felt really ashamed of feeling scared.

  I got my First then came home to work for Pa to earn some bucks to help finance the trip. He’d have coughed up the lot, no problem, but I could see he was pleased. My mate Martie was getting married to some jock with a Greek-god profile whose old man owned half of Victoria. She asked me to join her on a pre-wedding shopping spree, and Pa told me to go and kit myself out with some wet weather gear for Cambridge.

  We’d been away three days, having a great time, when my mobile rang. It was Ma, telling me that Gramma Ada, that’s my pa’s ma who lived with us, had collapsed. It was her heart, it was bad.

  I headed home straightaway. Gramma had been part of my life for so long that I couldn’t imagine how things could be without her.

  Maybe I’d get home and find it had all been a false alarm, I told myself. But when I saw the priest’s car parked outside the house, I knew things must be bad. Your money or your life, that’s all those bastards ever want from you, that’s what my pa used to say.

  Sorry.

  Gramma was a Catholic. Pa never got in the way of that, but he didn’t even pay lip service. I didn’t know why he took against your lot so much, but I let him set my agenda because he was my pa and knew everything.

  When I got to know what he knew, I was glad.

  Sometimes Gramma would talk to me about the Church in her easygoing loving way, usually after the priest had paid a visit. I think he must have gone on at her about me. I don’t know if he ever had a go at Pa, but if he did, I’d guess he only tried once.

  When I went up to Gramma’s room, I thought I was too late. She lay there like a corpse and for the first time it struck me how very old she was. I knew Pa was only just turned forty. And I knew Gramma was eighty-five. But it wasn’t till I saw her lying there that it occurred to me that she must have been well into her forties when she had Pa.

  So much for my mathematical mind.

  Ma said, “Here’s Sammy to see you.”

  I went and sat down by the bed. On the other side sat the priest, playing with those beads you lot lug around. I once asked Pa about them. He said they were like a holy abacus to help reckon up how much the Church was going to get from someone’s will.

  Gramma’s priest looked like he was minded to stay but Ma said, “Let’s go downstairs and brew a pot of tea, Father.” She could be pretty firm herself, Ma.

  I took Gramma’s hand and she opened her eyes, recognized me and said, “Sammy, you’re here. That’s OK then,” and closed her eyes again.

  For a second I thought that she’d just held on till I got home then decided to give up the ghost. But now she spoke again, so low I had to strain to hear her.

  What she said didn’t make much sense.

  She said, “I thought not having kids of my own was a curse, but it turned out a blessing. Soon as I saw him I knew your pa was the one, even before I heard his name. And then he gave us you with your lovely red hair. That’s the color I’d have chosen for myself, and now I’d got it in you, and that was even better ’cos I’d got you with it.”

  She reached up to touch my hair, but she didn’t have the strength, so I bent over her and let it fall over her hand and her face and when I drew back she was gone.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone till after the funeral.

  That was a real bash. She’d been well loved. Afterward everyone came back to the house even though it was a hell of a drive for most of them. The priest was there too. He’d given Gramma a good send-off in the church, so I reckon he deserved his throat-easer, and you had to admire the way he downed the stuff like mother’s milk.

  When he came to take his leave, he offered Pa his hand, which Pa took like it was a copperhead.

  “I’ll be off now, Sam,” he said, real hearty, like they were best mates. “I know how much you’ll miss your ma. I promised her I’d keep an eye on you all and I’ll be back very soon to see how you’re getting on.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Pa.

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  “I’m sorry?” said the priest.

  “You heard,” said Pa.

  I said he didn’t waste words.

  And to give the priest his due, he had the sense not to keep pressing.

  He went out of the door. Pa turned to the remaining guests and said, “All this talking makes a man thirsty. Who’s empty?”

  It was later that same night after all our visitors had gone and me and Ma and Pa were sitting together nursing mugs of tea that I spoke.

  I told them what Gramma had said and asked what it meant.

  Pa didn’t hesitate. He said, “They adopted me.”

  I said, “Is that it?”

  He said, “I’m adopted. You’re not. What’s your problem?”

  I could see his point. I mean he was the one who’d found out his ma and pa weren’t his real ma and pa, not me. But I’d still felt my life had taken a little lurch.

  I said, “I’ve just seen someone I thought was my grandmother put in the ground, now I find she wasn’t really related to me at all.”

  “So you’re going to miss her less?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Well then.”

  He stood up and ran his fingers through my hair.

  “Your ma knows the tale, such as it is. I’ve got some things I need to check.”

  I sometimes think Pa will live forever, ’cos whenever death comes for him, he’ll always have something he needs to check.

  When he’d gone out, I turned to Ma and said, “Well?”

  And she told me what she knew from talking to Gramma over the years and what she’d managed to extract from Pa.

  Gramma Flood’s tale was one of sorrow turned to joy.

  She’d wanted children and so had Granpa. When she reached her forties and they hadn’t come, their thoughts turned to adoption.

  Technically they were a bit old, but they were in good with their priest, who gave them such a red-hot intro to a Catholic adoption agency, they checked out fine.

  No shortage, it seemed. Odd thing that about you Catholics; even those ready to risk the sin of fornication still draw the line at contraception.

  Gramma loved to tell Ma the tale. Seems Granpa was taken by a strapping boy with lung power to match his physique. Then Gramma spotted this smaller kid, with a stubble of red hair. He lay very quiet, though when you got close you could see his eyes were alert and watchful. When the nun in charge saw her interest, she smiled and said, “Now I think there may be a message here for you, Mrs. Flood. You take this one, you won’t have to change his name because he’s called Flood already. Sam Flood.”

  That clinched matters. How could this be simple coincidence? asked Gramma. In her eyes, this baby was gift-wrapped from God. And Sam, my pa, seemed to confirm her judgment by growing up a loving son and taking to wine making like it was in his blood.

  In himself he stayed as he was when first she saw him: quiet, watchful, self-contained. Granpa saw no reason to tell him he’d been adopted, but Gramma thought different and when he got to sixteen, she decided it was time to tell him the truth.

  Not that there was much to tell. All she knew was that his mother had been a young woman who’d got into trouble, turned to the nuns for help, and died in childbirth. No details known about her origins or the baby’s father.

  I can see Pa taking in this news. I bet he said next to nothing, asked a couple of brief questions maybe, showed no emotion. But a couple of days later he vanished.

  He
was away for a week. He’d gone in search of more information about his real mother. What he discovered seems little enough, but for a boy of sixteen to discover anything was remarkable. Don’t know who’s better at walling up a secret, the government bureaucrats or you Catholic bastards.

  Sorry. Maybe things are better now, but this was a decade before that English woman who finally got all this murky stuff out in the open started chipping away. Don’t expect her book was on the curriculum at your seminary, but if you ever get to read it, you’ll see what a hell of a job she had to make progress.

  What he discovered was that his mother, Samantha Flood, far from being a young woman who’d got into trouble and sought the help of the nuns, had been little more than a child herself and already in the nuns’ care when she got pregnant.

  And she was English, an orphan brought out here for resettlement.

  When Ma told me this my mind went hurtling back ten years.

  “You mean she was like those kids in that play?” I asked incredulously.

  “Looks like it,” said Ma. “Back then no one knew how many of them there were, of course. Somehow your pa got to see her death certificate. It gave her address as St. Rumbald’s Orphanage.”

  “This wasn’t where Gramma went to choose Pa then?” I interrupted.

  “No, that was the baby unit of the Catholic Hospital. They don’t have facilities for taking care of infants out at St. Rumbald’s. Or anyone, from the sound of it. Your pa hitched a lift out there and asked to see the records but they told him there weren’t any. He got real frustrated. That’s why he decked the priest.”

  Told you you wouldn’t like this.

  “Pa hit a priest?” I said, surprised without being amazed. “Why?”

  “I asked him that,” she said with a bit of a smile. “He said, hitting a nun wouldn’t have looked so good. But when I pressed him, he said he reckoned the tight rein those nuns kept their girls on, the only bastards who’d get close enough to dip their wicks would have to be priests.”

  I took this in. My grandmother the child. My grandfather the priest.

  The police had got involved, but the decked priest had shown Christian charity, or maybe just didn’t want publicity, and no charges were brought. Pa came home as if nothing had happened, except that from then on in he’d have nothing to do with the Church.

  This must have been a trouble to Granpa and Gramma, but even at sixteen I guess they knew where they were with Pa. If they’d made it a stay-or-go issue, he’d have gone.

  He doesn’t say much, but Pa never has any trouble getting his message across.

  The same when he met Ma four years later. Within a fortnight he’d asked her to marry him. Ma didn’t go into details but I doubt if it involved making flowery speeches from a kneeling position. They were married in another fortnight.

  I asked Ma if he ever did anything more about finding out about his real mother.

  She said no. After watching that play, Gramma had been very upset and had said to Ma that she hoped Sam’s mother hadn’t been one of those poor kids. This was the first Ma heard anything about Pa being adopted and naturally she hadn’t rested till she got the whole story, such as it was.

  “I asked your pa why he hadn’t told me and he said, would it have made a difference? And of course I said no, and he said, well then. I reminded him of all the stuff we’d read about these child migrants and all, and asked if it didn’t bother him. He said he could see why anyone who’d grown up here, not knowing the truth about themselves, would want to dig. But he’d been born here, been brought up by good people, he’d got his own family he loved, what was in the past for him but pain, and wasn’t there enough of that waiting to jump out on you without going looking for it?”

  As I listened to Ma I felt all that indignation I’d experienced in front of the telly aged eleven welling up again, only this time it was personal. I had a grandmother who’d been brought over here against her will when she was just a kid. What had happened to her then I didn’t know, but from the stuff that had come out, it wasn’t likely to be good. What was certain was that she’d been placed in some orphanage run by nuns who’d taken so little care of her she’d got pregnant and they’d let her die giving birth to my father.

  I went out and found Pa and blazed away at him for ten minutes or more, asking him how he could sleep easy in his bed knowing all this and not trying to find out who his real father was.

  He listened in that way he has, not saying anything till he’s quite sure you’ve run out of steam, then he said, “I know who my real pa is. I’ve just buried your gramma alongside him. As for that other bastard, last time I went out looking for answers, I decked a priest. This time, all the stuff that’s come out about those poor migrant kids, I could end up decking the Pope. You going to cancel your career and take care of things here while your pa’s in jail?”

  This was a long speech for Pa and, like most of what he said, there was a lot more in it than just the words he used, a lot of stuff about love and responsibilities and options. If Pa précis’d the Bible, he’d get it down to a slim pamphlet.

  I simmered down, told myself it was Pa’s call, and I put it to him straight. Was he certain he didn’t want to know the truth? And he said, “Truth’s like a dingo, girl. It’ll run till you get it cornered. Then watch out!”

  So I made the rational objective decision and decided to let it be.

  Or, put it another way, I made the emotional personal decision that my work came first. Selfish? I admit it. My work means everything to me. Whether it will ever mean anything to anyone else, I’m not sure, but probably even Newton had no idea he was going to change the way folk looked at the universe when he set out. Not that he saw it that way. He ended up saying he felt like he’d been a boy playing on the seashore, occasionally finding a smoother stone or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all around him.

  I guess I’ll be lucky if I can get close to picking up even one pretty shell on the beach. But in going to Cambridge I feel like I’m striking out into that great ocean. Maybe if I can hold my breath long enough, I might even get down to some new coral reef.

  If I’d said that to Pa, he’d have asked if I’d been on the turps. But that’s how it feels. You said you needed religion to define who you are. I guess I need mathematics.

  So I made my decision to let things be.

  Then something happened. A way-out coincidence. Maybe you’d call it a divine message. No need to bring God into it. Me, I know that mathematically chance can be illusory. Often if you analyze what seems amazing coincidence, you find it was just as likely to happen as not to happen. Sometimes more likely.

  Years before, Martie had upstaged my indignation after I saw that TV play by remarking her family knew all about it as her Aunt Gracie was one of those kids.

  I’d completely forgotten that and when I met Gracie at the wedding it didn’t ring a bell. She was in gray. It suited her, she was that kind of woman: wispy gray hair, wide gray eyes that never quite focused in a tiny pale gray face. If the weather had been misty she’d have disappeared. But unfocused or not, I felt those gray eyes scan my face closely. And from time to time during the celebration, I caught her gaze following me.

  Later as I was helping Martie get ready for her grand departure, she said, “You made a great impression on Gracie. She said you reminded her of someone. The name too. She asked a lot of questions about your family. Especially dear old Ada. I’m real sorry she’s not still around, Sam. She was a lovely lady.”

  “Yeah, she was.”

  I hadn’t told Martie about the revelations which had followed Gramma Ada’s death. Some time in the future maybe, not in the run-up to her wedding. But suddenly it came back to me.

  “Wasn’t it Gracie you said was one of those migrant kids all the fuss was about?”

  “That’s right. Doesn’t like to talk about it though. Just turns vague if it’s mentioned. And when Gracie turns vague, she doesn’t have far to g
o!”

  We laughed, but my mind was racing.

  Later, after we’d seen the happy couple off, I went looking for Gracie. Saw no point messing around. Compared with Pa, I’m a pussy-footer, but I can be pretty direct.

  I said, “Martie tells me you thought you recognized me.”

  She looked embarrassed.

  “It was the hair mainly. And the name. But I knew it was just a coincidence when Martie told me about your grandmother. I was sorry to hear she’d died. She sounds like a nice woman. You must miss her.”

  “I do,” I said. “Only she wasn’t my real gran. Pa was adopted. His ma was like you. A child migrant from the UK.”

  I reckon Pa would have been hard put to be more direct. I thought I’d overdone it. I wouldn’t have thought she could have got any grayer, but she did.

  “And her name…?” she sort of croaked.

  “Same as mine. And Pa’s. Sam Flood.”

  She began to cry. I felt a heel. I was so keen to check out what looked like a real lead that I’d gone plowing in without the least consideration for poor old Gracie.

  But I wasn’t going to turn back now. And she proved to be tougher than she looked. I reckon you had to be to survive what those bastards put those kids through.

  We sat down together and drank whiskey and she told me what she knew about my grandmother.

  To start with it was a huge disappointment, like one of those calculations which starts great then suddenly fizzles out. All Gracie could tell me about little Sam Flood with the flame-red hair was that she’d been on the same boat as her from Liverpool.

  I asked her when that was, expecting her to be vague. But this was one thing she was certain of. It was 1960, the year Kennedy became president. She’d looked it up. Seems Kennedy was the first Catholic president and the nuns thought it was like the Second Coming and they made the kids watch it on television, which they didn’t mind as it was about the only television they ever got to see in those days. So, definitely 1960. And Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was top of the pops. That was the other thing she remembered. I think she thought it was dead appropriate.