by Rosie Thomas
‘I can’t remember. Brylcreemed hair, they all had. Jackets and ties.’
One of them, Harriet thought, had been her father. Which of them didn’t have any significance at all. She tried to imagine him, with his Brylcreemed hair, undoing the knot of his tie before unbuttoning Kath’s cotton shirtwaister. The picture would only come to her in black and white, like a still from a Fifties movie. She wondered if she had been conceived after the cinema, the dance or the country pub. There seemed no point in asking, ‘What was he like?’
‘I do remember someone from those days. Very vividly. I still think of him, sometimes.’
Harriet lifted her head. ‘Who is he?’
‘Oh, he was much older than me. He was the neighbour of your grandparents. We lived on one corner of the street and he lived on the opposite corner. Only his house was different, it was turned sideways so it looked in a different direction, and you couldn’t see into it from where we were, across the road. He kept to himself, and we hardly ever saw him. It was funny, the way we got to be friends.’
‘What happened?’
But Kath was simply absorbed in the recollection. She went on, when she was ready, without needing Harriet’s prompting.
‘I used to ride an old bike. I was doing a typing job for a shoe company and I’d cycle to work when the weather was good to save the bus fare. The day I properly met Mr Archer I think I must have been talking to a boy around the corner, where your gran couldn’t see me. After I said goodbye to him I got on the bike and swung round the corner on it, on the pavement. I ran straight into a lamp-post. Blinded by love, I suppose.’
Kath produced the pout again and Harriet laughed once more, although she was impatient for the story to continue.
‘I fell off, with the bike on top of me and the bike playing a tune because the wheel was buckled and some spokes had come loose. Mr Archer was coming up the road the other way, and he helped me up. I was half in tears, with the shock and with feeling a fool, and seeing my bike all bent.’
It came back to Kath as if it had happened a week ago. More than thirty years, she told herself, unwilling to believe it. Simon Archer had lifted the bike off her and held out his hand. She had taken it, and with her other hand she had pulled her skirt down to cover her knees. She had struggled to her feet, with his arm round her waist to support her, and the tinny tune wound down as the bicycle wheel stopped spinning.
‘The bike will mend,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
Kath had never said more than a good-morning to him before. She noticed that he spoke in a smart voice, like an announcer on the radio. She looked up at him and smiled, although her shin was smarting under a fierce graze and her hip and thigh throbbed from where she had hit the pavement.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Shall I fetch your mother?’
Kath made an imploring face. ‘No, please, unless you want to see me get a telling-off.’
‘You’d better come in with me, then. That leg needs a dressing.’
He wheeled her crippled bicycle into his garden and propped it behind the tall hedge. Kath had hobbled after him, up the path to the front door.
Inside, the house was bare and not very comfortable, but quite clean. Her rescuer made her sit on a wooden chair in the cream-painted kitchen, with her leg up on a low stool.
‘Dear me,’ he murmured. ‘Now then, first aid kit.’
Kath looked around, trying to focus on something other than the stinging cut. There was an old stone sink in the corner with a single dripping tap, a blue-and-grey enamelled oven on bowlegs, an old-fashioned wooden dresser with a few plain plates and cups, and a table in the middle of the room covered with an oilcloth.
It was shabbier than the kitchen at home and different from it not so much in its furnishing as in its feeling. Her mother’s kitchen was warm, busy, and scented with cooking. This room was cold, and Kath guessed there wouldn’t be much food stored behind the zinc grille of the meatsafe. She wondered about Mr Archer as she watched him filling a small metal bowl with hot water from his kettle. She knew that he was a widower, because she had heard her mother mention it, and she also knew that he did small electrical and mechanical repair jobs for people. That was all. She couldn’t even remember when he had come to live in the corner house, although he hadn’t been there for ever, the way her own parents had.
When he carried the bowl over and knelt down in front of her, she studied him carefully. She guessed that he was almost, but not quite, as old as her father. He had fair, rather thin hair, with a high parting, and a tall forehead. He was rather handsome, she thought, in a Prince Philip way, except that his face was lined and greyish. He glanced up at her and she saw that he had pale blue eyes.
‘You’d better take your stocking off, before I bathe your leg. I’m afraid it’s ruined, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t mend a huge hole like that.’ As if he was a doctor, Kath drew up her skirt and unhooked her suspenders. There was a tiny bulge of white flesh above the brown mesh stocking top, and she knew that they both saw it. She rolled the stocking deftly down until she reached the graze, and then she winced. ‘It hurts.’
‘Here.’ He slipped his thumbs inside the nylon tube and eased the torn edges away from the oozing graze, then twitched the stocking over her toes. ‘Done.’
Kath noticed that he had small, precise hands. He washed the wound, dabbing away the fragments of grit, and then lifted a piece of antiseptic gauze from its tin of thick, yellow grease and laid it in place. He finished off the job with a roll of bandage and then sat back on his heels to admire his handiwork.
‘Thank you,’ Kath said. ‘That feels much better.’ She wondered if they ought to shake hands, now that the emergency was past and they were looking at each other in an ordinary, social way. But he had taken off her stocking: it had created an intimacy between them that couldn’t be handshaken off.
‘I don’t know your name,’ he said, as if he had been thinking the same things.
‘It’s Kath. Katharine, really.’
‘Katharine’s pretty.’
‘I’m always called Kath,’ she said firmly, shaking her head to flick the hair back from her face. It had come loose in the fall.
‘Simon,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Kath?’
She still felt shaken, and it was comfortable, sitting with her leg up on the stool.
‘Yes, please, I would.’
While he boiled the kettle and set out two cups and saucers, Simon talked to her. She liked the sound of his voice.
‘Are you still at school? I haven’t seen you in your uniform lately, so I suppose not.’
So Mr Archer watched her coming and going. Kath was surprised to find that she was pleased with the idea. She pretended to be offended by the question, but went on smiling at him.
‘I’m seventeen. I work in an office, typing invoices, mostly. Not very interesting.’
‘And what else do you do?’
‘As much as I can.’
That was how they talked. Kath would tell him about herself and laugh, and he would ask more questions. He was friendly, but there was a hesitancy about him, as if he didn’t enjoy many conversations.
That first time, she remembered, he had told her that he would repair her bicycle. She had promised to come back a few days later.
When it was time to go she glanced down at her legs, and saw one glossy and smooth and the other bare and bandaged.
‘Better take the other one off too,’ she had said. She had peeled off the other stocking and then dropped the two of them, one perfect and one shredded, into her pocket. Simon made no attempt to look away, nor did she try to be coy. He didn’t leer, as most men she knew would have done. He simply watched her, with an openness that she found flattering.
‘I’ll be back, then,’ she had said.
‘That’s good.’ He had held the door open for her to walk through.
They had become friends. He mended the bicycle and came out to see h
er ride away on it. She called on him again and sewed the hem of a pair of curtains in his living room, where before they had hung down in neglected loops. After the third time she visited him without pretext. It was understood between them that she came when she felt like it and that it wasn’t necessary for him to visit her at her own house in return.
Kath’s mother referred to him as ‘Kath’s friend’, with a touch of pride. Mr Archer was gentlemanly, he had been an officer in the war, and had lost his wife tragically young. She didn’t, as she often protested, have any idea why he put up with listening to Kath’s nonsense. But he seemed to enjoy it, and it would do Kath no harm to talk to someone with a bit more sense than the boys she was endlessly running off to the pictures with.
That was how it was. Kath’s friendship with Simon Archer lasted for less than a year. Towards the end of that time Kath’s full skirts were no longer concealing the bulge underneath them, and her pretty face had taken on a pinched, defiant look.
Kath stopped talking. Busy with the threads of recollection, she didn’t see that Harriet was sitting stiffly upright in her chair. Kath was remembering one winter afternoon, early on, when she had knocked on Simon’s door after walking back from shopping. She had been wearing a scarlet wool scarf, and a matching knitted hat. She had followed him into the kitchen, laughing about something, and had dropped her hat and gloves on the oilcloth. She had taken off her coat too, because she was warm after her walk. Simon had turned from the sink where he had been filling the ketde, and seen her. She knew that her cheeks must be rosy from the wind, because she felt the heat glowing in them.
Simon put the kettle carefully down on the stove. He came to her and put one hand on her waist. It rested very lightly, curving with the hollow. He lifted his other hand and touched her cheek, brushing it with tiny movements of the fingers, as if he wanted to feel the texture of her skin.
Startled, she jerked her head back to look into his face. She was still smiling, from what she had been saying before, but the smile didn’t widen or fade. It seemed to stiffen on her mouth. They had stood quite still, just like that, for one or two seconds. And then Simon had nodded, as if he was sure now of something that he had only suspected before. He had let her go, only he hadn’t really been holding her. He had gone back to the stove and she had chatted on, but watching the back of his head because she wanted him to look round at her like that again.
When he did turn, after quite a long time, she wondered if whatever it was had ever really happened at all. There was nothing in his face to show it, and she didn’t know how to tell him that she understood.
‘Where is he now? Is he still alive?’
Harriet’s voice startled Kath. She had forgotten that she was there.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked, is he still alive?’
Harriet was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her knees drawn up against her chest. Her face had turned pale and her eyes shone. They were fixed on Kath.
‘Simon? I don’t know, love. I left home before you were born, because your grandparents wouldn’t hear of me staying. I came down to London, you know all this, and lived with my cousins until after I had you.’
Very quietly, Harriet asked, ‘Didn’t Simon look after you?’
She saw the light that had softened Kath’s face begin to fade. There were lines in the loose flesh around her eyes and beside her mouth; her hair was permed in greying ridges. Her mother wasn’t a girl of eighteen at all, although for a moment Harriet had glimpsed that girl. She wanted to hold on to her, denying the years.
‘Why should he have done?’ Kath answered. ‘It was my own problem. You were. I wanted it that way, once I knew I couldn’t marry the father. They’d have had me back, at home, if I’d let you go for adoption. But I wouldn’t let you go, so I never went up there again.’
Harriet knew about that. Kath had told her, often, it was part of her childhood creed, I wouldn’t let you go. Kath’s possessiveness had made her both father and mother. There was no need to speculate about him. He was faceless and nameless, an ejaculation. A physical spasm, like a yawn or a shiver. The father, Kath called him, not yours. Harriet couldn’t remember her ever having said even that much before.
But today she had seen something different in her mother. She had seen youth, but she had also seen sex, with its face scrubbed bare, clean and wholesome. She had caught sight of Kath as a girl, and that girl had emitted a powerful signal. Now, at once, Harriet wanted to know about the man who had intercepted and returned that signal. She felt the crackle of its electricity, even over the remove of years. She was hungry because she had never experienced that charge herself, jolting through her bones, not with Leo nor with anyone else.
She would have to find the man, because he belonged to her. It was important to know him as part of her own history’. Harriet felt herself both set free and dangerously adrift, and she needed a new anchorage before she could set a fresh course. Names, places, even the smallest details, if she was too late for anything more, would help her to fix herself.
She left her chair and went to kneel beside her mother, resting her head against Kath’s knees.
‘Harriet? Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
Ever since she had been old enough to understand her own story, her father had had no name and no face, because that was how Kath had wished it. Harriet had felt no need for anything more, because her mother gave her all she wanted. The fierce exclusivity of their love had only been disrupted by Ken, and later by Lisa. But now, Harriet was certain that he had both a name and a face, and she understood what a chasm there was to be filled.
She was certain, without needing to ask, without changing the rule of years between Kath and herself, that Simon Archer was her father. Leo had gone, and it was both ironic and apposite that his disappearance should expose a deeper bond waiting to be uncovered.
In a light, clear voice Harriet had said, ‘I’d like to go and see where you grew up. Perhaps he … your friend is still there.’
‘He probably wouldn’t remember me, even if he was. It’s a very long time ago.’
Of course, all my lifetime.
‘I’d still like to go.’
‘But there’s no family left up there.’
There had been a reconciliation, naturally. From the age of five or six onwards, Harriet remembered visits to her grandparents. But by then they had moved away from the Midlands town, and then they moved on again. Now they lived in a retirement bungalow on the coast, with photographs of their two Trott granddaughters displayed on the mantelpiece.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harriet said. ‘Even if there’s nothing there at all. It’s where I began, after all. I can just walk along the streets and look at it.’
She stretched up and kissed her mother, then scrambled to her feet. Looking down at her she hesitated, and then asked, ‘Why did you tell me all this today?’
Kath answered dreamily, ‘You just made me remember it.’
Of course. Beginnings and endings, one separation and another coming together.
Harriet picked up the tea-tray from between their chairs and walked away down the garden, in through the patio doors.
She was going to look for her father. And when she had found him, from that point she could start again.
Four
The town had long ago been consumed by the city.
In the local train, looking out, Harriet imagined that in her mother’s childhood there might have been a green ribbon of woods and fields separating the last housing estate from the first filling station. Now there was no dividing line, of trees or anything else, and the backdrop of houses and shops and small factories flowed seamlessly past her.
At the station, she bought a local street map from the bookstall and sat on a bench to study it. The other passengers from the train passed her and crowded out through the ticket barrier. When Harriet looked up the train had pulled out and the platform was deserted. At once, s
he was aware of her isolation in an unfamiliar place. The place names on the train indicator above her head meant nothing to her, and she was ignorant of the streets that led away from the station entrance.
There was no sense of a homecoming. If she had arrived expecting anything of the kind, Harriet reflected, then she was being sentimental. But still she had felt herself irresistibly drawn here, and there had been complicated arrangements to make before she could allow herself the time off from her business. The urban anonymity she had glimpsed from the train was less than welcoming, and she allowed herself the irrationality of a moment’s disappointment. Then she stood up, closing the street map but keeping her finger in place to mark the right page, and briskly walked the length of the platform. Her heels clicked very loudly, as if to announce her arrival.
The ticket collector had abandoned his booth, and so Harriet passed through the barrier without even cursory official acknowledgement of her arrival. There were two dark-red buses waiting beside a graffiti-sprayed shelter, but neither of the destination boards offered the area she was heading for. There was also a taxi at the rank, and the driver eyed her hopefully. Harriet hesitated, and then passed him by. She didn’t want to arrive at the house on the corner by taxi, proclaiming her lack of familiarity to whoever might now live in Simon Archer’s house. If the house was even still there, she reminded herself. Her mother’s home town had changed in thirty years.
Harriet bent her head over the map once more, then hitched her bag over her shoulder and began to walk.
The scale of the map was deceptive. She walked a long way, more than a mile, and her shoes began to rub. It was a long time since she had drunk a cup of coffee on the InterCity train from Euston, and she thought of going into a pub for a drink and a sandwich. But she knew that sitting alone in a bar could only heighten her sense of displacement, and she walked on instead.
The road was busy with a constant stream of heavy traffic that left a pall of grime in the air, and over the houses and shopfronts. The shops that she passed were small, with meagre and faded displays behind the dirty glass, and the houses looked cheerless and hardly inhabited.
