Dying Flames

by Robert Barnard

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Christa thoughtfully. “You have their address, don’t you?”

  “And a telephone number. I think maybe they should be rung first and told what the interest in them is. Apparently they’re fine, gentle people—”

  “Da—Graham. Are you working up to suggesting that I do the contacting and the talking?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact I am.”

  “Then will you let me handle it my way? I’m not completely insensitive, or a complete idiot for that matter. I’ll have to tell some lies, but I’ll make them as few as possible. Mum’s put me right off lies, and Adam too. We try to stick to the truth, if not always the whole truth. Now leave me to think up a plan for the approach, and I’ll report back as soon as possible.”

  “Have a nice weekend,” said Graham rather distantly.

  She is moving in with her new boyfriend, he said to himself bitterly as he put down the phone. Would this one last any longer than that last one, whose name he had forgotten (and probably Christa had too)? Even though Graham already hated this new boy, Sean, he was acknowledged by Christa to be no more than a temporary expedient. And she had nearly called him Dad! Okay, it was almost natural, when she had been taught to think of him as her dad for most of her life. But he didn’t like it at all. It made his interest in her seem almost incestuous. He would much rather be called a dirty old—well, middle-aged, and hardly even that—man, than be called Dad by the object of his…But he couldn’t finish the sentence with the most obvious word: lust. It was not lust. He knew all about lust. This was a quite new emotion to him, and he wasn’t even going to water it down to affection. This was what people called love.

  He filled in his time. He made notes for his next novel and wondered whether he was ever going to write it. He wrote letters to the Times, which were not printed, though they still sent little form letters of thank-you, which he thought rather quaint. He did crosswords and had his hair cut. Over the weekend he thought a lot about Christa and Sean (was he Irish? Was he a hot, sexy little sparrow who would leave Christa desolate? No, Graham rather thought not. If that sort of affair ever happened to Christa, it would not be for a few more years yet).

  On Saturday afternoon he went to a football match. It was an important game, Adam said, and he was one of the strikers. The change from an urban school to a rural one had done wonders for Adam’s prospects as a sportsman. In Romford he had agonized over whether he would make the school’s underfifteens team. In Suffolk he was not only inevitably a team member, he was its star. Good humor burst out of him every day when he came home from school. Graham blessed the transformation from the boy he had first seen in Luigi’s and thought the least he could do was go along to the match.

  For the first quarter of an hour Graham thought he had never endured a more tedious experience in his life, though he cultivated an involved look and cheered when the parents around him cheered. After the half-time break, with chat to village people he knew, he thought he had got the hang of the game’s rules at last, and he decided it might be an improvement on the awful and tedious rugby he had endured at school. By the end he was cheering with a degree of conviction and commitment. Adam scored a goal, and Hepton Magna won 3–1.

  Graham was enormously relieved when Christa rang him on Tuesday evening. She had seen the Telfords and talked to them. Typical author, Graham made notes while she told him about it.

  Christa had thought long and hard about how best to approach Terry’s parents, and in the end she decided it was best to tell them what she really was: a student. The pretense would merely be that she was studying the social sciences, with particular reference to children’s concerns. The story was that she was writing her final term’s special report, which in her case was on adoption.

  “I know you have an adopted son, and I have the impression that the adoption has been very successful,” she said on the phone to the woman with the gentle, elderly voice. “It’s important to me to have several case histories because it is so easy to concentrate on the adoptions where there have been problems, even disasters, because they usually make such fascinating reading. But the result is an emphasis on negative aspects, so that the report overbalances. In many ways adoption in Britain is a wonderful success story—as it seems to be in your case, with your son.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re right. But how did you know about Terry?”

  “By a stroke of luck, really. I have a friend at college, an older woman, who has a child in primary school. One of the children in her class is adopted, and some of the other children were making silly comments about this, and your son told the class that he was adopted, that he had had the best childhood it was possible to have, and he would be eternally grateful that he was chosen as a baby by you and your husband.”

  “That sounds like Terry. He’s a lovely boy.”

  “There are issues of confidentiality here, Mrs. Telford, so I ask you not to bring this up with Terry, or talk about the interview at all. If you are willing to talk to me, that is.”

  “Well…I don’t see why not.”

  “Of course I’d bring proper identification, and a letter from my tutor explaining that I am a bona fide student, and this is a part of my course at the college. That’s standard practice. You can’t be too careful these days.”

  “Oh, that’s true. Well, I’ll be happy to talk to you. I can’t answer for Derek, but he’s as proud of Terry as I am, and I think he will talk to you. He’s been a university teacher himself, so he’s very much on the side of students who have course work to do. They don’t always get the cooperation they should, and he knows it’s an important part of their degrees.”

  And so it was arranged. Christa got one of the letters she had received when she’d registered at the Jeremy Bentham College, photocopied the letterhead, then sweated over a letter from a mythical teacher in the Social Studies department. She thought of using some impenetrable jargon in it, and one or two deliberate spelling mistakes, but thought this might be clever-clever rather than clever. Anyway, she hadn’t been told what Derek Telford had been a university lecturer in, so she had best be careful. The letter she finally came up with was short, simple, and factual (except that it was pure fiction). Christa’s joy in composing it proved she was her mother’s daughter, whatever she said.

  Another part of her preparation was to have in her mind a few examples of other families she had interviewed and their practices and experiences, which ranged from the catastrophic to the euphoric and could be quoted during the interview, “to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald…,” but her memory of the quote failed her at that point.

  She was on the whole rather pleased with her preparations. In fact, she felt she was on the way to becoming a fiction writer. She glowed with confidence when she rang the bell of 27 Commons View, in Wimbledon, the address that Graham had got from the London telephone directory.

  “Oh, hello, it’s Christine Worcester, isn’t it? I’m Eve Telford.” The woman was in her sixties, dressed in an interesting olive-green woolen dress, with a simple but feminine hairstyle and glasses. “Do come in. You look too young to be doing a thesis.”

  “It’s more like a long essay,” said Christa. “But I think I may go on studying after graduation, so it will be a good practice for when I write a thesis. It’s the biggest thing I’ve done in my life, and very exciting!”

  “I’m sure it is. I thought we’d talk in here. Do sit down. The kettle’s on. I won’t be a minute.”

  The sitting room was neat, simply furnished, but comfortable and homely. Newspapers were obviously an important element in the Telfords’ lives, being strewn around in sections. Television was much less so, being tucked away in a corner, even looking dusty. Mrs. Telford came back with a tray and handed Christa biscuits and poured her a cup of tea. Christa took out a notebook and prepared to write, or pretend to.

  “Is this the house that Terry grew up in?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is. It’s near enough to the c
ommon to be ideal. And occasionally if we were hard up, we could let it out during the tennis and all go to the seaside.”

  “Was Terry an only child?”

  “Oh, no. We have a daughter, Sarah—our own—but I couldn’t have another child. We longed for another to make the family complete: a son, not because we are dynastic in any way, but just to have—I don’t know—experience with both. And our daughter longed for a sibling to play with, but more to cuddle and nurse and boss around a bit. She did all of those things!”

  “And the adoption was arranged officially?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. We could have been in great trouble if it had been done in any other way. They did hand a letter to us, at the request of the mother. It just said the baby boy was much loved, she would have done anything to keep it, but she was too young, and her parents didn’t want the baby to spoil her life. She said he was healthy and determined, like his father, who was in the services, and she hoped he and we would be happy. It was signed ‘Peggy,’ with no surname or address. The local authority people would have insisted on that, at the time.”

  “I suppose you’ve kept it ever since?”

  “Oh, yes—well hidden! We wanted it in case Terry ever became curious about his origins. But luckily he never has.”

  “Luckily?”

  Mrs. Telford began to look a little fierce.

  “I’m perhaps prejudiced, or at least behind the times. You read all these stories in the papers about heartwarming reunions, new ties with the birth mother and so on. But there must have been just as many that have turned out disastrously—fresh rejections, or finding out that you’ve nothing in common. So I think Terry is very wise not to go in for that sort of experiment. Though naturally we feel an enormous gratitude to the birth mother.”

  “I’m sure…. For anything more than giving up her child?”

  She screwed up her face. “Well, though we’d always been told we weren’t to try to make the child a carbon copy of ourselves, I think the letter reinforced that very usefully: the father a soldier, the mother writing a rather flowery letter—though she was very young, of course—those things meant we never expected Terry to be a great brain. Does that sound patronizing? I don’t mean to be. He’ll be a wonderful primary school teacher, and the children will love him, but he always had to work hard in school and later. A great heart, not a great brain…. Oh, there you are, Derek. Come and sit down and put your spoke in when you feel like it.”

  Derek Telford was lean to the point of emaciation, but bursting with energy and enthusiasm. He joined in with his wife in a résumé of Terry’s early years, the toys he had loved most, his first words and steps, his first day at school, and so on. They weren’t the sort to keep a photo album of Terry’s Great Moments, but they certainly had on tap its verbal equivalent. Christa learnt that Derek himself had become, after years as a schoolteacher, a lecturer in aerodynamics at the City University. Terry had been fascinated by any scientific experiment that Derek tried out at home, but his father had discovered that this interest was entirely in the spectacle: the scientific significance had never impinged on him at all.

  “It wasn’t easy for him later on,” said Derek, “deciding what he wanted to do with his life—I mean as far as work was concerned, because that’s only part of what you do with your life, isn’t it? He was restless, with no particular direction.”

  “But always coming back here, because it is the center of his life, and we are all such friends,” said Eve. “He took a gap year after his Advanced Level exams. His results weren’t marvelous and didn’t really point the way for him. He had a good year off from study, working in a hospice, then in a hostel for children at risk. He really grew up in that year. Then he started at the University of North London, mainly courses on education. He had a tiny bedsit and came home here at weekends. Easing the process of moving out, he said—though I rather think he meant for us.”

  “He was wise,” said Christa. “I should have done that.”

  “Then Derek got an offer, didn’t you, dear?”

  “That’s right,” said Derek, grinning broadly and all but rubbing his hands, his pride quite unconcealed. “It was an article I’d had in the Journal of Aerodynamic Studies, and it made a little bit of a stir, you know—a stir in a tiny circle, inevitably. And the next thing I knew, I got the offer of a year’s sabbatical research and teaching at a university in Indiana. Well, I was coming up to retirement here, due for leave, and everyone was very kind, so it was arranged and off we all went.”

  “When was this?”

  “Three years ago, in September.”

  “And Terry came with you.”

  “Oh, yes. We talked it over, got what the Americans call a catalog from the university to see what courses were on offer, and there were lots of things that appealed to him. Of course we were all worried a bit about interrupting his courses here, because we didn’t know if his American courses would be accepted towards a degree. But in the end we all felt it was too good a chance to miss.”

  “In what way too good?”

  They looked at her as if she were being rather dense.

  “Well, what other chance was he likely to get to live abroad, see how other nations live, experience another culture?”

  Plenty of chances, Christa thought, ones that he could make himself, and more challenging ones. The United States, after all, was hardly the same as taking off for Ulan Bator or New Guinea.

  With the antennae of an independent young woman, Christa was beginning to suss out the Telfords. They were cultivated, liberal, open-minded people who were also clingers to their children. They knew it was what parents should not do, but their intelligence provided them with a great range of reasons that in this or that case they were justified in going against the accepted wisdom. She understood why Terry felt he had to get away. She also understood why, in looking for his natural mother, he had kept his search quiet. His parents, while saying it was understandable and they were not in the least hurt, would subliminally have let it out that they were.

  “It must have been an exciting time for all of you,” she said.

  “It was,” said Derek. “We were on a lovely campus, an hour from Indianapolis, acres of space, and Eve got in with the local women’s groups and charitable organizations. I was hard put to it to tailor my teaching to students who had had an education in some ways very different to ours here, but I coped.”

  “That must have been difficult for Terry too.”

  “He coped too, wonderfully. You know the young—well, you’re one of them! You can accustom yourselves to new things much more quickly than us oldies. Terry makes friends easily, so he got a lot of help and put together with their advice a crash reading course to bring himself up to scratch. They really were a lovely bunch, his friends, and quite soon we were hardly seeing anything of him. In the vacations he took off to travel around a lot more of America and Canada. We didn’t try to stop him—it was the best opportunity he was ever going to have. And he rang us every two or three days to tell us he was all right, and what he’d been doing.”

  And sent his laundry back to be done too, Christa wouldn’t have minded betting. There was one thing to be said for a mother who refused to be treated as a washerwoman: it gave a tremendous fillip to the drive for independence.

  “So since you came back here Terry’s been working as a teacher?” she said.

  “That’s right. A supply teacher. They’re desperate for them. Not that Terry won’t be a first-rate teacher—I’m quite sure he will.” Eve seemed to be dimly conscious that she wasn’t making an altogether favorable impression. “But he’s not really qualified yet, and he’s doing some courses with the Open University. With those, and his American courses recognized, he can qualify and get a permanent job. Outside London, we hope. The schools in London are just too tough for a young teacher. And Derek is retired now, so we can look around for a home in the country. Like most pensioners we fancy a slower pace, a bit more peace and quiet.”r />
  You’ll get that, thought Christa, if you move to a small town where you don’t know anyone. Anyone but Terry.

  “And then perhaps grandchildren,” she said.

  “We’d love that,” said Eve, and Derek nodded. “Sarah, that’s our daughter, has had lots of relationships, but she’s never shown any sign of wanting to settle down with any of the men, let alone having children.”

  “Terry’s had girlfriends,” said Derek. “Girls he’s really fond of, but not one that’s serious enough for him to bring home.”

  “Of course if he were gay, we wouldn’t mind in the least—it would make no difference whatsoever to our feelings for him.” Eve protested too much, Christa thought. “But to be honest we’d prefer him to have a wife or partner, and children. It would somehow seem right—that life goes on, I mean.”

  Christa kept having to remind herself that she liked the Telfords very much. It must have been wonderfully exciting, having such liberated and lively minded people as parents. At first. Before too long the emotional blackmail of which they were so obviously unconscious must have got to be a burden, a smothering blanket, something to escape from. Terry must have had hundreds of little escape mechanisms. Otherwise how could such loving parents remain uncertain whether he was gay?

  Christa said as much to Graham, when she reported back to him on Tuesday. She was as fair to the Telfords as she knew how to be, but that fairness included, perhaps especially included, her half brother Terry.

  “When we saw him and Mum together,” she said, when they got on to a general chin-wag, “it was like two children playing together. A bit nauseous. But I think I understand now. They were the sort of people, his parents, who would only buy nonracist, nonmilitaristic, environmentally friendly toys for their child. Everything would be talked over at great length at some sort of family meeting, and there would be emotional pressure of the most subtle kind that it would take any child a long time to get a handle on. I can understand why he might want to have a silly, childish time with someone, with no concealed agenda—or apparently none.”