Dying Flames

by Robert Barnard

  “I take your point,” said Graham. “Well, I’m going to have to have a talk to Terry. I think it would be best to talk to him openly, with no tricks or subterfuges this time.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” said Christa tartly, “since he’s already met you.”

  “What I meant was, be straight that what I’m interested in is Peggy’s death, and how she came to meet it. But also, of course, I’m interested in how he came to have another natural father in addition to me. I suppose the answer must be your mother’s inveterate tendency to lying, but I want to get at how it came about.”

  “Well, he’s teaching in Peckham this week,” said Christa. “That came out when the Telfords and I were making conversation as I was leaving.”

  “And he teaches in primary schools,” said Graham. “It’s a start.”

  The first school he rang on the list in the telephone directory said that Terry Telford had taught there in the past, but was not there that day.

  “He’s teaching in this school all week,” said Graham.

  “Ah—that could mean it’s a school with real problems,” said the voice. “Try Selford Green or Winslow Road.”

  And it was at Winslow Road that Graham found him and was given the number of the staff common room and told to ring back in the lunch hour.

  “Terry Telford here,” said a slightly suspicious voice when Terry had been fetched.

  “Terry, this is Graham Broadbent here. You remember me from—”

  “Of course I remember you.” Brusque, but not unfriendly.

  “It seems to me we’re in a bit of a mess. You know about Peggy’s death?”

  “I’ve talked to the police about that.”

  “So have I, and they’ve been very reasonable. But I think you and I have an interest in what has happened that may not be of a criminal nature.”

  “What nature then?”

  “Of a human kind. To start with, I was told by Peggy—virtually told—that you were my son. I’m not sure I shouted ‘whoopee,’ any more than you shouted ‘whoopee’ when you were told at the dinner I was your father. But it surely leaves us with something to sort out, which is probably something quite distinct from anything the police are investigating.” Silence. “Well, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so…. I just feel I have nothing to say to you…. But if you feel you want to talk, that’s fine by me. I’ve got a small flat—a glorified box really—on the borders of Peckham and Camberwell. It’s 21 Tetleigh Road, flat six. When would you want to come?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow it is. But remember: I’m not your son.”

  Chapter 15

  The First Son

  Tetleigh Road was a short street of fairly substantial late-Victorian houses, and number twenty-one was at the end of the cul-de-sac and had a panel of eight bells by the blue-painted front door. When Graham had stated his identity to Terry Telford, a buzz sounded; he went in and proceeded as directed up the stairs to the second floor, thinking it felt more like living in New York than London (it was, in fact, a long while since Graham had lived in London). The flat, which he was ushered into by Terry, was no more than a flatlet, with kitchenette, bathroomette, and a bed-sitting-room with hideaway bed. It was rather ingeniously planned, given the restrictions imposed by its consisting of two of the house’s original bedrooms, one tiny, and Terry had made it pleasantly habitable with large posters of American cities and purveyors of crap music. There were records and books, but Graham always felt embarrassed at looking at the bookshelves of other people because they jumped to the conclusion that he was searching for his own books, or, at the very best, subjecting their tastes to an impromptu critique.

  Terry was apparently relaxed and moderately welcoming, but the welcome did not extend to actual friendliness. Graham also felt that Terry was tensed up. The coffee he was offered was the real thing—a relic of Terry’s upbringing, probably—and there was the sort of cake, with currants, cherries, and candied peel, that bore witness to a sweet tooth.

  “It’s a nice pad,” said Graham, who then sipped to mask an awkwardness. “It’s much more difficult than it was in my day for young people to get a foothold on the market.”

  “Much more,” said Terry, sitting down opposite him and striving to relax. “Eventually I’ll move elsewhere, but I’d like a few years in London on my own before I do that.”

  “That’s another problem with the housing market—young people stay at home longer than they did in my day. I loved my parents, but the moment it was possible, I was away and on my own. Nowadays you stay longer, and the longer you stay, the more difficult it becomes to strike out on your own.”

  “True,” said Terry. “But in the end it builds up and it’s something you’re screaming to do and get it over with.”

  “Parents clingy?”

  Terry shrugged. “A bit. There are many worse, that I do know. I owe them everything, so I’m loosening the bond gradually. All parents have a bit of that sort of clinginess. All real parents.”

  Graham felt stung. “Touché. Can I make one thing clear? My affair with Peggy—much too sweeping a word, but it must serve—lasted a few days: four separate occasions, if you want the exact reckoning. After that there was no contact until this year. If you were the result of what we did—”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “—then I was never told. What I would have done if I had been—and knowing Peggy now, I realize I could have been told even if it wasn’t true, so I was really lucky—I don’t know. Probably ducked out if I could. I never felt the glow of parenthood, even when I felt sure—stupidly—that you were my son.”

  “That’s lucky then,” said Terry, with a wry smile. “Funny, isn’t it? The people I know who have the glow of parenthood more than anyone else are the Telfords.”

  “Yes. I gather they love you very much.”

  “They do. And I them. I’ll always be there if they need me, and they will for me. So why do I sometimes think of that Oscar Wilde line about ‘She loved him with a love that made his life a burden’?…I suppose the trouble is that they’ll also be there when I don’t need them. So it becomes necessary to do things that they know nothing about.”

  “Girlfriends?”

  “Yes. The odd boyfriend too, but that never worked out.”

  “And finding out who your real parents were?”

  “Yes.”

  Terry put down his cup and thought for a time.

  “Don’t hurry it,” said Graham.

  “It was when we were about to go to America,” Terry said eventually. “Derek had got a year’s professorship in a university in Indiana. I was excited, but a bit in two minds, because it meant I wouldn’t ‘break the bonds’ for another year at least, and I was conscious of time passing. I suddenly felt I wanted to know. And that was accentuated by the fact that America, as a prospect, had obviously caused them to think a bit, put them in a bit of a quandary. Why, I didn’t know, and they certainly weren’t telling me. I heard the word over and over, from outside the door. That was perfectly natural, you might think, since the whole trip was an adventure for them too. But what wasn’t natural was that they always cut short the conversation when I went into the room.”

  “You felt it would have been natural to them to share their thoughts with you, since you were going with them?”

  “Of course. And my going with them was what they wanted. So what were they keeping from me? What were they afraid of?”

  “So you raided the family safe for the letter from your mother?”

  “Family safe? Good Lord, the Telfords don’t have a family safe. Anything valuable they may have is used, seen. They would think it immoral to lock things away.” He suddenly shot Graham a piercing glance. “How did you know about the letter from my mother?”

  “They spoke about it to someone I know.”

  Terry thought.

  “You mean you put somebody on to them?”

  “Yes. Not a private detecti
ve or anything like that. It was Peggy’s daughter, whom you met—your half sister, Christa. I’m sorry, but it seemed necessary. She liked them very much. They know nothing about the connection between her and you. I do want to find what was behind Peggy’s murder—not just the facts, but the impulse that led to it.”

  Terry remained in thought, then nodded. Graham breathed a sigh of relief.

  “They’d told me once they’d had a letter from my mother, but I hadn’t been interested then—much to their relief, I imagine. I didn’t want to hurt them, so instead of asking to see it I went looking for it. I knew their habits, so it was quite easy. It was in an unmarked envelope at the bottom of one of Eve’s underwear drawers. Incredible, isn’t it? It must have been there, or somewhere like it, for over twenty years.”

  “But the letter didn’t tell you her name, did it?”

  “No. It was signed ‘Peggy,’ but I thought that might be an assumed name. No, what it told me was that my father was an American serviceman.”

  Graham nearly dropped his cup. He set it down abruptly, then sat looking at Terry, astounded.

  “What a bloody fool I am,” he said at last. “Why on earth didn’t I think of it? Why didn’t I ask myself that?”

  “Ask yourself what?”

  “What Peggy was doing in Upper Melrose.”

  “Where on earth’s that?” asked Terry, frowning.

  “Essex. Or maybe just over the border into Suffolk. With a wonderful Anglo-Saxon church. It was where Peggy and I met up a few weeks after the school play we were in, and it all started.”

  “So? What’s the connection?”

  “An American air base, only seven miles away. Its name was Calton Heath, I seem to remember. One sometimes saw the servicemen in the pubs around. They were rather popular.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “Peggy told her parents she went there visiting a friend who lived in Lower Melrose. She was a friend of convenience, I suppose. I was in the church, seeing all the things the guidebook said I ought to see, and when I came out, there was Peggy. But she had no interest in architecture, still less in gravestones. She must have been there to meet her lover from the American air base, and he hadn’t turned up. So she took me instead. I should have had the modesty to ask myself why she looked at me twice.”

  “But you say you knew her already?”

  “Oh, yes. Shaw’s St. Joan. But I only had a tiny part in scene one, then shouted rhubarb occasionally after that. She was Saint Joan. Of course there was a lot of talk about her, but it was always the sporty boys she was coupled with in the gossip, not the spotty ones…. But probably she found all of us horribly inexperienced. Probably she got her kicks elsewhere.”

  “I think she did. The affair with the airman went on for several months.”

  “I see…. Until her parents took her off to Romford, I suppose.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I didn’t talk to Ken much about my mother. I knew by then I could find her if I wanted to.”

  “Ken?”

  “Ken Poldowski. My father.”

  “I see…. I suppose finding out that he was an American just when you were about to go to America was like a gift from the Gods?”

  “I don’t think like that,” said Terry with a dismissive gesture. “But it couldn’t have been more convenient. I spent the first months over there getting acquainted with the system, with people, with habits and attitudes that at first seemed strange. Then round about November I put an appeal on the Internet, with my date of birth, a probable location of London or the southeast, and an appeal to American servicemen who were in that area in the late seventies and who thought they might be or know about my father.”

  “A fairly wide net,” commented Graham. “A lot of the American bases are in the east or the southeast of the country.”

  “I know, but I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I thought it was worth a try. This wasn’t the crusade of a lifetime, something I’d have given my right arm to succeed in. I was interested, but I wasn’t obsessed. The Telfords were and are my real parents, and with all their foibles I could have done much, much worse with natural parents.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “Anyway, for a long while there was nothing. Or rather, just one or two answers that I thought were a bit iffy…suspect. Middle-aged men who were vague about England and seemed just interested in getting in touch with younger men. Then at last there was something: an answer from this guy Kenyon Poldowski.”

  “What marked him off from the others?”

  Terry smiled, self-deprecatingly. “I don’t know. He just sounded genuine. He gave details of his war service in Vietnam, his divorce from his first wife, his posting to Britain, the base in Suffolk, with mention of Ipswich and Colchester as places fairly nearby that he went to periodically. And just a simple statement that he had fathered a boy he had never seen while he was stationed there.”

  “Quite a lot of the servicemen there could have said the same.”

  “Oh, yes, I know that. But sometimes—just sometimes—you have to go on gut instincts. It was coming up to Easter. I was going to travel around to see more of America. I asked whether I could pay him a visit. He gave me the address of a nursing home for ex-servicemen in Wyoming. Said he was recovering from cancer, doing well, and would look forward to seeing me.”

  “So you went way off the tourist trail on your travels.”

  “I did. On the way to San Francisco I did a detour, and when I rang my mum and dad later that week, I said I’d been in San Francisco for three days, when in fact I’d just arrived. Somehow they’re the sort of people you have to get into little deceptions with. Otherwise there are too many questions. Anyway, I went to the home he mentioned, just outside Cheyenne, they showed me through to the sunroom, I saw Ken and he saw me, and somehow—bingo!”

  “You knew?”

  “We knew. Both of us.”

  “How?”

  Terry shrugged. “The cut of the face. Thick eyebrows, the jaw, the build generally. We looked, then Ken laughed and held out his hands, and we hugged and laughed, and it was…lovely.”

  “You don’t think it happened because you both so much wanted it to happen?”

  “No, I don’t. It was right—felt right and was right. I could see that Ken had been ill, really ill, but I could still see what he’d been like as a young man—not just physically, but what sort of guy he was. He was very warm and human, and he was straight. In the sense of uncomplicated. It was lovely just sitting there, talking to him, telling him about college in Indiana, what was strange to me, what reminded me of Britain, friends I’d made, what Derek was doing and what Eve said about the women’s groups she was joining. Then we went on to life in Wimbledon, growing up, what I wanted to do with my life, even American politics—everything! Mostly we were alone in the room, so we just babbled on, and the more we talked, the more we took to each other.”

  Graham found Terry endearing, but he worried too about a vein of naïveté in him, one that he could not bear to preach caution to.

  “And that’s why, when Peggy announced that I was your father—”

  “I felt outraged. Insulted for Ken. I knew he wanted to be my father, and I certainly wanted that too. I’d never talked over my father with Peggy the two or three times we had met. If we had, she’d have known better than to do what she did. But she hadn’t seemed to want to discuss the matter, and I didn’t need to.”

  “I expect she didn’t want to because she was preparing this big, theatrical denouement, all in the public gaze.”

  Terry’s eyebrows rose. “I hadn’t thought of that. But it does sound very like Peggy.”

  “She had no private, real self. But looking at it the other way: didn’t you talk about her with your father?”

  “Not much. At one point, after we’d been discussing what my parents had been doing while they were in America, Ken said, out of the blue, ‘I thought Peggy brought you up herself.’ That was when I realized she’d p
ut her real name on the letter. So I said no, she’d given me up for adoption, and I was glad she had, because I had wonderful parents. That was true, but I suppose I also said it to assuage my conscience a little.”

  “You felt you were going against their wishes in seeking out your dad, is that it?”

  “Something like that. Though I’m going to have to do that more and more as I start being myself. Being myself and not just their son. Anyway, when I’d told Ken what had happened, all he said was, ‘She was such a lovely girl,’ and the subject was dropped between us. We had two days of talking and swapping jokes, and him telling me about Vietnam and being in Britain, and his second marriage. His wife had died a couple of years before—cancer too—and he was living with his sister. We even talked religion.”

  “That’s something my generation scarcely ever did,” said Graham.

  “He’s a lapsed Catholic. I should think they often do. We didn’t come to any grand conclusions. It was just a wonderful two days, and we knew we’d be wanting to meet up again and do the same sometime in the future. He was scheduled to be released from hospital in two or three weeks, and he said when his sister retired, he and she would come to Britain. That hasn’t happened yet, but we keep in touch: ordinary letters, e-mail, postcards if we’re in unusual places. We joke as if we’d known each other all our lives and know exactly what amuses the other, which in fact we do. I can’t tell you what a revelation it’s been. We both see it as a small miracle.”

  “But when you came back, you decided to contact Peggy.”

  “Yes…. I wasn’t sure, but I’d had such a good experience with my father. I took my little piece from the Web site, rewrote a couple of sentences, and put it on the Find Your Family site.”

  “And you got a letter pointing the finger at Peggy Webster as the likely mother.”