‘Was it you recruited Len Simmeter?’ he asked.
‘Oh no—we’re much of an age, as far as I remember. In fact, I joined later—round about ’thirty-three, and he’d been in for a couple of years then. He’d been on a trip to Italy, seen good old Musso. So he went in with Sir Oswald right from the moment he split with the Labour Party. Matter of fact, it was at a meeting where he was one of the speakers that I joined the Union—rather like you tonight, young man.’
‘Yes,’ said Simon, with what he felt to be transparently false enthusiasm. ‘It must have been a tremendously exciting time, the ’thirties.’
‘Oh, it was, it was,’ said Al, who had finished stirring his coffee and was now licking the spoon. ‘You should have seen the support we had! And the speakers! Lots of your intellectuals—Harold Nicolson, Christopher Isherwood—all sorts. They didn’t stay, of course—those brainy types haven’t got the staying power of us common-or-garden types. But what a time it was!’
‘Was Len Simmeter a good speaker at meetings? You say he more or less recruited you.’
‘Well, he was and he wasn’t. More the sort for leading the marches. But he made a good warm-up speaker, like that young bloke tonight. And now and then he could really surpass himself. I remember one meeting—much later it was, just before the war—and he was telling this big open-air meeting that you’d got to break the power of the Jews (it was all Jews then, not the coloureds), and he went down into the crowd and he took up his little boy—the apple of his eye, he was, and hardly more than a babby—and he held him up and he shouted, “Until you smash Jew power, this country’ll never be safe for your kids and my kids.” There was a great roar at that. They loved it.’
‘I bet they did,’ said Simon. He searched his memory for an image of a sea of faces, seen from small eyes above a crowd, but his public debut had left no picture on his mind.
‘His wife didn’t like it. I was standing just by her when he came and got the nipper, and she didn’t like it at all. But she wasn’t the type to say. Just sort of screwed up her lips.’
‘She died, didn’t she? My father mentioned she died quite young.’
‘That’s right. Died in the blitz. That would have been ‘forty-one, I’d guess. I didn’t have much contact with Len by then. Naturally we was both lying low.’
‘Lying low?’
‘ ’Case they interned us, of course. Like they did Sir Oswald. Just like Them, isn’t it, to intern the most patriotic of the lot. Gerry Forbes—that was Len’s immediate superior in Paddington—he got taken. And one or two who were with A. S. Leese’s lot—the Imperial Fascists, they called themselves. ‘So during ‘forty and ‘forty-one we was both lying very low indeed. And I do know that Len was taken in for questioning several times, but they always let him go. Wasn’t a big enough fish, I suppose.’
‘What was she like, Len’s wife?’
‘Very quiet sort of body. He saw to that, I shouldn’t wonder—and that mother of his. Old Mrs Simmeter did a lot of work for the Union (like Sir Oswald’s mother), but she wasn’t what I’d call a companionable body. Len’s wife was kept very much in the background. What was it Hitler said women should occupy their time with? Kitchen, children, church—something like that. Well, that was pretty much her life. Maybe she wasn’t entirely with us, for all I know, but anyway Len didn’t involve her in Movement activities. She adored that little boy they had. Any child she was like a protector to. She couldn’t hardly bear to part from him when he had to be evacuated. Wanted him with her, yet didn’t, if you follow me. Len wouldn’t let her go with the boy. Thought her place was with him.’
‘So the boy was evacuated, was he?’
‘Oh yes, I believe so. So I was told. Somewhere in Sussex. But she stayed on, and in the end they both got their number. Her first, then him later, so far as I recall. Awful. I didn’t have much contact then, as I say, but I believe it really broke Len up, losing that boy of his. He’s not been the same man since.’
‘You’ve seen him since the war, have you?’
‘Oh yes. After the war things were very quiet for a bit. But I’ve seen him at party congresses and suchlike. He was active in the Kensington by-election, like I was. But he’s not high up in the Party, as he might have expected. It’s like he was broken, or like he’d had some big fright he never recovered from. No bounce. And you can’t do anything in a movement like ours without a bit of bounce!’
‘I suppose not,’ said Simon.
‘It’s a movement that’s got to appeal to the young, the virile. That’s always been my job, getting the young people in. Used to get a lot of recruits out of the Scouts, the Boys’ Brigade, and so on. Pity they’re not flourishing like they were. Schools don’t have their cadet corps either. You’ve got to find likely types where you can, these days.’
‘Well,’ said Simon, getting up, his coffee still unfinished. ‘I’d better be making my way.’
Al Needham drained his cup, licked his tongue around his mouth, and stood up.
‘You’ll be back, won’t you, young man? I say, write your name and address down for me—I’ve got this little notebook I keep for just such an eventuality as this.’
Simon took the dog-eared notebook, leaned over the table, and wrote in it ‘Simon Thorn’ and a totally fictitious address.
‘Good. Excellent. I’d like you to come along to one of our meetings. See how they suit you. It’s a more respectable set-up, ours. But we need young, bright boys like yourself—it’s not every day we come across them, by Harry! You’d be getting in on the ground floor. People are beginning to think! There’s an exciting time coming! Think about it, young man! I’ll be in touch.’
The older man waved, and trotted off into the dark, to nourish his hopes of a new dawn and a new generation of fine, well-spoken young recruits. Simon took once more the familiar roads that led to Paddington Station.
CHAPTER 11
‘I’m expecting Teddy round next week,’ said Len to Simon one evening when, quite exceptionally, they met on the first-floor landing.
Simon had in fact heard Len’s footsteps coming up and going into his bedroom for something, and he had chosen that time to go down to the lavatory. He had not seen Len for some time, having failed to coincide either with his morning or his evening shifts. There was a nagging feeling inside him that he needed to see Len from time to time, that he had to check his impressions of him, to see if they cohered with what he was learning about him. He is my father, he said to himself. And he added: and I want to know what he did to my mother.
So when he met Len on the first landing he stopped on the pretext of asking about the old lady. Len shook his head, with an expression of concern.
‘I’m afraid she’s failing,’ he said. ‘Very much so.’ He tapped his head. ‘Up here, too. Pitiful to watch. And yet she won’t give up, you know. Still thinks she ought to make the decisions, like she always has. Even though she hasn’t got the concentration any longer. Tragic. Still—I’m expecting Teddy round next week. That ought to perk her up a bit.’
‘That’s your brother, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. The baby of the family. Teddy always keeps people amused. It’s a sort of gift—I haven’t got it. I’m more the serious type. But Teddy’s got it and to spare—don’t know where it comes from. I hope he’ll do Ma a bit of good, though I realize it can’t be permanent. He’ll notice the difference in her. To be perfectly frank, I can see the writing on the wall . . .’
Simon sensed a deeply buried undertone of relish.
It meant that Simon, in the next week, haunted the Colonel Monk. Teddy might not relax from his duty of cheering up the Aged P. sufficiently long to pop along there as he apparently usually did, but there again, those duties were likely to prove tiring . . . The landlord at the pub, faced with a nightly visit from Simon, did not relax from his surly gloom. In fact one evening he came close to suggesting he’d be happier if he went elsewhere.
‘Seeing a lot of you lately,’ h
e said. Casting a dispirited eye around his elderly and miserable clientèle, he added: ‘Most of the young people go down the road.’
‘Oh, I like a quiet pub,’ said Simon.
In fact, the odd young person did come in, sometimes just to buy crisps or a pork pie, sometimes to down a single drink and then take himself out. On the Wednesday night, chirpy and glowing in the prevailing gloom, the girl from next door popped in for a bottle of stout.
‘Hello,’ said Simon. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’
‘Well, I don’t know. I shouldn’t. I’m getting this for my landlady—she’s got one of those heavy head colds. Can’t understand how anybody can drink this stuff, cold or not. I suppose she won’t die if I have a quick one. I’d like a lager and lime.’
So he got her a drink, and they sat cosily together in one of the murky corners of the saloon bar, a corner where the cleaner in the morning seemed to have dumped most of what her dustpan had collected. The girl lit up the corner though, Simon thought: she was warm and quirky and funny, and vitality came crackling out of her.
‘What on earth are you doing drinking in this horrible dive?’ she whispered with a giggle. ‘The people who come here mostly seem to be plucking up courage to end it all. The young people all go to the Jolly Beagle. It’s another hundred yards down the road, but it’s worth it.’
‘So I’ve been told. But I have my reasons,’ said Simon, with mock portentousness. ‘You’re right it’s not much of a place, though. You expect spiders to come and weave webs around you if you sit here too long.’
‘How’s life and everything? Settling into London?’
Simon was disconcerted by the question. He had been so preoccupied that he had never asked himself that. And he’d done precious few of the things people settling into London usually do.
‘I suppose so. I’ve been so busy I hardly know. It’s always a business, getting on top of a new job.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m at the London Zoo. On the scientific staff.’
‘Oh, what a smashing job. What are you doing staying in a mucky dump like Miswell Terrace? You should have a sharp little flat.’
‘I have my reasons. Oh, I’ve said that, haven’t I? Well, I expect I will be getting a flat before long. At the moment I don’t get much time for looking.’
‘I’m going to share a flat next year. You know, go in with two or three other girls. I’m filling in time working at a hairdresser’s. But I’m going to drama school—I’ve got a place at the Central Academy—next year. I didn’t think I was ready yet this year to get the most out of it.’
‘One day I’ll see your name in lights. You’d better tell me what it is or the whole effect will be lost.’
‘I’m Rosemary Short. Rosie, my friends call me. And you’re Simon Cutheridge.’
‘How did you know?’
‘My landlady asked old mother Simmeter. Heard she’d been ill, so she went round to see if she could help. She stayed for a chat, and didn’t get offered so much as a cup of tea and a biscuit.’
‘I think that’s fairly typical of the Simmeters.’
‘I say, you know I told you about that trouble at the Angel. Do you know what it was about?’
‘I could make a guess: Len Simmeter called one of the guards or ticket collectors a black bastard, or some such term.’
‘You knew.’
‘No, I guessed. It’s one of his charming little obsessions. He’s careful about giving it rein these days, but he’s got a very nasty temper underneath. I thought that’d be what landed him in trouble.’
‘Isn’t it ghastly? What a rotten little sod.’
‘Yes,’ said Simon, as if pronouncing a long-pondered judgment. ‘I think he’s one of the most unappetizing people I’ve ever met.’
‘Oh look—over there. Do you know him?’
Simon peered through the murk at a tall man of thirty or so, standing by the bar.
‘I don’t think so. Should I?’
‘That’s Mr Blore. He used to have your room.’
‘Really? I assumed he’d moved out of the area. I say, do have another one.’
Rosemary’s landlady’s cold seemed to have become a matter of lesser importance. She pushed her glass across with a smile. As Simon waited for the landlord to get off his fat beam and condescend to serve, he turned to the tall man and said:
‘You don’t know me, but I gather I’ve got your old room.’
‘Really?’ said Blore, in a manner more pitying than aggrieved. ‘Well, rather you than me. I served my sentence.’
‘I feel rather guilty about it. I had the impression that Len Simmeter might have hurried you out.’
‘He turned me out. I knew he must have someone else lined up. It was the best thing that could have happened to me: I’ve got two good rooms now for the same rent. Len had been at daggers drawn with me since he saw my Labour Party poster. I think I only stayed on for devilment, to annoy him. I presume the object of the exercise was to up the rent still further?’
‘I suspect so,’ said Simon. ‘I pay four pounds ten.’
Blore whistled.
‘But that’s ludicrous. It’s daylight robbery. And probably illegal to boot. I bet he’s operating with two receipt books or something. You should dob him in.’
‘Oh no,’ said Simon. ‘I shan’t be dobbing him in for that.’
‘Well, someone ought to. You may have got yourself in with that gorgeous little tottie from next door, but you shouldn’t stay a moment longer than you need.’
‘The Simmeters have a fatal fascination, as you found.’
‘They have nothing of the kind. Len Simmeter’s not only a capitalist swine, he’s a fascist capitalist swine. Did you know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve found out.’
Then Simon carried the glasses back to the table, and for the rest of the evening he forgot about the Simmeters. As he walked home with Rosemary he promised to take her round the Zoo.
‘I must remember I’ve got to take Miss Cosgrove round too. She has the other room on the second floor.’
‘Oh well, we can organize it so you take us both together.’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I think I’ll take you round on your own.’
The question of moving from the Simmeters’ came up again by chance next day at the Zoo. He and a senior colleague were standing observing a puma that was taking badly to captivity. While they were watching the moping beast, his companion turned to him and said:
‘Done anything about getting a flat nearer here yet?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Because I think the Boss is getting a bit worried. He’s wondering if you’re thinking of moving on, and he doesn’t want to lose you.’
‘That’s nice of him, but it’s nothing like that. It’s just—well, laziness I suppose. I’ll start looking for something more convenient as soon as summer’s over.’
And suddenly Simon realized that he was telling the truth. He was going to be moving out from the Simmeters’ soon. That quest to find out about his origins had suddenly begun to lose the fine edge of urgency. He no longer had any need to ‘find a father’. He had found him, and would quite happily unfind him at any time. The moment he compared Len Simmeter with Tom Cutheridge back in Yeasdon, his heart yearned back to the slow, warm old man. The nature of his quest seemed to be changing, from an emotional one to a purely intellectual one: it was less a question of ‘who am I?’ and more one of finding out what had happened to his mother, and how he had turned up on that platform in Paddington. Any emotion, any urgency, was connected with his mother: he wanted to know what exactly had happened on the night she died.
The next evening he called in at the Paddington Reference Library on his way home from work. What he was interested in now was Mary Simmeter’s death. It should be easy enough to determine the date. He called for the volume of the Recorder for 1941. It was much lighter than the others he had handled: newsprin
t was scarce, though news itself there was in an abundance that even the ’thirties had not known. He turned to the week he had arrived in Yeasdon. Got it in one.
From the yellow pages of the emaciated issue of the paper there came a dim echo of the horrors of that week. It was one of the worst weeks of the blitz, and in that May London was strafed over and over again. On the front page, and again on the inside ones, there were pictures of blazing buildings, of houses and public buildings reduced to rubble. On page five, closely squeezed up together, as if in a journalistic paupers’ grave, there was a list of casualties. Mary Simmeter was killed—no precise date was given, but the issue of the paper was dated May 12th—by the bomb that had demolished 24 Fisher Street. Simon frowned. The address meant nothing to him. He drew a finger down the huddled list of names: finally he came to Simon and Eve Rosebourne, and their daughter Helen, aged three, all killed at 24 Fisher Street. So the presumption was that Mary had been out visiting, or perhaps on an errand of mercy, when she was killed.
The rest of the evening Simon spent in the Colonel Monk. Teddy Simmeter did not come in, but Rosie Short did. They talked, exchanged confidences, got very close. At one point in the evening Rosie said:
‘You’ve got a reason for coming here, haven’t you? You weren’t just joking?’
‘No, I wasn’t joking.’
‘I bet it’s something to do with those rotten Simmeters.’
‘Yes, in a way it has.’
‘No “in a way” at all. It has. Are you going to tell me?’
Simon paused and thought.
‘Yes, I expect some day I will. Not now.’
‘You’re not one of those shut-in, secretive people, are you?’
He put his arm round her.
‘No. I promise you I’m not that.’
It was Friday night when Teddy finally came in. There were rather more customers in the bar than usual, and people coming in and out for bottles the whole time, but Simon recognized Teddy at once. In spite of the twenty-odd years that had passed, there was still something of that young boy in RAF rig he had glimpsed in the Simmeters’ sitting-room. Not that time had dealt lightly with him. Then he had been a fresh-faced, shy, not unhandsome young pilot, taking on the planes, presumably, that were inflicting such punishment on London night after night at the time of Mary Simmeter’s death. Now he was a pudgy businessman, or more accurately a fat one. He was one of those men who made you wonder about the logistics of trousers; his face was red and veined, under an increasingly sparse head of hair, and he had a double chin round and succulent as turkey breast. But there was about him an air of invincible jollity, of honest roguery, of taking life as it came that was perhaps a relic of his Battle of Britain days. The Simmeter strain only came out in his tendency to corpulence, but whereas his mother’s bulk, even in her decline, seemed ponderous, overbearing, threatening, in him the bulk had been transformed—‘laundered’, one might say, as dubious money is in the States—into something rubicund, endearing, almost Pickwickian. And those small, mean, Simmeter eyes has passed him by altogether.
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