by F. G. Cottam
‘You’ll be the writer, Mr Seaton,’ she said.
He had Covey’s fake accreditation dampening in his coat pocket. But it had no useful application here. And writers didn’t need qualifications. They just needed subjects to claim to be writing about.
Mrs Reeve had a cloth between her hands and her hair pulled back in pins away from her face. She was middle-aged, all spectacles and bland parochial disapproval. And then she smiled, and it seemed to him as though the summer sun came out.
‘Writing a book about Marjory Pegg, are you?’
‘Researching one.’
‘By all accounts the woman was a saint, the work she accomplished at the school. Can I get you a cup of tea, Mr Seaton? Or there’s coffee, freshly brewed.’
Seaton squeezed the raindrops from his eyebrows with his thumbs. ‘Coffee would be grand,’ he said.
By all accounts. So the two women had never met. But that would have been a bit much to ask for. Marjory Pegg had been forty-three at the time of the disappearance, according to the crime reporter Philip Beal. And Beal had struck Seaton as a pro. Such facts as he had been able to establish, he would have been far too methodical to write up imprecisely.
They drank their coffee in a tiny room off to the left of the church altar. The room smelled of cut flowers and was lit by a naked bulb against the gloom allowed by one small stained-glass window. Rain gurgled and spilled over swamped guttering on to the ground outside. Mrs Reeve produced a framed picture. It showed eight pale children standing to attention in front of a stone building in a schoolyard. Seaton knew it was a schoolyard because the lines and numbers of a hopscotch game were still etched faintly on the flagstones in front of the class. The children were flanked by a neatly dressed woman and a thin elderly man in a clerical collar. Seaton assumed the man was one of the Reverend Madden’s predecessors. He studied the woman.
Marjory Pegg was tall and bareheaded in the picture. Her thick silvery hair was combed back into a bun. She wore a plain pinafore dress over a striped shirt buttoned to the wrists and collar. Pinned to her breast was the sort of watch worn on a ribbon or chain by a nurse. Seaton could clearly see where the schoolteacher’s stockings had been darned under the knee. And her shoes, plain and immaculately polished, were thick with the resoles of careful repair. She was smiling in the photograph, into the sunlight that gave the picture its vivid sharpness and detail. Her eyes were squinting against the brightness. But this did nothing to harden her expression. She looked kind and cheerful. And she looked immensely proud of her charges, with their tousled short-back-and-sides haircuts and their short-trousered uniforms.
The brilliant clarity of the shot gave the photograph between Seaton’s hands an impression of immediacy, of modernness, as though it could have been recently posed and taken. But this illusion was swiftly dispelled. The boys had the young-old faces of children who had endured the hardship common to their class and time. These boys did not look strangers to cold or occasional hunger or the visitation of grief. Their eyes had a tough, wary innocence. Seaton studied expressions possessing complexities he reckoned altogether lost to modern youth. These were children of their age; at once buoyant and carefree, cautious and bruised. None of the group could have been more than about eight years of age. But there was nothing in the picture to distinguish Peter, if he was among them, from the rest.
Seaton was reminded of Fischer’s crooned platitudes about polio and rickets. But there were no calipers bolted to the legs of any of the boys. And none leaned on a crutch. He was reminded of Mason’s bleak dismissal of Peter the workhouse foundling. But Miss Pegg’s brood were of a muchness. This was a jaunty band of brothers, a healthy hardy litter without a runt.
‘You’re frowning, Mr Seaton.’
‘I’m just wondering, is one of these boys Peter Morgan?’
The picture was taken from his hands. On Mrs Reeve’s face, the sun went into eclipse.
‘I’m sorry.’
She stood. ‘You’re here under false pretences. You lied to the Reverend. I’d be obliged if you’d leave.’
‘Please, Mrs Reeve. My interest is far from merely prurient.’
‘I’m sure. And I’m sure your time is precious. And since I know nothing about any boy called Peter Morgan, you are wasting it here.’
She still had the framed picture in her hands. They were shaking slightly. The smell of flowers in the small room was underlaid by water, stagnant in a vase or backing up from a drain somewhere, brackish, choked by leaf-fall. The sound of rain spewing from the gutter outside was incredibly loud. Seaton thought he heard a chord of organ music stir from somewhere outside the door separating them from the aisle of the church and he shivered and goosebumps pricked and raised themselves on his flesh. He steeled himself for the clump of a team of horses, for the snorts and gasps against the bit, under their black mourning plumes.
‘Leave,’ she said. She had the picture held in one hand, her pride in the saintly Miss Pegg forgotten, redundant.
And there was no organ music. It had been his imagination. The time for games was past. He was the only one still playing them, and he was ashamed of his little deception here. Ashamed. He bowed his head and reached for the door handle and walked before the altar and along the silent aisle and past the font, out of the church porch.
He found himself among graves. It was still light, though the evening darkness was fast enough descending. He had blundered to the right instead of the left and the route down the hill to Penhelig in his haste to get away. When he looked around, he was on a small plateau to the rear of St Luke’s. The headstones were modest, rain-stained sandstone and dull granite rather than marble. The grass was recently cut. The shadows of the graves stretched over the grass in low sunlight. It was still raining from above him, but over to the west, out over the sea, the cloud had thinned in a fiery horizon. Seaton looked at the headstones. After a moment, he found the grave belonging to Peter Morgan’s father. By Public Subscription, it said on the granite, chiselled and still somehow free of moss after seventy years. His name was etched into the stone below a handsome carved relief. It was a small stone. But Seaton thought the people of his village had done the memory of Robert Morgan proud.
Seaton knew from the account written up by Philip Beal that Peter’s father had been the cox of the Aberdyfi lifeboat. He had perished in a storm after the lifeboat capsized, attempting to reach a foundering cargo vessel in Cardigan Bay. That had been in 1925. He had been thirty-seven years old. It had been the sort of small tragedy familiar to seafaring communities. It had deprived Peter Morgan of his father at the age of five. It had inspired the piece of commemorative art carved and rubbed into granite that Seaton looked at now, flushed with low November sun, the sound to the rear of him of rain dribbling through church gutters, the tended grass wet under his knees as he ran respectful fingers over the relief.
It showed a lighthouse mounted on a rock. Its single beam spread to the right across the stone. The dead man’s name had been written in the beam. And under it, the lines:
A BRINGER OF HOPE
LOST BUT REDEEMED
IN GRATITUDE
Well. The Aberdyfi boat would have saved a lot of lives. It was why they were built. It was the reason their crews went out.
Seaton got to his feet. His legs ached. Dusk was creeping now among the graves. Most of the headstones were crowded with names. Morgan’s ancestors had been buried elsewhere. He had come to Aberdyfi from Barmouth, where he had himself put to rest the bride who died bearing him his son. He had come to Aberdyfi to escape grief. But they had done him proud, his adopted people, with their tribute, with this refuge on the plateau in the quiet and the late light tucked to the rear of the old church. It seemed to Seaton as good a place as any to be buried. It was a place of peace and sanctity where a noble soul could sleep untroubled.
The barman at the Penhelig Arms was disappointingly young. Seaton would find no enlightenment there. He took his pint of Banks’s bitter over to a table by t
he window. In the morning he would try to talk to the Reverend Madden. He had lied, but the clergy were generally forgiving. Tomorrow he would tell the truth, if not the whole truth, admit his interest lay solely in the abducted boy. He had lied because closed communities were apt to conceal their crimes and the disappearance was exactly the sort of appalling event to provoke collusive, clannish secrecy. He had hoped to stumble upon the subject of her vanished pupil as though inadvertently, discussing the unsung qualities of the admirable Marjory Pegg.
It had been the wrong approach. The crime had taken place so long ago, almost no one could be left alive to remember it. It was a remote enough event to qualify as history. Confronting it head-on, asking his questions openly, was not now likely to provoke pain, or resentment at unwarranted intrusion. He had made a crass mistake. But would put it right in the morning.
He took another, welcome sip of beer. Through the window, distant across the estuary, he could see the twinkling lights of a town, remote before the black hills massing in the night behind it. He didn’t know the name of the town. He didn’t know anything. And he was unlikely to find anything out. The old St Luke’s school building was a ceramics studio now. It looked the same from the outside, but was filled with bags of clay and potter’s wheels and kilns creating souvenirs for Welsh resorts whose visitors had a taste for indigenous crafts. The school records had long been destroyed. And Madden would not speak to him. Not now. Why on earth should he?
Seaton picked the menu up from his table. There was a dining room at the pub, a kitchen with a good reputation. More of Covey’s money. Lamb featured heavily among the signature dishes. He would order a hearty casserole for which he could find in himself no appetite whatsoever.
The pub door opened and a woman walked in. He had to look twice before recognising Mrs Reeve. Her hair had been combed out and she was wearing lipstick. She had on a tailored coat and a scarf, finely woven out of wool. Seaton thought the scarf probably cashmere. She sat down opposite him and began to pull off a pair of leather gloves.
‘Are you a policeman?’
‘They don’t investigate seventy-year-old crimes.’
She nodded. ‘What is your interest?’
Seaton sighed and gripped his glass in his fist. Where to begin.
‘Just tell me this. Is your interest likely to result in exposure? In retribution? In what is fashionably termed closure?’
He’d had the woman in front of him buttoned into a floral overall, mopping imaginary spillages from the St Luke’s font in a spinsterly attempt at attaining God’s grace. Sometimes luck confounded judgment.
‘Exposure is unlikely, Mrs Reeve. But I would hope with all my heart to make the guilty pay and bring a sad business to an overdue conclusion.’
She looked at the table, where her gloves rested now like clasped hands. ‘That will have to do,’ she said. She sighed. ‘You’ve something of the priest about you. Catholic and defrocked, in case you mistake that for flattery. It could just be the Dublin brogue. But you’ve a basic goodness about you, I think.’
He said nothing. He sipped Banks’s beer.
‘I’ll have a large whisky, Mr Seaton. No ice. I take my whisky with a dash of soda water. We’ll have a drink. And then I’ll ask you to accompany me to my home where I’ll tell you what little I know about the sorry matter of the stolen boy.’
Mary Reeve lived in a house on the Aberdyfi seafront, left to her by her uncle. She had always lived in the village. She owned and ran a shop there selling antiques and curios. She had lived in a flat overlooking the shop. Most of the summer visitors were repeat trade and the shop did well, looked out for sentimentally by customers whose trinkets casually bought there had become, with time, cherished mementoes. For the last five years, she had lived in the house where Seaton sat with her now. Her uncle had been the golf professional at the links course just to the south of the village. Seaton had seen the flags marking a couple of its holes from the window of his train coming in. Her uncle, William Reeve, had been at school with Peter Morgan.
‘Where did Peter live? Was there an orphanage?’
They were in her kitchen. Seaton suspected it had seen some changes since the death of William Reeve. They were seated at a hardwood table with a deep reddish grain. Her cooking range was shiny and German and new, and the steel utensils in her kitchen hung from butcher’s hooks. Mary Reeve didn’t bring her bric-a-brac home.
She smiled. ‘There were no Social Services back then, Mr Seaton. There was no Welfare State to build institutions for fatherless boys. There was only charity. And it was random. And, by all accounts, it was pitilessly cold.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Marjory Pegg took him in. Her stipend was modest, of course. But she loved him. And the collection plate of a Sunday in St Luke’s was felt by most of its parishioners to be a worthwhile obligation.’
‘So the parish paid for his keep?’
‘In strict terms, yes. But the people here wouldn’t have put it like that. They’d have called it caring for one of their own.’
‘What kind of boy was he?’
She shrugged. She stared at her hands. ‘He was taken thirty years before I was born. So this is hearsay. But it’s the most truthful hearsay you’re ever likely to get. He was good at football and cricket. He liked to read adventure stories. He made friends easily. I don’t doubt in the autumn, he scaled the wall and stole the odd apple from Bradley’s orchard.’
‘They all did that?’
She smiled. ‘A rite of passage.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘an ordinary boy.’
Mary Reeve looked at him. ‘Let me tell you about my uncle.’
William Reeve had left school at sixteen and gone to work as a railway clerk in Machynlleth. He caddied in his spare time to help save for his own clubs and course fees. By twenty, he was a scratch golfer and went on to win several amateur tournaments in Wales and the northwest of England. In 1940, at the age of twenty-two, he was called up to fight in the war. He saw action in Italy. He was eventually commissioned and rose to the rank of captain. He was awarded a DSO. And he did not leave the army until three years after the end of the war in 1948.
‘My uncle said his rank owed everything to the army’s need to field potential winners in inter-service sporting tournaments,’ Mary Reeve said. ‘But he couldn’t joke the medal away. He was a brave, kind, modest man. I suspect he was a formidable soldier in the execution of his duty. But he chose an unusually quiet life, once the choice was his to make.’
Seaton said nothing. Sometimes it was the best way of all to ask a question.
‘I’ve often wondered whether it was his choice, entirely. The limitations. The strictures. Oh, they seemed self-imposed. But you can’t help wondering, speculating. I very much suspect my uncle lived a life curtailed, Mr Seaton.’
Now, he did ask a question. ‘Why?’
It was very quiet in Aberdyfi, in Mary Reeve’s handsome, stone, inherited house. Her refrigerator trickled, self-regulating. And a quartz kitchen clock ticked spasmodic seconds on the wall. But there was none of the noise a city dweller, like Seaton was, would readily associate with life. There was no human noise. There was no passing traffic on the road outside.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
William Reeve’s study was lined and mounted with more golf memorabilia than Seaton would have thought it possible for one room to accommodate. Properly displayed, he thought there might be sufficient artifacts to fill a small museum. There were wooden shields with brass plaques screwed to them and silver trophies topped by cast or sculpted figures in plus fours. There was a cracked and yellowing collection of balls, buckets filled with shafts, the leather smell of old grips and varnish and linseed oil. But the room was a room, rather than a shrine. It was a monument to the game, not to Reeve himself or his golfing accomplishments. There were photographs, but their subjects all had the familiar look of sepia champions from some golden age of a game abo
ut which Seaton had only a vague passing knowledge.
Mary Reeve spoke with her back to Seaton as she rummaged in a bureau in the furthest corner from the door.
‘When my uncle was thirteen, his father took him as a special treat to Hoylake to see the final rounds of the Open at Royal Liverpool. They sneaked under a rope into the gallery and saw Bobby Jones play the back nine that won him the championship. Nineteen thirty. It was Jones’s last championship round in any tournament.’
Seaton said nothing. She straightened and turned around. She held a velvet bag in her hand, shaped by the flat rectangular object it concealed. A slim volume? Another picture?
‘My father called Jones a peerless talent, the best golfer he had ever seen, the greatest player ever to hold a club between his hands.’
The bag was black and felt and had a tasselled drawstring. She loosened the string. ‘He saw greatness, at Hoylake, my uncle told me once. And then, very quietly, he told me about the miracle called Peter Morgan with whom he’d been to school.’
She pulled the cloth free and let it drop to the floor. He saw that she held a small chalkboard in her hand. She gripped it by its wooden border in her fingers, delicately, so that her fingers did not touch the slate itself. She brought it across the room to him, into the light, holding it up, turning it between both hands to show what it displayed to best effect.
It was calculus. Four lines of dense equations had been scrawled across the slate. The chalk in which the equations were described was so old it had yellowed. The oil mixed with the chalk in the pressing process, to stop it crumbling on use, had decayed and yellowed to a faint stain on the black stone. Examining the characters, Seaton saw that it wasn’t really fair to call the equations scrawled. The numbers and signs were bold and confident, the work of a small hand hurrying to keep pace with the intellect dictating what it described. He was looking at the work of a mind functioning at cyclonic speed and power.
