The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  For next to the child’s name was that of the boy’s mother. Mabel Methven née Kerr, making her mark once again. The older Methven nodded twice this time, as though he had known all along.

  ‘Told you so. Says it here, clear as cuckoo spit.’

  A second Thomas Methven smuggled out of the night, came in as one thing, left as something else. Solomon could feel the hair on his neck prickling at the thought that his dead client’s pawn ticket had led him to the very font where he had been named – a child born somewhere unknown, turned into a Methven by the simple act of pouring water on his head.

  ‘I’ll need to take a copy,’ he said, fumbling for his piece of paper on which to inscribe the good news. ‘To prove that this is my Thomas Methven, if it comes to that.’

  He could almost taste it now. Twenty per cent commission on fifty thousand, plus expenses, of course. Cash in clean, crisp notes. But they were canny, the Methven clan. Knew when to ask.

  ‘So there might be money in it, then?’ said Archie, a bland smile belying the determination of his stare.

  Solomon flushed, feet hot inside his fuchsia socks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Depends if it is him. I’ll have to trace his parents’ line first, see how many have a rightful claim.’

  They all looked at Reverend Jennie’s family tree spread along the aisle. Hundreds. Possibly thousands. If her chart was to be believed. The brothers would be lucky if they got the price of a pint between them by the time the dispersal came. But the older Mr Methven already had other ideas.

  ‘We won’t get nothing,’ he said, coughing into his sleeve.

  ‘Why not?’

  Solomon was surprised. It wasn’t like a potential beneficiary to give up his claim before it had even begun.

  ‘Weren’t right, were it. Put the first in the ground one day, come back with the second the next.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Tom, agreeing with his father for once. ‘The Kerrs always were a tricksy lot. Back and forth across that border like they owned it, buying and selling whatever they could get their hands on, no questions asked.’

  ‘Proper Borders folk those Kerrs,’ Archie agreed.

  Thieves. And raiders. Each side of the frontier a personal fiefdom, no concern for where it might start and where it might end.

  ‘Are you not Borders folk?’ Solomon asked.

  The three men shook their heads in unison, an adamant gesture.

  ‘No, son, we’re from Fife originally,’ said the older Mr Methven. ‘Grandparents came down to work, never went back.’

  ‘When was that?’

  Tom frowned, looked to his father. ‘Before the war?’

  ‘Aye, well before the war,’ said the older Methven.

  ‘In the twenties?’ said Solomon.

  ‘No, son. The first.’

  They all turned to stare at the date on the flyleaf of the Bible, the six-month gap between the first Thomas Methven dying and the second showing up. Solomon’s hand fluttered against his corduroys as he thought again of his grandfather in khaki.

  ‘Did Archibald Methven go to war?’ he asked.

  ‘They all went, didn’t they,’ said the older Mr Methven. ‘Silly fools. Should have stayed behind and seen to the earth when they got the chance.’

  ‘I’ve got a photo,’ said Tom, pulling something from his jacket and holding it out for the rest to see. ‘Thought it might be useful.’

  Black and white. A serious man standing with his hand upon a table, small boy by his side.

  ‘Aye, that’s them,’ said the older Methven. ‘Archibald and Tom.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you know what happened to him, do you?’ asked Solomon, studying the man who’d gone for a soldier, just as his grandfather had, too.

  ‘He got shot, didn’t he,’ said Tom. ‘That’s what granny always said.’

  ‘A bloody mess,’ said the older Methven. ‘That was the story.’

  ‘I thought it was an accident,’ said Archie.

  ‘No, son. Deliberate.’

  All those farmers and their guns.

  ‘The beginning of the end, either way,’ said Tom, a mournful touch to his voice.

  They all paused then, looked towards the church’s own small memorial to its fallen, names carved in wood along the edges of the choir stall, the older Methven’s eyes suddenly rheumy, even Archie with a shine to his. Then they looked back at Reverend Jennie’s chart. Archibald Methven & Mabel Methven née Kerr. And their long-lost son. All gone now. It was Archie who said it.

  ‘Maybe the second child wasn’t his.’

  ‘Trust you to think of that,’ said Tom.

  But the elder Mr Methven wiped his face with his sleeve and nodded as though it was only to be expected.

  ‘Could be, son. Could be. It was a war, wasn’t it. All sorts went on then. Mother always did say the second boy was different.’

  ‘In what way?’ said Solomon.

  ‘Went a-wandering, didn’t he. Disappeared to Edinburgh, never came back.’

  ‘No Methven ever goes a-wandering,’ agreed Tom.

  Archie laughed. But Solomon thought it was a fair judgement given how many were buried beneath the flagstones on which they were standing now.

  ‘Where might the child have come from, then?’ he said. ‘If he didn’t come from here.’

  The older Methven jerked his head in the rough direction of south.

  ‘Across that border, probably. Best way to keep something quiet hereabouts. But you want to be careful if you’re headed that way. It’s a war in those parts.’

  ‘What is?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘Immigration. They’re not too sure about foreigners right now.’

  Of course, the vote. To leave. Or to remain. A divided nation. It was left to the minister to point the way forward.

  ‘I would try the school first,’ said Reverend Jennie.

  ‘A school?’

  ‘Aye, son,’ said the older Mr Methven, pointing to the land beyond the diamond window panes. ‘For foundlings. Thirty miles that way. You can’t miss it. Been bringing up lost boys there for more than a hundred and fifty years.’

  Three

  Solomon drove south as instructed, sliding over the border into a foreign land of moors and beaches swept clean by the wind, following the siren call of a dead man clothed in fifty thousand as it drew him towards the hidden foothills of his youth. As he hunkered over the wheel of his aunt’s ancient Mini, he could feel an urgent pressing in his chest. What was it he was about to uncover? Adventure. Or the beginning of the fall. In his pocket a pawn ticket burned against his heart, a newspaper cutting inscribed with his grandfather’s handwriting pressed close.

  The dog lay low on the back seat, whimpering as the little car rattled and bucked, cold air whistling a tune through the floor:

  It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .

  As though Godfrey Farthing was whistling to Solomon, drawing his grandson ever closer towards a school for foundling boys: a place for children who had somehow lost their parents, or parents who had somehow lost their child.

  They arrived as the sun was almost gone from the sky, a long northern evening stretching out like the shadows of the trees that had once lined the route. The school appeared like a ghost at the end of the never-ending drive, a building folded into the turn of a river valley, hidden from all who might want to see. Solomon drove the Mini right into the courtyard with its gravel and its weeds, parked in the shadow of that familiar plinth. A memorial to all those young men who had lost their lives on some distant battlefield, nothing left of them but this spear of dark granite reaching for the sky. What was it about death amongst the stench that people found so alluring?

  And yet . . .

  Was this not where Solomon Farthing had acquired his calling?

  Old Mortality.

  Digging out the names of the dead until they were alive once more.

  Solomon knew the moment he arrived that he had been to this place before. That spring in ’5
7, after his father was lost in the great rope of the Thames. Went straight down. Like an arrow. That was what they’d told him. Caught in its muddy churn. His father had been trying to save a young woman. Or perhaps he had been drunk. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to live after the loss of Solomon’s mother to some disease that ate her lungs before her son was barely six years old. All of the three were possible, Solomon could see that in himself now. Yet even sixty years later he wished that his father might have waited, stood on the parapet imagining a future, rather than contemplating the past.

  He had been seven years old, abandoned on the doorstep of their London home expecting his father to return at any moment, sensing even then that perhaps his father never would. Eventually, he had let himself into their flat with the key he carried on a string beneath his shirt, found the kettle cold on the stove top, no margarine left in the Frigidaire. He’d spent an hour lying on the floor amongst the dust, eating every square of the chocolate wrapped in silver foil that his father kept in an old tobacco tin beneath his bed. Then the woman from next door had come knocking, standing on the threshold with her apron double tied.

  ‘Where’s your dad, then?’

  ‘Don’t know, miss.’

  She had laughed at that. ‘Just call me Mrs Butter and be done with it.’

  She was a good woman, Mrs Butter, had squeezed out five children, all with ginger ringlets, boys and girls both. She’d put out her hand to Solomon then, as though to offer him a future.

  ‘You’d better come with me till he gets back.’

  And Solomon had allowed himself to be drawn towards a different kind of life. Milk bottles left open on the table. Children giggling in a corner. Comics and the smell of coal dust. But even then he had known that it would not last forever. Already a boy on his own in the world, only seven years old but like a soldier marching forwards, forwards, always forwards, never allowed to look back.

  Two days later they had driven him north, seven years old and riding on the back seat of an old Ford, bumping and grinding its way from the heat of London to somewhere far beyond that. The driver had worn a felt hat with a brim, the woman sitting next to him a green one with gloves to match.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Solomon had asked as the sun sank lower and lower and the car drove further and further from everything he had ever known.

  ‘To a new school,’ the woman in the green hat had replied, not bothering to turn, just continuing to stare out of the windscreen at the long straight road in front.

  Almost sixty years on, the foundling school appeared to be deserted, no more boys mingling and tussling in the yard. Solomon peered through the gloom at a building that had seen better days, rather like him, water staining the stonework in great grey streaks. He realized that his hands and feet were clammy; every part of him, in fact. He knew, without being able to see, that beyond the quad there was a long field sprinkled with buttercups in summer. And beyond that, a river – a dark thing flowing swift in the night. He gave a little shiver, remembered the words of the Book Fetcher. If it’s business, that’s one thing. If it’s family business, that’s something else.

  Behind him there was the sudden sound of footsteps on gravel, a boy watching from the shadow of the building, hair rumpled, knees dirty, a younger version of himself. Solomon started forwards, but the boy disappeared, sliding through a small doorway in the corner of the quad. The dog made to follow. Solomon hesitated, then he followed, too.

  The corridor he found himself in was lined with wood, panel after panel fixed to the wall, a thousand names (or thereabouts) looking down at Solomon as he looked up at them. Head Boys and Prefects. Leaders of the First Eleven. Others who had won some sort of cup. The names were written in gold paint, all faded now. Solomon put a finger to the nearest, left a print in the dust, started to walk along the corridor tracing one lost name after another, until he came to the date when he had been a boy at this school, too. It was there that he found himself face-to-face with a man of his own age, wearing a felt dressing gown over a pair of trousers.

  ‘Solomon Farthing,’ the man said holding out both his hands. ‘I knew you would come.’

  It was the singing that Solomon remembered the most. A courtyard full of boys swirling and tumbling while from somewhere deep inside the old stone building a choir raised its voice.

  The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;

  He makes me down to lie

  In pastures green; He leadeth me

  The quiet waters by.

  Dropped from an old Ford into a school for boys of every size and disposition, abandoned by their parents to an uncertain future, not to mention the black hole of their pasts.

  Solomon had come from a school in London where girls skipped and sang in the playground, while boys huddled in corners and bartered ha’pennies for a Black Jack or cards from packs of cigarettes. But here there was a courtyard and a chapel, the sound of boys singing percolating throughout the building from morning till dark. The evening Solomon arrived they had put him to bed in the sick bay beneath a blue blanket and a sheet stiff with the biscuity scent of starch. In the morning he had woken to an old woman bending over his pillow.

  ‘It’s time to get up now, Solomon.’

  Whispering his name as though it was some secret they must keep between themselves. The woman had dressed him in borrowed shorts and a grey jumper striped with a V at the neck in pink. Then she had sent him to eat breakfast with a hundred other boys, all praying over porridge:

  Our Father who art in heaven . . . give us this day our daily bread . . .

  Each bowl stamped on the rim with a mermaid that was pink, too.

  He had been at the school three weeks, maybe four, when he was summoned to the headmaster’s office to find a man he had never met before standing beside the headmaster’s desk. The man’s jacket had been fastened, every single button, shoes polished as though it must be a Sunday. The headmaster had put his hand on Solomon’s shoulder.

  ‘This is your grandfather,’ he’d said.

  ‘We look after naughty boys now. The damaged ones.’

  The man who had welcomed Solomon by name poured tea from a great, round pot into a mug stamped with a tiny mermaid on its lip. Aren’t all boys damaged, thought Solomon as he watched the steam curl from the spout. One way or another. Or perhaps that was just him.

  ‘They send them to us when no one else will have them,’ said the man, nudging a mug of tea towards Solomon. ‘A bit like when you were young. But for different reasons, of course.’

  Solomon nodded, though after more than sixty years he was still waiting for someone to explain exactly how he had started, and what had happened next. They were sitting at the end of a long table in the school kitchen, somewhere Solomon had never been allowed to enter when he was young.

  ‘Eddie Jackson,’ the man had said when they first encountered each other in the corridor.

  Solomon had replied as though answering to the morning register.

  ‘Farthing, Solomon.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the teacher had said, as though that was only to be expected. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  The kitchen was a gloomy sort of place, cobwebs drifting from high corners, two huge sinks on one side and a metal counter running all along the other. There was the low stink of pizza charred along its edges, cheese burned on top. The dog sauntered into a corner to investigate while Eddie Jackson waved his arm towards a stack of unwashed plates in the sink.

  ‘We let the boys make their own meals now. Chaos from order.’

  ‘Are there no rules?’ Solomon said.

  ‘A few. But sometimes it’s good to run free, don’t you think.’

  Solomon took a hot mouthful of tea, remembered his grandfather’s instructions for a sensible kind of life. Polish shoes. Do not run. Always button your cuffs. He pulled the edges of his tweed jacket over the flap of his shirt beneath.

  ‘How did you know I was coming?’ he asked.

  ‘Methven said to expect you.�
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  Solomon touched a finger to the half-walnut shell in his pocket. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that this case had turned out rather like Edinburgh, a city in which one often reached the destination one wanted, without ever quite understanding the route.

  ‘I’m trying to track down an old boy,’ he said.

  ‘We get a lot of old boys visiting.’ Eddie Jackson nodded. ‘Returning to the mothership, so to speak, once they reach a certain age.’

  Solomon wondered then how it was that this man seemed to understand him, even though he barely understood himself.

  ‘Mine’s a bit older than most, though,’ he said. ‘From 1918, I think. A Thomas Methven. Though he might have started here as someone else.’

  ‘Ah.’ The teacher grinned then. ‘Most of our boys begin as one thing and end as another. We count that as a success.’

  After tea, Eddie Jackson led Solomon through a labyrinth of corridors towards the beating heart of the school – the room where all the registers were kept, counting all the lost boys in and counting them out again. The dog trotted along behind for a while, before wandering in a different direction, disappearing with a flick of its tail, didn’t bother to look back. Somewhere, somehow, Solomon heard singing rise and fall.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary . . .

  Or perhaps that was just inside his head.

  The study was dark and dusty, full of books locked behind wire mesh that had not been removed for years. On one side there were the registers, row upon row of blue-spined journals that Solomon recognized from early morning roll-call. On the other a glass display case covered with a velvet cloth. To Solomon’s surprise, the teacher made straight for the latter rather than the former.

  ‘1918,’ he said. ‘The war generation.’

  Drew the velvet from the glass.

  The case was just like the cabinet of curiosities in Godfrey Farthing’s pawnshop – full of stuff that somebody had treasured once. Solomon peered in to see a row of small dull plaques gazing back. Campaign medals. Distinguished service medals. Two Stars and a War medal, one for Victory, too. He recognized the last grouping from an old cardboard box of military memorabilia his grandfather used to keep beneath the pawnshop counter. Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, wasn’t that what the old man had called them? Long since disappeared.