Dying Flames (15 page)

“I mentioned him to the police today,” said Ted. “And before, at Romford. I expect they'll get on to him now, but I can't say they showed any special interest. Maybe they think he hasn't been around Peggy long enough to work up any sort of…resentment, rage, whatever it is that can make a man murder.”

Oliver shifted uneasily in his seat, as one who had known Peggy long enough to leave a rich supply of those emotions.

“The meeting between him and Peggy was presumably only the culmination of something, of a search,” said Graham. “And the search itself may have been fueled by rage or resentment.”

“Odd about the two fathers,” said Ted.

He was voicing the feelings of all of them, but, strangely, it was something that Graham, in his concern for the well-being and futures of Christa and Adam, had spent little time musing on.

“I only heard about that from Dad on the phone,” said Oliver. “Let me get it straight in my mind. According to Peggy, you were the father of Terry Telford.”

“Yes,” agreed Graham. “When I had the only talk with her alone that I've had since schooldays, she said, ‘It was a boy, you know. A baby boy.' I could have guessed it was a baby. And then Terry appeared out of the Internet into her life: he was the right age and it was clear—it seemed clear to me—that I was his father.”

“Though there's the complication, isn't there, that Christa also thought you were her father?” asked Oliver.

“I don't think that's much of a complication. First of all, I was away in Mali in '83 to '84, when she must have been conceived. Between Terry's birth and Christa's I'd made a very tentative start as a novelist. By the late eighties, when Peggy might begin to talk to Christa about her parentage, I was getting nominated for fiction prizes and mentioned in lists of promising young writers. Having given away for adoption a possible status symbol and talking point, Peggy just transferred the paternity to the younger child. I think that's very much in line with her usual approach to the truth.”

“She came up with much more fantastic stories than that in her time,” agreed Ted. “But have you thought: if having you as the father of one of her children is a status symbol, she could have made up your fathering of Terry too. You and she had…been together, but that in itself isn't much of a story, and it only gets really interesting and believable if there was a child as the result.”

The younger men both pondered this.

“What did she say at the time?” Graham asked. Ted leaned forward and put his face in his hands.

“She said it could have been a lot of people. Well, ‘several' was how she put it. Her mother and I couldn't believe our ears. Our darling girl! It was the shame of thinking that some of her men could be local that decided us: we had to move. And Romford seemed the ideal place: big and sort of anonymous, a London suburb. A child of uncertain father wouldn't make the sort of stink there that it would in Bidford.”

“But she didn't mention my name?” Graham asked.

“No. She mentioned boys in the school play, local men, but she never put a name to them. Said it wouldn't be right. Maybe she couldn't.”

“So along comes Terry, and he's handed over for adoption to the Telfords. Were they told anything about the father?”

“Search me. She did all that herself. I think she went through the regular channels though. She had phone calls at home from the Social Services people—whatever they were called then. Or said that's who they were from.”

All three men sat thinking, all of them out of their depths. Even Ted, it seemed, had tried to have as little as possible to do with Peggy's first pregnancy and birth. Graham turned to Oliver.

“You never asked Peggy about the father of her son?”

“Not on your life! I was twenty, very inexperienced, and thoroughly ashamed of my sister. Also by then I knew I couldn't rely on getting a truthful answer out of her, so what was the point of asking?”

Silence descended again.

“Let's shift the focus away from Peggy,” said Graham at last. “Young Mr. Telford says he knows who his natural father is. How does he know? Maybe by going on the Internet. That's how he got in touch with Peggy. Why try to find your father
first
? Most people are more interested in their mother. The mother has had more to do with the child, inside and outside of the womb. Often there's a pathetic story involved. With the father it's more likely to be a rather grubby tale of cowardice or dereliction of duty. But Terry goes after the father first—or so far as we can tell he does. He'd only known his mother for three weeks or so before she vanished out of his life.”

“There's another thing,” said Oliver. “You've a much better chance of finding your mother. A father may not even know he
is
the father of such a child—as you didn't, Graham—or he may not want to be identified for financial or other reasons. Many people would say there isn't quite the same bond as between a mother and her child, so a strong wish to form a close relationship is rarer.”

“All this leaves us with a mystery,” said Graham. “Why, how, and when did Terry come to find his father—if that's what he is—before he found his mother?”

“Ask the lad himself,” said Ted. “There's no reason for him to be embarrassed or ashamed. Why should he clam up?”

“Why indeed?” said Graham. “But that just could be connected to Peggy's death, so we ought to go carefully.”

“We?” said Oliver. “Is there a we? If so, I don't think I'm part of it. We should just leave it to the police.”

“Aren't you curious who murdered your sister?”

Oliver thought, then shook his head.

“Hardly at all, to be honest. When you haven't had any contact for years, and when you've been done down by her…Well, it's difficult to care.”

“I think this is a
plot
to you,” said Ted, to Graham's surprise. “Not a story of real people, but a story, like you might use in a book. I didn't get the impression you cared much about Terry Telford.”

“I didn't.”

“He's just one of the pieces in the jigsaw to you.”

“Maybe. But I care about Christa and Adam.”

“But what will happen to them?” Oliver asked. “How can you claim to be their guardian or foster father? You've no connection with them.”

“You talk as if people are queuing up,” said Graham. “I think that if I'm in situ, if Adam is happy, and if Christa is with us at least part of the time—there's no question of her legally needing a foster home, but she'd be a stabilizing factor for Adam—I think the Social Services people will be ready to rubber-stamp the arrangement.”

“I hope you're right,” said Oliver feelingly.

“And I'm grateful and will be quite willing to play a part,” said Ted.

“Look, I care for both of them. And I also care about the truth coming out—in an abstract way, I think: that people are better for facing up to truth. So I may follow up trails that I think the police won't be interested in. By the way, Ted, there's no doubt that it is murder, is there?”

“No. Strangulation,” said Ted, getting up. “No disrespect, Graham, but Peggy, even after what she's done, could never be a piece in a jigsaw to me. Not after I've seen her on the slab, seen the marks on her throat…. I think I need to go home and have a rest, Oliver. I'm absolutely dead beat.”

Oliver jumped up, very ready to depart. They clearly wanted to be on their own. On their own together, or actually on their own? Graham wondered. He raised his hand in farewell, gave them five minutes, then left the Crown to find his way back to his car.

His brain was less tired than his body, and as he walked, he reviewed the evening. Ted, he felt sure, had only had half his mind on the conversation. The rest of his mental faculties had been back in the 1970s, reviewing the death of a daughter he had once had, or thought he had, rather than that of the middle-aged woman who had given him so much grief. Oliver was more difficult to fathom. Like his namesake he seemed to want
more
: more love, which he had had too little of in childhood, more respect, more of life's rewards. Had he cast aside his sister too readily, Graham wondered, and had the motive been jealousy more than the feeling of having been swindled by her?

When he got home, Adam was just back from an evening with his friends, seemingly restored to normality by the elasticity of youth. This time Graham did not just accept this gratefully and hope for the best. Telling him about his mother's death enabled him to make a point again with force and sincerity.

“As long as you need it or want it, you have a home here,” he said.

Adam nodded, apparently sincerely grateful, and Graham was glad he had done something that was dictated by no self-interest or ordinary logic. He didn't ask himself whether his offer to Adam was really a covert offer to Christa.

As he went to bed, a stiff whiskey later, his mind was on someone else: the young man who was apparently his real son. One thing he was going to have to find out was how Terry had acquired a father who was not him. And that, surely, meant he was going to have to revise his decision about talking to the Telfords.

Graham had a great deal to think about in the days that followed. Adam was not a problem: he had accepted his mother's death coolly, as Christa had too, and he resumed his nonchalant approach to whatever befell him, though this did not deceive Graham, and he was conscious all the time of the need to provide a bedrock of stability for the boy. But he was also thinking of his other near-son, and the need to get into some contact with him. Much thought produced the conviction that he should not approach Terry before he had a better idea of what the Telfords were like, and what kind of upbringing he had had. And approaching the Telfords presented problems, because they could have been warned off him by their daughter.

He brought up that difficulty when Christa phoned to tell him she wouldn't be coming home that weekend. She actually used the word
home,
which softened the disappointment. But the wonderful lift of the heart when he heard her voice did not last for long.

“There's a special Egypt of Rameses II exhibition at the British Museum that all the Egyptian History students are going along to on Saturday,” she said. “And I'm going to spend quality time with my boyfriend.”

The word, as always, sent a dagger to Graham's heart.

“Oh? And which boyfriend is this?”

“Sean. Haven't I told you about him? He's quite nice.”

“Are you going to bring Sean to meet me?”

“You're joking, I take it. This is not the nineteenth century. I never took any of my boyfriends home to meet Mum, and I'm not going to start now. He's
just
a boyfriend. It's not a long-term thing. I am only nineteen, remember.”

“I'll remember. And that I'm not your parent. Talking of which—”

“Yes?”

“I'm trying to think of the best way to approach Terry Telford's parents.”

“Really?” There was a feeling of ears being pricked up.

“Yes. I don't think I should approach the man himself without having some idea of his background. Was it really a happy childhood? Was he idolized as his sister said? If so, why does he apparently feel so passionately about the man he believes is his natural father? I need to get a lot of background filled in.”

“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 common 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.