Dying Flames (4 page)

She took up her cake again.

“And how did the reunion for poor old George Long go? He must be well past it by now.”

“Past it? Not at all. Pretty much what he was when I was in 6C I thought. Just as commanding, just as theatrical.”

“Well, he's damned lucky,” she said forcefully. Then she retracted it with a charming smile. “Sorry. I shouldn't begrudge him it and it's mean of me, but I'd be very happy if I was the same girl as I was when you were in 6C.”

“Wouldn't we all be happy to take twenty or thirty years off our ages?” Graham asked. “Though I always think children face things now that we never had inklings about when we were growing up. Having sex in one's early teens with parents turning a blind eye isn't just a joyful liberation.”

“Of course it's not,” said Peggy softly. Then she added, “Remember your promise.”

“George, I believe, is still acting and directing—all sorts of things from Shakespeare to music hall…. I wonder how good
St. Joan
was. It was wonderful to be in, even a small part. And everyone seemed to think it was pretty good, and enjoyed it. So I suppose that must mean that it hit the mark. How you ever learnt the central role I can't imagine. It must have taken over your life.”

She had finished eating and was gazing ahead of her, with traces of chocolate still enchantingly clinging to her upper lip and chin.

“It did,” she said dreamily. “In the most wonderful way. There's never been another year like it—never.”

“And yet Saint Joan was not your part, in a way, was it?”

She shot him a glance. “Remember your promise,” she repeated, her voice once again soft and low. “You forget that Saint Joan is someone all the characters are interested in, are fascinated by. A bit mannish, direct and almost brutal at times, but always the center of attention. Who says sex doesn't come into their fascination? I knew everyone else in the cast had—well, I suppose the current expression is ‘got the hots' for me. The only female part in the play. Even
Macbeth
has a couple of other women's parts apart from the Lady. I was on my own, in my element, with everyone lusting after me. It was lovely—and disturbing!”

“I bet it was.”

She suddenly wiped away a tear.

“And now I'm an assistant in a glorified corner shop, employed by a couple who are lovely people, good to me, and high up in the theater scene here, but who are also the sort of people who give the tag
do-gooder
a bad name. Isn't life a bugger?” She got up and turned to the door. “I must be getting back.”

She waited at the door while Graham paid, then walked him briskly along the road.

“We must keep in touch,” said Graham.

“Must we? You know my address, I gather. I suppose you have my telephone number as well. If you want to get in touch, you can. From things you've said it doesn't seem likely you'll want to.”

“There's the matter of—” began Graham. She put her finger to her lips, and his voice faded away. But as she turned to go back into Halliburton's, she said, still in the same low voice:

“It was a boy, you know. A baby boy.”

Then she went back into the shop, and her manner of shutting the door—theatrically, finally—told Graham their first encounter as adults was at an end. As he walked back to the car, he found he did not regret it. That first sight of her through the window of the greengrocery had been deceptive: a sudden jump back in time had occurred, and he had been the sexually hungry boy lusting for the loveliest thing on offer. But no sooner had they started talking than the cautious adult that he had become reasserted himself.

He did not entirely trust Peggy.

Perhaps he shouldn't have trusted her all those years ago. Perhaps she had been a sexual tease then—though a less experienced one. Whom had she…“been with,” as prim ladies used to say, during the rehearsal period and performance run of the play? Surely some talk must have reached his ears, low down though he was in the pecking order of the actors. What had happened after the meeting with her by the church at Upper Melrose and the days after that?

When he got home, he picked up the phone and rang George Long.

“Hello, George. It's Graham Broadbent here.”

George never forgot a pupil, never had to be prompted as to who they were or what they'd done.

“Young Broadbent! It was good to see you at the beanfeast. Honored you could find the time to come. What can I do for you?”

“Ah…” So George had known from the tone of Graham's voice that this wasn't a social call. That's what came of directing plays: all the social resonances of ordinary talk were registered. “Will you keep what I'm going to ask you strictly under your hat?” he said cautiously.

“Of course. Always do. Silent as the grave.”

“Peggy Webster. Peggy Somers that was.”

“Thought it might be something to do with her. Her name was in the air at dinner.”

“It was. I want to know where she lived, and what her father did. I'm sure I knew at the time, but I never met them and it's all gone out of my mind.”

“No reason for it to stay there, was there? The family lived in Bidford. Her father had a garage there. Not very prosperous. People passed through the village in their cars, but they kept on to somewhere bigger where the petrol would be cheaper. They'll be long gone, you know. They moved to Romford rather quickly. If they hadn't, I'd have snapped her up for my Hermione the following year, instead of that puddingy girl who actually played her. You should try Romford, though it's pretty big—much more difficult than Bidford to find people in.”

“Oh, I've done Romford, George. Peggy and I had coffee this morning. Time has changed her—you wouldn't know about time. But it's her background I'm interested in, purely for the purposes of a book, of course.”

“Oh, naturally, for fictional reasons. Well, don't worry: I'll be silent as the grave.”

Graham wondered whether he would be. When it came down to it, a schoolboy never
knew
his masters. George could be the biggest old gossip in the business for all he knew.

The village of Bidford lay on the border of Essex and Suffolk fifty miles from London and eight miles from Lavenham, straggling either side of a road that was no longer important but still attracted a fair bit of traffic in the spring and summer: tourist trade, mostly families and old-age couples in search of Picturesque Essex. A corner shop doubled as a post office, and among the postcards strategically situated by the counter there were two or three Constable paintings, none of them of Bidford. The cottages along and just off the main street were suitably sized for the elderly, less so for young and growing families, though there were one or two more spacious dwellings, once the homes of the rector, the doctor, and a solicitor who practiced elsewhere. The last was the only one who remained, as if he alone answered to an eternal need, but the rectory was home to a Colchester businessman, and the doctor's house was weekend home to a psychiatrist in regular demand for daytime television and radio, a fount of instant diagnosis and advice.

There was one pub, The Haywain, previously the King's Head, with Constable's wagon now on the inn sign, in place of George III, who was too unromantic to attract passing custom. Shunning the tearooms, which seemed exclusively geared up to the tourist trade, Graham picked on The Haywain for his lunch, with a menu of staple English fare such as scampi, baked potato with chili con carne, and lasagne. As he parked the car, Graham realized that he had driven through the village from end to end, but had seen no sign of a garage. Garages, like electric razors and plastic macs, had become things of the past.

The Haywain, that lunchtime, was populated mainly by locals, by old and new residents. They were dressed casually, even sloppily, but they were yarning to each other, or to the landlord, swapping comments on the weather, the harvest, or the political situation, and—on his entry through the saloon bar door—fixing their eyes on the newcomer. Yes, mainly local: that was ideal.

“I'll have a pint of Bass…and the lasagne as well. You can dispense with the salad.”

“No salad? Will you have the chips then?”

“Oh, all right. With chips.” Arnold Wesker had been right all those years ago. It was chips with everything for the British. The landlord bustled off to the kitchen with the order, then came back to do his landlordly duties by the newcomer.

“You a stranger round here?” he asked, as he drew his pint.

Graham nodded. “I am now, though I'm just over the border in Suffolk. I grew up in Colchester. I'm near Ipswich now, but I'm having a day off to drive round old haunts. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure that I was ever in Bidford as a boy.”

“Lots of folk pass through here,” said the landlord.

“I can see that. I had a girlfriend here once, briefly, but I can't recall that I ever visited her at home. I think her father had a garage here.”

The all-male customer clientele looked at each other.

“Well,” said the man immediately beside Graham at the bar, “that would have to be either Ted Somers or Wilf Bradby, who bought it off him. Going by your age, that is, which I'd guess as early or midforties.”

“Pretty spot-on,” said Graham, swallowing his dislike of people who guessed his age and got it right. “It was Ted Somers. I never met him, so far as I recall—which means I was never ‘taken home to meet the parents.' ”

“That would be Peggy you were going with, then,” said the man. “She had one or two boyfriends that she didn't take home to meet the parents. She was the apple of their eye. She'd want to be very sure before she took anyone home, because they'd have hit the roof if he hadn't been up to scratch.”

“Meaning nothing personal,” said the landlord hastily. “Where's your manners, Percy?”

“Sorry,” said the man, not noticeably shamefaced. “Nothing personal at all. I'm Percy Sharp. I've lived here pretty much all my life, though I worked in Lavenham. We all remember the garage, because it was convenient. But neither Ted nor Wilf could make a go of it. Wilf sold it five years after he took it over. See the new houses next door to this place? That's where the garage was.”

Graham nodded. He'd wondered whether that was the case.

“Owning a garage hasn't been much of a recipe for success for years now,” he said. “Ted must have seen the signs at the beginning of the trend.”

“Happen. But I don't think he'd have moved if it hadn't been for Peggy. I'd better not say any more. Nobody really knows the facts. And for all I know you could be the father.”

There was a sniggering around the bar.

“For someone who isn't going to say anything, Percy Sharp, you get your meaning across,” said the landlord.

“If she was pregnant when she moved away,” lied Graham, “then I wasn't the father. We had a brief little romantic friendship about eighteen months before the family moved away. Do you remember Peggy, Percy?”

“Aye, I remember her. And her brief romantic friendships. Proper little bobby-dazzler she was. Talented too. They say she was a brilliant little actress. Played Saint Theresa or something in a school play. Ted and Mary were over the moon.”

“It was Saint Joan. I was in the play too.”

“Were you though?” said Percy, looking at him appraisingly, like a tailor. “Wouldn't have put you down as the acting type.”

“Small part.”

“Anyway, we heard nothing but that play for months. I mind her father talking about her, standing where you're stood now. Boring the pants off us, if the truth be known, but we all liked her and could see she was something out of the ordinary. Still…”

Graham waited, but nothing came.

“Still?” he was forced to ask.

“Still, talent isn't everything, is it? Anyone who's had children, or had to do with them, knows that. You think one of them's the brightest knife in the box, and then something happens and they spend the rest of their lives in dull jobs that go nowhere. And sometimes it's nothing that happens, but them just reaching their top, the limits of their talents, and not being able to push themselves any further up.”

“Was that the case with Peggy? She reached her top?”

“Oh, no. Something happened. I suppose I've more or less told you what that was, haven't I?”

“Yes, you have.”

“That wasn't the official line. According to her dad and mum she'd had the offer of a place in drama school. As a consequence they were moving closer to London—Romford it was—so she could take it up and still live at home.”

“Yes, I knew they went to Romford.”

“Oh, you heard, did you? That at least was true. Dicky Mortlake—we buried him ten years since—was driving through Romford a few months after they upped sticks and left, and he saw Peggy walking with her mother, very pregnant. So that was what it was, which frankly was what we'd all guessed anyway.”

“Had you just guessed that because she was pretty and young, and just the age to be careless about precautions?” asked Graham, lapsing into the circumlocutions of his youth.

“Partly, maybe,” said Percy, remembering. “But she was always…flighty.”

He looked as if he wanted to say no more, but Graham pressed him.

“Had lots of boyfriends?”

“Aye, she did, but that wasn't what I was thinking about. Her manner was…let's say it wasn't modest, not what we expected then from a schoolgirl. I said she was flighty. I think I mean she was flirtatious. She'd come at you with little remarks and double meanings and sexual provocations—even when she was with much older men, like me. Mostly we made a joke of it, but who's to know whether there weren't some who fell for it. The father of the child could have been one of the boyfriends of her own age, but equally it could have been any man in the village, most of us included.”

“Did her parents know nothing about her ways?”

“Course not. Can see you haven't got teenage children. The parents always get duped—I expect it's been going on since the Garden of Eden. Peggy never did anything while they were by. She was Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp when they were around. To this day Ted has never said who the father was—or even whether he knows who the father was. That's how much he and Mary were hurt and surprised by it.”

Graham stopped, his pint halfway up to his mouth. He looked around at the other men at the bar.

“But Peggy's father's dead, isn't he?”

“Not so far as we know,” said Percy Sharp, and they all shook their heads. “Her mother, Mary, died two years ago, but we'd have heard if Ted had gone. He and Mary used to come back every year or two, just to visit Kath Moores, who was Mary's great friend. Ted was back last summer on his own. Kath would have told people if he'd died.”

Graham was conscious he was being looked at by the landlord.

“Do you know what I think?” the man said.

“No.”

“I think you've just met up again with Peggy Somers—or whatever her new name is. She's brought back a lot of memories of an old love affair. And she's spun you a lot of stories about herself and her activities, just like she used to tell us.”

Graham was pleased to feel that the atmosphere had lightened. Everyone was grinning.

“Well, your guess comes pretty close. Yes, I have met Peggy again. But why on earth would she tell me her father was dead when he's not?”

One or two of the men shrugged.

“Who can tell?” one of them said. “Sometimes she'd tell you stories that had her mingling with celebrities: she'd met Johnny Rotten or Laurence Olivier had come to see her in that school play. You knew she was making that sort of thing up, and why. She found life humdrum and limited here, and she was yearning for bright lights and glamour. So she made up another existence for herself.”

“But she made up stories you couldn't see any reason for,” said Percy Sharp, unwilling to lose the limelight. “She'd tell you her mother had an incurable illness, or that her cat had been killed by someone's dog—and it was, like, childish. You saw the cat next time you walked down the street. It was as if she thought we were stupid.”

“Or the fact that getting our attention, or sympathy, for that moment, was all that mattered,” put in the other man.

“What you're saying is that she is a congenital fantasist,” said Graham.

“A born liar is how we'd probably put it,” said Percy.

“But charming with it,” put in his feed. “Oodles of pathos, or come-hither, or whatever role she was playing that day. And we were pleased and flattered. We were middle-aged men, and it was nice having a fresh and pretty young thing making up to us, and telling us things. You're that age yourself. You'd be flattered too.”

I was, thought Graham. By her daughter.

“Here's your lasagne,” said the landlord, seeing his wife coming through from the back with a plate bearing a microwaved casserole dish with chips around it. “Would you like it at a table?”

“I'd better. But if anyone has any information about Peggy or her parents that hasn't come up yet, I'd be interested to hear.”

Graham settled down on a sofa under a light and tucked in to a better-than-expected lasagne. He took out that day's
Times,
but kept it turned to the First Night arts pages, periodically flicking his eyes to the little knot of male figures by the bar. He had no doubt they were talking about Peggy Somers, or more likely the family as a whole. Graham kept on stolidly eating, surprised at how hungry he was, now and then sighing over the arts reviews. His definition of old age was when you found a paper's arts pages contained mostly things you didn't consider art at all. And he had reached that stage by the age of forty-four. As he mopped up the last of the meat and pasta and the chips, he was not surprised when he was approached by a man who'd detached himself from the little group at the bar. It was not Percy Sharp, but a short, slight man who had taken little part in the talk thus far.

“Do you mind if I sit down? I'm Ben Coward, by the way. I didn't catch your name?”

“I didn't give it. Graham Broadbent.”

The man wrinkled his forehead. “Rings a bell somehow.”

“I write books. Novels. I get into the Colchester papers sometimes.”

“Best keep quiet about the novels. The others over there are a bit suspicious. We like our privacy. They weren't willing to come and talk to you, but we thought there was something you ought to know.”

“Well, thank you for taking the risk.”

“Oh, not really a risk,” Ben Coward said, afraid he had been too melodramatic. “But Kath Moores is a strong-minded lady. Formidable, one might say. I'd rather you didn't—”

“Of course. I've never been a journalist, but never revealing your sources seems a good idea for people generally.”

“She's not really a dragon, but she's rather a strict, straitlaced person, and very private. Methodist…We think Ted Somers and she may be—what shall I say?—getting together. Like we told you, he's been visiting on his own here, and Kath has had several weekends away. She doesn't tell anyone where she's been, and if anyone asks she says, ‘Visiting friends.' ”