Out of the Blackout (20 page)

‘You shouldn't imagine he just got this idea tonight, Len. Why do you think he's been all palsy-walsy with you? He's been into it, knows about it all. He was just about to tell me, when you came in, how we moved the body.'

‘What body?'

‘Your wife Mary's,' said Simon. ‘Whom you killed.'

‘My wife? I loved my wife. I've told you, I worshipped the ground she walked on.'

Simon took a step closer to him, his eyes still fixed on the terror-stricken face. Len cringed back. Simon spoke as if he were reciting a charge.

‘Mary, whom you killed. It was early in the war, and you were all het up. You had to hit out at something, and she was there. You couldn't stand opposition, and you knew that in her heart she stood against you. You hit her—then more, then more still. Real beating. You found you liked it. It gave you something you needed—when the fix of meetings and marches and salutes had been taken away. It was the sort of pleasure you might have had a great deal of, if the war had gone the other way. You enjoyed it, and you went too far.'

‘I never did. This is fantasy.' Len was hopping in an ecstasy of panic, and then he turned on his sister. ‘What have you been telling him?'

‘Make up your mind, Leonard, do. Either it's fantasy, or I've been telling him things. As a matter of fact, I haven't told him anything he hadn't already worked out for himself.'

‘Then you moved the body,' resumed Simon, his voice rising a tone or two. ‘It was May ‘41, the last big raids of the Battle of Britain. The sort of marks she had on her could easily have been confused with injuries gained when a house was bombed. Especially when the medical services at the time were stretched almost out of existence. I expect one of you went to prospect for the nearest badly bombed house—'

‘Ma,' said Connie. ‘Ma went.'

‘Then you took her to the house in Fisher Street. Where was that? Through the back yard and into the ruins?'

‘Further than that,' said Connie feelingly. ‘A bloody sight further than that.'

‘You shut your lying mouth.'

‘I just said that Fisher Street was further away from Farrow Street than Mr Cutheridge implied,' said Connie in a sweetly genteel voice. ‘Where could be the harm in that?'

‘And you left her there with the other bodies. And when she was found, I suppose you told the authorities she was visiting there. That they were friends of hers.'

‘I always said “slight acquaintances”,' said Connie, again looking with relish at her brother to see the effect of her words on him. ‘I thought there might be relatives or friends to pop up and say the dead couple had never heard of the Simmeters. Though as it turned out the poor things were new in the district, and hardly had any family.'

‘Shut your mouth, you bitch,' shouted Len, in a vitriolic burst of self-assertion. ‘You'll make him think this crap he's imagined is the truth.'

‘Well, isn't it?' asked Simon. ‘What's your version?'

‘I don't need a version. It was accepted at the time. Mary was out visiting. She was visiting a house that was hit by a bomb. Everyone in the house was killed.'

Suddenly, to Simon's amazement, Connie began to laugh. It was a laugh that began small, but billowed out, as if she had been saving up the humour of it for twenty-five years, having had nobody with whom she could relish the comicality of the thing.

‘Oh dear, Simon: it's a good job nobody had the time to go deeply into the story at the time. Isn't it, Len? Nobody seemed to find it at all strange that Mary was out visiting at the Rosebournes', did they? It never occurred to them. If they'd looked into it further, they'd have realized that she never could have been.'

‘Why not?' asked Simon, and was greeted by a further billow of laughter.

‘It wouldn't have been allowed. Because they weren't really called Rosebourne, were they, Len? They were called Rosenbaum. And they were Jewish. Poor refugees from Nazi Germany. You wouldn't have let Mary nod her head in the street to them. We'd put Mary in the home of a Jewish family!'

‘You . . . stupid . . . bitch!' said Len, spitting it out slowly, trying to endow it with the concentrated bitterness of three decades.

‘The funny thing was . . .' said Connie, her words still interrupted by gusts of laughter, ‘that we heard afterwards . . . that the man was on the list of the authorities . . . as a suspicious alien . . . If things hadn't turned out as they did . . . he and Len might have been interned together!'

And Connie had her last gleeful laugh over the long-past pains of others, and then subsided somewhat.

‘But as it was,' Simon put in quietly, ‘you pulled up your roots and got the hell out of Paddington.'

‘That's about it. Len never really felt safe in Paddington again. About a month after that he took a job at the Angel, and we bought this house. Made a big loss on the Paddington house, but Len insisted. The only thing Len values higher than money is his own skin. Of course, if anyone had wanted to trace us, they could have. It wouldn't have been difficult. But Len insisted no one would go to so much bother, and for once he was right. He was never called in for questioning after we moved. You just weren't a big enough fish, were you, Len?'

‘Look,' said Len hoarsely, turning on Simon. ‘I want an end to this. What she's been babbling on about is spite, nothing but spite. Not a grain of truth in it. You don't imagine, do you, if you go along to the police with a story like that, that they'll take you seriously and start looking into it?'

‘No,' said Simon, suddenly strangely weary. ‘No, I don't. I don't think I ever envisaged it becoming a matter for the police.'

‘I heard the word “murder” used,' said Len, feebly aggressive.

‘Justifiably, from all I've heard tonight. But you're quite right: even if I wanted to, I could never get the police interested. And I'm not sure that I'd do it, even if I could. I just wanted to know. I'll be getting out of here tomorrow.'

‘And why,' demanded Len, his body now held more confidently, expressing, indeed, an almost cocky confidence now that he seemed safe, ‘should you “want to know” may I ask?'

‘I'm sure he's a Spurling,' announced Connie, with obvious self-congratulation at her own perceptiveness. ‘I'd put my money on one of Enid's. She was one of those dull, plodding women, Enid was, who'd go worrying away at a thing, year in, year out. And she was very fond of Mary. She had a son a year or two older than your David, but I can't remember his name. They never liked us, Len.'

‘So you're one of the Spurlings, are you? By Chrr-ist, that was a dull family if you like! I don't congratulate you on your parentage, young man. Pillars of the Baptist Church—that's what you
lot are, or were. The Church deserved you, and you deserved the Church, if you ask my opinion. Well, I'll tell you what I'm going to do: in the morning I'm going to send you packing.'

‘You won't need to.' Simon still seemed possessed by this great weariness, and he made no attempt to reassert dominance over Len. ‘I've found out most of what I was looking for. That you were a bully inside the house as well as out of it. That you mistreated your wife, and when eventually you killed her, you covered up the killing with the help of your family. I think the fear you've lived with since has been some sort of punishment. I hope so. If I've added to it I'm glad. I'd like to think you suffered something for what you did.' He paused. ‘There were some other things I'd like to have found out. I'd like to know what happened to your son.'

At his mere mention of the word, there sounded through the room an animal-like cry, a howl of anguish.

‘My son!' cried Len. ‘You talk about punishment, and then about my son!'

His face was crumpling, as it had in the pub, and he suddenly sank into a chair.

‘Oh Gawd,' said Connie, with unshakable calm. ‘Don't start him off about his son.'

‘You talk about punishment,' howled Len again, his shoulders heaving up and down. ‘That was my punishment. If anyone had said, “What's the worst thing that could happen to you?” I'd have said, “To have Davey killed in a raid.” And that's what they did to me. Some Luftwaffe pilot on his way home, just getting rid of his surplus stuff. On my David. If you want me punished, then you're too late. That was it. Talk about suffering—a boy like you doesn't know what suffering is. I wish I'd died the day I heard.'

There was something so anguished, so intense, so drained about the man, coming through his inadequate language, that Simon momentarily felt a twinge of doubt. Did he believe this? Could it be that it was Connie who had got rid of him, and foisted some kind of death notification on Len? As a super-vicious joke, presumably? He looked at Connie. If she had, then surely there would be some sign on her face of that secret knowledge—some hugging to herself of what she had done all those years ago. But there wasn't. There was nothing in her look
but sheer contempt Len must be acting—acting out grief for a child he had himself got rid of. Got rid of, surely, because he had seen too much.

Suddenly Simon's weakness gave way to a desire to retch. All he wanted to do was get away from this house, these people. His people. Suddenly he wanted to make acknowledgement that his people were those who had made themselves his people, and that these were nothing to him.

‘I'll leave you to yourselves,' he said. ‘As Teddy said, keeping yourselves to yourselves could be the Simmeter family motto. Perhaps it's that that's really your punishment.'

Half an hour later he had packed his cases, and stuffed things into a couple of carrier bags he had picked up in shops. They represented all of himself that he'd brought to the Simmeters'. As he left the house he heard raised voices from back in the living-room. The recriminations were just starting. The Simmeters had turned in on themselves.

Twenty minutes later he was booking into his old hotel, off New Oxford Street. When he put his head on his pillow, he went straight off into the soundest and most trouble-free sleep he had enjoyed for weeks.

I
n the week that followed Simon spent all his free hours looking at flats. He was happy and busy; his mind became imperceptibly adjusted to thinking of the future, and occupied itself less with the Simmeters. When he went to bed on Thursday night he was surprised to realize that he had not thought of them once that day. On Friday he got the key for a flat in Swiss Cottage, where he was to remain very happily until 1970, three years after he had married Rosemary.

That weekend he went down to Yeasdon. He had phoned often since he came down from Leeds, but he had never been home. Home had never meshed in his mind with what he had been doing: embedded in his mind was the idea that his investigations held the seed of disloyalty to the Cutheridges. Now he was done with them, and the awkwardness was gone. He had a
warm and delighted homecoming, and Dot Cutheridge was over the moon that he looked fit, happy, and well over the miseries of his marriage and separation.

‘You look a new man,' she said. ‘Practically a teenager again. I bet you've met somebody.'

‘Well, there is somebody,' Simon said. ‘I don't suppose it will come to anything, so don't start building castles. I'm certainly not going to rush in this time.'

‘I didn't notice you rushed in last time,' said Dot, with a countrywoman's tartness. She had never let that incredible gift of a family rob her of common sense in her treatment of Simon.

The only sadness of the visit was the accelerating failure of his father. From being head stockman he had declined after his accident to being a jobber around the estate, and as he had been able to do less and less, his mental agility had gradually left him. Now he spent much of his day in a dream or a doze. Dot and Simon told him things, drew his attention to changes in the garden, or the approach of autumn; he would nod, or venture a comment, but soon he would retreat quite happily into his dream world, which seemed warm with happy reminiscence, leaving mother and son to talk to each other from their positions on either side of him around the open fire.

‘You've been looking into this business of who you are, where you came from, haven't you?' said Dot on Saturday night.

‘I don't know why we bother to talk,' said Simon, smiling. You always know without asking.'

‘And you found out?'

‘Yes, I found out . . . most things. I found out as much as I need to know.'

‘Were they a nice family?'

‘No,' said Simon emphatically. ‘Not nice at all.'

‘I suppose it wasn't likely they would be. Though your mother had looked after you, I'll give her that.'

‘Oh, Mother was different. She must have been quite different. But she died . . .'

‘Died in the war?'

Simon did not want to distress her needlessly.

‘Yes—died about the time I came here. That must have been why I was sent away.'

‘Thank God, at any rate, that I didn't steal you from anybody.
I've often wondered whether I didn't put difficulties in the way of them finding out who you were. The thought that I might have robbed some poor soul was awful—but not so awful as the thought of giving you back. I always said to myself that if she'd wanted you back she'd have made some effort. I'll offer up a prayer of thanks in Church tomorrow—and a prayer for her, poor soul. Well, Dad—you'll be wanting your supper, won't you?'

Simon went with his mother to the Methodist Church next day. Dot Cutheridge's prayers for the dead natural mother of Simon were perhaps rather a departure from orthodox Methodist practice, and Simon too stepped out of Wesleyan line by telling his mother after the service that he was going to call on his friend Mick Malone and take him for a drink before Sunday dinner.