Reflex (12 page)

It was a pub that finally oriented me. The Willing Horse. An old pub. Dark brown paint. Frosted glass in the windows with tracery patterns around the edges. I parked the car around the corner and walked back to the chocolate doors, and simply stood there, waiting.

After a while I seemed to know which way to go. Turn left, walk three hundred yards, cross the road, first turning on the right.

I turned into a street of bow-fronted terrace houses, three stories high, narrow and neat and typical. Cars lined both sides of the street, with many front gardens converted to parking places. There were a few bare-branched trees growing from earthpatches near the edge of the pavement, and hedges and shrubs by the houses. Three steps up to a small flat area outside each front door.

I crossed that road and walked slowly up it, but the impetus had gone. Nothing told me whether I was in the right place, or which house to try. I walked more slowly, indecisively, wondering what to do next.

Four houses from the end I went up the short footpath, and up the steps, and rang the doorbell.

A woman with a cigarette opened the door.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Does Samantha live here?”

“Who?”

“Samantha?”

“No.” She looked me up and down with the utmost suspicion, and closed the door.

I tried six more houses. Two no answers, one “clear off,” one “no dear, I'm Popsy, like to come in?” one “we don't want no brushes,” and one “is that a cat?”

At the eighth an old lady told me I was up to no good, she'd watched me go from house to house, and if I didn't stop it she would call the police.

“I'm looking for someone called Samantha,” I said. “She used to live here.”

“I'm watching you,” she said. “If you try to climb in through any windows, I'll call the police.”

I walked away from her grim little face and she came right out into the street to watch me.

It wasn't much good, I thought. I wouldn't find Samantha. She might be out, she might have moved, she might never have lived in that street in the first place. Under the old woman's baleful gaze I tried another house where no one answered, and another where a girl of about twenty opened the door.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Does anyone called Samantha live there?” I'd said it so often it now sounded ridiculous. This is the last one, I thought. I may as well give it up and go home.

“Who?”

“Samantha?”

“Samantha what? Samantha who?”

“I'm afraid I don't know.”

She pursed her lips, not quite liking it.

“Wait a moment,” she said. “I'll go and see.” She shut the door and went away. I walked down the steps to the front garden where a small red car stood on some tarmac. Hovered, waiting to see if the girl returned, aware of the old woman beadily watching from along the road.

The door behind me opened as I turned. There were two people there, the girl and an older woman. When I
took a step towards them the woman made a sharp movement of the arm, to keep me away. Raising her voice she said, “What do you want?”

“Well . . . I'm looking for someone called Samantha.”

“So I hear. What for?”

“Are you,” I said slowly, “Samantha?”

She looked me up and down with the suspicion I was by now used to. A comfortably sized lady, gray-brown wavy hair to her shoulders.

“What do you want?” she said again, unsmiling.

I said, “Would the name Nore mean anything to you? Philip Nore, or Caroline Nore?”

To the girl the names meant nothing, but in the woman there was a fast sharpening of attention.

“What exactly do you want?” she demanded.

“I'm . . . Philip Nore.”

The guarded expression turned to incredulity. Not exactly to pleasure, but certainly to acknowledgment.

“You'd better come in,” she said. “I'm Samantha Bergen.”

I went up the steps and through the front door, and didn't have, as I'd half expected, the feeling of coming home.

“Downstairs,” she said, leading the way and looking over her shoulder, and I followed her through the hall and down the stairs, which in all those London houses led to the kitchen and to the door out to the garden. The girl followed after me, looking mystified and still wary.

“Sorry not to have been more welcoming,” Samantha said, “but you know what it is these days. So many burglaries. You have to be careful. And strange young men coming to the door asking for Samantha . . .”

“Yes,” I said.

She went through a doorway into a large room, which looked more like a country kitchen than most kitchens in the country. A row of pine-covered cupboards on the right. A big table, with chairs. A red-tiled floor. French
windows to the garden. A big basket-chair hanging on a chain from the ceiling. Beams. Bits of gleaming copper.

Without thinking I walked across the red floor and sat in the hanging basket chair, tucking my feet under me, out of sight.

Samantha Bergen stood there looking astounded.

“You are!” she said. “You are Philip. Little Philip. He always used to sit there like that, with his feet up. I'd forgotten. But seeing you do it . . . good gracious heavens.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, half stammering and standing up again, steadying the swinging chair. “I just . . . did it.”

“My dear man,” she said. “It's all right. It's extraordinary to see you, that's all.” She turned to the girl but said still to me, “This is my daughter, Clare. She wasn't born when you stayed here.” And to her daughter she said, “I looked after a friend's child now and then. Heavens . . . it must be twenty-two years since the last time. I don't suppose I ever told you.”

The girl shook her head but looked less mystified and a good deal more friendly. They were both of them attractive in an unforced sort of way, both of them wearing jeans and sloppy jerseys and unpainted Tuesday afternoon faces. The girl was slimmer and had darker and shorter hair, but they both had large gray eyes, straight noses, and unaggressive chins. Both were self-assured; and both undefinably intelligent.

The work I had interrupted lay spread out on the table. Galley proofs and drawings and photographs, the makings of a book. When I glanced at it, Clare said, “Mother's cook book,” and Samantha said, “Clare is a publishers' assistant,” and they invited me to sit down again.

We sat around the table, and I told them about looking for Amanda, and the off-chance which had brought me to their door.

Samantha regretfully shook her head. “An off-chance is all it was,” she said. “I never saw Caroline after she
took you away the last time. I didn't even know she had a daughter. She never brought her here.”

“Tell me about her,” I said. “What was she like?”

“Caroline? So pretty you wanted to hug her. Full of light and fun. She could get anyone to do anything. But . . .” she stopped.

“But what?” I said. “And please do be frank. She's been dead for twelve years, and you won't hurt my feelings.”

“Well . . . she took drugs.” Samantha looked at me anxiously, and seemed relieved when I nodded. “Cocaine. LSD. Marijuana. Almost anything. She tried the lot. She told me she didn't want you around when she and her friends were all high. She begged me to look after you for a few days . . . it always turned into a few weeks . . . and you were such a quiet little mouse . . . you were quite good company, actually. I never minded, when she brought you.”

“How often?” I said slowly.

“How often did she bring you? Oh . . . half a dozen times. You were about four the first time . . . and about eight at the end, I suppose. I told her I couldn't take you again, as Clare was imminent.”

“I've always been grateful to you,” I said.

“Have you?” She seemed pleased. “I wouldn't have thought you'd remember . . . but I suppose you must have done, as you're here.”

“Did you know anyone called Chloe or Deborah or Miranda?” I said.

“Deborah Baederbeck? Went to live in Brussels?”

“I don't know.”

Samantha shook her head dubiously. “She wouldn't know anything about your Amanda. She must have been in Brussels for . . . oh . . . twenty-five years.”

Clare made some tea and I asked Samantha if my mother had ever told her anything about my father.

“No, nothing,” she said positively. “An absolutely
taboo subject, I gathered. She was supposed to have an abortion, and didn't. Left it too late. Just like Caroline, absolutely irresponsible.” She made a comical face. “I suppose you wouldn't be here if she'd done what she promised her old dragon of a mother.”

“She made up for it by not registering my birth.”

“Oh God.” She chuckled with appreciation. “I must say that's typical Caroline. We went to the same school. I'd known her for years. We'd not long left when she got landed with you.”

“Did she take drugs then? At school?”

“Heavens, no.” She frowned, thinking. “Afterwards. We all did. I don't mean she and I together. But our generation . . . we all tried it, I should think, some time or other, when we were young. Pot mostly.”

Clare looked surprised, as if mothers didn't do that sort of thing.

I said, “Did you know the friends she got high with?”

Samantha shook her head. “Never met any of them. Caroline called them friends in the plural, but I always thought of it as one friend, a man.”

“No,” I said. “Sometimes there were more. People lying on floor cushions half asleep, with the room full of haze. All enormously peaceful.”

They were the people with words like “skins” and “grass” and “joints,” which never seemed to mean what my childish brain expected; and it was one of them who had given me a cigarette and urged me to suck in the smoke. Suck it into your lungs, he'd said, and then hold your breath while you count ten. I'd coughed all the smoke out before I counted two, and he'd laughed and told me to try again. Three or four small drags, I'd had.

The result, which I'd dreamed of occasionally afterwards rather than actively remembered, was a great feeling of tranquility. Relaxed limbs, quiet breathing, slight lightness of head. My mother had come home and slapped me, which put an end to all that. The friend who'd
initiated me never reappeared. I hadn't met hash again until I was twenty, when I'd been given a present of some greeny-yellow Lebanese resin to sprinkle onto tobacco.

I'd smoked some, and given some away, and never bothered again. The results, to me, weren't worth the trouble and expense. They would have been, a doctor friend had told me, if I'd had asthma. Marijuana was terrific for asthmatics, he'd said, sadly. Pity they couldn't smoke it on the National Health.

We drank the tea Clare had made, and Samantha asked what I did in the way of a job.

“I'm a jockey.”

They were incredulous. “You're too tall,” Samantha said, and Clare said, “People just aren't jockeys.”

“People are,” I said. “I am. And jockeys don't have to be small. Six-footers have been known.”

“Extraordinary thing to be,” Clare said. “Pretty pointless, isn't it?”

“Clare!” Samantha said, protesting.

“If you mean,” I said equably, “that being a jockey contributes nothing useful to society, I'm not so sure.”

“Proceed,” Clare said.

“Recreation gives health. I provide recreation.”

“And betting?” she demanded. “Is that healthy?”

“Sublimation of risk-taking. Stake your money, not your life. If everyone actually set out to climb Everest, just think of the rescue parties.”

She started to smile and converted it into a chewing motion with her lips. “But you yourself . . . take the risks.”

“I don't bet.”

“Clare will tie you in knots,” her mother said. “Don't listen to her.”

Clare however shook her head. “I would think your little Philip is as easy to tie in knots as a stream of water.”

Samantha gave her a surprised glance and asked me where I lived.

“In Lambourn. It's a village in Berkshire. Out on the Downs.”

Clare frowned and looked at me with sharpened concentration.

“Lambourn . . . isn't that the village where there are a lot of racing stables, rather like Newmarket?”

“That's right.”

“Hm.” She thought for a minute. “I think I'll just ring up my boss. He's doing a book on British villages and village life. He was saying this morning the book's still a bit thin—asked me if I had any ideas. He has a writer chap doing it. Going to villages, staying a week and writing a chapter. He's just done one on a village that produces its own operas. Look, do you mind if I give him a call?”

“Of course not.”

She was on her feet and going across to a telephone extension on the kitchen worktop before I'd even answered. Samantha gave her a fond motherly look, and I thought how odd it was to find Samantha in her late forties, when I'd always imagined her perpetually young. From under the unrecognizable exterior, though, the warmth, the directness, the steady values and the basic goodness came across to me as something long known; and I was reassured to find that those half-buried impressions had been right.

“Clare will bully you into things,” she said. “She bullied me into doing this cook book. She's got more energy than a power station. She told me when she was about six that she was going to be a publisher and she's well on her way. She's already second-in-command to the man she's talking to. She'll be running the whole firm before they know where they are.” She sighed with pleased resignation, vividly illuminating the trials and prides of mothering a prodigy.

The prodigy herself, who looked normal enough,
finished talking on the telephone and came back to the table nodding.