Requiem for a Wren (29 page)

I didn't want to rush at this, so I had a bath and went down to a light lunch in the coffee shop. Then I went back up to my room and looked for Prentice in the telephone directory. It was there, all right, with the same address, though the name was Mrs C. W. Prentice. I stared at it in thought for a minute. There had been mention of an aunt that she was going to live with. This would be the widow of her uncle, the one who had been on the faculty of Stanford University. Widow, because if the husband had been alive the telephone would have been in his name.

I put the book down presently and sat down on the edge of the bed, and called the number.

A woman's voice answered, with a marked American accent. I said, 'Can I speak to Miss Prentice?'

'Say, you've got the wrong number,' she replied. 'Miss Prentice doesn't live here now.'

A sick disappointment came upon me. I had been counting on success this time. 'Can you tell me her number?' I asked. And then, feeling that a little explanation was required I said, 'She's expecting me. I'm on my way from England to Australia, and I stopped here in Seattle to see her.'

I don't think my explanation impressed the woman very much, because she said, 'She left here more than a year back, brother, after the old lady died. We bought the house off her. Did she give you this number?'

'No,' I said. 'I looked it up in the book.'

'I'd say that you'd got hold of an old book. Did you say she was expecting you?'

'I wrote to her from England a few days ago to say that I'd be passing through Seattle, and I'd ring her up' I explained.

'Wait now,' she said. 'There's a letter came the other day for her from England. I meant to give it to the mailman and I clean forgot. Just stay there while I go get it.' I waited till she came back to the phone. 'What did you say your name was?'

'Alan Duncan.'

'That's correct,' she said. 'That's the name written on the back. Your letter's right here, Mr Duncan.'

I asked, 'Didn't she leave a forwarding address with you?'

'A forwarding what?'

I repeated the word.

'Oh, address,' she said. 'You certainly are English, Mr Duncan. No, she didn't leave that with us. A few things came in after she had gone, and we gave them to the mailman.'

I thought quickly. There was just a possibility that the woman might know more than I could easily get out of her upon the telephone, or possibly the next-door neighbour might know something that would help me. 'It looks as if I've missed her,' I said. T think the best thing I can do is to come out and collect that letter.'

'Sure,' she said affably. 'I'll be glad to meet you, Mr Duncan. I never met an Englishman from England.'

I laughed. 'You've not met one now. I'm Australian. Would it be all right if I come out this afternoon?'

'Surely,' she said. 'Come right out. The name's Pasmanik - Mrs Molly Pasmanik.'

I drove out in a taxi half an hour later. It was quite a long way out of town, in a district known as North Beach; the house was a street or two inland from the sea at Shilshole Bay, a decent suburban neighbourhood. The taxi driver didn't want to wait, so I paid him off and went in to the open garden to ring the bell of the small, single-storey house.

I spent an hour with Mrs Pasmanik, who produced a cup of coffee and some little sweet cakes for me, but I learned very little about Janet Prentice. She had lived there with her aunt until the aunt had died, but Mrs Pasmanik could not tell me how long she had lived there; they had themselves come to Seattle very recently from New Jersey. She really knew very little that was of any use to me.

I could not find out from Mrs Pasmanik that Janet made friends in the neighbourhood, and in that district houses seemed to change hands fairly frequently. The neighbours on the one side had left two months before my visit, and on the other side had come shortly before Janet had sold the house, and they knew nothing of her. The aunt had died in May 1952 and the Pasmaniks had bought the house from Janet in June. They had not seen much of her as the business had been handled by an agent; they had an idea, however, that she was going down to San Francisco to live there. There had been one or two legal complexities about the sale of the house because she was an alien in the United States, inheriting the estate of the aunt who was a US citizen. They had never had any address for the forwarding of letters, but had given everything back to the mailman. She thought the post office would have a forwarding address. The aunt had been cremated and the urn had been deposited in a cemetery at Acacia Park.

There was nothing more to be done there. Janet Prentice had been here, had lived here for some years, but she had gone on. I said goodbye to Mrs Pasmanik and walked slowly three or four blocks up the street to the Sunset Hill bus that would take me back to town. These were the streets she must know very well, the surroundings that had formed her in the years that she had spent in this district while I searched for her in England. Here were the stores where she had done the daily shopping for her aunt, the A P and the Safeway, far from her home in Oxford, far from the Beaulieu River and from Oerlikon guns. As I drove in to town in the bus we crossed a great bridge and I saw masses of fine yachts and sturdy, workmanlike fishing vessels ranged along the quays and floats, and I wondered if the ex-Wren had found solace there, some anodyne related to her former life.

Somewhere along that waterfront there might be somebody who knew her, some fisherman or yachtsman, but how to set about such an inquiry in a foreign country was an enigma.

I sat in my hotel bedroom that evening brooding over my problem, which seemed now to be as far from a solution as it had ever been. True, I had caught up with her in time and I was now no more than fifteen months or so behind her, so that the memories of those who might have known her would be fresher, but to balance that she had disappeared into a foreign country, if a friendly one, of a hundred and fifty million people. I had dinner in the dining-room of the hotel, and then I couldn't stand inaction any longer and went out and walked the streets painfully until I found the inland water I was looking for, with infinite quays and wharves packed with small craft. I must have walked for miles that night beside Lake Union. I walked till the straps chafed raw places on my legs, and hardly felt them, but it was like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, of course. Once, crazily, I stopped an old man coming off a little rundown fishing boat and asked him if he had ever heard of an English girl who worked on boats, called Janet Prentice.

'Never heard the name' he said. There's a lot of boats in these parts, mister, and a lot of girls.'

Finally I came out to a busy street and hailed a taxi and went back to the hotel. I didn't sleep much that night.

There were still a few faint threads to be followed up that might possibly lead to her. I went and saw the British Vice-Consul in the morning; he knew of her existence but thought she had returned to England. I went to the head post office and saw a young man in the postmaster's department, who told me that it was against the rules to give out forwarding addresses and suggested that I should write a letter to the last known address, when it would be forwarded if any forwarding address existed. I hired a car after lunch and went out to the cemetery and talked to the janitor, who showed me the urn containing the ashes of the late Mrs Prentice and told me that the urn had been endowed in perpetuity at the time of the funeral. I had hoped that annual charges of some sort would be payable which might lead to an address, but there was nothing of that sort.

With that I had shot my bolt in Seattle, but there remained one faint hope of contact in America. I flew down to San Francisco next morning and got a room in the St Francis Hotel. That afternoon I got a car and drove out to the beautiful Leland Stanford University, and called on the Registrar as a start, who passed me on to the Dean. He remembered Dr Robert Prentice, an Englishman who had joined the faculty about the year 1925 and had worked with the Food Research Institute; he had left Stanford about seven years later to take up an appointment with the University of Washington at Seattle, where he had died about the year 1940. They had no records that would help to trace his niece. I thanked them, and went back to the hotel.

That evening I booked a reservation for the flight across the Pacific to Sydney. I had followed a dream for five years and it had got me nowhere. Now I must put away the fancies that I had been following and, as Viola had once remarked, stop behaving like a teenager. I was a grown man, nearly forty, and there was work for me to do at Coombargana, my own place. I dined that night in a restaurant at Fisherman's Wharf looking out upon the boats as, they rocked on the calm water of the harbour. I must put away childish things and get down to a real job of work. I was content to do so, now that it was all over. I knew that I should never quite forget Janet Prentice, but that evening I felt as though a load had slipped down to the ground from off my shoulders.

IT WAS nearly two o'clock in the morning in my bedroom at Coombargana in the Western District before I could bring myself to begin upon a detailed examination of the contents of her attache case. I had been reluctant to violate her privacy when she was impersonal to me, a housemaid that had been engaged while I had been away. Now she was very personal, for she had been Bill's girl. She had come here for some reason that I did not understand after the death of her mother and her aunt, and she had looked after my mother and father in my absence more in the manner of a daughter than a paid servant, all unknown to them, till finally she had died by her own hand. Why had she done that?

If I had been reluctant to violate her privacy when she was a stranger I was doubly reluctant now. I laid the contents of her case out on the table, putting the letters in one pile, the photographs in another, and the bank books and the cheque book in a third. There remained the diaries, eleven quarto books of varying design. I had opened one and shut it again quickly; her writing was small and neat and closely spaced. Those books, I had no doubt, would tell me all I had to know, and I didn't want to know it.

There was no need to hurry over this, I told myself. I made the fire up, took off my dirty trousers and pullover and changed back into my dinner jacket, sat staring at the fire for a time, wandered about the room. Twice I roused myself and drew a chair up to the table to begin upon the job and each time my mind made excuse, and little trivial things distracted me from the job I hated to begin. I remember that I stood for a long time at the window looking out over our calm, moonlit paddocks stretching out beyond the river to the foothills. Already one hard, painful fact protruded, the first of many that her diaries must contain. She had made an

end to her life on the eve of my return home, presumably because I was the only person who could recognise her and disclose her as Bill's girl. I had arrived earlier than I had been expected; if I had come by sea as they all thought, she would have been buried by the time that I arrived and her secret would have been safe.

If I had stayed away from Coombargana, if I had gone on as an expatriate in England as my sister Helen had chosen to do, Janet Prentice might have lived. In some way that I did not want to understand, I was responsible for her death.

I came to that conclusion at about two in the morning, and I think it steadied me. My mother had said earlier in the evening that she had failed the girl and made her terribly unhappy without knowing it so that she had taken her own life, and she couldn't understand what she had done. It now seemed quite unlikely that my mother had anything to do with it at all. It was my homecoming that had precipitated this thing, and I must face the facts and take what might be coming to me. If only for my mother's sake I had to read these diaries.

I sat down at the table, put all the other papers on one side, and started to examine the eleven quarto books. I glanced at the first page of each and arranged them in order of date, beginning with the first.

It started in October 1941, when she had joined the Wrens. In that first volume the entries were daily to begin with and largely consisted of reminders about Service routine, leave dates, corresponding ranks in the Army and the RAF to indicate who should be saluted and who not, and matters of that sort. As the volume went on, the entries ceased to be daily and became rather more descriptive and longer; some power of writing was developing in her, as might have been expected from her parentage, and the diary began to show signs, which were to become more marked in the later volumes, that it was assuming the character of an emotional outlet.

An entry in August 1942 is fairly typical:

~ Saturday. Went to movies in Littlehampton with Helen

and a lot of boys in W/T. Community singing in truck on the way home, Roll me over. Air-raid alarm as soon as we got back about 11.45, went down to the shelter. A lot of bombs dropped and one near miss, a lot of sand came down from the roof and our ears felt bad. Waves of them were coming over and a lot of Bofors firing. All clear about two-fifteen and very glad to come up on deck, a lovely starry night but a lot of stuff on fire better not say what. Shelter No 16 got a direct hit and some of the boys were killed, and Heather Forbes, engine fitter. Alice Murphy was buried but dug out and sent to hospital, not very bad. A crash by the transport park and three bodies on the ground beside it, but they were German. One of the Bofors got it rooty-toot-toot. They let us lie in, but I got up for breakfast and Divisions was as usual.