‘A friend of Miss Comfrey’s?’ said Stella Parker at last. It seemed beyond her comprehension that anyone she knew or had known could also be acquainted with the famous. Grenville West was famous in her eyes simply because he had his name in print and had written things which got into print. She repeated what she had said, this time without the interrogative note, accepting the incredible just as she accepted nuclear fission or the fact that potatoes now cost fifteen pence a pound. ‘A friend of Miss Comfrey’s. Well!’
Her grandmother-in-law was less easily surprised. ‘Rhoda was a go-getter. I shouldn’t wonder if she’d known the Prime Minister.’
‘But do you know for a fact that she was a friend of Grenville West’s?’
‘Speak up.’
‘He wants to know,’ said Stella Parker, ‘if you know if she knew him, Nanna.’
'How should I know. The only West I ever come across was that Lilian.’
Wexford bent over her. ‘Mrs Crown?’
‘That’s right. Her first husband’s name was West. She was Mrs West when she first come her to live with Agnes. And poor little John, he was called West too, of course he was. I thought I told you that, young man, when we was talking about names that time.’
‘I didn’t ask you,’ said Wexford.
West is a common name. So he thought as he waited in the car for Lilian Crown to come home from the pub. But if Grenville West should turn out to be some connection by marriage of Rhoda Comfrey’s how much more feasible would any acquaintance between them be. If, for instance, they called each other cousin as many people do with no true blood tie to justify it. Their meeting, their casual affection, would then be explained. And might she not have called herself West, preferring this common though euphonious name over the rarer Comfrey? Lilian Crown arrived home on the arm of an elderly man whom she did not attempt to introduce to Wexford. They were neither of them drunk, that is to say unsteady on their feet or slurred in their speech, but each reeked of liquor, Lilian Crown of spirits and the old man of strong ale. There was even a dampish look about them, due no doubt to the humid weather, but suggesting rather that they had been dipped into vats of their favourite tipple.
Mrs Crown evidently wanted her friend to accompany her and Wexford into the house, but he refused with awed protestations and frenetic wobblings of his head. Her thin shoulders went up and she made a monkey face at him. ‘OK, be like that.’ She didn’t say good-bye to him but marched into the house, leaving Wexford to follow her. He found her already seated on the food-stained sofa, tearing open a fresh packet of cigarettes.
‘What is it this time?’
He knew he was being over-sensitive with this woman, who was herself totally insensitive. But it was difficult for him, even at his age and after his experiences, to imagine a woman whose only child was a cripple and an idiot not to have had her whole life blighted by her misfortune. And although he sensed that she might answer any question he asked her about her son with indifference, he still hoped to avoid asking her. Perhaps it was for himself and not for her that he felt this way, perhaps he was, even now, vulnerable to man’s or woman’s, inhumanity.
‘You were Mrs West, I believe,’ he said, ‘before you married for the second time?’
‘That’s right. Ron – Mr West, that is – got himself killed at Dunkirk.’ She put it in such a way as to imply that her first husband had deliberately placed himself as the target for a German machine-gun or aircraft. ‘What’s that got to do with Rhoda?’
‘I’ll explain that in a moment, if you don’t mind. Mr West had relatives, I suppose?’
‘Of course he did. His mum didn’t find him under a gooseberry bush. Two brothers and a sister he had.’
‘Mrs Crown, I have good reason to be interested in anyone connected with your late niece who bears the name of West. Did these people have children? Do you know where they. are now?’ Would she, when she hadn’t known the address of her own niece? But very likely they had no reason to be secretive.
‘Ethel, the sister, she never spoke a word to me after I married Ron. Gave herself a lot of mighty fine airs, for all her dad was only a farm labourer. Married a Mr Murdoch, poor devil, and I reckon they’d both be over eighty now if they’re not dead. The brothers was Len and Sidney, but Sidney got killed in the war like Ron. Len was all right, I got on OK with Len.’ Mrs Crown said this wonderingly, as if she had surprised herself by admitting that she got on with anyone connected to her by blood or by marriage. ‘Him and his wife, they still send me Christmas cards.’
‘Have they any children?’
Mrs Crown lit another cigarette from the stub of the last, and Wexford got a blast of smoke in his face. ‘Not to say children. They’ll be in their late thirties by now. Leslie and Charley, they’re called.’ The favour in which she held the parents did not apparently extend to their sons. ‘I got an invite to Leslie’s wedding, but he treated me like dirt, acted like he didn’t know who I was. Don’t know if Charley’s married, wouldn’t be bothered to ask. He’s a teacher, fancies himself a cut above his people, I can tell you.’
‘So as far as you know there isn’t a Grenville West among them?’
Like Mrs Parker, Lilian Crown had evidently set him down as stupid. They were both the sort of people who assume authority, any sort of authority, to be omniscient, to know all sorts of private and obscure details of their own families and concerns as well as they know them themselves. This authority did not, and therefore this authority must be stupid. Mrs Crown cast up her eyes.
‘Of course there is. They’re all called Grenville, aren’t they? It’s like a family name, though what right a farm labourer thinks he’s got giving his boys a fancy handle like that I never will know.’
‘Mrs Crown,’ said Wexford, his head swimming, ‘what do you mean, they’re all called Grenville?’
She reeled it off rapidly, a list of names. ‘Ronald Grenville West, Leonard Grenville West, Sidney Grenville West, Leslie Grenville West, Charles Grenville West.’
‘And these people,’ he said, half-stunned by it, ‘your niece Rhoda knew them?’
‘May have come across Leslie and Charley when they was little kids, I daresay. She’d have been a lot older.’
He had written the names down. He looked at what he had written. Addresses now, and Mrs Crown was able, remarkably, to provide them or some of them. The parents lived at Myfleet, a village not far from Kingsmarkham, the son Leslie over the county boundary in Kent. She didn’t know the whereabouts of Charley, but his school was in South London, so his father said, which meant he must live down there somewhere, didn’t it?
And now he had to ask it, as tactfully as he could. For if every male of the West family… ‘And that is all?’ he said almost timorously. ‘There’s no one else called Grenville West?’
‘Don’t think so. Not that I recall.’ She fixed him with a hard stare. ‘Except my boy, of course, but that wouldn’t count, him not being normal. Been in a home for the backward like since he was so high. He’s called John Grenville West, for what it’s worth.’