‘It pays well.’
‘Do you like it, though?’
‘It’s easy.’
She laughed, and we plonked in the armchairs opposite each other: ‘You always were on the lookout for a cushy billet.’
I offered her a cigarette: ‘How’s your work then?’
‘The same old drag. But it keeps me alive and kicking. Do you want something to eat?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She made the tea, poured it, put in sugar and milk, stirred it up, and pushed it towards me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Grandma’s funeral,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t know about it.’
‘We tried to find you. I even went to the police, but there was nothing they could do.’
This made my stomach jump: ‘I’ll keep in touch from now on.’
‘It’s best if you do, in case something happens to me. Not that I’m likely to be a drain on you, because I’m getting married soon. Albert and I have fixed it for about three months from now.’
‘Albert?’
‘You’ll meet him tonight, if you come out down town.’
My grandmother’s box was upstairs, and I was given an envelope with the key in it. It wasn’t full. There were the rent books she’d kept right through her life, all the lapsed insurance policies, birth certificates, a family Bible which, when I opened it, had the births and deaths of several generations of the family written in the fly-leaves, not only by her but by others before her. There were character references from people she had worked for from the age of twelve — packs of that useless detritus that old-fashioned half-literate people liked to hoard. I tore up a few of the rent books and stacked them in the fireplace, piled them on and got a good blaze going with my lighter, for the room was damp and cold. Some fifty-year-old newspapers came out, and these I put to one side to read later, curious as to why she had saved them. Then a pack of ancient photos, a few of them daguerrotypes, members of the family who had steamed over from Ireland.
I compared the dates on the back with the notes in the Bible, and one photo was particularly interesting because it was of the first Cullen to come from County Mayo at the time of the Famine. He’d brought six sons and a wife with him, and the photo showed a man who looked very much like photos I’d seen of myself. It gave me a shock. Polly Moggerhanger had taken one of me in Geneva, and the same stiff self-conscious pose was there. The man of eighteen-forty wore a fine suit, with a waistcoat that had a watch-chain looping across it. He was just above middle height, about thirty years old, and wore a derby hat (or was it a billy-cock?). But he had my thin lips and straight nose, the same arching of the back as the head looked superciliously into the air as if expecting trouble from that quarter. It gave me a pang to realize he’d been dead eighty years, and that maybe in another hundred years someone like me would be looking at a photo of me and saying the same thing to himself. Time has no meaning, I thought, when it comes to photos hoarded by an old woman. I tried to picture his life in the England of those days, but I couldn’t. He’d worked with his sons on the railways in Cambridgeshire, and I supposed they’d earned good money with it. He certainly looked well dressed in this photo.
I put it in my wallet, continued digging in the trunk. There was a bonnet, a few embroidered handkerchiefs, a hymn and prayer book, a man’s yellow necktie or cravat, and a gold watch that didn’t go when I wound it up. Lower down and beneath everything was a small leather bag with something inside that weighed heavily. I opened the string, and gold coins fell out. There were fifty altogether, and I’d never seen golden sovereigns before, that must be worth four or five quid each. The sight and weight of so much gold made my mouth water, and for several minutes I ran them through my fingers like a miser. I was so long up there my mother must have thought I’d laid down and died, so I put all the things back except the gold and humped my way to the living-room.
She looked up from her novel. ‘Get anything?’
I clinked the bag down: ‘Photos, rent books, and this.’
‘What the hell is it?’
‘Fifty gold sovereigns.’
She stood up: ‘Do you want any more tea?’
‘If it’s fresh. There’s half for you, and half for me. It’s over a hundred pounds each.’
‘It was left to you,’ she called from the scullery.
‘I insist on going halves.’
This obviously pleased her: ‘All right. Albert and me might go to Paris for a few days with it. I’ve always wanted to go there.’
‘That’s a good way of spending it,’ I said, pleased that she hadn’t wanted to fritter it away on sensible things like clothes or the house.
I met Albert that night, and we hit it off together, which was just as well because my mother wanted me to ‘give her away’ when the time came, and we both knew I wouldn’t give her away to just anybody. She looked so young dressed up that if I’d met her in London and she’d not been my mother I could imagine wanting to get off with her. As for Albert, he was about fifty, and had been a factory worker most of his life. But from being a boy he’d been in the Communist Party and had educated himself, so we had a lot to talk about. Before the war he’d actually been sent to Russia by his trade union, and in those days, being so young, he’d thought it was great. Even now, he wasn’t one of those who’d opted out. He knew all about what had been going on, but still kept his faith in a better world and all that. I didn’t see eye to eye with him on some of this, but there’d always been a tradition of religious tolerance in our family, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t respect him for it. We drank steadily, as if we’d never stop talking, and I could see how pleased my mother was that we took to each other. I certainly wouldn’t mind him going to Paris on part of the Cullen gold. My grandmother must have got her hands on so much during the Great War when she was working at the gun factory. I’m glad to know that somebody made something out of it apart from the millionaires. She must have gone out of her way to get gold so that it wouldn’t lose its value, and I was glad that at least one member of the Cullen family had shown a bit of wisdom for once.
I left my twenty-five sovereigns locked in the box, and went back to London, an ideal journey in that I neither met nor spoke to anyone. Sunshine came warmly into the musty compartment as I left Nottingham, but two hours later the train passed St Albans and entered the drizzle. My mother had packed sandwiches so I didn’t need to go to the restaurant coach. As for drink, I never got thirsty. I don’t know why but I could go a whole day without liquid of any kind, not even feeling uncomfortable for lack of it.
On St Pancras Station I bought a newspaper to pass my time on the Underground, and when I unfolded it I saw a headline which made me feel uneasy, not to say queasy. HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN RIVER. POLICE LAUNCH SEARCH ON PUTNEY REACH. HUSBAND GASSED. I read it several times. Her head had been discovered in the mud, and my friend on the plane from sunny Portugal had done it after all, in spite of that loving reunion I’d witnessed at London airport. The gory gossip was given, and all the office girls were reading it up. I chopped my vomit back and saw his face before me, mad and vivid in its details, when even on the plane during his spiel I hadn’t got a good look at it, and so could never have known what was really behind those amiable, intelligent, grotesque eyes.
His story had fixed me, there’s no doubt of that, because who isn’t still gripped by tales of medieval jealousy, mother-love, and spite, even though it can be seen as rockingly funny? But I couldn’t see that far behind his eyes and believe he’d really meant what he said. I decided that from now on I’d accept what people said as being part of their true interiors. They are incapable of lying when they are desperate, and in any case your intuition has to tell you when they were in this state. If I had taken the pains to see, which wouldn’t have been that far beyond me, to the deepest recesses behind his eyes in which that picture lurked in black and grey and red, of his wife’s head tilted in the mud and staring at some innocent barge going by in the moonlight, I might have saved her, and him. But I didn’t, because somehow my feet were no longer plugged into the earth, and my aerial was withered in its contact with heaven. It seemed I had been living underwater not to have known the truth of what was so obvious, and been able to do something about it. I saw everything sharp and clear with the bare eye, but a lazy idleness inside kept a permanent cloth-bound foot on the deeper perceptions that blinded me from action. Some explosion was necessary in my consciousness and I didn’t know how to bring it about before something happened due to this inadequacy that would be fatal to me.