But the Southport Harry Spalding had known had been a splendid place; handsome, sun-drenched and dedicated to pleasure. It was a cut above Blackpool and Morecambe to the north, and knew it. There were casinos and luxury cinemas and theatres and concert halls. There was marble and terrazzo and parquet and there was money. The thoroughbreds ridden at Aintree were trained on the shore. Birkdale was considered the best links golf course in the whole of England. The Giroud brothers ran their aviation club on a hard, smooth strip between the sand hills and the sea. Star entertainers were lured in the season to the Floral Hall and the summer flower show held in Victoria Park was at least the rival of the show held annually at Chelsea. Then, Lord Street had boasted an array of shops to compete with anything in Paris or Milan.
Suzanne walked through the station approach to Chapel Street. She had booked her accommodation the previous evening by email, after choosing a small private hotel in Birkdale that had looked nice without being massively overpriced. The fact that she had found somewhere so easily was indicative, she supposed, of the decline of the resort. Once its hotels and guesthouses would have been full to capacity from the end of May until the beginning of September. But it was no longer the case. It was made plain in her reading that the town saw its future appeal more as a conference location than a place where people sought to spend a holiday.
She was aware that she was spending the BBC’s money on something that was nothing at all to do with the corporation. But in her five years there, she had seen a great deal of money squandered.
Chapel Street was pedestrianised. Late afternoon shoppers browsed the windows of generic stores or sipped coffee at the tables in Café Nero. A pair of middle-aged buskers stood with electric guitars in the middle of the street and played an old hit by Dire Straits. She felt a stab of disappointment. It wasn’t that the town looked any drearier than anywhere else did. It was just that she could have been anywhere in England. Then she sniffed and looked up at the sky. And she smelled ozone and salt on the fresh summer breeze from the sea and saw the shimmering, layered cobalt light that only skies on the coast possess when the sun is shining on them and reflecting back the sea.
Chapel Street ran parallel with Lord Street. Or rather, with part of Lord Street, which was much longer than Chapel Street. She walked through a covered arcade that connected the two and found herself on a wide avenue with high trees and fountains. To her left, she knew, she would find the town’s main library. And opposite the main entrance to the library, on the same stretch of wide pavement, she would find the Tourist Information Office. She hefted the single bag comprising her luggage. Unpacking her bag could wait. There were mysteries here to be solved.
But she solved none of those mysteries on her first visit to Southport’s main public library. The Atkinson Library was situated in a grand building paid for by the philanthropist after whom it was named. Other parts of the building housed an arts centre and the Atkinson Art Gallery. In Spalding’s era, the arts centre had been a theatre given to glittering premiers and productions hailed for their extravagance. But Suzanne was aware that she lived in a more practical age. And the reference library there was excellent, she discovered, once she had completed the formality of taking out a temporary membership. There was a rich and vivid archive charting the history and development of the town. There was lots of information on the great maritime disaster that occurred when the crew of the Southport lifeboat went to the aid of the stricken vessel Mexico. There was nothing whatsoever in the library about Jane Boyte.
After an hour and a half of searching without result, Suzanne decided that she would go for coffee. She crossed the road from the library to the west side of Lord Street, where the shops were arrayed, then turned right and after a block came to a Costa coffee house. Costa roasted their beans at a plant in Old Paradise Street, around the corner from the Lambeth flat she shared with Martin. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, it was a familiar, homely smell. She was a fair way from home. When she ordered her drink, there was even a photograph of the Old Paradise Street street sign in sepia as part of a montage on the wall. And, of course, that was fondly familiar, too. But as the June shadows began their slow lengthening towards dusk, she felt a very long way from home indeed.
What if Martin never came back? It was a desolate thought, and one she had tried to avoid consciously thinking, while thinking it all the while at some deeper and less disciplined level of her mind. What if they never sat down again at their corner table in the Windmill for a drink to a soundtrack of the landlord’s tearful soul? There would be no more impromptu picnics in Archbishop’s Park, no more games on balmy evenings on the tennis courts, no more shopping amid the fruit and bric-a-brac stalls of Lower Marsh, and no more browsing in the book and record shops there. What if they had shared a bed for the last time, exchanged their final intimacy? She looked around her, trying to dismiss the thought, at the young girls in their northern gaggles wearing too much make-up for the daytime and wearing generally far too few clothes. What if she never heard the familiar sound of his key in the lock ever again? If his clothes just hung, limp in the wardrobe, and the scent of him faded altogether from the pillow? It was why she was here, wasn’t it? It was why she was in this unfamiliar place. She would do everything she could to bring about his safe return. She would do anything.
She sipped coffee. She looked along the still-handsome avenue she sat in, trying to imagine Harry Spalding here. He had said he was looking forward to shopping on Lord Street. She imagined him rigged out in a summer suit and hat. It would not be seersucker and straw boater for him, though. He was Europeanised. He had drunk cocktails with Scott and sparred with Hemingway in Paris. Maybe he had been granted an audience with Gertrude Stein or the scholar madman Ezra Pound. Certainly he had been on nodding terms with the dark magician, Aleister Crowley. No; it would not have been straw and seersucker for him. It would have been slubbed silk and a pale fedora and a malacca cane to twirl in his louche search along Lord Street’s glittering windows for a diamond tiepin or an engraved silver case for his cigarettes. She could imagine him fairly well, pretty vividly. There was no absence of detail. But when she saw him walk, he did not stroll. Instead Harry Spalding moved with the lope of a predator along the pavement.
The following morning, because it was all she knew to do, Suzanne went back to the library. Her Birkdale hotel room had been comfortable enough. She had thought over breakfast about exploring the locality. It looked encouragingly unchanged. She had Jane’s old address. But she knew that she would not knock on the door and discover Jane’s daughter there, cogent at eighty and happy to reminisce. Jane Boyte had died in 1971. There had been no descendents. The internet and the fashion for the subject on television made genealogy a very easy subject to research. She had researched the descendants of a northern comic from this very region for just such a programme herself two years earlier. She was familiar from that study with the old Southport surnames. The salient facts had taken Suzanne fifteen minutes to discover. Jane’s life ended in a cul-de-sac. She had encountered in her life a great man in Michael Collins and a bad one by the name of Harry Spalding. How well she had known either of them remained to be established. But her own life seemed to have ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Such was the lot of most people. Glamour was not a quality that sustained itself, unless you were Marlene Dietrich. Unless you were Pablo Picasso.