‘Until tomorrow, then, Mr Owen. And don’t worry: I can see myself out.’
∗
There was a strange sense of expectancy in the air the following day, which had nothing to do with Michael’s impending journey to Yorkshire. It was January 16th, and at five o’clock that morning, the United Nations’ final deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait had expired. The allied attack on Saddam Hussein might be launched at any moment, and every time he turned on the radio or the television, Michael was half-expecting to hear that the war had begun.
Boarding a train at King’s Cross station late in the afternoon, he glimpsed some familiar faces among the other passengers: Henry Winshaw and his brother Thomas were both taking their seats in a first-class carriage, along with their young cousin Roderick Winshaw, the art dealer, and Mr Sloane himself. Michael, needless to say, was travelling second class. But the train was not busy, and he was able to spread his coat and suitcase over a pair of seats with a clear conscience, while he took out an exercise book and attempted to make notes on the most important passages from what was obviously a well-thumbed volume.
I Was ‘Celery’, published by the Peacock Press in late 1990, had turned out to be the memoir of a retired Air Intelligence Officer who had worked as a double agent for MI5 during the Second World War. Although it offered no direct information about Godfrey Winshaw’s disastrous mission, it did at least explain the meaning of Lawrence’s note: BISCUIT, CHEESE and CELERY, it appeared, had all been the codenames of double agents controlled and supervised by something called the Twenty Committee, established as a collaborative venture by the War Office, GHQ Home Forces, MI5, MI6 and others in January 1941. Might Lawrence have been a member of this committee? Very likely. Might he also have been in secret radio communication with the Germans, supplying them not only with the names and identities of these double agents, but with information about British military plans – such as the proposed bombing of munitions factories? This would be difficult to establish, fifty years after the event, but the evidence was beginning to suggest that Tabitha’s worst accusations about her brother and his wartime treachery were very close to the truth.
As the train sped on through the grey, mist-shrouded landscape, Michael found it harder and harder to concentrate on this puzzle. He laid the book down and stared vacantly out of the window. The weather had hardly changed in the last two weeks. It was on just such an afternoon, some ten days ago, that Fiona’s body had been cremated in the drab, cheerless setting of a suburban funeral parlour. The ceremony had been sparsely attended. There had been only Michael, a forgotten aunt and uncle from the South West of England, and a handful of her colleagues from work. The hymn singing was unbearably thin, and the attempt to convene at a pub afterwards had been miscalculated. Michael had only stayed a few minutes. He had gone back to his flat to pick up an overnight bag, then taken a train up to Birmingham.
His reconciliation with his mother, too, was less than he had expected it to be. They spent an awkward evening together at a local restaurant. Michael had presumed, rather naïvely, that his very reappearance would fill her with such delight as to compensate fully for all the pain he had inflicted by breaking off communications for so long. Instead, he found himself called upon to justify his conduct, which he attempted to do in a succession of halting and poorly argued speeches. In effect, he maintained, his father had died twice: the second, and more devastating death being when Michael learned the truth about his parentage. He now believed that his two or three years’ subsequent withdrawal from the world could be seen as a period of sustained mourning – a theory supported, if support were needed, by Freud’s essay on the subject, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. His mother seemed less than convinced by this appeal to scientific authority, but as the evening wore on, and she saw the sincerity of her son’s contrition, the atmosphere nevertheless began to thaw. After they had arrived home and made two cups of Horlicks, Michael felt emboldened to ask a few questions about his lost parent.
‘And did you never see him again, after that one time – the day it happened?’
‘Michael, I told you. I saw him once again, about ten years later. And so did you. I told you that already.’
‘What do you mean, I saw him? I never saw him.’
His mother took another sip of her drink and embarked upon the story.
‘It was a weekday morning, and I was in town doing some shopping. I felt like a bit of a break, so I went to Rackham’s, to get a cup of tea in the café. It was quite full, I remember, and I stood there for a while with my tray, wondering where I was going to sit. There was this gentleman sitting by himself at a table, looking very gloomy, and I was wondering whether it would be all right to join him. And then suddenly I realized that it was him. He’d grown old, he’d grown dreadfully old, but I was sure that it was him. I would have known him anywhere. So I thought about it for a minute, and then I went over to the table, and I said, “Jim?”, and he looked up, but he didn’t recognize me; and so I said, “It’s Jim, isn’t it?”, but all he said was, “I’m sorry, I think you must be mistaken.” And then I said, “It’s me, Helen,” and I could see it beginning to dawn on him who I was. I said, “You do remember, don’t you?”, and he said yes, he did, and then I sat down and we got talking.
‘He wasn’t much fun to talk to: just a shadow of the man I’d met before. He seemed very angry with himself for never having settled, for not finding someone he could build a home with and start a family. He seemed to think it was too late to do any of that now. So then when I began talking about myself, I just couldn’t help it. I had to tell him about you. I thought perhaps it might mean something to him. And of course he’d no idea. He was completely flabbergasted. He wanted to know all about you, when you were born, what you looked like, how you were doing at school, all that sort of thing. And the more I told him, the more he wanted to know; until in the end, he asked me if he could come and see you. Just the once. So I thought about it and to be honest I didn’t really like the idea, but finally I said all right, but I’ll have to ask my husband, thinking of course that he’d say no, and that would be an end to it. But you know what Ted was like, he could never deny anybody anything, and when he got home that evening I did ask him, and he said yes, he didn’t mind, he thought it was the least the poor man deserved. And so later that night, after you’d gone to bed, he came round to the house and I took him up to your bedroom and he stood and looked at you for about five minutes, until you woke up and caught sight of him and started screaming fit to bring the roof down.’
‘But that was my dream,’ said Michael. ‘That was my nightmare. I dreamed that I was staring into my own face.’
‘Well you weren’t,’ she said. ‘It was your father’s.’
For some time Michael said nothing. He was too astonished to speak – until, brokenly, he managed to ask: ‘Then what?’
‘Then nothing,’ said his mother. ‘He left and none of us ever saw him again. Or heard from him.’ About to take another sip, she hesitated. ‘Except that …’
‘Yes?’
‘He asked if he could have a photograph. I can still remember how he described you – “the only trace of myself I’ve managed to leave behind these last twenty years” – and when I heard that, I didn’t feel I could refuse him, very well. So I gave him the first one I could find. It was the one you always kept out, the one of you and Joan, writing your books together.’
Michael looked up slowly. ‘You gave him that picture? So I never lost it?’
She nodded. ‘I meant to tell you, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t think of any way to tell you.’
His capacity to absorb these revelations almost, but not quite, exhausted, Michael said: ‘When was all this? When did it happen?’
‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘it was in the spring. That I do know. And it was before your birthday, the day we took you down to Weston. You were never the same after that day. So I suppose it must have been … 1961. It must have been spring, 1961.’