The nurses bring a cup of tea, touch them on the shoulder, say very little except ‘Sorry’ – then leave them to hold onto him a little while longer. When the moment comes to let go, they just do it, they find they can do it – they help each other.
There’s a funeral at Streatham Crematorium. A wavy blue August day. Mr Whippy vans tinkling in the streets. Just John, Julia, Leon, Lucy, and this tiny tiny coffin. It feels odd and wrong and terrible. It’s far too soon after the wedding to be gathering again, around something barely bigger than a shoe box.
They ask politely if they can have the ashes and the man says he’s sorry but, frankly, there won’t be any: they just get blown up the chimney. He apologizes for his bluntness, but John and Julia agree later that there’s something reassuring about this. The idea that what’s left of their baby boy is just flying up and away into the sky. They can live with that. It’s OK.
People are good. A few days before the funeral, Ronnie Lane, bass player from the Small Faces and an old friend of John’s, sits there in the kitchen at Lillieshall Road with his scuffed DMs on a chair and rolls a joint and says something that John will always hold onto.
‘The thing is, mate,’ he says, ‘when you see a poor dead baby bird lying on the street, it’s kind of reassuring to look up because there are always more eggs up there in the nest.’
The idea stays in John’s head. He wonders about it – wonders why he can handle the idea, why it at least doesn’t make him feel any worse. It’s not that it unwrites the death – how the hell can you ever do that? – but it’s that thing of looking up.
Yes, he likes that. If you don’t believe in God or an afterlife, and he certainly doesn’t, then isn’t that all you can do, look up? Once you’ve held your own small child in your arms and felt his tiny volume of blood stop, then isn’t that all that’s left? You can still raise your head. You can still look up.
He asks Ron if they can say that at the funeral, the bit about the baby bird, and Ron nods and yawns, leans back, shuts his eyes, and says, ‘Of course, mate, of course.’ Years later, John reminds him of it – of that great and touching thing he said and how very comforting they found it, especially at the funeral – and Ron looks blank. Did he really say that? But he’s not well himself by then. A few years later he too is dead, of multiple sclerosis. He’s had it for ages.
Meanwhile Frances Caiman, next door at Number 36, is a great help too. She’s a consultant radiologist, married to a GP and mother of Tom and Barney, two small, loud boys – a warm, strong, upbeat woman.
‘What you’ve got to bear in mind,’ she tells them in her down-to-earth voice, ‘is you get all these stories about how a miracle 2 lb baby survives … but you hardly ever get any stories eighteen years later saying “Miracle baby gets three A levels and goes to Oxford”.’
The baby would never have got to university. The baby blew away in the wind. They call the baby who blew away Jamie. Jamie Jess.
John and Julia support each other, dig the garden, plant a yellow climbing rose in his memory. By next summer it will be halfway up the metal arch, a cluster of tight-curled lemony sunshine buds. John will feed it with manure, spray it for blackfly. And half a decade after that, it will be a full-blown mature rose and another young pregnant woman, who has just fallen in love with the house, will stand in the garden and breathe in its scent and take its existence entirely for granted in a way that only the still childless can.
Meanwhile the magnolia that they planted blossoms for the first time – white waxy blooms poised like birds on the edge of flight. A year later, their daughter Collette is born, followed a couple of years after that by their son Barney.
‘Here they are.’ John shows me a colour snap of a small girl and boy running at the bottom of our garden. ‘And this one’s Collette’ – a red-haired child in a sticky-out dress stands on the terrace outside my study and squints into the sun. I recognize her as the lanky auburn girl in jeans who skulked in the kitchen when I first arrived today in Kent.
John tells me that at first he used that room – the small room at the top of the first flight of stairs – as a bathroom because it already had plumbing. And he used the larger room next to the master bedroom as a study. But then he found he hated working in the larger room – he could never settle in it for some reason – so he switched and worked in that smaller room and converted the big one into a bathroom.
I tell him that little room has been my study on and off for ages and I too like its smallness, its view over the garden, the evening sunshine that floods in. Sometimes I take a cushion and a glass of wine and camp down on the terrace outside to read. Especially in the evenings when the house is empty of kids, dog, man. If you get down low enough, all you can see is the sky, the tops of the trees, the birds going to bed.
I ask John about his older daughter Lucy. I realize I know which Leon’s room was but not hers.
‘Was she in the other room at the top?’ I ask him. ‘The one next to Leon’s? Because that’s our daughter Chloë’s room now.’
‘Yes,’ he says, and starts telling me why he eventually left the area – that he just felt it changing. That Lucy and Leon used to be able to walk to school – the primary school on Wix’s Lane – or else go up to the Common with their bikes without worrying. But the gap between the rich and the poor seemed to be growing and he was uncomfortable with it.
‘There were more BMWs in the street,’ he says, ‘and house prices were becoming unreal.’
He gathers all the photos off the table and tells me Julia says it’s fine for me to borrow them.
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s fine. There’s lots of the house and garden in there.’
‘Is Jonathan a photographer?’ he asks me as he walks me out to my car.
I tell him no, he’s a lot of other things though: writer and director, even a local Labour Councillor now.
He looks puzzled. ‘Oh. Only I could have sworn I saw him taking pictures at a party a little while after you bought the house. And I was feeling so guilty about the price you paid that I avoided him.’
I laugh.
‘We didn’t think we paid too much,’ I say.
‘Oh, didn’t you? Oh good.’
We say a warm goodbye and I drive off down the lane in the Saturday March sunshine, brambles snapping at my windscreen. Now I want to hear Leon’s story. And Lucy’s.
Back home in the little room that was once John Pidgeon’s study and is now mine, I open my notebooks.
So many names, so many families to discover and unearth. Some of these people must surely still be alive – Ricketts and Kyle and Sherrif from the late seventies, perhaps? And the Reynolds and McNishes and Duncans from the sixties? Maybe even the Bartolos and Costellos and Blaines from the fifties. And I realize that my list includes only adults – how many children are lurking under those grown-up-only lists?
And then as I go further back, I’m definitely not going to be looking for ex-residents but descendants: children and grandchildren of the Askews and Hinkleys and Spawtons and Haywards. Maybe I’m tired but the task suddenly seems impossibly daunting. Where do you start? With one name or several? With a year