‘I don’t know. She just – I don’t know – I wasn’t exactly convinced.’
‘But, sweetie, you can’t make a person say they lived here if they didn’t.’
‘I don’t mean that. I just mean – what if she’s the right one but she just couldn’t be bothered, didn’t want to talk to me, just didn’t want to play?’
He leans in the doorway and folds his arms and thinks about this. ‘Personally I think it’s very unlikely. But anyway, even if you were right, what on earth could you do about it?’
I tip back in my chair. ‘Offer them money?’
‘Oh yeah? And then everyone you phoned would be rushing to agree that they’d lived here.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘You know, I keep on thinking about that man Leon in Jake’s room,’ Raph says a week or so after his visit.
‘And?’
‘I can’t get him out of my head. I even see the wallpaper in my mind.’
I smile. ‘Is this because you’d like some Spurs wallpaper yourself?’
Straightaway he shoots me an injured look. ‘No, it’s not that – except I would like some actually – it’s just, um, I don’t know what it is.’
‘You’d rather you didn’t know about him?’
‘Kind of, yes. It’s like he won’t go away now. Even though I liked him a lot.’
I wonder whether to feel bad about this. I know what I’ve done. In some small way, by bringing the grown-up Leon back to the house, I’ve messed with the normal order of things and created a ghost: for my own kids anyway. The grown-up Leon may have been and gone, popping in for a beer and a chat – but the ghost of the child Leon is firmly back here now, sitting up under his duvet, kicking a ball around the garden, haunting us, reminding us. That room is one that Raph’s taken for granted as his, as ours, since his earliest days, his babyhood. Have I done something terrible?
And is this just the beginning? Is the same thing going to happen with other – maybe less friendly or benign – people from the house? It’s true that we stop ourselves thinking about the ones who’ve gone before. We have to, otherwise how would we ever be able to make our own lives fit those spaces? How would you sleep, cough, be ill, or even (or maybe especially?) make a baby in a room where you could feel all those other people down the years doing it, being it, making it?
‘My only worry about if you let me get Spurs wallpaper,’ says Raph, warming to the much more important subject now, ‘is, I mean, can I trust myself? What if I suddenly switch teams again?’
A Liberal Democrat Councillor has suddenly resigned so there’s a by-election down the road in Stockwell Ward. It matters deeply to the local Labour Party, desperate to regain control in Lambeth. Jake has been sent out to deliver leaflets and Jonathan is sitting in the kitchen, phone canvassing, working through each name on the electoral register.
‘It may be a silly question,’ he says, feet on table and phone to ear, as I come in, ‘but I just thought of something. You have checked the electoral registers, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know. What do you mean?’
‘Your big list of names of people who lived here, where did you get it from, originally I mean?’
‘It’s from Kelly’s.’
‘And what’s Kelly’s?’
‘It’s a kind of old directory of the area, like a telephone directory, I suppose.’
‘But you should definitely check the electoral registers too. It might be more accurate for one thing.’
‘I think Kelly’s is pretty accurate.’
‘OK, but you’d get middle names and so on.’
‘Do I really need middle names?’
‘I think you need every single bit of help you can possibly get, don’t you?’
I’m not sure he’s right. I’m not sure the electoral registers will tell me anything that isn’t in Kelly’s – and anyway I’ve no reason to suppose Kelly’s isn’t perfectly accurate.
Feeling slightly annoyed at the way he always has to know better, but also knowing that I can’t possibly afford to miss a single trick, I go to the London Metropolitan Archives – conveniently just round the corner from the Family Records Centre – which is where you can look at old electoral registers.
But each year’s register has to be ordered separately and you can only order five documents each twenty minutes and then wait another twenty minutes for them to be delivered up from the vaults below. I look at my watch. Ten to three. I haven’t left myself enough time. I came here straight from my exercise class and I have to rush back and collect Raph from a school trip at four.
I decide to work backwards from the Pidgeons and just see if I learn anything at all when, suddenly, there in 1980, as well as Veronica Ricketts, is Doreen Ricketts. And next to her name: ‘Allowed to vote from July 10’.
Now this is worth knowing. July 10 has to be her eighteenth birthday – which automatically gives me a birth date. Doreen is a year younger than me. I almost run back past the scrubby stretch of park with its Sport for All tennis court, past Exmouth Market and back into the Family Records Centre.
A man moves his bag out of the way and tuts because I’m apparently moving too fast. I don’t care. Straightaway I find her birth in 1961. Doreen Josephine Ricketts, daughter of Veronica Ricketts formerly Shirley. Straight to the green marriage registers and after only a few years there’s a Doreen J. Ricketts marrying a Mr Webley in August 1984. I order both certificates, pay cash, and run to the tube, making it to school just as the coach pulls into The Chase.
Back at home, I type Doreen J. Webley into the Info Disk and up she comes, an address in Carshalton, though no phone number. Next day I send her a letter, recorded delivery.
4.20 p.m. A power cut. Jonathan and I are looking up random Hinkleys on the Internet – there seems to be an Australian darts player called Peter Hinkley though he lost 3–0 to T. Hankey of England in the 2001 World Darts Championship at Frimley Green. We’re just wondering if he might be Isabella and Walter’s great-great-something, when there’s a huge electrical sigh and everything in the house switches off – pfling. Jonathan goes down to the cellar to check the fuses, but it’s not us.
It’s 6.30 p.m. and the power is still off. Jonathan cooks quiche and sweetcorn in the gas oven and serves it to the kids in the fast-descending gloom. They’re dismayed – no Playstation, no TV.
‘Oh God, what are we going to do?’ moans Jacob.
‘Gameboy,’ Raph whispers urgently to his friend Seb who came over this afternoon. ‘Phone your Dad and tell him to bring that and some batteries.’
Seb has just decided he’s staying the night. Raph gets him the phone. I sit on the kitchen sofa, pushing aside school rucksacks, old socks and a tartan blanket covered in dog hair (this even though the dog is not allowed on the sofas).
‘Dad, this is Seb. Can you bring my PJs?’
‘Can you bring my PJs?’ mocks Chloë from the floor where – on Jonathan’s orders – she’s sitting cleaning everyone’s school shoes.
‘Shush!’ says Raph.
‘And, Dad, there’s a power cut so can you bring my Gameboy as well as my cricket stuff, oh, and the Tony Hawks PS2 game just in case the power comes on –’
‘Thank you,’ Jonathan prompts