‘Yes?’ It’s a female voice, oldish.
‘Mrs Harrison?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m so sorry to bother you, you don’t know me. I’m a writer and I’m researching a book about a house in London – my house – and I found your name on a will, as a witness, and wondered if you used to know someone called Laurie Stearn?’
‘Stearn?’ The woman sounds nonplussed and a little bit wary.
‘Yes, I know this sounds odd but it was her will and I’m trying to trace her granddaughter, Diane Askew.’
‘I don’t know anything about any wills,’ says the woman even more warily, ‘and I don’t know any Stearns, no, I’m not sure I can help you.’
It’s the wrong person or the wrong Harrison or something. Could it be a daughter?
‘But you know what,’ she says more brightly, ‘it’s really funny because my next-door neighbour has a niece called Diane Askew. I know she does. Isn’t that peculiar?’
‘But that’s her!’ I almost shout. ‘That’s who I’m trying to contact.’
‘What a coincidence,’ continues the woman blandly, ‘that she should have the same name
I want to reach down the phone and hug her. ‘No,’ I try to explain, desperate that she shouldn’t hang up on me, ‘it’s not a coincidence at all. That’s who I’m looking for – that’s the person, that’s her!’
The woman pauses. ‘Well … Clayton is her name.’
‘Audrey Joan Clayton?’
‘Yes actually … how on earth did you know?’
‘Well, it’s complicated, but I’m looking for her too.’
‘Come to think of it,’ Mrs Harrison says, ‘I think I might have witnessed Audrey’s mother’s will a very long time ago.’
‘Laurie Stearn?’
‘It might have been Stearn. Yes, oh yes, I think so.’
The room’s suddenly hot, I’m sweating, my heart is banging crazily.
‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘I’m so sorry to be disturbing you like this, but could you possibly give me a phone number for Mrs Clayton?’
Mrs Harrison hesitates. ‘Well, she’s not in right now, so you won’t get her.’
‘Oh, but –’
‘But I know where she is.’
I wait. She’s going to say she’s out of the country or something.
‘In fact, I can see her right now,’ Mrs Harrison tells me. ‘She’s just out there in the street chatting to a neighbour. Do you want me to get her for you?’
I wait for what feels like ages but is in fact a moment or two. A sound of rustling and crunching as the neighbour comes to the phone.
‘Mrs Clayton?’
‘Ye-es?’
I say my bit again. Try to keep it simple. Explain that I’m writing a history of my house which is in Clapham and –
‘Lillieshall Road?’ asks Mrs Clayton, totally unprompted. ‘I went there!’
‘You did?’
‘Oh yes, dear. When I was a little girl, in the 1930s it would have been, quite a few times. There was an old lady who lived there.‘
‘Lucy Spawton?’
‘That’s right, I knew her.’
‘You knew Lucy Spawton?’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
‘That’s right, dear. She lived upstairs, you see, and there was this old couple called the Hinkleys –’
‘You knew the Hinkleys?’
‘Well, yes, dear, at least I only met them a few times I suppose but –’
Jake comes up the stairs, slumps on the landing carpet in stained school shirt, breathing hard, waiting to complain about Chloë. Furiously, silently, I bat him away, push the door shut with my foot, lock it. I hear him tut and slump for a moment with his weight against it, then turn and go back downstairs again.
‘This is just so wonderful,’ I tell Mrs Clayton. ‘You see you’re the very first person I’ve spoken to who actually knew these people.’
Mrs Clayton laughs delightedly. ‘Really, dear? Well, it’s nice to be able to be of some use to someone.’
I wonder how old she is. I ask her how old she was when she knew Lucy.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘Miss Spawton lived there for fifty years, she was a spinster, you see, dear. And she lived upstairs and let it out to people, I know that. And when she died, I think it was during the war, she left the house to her nephew Tom who lived somewhere nearby –’
‘Park Hill?’
‘That’s right! And when he died – not that long after Lucy, poor Tom – our Auntie Til sold it to a Mr Reggie Povah – that’s P-O-V-A-H if you’ve got a pen handy and want to write it down, dear. And Reggie Povah was related to us by marriage, and he was sold it a little on the cheap on the condition that he didn’t throw the Hinkleys out – they were old by then – but as soon as he’d got the house the horrible man put them in an old people’s home!’
‘In Hackney?’ The day before I had received their death certificates and couldn’t understand why, after thirty years spent living in our house, they had died in Hackney a year or so later.
‘Yes, well, you see, I think he did it up and let it to Americans and Canadians. Oh, it was a horrible thing he did. I don’t think the family really forgave him, you know.’
I think of those names through the forties – the Costellos, Rita Wraight, the Blaines. I explain to Mrs Clayton that I know Margaret Phyllis Askew lived here in 1947.
‘Yes, well, she was my sister, my twin in fact. She’s passed on now. And she had three children and one of them, I think Diane, probably lived there with her mother and father. Diane lives in Brighton now. Would you like to talk to her? Shall I get her to ring you?’
Downstairs, Jonathan is back from his committee and has a phone in one hand, a beer in the other. Both boys are sitting on chairs in the kitchen doing a five-minute penalty for deliberately kicking a ball in Chloë’s garden. Raph looks furiously sulky but Jake just looks resigned. Chloë is swinging on the swings, clearly relishing the sight of her brothers stuck on kitchen chairs.
‘Guess what. I’ve just spoken to someone who knew Lucy Spawton and the Hinkleys,’ I tell Jonathan.
He smiles and tells the boys the penalty’s over. They rush out into the garden.
I tell him how Diane Askew may have lived here as a child with her parents Phyllis and Peter. And I tell him about Reggie Povah and Audrey Clayton calling him A Horrible Man and saying he threw the Hinkleys out.
‘So we have a baddie?’
‘It’s a good story, isn’t it?’ I say – forgetting for a moment that this is all horribly real.
At about nine-thirty the phone rings.
‘Julie Myerson?’ says a crisp and rather focused voice. ‘This is Diane Askew.’ Diane says she’s had a very excited phone call from her aunt.
‘But I’m afraid I’m too young,’ she says quickly, as if genuinely sorry to dash my hopes. ‘I was born in