‘Holy Trinity? Or St John the Evangelist? That’s on Clapham Road. Both have big columns.’
‘Well, I don’t know – which would it be?’
‘This is wonderful,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t say how much I appreciate your ringing.’
‘Not sure if I can be of much help,’ she says again. I tell her every word is gold dust and that I would love to talk to Bob.
‘My aunt told you,’ she says, ‘about Reggie Povah?’
I say, yes she did, and I ask whether there’s any way of finding out more about him.
She laughs.
‘Well, he died quite recently,’ she says, ‘and he was a bit of a – well, let’s just say he wasn’t too popular in our family. But his daughter Alexa lives near me in Brighton. I see her all the time. I can put you in touch with her easily.’
In a daze, I make the kids tea and burn the fishcakes. Chloë carefully picks the outside breadcrumb bit off. I try to tell them what’s happened – that today I’ve made a breakthrough. I’ve spoken to people who are related to people who actually lived in the house.
‘Great,’ says Raph, absently forking peas into his mouth. ‘More people cluttering up my room.’
An hour later, Diane rings back.
‘Well, it’s all very weird,’ she says. ‘You see I’ve spoken to Alexa and I don’t think she knows much, but when I told her I’d been speaking to you, she said she knows you and she’s actually been to the house.’
‘What?’ I try to do something with this information but it makes no sense. ‘Really? How do you mean, been to the house?’
‘Your husband is a writer and director called Jonathan Myerson?’
I sit down. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, Alexa used to be an actress and she came to your house to rehearse something, with Philip Lowrie, who played Pat Phoenix’s son in Coronation Street.’
‘My God, yes, that makes sense, years ago.’
‘So, do you see how weird that is? She’s been in your house but without having any idea that her father once owned it. Anyway she’s very intrigued about the whole thing and would love to talk to you – do you want her number?’
‘Funny,’ says Jonathan when I tell him, ‘I knew there was something odd about that name Povah. I knew I’d heard it somewhere.’
‘But what about the coincidence – of her coming here and having no idea about all of this? Isn’t it just totally amazing?’
‘It’s the kind of thing you would say means something,’ he points out, maddening in his refusal to be amazed, ‘but that I would say is just one of those coincidences.’
‘But this very house – of all the houses in Clapham? Of all the houses in just this one particular road?’
He shrugs. He hasn’t got an answer to that.
Chloë’s response is much sharper. She sits in the bath, pale, blonde, tired, turning the bar of soap round and round in her hands and then dipping it in the water to watch the suds float off.
‘Maybe,’ she says, frowning down at her wet body, ‘maybe it’s this: maybe buildings can draw people back to them. Maybe all the buildings we ever go in, our ancestors have been in before us and we just don’t know it because we never find out those things.’
She looks up to see what I make of that. I tell her I like it as a possible explanation.
A hot afternoon. I put the dog in the back of the car and go to the Westminster Archives bookshop in Queen Anne Street. I have learned the lesson of the Probate Search Room and the electoral registers: there could be a whole lot more out there, I have to know where to look, how to look.
I buy six different pamphlets about researching family and homes – genealogy, how to use the newspaper library at Colindale, researching your family history on the web.
‘Plenty of serious reading for you there, eh?’ says the man with very thin white hands who rings them up on the till.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Not that it’s any guarantee that you’ll find anything,’ he laughs.
I get home and try to read the pamphlets but don’t understand any of them, so I ask Jonathan if he can make any sense of them.
He gives me a beady look. ‘What do you mean, make sense?’ he says.
I show him the bit about newspapers on the Internet. Where does it say whether you can look at newspapers on the Internet?
‘It says it here,’ he says, ‘and you can’t.’
‘Oh.’
The phone rings in my study. I rush upstairs and it’s someone called Doreen Webley. ‘I used to be Doreen Ricketts,’ she says. ‘Veronica was my Mum. I lived in that house in 1978 for a couple of years and, well …’
She sounds as if she’s about to go on. I wait. She laughs softly.
‘I remember that house,’ she says.
I ask her if her Mum’s still in this country.
‘She passed away in May,’ she says, ‘in Canada. She had cancer.’
I tell her I’m sorry.
‘I came over from Jamaica when I was sixteen,’ she says, ‘to live with her. Or that was the idea anyway. I was born over here, you see, but I only lived here about a year as a baby before I was taken back to Jamaica. So living in Lillieshall Road when I was sixteen was really my first memory of England.’
I ask her if these memories were happy and she hesitates.
‘Ye-es. But I wasn’t there very long. My Mum sold the house and moved to Canada because she was getting married to the owner of the house, you see.’
I take a breath. ‘Alvin Reynolds?’
‘I never met him though. She married him over there in Canada but, well, the marriage didn’t work out.’
This is amazing. Weeks before, Jonathan had, jokingly, wondered whether the mysterious Veronica Ricketts was an Alvin girlfriend and I’d told him not to be silly. Alvin Reynolds was clearly married to Merciline Reynolds, as she appeared in Kelly’s, though it was true that, after a few years, Merciline disappears. I ask Doreen whether she’d be interested in coming round for a chat.
‘I’d be very interested to see the house again, yes, I’d love to do that actually.’
I ask her if she has any photos of her and her Mum from that time. ‘No, none of us together, no.’
‘Nothing?’
‘I’m afraid not, no. I have nothing of myself at all. I might have one of my Mum somewhere. I’ll have a look.’
Jonathan’s mailshots – to all the Thomas Kyles and all the Gerald Sherrifs and all the John Costellos – are not producing the desired results. In fact, they have yet to elicit a single response. Jonathan, never one to admit that maybe he has wasted his time, has decided to crank things up a gear. He spends idle afternoons ringing all those who have numbers listed alongside their addresses.
‘Hello, can I speak to Thomas Kyle, please?… Right, well, I’m sorry to bother you, this is rather a strange call, but I’m trying to trace a Thomas Kyle who once lived in Clapham in South London … No, the name Lillieshall Road doesn’t ring any bells?… Right, OK, thanks, sorry