‘Still does. The shelves at home are full of Agatha Christie.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Not really. I don’t read anything much. I work hard, I manage quite a big shop that sells fitness equipment, dancewear, things like that. In fact I own the franchise, so it’s my own business. I’m at the shop all day, and in the evenings there’s paperwork to do. There isn’t much time for anything else.’ The words came spilling out. She wanted to impress him, Harriet realised. Why else should she need to boast about her responsibilities?
‘How modern,’ Simon said. ‘To answer your question, Harriet Vane is a character in the Lord Peter Wimsey books written by Dorothy L. Sayers. I lent them to your mother, long ago, and she fell in love with Lord Peter. Her favourite was The Nine Tailors, although Harriet doesn’t appear in that one.’ There was a pause. ‘I remember her telling me that you would be either Peter or Harriet.’
Deliberately, Harriet said, ‘I never knew that. I think there are all kinds of things I don’t know about.’
Simon poured the tea. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best?’
She was certain that he was sparring with her. He must know why she had come. She took the cup that he held out and drank some of the tea. It had an oily film on the surface, with whitish flecks caught in it. Tell me, she wanted to say, but Simon headed her off.
‘What about Kath Peacock?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to hear what has happened to her. Who is Mr Trott?’
Harriet relaxed a little, some of the stiffness ebbing from her neck and head. ‘I can tell you all about Mum. She’s well. I think she’s very happy. She didn’t want me to come to look for you.’
‘I don’t know why you’ve come to look for me. Go on about your mother.’
‘She married Ken while I was still quite small. He’s an engineer, a nice man. As a hobby he likes buying houses and putting in new bathroom suites and building retaining walls and then selling the house and starting all over again with a different coloured bathroom.’
Simon raised an eyebrow and looked around him, and then their eyes met and they began to laugh. The laughter was spontaneous and easy, as if between friends. It warmed Harriet and it convinced her that, after all, she had been right to come. Simon took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘That gives me a very vivid picture. Carry on, please.’
In the beginning, Harriet just talked about Sunderland Avenue, Ken’s work, Lisa and her boyfriends and Kath in her kitchen. Simon Archer listened and drank his tea. Then, with more confidence, she went further back, to Lisa’s birth and her own furious jealousy, and beyond that to the arrival of Ken to rescue her mother and herself.
‘Not that we needed rescuing,’ Harriet said. ‘Kath and I were fine. I thought we had everything we needed, just the two of us.’
‘Yes.’
Simon’s responses were never more than a word or two. He watched Harriet closely as she talked, but his own expression didn’t change.
‘I didn’t want to share her with anyone. When Ken came, she wasn’t all mine any more. He had a car, and a house with proper plumbing and a garden and all that, but I’d rather just have had Kath to myself, like before.’
And then she told him about before, about the succession of furnished rooms, the times spent waiting for Kath to come home from work, and her unformulated but clear childish understanding that they must be everything to one another because there was no one else.
Simon’s eyes still held hers, shrewd, without any sign of distress. ‘Kath needed more,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question, the verdict of someone who knew her well. Harriet nodded, disappointed in him. She had expected more in return for her story.
Simon smiled, sensing as much. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It’s comforting to rejoin broken ends, or to have them joined for me, since I’m long past involving myself in anything of the kind.’ A small gesture indicated the chaotic kitchen, hinted at the decaying house beyond it, and told her that Simon was indeed past involvement in the common processes of life. She felt both sorry for him and angry at his withdrawal from the world. For the first time since she had arrived she saw him as himself, not illuminated by Kath or herself. As a result her need to know, father or not, released its choking grip on her a little.
She asked, ‘Why are you?’
He chose to ignore the question, but disarmed her. Talking almost to himself, he said, ‘Kath was unusual. She was alive, vibrating with life, like nothing else around.’ This time the gesture took in the extinguished town, as it must have been in the post-war years. Then and now, Harriet thought. ‘I used to love to see her, and listen to her. She lit everything up.’
‘I know. For a long time I haven’t bothered to see her as anyone but my mother. In the kitchen, cooking meals. Ordinary. Then all of a sudden I saw a young girl looking out of her face, when she told me about you. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to meet you. I came from London to find you.’
As soon as the words were out, she knew that they would have been far better left unsaid. That she had come at all was a threat all over again, to have come a long way, with a list of reasons, was too much of an intrusion.
Simon looked at an old kitchen clock, almost obscured on the mantelpiece by sheaves of yellowing bills and papers. Harriet knew that they had been sitting at the table for almost two hours. Stiffly, but deliberately, he stood up.
‘I’m glad you came. I’m pleased to hear that Kath is well, and happy. She deserved that.’ He had asked her in, and she had accepted his hospitality. His courtesy would continue, but it was clear that she couldn’t hope for anything beyond it.
He held out his hand now, and reluctantly she shook it. ‘Perhaps you’ll give her my best wishes,’ Simon added. ‘I don’t think any other greeting would be appropriate, after thirty years.’ If there was a twitch of a smile, it was gone before Harriet could be sure. ‘This way,’ Simon said. ‘I’m sorry the passage is so dark.’
There was the crumbling hallway again, the front door and then the empty street. Simon shook her hand once again, as if she was the well-meaning but unwelcome official he had first taken her for, then closed the door.
The autumn afternoon was already almost over. There were yellow lights showing in two or three of the windows opposite, and in contrast with the cosiness Simon’s house seemed morbidly chilly and dark. Angry with herself, smarting with the rejection, Harriet began to walk away.
A small boy on roller skates rattled over the uneven paving stones, wobbled, and almost fell. He grabbed at her arm to save himself.
‘Be careful,’ Harriet warned, and he gaped up at her, dirty-faced and cheerful.
‘You’ve never been in there, have you?’ He jerked his head at Simon’s gate.
‘Yes, I have. Why not?’
He whistled, pretending admiration. ‘Cos he’s mad. My sister said. You want to watch he doesn’t get you.’ Delighted with his dire warning he launched himself off again.
Harriet watched him almost collide with Kath’s lamp-post. Even in her girlhood, Kath had said, the little children tended to avoid Simon’s house. Now, a solitary old man existing in a nest of newspapers and rubbish, he was a bogeyman to frighten another generation. Sadness for him overcame Harriet’s bitterness and hungry curiosity once more, and made her want to know about him for his own sake. She looked up at the house but it was obstinately dark.
Harriet turned away without any idea where she was heading. She walked the length of her grandparents’ old street, looking through the still-open curtains at the blue eyes of television sets, tea-tables, homework. She rounded a corner, went on without the intention