One wall in the sitting-room was lined with bookcases, and the newest, most obviously luxurious object in the flat was a big stereophonic radiogram standing behind the door. No television. No pictures on the dull coffee walls. Not a man of visual pleasures. Beside a large battered arm-chair, handy to perpetual reach, stood a wooden crate of bottled beer.
Wandering round his flat I realised what a fearful comment it was on myself that I had never been there before. This big tolerant dishonest man I would have counted my only real friend, yet I’d never seen where he lived. Never been asked; never thought of asking him to my own home. Even where I had wanted friendship, I hadn’t known how to try. I felt as cold inside as Simon’s flat; as uninhabited. Gabriella seemed very far away.
I picked up the heap of papers inside the front door and carried them into the sitting-room. Sorted into piles, they consisted of sixteen dailies, three Sundays, three Horse and Hounds, three Sporting Life weeklies and one Stud and Stable. Several letters in brown unstuck envelopes looked unpromising, and with very little hesitation I opened all the rest. There were none from France, and none from the accomplice cousin. The only one of any help was written in spiky black hand on dark blue paper. It began ‘Dear Simon,’ thanked him for a birthday present, and was signed ‘your loving aunt Edna.’ The handwritten address at the top said 3 Gordon Cottages, East Road, Potter’s Green, Berks., and there was no telephone number.
There was no desk as such in his flat. He kept his bills and papers clipped into labelled categories in the top drawer of a scratched chest in his bedroom, but if his cousin’s name and address was among them, I couldn’t recognise them. Alongside the papers lay a Horse and Hound rolled tightly into a tube and bound with wide brown sticky paper, ready to be posted. I picked it up and turned it round in my hands. It bore no address. The thick layers of brown sticky paper were tough, and even though I was careful with my penknife it looked as though a tiger had been chewing it when I finally hacked my way through. The magazine unrolled reluctantly, and I picked it up and shook it. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until one looked at it page by page that the money showed, five pound notes stuck on with sellotape. They were used notes, not new, and there were sixty of them. I rolled the Horse and Hound up again and laid it back in the drawer, seeing a vivid mental picture, as I picked up the brown pieces of gummed strips and put them in the wastebasket, of Simon listening to his radiogram and sticking his money into the journals, night after night, an endless job, working for his old age.
Potter’s Green turned out to be a large village spreading out into tentacles of development around the edges. East Road was a new one, and Gordon Cottages proved to be one of several identical strips of council-built bungalows for old people. Number three like all the rest still looked clean and fresh, with nothing growing yet in the bathmat sized flower bed under the front window. There was bright yellow paint clashing with pale pink curtains and a bottle of milk standing on the concrete doorstep.
I rang the bell. The pink curtains twitched, and I turned my head to see myself being inspected by a pair of mournful, faded eyes set in a large pale face. She flapped a hand at me in a dismissing movement, shooing me away, so I put my finger on the bell and rang again.
I heard her come round to the other side of the door.
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything.’
‘I’m not selling,’ I said through the letter-box. ‘I’m a friend of Simon’s, your nephew Simon Searle.’
‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’
‘Henry Grey... I work with Simon at Yardman’s. Could I please talk to you inside, it’s very difficult like this, and your neighbours will wonder what’s going on.’ There were in truth several heads at the front windows already, and it had its effect. She opened the door and beckoned me in.
The tiny house was crammed with the furniture she must have brought with her from a much larger place, and every available surface was covered with useless mass-produced ornaments. The nearest to me as I stood just inside the doorway was a black box decorated with ‘A present from Brighton’ in shells. And next to that a china donkey bore panniers of dried everlasting flowers. Pictures of all sorts crowded the walls, interspersed by several proverbs done in poker-work on wood. ‘Waste not, Want not’ caught my eye, and further round there was ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of you’; an improvement on the original.
Simon’s stout aunt had creaking corsets and wheezing breath and smelled of mentholated cough pastilles. ‘Simon isn’t here, you know. He lives in London, not here.’
‘I know, yes.’ Hesitatingly, I told her about Simon going away and not coming back. ‘I wondered,’ I finished, ‘if by any chance he has written to you. Sent you a picture postcard. That sort of thing.’
‘He will do. He’s sure to.’ She nodded several times. ‘He always does, and brings me a little souvenir when he’s been away. Very considerate is Simon.’
‘But you haven’t had a postcard yet.’
‘Not yet. Soon, I expect.’
‘If you do, would you write to me and let me know? You see, he hasn’t said when he’ll be back, and Mr Yardman is advertising for someone to fill his job.’
‘Oh, dear.’ She was troubled. ‘I hope nothing has happened to him.’
‘I don’t expect so; but if you hear from him, you will let us know?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. Dear oh dear, I wonder what he is up to.’
Her choice of phrase reminded me of what in fact he was up to, and I asked her if she knew Simon’s cousin’s name and address. Unhesitatingly she reeled it off. ‘He’s my poor dead sister’s son,’ she said. ‘But a surly man. I don’t get on with him at all. Not easy, like Simon, now. Simon stayed with me a lot when he was little, when I kept the village shop. He never forgets my birthday, and always brings me nice little mementoes like these.’ She looked proudly round her overflowing possessions. ‘Simon’s very kind. I’ve only my old age pension, you know, and a little bit put by, and Simon’s the only one who bothers with me much. Oh I’ve got my two daughters, of course, but one’s married in Canada and the other’s got enough troubles of her own. Simon’s given me a hundred pounds for my birthday every year for the last three years; what do you think of that?’
‘Absolutely splendid.’ A hundred pounds of tax payers’ money. Robin Hood stuff. Oh well.
‘You’ll let me know, then,’ I said, turning to go. She nodded, creaking as she moved round me to open the street door. Facing me in the little hall hung more time-worn poker work. ‘See a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. See a pin and let it lie, you will want before you die.’ So there, I thought, smiling to myself, was the origin of Simon’s pin tidying habit, a proverb stretching back to childhood. He didn’t intend to want before he died.
The accomplice cousin farmed in Essex, reasonably handy for Cambridge airport, but a long haul for Gatwick. It was evident at once, however, that I could expect no easy help from him.