‘You never told me about that old Mr Bale, Lyn,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘You never told me he’d had a heart attack coming round from the anaesthetic. I had to hear it from Kevin’s mum.’
‘How could I tell you when I didn’t know?’
‘Well, I’d have thought you’d know that, working next door but four or five or whatever it is. And there’s no need to colour up like that, it isn’t as if it matters.’
‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ said Lyn.
‘No, of course he isn’t dead. I’d have said if he’d been dead but Kevin’s mum said he was on the danger list.’
The conversation, in which neither Stephen nor Dadda took part, then turned upon whether ‘danger list’ was merely a figurative term or if hospitals actually maintained such ominous catalogues. Stephen wondered if Dadda also remembered what day it was. Probably, for he forgot nothing, his memory was prodigious. But it was impossible to tell what went on behind that massive, tortured brow, perpetually corrugated as if in a continual wince and recoil from life.
It was a family gathering, though one very different from what was now taking place in Tace Way, that had first alerted Stephen to the true facts of his descent.
5
Arthur and Helena Naulls had had their Golden Wedding party in November about the time of Stephen’s own twenty-first birthday. Before that he hadn’t known Helena’s wedding date. Who but a genealogist knew his grandmother’s wedding date? But he had always known his mother’s birthday and at primary school he had been allowed to make her a birthday card. He could still remember it, a picture of a house and a tree and a sun with rays like a starfish. Three weeks later she had gone off with a long-distance lorry driver.
Her birthday was 25 May and her parents had been married in November, though not perhaps the previous November. They had been married for fifty years, but was his mother forty-nine or only forty-eight? There was no one he could ask. The idea of asking Dadda! What he did was to go to Holy Trinity Church and look at the parish records where he found that his parents’ wedding date was also May — the 27th. Birth dates are not given on marriage certificates, only ages, and his mother’s was there as twenty-five, which meant she must have been born in 1926 and have been twenty-seven when he was born. Stephen was almost sure this wasn’t so, that she had been twenty-eight when he was born and thirty-four when she ran away. Perhaps there had been a muddle because her birthday and her wedding date were so close together.
He puzzled over the dates on the backs of photographs, most of which seemed to have been taken in May, and he tried to get from his aunts the precise age gap between his parents and between his mother and Uncle Stanley. Their answers were always, ‘A couple of years’ or ‘Oh, three or four years.’
The true facts came out simply and when he wasn’t even looking for them. Looking for his own birth certificate for his own marriage, he found his mother’s too — in a desk in the house in King Street. The Holy Trinity marriage entry was wrong. Brenda had been born in May 1925 and therefore conceived during the previous August when Helena was still second housemaid at Chesney Hall.
The other clarification followed swiftly from a photograph of Tace he saw in a newspaper review. It was a few weeks after his marriage and Stephen had been feeling unsure of himself, unsure of life itself. The discovery fortified him. When he looked at the picture of Tace he might have been looking into a mirror.
Of course it had to be! He had always felt he couldn’t be the descendant of Naullses. The Whalby connection was bearable, for they were good honest craftsmen, respected for their skills. But to be a Naulls, formed out of the same genes as Uncle Stanley, mouthing platitudes in the council chamber, or weedy, weak-eyed Uncle Leonard, that was intolerable. It was also false. His mother wasn’t the daughter of Arthur Naulls but born of a summertime passion between a pretty servant and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.
Tace was married, so there was naturally no question of his marrying Helena. But he hadn’t deserted her, he had arranged a suitable marriage with his under-gardener, had given the couple the lodge to live in and had had the child named after one of his sweetest heroines, Brenda Nevil of Wrenwood.
Stephen never much cared to think about sex. In the past, when his thoughts had turned to it as a young boy’s thoughts will, his body hadn’t followed his mind. All he had been able to envisage was his mother, so slight and fair, being mounted first by Dadda and then by the lorry driver. So it wasn’t the sexual aspect of Helena’s affair that interested him but its romantic side. He imagined Helena coming to some trysting place on a summer night, to the Banks of Knamber perhaps, or like Lady Irene and Alastair Thornhill, to the ghost of a road, the Reeve’s Way, as it threaded through the Vale of Allen, and Tace meeting her there in the twilight. Love children, he had read, were more beautiful, more charming and more favoured by destiny than those born in wedlock. His mother was and must still be such a one. For the loss of her he had compensated as best he could, first with the imaginary friend he called Rip, then with the moor itself, but in May he thought of her still and with a curious longing.
It wasn’t for many weeks after coming to Chesney that Peach ventured out. His favourite places to be were the chestnut leaf table and the top of the mahogany tallboy under the landing window on which he lay for hours, staring at the peaks and plateaux of the moor.
He grew large and plump and round-cheeked, but he was without kittenish ways as if his sad experience had robbed him prematurely of his youth, yet when he sat on Lyn’s lap in the evenings he gave himself up to a drowsy and contented purring. His first excursion from the house took him no farther than the garden. Next time he was off and away. When two hours had passed and he hadn’t returned, Lyn imagined him finding his way back to Bale’s and by this act leading her there in search of him. She imagined herself reunited with Nick through the cat’s agency, as lovers might be in some fairy story.
But Peach didn’t go to Bale’s or to his former home in Hilderbridge. He came back in the evening, bringing Lyn a fieldmouse. Her mother had come over to tell her Joanne had been kept in hospital with high blood pressure and threatened eclampsia. She had gone to St Ebba’s antenatal clinic and they had kept her there. When Mrs Newman saw the mouse, though it was dead, she jumped on a kitchen chair and squealed. Peach took back his gift, which he had laid at Lyn’s feet, and sat with it in his mouth, making cross twittering growls.
Stephen wrote for ‘Voice of Vangmoor’: ‘Those who declare our moorland puts up a poor showing when it comes to wildlife, should contemplate some of the offerings of my ginger tomcat: fieldmice, a shrew and even a water vole.’ Author’s licence, he told himself, though he had hesitated over the water vole. ‘Wild flowers too are to be found in abundance. Not only is the bilberry putting forth its globular pinkish-green blooms and the uva-ursi prolific with blossom this spring, but a few orchids may be spotted. I myself was lucky enough last week to see a fine sample of the Lesser Twayblade and another of the Small White Orchid, rare occurrences as far south as this and in these times. Readers of our great Vangmoor novelist, Alfred Osborn Tace (or viewers, as one must say these days!) will be familiar with the scene in Wrenwood in which Brenda Nevil hunts for specimens of this orchid for her bridal bouquet.’