Before walking over to the main entrance, I took out my video camera and filmed for about twenty seconds, panning all over the building, left and right, up and down. It was the first time I’d used the camera, but it seemed pretty easy to operate. I’m not quite sure why I did it, though: partly to calm my nerves, perhaps, and partly because I thought my father might like to see the footage the next time we met, whenever that would be. At any rate, it was hardly going to be of much use to Lindsay or Alan Guest for their promotional video. Afterwards I put the camera back in the glove compartment and locked the car.
It’s odd that when I think back to that morning, now, and remember myself walking across the expanse of asphalt in front of the tower block, it feels as though it was all happening in complete silence. And yet, obviously, there is no such thing as complete silence any more. Not in England. So there must have been the rumble of traffic from the Eastern Avenue, or the distant wail of police sirens, or the crying of a baby in a pushchair two streets away, but that’s not how I remember it. All was stillness. All was mystery.
I took the lift up to the fourth level and emerged into a dark, featureless corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and walls painted an intimidating shade of deep brown. The little windows at either end of the corridor admitted just a hint of the grey, late-morning light: two feeble glows in the distance to my left and my right, as I walked over to the doorway of my father’s flat, full of trepidation, my footsteps so light and measured that they barely made a sound. I took the keys that Mr Byrne had given me and tried to fit one of them into the lock – which in itself was quite hard to locate, in this gloom. The key didn’t seem to fit. Nor did the other two on Mr Byrne’s key ring. I tried each of them again, one after the other, but two of them didn’t fit at all, while the other one did – with a fair amount of forcing – but refused to turn.
I remembered Mrs Byrne’s comment, as we’d said goodbye yesterday evening, that she didn’t think I’d been given the right keys. I had taken no notice at the time, taking it simply to be the wittering of a confused old woman, but maybe she knew what she was talking about.
‘Shit!’ I said, out loud, and started trying the keys again. But it was no use. However hard I twisted the one key that seemed almost to fit, the lock refused to yield. After two or three minutes, there was no point in pursuing the attempt any further. I wrenched the key out of the recalcitrant lock, and threw it on the floor in frustration.
‘Shit!’ I said, again. Why was it that everything I tried to do, whenever it had anything to do with my father, always ended in disappointment and frustration? I thumped the locked door of his flat so hard that it hurt my fist and then stood in the darkness of the corridor for a few seconds, wondering where I could go from here. Surely it would be too anti-climactic just to give up, return to the car, and continue with my journey north?
Then I remembered the other thing that Mrs Byrne had mentioned: that there was another set of keys, belonging to a woman called Miss Erith who lived in the flat opposite. That had to be worth trying, surely.
I approached the door of the flat, and hesitated for a moment before ringing the bell. Supposing there was no one at home? Well, that would be the end of it, then. But no – I could hear voices, distantly, coming from inside. A man’s voice and a woman’s.
Quickly, before I had the time to tell myself that I was doing something foolish, I rang the bell. Almost immediately I regretted it, but there was nothing I could do about that now. After a couple of seconds I could already hear footsteps coming towards the door.
The door opened and I found myself looking at a small man of Pakistani origin, who seemed to be in his late sixties.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry – I think I must have called at the wrong flat.’
‘Who were you looking for?’
‘Miss Erith.’
‘No, this is right. Come on in.’
I followed him inside, down a short corridor and then into a bright but small sitting room, full of clutter. There were three free-standing mahogany bookcases, crammed with old hardback books and a few battered paperbacks, an ancient stereo system (dating from the 1970s, I would say, or maybe even the 1960s) with a whole lot of vinyl records and cassettes ranged around it (no CDs), at least a dozen pot plants, and a number of pictures on the walls, most of which even I recognized as reproductions of old masters. There were two armchairs placed opposite each other, and in one of them sat an elderly figure who I took to be Miss Erith. I guessed that she was at least ten years older than the man who had let me into the flat, although there was a liveliness in her eyes which belied her physical frailty. She was wearing brown slacks, and a navy-blue cardigan over her blouse, but the left sleeve was rolled up at the moment and, judging from the equipment on the table beside her, she was on the point of having her blood pressure taken.
When she saw me, her body gave a visible jolt and she almost jumped out of her chair in astonishment.
‘Good grief,’ she said. ‘It’s Harold!’
‘Don’t get up,’ I said, ‘I’m not Harold. My name’s Max.’
She stared at me more closely.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank God for that. I thought I was going mad for a minute. You do look like him, though.’
‘I’m his son,’ I told her.
‘His son?’ She looked me up and down, now, as if this information made it even more difficult to accept the reality of my sudden appearance – or indeed my existence. ‘Well …’ she continued, as if to herself, ‘Harold’s son. Who’d have thought it? Max, did you say your name was?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Your father isn’t with you?’
‘No.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Yes, he is. He’s very well, actually.’ With one thing and another, I seemed to have reduced her to speechlessness. To fill the silence, I said: ‘I was just passing through the area, so I thought …well, I thought it was about time someone checked up on the flat.’ Still no response. ‘I’m on my way to Scotland. To the Shetland Isles.’
Miss Erith’s companion stepped forward, at this point, and held out his hand.
‘Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Doctor Hameed.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Doctor,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘Maxwell Sim.’
‘Maxwell. The pleasure is all mine. Call me Mumtaz, please. Margaret, why don’t I make a pot of tea for your guest?’
‘Yes, of course. Of course.’ She slowly emerged from the daze into which my presence had thrown her. ‘Yes, where are my manners? Sit down, please, and have some tea. Would you like some tea?’
‘That would be lovely. But shouldn’t you finish … ?’ I gestured at the blood pressure monitor on the table.
‘Oh, we can do that afterwards. Come on, this is a special occasion.’
‘Very good,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I’ll make a pot for all of us.’
When he had disappeared on this errand, Miss Erith explained: ‘Mumtaz used to be my GP, until he retired. But he still comes and sees me, every couple of weeks, completely off his own bat. He gives me a quick MOT, and then we drive out somewhere for lunch. Nice of him, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’
‘You see, if there were more people around like him, we wouldn’t be in the state we are now.’
It wasn’t clear to me exactly what she meant by this remark, so I let it pass.
‘I haven’t seen your father,’ Miss Erith continued, ‘for more than twenty years. 1987, it was, when he left. He’d only been here a year or so. I was just getting excited about the idea of having him for a neighbour when he buggered off to Australia, without so much as a by-your-leave.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was a bit of a surprise for me, as well.’