dreamily, ‘You just made me remember it.’
Of course. Beginnings and endings, one separation and another coming together.
Harriet picked up the tea-tray from between their chairs and walked away down the garden, in through the patio doors.
She was going to look for her father. And when she had found him, from that point she could start again.
The town had long ago been consumed by the city.
In the local train, looking out, Harriet imagined that in her mother’s childhood there might have been a green ribbon of woods and fields separating the last housing estate from the first filling station. Now there was no dividing line, of trees or anything else, and the backdrop of houses and shops and small factories flowed seamlessly past her.
At the station, she bought a local street map from the bookstall and sat on a bench to study it. The other passengers from the train passed her and crowded out through the ticket barrier. When Harriet looked up the train had pulled out and the platform was deserted. At once, she was aware of her isolation in an unfamiliar place. The place names on the train indicator above her head meant nothing to her, and she was ignorant of the streets that led away from the station entrance.
There was no sense of a homecoming. If she had arrived expecting anything of the kind, Harriet reflected, then she was being sentimental. But still she had felt herself irresistibly drawn here, and there had been complicated arrangements to make before she could allow herself the time off from her business. The urban anonymity she had glimpsed from the train was less than welcoming, and she allowed herself the irrationality of a moment’s disappointment. Then she stood up, closing the street map but keeping her finger in place to mark the right page, and briskly walked the length of the platform. Her heels clicked very loudly, as if to announce her arrival.
The ticket collector had abandoned his booth, and so Harriet passed through the barrier without even cursory official acknowledgement of her arrival. There were two dark-red buses waiting beside a graffiti-sprayed shelter, but neither of the destination boards offered the area she was heading for. There was also a taxi at the rank, and the driver eyed her hopefully. Harriet hesitated, and then passed him by. She didn’t want to arrive at the house on the corner by taxi, proclaiming her lack of familiarity to whoever might now live in Simon Archer’s house. If the house was even still there, she reminded herself. Her mother’s home town had changed in thirty years.
Harriet bent her head over the map once more, then hitched her bag over her shoulder and began to walk.
The scale of the map was deceptive. She walked a long way, more than a mile, and her shoes began to rub. It was a long time since she had drunk a cup of coffee on the InterCity train from Euston, and she thought of going into a pub for a drink and a sandwich. But she knew that sitting alone in a bar could only heighten her sense of displacement, and she walked on instead.
The road was busy with a constant stream of heavy traffic that left a pall of grime in the air, and over the houses and shopfronts. The shops that she passed were small, with meagre and faded displays behind the dirty glass, and the houses looked cheerless and hardly inhabited.
Harriet was disconcerted by the anonymity of the streets, and by their barrenness. There was nothing to tell her, You are here, a thin thread links you to us, Sam’s Superette and Madge’s Wool Shop and S. Walsh, Turf Accountants. The disappointment that she had felt on the station swelled, and to counteract it Harriet told herself that she hadn’t come looking for a place, only for the people it had once sheltered. As she plodded on, Kath’s astonishment at her pilgrimage seemed justifiable. Even Harriet found it hard to believe that she would discover her father in this grey, ugly and exhausted place.
To stifle the thought, she resumed her observation. The one place this could not be, she thought, of all defeated urban wildernesseses, was London. Even in its parts that were sadder than this, London had an unmistakeable spiny vitality. There was no liveliness here. Harriet felt a wave of affection for London, like the surprising warmth that had overtaken her on the crowded tube ride to Sunderland Avenue. There was home, after all, and there was everywhere else. Had Kath felt that, once, about these streets? Presumably not, Harriet decided. She had left and never came back.
The responsibility – was it responsibility, or simply need? – had devolved upon herself.
A dark red bus trundled past her, the board on the back bearing the same destination as the one she had rejected outside the station. Harriet quickened her pace, but the stop was in the distance and even as she half-ran it slowed, dropped a single passenger and gathered speed again. She stopped to consult her map for the last time, and saw that her goal was only a handful of streets away. She turned a corner, and then another, away from the main road.
There were houses here instead of shops. This was where Kath had lived, ridden home on her bicycle to save the bus fare. Harriet’s senses were all primed, ready for the impressions to crowd in on her, but now that she was here there was nothing to feel. The rows of houses were neither inviting nor as seedy as the ones that lined the main road. They were simply ordinary and insignificant.
Almost too quickly, she found herself at the right turning. She checked the street name and looked across at her grandparents’ house. It was the same as all the others, the windows masked with net curtains, a patch of garden separating the front door from the pavement. Harriet turned away from it to look at the house opposite. As Kath had described, it faced in a different direction, presenting a high, blind wall of reddish brick directly to the street.
Very slowly, she crossed the road and walked round in the shelter of the wall. She came to a dusty hedge, too high to see over, enclosing the front garden of the house. When she found the gate she had to push past scratchy branches to reach the path and the front door. As she looked for a bell to press she discovered that she was breathless, almost gasping. There was no bell-push. She pressed the flap of the letterbox and it snapped back on her fingers. The sound generated no answering echo within the house, and the windows remained sightless. Harriet knocked, hard, with bare knuckles.
Then she heard someone coming. She rehearsed her lines. A friendly smile, I’m looking for a man who used to live in this house. A long time ago, I’m afraid. How many years have you …
The door opened.
Harriet’s smile never materialised. She had tried to envisage all the alternatives that might confront her, the Bengali housewife with no English, the surly night-shift worker, the transitory bedsit dweller – absurdly, she had made no provision for facing Simon Archer himself.
The man who opened the door was in his late sixties, stooped but still tall, with strands of thin, colourless hair brushed back from a high forehead.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Archer.’
The man regarded her. Harriet felt half deafened by the blood in her ears, pounding like surf. I’m looking for my father. The enormity of what she was doing threatened her, made her wish herself somewhere else.
‘I am Mr Archer.’
‘Did you … were you living here thirty years ago?’
He didn’t like questions, Harriet saw that at once.
‘What relevance can that possibly have? Are you from the Social Services? I don’t want Meals on Wheels, or large-print books.’
