of Oral History at the Polytechnic?’
He did have a cultured voice, clipped and precise. Harriet understood Kath’s comparison with a radio announcer, but an announcer of the old, dinner-jacket days. The recognition drew her closer to the eighteen-year-old with the torn stocking, giving her the determination to press further. Harriet found her smile, although the warmth of it wasn’t reciprocated.
‘Nothing like that, either. I’m Kath Peacock’s daughter. Kath, who used to live across there. She was a friend of yours.’ And more. You must remember.
For a moment Harriet was afraid that Kath was right, and Simon Archer had forgotten her. Then, with an imperceptible movement, he let the door open an inch wider.
‘Kath’s daughter?’ There was a pause. ‘Come inside, then.’
She followed him into a dim hallway. She had an impression of cracked yellow paint, a narrow stairway with bare boards, a curtain with musty folds smelling of damp. At the end of the hallway there was a kitchen, with a small window looking over a garden at the back. In this room, Harriet thought, Kath had sat the first time, with her leg propped on a stool. She wondered what else had happened here.
Simon Archer jerked his chin at the room. There were piles of newspapers on every surface, jars with brushes stuck in them, tools and crockery intermingled, dust and a smell of mildew everywhere.
‘I won’t ask you to forgive the state of things in here. Why should I, and why should you?’
Harriet held her hand out. ‘I’m Harriet Trott.’
Simon took her hand, briefly and formally. His was bony and cold. ‘Harriet Trott,’ he repeated. ‘But you’re a grown woman.’
‘I’m nearly thirty,’ Harriet said gently. ‘It’s almost exactly thirty years since Kath left here.’
He looked at her, still unconvinced by her claim. ‘And you’re her daughter?’
‘Yes.’
Simon shook his head. ‘I forget. Kath can’t be eighteen any longer, can she? No more than I am.’
‘Next year she’ll be fifty.’
‘I suppose so.’ He moved away from her, edging around his kitchen, lifting one or two of the pieces of clutter and putting them down again elsewhere as if to establish his dominion over this much, at least. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
Harriet watched him lifting and filling the kettle, wiping two dusty cups with a matted cloth. She was studying the shape of his head and his hands, the set of his features, wondering if she might see herself. She could only see an elderly man in a green cardigan and oil-stained trousers, no more. Her neck and jaw muscles ached with the tension of her gaze.
‘Do you know why she called you Harriet?’ The abruptness of the question startled her, so that she only shook her head numbly. ‘Rather than Linda or Judy or something that was fashionable then? No?’
He put the cups into a clearing on the table, an old brown earthenware teapot beside them, with a clotted milk bottle. ‘Not very elegant. I don’t get many visitors. Well, she called you Harriet after Harriet Vane.’
She had been expecting a revelation, perhaps an admission that would connect the two of them. ‘Who is she?’
Simon laughed, a little dry noise in his chest. ‘You’re like your mother. She wasn’t a big reader either, but she did like detective stories.’
‘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
