Damn, thought Jean with a sense of annoyance that she couldn’t quite account for.
“Well, goodbye then . . . Howard,” she said, testing out the sound of his name for the first time.
“Goodbye . . . Jean.”
* * *
This week in the garden:
Harvest radishes and beets. Sow lettuce seed. Spray cabbage with salt water to keep caterpillars down. Plant out winter greens, kale, cabbages and broccoli. Hill soil around main crop potatoes. Feed berries with liquid manure. Check fruit trees for woolly aphids; paint any patches with derris.
* * *
9
Jean had always assumed Chelsea to be a fashionable district of expensive boutiques and cafés and was therefore surprised to discover among its elegant squares pockets of shabbiness and neglect not much better than slums.
Once, when she was a teenager, she had been invited to lunch by her elderly godmother who lived in a mansion flat in Cadogan Square. Given the courtesy title “Aunt Rosa,” though she was no relative but the descendant of a dynasty of Belgian industrialists, she had taken the young Jean by taxi to lunch at the Anglo-Belgian Club in Knightsbridge. They had vichyssoise and rabbit fricassée—terrible, alien food that Jean had forced down with watering eyes and a bulging throat, all the while conscious that this was a huge treat, and of the envy of Dorrie, who had not been included. Not long after this Rosa had died of an aggressive type of cancer and that was the end of fine dining and rides in taxis.
It was possibly the memory of this outing that had informed her decision, now regretted, to dress smartly in her gray wool suit with the fur collar and court shoes. It had not seemed inappropriate in Sloane Square, where she had ducked into Peter Jones to buy a new nightgown for her mother and some florentines, but looked decidedly out of place in Luna Street.
On the corner an abandoned and crippled Ford Popular, sunk onto four punctured tires, its windows smashed, was being used as a drum kit by three shirtless boys wielding pieces of metal tubing. Farther along a soccer game was in progress in the empty road, a wire-haired terrier yapping and chasing after the ball and dancing around the children’s legs. Jean was half inclined to ask why none of them were at school on a Thursday afternoon, but they were a feral-looking bunch, quite likely to swear at her for interfering, and she felt at a disadvantage in her Sunday best.
She had assumed that Martha Campkin was a respectable, affluent Chelsea-dweller, in the mold of Aunt Rosa, but the tall, soot-streaked villa in Luna Street, where she occupied the ground floor, seemed to tell quite another story. As Jean hesitated on the pavement, checking the address in her pocket diary, a shape moved in the basement shadows and a rat slunk out from behind an overflowing metal dustbin. It seemed to be in no great fear or hurry—swaggering rather, Jean thought as she scuttled, mouse-like herself, up the steps to the front door and rang the bell.
Having learned from Alice Halfyard the useful fact that Martha’s father was a vicar, it had taken no more than a minute to find his entry in Crockford’s: Campkin, William Sefton, St. John’s Rectory, Chatham, b.1903; Keb. Coll. Oxf.; BA, MA Wells Th. Coll.
She had telephoned the rectory on a Sunday afternoon at a time she judged to be safely between the end of lunch and evensong. The voice that answered was soft and tentative, not one that could be imagined carrying from the pulpit, and Jean was surprised when the speaker identified himself as Reverend Campkin. In response to her request for Martha’s whereabouts he said with some apology that he was no longer in contact with his daughter, which seemed an astonishing admission for a clergyman.
“I’m afraid I only have an old address for her, but someone there may be aware of her more recent movements. We, unfortunately, are not. She’s not in any trouble, I hope?”
Jean was momentarily thrown by this. “Oh no,” she said. “Well, not as far as I know. I’m just doing some research into residents of St. Cecilia’s Nursing Home after the war.”
“Oh, I see. Well, Martha was certainly there. Perhaps you’ll remember us to her if you find her. Her mother is not in the best of health.”
Having agreed to this bizarre commission from a complete stranger, she noted down Martha’s last known number in Forest Hill.
It had taken her precisely two further calls to track Martha down to her current habitat in Luna Street. The chain of addresses was remarkably short, causing Jean to wonder what, if any, effort her father had made to find her, and what could have caused their estrangement.
When at last she found herself speaking to Martha, whose confident, cultured voice was perhaps another factor in her decision to overdress for the occasion, she didn’t mention Gretchen but stuck to her story of interest in St. Cecilia’s. It was still true, but not the whole truth.