A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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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.’
‘I’m not from the Social Services, nothing like that. I just want to ask you about something that happened a long time ago.’
‘Department 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