John Harvey: Trouble In Mind

Photographs of the two grandchildren, more recent than those on Mary Anderson’s wall, stood, silver-framed, on the closed lid of a small piano.

“They’re adorable,” she said, following his stare. “Perfectly sweet. And well-behaved. Which is more than you can say for the majority of children nowadays.” She pursed her lips together. “Discipline, in our society, I’m afraid, has become a dirty word.”

“How long did they stay?” Kiley asked.

“A little over a week. Long enough to help undress the tree, take down the decorations.” Christina Hadfield smiled. “Twelfth Night. Another old tradition gone begging.”

“Terry, their father, he was home on leave while they were here.”

“If you say so.”

“He didn’t make any kind of contact?”

“Certainly not.”

“No phone calls, no…”

“He knows better than to do that after what happened.”

“What did happen?”

“When Rebecca first said she was leaving him he refused to believe her. And then when he did, he became violent.”

“He hit her?”

“He threatened to. Threatened her and the children with all manner of things. She called in the police.”

“He was back in England then, when she told him?”

“My daughter is not a coward, Mr. Kiley, whatever else. Foolish, I grant you. Slow to acknowledge her mistakes.” Reaching down towards the low table beside her chair, she offered Kiley a cigarette and when he shook his head, lit one for herself, holding down the smoke before letting it drift up towards the ceiling. “What possessed her to marry that man I was always at a loss to understand, and unfortunately, circumstances proved my reservations correct. It was a mismatch from the start. And a shame it took the best part of four years in noncommissioned quarters-bad plumbing and condensation streaming down the walls-to bring her to her senses.”

“That’s why she left him? For a better class of accommodation?”

Christina Hadfield’s mouth tightened. “She left him because she wanted a better life for her children. As any mother would.”

“His children, too, surely?”

“Is that what you’re here for? To be his apologist? To plead his cause?”

“I explained when I called…”

“What you gave me to understand on the telephone was that the unfortunate man was having some kind of a breakdown. To the extent that he might do himself some harm.”

“I think it’s possible. I’d like to find him before anything like that happens.”

“In this, you’re acting for his mother?”

“Yes.”

“Poor woman.” Smoke drifted from the corners of her mouth. “After speaking to you, I telephoned Rebecca. As I suspected, she’s heard nothing from him. Certainly not recently.”

“I see.” Kiley got to his feet. Whoever had been whistling while they worked outside had fallen silent. Christina Hadfield’s gaze was unwavering. What must it be like, Kiley thought, to entertain so little doubt? He took a card from his pocket and set it on the table. “Should Terry get in touch or should your daughter hear from him… unlikely as that might be.”

No call to shake hands again at the door. She stood for a few moments, arms folded, watching him go, making good and sure he left the premises.

Was it the fact that his grandfather-his father’s father-had been an engine driver that left Kiley so susceptible to trains? The old man-that was how he had always seemed to Kiley, though he could not have been a good deal older than Kiley himself was now-had worked on the old London and Midland Railway, the LMS, and, later, the LNER. Express trains to Leeds and Newcastle, smuts forever blackening his face and hair. Kiley could see him, home at the end of a lengthy shift, standing by the range in their small kitchen, sipping Camp coffee from the saucer. Rarely speaking.

Now, Kiley, who didn’t own a car, and hired one from the local pay-as-you-go schemes when necessary, travelled by train whenever possible. A window seat in the quiet coach, a book to read, his CD Walkman turned low.

His relationship with Kate, a freelance journalist whom he had met when working security at an Iranian film festival on the South Bank and who, after some eighteen months, had cast him aside in favour of an earnest video installation artist, had left him, a sore heart and a taste for wine beyond his income aside, with a thing for reading. Some of the stuff that Kate had off-loaded on him he couldn’t handle-Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan-while others-Graham Greene, the Chandlers she’d given him as a half-assed joke about his profession, Annie Proulx-he’d taken to easily. Jim Harrison, he’d found on his own. The charity shop below his office, where he’d also discovered Hemingway-a dog-eared Penguin paperback of To Have and Have Not with the cover half torn away. Thomas McGuane.

What he was reading now was The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes , which, when he’d been scanning the shelves in the Kentish Town Oxfam, he’d first taken for yet another celebrity cookery book, but which had turned out to be an odd kind of crime novel about Mario Balzic, an ageing cop trying to hold things together in a dying industrial town in Pennsylvania. So far, more than half the book was in dialogue, a lot of which Kiley didn’t fully understand, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter.

For a few moments, he set the book aside and gazed out of the window. They were just north of Bedford, he guessed, the train gathering speed, and most of the low mist that had earlier been clinging to the hedgerows and rolling out across the sloping fields had disappeared. Off to the east, beyond a bank of threadbare trees, the sun was slowly breaking through. Turning down the Walkman a touch more, Mose Allison’s trumpet quietly essaying “Trouble in Mind,” he reopened his book and began chapter thirteen.

Nottingham station, when they arrived, was moderately busy, anonymous and slightly scruffy. The young Asian taxi driver seemed to know where Kiley wanted to go.

Travelling along London Road, he saw the floodlights of the County ground where he had once played. Had it been just the once? He thought it was. Then they were crossing the River Trent with the Forest pitch away to their left-the Brian Clough stand facing towards him-and, almost immediately, passing the high rows of white seats at one end of Trent Bridge, where, in a rare moment of recent glory, the English cricket team had sent the Australians packing.

It was a short street of smallish houses off the Melton Road, the number he was looking for at the far end on the left, a flat-fronted two-storey terraced house with only flaking paintwork to distinguish it from those on either side.

The bell didn’t seem to be working, and after a couple of tries he knocked instead. A flier for the local pizza parlour was half-in half-out of the letterbox and, pulling it clear, he bent down and peered through. Nothing moved. When he called, “Hello!” his voice echoed tinnily back. Crouching there, eyes growing accustomed to the lack of light inside, he could just make out a toy dog, left stranded, splay-legged, in the middle of the narrow hall.

“I think they’re away,” a woman’s voice said.

She was standing at the open doorway of the house alongside. Sixties, possibly older, spectacles, yellow duster in hand. The floral apron, Kiley thought, must be making a comeback.

“Most often I can hear the kiddies of a morning.” She shook her head. “Not today. Quiet as the grave.”

“You don’t know where they might have gone?”

“No idea, duck. You here for the meter or what?”

Kiley shook his head. “Friend of a friend. Just called round on the off chance, really.”