Peter Corris - Forget Me If You Can

‘Fine.’ I pulled the chair across and sat down. The dark eyes bored into me as she drew on her cigarette again.

‘Would you like some tea?’ Mrs Saunders said.

‘Coffee,’ Rose North snapped.

‘You know you’re not allowed coffee.’

‘Perhaps just this once, Mrs Saunders,’ I said.

Rose North grinned again and Mrs Saunders sighed and bustled out of the room.

‘I’ve got a million and one things wrong with me. Don’t get old, that’s my advice to you. I don’t suppose you’ve got any cigarettes on you?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs North. I gave it up.’

‘Everyone has. Damn foolishness. Well, you wanted to talk about Lee, Mavis said. Poor boy. I never could understand why he wanted to go off and shoot black people, him and his brother.’

I looked at my notes. ‘Did Peter go to Angola as well? I’d have thought he was too young.’

The old woman smoked and said nothing for a couple of long minutes. Mavis Saunders came in with two cups of coffee on a tray. Rose North snatched at hers with a brown, wrinkled hand. A little spilled into the saucer and she deftly tipped it into the cup. Her hands didn’t shake. I took my cup and sipped it-instant and pretty weak at that. The old woman gulped hers down fast. She took a last drag on her cigarette, flicked the butt out of the holder and dropped it into the cup. She lit another and drew in the smoke. ‘Always best after a coffee, better still with a glass of wine. You know how much wine they allow me here?’

I shook my head.

‘A litre a week. Can you imagine that? Not worth having. What were you saying? My memory jumps around a bit. It’s all right for most things, it just sort of skips a beat now and then.’

‘I said I thought your son Peter would have been too young to have fought in Angola.’

She stared through the window at the waving treetops, the cigarette burning unheeded in its holder. She sat very still and seemed to be looking down a tunnel into the past. Her voice was quieter and the accent stronger. ‘Eric and May Trumble are dead, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And my Percy is long gone. He was a good man, Percy, but… I am Maltese, did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Yes. African, Arab, Greek, Roman-real mixture. Passionate people. What harm can the truth do now? Eric Trumble was Lee’s father, not Percy. I had an affair with Eric soon after Percy and I were married. What do you think of that?’

I had many questions but no idea of how to ask them. How does a married woman with a lover know which man is the father of her child? Did Eric Trumble know about his paternity? Did Lee North know? Most importantly, was the old woman romancing? She twisted in her chair away from the window and stared at me. ‘I don’t know why I told you that. There’s something about you that made me want to say it. That’s your talent is it, Mr Hardy? Making people talk?’

I mulled over what I’d learned as I drove back to the city. She had shown me a family photograph of herself with Percy, Lee, Peter and Maria. Lee and the girl resembled the mother, lean and dark. Peter followed his father who was a stocky, sandy-haired type. No doubts about paternity there. The information was just a further twist to an already screwy story and didn’t help me.

I’d felt bad about lying to Rose North about my interest in her family, but there was some comfort in my feeling that she didn’t believe me anyway. She’d been about to press me for more details on my project when a kind of cloud had passed across her face and her mind drifted away. Mrs Saunders had chosen that moment to come in and pronounce her tired and Rose hadn’t objected. Her last words to me were, ‘They were brave, brave boys, but very, very, foolish.’

Well, one of them was foolish still. The address I had for Maria North was in Stanmore, not far from the comforts of home. I’d intended to leave her until the next day but the intriguing elements in the case had got to me. I called her number on the car phone.

‘Maria North-Barr.’ The voice was a rich, slurred contralto.

I gave her the journalistic spiel, including that I’d just come from seeing her mother, and asked if it would be possible to see her.

‘I would be positively delighted, Mr Hardy, positively delighted. It’s, been ages since I’ve talked to a journalist. It’ll be just like old times. I’m just having a little drink. You do drink, I trust.’

I told her I drank and that I was only a few minutes away. I turned off Parramatta Road and drove through the leafy, gentrified streets of Stanmore. Her house was an imposing Federation job set in a big overgrown garden at the bottom of a street that ended at the railway line. The location-the tracks were within seventy metres of the house-would have sliced thirty grand off the value. A train rumbled past as I pulled up and a plane roared low overhead at the same time. Double-glazing would be an essential.

The name of the house on the brass plate by the front door was Rosalind. It should have been Neglect. I’m an expert on neglected houses, my own being an outstanding example, but this one had mine beat to a frazzle. The tiles on the porch had cracked and lifted as weeds pushed up through them. A tangle of shrubs and weeds and creepers had invaded the porch and the window ledges. Small gardens grew in the guttering, spilling out to trickle down the brick walls.

I rang the electric bell and got no result so I knocked hard on the door, dislodging flakes of paint. High heels clicked on boards and I heard a muttered curse as a step was missed. She flung the door open and looked at me with the same deep, dark eyes as her mother. ‘Mister Hardy, please do come in.’

She was tall and thin, wearing a blue silk dress that would have fitted better if she had another kilo or two of meat on her bones. Her dark hair, with a little grey in it, was swept back and held with a blue headband in a style ten years too young for her. I put her age at about forty-five. I took the hand she extended-the free one, the other carried a glass-and shook it. ‘It’s good of you to see me like this,’ I said. I reached inside my jacket. ‘You wanted some identification.’

She waved that away and swayed slightly but regained her balance quickly. ‘Now that I’ve seen you I have no doubt whatsoever that you’re who you say you are. Not that I really care. Come in and have a drink.’

I followed her into the house, which smelled of damp and dust, through to a big tiled kitchen with French windows letting out onto a back garden more wild than the one in front. The windows were open and a train rattled by, shaking the cocktail fixings set out on an old-fashioned card table. She pointed to a pair of deckchairs with slightly torn canvas. ‘Sit you down. I was just having a martini. You’ll join me?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

She slugged back the rest of the drink she’d carried and poured two more from a crystal pitcher. Her hand shook but she managed to get the glasses two-thirds full. Then she dropped an olive in each and added more gin. ‘Gilbey’s gin keeps you thin,’ she said. ‘I believe that, I really do.’

I reached forward to take the glass, doubting her ability to get it to me. She smiled, lifted her own and steered herself into her chair. ‘Cheers.’

I drank. The vermouth bottle was on the table but it might just as well have stayed in the cupboard. The drinks were almost pure gin, diluted a bit by melted ice. Not that I minded. She took a hefty pull and extracted a cigarette from the packet on the table. It gave me a chance to study her. My original guess at her age was way off-she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but cigarettes and booze had put ten years on her. Her hands were slender and young-looking, but the fingers were heavily nicotine-stained; the flesh around her neck was firm although her chin was sagging and her fine eyes were disfigured by deep pouches and a mass of premature wrinkles.