A Stranger in the Family (6 page)

‘Home sweet home,’ said Ivor. ‘Maria will have coffee on the make. It’s her time for it.’

And she did. She was dressed informally but in the sort of blouse and skirt that said they didn’t come from a mass-market chain. She kissed Kit, sat him down in a chair that embraced and welcomed him, and put before him a plate of cake and biscuits.

‘Let’s not talk about garages and shops,’ she said. ‘I get enough of that, particularly as I act as relief or deputy manager in situations of emergency. Tell me about you. What’s happened since we met?’

So he told them about the slight fluctuations in his relationship with his birth mother, his visit to the police, his talk with Micky, and at last the visit to the nursing home and his birth father.

‘So how was Dad?’ asked Maria. ‘Mad as a meat axe?’

‘Respect the old,’ said Ivor. ‘I have a vested interest.’

‘In any case, he isn’t – or wasn’t on the day I met him – mad, so far as I could see,’ said Kit. ‘But definitely odd. Playful, sadistic, wanting to gain and maintain a position of superiority, of his being in charge. Interest in me there was, even as he denied knowing me or knowing of me, but
concern for me in any human way there certainly wasn’t.’

‘He doesn’t have a reputation for warmth and concern,’ said Ivor.

‘I think I could have guessed that from Micky’s account of how he dropped contact with his children. Apparently as soon as he decided they weren’t all that bright – sorry Maria, I was thinking of the boys – and didn’t add anything to his image, he just forgot about them.’

‘Yes, he did,’ his sister said. ‘It didn’t affect me that much but Micky was very hurt. As a teenager I would naturally have gone to Mum with my problems, but the boys had to do likewise because there was no adult male around any longer. If they’d rung to say they wanted to talk to him they’d have been given an appointment time, same as anyone else. If he didn’t charge them it was because it would get around and he would be the subject of ridicule. He likes sarcasm and ridicule when he directs it at others, but he hates it when others direct it at him.’

‘Sarcasm and ridicule, though, were very effective in his job,’ said Ivor. ‘The less human feeling he had about a case, the more effective his use of sarcasm and ridicule was.’

‘I’ve had two conflicting views of him as a lawyer,’ said Kit. ‘One was of him as essentially
a Leeds man, doing boring, routine solicitors’ jobs – wills, family disputes, divorce settlements. The other is of him frequently away on lucrative legal business. He seems to have had two distinct careers.’

‘That’s right. He did,’ said Ivor.

‘How do you know about him?’ Kit asked. ‘From Maria?’

Maria shook her head.

‘Not from me. We kids were completely in the dark. Suited us. He was out of our lives.’

Ivor sat for a few moments in thought.

‘I think I’ve always known
of
him – known his name. I only got to know what he did for the really lucrative part of his profession at the time I began going with Maria. People started coming up to me and filling me in with the gossip.’

‘Why? To warn you off her?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think they meant well by me, felt I ought to know what the gossip said so I would know what I was getting into. It was, I thought, nothing very dreadful.’

‘Who were the people? What real knowledge of him did they have?’

Ivor Battersby shifted in his seat.

‘If you’re in the used-car business you get to know some pretty dodgy individuals – without, of course, being dodgy yourself necessarily, and I’m not.’

‘Of course you’re not,’ said Kit grinning.

‘Many of the salesmen are petty crooks wanting to go straight – after a jail sentence, for example, or after a lucky heist that’s given them the wherewithal to quit a way of life that’s risky and not all that profitable. So I learnt that what Frank Novello had built up over the years was a close rapport with the world of gang crime.’

Kit thought for a bit.

‘What does that mean? That he was good at defending them when they were on trial? Everyone should have a good defence lawyer, and there’s no shame at being good at getting a client off.’

‘No … o … o. He was good at defending them, good at finding loopholes, ambiguities in laws and Acts of Parliament. But that’s not all of it, or even half. First of all, he became very close to the gang leaders in Manchester, especially as a negotiator in territorial disputes, in disputes about the various kinds of criminal practices, and sometimes in purely personal matters – disputes over girlfriends and so on.’

‘Go on,’ said Kit.

‘I know someone who originally encountered him in a divorce suit, his own, then in an adjudication between rival gangs who had been at loggerheads about the geographical limits of their sway. He said it was like Frank was two
different people. In the first he was caustic, wry, using ridicule and character assassination. He was a different man with the representatives of the gangs – this was in Liverpool. He was emollient, genial, the born peacemaker. My friend said you could see why he was in demand in the areas where gangs operated – London, Manchester …’

‘Glasgow?’ hazarded Kit. Ivor smiled.

‘Oh yes. Definitely Glasgow.’

‘The ice cream wars?’

‘Those are what everyone has heard about. They’re a small part of the story. There were pizza wars, wars identified by the names of the gang leaders. I didn’t want to mention Glasgow because I didn’t want to put ideas into your head – ideas that I couldn’t prove or disprove. It’s not something that interests me. And I came into Frank Novello’s story quite late. When Maria and I married he was drawing to the end of his career – both sides of it.’

‘You never talked it over with him?’

Ivor looked at him.

‘I’ve never met him. He wasn’t even at our wedding.’

‘I’m beginning to think I’m not the only child my dad doesn’t want to acknowledge,’ said Kit.

‘That’s right,’ said his sister. ‘Remember, it goes both ways. We don’t acknowledge him.
Have nothing to do with him. That suits Ivor down to the ground because a garage owner doesn’t want any connection with anyone whose activities are dicey.’

‘I’m not sure peacemaking is a dicey activity,’ said Kit.

‘Well, when gang warfare is in the equation it sure as hell involves players who aren’t on the side of law and order,’ said Ivor, getting up. ‘Come on, I’ll take you to the station. Glasgow awaits.’

‘Well, this is cosy,’ said George Farson, a neighbour from down the road, stretching out his feet and sipping as if his life depended on it. ‘But I feel a fraud. I knew your mother to gossip with in the street, but hardly more than that. Gossiped about other people, never her, or me come to that. Brought her a few old magazines when I knew she … hadn’t got long. You know, I don’t think any of us knew her really well. I don’t think she wanted people to know that much about her.’

Kit knew he was right. He looked around the family living room at the motley assembly of academics, neighbours and kindred spirits. Sniffing the atmosphere (with its mixture of pipe
smoke, defiantly indulged in, high-mindedness and sheer love and admiration), he thought he detected, too, an overlay of embarrassment – that they were almost under his roof under false pretences, though the pretences were not theirs but his. The thought made him wonder, briefly, if he had ever known his parents well. He had walked round Waverley Street and the adjoining thoroughfares in the early evening sunshine the day after his return and had noticed places where his mother sometimes visited, people he knew she respected (she could hardly confide in people she did not respect). He had then gone through her address book to find Glasgow people she seemed to be close to, and perhaps to trust. But all in all the little sherry party that resulted had amounted to no more than twelve people, only four of whom were well acquainted. Could anything possibly come of it?

Kit had bought, under advice, the best sherry he could find. That was something his mother had always insisted upon. You didn’t serve cheap plonk to your friends. You served them the best you could afford.

‘I think you may be right about my mother,’ said Kit to George, conscious that he was more relaxed about using that word about the mother who’d raised him than he was about his birth mother in Leeds. ‘But it’s probably just a matter
of temperament, isn’t it? My mother was reserved – full stop. She wasn’t willing to share personal matters with people she had a casual relationship with. It made her seem secretive, when perhaps she was not.’

‘She was renowned in the department for being … let’s call it discreet.’

The man who had joined the pair of them was one of the few that Kit knew fairly well. He was Professor Purbright, the head of the Fine Arts Department at Stevenson University – his mother’s ex-boss, and by and large a respected one. He was clutching an unlit pipe, though whether as a political statement, or as an old man’s equivalent of Linus’s blanket, Kit was unsure.

‘She put everything she had into her academic duties, then when they were done she was off – clutching her briefcase stuffed with heavy art books, marking, the latest numbers of art periodicals. There was never any doubt that her family came first. She’d told me once – a rare moment of speaking about her private life – that if there was ever any question of a divided loyalty – say if you or Jürgen had some physical or mental problem – she would resign the lecturing hours immediately and give her all to home. “I don’t do it for the money,” she said, “only to keep my brain alive.”’

‘That sounds like Genevieve,’ said Kit. ‘And I’m sure she would have done just that. In fact, when my father was ill she contemplated resigning, but he begged her not to. She was coasting towards retirement age, and as he’d been given a death sentence he thought she’d be making a pointless sacrifice. He knew she wouldn’t be any good as a terminal nurse, and he wouldn’t be any good as a terminal patient.’

‘We knew almost as little about Jürgen as we did about you,’ said Professor Purbright.

‘He was as discreet, as unpersonal, as Genevieve,’ said Kit. ‘But I would think her colleagues were bound to be interested in the sudden arrival of a three-year-old child.’

‘Oh, they were surprised. As you say, that was natural. But as they were sensitive, academic types they held back, mostly. I do remember one time – the only time – when one of the staff tried to get something out of Genevieve. We were having a staff pub crawl after work at the end of oral exams, and we knew that you, Kit, were at a camp in the Lake District and Jürgen was away – sister ill or something. So we pressured Genevieve and for once she accepted our invitation – “half an hour” she insisted it had to be. And one of our staff members – she was thinking of adopting, was Edith Currie … you wouldn’t know her, Kit – she asked your mother
if she thought adopted children made for bigger problems.’

‘What did my mother say?’

‘She said your adoption was a bit out of the ordinary, but certainly you didn’t present any more than the usual problems. Then she must have seen another question coming up, so she said, firmly and finally: “It is a family matter. It has to be kept in the family, so we don’t talk about it.” End of quizzing. The comment struck me as rather strange, which is why I remember it.’

The professor finished his moment in the limelight with a grunt of self-satisfaction, and began jiggling his sherry glass. Kit saw a woman standing behind the drinks table grab a bottle and come over to fill the professor’s glass. Kit recognised Katie McCullogh, who had done her doctorate under Genevieve some years ago.

‘I asked you here to air your thoughts, not to take over the catering,’ he whispered in her ear. He had told all those he had telephoned that he was anxious to find out who he was, and how he had come into the world and to Glasgow. He had prayed this declaration would turn out to be an attraction rather than an off-putter, and to his delight all who had said they could come had come.

‘I’m happy to be barmaid,’ whispered Katie
back. ‘If I don’t talk I can listen, and so far I’ve heard pretty much all of the talk. It’s been very interesting.’

‘But you knew my mother better than most of the people here.’

‘Maybe. But I only knew one side of her – the academic side. We talked about Caravaggio, not about little Kit. I don’t remember her ever bringing up her personal life in conversation, and if I did it was carefully steered in another direction. I was never told anything of interest.’

They were interrupted by another man, a younger one, coming up to put in his pennyworth. He was fortyish, smart, perhaps even smarmy. At his approach Professor Purbright made an ambiguous noise and withdrew into the general throng.

‘I say, I can vouch for what has been said about your father,’ the newcomer said to Kit. ‘He was discretion itself. These days we have started to think of newspapermen, even editors, as pushy people, discharging their personalities at you and all over you if you had the right sort of name or job.’

‘That wasn’t my father at all,’ said Kit, thinking it might better describe the man who had just joined them.

‘Oh,’ said the man, a little deflated. ‘I’d thought you might have more vivid memories
of him than those of us who just met him on business or social occasions.’

‘He really wanted to bring out my personality, not to parade his in front of me.’

‘That’s exactly it! So that’s how he was with everyone, then. I saw him mostly in formal meetings, where nothing personal was called for, but I also met him at parties, receptions, that kind of thing. He didn’t like mingling at large. He’d pick on someone, ask them what they did, then launch into questions about the job, ask about any new controversy about aspects of the job, what difference a Bill being pushed through Parliament would make. I know that was his technique because he used it on me, and I listened to him doing it to others.’

‘What kind of people did he use it on?’

‘Every kind! Politicians, churchmen, actresses, left-wing agitators. He got interesting things out of the least promising of individuals. It was almost as if he was a fiction writer, eager to extract possible ideas for novels.’

‘Perhaps being deputy editor of a newspaper has some similarities to being a novelist. I don’t mean that satirically, just that they extract gold from dross, interest from dreary reality. Glasgow’s a very rich city in some ways.’

‘That’s true enough. I should know – I’m a solicitor, as perhaps you know.’ (Paul Lawrence,
then, whom Kit had asked because his mother often consulted him in the months of her illness.) ‘People think Glasgow is all slums and Burrell Collections and the ice cream wars, but it’s much richer than that.’

‘What made you think of the ice cream wars?’ Kit asked quickly.

‘Because they have the true Glasgow spirit: violence, greed, but a touch of reality as well. Starts as an argument between ice cream sellers and their various patches, before long all hell breaks loose and the Risorgimento is being fought all over again.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I suppose I mentioned the wars because I remember your father, a few years before he died, talking to someone at a conference about them. I mean, of course, about the gang warfare in general. People know by now that the ice cream wars were only a tiny section of the large picture – fights over territory, procedures, personal animosities.’

Kit stood uncertainly, sipping his sherry.

‘I can’t think, can’t imagine, what connection there could be between my father, so gentle and scrupulous in his behaviour, and the Glasgow gangs. It wasn’t a topic he talked about at home.’

‘Perhaps any connection could have been professional rather than personal,’ said Paul Lawrence, with his unendearing smirk.

‘Meaning?’

‘As a journalist he would have found the gangs good copy, and the ice cream wars were one of the things everybody knew about Glasgow without really understanding the details or the dynamics of the conflict.’

‘I don’t know … I wonder if there were ramifications in the ice cream wars that were personal to him.’

‘You maybe have been unlucky in the timing of your father’s death,’ put in Professor Purbright, who had wandered around on the outskirts of the conversation.

‘How’s that?’

‘Your father wouldn’t have talked about any personal ramifications with any of the people here, because any connection with these people was pretty frail. The connection with your mother was probably the most important one in his life, and surely she must have known. The next most important connection was no doubt you. But how could he confide something possibly troubling to a young boy? He’d want you to be eighteen at least, probably more. I’m assuming what he had to confide, if he had anything, was somehow difficult, personal, embarrassing. How old were you when Jürgen died?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘And he’d been ill in hospitals and in a hospice for some time. I think you would have been told any secrets he might have had if only he’d lived a bit longer, and been in robust health.’

‘I’m not sure my father was ever robust,’ said Kit sadly.

‘The thing everyone knows about your father was that he came to Britain with the train children – the Kindertransport,’ said Paul Lawrence. ‘That he didn’t mind people knowing.’

‘Well, there was nothing disgraceful or embarrassing about that,’ said Kit stoutly. ‘He felt that everyone concerned with it could be immensely proud of what they did. That we did talk about. He felt that so much credit was due to so many people and organisations that the best thing he could do for his adoptive country was to make his own rescue and survival as widely known as possible.’

‘That sounds just like Jürgen,’ said Purbright. But Kit turned back to Paul Lawrence.

‘This conference or meeting or whatever it was where you listened to Jürgen talking to someone about gang warfare – what was it about? What body was it that my father belonged to? I ask because I met someone in Leeds who was an expert on gang culture in the major British cities. I just wondered—’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Lawrence, crinkling his brow.
‘It was such a long time ago … I’m just trying to get a picture into my mind … a picture of where we all were. That might tell me what we were at … No. Nothing’s coming.’

‘Was it St Andrews? The theological college?’ It was Katie McCullogh, Kit’s mother’s PhD student of some years ago.

Lawrence swung round in her direction.

‘The main hall, and the committee room beside it. You’re quite right, it was there. Were you a delegate yourself?’

‘No, but I was there – helping with the refreshments. It was a conference bringing together—’

‘All the racial and religious bodies in the big cities. It was one of these “We must encourage togetherness” do’s. I always wonder whether we’ve got it right – whether friendly apartness isn’t the best solution after all.’

‘So what did this gang expert represent or talk about, then?’ asked Kit.

‘Oh, what the law can do to cut down on the beatings and the rivalry and the occasional slaughters – slaughters like that family here in Glasgow … what was their name? Oh, the Doyles.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Oh Lord, I’ve got to go. I’m at the Theatre Royal tonight – the resuscitation of Scottish Opera.’

It was a signal to all of them to depart. Kit
doubted if they all were going to Scottish Opera, but they clearly all felt they had done what little they could do to help Kit in his efforts – to do what they were not quite sure. Kit appealed to them to contact him if anything occurred to them – however trivial – and he distributed little cards he’d printed himself at Glasgow station with his mobile number on them. As they were making their farewells and voicing their good wishes Kit noticed that it was mostly the men who were going, and two of the women were holding back. He tried to speed up the departures without stinting on thanks and exhortations, and when they were all gone he turned back to the women.

‘You wanted to talk to me,’ he said. Katie McCullough nodded and introduced her friend, a stunning Scottish beauty of about her age.

‘Yes, we wanted to talk. You’ll have noticed there was a shortage of women here.’

‘I was quite aware of that,’ said Kit. ‘I looked for more to invite, but couldn’t find any among my mother’s contacts. I also noticed a shortage of Scottish accents.’

‘Pure south-east England most of them. We, the colonised, like to keep a low profile, particularly if there’s any question of breaking confidence on things overheard while doing manual jobs for the university. Alison here, Alison McDermott, was another of your
mother’s doctoral students, both of us doing late sixteenth-century Italian paintings – Caravaggio and Moroni. It brought us together – also having your mother as supervisor.’