The Fire Baby

A line of Lloydloom wicker chairs stood in firing-squad formation behind the smudge-free glass of the conservatory. All were empty except one. He’d rung ahead and the woman who had answered the phone said Mrs Constance Tompkins would love to see him. But she might not say much: ‘Mrs Tompkins is with us sometimes, and sometimes not. She’s happy either way.’

The rest of the residents were in a TV lounge at the rear. The heat was stifling, but try as he might Dryden could not detect the tell-tale odour of stale urine. Faintly disappointed not to have his prejudices confirmed he talked loudly to everyone he met on the assumption they were deaf. The woman who ran Fenlandia wore a dark suit and could have been a director of a City insurance company. She led Dryden to the conservatory at a military pace.

Mrs Tompkins was reading a novel with rapt concentration. The paperback cover was frayed and stained, a Penguin Classic from the sixties, lovingly re-read. She didn’t look up when they arrived and, while she might have been deaf, Dryden suspected she was just ignoring him.

‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,’ said the proprietor, touching Mrs Tompkins on the arm. ‘This is the man I mentioned, Connie. From the newspaper.’

She carried on reading pointedly until she finished a chapter. Then she folded the book and put her reading glasses away. She looked sprightlier than she had at Maggie’s funeral, but Dryden guessed she must be seventy-five, perhaps more. She looked like Queen Mary, but in colour. If there was a family resemblance with Estelle he couldn’t see it, except, perhaps, around the darting, playful eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said, and laughed. Dryden felt he’d made a misjudgement somewhere, sometime, about seventy-five-year-olds. ‘You want to know about Maggie, don’t you? I read the piece.’ She pulled a copy of The Crow from the side of the cushions she sat on. ‘It’s got your name on it.’

Dryden sat down. Outside, the sunshine was burning the grass lawn quietly to stubble. The antimacassar on the seat oozed lavender water; he suddenly felt very tired. It took an effort of will to summon up the first question. ‘Maggie died before she could tell Matty why she did what she did. I think she planned to tell him. She left some tapes – about her life. Estelle says she never explained, at the beginning at least, why she swapped the children. We know she wanted to give Matty a new life, but what was wrong with the one she could have given him herself? Matty should know – it’s what Maggie would have wanted. Do you know, Mrs Tompkins?’

She’d been looking out at the pine trees until then, but now she turned, and smiled again.

‘I’m letting go of the past now, Mr Dryden,’ she said, leaning forward and tapping his knee with her book. ‘It’s very therapeutic’

‘But you went to the funeral…’

He had her then. He could tell she wasn’t sure if he’d been there. ‘Do you know? Why she did it?’ he asked, and knew instantly that she did. There was pain in her face and he sensed she was tumbling back, towards a period of her life that Dryden guessed had been humiliating – the poor relative taken in out of charity, into an insidious order which put an unmarried woman at the bottom of a tiny social pyramid.

‘Maggie was a sweet girl. I don’t think Johnnie was all bad, either. Rudderless sort of man, lost, and angry about something. I knew they were seeing each other. He’d done some work on the farm as a picker. She’d been protected at Black Bank, perhaps over-protected. It was a very old-fashioned place, as I’m sure you can imagine. I found it so… stifling.’

Dryden watched Connie’s bright eyes dancing over the lawn.

‘I watched her several times that summer, she’d leave the house in the evening and set out across country. I don’t think she thought I was a threat to her so she didn’t seem to care that I knew. Assignations,’ she added, hugging herself. ‘Romantic, I thought then, so I said nothing.’

The pain showed again, even after nearly thirty years. ‘She told no one about the baby until she had to. She was very brave about that. She told me first – I think she wanted advice about what to do and how to break it to my brother. She was very matter-of-fact about it, and I think then she believed Johnnie would be her husband. He was scared, of course, but I felt he wanted the child too.’

She let a silence begin to lengthen. A gong sounded discreetly from somewhere within Fenlandia.

‘Morning coffee,’ said Miss Tompkins, with relief. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform brought a tray. Dryden noted the superior biscuits.

‘You like it here?’ he said, taking one.

‘As Maurice Chevalier said in a different context, Mr Dryden, it’s better than the alternative.’

‘Must be expensive though?’

‘Very. I married late and well. Ideal,’ she smiled. She slurped coffee and pressed on. ‘Then something happened – to Maggie. She stopped seeing Johnnie.’

‘This was when, exactly? Sorry – if you can remember.’