Winter of the World

The next day was a Sunday, and they went in the morning, when Lloyd had no lectures. They were both shocked by the state of the little house. The paint was flaking, the wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains were grey with coal dust. The only decoration was a row of photographs cut from magazines and tacked to the wall: the King and Queen, Fitz and Bea, and other assorted members of the nobility. The place had not been properly cleaned for years, and there was a smell of urine and ash and decay. But Lloyd guessed it was not unusual for an old man on a small pension.

Peel had white eyebrows. He looked at Lloyd and said: ‘Good morning, my lord – I thought you were dead!’

Lloyd smiled. ‘I’m just a visitor.’

‘Are you, sir? My poor brain is scrambled eggs. The old earl died, what, thirty-five or forty years ago? Well, then, who are you, young sir?’

‘I’m Lloyd Williams. You knew my mother, Ethel, years ago.’

‘You’re Eth’s boy? Well, in that case, of course . . .’

Daisy said: ‘In that case, what, Mr Peel?’

‘Oh, nothing. My brain’s scrambled eggs!’

They asked him if he needed anything, and he insisted he had everything a man could want. ‘I don’t eat much, and I rarely drink beer. I’ve got enough money to buy pipe tobacco, and the newspaper. Will Hitler invade us, do you think, young Lloyd? I hope I don’t live to see that.’

Daisy cleaned up his kitchen a bit, though housekeeping was not her forte. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said to Lloyd in a low voice. ‘Living here, like this, he says he’s got everything – he thinks he’s lucky!’

‘Many men his age are worse off,’ Lloyd said.

They talked to Peel for an hour. Before they left, he thought of something he did want. He looked at the row of pictures on the wall. ‘At the funeral of the old earl, there was a photograph took,’ he said. ‘I was a mere footman, then, not the butler. We all lined up alongside the hearse. There was a big old camera with a black cloth over it, not like the little modern ones. That was in 1906.’

‘I bet I know where that photograph is,’ said Daisy. ‘We’ll go and look.’

They returned to the big house and went down to the basement. The junk room, next to the wine cellar, was quite large. It was full of boxes and chests and useless ornaments: a ship in a bottle, a model of Tŷ Gwyn made of matchsticks, a miniature chest of drawers, a sword in an ornate scabbard.

They began to sort through old photographs and paintings. The dust made Daisy sneeze, but she insisted on continuing.

They found the photograph Peel wanted. In the box with it was an even older photo of the previous earl. Lloyd stared at it in some astonishment. The sepia picture was five inches high and three inches wide, and showed a young man in the uniform of a Victorian army officer.

He looked exactly like Lloyd.

‘Look at this,’ he said, handing the photo to Daisy.

‘It could be you, if you had side-whiskers,’ she said.

‘Perhaps the old earl had a romance with one of my ancestors,’ Lloyd said flippantly. ‘If she was a married woman, she might have passed off the earl’s child as her husband’s. I wouldn’t be very pleased, I can tell you, to learn that I was illegitimately descended from the aristocracy – a red-hot socialist like me!’

Daisy said: ‘Lloyd, how stupid are you?’

He could not tell whether she was serious. Besides, she had a smear of dust on her nose that looked so sweet that he longed to kiss it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve made a fool of myself more than once, but—’

‘Listen to me. Your mother was a maid in this house. Suddenly in 1914 she went to London and married a man called Teddy whom no one knows anything about except that his surname was Williams, the same as hers, so she did not have to change her name. The mysterious Mr Williams died before anyone met him and his life insurance bought her the house she still lives in.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Then, after Mr Williams died, she gave birth to a son who happens to look remarkably like the late Earl Fitzherbert.’

He began to get a glimmer of what she might be saying. ‘Go on.’

‘Has it never occurred to you that there might be a completely different explanation for this whole story?’

‘Not until now . . .’

‘What does an aristocratic family do when one of their daughters gets pregnant? It happens all the time, you know.’

‘I suppose it does, but I don’t know how they handle it. You never hear about it.’

‘Exactly. The girl disappears for a few months – to Scotland, or Brittany, or Geneva – with her maid. When the two of them reappear, the maid has a little baby which, she says, she gave birth to during the holiday. The family treat her surprisingly kindly, even though she has admitted fornication, and send her to live a safe distance away, with a small pension.’

It seemed like a fairy story, nothing to do with real life; but all the same Lloyd was intrigued and troubled. ‘And you think I was the baby in some such pretence?’