Read Online A Place Of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed - Free Book Online Page A

name. Mrs Bishop always had
from those first blank days when she had fed him beef tea and boiled eggs and
let him play with anything he liked in the kitchen scullery at Garth Hall. She
knew about the car crash and told Alf, her husband, she just wanted to take the
poor little mite home because he didn’t weigh more than a ha’porth of copper
and couldn’t speak a word from shock.
    McCall smiled at her fondly – smaller than in memory, colour
gone from her pot doll cheeks, her hair no more than a winter frost.
    ‘It’s really kind, Mrs B. A lovely present.’
    ‘I’ve writ some words on the back.’
    He read them, smiling, knowing she meant every one. Then she
produced an envelope of photographs and spread them across the table like Tarot
cards. McCall had not seen these before – little Box Brownie prints of Alf,
tie-less and tipsy and leaning against the chrome radiator of his Lanchester
outside some pub, Mrs Bishop looking self-conscious on a day out, wearing other
people’s cast-offs and hoping it didn’t show.
    And there was a picture of McCall, no more than seven,
laughing on Mrs Bishop’s back step with David, the boy she would lose to
leukaemia and who now lay on the other side of her garden wall. McCall smiled
to himself and shook his head.
    ‘God fits the back for the burden, Francis – ’
    Both boys were in short pants, sandals, home made pullovers
and happy. David was a late baby and all the more loved for that. But in the
picture, his dark eyes were already hollowing out. She must have known, even
then. She would have to give him back.
    ‘– but Alf was never the same after. Killed him in the end,
it did.’
    ‘I can just about remember David’s funeral.’
    ‘I can never forget it.’
    ‘What a heartbreak for you.’
    ‘If you’d not been there to look after, Francis, I think I’d
have done myself in.’
    McCall thought he should go. But Mrs B kept ruching the edge
of her pinny and clearing her throat. She had more to impart, something bottled
up and corked with age.
    ‘Never seemed right to me, not fair at all.’
    ‘You mean about David?’
    ‘Not just that though the Lord knows it hurt enough.’
    ‘What then, Mrs B?’
    She picked at the tablecloth, biding her time. When her
words came, they were as bitter as only the old can make them, dried in a heart
shrivelled by hurt.
    ‘Them at Garth... didn’t always want you, you know... not as
much as me.’
    ‘Bea and Francis? But they took me in when I had no one.’
    ‘Not your own flesh and blood, they wasn’t.’
    ‘No, but they were the next best thing – ’
    ‘– as I could’ve been. I prided in you. I was as close to
you as them, wasn’t I?’
    ‘Of course – as good as any mother to me, you were.’
    ‘Well, there’s some that forgot that in all their
goings-on.’
    He walked home through the graveyard where David lay. The
village children had filed into the dark church from the sunshine of their
playground to sing All Things Bright And Beautiful for a friend who would not
be coming back. McCall’s abiding memory of that day was being scared by all
squawking birds falling about his head from the bell tower. David had been like
a brother. But he, too, became someone else who vanished from his life for
reasons he had not understood.
    Maybe McCall had done something wrong or they did not like
him. Until now, he had never put Bea and Francis in that number.
    He was tired after his walk and went to his bedroom to
re-read the words Mrs Bishop had written on the back of the map she’d given
him.
    To my boy Francis, to remember me by.
Affectionately yours, Mrs B.
    He opened his memory box and took out the envelope he
received at school many years before with the photograph of him as a baby with
his parents. Allowing for a bit of arthritis or failing sight, they had been
written by the same person – no scholar but neat and tidy and legible.
    McCall always suspected Mrs Bishop sent the picture. What he
could not work out