Read Online Out of the Blackout by Robert Barnard - Free Book Online

was at an end. ‘Well, we’ll be in touch. And we’ll hope to see you down here in June.’
    â€˜Thank you very much,’ said Simon, unable to think of any device to prolong the interview further. ‘I’m obliged to you both.’
    He turned as he gained the street, to wave. The man in the old fawn cardigan stood in the doorway, ingratiatingly smiling. He gave a stiff wave, as if it was a habit he’d never got accustomed to. In the shadow of the hall loomed the bulky figure of the old woman. Then the door was shut firmly.
    Walking down the street, Simon felt grubby, and in some odd way diminished. These, surely were mean, shabby people—depressing if he put them in his mind beside the generosity and openness of Dot and Tom Cutheridge, of his father and mother. Was this man, of whom he had no memory, his father? Biologically, possibly, but in no other sense. And yet, oddly, Simon felt go through him a spurt of excitement; he experienced the zestof anticipation, a feeling that he had just accomplished the first stage of a great and difficult project. It was almost, he decided, like the thrill of a chase.
    Ten days later he received a letter to say that the room was his. He paid rent for nearly six weeks before he actually moved down. He had a feeling that the Simmeters were rubbing their hands at having landed a right greenhorn.
    â€˜It might suit me very well,’ said Simon in Leeds, packing up those exercise books of memories and impressions he had started eight years before and looked forward now to adding to, ‘to be thought a greenhorn.’

CHAPTER 6
    W hen Simon Cutheridge travelled down to London in the third week of June, 1964, he had gone beyond asking himself whether what he was doing was a sensible thing, or one that was likely to make him happier. It had become something there to be done—something to be undertaken stage by stage, like a programme of research. He had drawn a line under his period in Leeds with some relief: he had given away some of his possessions, stored others with friends. He was, now, the clothes he stood up in and the suitcases he carried. He knew that many children adopted at birth developed a niggling itch to ferret out the identities of their real mothers and fathers. How much more natural in him, he thought, who had a history before Yeasdon and the Cutheridges, to wish to blow the dust off that page of his life. He was Simon Cutheridge. But he was also, he felt sure, Simon Simmeter. Or some other Christian name—perhaps some other surname too—but at any rate part of the Simmeter family. For better or worse.
    He took the Underground from King’s Cross to the Angel, because he was not a young man who had yet got into the taxi habit. He was a healthy man, and it was not the suitcases he was lugging that made his heart beat so dramatically as he emerged from the poky entrance to the Angel. He put them down for a minute to steady himself, wiping his forehead. Then he took them up and began walking.
    Miswell Terrace was only five minutes from the station. It was just before three when he rang the doorbell at No. 25, but it was not the old woman’s steps he heard along the passage. When Leonard Simmeter opened the door he had on the same old fawn cardigan, buttoned over the waist, and he rubbed his hands in the same convulsive way. But this time he wore a prepared smile, and he seemed to have lost some of the unaccountable nervousness of their first meeting.
    â€˜Ah . . . get here all right? Have a good journey down?’
    Simon uttered conventionalities to answer conventionalities as he was ushered into the depressing hall. Nothing had changed. An old mac and some women’s coats were hung on hooks. A little table held an ancient china fruit bowl, with no fruit in it. The door to the Simmeters’ living quarters had been meticulously shut.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Simmeter, with that uneasy, almost shifty