It rained on Friday. I woke to find a fine spray of droplets blowing in through my bedroom window—habitually left open for Mr. Tibbs—cursed, sat up, and groped for my dressing gown. The night could, in the face of all the grim and grey mundanity outside, have seemed like a dream, but it didn’t. I didn’t for a moment consider the possibility that it hadn’t been… well, real. I had to admit, however, that it’d been the first time a rock star had kept me up all night. I suspected that I’d been a disappointment; Damon Brent, chain smoking and pouring out floods of names and half-connected stories, caught up in the excitement of having someone listen to him, had slowly realised that I’d never heard of most of the people he was talking about.
Around four a.m., he’d looked apologetic, and said I should go to bed, grab some sleep. There’d be, he said, plenty of time. He smiled when he said it. Some kind of private joke, maybe.
I stumbled into the kitchen. Something familiar glinted on the worktop, next to the kettle. His brooch. Still sleep-mired and claggy, I stared at it for a long while before picking it up. It looked like something that might have lain hidden in an elderly aunt’s jewellery box, only to catch the light like a prism when, some empty afternoon, it got taken out and examined for the first time in years. I shook myself. The thing felt heavy in my hand, cold, but it soon warmed against my skin. A folded piece of paper lay under the brooch, the writing on it large and rounded. Just one word.
Boo !
At least he had a sense of humour. He had a plan too: he wanted me to pose as a biographer, gaining access to interview his former bandmates, friends, associates, and… other suspects, I supposed. He thought I’d be professional, believable. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I had no idea where to begin, how one went about finding people who, as far as I knew, hadn’t been heard from in almost three decades.
The best place I could think of to start was Mum’s scrapbook. It had been one of the few things of hers I couldn’t bear to keep in the flat after she died, perhaps because it had been so important to her, so intimate. I’d kidded myself that I’d given it back to Auntie Jan because she wanted it. It had been half hers, too, I’d said. But now I wanted to look at the cuttings, the adoration… the tiny sealed moment of history when it had all happened and she—they—had seen it.
I showered, dressed, and caught the bus out to Broadwater, spending the whole ride thinking about how I would frame my questions. I could hardly tell her the real reason I wanted to know, but ‘so, aproposof nothing, how about the Seventies?’ didn’t really seem the right way to kick things off. Still, I reflected, as I got off the bus and walked up from Sompting Road, thankful for the time to clear my head and prepare myself, I didn’t know anyone more entirely sane than my Auntie Jan. I wanted to see her and to believe that somehow that would make it all fine again.
I got to the corner shop before I realised I’d be visiting empty-handed, so I stopped in and bought a packet of treacle tarts. They looked pathetic, even to me, and I felt like a heel.
Auntie Jan’s place stood among the neat, pleasant, three bedroom post-war semis on the way to the golf course. All uniform, all… nice. She and Uncle Duncan had bought it when they married and never felt the desire to move. Not even now.
She was the first of the family to leave Hertfordshire, at least for a generation or so, and she’d been so pleased when I came down to the university for my postgrad study… I’d barely been able to convince her not to move me into the spare bedroom. I couldn’t have faced that. Oh, I would have visited anyway, yes, but….
The door opened, and Auntie Jan beamed at me, her heavily powdered face lighting up like a sunrise.
“Hello, darling! Come in, it’s so nice to see you.”
She ushered me into the little porch with all the pomp of the Queen of Sheba and insisted on taking my coat, thanking me for the paltry treacle tarts.
“I was surprised when you rang,” she said, leading me through to the kitchen. The immaculate state of that house never ceased to amaze me. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this week, knowing how busy you are with all your studying.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” I lied, trying to peer into the living room, the curtains pulled tight and the door only slightly ajar. “But are you sure I’m not disturbing you?”
“No, don’t be silly. Sylvia came this morning. He’s had his bath, he’s all spruced up… knackered, of course, now. He’s asleep, love. Be awake and with it again in a minute, I shouldn’t wonder.” She put the kettle on, rattling in the dark pine-look cupboards for plates. “Gives us five minutes off, though, doesn’t it? Here you are, open up those tarts.”
I plated up the treacle tarts, watching Jan make tea with a kind of automatic efficiency she had probably acquired as a nurse. It seemed easy to picture her applying first aid, taking pulses, and changing dressings with those strong, brown fingers, stripped of pearly nail polish and gold rings, her slim figure clad in a more conventional uniform than the baggy pink sweater and black leggings she always seemed to wear nowadays. Her lips, painted coral pink, pressed together in a line of pure concentration, and her big, round glasses lent an owlish air to her face, softened by her short, blonde-streaked haircut. She treated herself to a morning off once a week—when Sylvia, the physiotherapist, came in—and divided that precious free time on a strict rota. She would go to the hairdresser’s for a touch-up to the roots and a cup of coffee she hadn’t made herself, or to the chiropodist for a pedicure with added tea and scandal. Sometimes she went shopping, or met up with a friend for an early lunch and a whole hour or so of normality.
“How are things?” I asked. We sat at the kitchen table, addressing the treacle tarts. “Really?”
She shrugged. “All right. Nothing new. He’s got his ups and downs, same as ever. Some days, he’s almost himself again, but others…. No. No, we’re fine, love. Honestly.”
She smiled, and I had sense enough to let her steer the conversation past the jagged rocks and into the shallows. She poured the tea, stirring two sugars into her cup with methodical rhythm, and I put my hand on her arm.
“Thanks, love,” she said, because she would never have cried.
Not, at least, with me there. I gave her wrist a gentle squeeze and withdrew my hand.
“By the way,” I said after a moment, lifting my cup. “I need to pick your brains.”
“Ooh.” She chuckled. “You can try, darling… but I don’t know what good they’ll be.”
“I’ll try and get some use out of them,” I promised with a grin. “Listen, do you remember, it would have been about the mid-Seventies, when you and Mum and Gail went up to Gloucester?”
She frowned. “Gloucester?”
“You’d have been about fifteen, sixteen, I suppose…. It was when—”
A drawn-out moan came from the sitting room. Auntie Jan, with that cool efficiency, placed her cup back in its saucer, stood, and carried on talking in the same bright, even tone while she moved through the clean magnolia hallway.
“Oh, hang on… I know! You mean when Damon Brent died, love?” Her voice rose a little as she entered the sitting room. “Yes, we were there…. Of course I remember that. You come through, Ellis. He’s decent, you’re all right. It’s Ellis, Duncan. Ellis. That’s right, darling, your favourite niece.”
I stood, licked the crumbs of treacle tart off my thumb, and followed her. Uncle Duncan, as usual, had been positioned to face the bay window. He liked, in his waking hours, to look out at the other houses, the cars and people passing by… particularly, as Auntie Jan observed, if they happened to be young women. It seemed an unnecessary trial to get him into his specially equipped bed for simple daytime naps, so—for his little rests, as she said—Jan would draw the heavy curtains and leave him in his chair with a pillow and a blanket. “He always lets me know when he’s ready to get going again,” she would say. He did so now, moaning and flicking his head to the side to articulate what he wanted, his fingers curling on the arms of the chair with the frustration of his flesh-prison.
His mouth contorted, small flecks of drool piling at the corner, as he shaped the word ‘window’ with an unwilling tongue. Pale blue eyes wheeled in my direction, and Auntie Jan pulled the curtains open, filling the room with thin, drizzly sunlight. Photographs lined the walls, covering those surfaces not taken up by the paraphernalia of caring and coping. Many of them depicted family occasions—birthdays, wedding receptions, anniversaries—and holidays, frame after frame of Auntie Jan and Uncle Duncan standing in front of famous landmarks, monuments, or moments of local colour. In one of them, Uncle Duncan sat on a camel, beaming with the same wide, toothy smile that opened up his face when he recognised me. That could take a few minutes now, on his worse days.
“Hello, Uncle Dunc,” I said, pulling out one of the dining chairs that lived against the wall, overcrowding the room, and settling myself on the hard, Regency striped upholstery.
The dining room had been converted to house his sit-in bath and adapted bed with the help of a disability grant but, despite everything she did for her husband, Auntie Jan refused to get rid of her reproduction faux mahogany dining set.
I held out my hand for Uncle Duncan to grasp with three hard fingers that shook with the effort. He gave me a smile, and his tongue flexed against the roof of his mouth in approximation of my name. I kissed his cheek, and he laughed.
The doctors, during the months of hospitalisation that followed the crash, said he might never relearn the brain functions that most of us take for granted—memory, speech, those little luxuries—but, slowly, he’d started to prove them wrong. The taut, waxy indentations at the side of his forehead, where a metal rod had pierced his brain as he lay, crushed beneath the train carriage, still showed the marks of the operations. “We’re thankful,” Auntie Jan would say, in what I thought at first must be some perverse Pollyannaism borne of desperation. “Because he wasn’t burned. At least he wasn’t burned.”
True enough, though I wondered if the fire wouldn’t have proved a more merciful disaster. The settlements had started, with all the investigations and inquiries finally completed, and it seemed that every few days the papers covered another victim awarded compensation. I asked Auntie Jan how the solicitor felt about their progress.
“It’s going very well, apparently,” she said, fastening the curtain tie-backs. “She’s a lovely woman. Reckons it’ll be over and done with by Christmas, which’ll be helpful… ’cos he’s not cheap, are you?”
She prodded his outstretched arm as she passed, sorting through the plastic cups, bags, and beakers that lined the sideboard. Uncle Duncan smiled. She returned with a moist tissue and wiped his face, carefully cleaning away the tracks and traces of his sleep.
“Mind you, you’ve never been cheap… I’ll give you that. Have to, don’t I? Always some new gadget or something, spending I don’t know what on your fishing gear….”
He frowned and gave her a reply that I couldn’t make out.
“Well, yes. Holidays, that’s fine. Bit different, though, isn’t it? That was something for both of us. Still,” she continued, screwing up the tissue and dropping it into the rubbish bag that hung by the chair, “maybe, once all this is settled, we can afford a little break. A few nights in the Cotswolds or something. What do you think? It’s not the Nile delta, I know, but it’d be nice, wouldn’t it? What’s that, love? Drink?”
Auntie Jan poured a cup of water, helped him drink it, never once breaking pace in her even, jovial speech, though now she directed that sunny, competent rhythm at me.
“It’s all very well, this compensation lark, but you don’t like to push yourself forward for it. Did you read about this bloke in the paper? ‘Travel anxiety’. Enough to pay off his mortgage, just ’cos he didn’t like the idea of getting on a train again… and when you look at some of ’em…! I don’t know. Mind you, it’s not the point, is it?”
She moved back to the sideboard, stacking the plastic cup with its companions for washing and tidying the rows of items with busy, efficient hands.
“It’s not about paying for what you’ve lost,” she said quietly, “it’s about helping you build a life around what’s left.”
I opened my mouth, trying to think of something to say but not sure what. What response could there be? I looked at Uncle Duncan, watching the woman from Number 23 walking back from the local school with her two small children and a little white dog. The youngest child, in an oversized blue jacket, skipped ahead on the pavement, oblivious to its mother’s calls.
“Now,” Auntie Jan wiped her hands on another tissue, buoyant and bright once more, “what was it you were asking about, darling? Ellis was asking about when Caro and I were teenagers, love,” she added, for Duncan’s benefit. “In the Seventies.”
I nodded. “Seventy-six.”
“Yes… you’d have been in the Army still, then, wouldn’t you? That’s right.” She paused behind him, stroking the wisps of his sandy hair. “God, it’s thirty-odd years, isn’t it? ’Course, I shouldn’t think anyone remembers Damon Brent these days.”
If only she knew. I said nothing.
“What did you want to know about it for?”
Ah, the merits of preparation. I cleared my throat.
“Well, there’s this guy in the Media Studies department at the—”
“Ooh, a young man?”
“Um, yes. Anyway,” I hurried on, because there would be absolutely no stopping her if she headed down that road, “anyway, he’s researching views of celebrity. You know, cults of fame, from Alexander the Great to Princess Diana… how the ways we think about people in the public eye have changed and how the public reacts to… well, to death.”
I could hear myself sounding more and more uncomfortable. Auntie Jan pursed her lips and nodded.
“You mean, like the flowers and that? There’s more flowers now, aren’t there? Shrines. At accidents and things… you never used to see that as much. Not there on the roadside. Yeah, of course, darling… amazing what you can study at university, isn’t it?”
Relief began to seep through me.
“All jobs for the boys,” I said with a shrug, relying with sly cowardice on the respect I knew she had for my study, for my breaking out. “But I remembered Mum telling us about how you and Auntie Gail went up there and there was the vigil and… I was wondering if I could see the scrapbook?”
Auntie Jan folded her arms across her chest and sighed, gazing out at the grey sky. I hoped I hadn’t hurt her. After everything, keeping the CDs I’d bought Mum was one thing, but I couldn’t stand to keep the book. Not in my flat. Not where, every time I thought of it, sitting in a cupboard somewhere, I thought of her.
“I dare say it’ll be in the back bedroom,” Jan said after a moment. “Yes. I shouldn’t wonder…. Oh, it was all the rage, then. All those pictures. Coming back, though, isn’t it? Getting quite popular again, scrapbooking. Mm. Come on, we’ll go and have a look. You’re all right here for a few minutes, aren’t you, Duncan?”
She patted Uncle Duncan’s head, but he didn’t seem to notice. Auntie Jan bent down to the level of his chair and squinted.
“Oh, I see. Number 26 is washing her windows. Dirty old bugger.”
He grinned a little wider.
“Come on, love,” she said, leading me back out into the immaculate hallway, up the stairs, and towards the box room at the back of the house.
More photographs up here: Duncan and Jan on their tenth wedding anniversary, pictures of Duncan in his Army uniform, with his unit and without, and of Jan, posing for a professional portrait she’d won in a magazine, too heavily made up against a cloudy blue background and smiling. There were pictures of their only child, my older cousin Marcus (in Canada now, working for a shipping company), in various stages of growth and high-flying success, and pictures of Mum, too, which still knocked me for six every time I saw them. Stupid, really.
The box room held several large, dark wood wardrobes, part of the old suite that had been in the master bedroom. I recalled, while Uncle Duncan was still in hospital, coming down from my university digs to help Auntie Jan move them out. It was an act of superstition, I think, but she couldn’t bear to have his clothes, his shoes, his general mess and stuff, stay in the room. When he finally came home, she left the wardrobes in here, donated the rest of the set to the local hospice shop, and went out to buy herself a brand new bedroom suite. Faux Rococo. Snippets of its white paintwork and curlicues were visible through the partially open bedroom door.
“In here, I think,” she said, kneeling to open the base drawers.
The little pendant handles clanked and rattled as she fought with the sticky runners and the piles of old curtains and table linen that now filled them. The smell of musty cloth wafted out into the room, tinged with cedarwood and lavender.
I hesitated in the doorway, the framed photograph of Mum on the opposite wall somehow putting me off the idea of entering the room. It felt… strange, seeing her young, pretty and bikini-clad—posing arm-in-arm with her sister—caught forever on some sun-drenched holiday.
“Here we go,” said Auntie Jan, pulling a dog-eared scrapbook out from among the piles of old fabric. She followed my gaze and grinned. “Majorca, 1978. She looked lovely, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “So did you. Was it a good holiday?”
She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was. Very.”
I smiled, but there was nothing I could trust myself to say. We both stayed silent for a moment; perhaps in tribute.
“Well, it’s all in here. I’m sure there’ll be something you can use, darling.”
Jan brought the book out onto the landing, and we leant it against the banister between us. Blue card covers, A3 sized, held together thick leaves of grey sugar paper. The pages, brittle with age and glue, had been embellished with swatches of fabric, sequins, and biro tattoos, proclaiming the irrepressible optimism and energy of youth. Damon Brent’s eyes stared out at me from the first page, and the whole thing reminded me of some kind of offering, desiccated but unburned.
My heart sank as I looked at that defiant pout, the smoky kohl, and the scary perm. Definitely a teen scream photograph; the stark black and white of the image highlighted every millimetre of cheekbone, created planes and angles, lifting Brent from simply handsome to ethereal. Hyper-real. Auntie Jan giggled. I blinked, not used to hearing that sound from her.
“There you are,” she said. “Damon Brent.”
She flipped through the next few pages. Brent again, again, and again. Generally, they were publicity shots. In most, the band flanked him, all four of them primped and posing for the camera. In some, his image had been carefully cut out from a wider shot. A few newspaper articles slipped in here and there, clipped mainly from tabloids and music inkies. It seemed Mum’s fascination had started early in Brent’s career and taken very serious root.
“Ooh, he was lovely, though, wasn’t he?”
Jan grinned conspiratorially at me and turned another page. I smiled, beginning to feel ever so slightly dizzy. Brent, again. Stills from a live performance. Hip cocked, he was hammering hell out of a Telecaster, shoulder to lurex-lapelled shoulder with another guitarist whose dark poodle perm fought his own for the limelight. Both faces were contorted, streaked with sweat and sliding make-up. Behind them a taller, heavier guy on bass shared the by-now obligatory frizzy ’do in a mousey brown shade with big sideburns, pepped up with spray-on glitter. The accompanying live review, carefully clipped from the NME, saw one reviewer compare Damon Brent somewhat unfavourably to both Bolan and Bowie (I wondered briefly whether I should ask the accused what he thought of the phrase ‘pin-up pimpette’), but granted an imperial thumbs-up to the band’s ‘sweaty, filthy, and at times transcendent rock grooves’. I rubbed my blackened fingertips together and felt a little more like an outsider.
“’Course,” Auntie Jan said, gazing wistfully at the page, “your gran hated us going to concerts like that…. Dad too. Oh, you should have seen him when your mum and me were getting ready to go out! He was such an old git about it! Of course, y’know, you know now that it’s all because they worried, isn’t it? But, when you’re young, you think you’re immortal.” She chuckled. “We used to leave our clothes at Gail’s and change before we got on the train… mini skirts up to our armpits, you name it. I can’t think now, what we looked like, but that’s how it was. ’Nother cup of tea, love?”
I nodded weakly. We took the scrapbook downstairs, spread it out on the kitchen table. She poured tea and fixed faces to names. The pages smelled of patchouli and white musk.
“They were a four-piece outfit, you see. Damon, obviously, then you had Leon Fielding—he was a Yank, you know—Charlie Davies on bass. Your Auntie Gail thought he was the bee’s whatnots, but me and your mum were always Damon’s girls.”
She giggled again, standing by my chair, looking over my shoulder at a full page close shot of Brother Rush searing the stage. I followed where she pointed; Fielding, the dark-haired poodle perm, clutching a sunburst Les Paul, lip curled like Elvis and knee bent like Berry. His long, oval face was capped by thick, dark brows and deep-set dark eyes, one framed by either a scar or a smudge of eyeliner… I wasn’t sure.
Suddenly, something clicked in my brain.
“Fielding… didn’t he do a comeback album a few years ago?”
Jan nodded. “That’s right, love. It was— Hang on.”
She disappeared into the other room for a few minutes, and I heard the sound of a cabinet being opened. I wondered how I could have been so dense, how I could have forgotten. Some bloody detective I’d be! It had been three or four years ago, a chance sighting of a TV ad, but… yes. Leon Fielding was still working. Being a thoroughly Anglicised American during George W. Bush’s tenure in the White House gave him almost automatic left-wing credentials, and he’d slipped out of the woodwork with a new UK tour and an album of acoustic ballads. I remembered having mentally pegged him as a slightly edgier Tony Christie and mentioned it in passing to Mum… though it hadn’t been one of her good days.
Jan came bustling back in, a stack of three CDs in her hands. She put them on the table in front of me and smiled shyly. I blinked. No way. Still, once a fan….
I looked at the cover art on the first disc: just a simple, moody headshot. Fielding had aged a little like Bob Dylan, losing the smoothness of youth for a slight hint of well-worn loucheness in middle age. The song titles had a distinctly anti-war, eco-rock sound to them—Only the Rain; Love, Justice & Dust; Take Me Home Tomorrow—I couldn’t help but think what a long way it seemed from twelve bar electric boogies and three minute sweaty-palm pop songs.
“You take those if you like, love,” Auntie Jan said. “Have a listen. It’s really quite good.”
“Um. Thanks,” I said, still slightly stunned. I slid the discs into my bag. “I didn’t know—”
“’Course,” she muttered, and I realised that she hadn’t been listening to me, that her attention had already turned back to the scrapbook. “You can see what Gail was on about, now. Look at him, strapping great big bloke like that….”
I followed her pink-tipped finger, tapping the picture. Charlie Davies, clad in bright yellow flares and a frilly orange shirt, stared intently at his fingering and appeared to be trying to ignore the audience.
Jan had a point.
But then there was Damon Brent, right up there in the centre of the thing, with his Telecaster yanked so high he could almost have taken his eye out with it. Spotlights striped the stage red, yellow, and blue, throwing patterns across his face; eyes tight shut, mouth wide open in what I guessed must be that battle cry I knew from the recordings.
“Who,” I licked my lips, pausing to take a sip of my tea, “who was the fourth?”
I wondered if Jan heard me at first; her face had softened so as she stared at the picture. But her hand descended, patting me on the shoulder before she reached out to turn the page.
“Joss Napier, on drums. You can’t see him in that one… here we go. He wasn’t so much of a looker, but you wouldn’t really kick any of them out of bed, would you?” She grinned and nudged me in the ribs. “Hm? God, it’s such a time ago! All seems so silly now… it was wild, though, at the time. At the time.”
She’d turned to another picture, clearly a centrefold from something, the staple marks still visible down the middle of what had once been a two-page spread, carefully torn out and reassembled.
I could identify Leon Fielding, a tumble of dark eyes and darker curls, sporting a silver lurex jacket with impossibly sparkly lapels; Charlie Davies, piercing green gaze and very macho expression both incongruous with the purple feather boa, and of course Damon, pouting for the camera, the old, fragile, and slightly pocked mark of the magazine’s staple just above his right eyebrow. Behind him stood the band’s last unfamiliar face: Joss Napier.
A tallish, gaunt figure—all sharp, pale blue eyes and long, rounded nose—he looked less bored and contemptuous than Davies, but nowhere near as at ease as the other two. His long dark hair hung below his shoulders in what looked like a naturally wavy style, feathered slightly in deference to fashion, his arms—crossed defensively across his chest—encased in the fluted sleeves of an unflatteringly tight red polysatin tunic.
“Like I say,” Jan said softly, “it’s stupid, really. Don’t know why I kept the thing. Daft, getting like that about… well, we were kids, weren’t we? Loving some silly song so much it hurts. Just hormones, isn’t it?”
Her hand rested on the page, pearlescent pink-tipped fingers almost caressing the fragile paper. She gazed into the mid-distance for a moment, tutted, then flicked through another few pages.
“Oh…. Yes, this is it,” she said, the smile leaving her eyes. “This is what your young man’s after, isn’t it, love?”
At this point, the offering became a shrine. Page after page after page of cuttings broke the news of Brent’s death, over and over again, as if Mum and Jan had not believed the reports. Picture after picture, carefully pasted into the book, showed the house, the drift of tributes at the gates, and the grainy, pale faces of fans clustered outside. There were several similar pieces, with shots of a whole parade of famous faces being led out, white-faced and with blankets around their shoulders. Numerous column inches had been devoted to different versions of My Night At Damon Death House and House Party Tragedy: What Went Wrong?, featuring a lot of artists who should have known better.
A pressed daisy, yellowed and papery, slid from the crackling pages, and Auntie Jan sniffed.
“God, listen to me! I thought it was heartbreaking then. Well, it was, it was heartbreaking, really. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? For someone you didn’t even know, but…. We had all the records, your mum and me, and we’d’ve gone to a hell of a lot more concerts, ’cept for your granddad. Mind you, he did give us the money to go up to Gloucester. Well, we went straight home when we heard what had happened—it was awful! I never thought he’d give us the cash… he was all set to round on us for making a fuss, but your gran said to him, ‘Harold, you was young once,’ and gave him a bit of a Look. You remember her Looks, I expect?”
I nodded. They normally preceded a very sore behind.
“Yes. Anyway, he gave us thirty pound! Can you imagine? Of course, we were just glad of it, at the time, but I always wondered about that. Still, we were down that train station like ferrets up a pipe, I can tell you… your Auntie Gail as well.”
She traced a finger down a full-page photo of the iron gates, damp flowers bound to the bars, and sighed.
“Such an outpouring, you know. I ’spect it was ’cos he was so young. Only, what, twenty something? And the way it happened… everyone thought it was a drugs overdose, ’cos of course everybody did it then. Rock stars and that,” she added quickly.
I nodded, privately intrigued.
“It took hours to get there. We camped in a tent, would you believe? Of course, the house was right out in the middle of nowhere. So many people, ’cos of the party, you know… quite famous, some of ’em… and it was crawling with journalists. Oh! I’d almost forgotten this. Look.”
Jan flipped over the last leaf before the dismal expanse of blank pages that spoke more than all the column inches put together.
“Yes, this is it. God, your granddad didn’t half go spare!”
The headline read: My Agony: Inez speaks out, and the full-page photo showed the gates of Westleve House. A woman in dark glasses and a printed dress was being supported by Charlie Davies, his arm outstretched as he pushed away a snap-happy hack.
“Here.” Jan’s tapping finger picked out three familiar faces in the crowd behind the police cordon. “In The Mail, no less.” She smiled. “Could have wished it was different circumstances… people were talking to Mum and Dad about that for months after! Your gran said she couldn’t set foot in the post office without old Mrs. Hinckley buttonholing her. Wouldn’t give her the time of day before, but give the old cow a whiff of a scandal…. God, we all look so young, don’t we? ’Course, here, look.” She pointed to the woman in the psychedelic frock. “That’s Damon’s missus. Inez Blackman. Kept her maiden name, she did. Tennis player… don’t know if she was a good one or not, but I’d never heard of her ’til she married him. Anyway, there we were, and she shows up, goes into histrionics, and out he comes… oh! Charlie Davies, almost as close as you are to me now. I tell you, your Auntie Gail damn near wet herself, she was that—”
From the other room, Uncle Duncan called out. Jan blinked and cursed.
“Oh, bugger…. I should have been thinking!” She pushed the scrapbook into my hands and dashed to the door. “Coming, sweetheart—just a minute! You take that, Ellis, love. I hope it helps your young man with his course.”
“Thanks,” I said feebly, following her back into the immaculate hall, just in time to catch the smell.
“Sod it.” Auntie Jan pushed her fingers through her hair. Uncle Duncan began to holler. “I should have been paying attention! He’ll only get upset, love,” she added, patting my arm. “Go on, you run off now.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure? I could—”
“No. Best not, darling. Go on.”
She leaned in to kiss my cheek. In the sitting room, Duncan screamed in frustration. It sounded as though he was crying. Jan smiled at me from behind her owlish glasses and wrinkled her nose.
“Go on.”
“I’ll ring you over the weekend, okay?”
“All right, love,” she said, handing me my handbag.
I hugged her, instructed her to give Uncle Duncan my love, when he felt… better… and let myself out while she went to fetch the marigolds and the antibacterial soap. I walked back down to the bus stop with the scrapbook clasped across my chest, feeling utterly and completely rotten.