useful screen, with a narrow view of the house and drive.
Matthew asked, 'Want to walk past again?'
'I think we'll stand here a while.'
'There's a path down there. If we cut through to the field we could see the back of the house. He might be gardening.'
'Don't agitate,' I told him.
Matthew gave a shrug and hoisted himself on to the wall and sat bouncing his heels off the stones. Somewhere above us a blackbird warbled. It was good to hear. Bird-song is rare in my life.
Matthew said casually, as if to fill in the time, 'Mighty Molly gave us a bell last night.'
This time I didn't pull him up for insulting one of my own sex. 'You didn't tell me. What time was this?'
'Quite late. When you were running your bath. I told her you couldn't come to the phone.'
'What did she want this time?'
'Same as before. Did we have any news? She said quite a lot of people phoned the paper after she printed some stuff about wanting to find the hero. Some of them were watching when I was rescued. She said they described the man for her, but not one of them recognized him. I told her I could. I told her he was on the television.'
'Oh, Mat!'
He folded his arms and stared at the sky. 'What's bugging you now?'
I felt like wringing his neck. 'You told her that? Did you give her Professor Jackman's name?'
'Course I did.'
'You great ninny! Suppose you made a mistake.'
'I didn't. I keep telling you.'
'Mat, would you look at me when I'm talking to you? You don't say things like that to the papers unless you're one hundred per cent sure, and even then it isn't always wise to talk to them.'
'Why? We're not ashamed of anything. She was bound to ask me if I had anything else to tell her. Did you want me to tell a lie?'
'You could have told her… oh, what does it matter now? What are we doing skulking behind this bush if the whole thing is public knowledge?'
'It was your idea to come here,' Matthew pointed out ungratefully. He jumped down from the wall. 'Shall we call at the house, then?'
'I think we must. She will have phoned him by now, I'm sure of that. And Matthew…'
'Yes?'
'Leave the talking to me.'
'Be my guest.'
Mat's condescension stung me. I sensed an assumption of male superiority in the remark. It had got through to me in almost everything Mat had said this morning. It came from the school, I was convinced. I couldn't allow it to take hold. I was mother and father to him and I needed his respect. So I grasped him by the sleeve of his blazer and told him firmly, 'If you give me that kind of lip, young man, you'd better find someone else to dig you out of messes like this, because you're going to lose my sympathy here and now.'
His eyes widened and suddenly he looked very childish. 'Sorry, Ma.'
Saying, 'Come on. Let's get it over with,' I stepped out towards the house.
We had not even reached the entrance when Matthew said, 'Someone's coming out.'
I glanced over the wall and saw a man on the porch.
'That's not him!' Matthew said in a stage whisper. 'Ma, that's not him.'
I saw for myself that the man now moving briskly and with a bit of a swagger towards the Volvo in the drive was nothing like the professor we'd both seen on TV. This was a hunk of muscle and sinew not much over twenty, with swept-back straw-coloured hair and no moustache. He was in a cornflower-blue short-sleeved shirt, white jeans and white trainers. Some flicker of memory led me to think I'd seen him before in different surroundings. Generally when I recognize people they turn out to have been fares in my taxi, but you know how it is when your brain can't place someone. Mine was telling me this handsome young buck had never been in my taxi. I'd seen him in some other setting. I placed my hand over Matthew's wrist. 'We'd better leave it a few minutes. We'll walk past.'
We had not taken a couple of steps when a scene of pure melodrama unfolded. From the still-open door of the house came a voice in shrill protest: 'You can't walk out on me, for Christ's sake! Come back!' Then a woman with long, loose red hair appeared in the porch and dashed after the man, catching up with him as he opened the car door. She must have been some years older than he, with a face that was still pretty, yet with a strained, stretched look to the skin.
All this happened as Matthew and I passed the front of John Brydon House. I didn't like to take too obvious an interest, particularly as the woman was barefoot and wearing a pink silk dressing gown open to the thighs. I need not have troubled. The actors were too caught up in the drama to care about who was watching. The woman reached out and got a grip on the gold chain at the man's throat. She was trying to stop him from getting into the car. She cried out, 'Don't go, Andy, you can't do this to me! Come back in, please, please! What do you want me to do, get on my knees and beg?'
The man called Andy didn't answer. He was prising her fingers one by one from the chain as if he didn't want to risk snapping it. by thrusting her away from him. Meanwhile she clutched a mass of his blond hair with the other hand, but that didn't appear to trouble him. Having succeeded in saving the necklace, he gripped her wrists, forced her to her knees and then toppled her off balance with a light, contemptuous push. She cried, 'Bastard!' as her shoulder made contact with the gravel, but a stronger shove could have made it a lot more painful.
By the time the woman was on her feet again, Andy had got into the car and slammed the door. He started up the engine. She drummed her fists on the window and cried, 'Andy, I didn't mean that!' The Volvo crunched on the gravel, swung into the road and headed towards Bath. The woman ran as far as the entrance and watched it go. She was sobbing.
Matthew and I had raised our walking pace from a stupefied shuffle to a quick march towards our own car, which fortunately was parked in the opposite direction from the route the Volvo had taken. We got in and closed the doors.
'Who do you think they are?' Matthew asked.
I told him I hadn't the faintest idea.
'It's the right house.'
'I know. Phone books aren't always up to date. Maybe your professor sold it to these people and moved somewhere else. Anyway, I don't propose to knock on that door.'
'What was she shouting about?'
'It's none of our business. Something private.'
'Like sex, do you mean?'
'Matthew, that's enough.'
'She wasn't wearing anything under that dressing gown. Was she a prostitute, Ma?'
'Don't be ridiculous.' I started the car.
'I was only asking. You hardly ever talk to me about sex.'
Liberated youth! At his age, I almost died of shame when my mother told me what to expect – without once mentioning the reproductive organs by name.
I reversed the car and drove past the house. The woman had gone and the front door was shut. We drove down into Bath and parked in one of the spaces opposite the Orange Grove. I was glad to have the distraction of the other promise I'd given to Mat – the visit to the local history section in the central library. I took him downstairs and we passed a quiet half-hour taking books off the shelves and looking for references to Gay Street. We discovered it was named after someone called Robert Gay, who had owned the land on which it was built. 'Big deal!' said Mat. But we managed to compile a list of former residents and visitors that included John Wood, Tobias Smollett, Josiah Wedgwood, Jane Austen and William Friese-Green. Matthew wrote down the names and said he hadn't heard of any of them.
'You've got to find out. That's the purpose of the exercise,' I told him, trying to generate some enthusiasm. 'We'll walk to the reference library now and I'll show you where to look.'
