His Name Was Walter Read online

  Ida’s head moved restlessly on her pillows. Her strength was almost gone. ‘Pretty,’ she droned at last. ‘So … pretty. I loved … to look at it. I meant to … give it back to you when you were old enough to understand it, but …’

  But you could not bear to give it up, thought Walter, seeing the light in the old worker’s eyes, even now, as they lingered on the roses flaming beneath his fingers.

  He lifted the shawl from the box and instinctively pressed it to his nose, but if the cloth had ever held a trace of his mother’s scent, it did no longer. Now it smelled only of Ida and the hive. As he let it fall out of its folds, there was a rustle, and he saw that a scrap of paper was fastened to a corner of the fabric with a small gold safety pin. A lock of brown hair was caught in the pin, and there was faded, straggling writing on the paper. He squinted at the writing and read: His name is Walter.

  ‘Wicked!’ Ida murmured, her voice so faint that he could hardly hear it. ‘So wicked, to love it so. I beg you to … forgive!’

  ‘Of course I forgive you, Sister Ida,’ said Walter.

  He spoke almost without thinking. There was a great roaring in his mind. Somehow the shawl did not mean a great deal to him. Perhaps this was because it had been Ida’s treasure for so long — the only thing she had ever stretched out a hand to take for herself, the one bright fragment of beauty in her dim, dutiful life.

  But his whole being thrilled at the sight of the note and the lock of hair. They were small things, but they told him so much. As he stared at them, he felt a strange, sharp pain deep in his chest. He did not know it, but a fine crack had appeared in the shell that encased his heart.

  There was a sigh, soft as a breath. The face of the husk in the bed grew calm. The fingers that clutched the bedclothes relaxed. And Walter saw that he was alone. Ida’s small, pinched life was over. Her spirit, released, had flown.

  Walter unpinned the note and slipped it and the lock of hair into the pocket of his shirt, next to his heart. He refolded the red-rose shawl and found space for it in the inside pocket of his jacket, where he carried his savings and his identity papers to keep them safe from the thieves of the warren. Then he took a coin from the knotted handkerchief and called the attendants back.

  ‘She would like red roses on her grave,’ he said, giving them the coin. They looked surprised, but he knew they would do as he asked. They might ignore the wishes of the living every day of their lives, but the wishes of the dead were sacred.

  The section was finished, and again there was silence around the table, but this time Colin didn’t look up. His mind was still full of the story. His fingers itched to turn the page. He longed to look at the third picture, but he also wanted to go on reading. He wanted to know what would happen now that Walter had found out his true name — now that a crack had appeared in the shell around his heart.

  This isn’t like me, Colin thought uneasily. Why do I care so much? It’s only a story!

  But there was no doubt about it — for some reason, the book he’d found in the secret drawer was having a very strange effect on him. He couldn’t understand it.

  Abruptly he switched off his torch and pushed the book away.

  ‘Someone else have a turn,’ he muttered, and with a contrary pang of regret he saw Grace grab the book eagerly and pull it towards her.

  ‘I’ll need the torch, too, Colin!’ she said, holding out her hand without bothering to look up. ‘Mine doesn’t have much battery left. Anyway, I’ve forgotten where I put it. It’s probably right at the bottom of my pack.’

  Silently Colin gave her the torch.

  Mrs Fiori twitched in her seat, then suddenly jumped up and went to the window, peering out into the dark and the rain and then checking the time on her phone.

  ‘It’s ten past seven!’ she exclaimed fretfully, rubbing her forehead. ‘I’d completely lost track of the time. What on earth’s going on? The taxis should have been here long ago!’

  ‘Maybe the tow-truck guy forgot to tell Mr Simon about us coming up to the house!’ Grace suggested brightly, flicking Colin’s torch on and off. ‘Maybe the taxis came and couldn’t find us and just went again.’

  Mrs Fiori spun round, looking horrified, just in time to catch the corner of Lucas’s mouth twitching.

  ‘There’s nothing to smile at, Lucas!’ she snapped. ‘At this rate we’ll be here all night!’

  ‘Mr Simon’ll fix it,’ said Grace with sublime confidence. She pulled the book a little closer, still clicking the torch on and off.

  ‘Don’t waste the batteries!’ Colin couldn’t help saying.

  Grace looked blankly down at the torch. ‘Oh, sorry!’ she said. ‘Mrs Fiori, will I start reading now?’

  ‘No!’ Mrs Fiori cleared her throat. ‘No, Grace, not just now,’ she went on in a calmer voice. ‘I’m going upstairs to see if I can get a phone signal, whatever that man said, and I think you should leave the book alone while I’m gone. We shouldn’t really have it out of the desk at all. We don’t want it damaged.’

  She turned to Lucas. ‘You can come with me, Mr Cheah,’ she said coldly. Then, perhaps feeling she was taking things a bit too far (which she was, in Colin’s opinion) she held up her phone and added rapidly: ‘You know more about these things than I do. You might be able to get it to pick up something.’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘If there’s no signal, there’s no signal,’ he said. But he stood up anyway, obviously only too glad of the chance to escape the kitchen and to get his hands on any electronic device at all, even a teacher’s.

  ‘I’ll come too!’ Dropping Colin’s torch onto the open book, Grace started to slide off the bench.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Grace, you can’t climb stairs on crutches!’ Mrs Fiori cried, pulling a new-looking torch from her backpack. ‘You stay here and listen out for the taxis. Or …’ She glanced at Colin and seemed reassured by what she saw. ‘Look, if you promise faithfully to be very careful, you can read the next chapter to Colin and Tara. I’ll catch up with it later, if there’s time.’

  Grace sighed, but slid back into her place without argument.

  Mrs Fiori looked at her suspiciously for a moment, then turned on her torch and went to the door that led out into the corridor. ‘Don’t any of you leave this room,’ she ordered. ‘All right, Lucas!’

  Ushering Lucas out in front of her, she left the kitchen, shutting the door very firmly behind her.

  Grace waited, tapping her fingers on the book, as the muffled sounds of footsteps on bare boards faded away. ‘Sure you want to hear this?’ she asked Colin and Tara.

  They both nodded.

  ‘I’d like to see the picture first, though,’ Colin said.

  Grace sighed again, turned the book on the tabletop and shone the torch on the illustration page.

  A ghastly, upturned face framed by a tangle of greasy hair loomed from the mouth of a dark alley. At first glance the face seemed to be floating in the gloom, but slowly Colin made out a shape almost lost in shadow, and realised that he was looking at a haggard woman sitting cross-legged on the bare stones. The woman’s clothes were threadbare, but tumbling between her thin, raised hands was a black shawl printed with blood-red roses.

  ‘She’s looking at us!’ Tara whispered, and pressed her hand to her mouth.

  ‘She’s looking at the painter,’ said Colin. But he, too, felt as if the woman’s tragic, sunken eyes were melting into his own. He felt the hard pavement beneath his feet as he looked down at her. He breathed in the chill, dank odour of the alleyway. He saw the red roses glisten and move as the starved hands caressed the shawl’s soft folds …

  But Grace obviously thought she’d waited long enough.

  ‘Okay?’ she asked impatiently, and without waiting for an answer she turned the book to face her again, shone the torch on the text opposite the picture and began to read, rather fast.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Afterwards, passing the counting house on the way back to the warren, Walter wondered
if he had been foolish to obey the impulse to buy roses for Ida. Perhaps he would regret the coin later. But the fact was, for the first time in his life he had been touched to the heart, and had acted on what his heart told him to do.

  That was what made him stop when he came upon the spectre sitting begging in the mouth of an alley just beyond the counting house. Before his heart was touched, it had never crossed his mind to do anything but hurry by the fearsome shadows he passed on his way to and from work. But now he saw the spectre with new eyes. He suddenly saw past his fear to her gaunt face and outstretched hand, and realised she was as human as he was.

  He fumbled in his jacket pocket. If he could buy roses to lie on a grave, surely he could buy bread for a living woman.

  Clumsily he pulled out the knotted handkerchief containing his coin store, and with it came the red-rose shawl. The shawl fell out of its folds and tumbled over his hands, the fringe brushing the stones of the alley.

  The beggar hissed and hunched forward, her dull eyes suddenly alive. ‘That shawl!’ she croaked. ‘Where did you get it?’

  Walter’s heart began to hammer. He stood perfectly still as the woman reached for the hanging folds of the shawl and pressed them to her thin cheek.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he managed to blurt out at last.

  ‘Once it was mine,’ the woman said. ‘I gave it away, to keep a baby warm.’ She laughed harshly. ‘Soft in the head, I must have been. The mite died, I suppose, like its poor little mother, shawl or no shawl. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave it unprotected in the cold.’

  Walter could not speak. For a brief, wild moment, half joy, half horror, he had thought the beggar woman must be his mother. In the next moment, he had learned that his mother was dead. His mind felt paralysed. But his eyes must have shown what he felt, for the woman looked up at him sharply, then all at once her face seemed to crumple.

  ‘It couldn’t be!’ she whispered. ‘Surely it wasn’t so long ago …’ She broke off, staring. ‘Yet you have the look of her. Her hair, her eyes … It is you! You’re Clara’s baby, all grown up! Ah, where has the time gone?’

  Her face was bleak, but she did not cry. It was as if she had wept enough for a lifetime already, and had no more tears to shed.

  Walter sank to his knees beside her. The red-rose shawl trailed between them.

  ‘Tell me!’ he begged.

  And so kneeling there in the dark street, he heard the story of his birth from the cracked lips of a stranger, who had turned out to be no stranger at all.

  ‘I was caretaker for a small hotel near here, in those days,’ the beggar woman said, shaking her head in slow wonder as if her old life seemed like a dream. ‘One night, when I was locking up, I found a girl sitting on the front step.’

  ‘My mother,’ said Walter, trying out the words on his tongue.

  ‘Yes. I tried to move her on, but then I saw how young she was, shivering with more than cold, and in the family way, too. So, to cut a long story short, I took her in — smuggled her into my basement room so the guests wouldn’t see her. I could have lost my place for that, but at the time I felt I had to do it.’

  Again she shook her head, this time, Walter thought, in wonder at her own recklessness.

  ‘I made her eat some soup, and after that she managed to talk a bit. Her name was Clara. Six months before, her man had gone across the sea to fight in the King’s Great War. Well, she’d just heard he’d been killed. Like my own man. Like the thousands of others who left laughing and singing, and never came back.’

  She pressed her lips together, then went on, with Walter hanging on her every word.

  ‘She had no family, nowhere to go. From what I could make out, she’d fainted on the doorstep of her boarding house when the bad news came, and while she was lying there in the street someone made off with her handbag. It had her rent money in it. The next day, when she couldn’t pay what she owed, the owner of the boarding house turned her out.’

  She smiled bitterly at the look on Walter’s face. ‘At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so cruel. Now, after all I’ve seen, I can believe it easily.’

  Walter thought of the hawk in the counting house, the bullies in the hostel. Then he thought of himself hurrying past the faceless spectres of the city with his eyes turned away. He winced with pain as the shell around his heart split a little more.

  ‘Who knows how long she’d been wandering the streets before I found her, or when she’d last eaten or slept?’ the woman went on. ‘She must have had a suitcase with her at the start, but she’d lost it — probably just left it behind somewhere. She was in a daze, half mad with grief and terribly weak besides. I thought I’d try to get her to hospital in the morning, but that night her baby came. Well, that was you, wasn’t it?’

  She blinked at Walter as if she still found his existence hard to believe.

  ‘Puny, wrinkled little scrap you were, but the poor girl held you and kissed you as if you were the most beautiful thing in the world. Weak as she was, she asked me for paper and pencil and wrote something down. Something about you being called after your father, I think it was — I was that flustered and worried by then that it’s all a blur. I do remember that she got me to cut off a bit of her hair. She said that was all she had to leave you. Have you still got it?’

  Walter nodded. His newly woken heart was wrung. ‘She knew she was going to die,’ he said.

  The woman shrugged. ‘I tried to jolly her along. Told her she’d be feeling better soon. But we both knew it was a lie. She passed away a couple of hours later.’

  ‘So you took me to the hive.’ Walter had not meant the words to sound accusing, but somehow they did.

  ‘What else was I supposed to do?’ the woman flashed back. ‘I couldn’t look after you, and I had to make myself safe.’ Her face hardened. ‘And I did. What would you say if I told you that when I’d got rid of you I came back and carried your mother’s poor little body back out into the street, so she’d be found there and no one would ever know she’d been in my room?’

  Walter usually shrank back into himself, tongue-tied, when anyone near him was angry, but this time he did not. He heard the old pain and shame behind the anger, and was able to answer.

  ‘I’d say I understand,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d say you helped my mother when she was alive, and that was enough. I’d say thank you for my life.’

  He pressed the rose shawl into the woman’s hands. He would have given her every coin in his money store, too, but she would take only one silver sixpence for luck. Her anger had died as suddenly as it had come. Now she only looked sad. So after a time Walter stood up, said goodbye to her and walked on.

  Suddenly the grimy streets felt different to him. They felt empty, and after a few minutes he realised why. Tucked away in a secret room at the back of his mind there had always been the belief that somewhere in the city his unknown mother lived. And in the darkest corner of that secret room, so well hidden that even Walter was not aware of it, had crouched the tiny hope that one day his mother would try to find him. She would go to the hive. She would learn where her lost son was. Then she would come for him.

  Now Walter knew this would never happen — never could have happened, because his mother had been dead for almost as long as he had been alive. That had changed the way he felt about the city, just as knowing his mother had loved him, and learning his true name, had changed the way he felt about himself.

  Everything had changed. He felt as if he had woken from a long dream. And so there came a moment when he stopped at a familiar crossroad, and instead of turning right towards the warren, he turned left, raised his head, and strode away, out of the city, to seek his fortune.

  Grace’s reading had slowed more and more as the section went on. When she reached the end, she stared down at the page for a moment, biting her lip and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she gave her head a little toss and slammed the book shut.

  ‘This is a stu
pid story,’ she said fiercely. ‘Walter’s stupid! Why didn’t he run away before? Why did he put up with that awful counting house place and the warren and everything for so long?’

  ‘He didn’t think he had any choice, before,’ Tara said. ‘He was so used to doing what he was told.’

  ‘And he didn’t have anywhere else to go,’ Colin added.

  Grace stared at them as if they were speaking a foreign language. Then she slid quickly to the end of the bench. ‘I’ll just go and see how the others are doing,’ she announced casually.

  ‘We’re supposed to stay—’ Colin began. But already Grace had grabbed her crutches and was swinging herself to the door, the torch in her hand.

  ‘All good,’ she said airily. And then she was gone, leaving the door wide open to the dark corridor. Slowly it creaked back against the wall.

  ‘She’ll get into trouble,’ said Colin. Remembering Mrs Fiori’s glance at him he felt vaguely guilty, though he knew he couldn’t have stopped Grace leaving even if he’d tried harder.

  Tara gave a little shrug. ‘Grace is always getting into trouble. It doesn’t worry her. She expects people to forgive her — and in the end they usually do. She doesn’t understand why everyone’s not like her. She can’t imagine how it feels to be — you know — not confident about things. That’s why reading about Walter makes her angry. That’s why she shut the book.’

  Colin nodded. It occurred to him that he’d never heard Tara Berne say so much at the one time. It also occurred to him that she was a more interesting person than she seemed.

  ‘We could read the next chapter,’ Tara suggested shyly. ‘No one would care.’

  Colin hesitated, then did what he’d been longing to do since Grace stopped reading. He reached for the book, opened it carefully and began leafing through it to find the right place. Quietly Tara moved the candle closer, so it cast a warm glow over the turning pages.

  A high, whimpering cry of pure terror came from the front of the house, shattering the silence. As Colin jumped up, he heard a loud clattering sound, some thumps and a burst of hysterical sobs. He ran into the dark corridor, his mind filled with a vision of Grace falling down the stairs, her crutches bouncing and sliding after her.