The Bridge

As you may know, it has been my routine, for the past several years, to take a brisk walk at night; during the summer, this is usually several laps of a local urban lake. However, during the winter months I prefer to walk around a “street circuit”, and I have a regular route of around six miles, which I try to do at least five times per week.

             On the 27^th of December 2014, I was taking my usual walk and, since I generally set off around 7pm, it was fully dark, though of course in the city, complete darkness is something rarely, if ever, experienced.

             As I complete the fifth mile of my walk, my route takes me along Fentham road and over a railway bridge. Here, there are streetlights at either end of the bridge, but not on the bridge itself, and the darkness along this stretch seems to pool and collect, trapped in a pincer movement by the yellow sodium vapour lamps at either end. It was a cold night on the 27th, and a fog had started to gather, knitting itself around the streetlights and further reducing their ability to dispel the darkness between them.

I have long since stopped noticing the temporary darkness, and by this stage in my walk I’m generally more focused on completing the route and getting back to the warmth of my home.

As I cross the bridge, a solid brick and stone affair, I often pause momentarily to look up and down the track to see if any trains are approaching or receding; it’s quite a busy line, carrying trains between Lichfield and Sutton Coldfield in the north, down to Birmingham New Street and beyond to the south, so I’m regularly rewarded with either head- or tail-lights of a passing train. This particular night, as I looked left towards Birmingham, I could see the light of an advancing train; still some little way off, but already I could feel the unmistakable quivers and trembles of the ground, and hear the singing and twanging of the rails, as though the train were telegraphing its approach along them.

At this moment I looked up and saw a figure, standing at the far end of the bridge. He—or she—was too far away for me—and from the next streetlight—for me to make out any details, but as I approached, I could her him—by the voice I could now tell it was a man—talking.

I assumed, initially, that this man was talking on his mobile phone, which is the usual case when you see people apparently talking to themselves. But as I drew closer I could see enough to tell that this wasn’t the case. Now, I should say here that encountering someone talking to themselves—or to some invisible interlocutor—on my walks is not exactly unusual, and my normal routine on these occasions is simply to walk briskly past, without making eye contact or engaging with them in any way.

But the closer I got, the more agitated this man appeared to get, and the more it became evident that he was talking to me. The approaching train was getting louder, but nevertheless I could hear at least some of what he was saying:

“George? Is that you? Oh God, George, I’m sorry. I thought…they said…Oh God, George…”

He clearly had me mistaken for someone called George, someone he was clearly far from happy to see. He started to cower against the wall of the bridge, which was beginning to tremble as the train neared us. I carried on walking, by now starting to get a little unnerved and wishing to be past as soon as possible.

I drew within ten yards of the man and he started shouting at me, almost pleading. “No, George, I’m sorry, I’m…it’s all there, George, it’s all still there. 21 Owen Street, George, I promise. Oh God no, George, no…!”

             He pushed back against the bricks, apparently trying to get away from me, though prevented from doing so by the sturdy construction. But then I noticed something that I had not previously seen in all my nightly crossings: the part of the bridge wall where he was standing appeared to be in need of repair, and as he leaned back on it, it began to move. The train was by now loud in my ears and would be passing beneath the bridge at any moment. The bridge rumbled and shook, and the stones and bricks behind the man started to shift more alarmingly than before. A top-stone fell from the bridge, down the steep embankment and, suddenly afraid this man might actually fall, I moved towards him to try and stop him.

             “Get back from the wall!”, I shouted. “Look, it’s starting to…”

             I tried to grab him, but he lurched away, scrabbling at the wall with his hands and the heels of his feet, desperate, it seemed, to get away from me. His face held an expression I have never before seen, and can only hope that one day I will be able to forget; abject terror, his eyes wider than ought to have been possible, his skin as white as the full moon, and with a wildness, a madness that has brought me to fevered wakefulness on a few nights since then.

             “Nooooo!” he yelled, looking directly into my eyes, and as he did so, the bricks behind him gave way, and he tumbled down into the blackness beyond, at the same moment as the train thundered under the bridge. There was a brief scream, cut off by a sickening thud.

             My own momentum, as I desperately tried to stop him falling, had caused me to fall to the pavement, and for long moments I lay, breathless, as the train raced away into the distance. I came to my senses with a sudden jolt, realizing what had happened. I couldn’t bear to think what I might see if I looked over the edge of the bridge and down onto the tracks, and didn’t want to find out. Some way along the road there is a telephone box, so I stumbled to my feet and ran towards it. The strange thing is that I had a mobile phone in my pocket; clearly, at the only time in my life when I have genuinely needed to make an emergency 999 call, I forgot about this relatively recent piece of technology and reverted to an instinct from much longer ago.

             I dialled 999, then had a moment of uncertainty: who should I ask for? Police? Ambulance? Maybe even the Fire Service? In the end, when asked, I shouted “Police!”, and when put through, described as best I could—which wasn’t very well, I’m sure; I was hyperventilating and shaking—what had happened. They told me to stay where I was and a car would be with me in a few minutes.

             I put down the receiver and leaned against the side of the kiosk, waiting for the police to arrive. Another moment of uncertainty: Should I wait? I hadn’t told them my name; they had no idea who I was. I’d made the call from a public call box; did I really want to get mixed up in all of this? What if they blamed me? Thought I’d pushed the man? Couldn’t I just leave now? I’d done my duty, anyway. I’d reported the accident. Surely that was all that would be expected of me?

             Too late: a siren, then flashing blue reflections in the windows of the houses along the road, and finally the car, speeding around the corner at the far end of the bridge, coming towards me, stopping. Behind it, a paramedic car.

             “Hello Sir. Did you make the emergency call?” A female police officer, just putting on her hat, yellow fluorescent clothing glowing.

             I tried to answer but felt like I had a mouthful of dust. I cleared my throat. “Yes. Yes, it was me. The man…he went over the wall. I tried to stop him but the wall…it collapsed and he fell. I couldn’t reach him, he just…”

             I realized I was babbling and stopped. She was nodding patiently, understandingly. “Okay, just take your time. What’s your name?”

             I told her; she introduced herself as Police Constable Chand. She opened the rear door and invited me to take a seat inside: invited in the way that all police officers invite one to do something: with no question of there actually being any alternative. Her male colleague sat at the wheel and nodded perfunctorily to me through the rear-view mirror.

             After a few minutes, more emergency vehicles arrived, and bodies started to emerge. The bridge was cordoned off with warning tape. I saw people begin to examine the bridge, and try to find a way down the embankment to the line.

             PC Chand got back into the passenger seat and turned to face me.

             “We’ll take you home now, Simon, and we’ll need to get a preliminary statement from you, if you feel up to it?”

             I was feeling a little less shaky by now, so I agreed. Besides which, I wanted to get it over with.

            

             I made cups of tea all round, and we sat in the lounge. “So, in your own time, just tell us exactly what happened. Try not to leave anything out, but if necessary we can come back to you for any details you might miss.”

             I took a sip of hot, sweet tea, then a deep breath which was almost steady, and ran through the whole thing, with as much detail as I could remember.

             As I was coming towards the end of my account, PC Chand’s radio crackled out an incomprehensible message. She excused herself and left the room, leaving me to continue my account with her colleague, still as amicably uncommunicative as he had been in the car.

             I’d hardly had chance to add further to my statement when she returned, with an expression on her face I found difficult to read. She asked her colleague to join her in the other room and excused herself, and him, again. After two or three minutes, they returned.

             “I’ve had a message from the team back at the bridge,” she began, quite deliberately. “They assure me that there is no body on the line, no signs of injury, the train driver did not report a collision, and he has been contacted and saw nothing unusual at the bridge. Also,” she paused for a moment, watching for my reaction carefully, “also, the bridge is perfectly intact, from one end to the other. No signs of any missing bricks, no collapsed wall. Nothing.”

             No one said anything for long seconds, both police officers because they were watching and waiting for my response; me because I had no idea how to respond. Finally I found some words. “Well clearly they’ve missed something, then. Maybe I’ve not got the place quite right. They can’t have checked the whole bridge, there must be somewhere with bricks missing; I saw them fall off myself. And as for the man, well, maybe the train missed him and he ran away.”

             “You said you’d heard a scream and,” she broke off and checked her notebook, though I had the distinct feeling that this was less an aide memoire and more a theatrical action or one borne of long habit, “and a ‘horrible thud’.”

             “Well, yes,” I stammered, “but I could have been mistaken. Or perhaps the train only glanced him and he was still able to move.”

             “You see,” she continued, “the thing is, just the other side of the wall of the bridge, at the top of the embankment, is a fence. You couldn’t have seen it in the dark. It’s quite a high chain-link fence. Strong. No way that anyone falling through or off the wall of bridge could get over it. Or under. Or through. The fence is perfectly intact everywhere.”

             I’d run out of ‘yes buts’; I could do nothing but stare at her mutely.

             She smiled, with only a little condescension. The warmth in her expression and the informality of her manner had now disappeared. “Sir,” (where was the ‘Simon’ from earlier?), “I’d like to believe that you’re not making this up and genuinely believe what you’ve told us. It was obvious as soon as we arrived that you appeared to be very shaken. But the team are quite certain than no accident or incident has taken place on the bridge or on the rail lines; there is no evidence other than your own account, of something which, to be fair, you say happened in a very dark area, when there was a lot of noise and commotion from the train and the bridge. I’d also like to believe you were simply mistaken in what you thought you’d seen, as wasting police time is a serious offence. On that basis, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and leave the matter here and say goodnight. We’ll see ourselves out.”

             It will probably not come as a great surprise when I tell you that I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. In fact, I don’t think I slept for more than two or three hours during the night. The events of the evening rolled over and over in my mind like the waves on a rough, grey sea, whipped up by an unceasing hurricane, crashing against a rocky shore. When I finally nodded off, my sleep was light and troubled by dreams, some accurate recollections of what I’d seen, others mangled, surreal versions. Sometimes I dreamt the man had climbed back up the bank, sometimes he’d bounced off the train and run away, laughing, into the night. And in some—the worst—I’d climbed down after him and seen his bloodied, dismembered remains on the track. In most, though horrifically torn, he was still alive, grinning up at me.

Finally, around six a.m., I climbed wearily, bleary-eyed, out of bed, shuffled into the kitchen and made myself a strong coffee to punch away the cobwebs of the night’s terrors. One thing that remained from my nightmares was a detail that I had forgotten the previous evening, and which wasn’t part of my account to the police. The man had mentioned an address: 21 Owen Street. I sipped my coffee and wondered whether I ought to call the police to let them know. They could call at the address to see if anyone was missing. Surely they wouldn’t mind my doing that, just to be on the safe side? Then I thought about last night and the way they had both looked at me. It was obvious they thought I was lying, for whatever reason, despite PC Chand’s words. The look in her eyes, which I remembered with acute clarity, was one of annoyance and pity. They thought I was just another fantasist, an attention-seeker: a nuisance and a time-waster. I wasn’t prepared to be humiliated again, let alone run the risk of getting myself into trouble if I went back to them.

All day long I mulled this over; part of me—the same part which only last night had been suggesting I didn’t wait around for the police to arrive—told me I should be leaving it alone, as it really was none of my business. But another part, the part which had the upper hand for most of the day, nagged at me to do something; to prove them wrong, show them that I hadn’t been either imagining things or fabricating them.

In the afternoon, I finally made a decision; I wasn’t going back to talk to the police about the piece of information I’d remembered, as I didn’t want to risk getting into any trouble myself if they thought I was being a nuisance. But I could go to the address myself first, couldn’t I? If I found out that the man I knew I’d seen the previous night lived there but was missing unexpectedly, well, then they’d be forced to believe me and I would have the pleasure, I hoped, of hearing them apologize to me for disregarding my account of events. And also, I thought, what about the poor man who fell over the bridge? He might still be out there, wandering around, maybe with a head injury that had rendered him unable to remember who he was or where he lived.

I Googled Owen Street and discovered that it was only a few hundred yards from the railway bridge on Fentham Road, scene of the previous night’s events. Early in the evening, I set out for Owen Street. Rather than going straight there, however, I first wanted to visit the bridge again.

It was somewhat earlier—and hence somewhat lighter—than it had been when I’d been there the night before, and I was still able to see quite clearly the place where the man had been standing, and where he had fallen through the wall. There was nothing there, just as the police had said. No gaps, no stones or bricks askew. Not a single sign that anything was amiss. I came to the place and looked closely at the mortar between the bricks, running my finger along the sandy grooves. There was nothing to suggest that these bricks hadn’t been in place since the bridge’s construction.

An unpleasant coldness was creeping into me as I scanned the rest of the bridge, uncomprehendingly. It simply wasn’t possible that I’d imagined what I’d seen. I know from time to time while I walk, I do let my thoughts go on their own wanderings, but I’ve never had any daydream that has approached the level of detail and realness, and left such strong and clear memories, as what had happened here less than 24 hours earlier. I don’t mind admitting, I was rattled. For a few minutes, I just stood, occasionally wandering along the bridge, then back, not really knowing what to do, or what to think. Finally I realized there was only one thing I could do: Go to 21 Owen Street.

Owen Street was typical of the area; a single straight road, ending in a cul-de-sac, lined with tall Victorian terraced houses on both sides, running alongside the railway line, a few hundred yards south of the bridge. It was clear from the multiple doorbells and proliferation of cars per house that most of these had been converted into flats, apartments and bedsits, as with most such houses in the area. Number 21 was towards the closed end of the short road. Unlike its neighbours, this house had no car in front, still had its front garden—albeit unruly and unkempt—unconverted to parking space, and as I walked up the short path, I could see that the door had only a single bell beside it. The house was not in good repair; all of the paintwork was peeling, and bare wood showed in many places. The gingerbread decoration under the eaves was crumbling as though it really was gingerbread; there was a general air of interminable decline about the place.

I was suddenly anxious and stopped short of the door. What the hell was I doing? And what would I say if someone answered the door? Suddenly the whole thing felt ridiculous. What if they called the police? Might I be committing another crime just by being here? Could this be harassment? No, surely not: this was the first time I’d called. On the other hand, what if the man lived here and his family were concerned about his absence? Surely this was the right thing to do?

Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached out and pressed the doorbell. I didn’t hear anything inside and wondered if it were broken, not unlikely given the condition of the rest of the house. Maybe it was a sign that I should just call it a day and forget about the whole thing before any more harm was done?

While I was considering whether to ring again, knock, or simply leave, I saw movement through the murky, frosted pane of glass in the door. A few moments later I heard a quite, high-pitched, elderly voice.

“Just a moment, please.”

A security chain being engaged, a deadbolt lock being opened, a scrape of the doorframe, and a two-inch gap opened between door and jamb.

“Hello? Who is it, please?” The voice of an elderly lady. High, quiet, but with a degree of firmness.

I had another anxious moment: if she decided to call the police, she’d give my name. Since I’d given my real name to the police the previous evening, they might be able to connect her call to me. I didn’t want that, so after a moment’s pause, hoping she wouldn’t notice, I gave my name as ‘Simon Jones’. I gave a brief explanation of why I was calling. “I was just wondering if this man might have lived here, or if you knew who he might be?” I finished.

The door closed without the lady speaking. I don’t blame her, I thought. No doubt I’ve scared her with my crazy story and any second now she’s going to lock the door and call the police.

She didn’t. She disengaged the security chain and opened the door fully.

The voice had given me an impression of one of those ladies who, whilst elderly, still retain a certain strength and fortitude. The reality was somewhat less than that. She was no more than five feet in height and I very much doubt she’d have troubled the scales to register more than six stones. Her hair was white rather than grey, and not a square centimetre of her face was free of deep wrinkles. Her hands were liver-spotted and frail, and she wore a loose cardigan over a faded brown dress. Thick stockings and slippers completed the image of a lady in her dotage, and I would have assumed her mental deterioration to be roughly on a par with the physical, but for one thing: her eyes. She wore no spectacles and there was no sign of her having removed them, or being in need of them. She look me up, down and through with a pair of pale grey yet clear and focused eyes, which gave every indication of being attached to a mind still in fine running order.

“Don’t stand there in the doorway,” she scolded, making me jump slightly as I realized my thoughts had been wandering, “you’re letting the cold in and the warm out. Come in and let me get this door shut.”

I did as she instructed and found myself in a high-ceilinged hallway, a steep staircase running up one side. The white chair of a stairlift sat at the bottom of the staircase, incongruous amongst the many fixtures and fittings, which, if not original, could nevertheless surely not have been any more recent than the ’30s. Faded pictures and photos in heavy, dark wooden frames covered much of the walls, and from what I could see of the wallpaper, an indistinguishable pattern in shades of brown, that was probably a good thing. The house had a smell that was familiar to me from countless visits to my grandmother’s house in the past: furniture polish and lavender.

“Come through,” said the old lady, and walked down the hall and through a door to the right. I followed her into a small, cozy sitting room, with décor much in the same style as the hallway. A couple of ancient-looking easy chairs with high backs flanked the fireplace, in which I was mildly surprised to see burned a real coal fire. A gilded mirror hung over the fireplace, and various ornaments and knick-knacks filled the mantel. In the centre was a white-faced clock in a wooden housing. It ticked the seconds past, a homely sound. Many more photographs peppered the room: on the walls, on shelves, on a lace-covered mahogany table, on a matching sideboard. This room felt like an extension of the old lady’s mind, filled with memories of a long life.

Even before she sat, it was clear to see which was her chair; of the two, one was unaccompanied but the other stood with a magazine rack on the side closest to the fire, and a small table on the other, on which were an empty mug, a paperback book—upturned to hold a place—and a glass with a half-finger of some amber liquid.

“Please sit,” she said, indicating the other chair. “Would you like something to drink?” She stepped softly over to the sideboard and opened the sliding front. Inside, even by the dim light of the room, I immediately spotted the unmistakable shape of a bottle of Old Pulteney. I also saw a Macallan lurking, and also what I thought might be a Balvenie. Well, well.

I asked for a glass of the Old Pulteney, which she poured me. I took the generous measure from her slightly shaky hand and looked at her appraisingly. She seemed to notice my quizzical look and I saw one side of her mouth turn up slightly in a smile, but she said nothing until she had eased herself down into her chair, picked up her own glass and held it towards me. “Up yours,” she said, and as I clinked my glass against hers, I swear her eyes actually twinkled.

“My name,” she continued, after taking a sip of her drink and holding it in her mouth for a second appreciatively, “is Emily Foster. You may call me Emily, if you wish.”

The whisky had worked its usual magic on me and I felt warm and relaxed. “And you may, of course, call me Simon,” I smiled. “I’m very grateful to you for inviting me in. I wasn’t sure whether I should call, but I thought it was only right that I did something. Do you know who the man might have been? He mentioned this address, you see. So I thought he might live here.”

“There’s no-one here but me, Mr. Jones,” she said, ignoring my earlier invitation to use my first name. Then looked towards a small, framed portrait photograph on the end of the mantel closest to her, “My husband died fifteen years ago, so there’s been no-one but me since then.”

I felt a peculiar mix of relief and disappointment. It seemed as though my brief role as amateur detective was already coming to an end. “But why,” I asked, more to myself than to her, “would he have said anything about this address if he was unconnected with it?”

“Perhaps he was talking about a different Owen Street; in a different town,” she suggested. “There must be many, Mr. Jones.”

It was a very good point, and something I should have realized for myself. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Birmingham’s Owen Street was close by. Perhaps this man didn’t even come from Birmingham. I had made too many assumptions, and I felt stupid, out-thought by an octogenarian. “Well, if you have no idea who this man might have been, then I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time,” I said, quite eager now to remove myself as soon as possible, though regretting not being able to finish the excellent single malt.

Mrs. Foster smiled at me again in the same lop-sided fashion. “Oh, I think I might know who he was,” she said, and must have known the effect it would have on me.

I took a sip from my whisky and sat forward in the chair. “Who?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. I could feel my pulse increasing.

Mrs. Foster didn’t reply. Instead she put down her glass, pushed herself up from the chair with a soft grunt, and walked over to the sideboard. On the right-hand side, next to the section serving as her drinks cabinet, was a smaller door, which opened to reveal several shelves. Each of these held a stack of photograph albums. She pondered for a moment, then reached down to the lowest shelf and selected an album from the half-dozen or so piled upon it.

She closed the door and returned to her seat. Slowly, with deliberation, she turned the pages, taking care that the tissue-paper inserts stayed flat against the photographs. Presently she stopped, folded back the tissue paper, and handed the open album to me, pointing a pale finger at a particular picture.

“Was this the man, do you think?” she said, and there was a note in her voice that gave me the distinct impression that her question was asked merely out of politeness, and she knew very well that it was.

He was a little younger in the photograph than I remembered him, but there was absolutely no doubt in my mind: the same round face, the same dark eyes, the same rather stocky build. It was the man I had failed to prevent falling onto the railway tracks last night.

“Who is he?” I asked, with a thrill at the realization that this was the first time I had held in my hands the concrete evidence that would prove to those skeptical police that I had been telling the truth.

Mrs. Foster sipped at her whisky, looking at me, then turned away and stared into the crackling fire. She didn’t answer. She appeared to be utterly lost within herself. I waited, trying to be patient but desperate to know the identity of the man, and his connection with this house.

She continued to gaze into the mesmerizing flames, and they flickered across the crinkled skin of her face and sparked in her eyes.

I could wait no longer. “Mrs. Foster? The man, the man in the photograph; who is he?”

At last she turned back towards me and met my eyes with hers, which seemed to have harvested some of the firelight and were now shining it back at me.

“He was my grandfather,” she said.

             I find it difficult to put into words how I felt as she spoke. It would sound such a horrendous cliché to say my blood ran cold…though that’s how I felt; it would sound hackneyed to say my head swam…though it did. It would be unoriginal in the extreme if I were to tell you that I thought I must have misheard…though my baffled, quizzical expression must have betrayed to her that I was thinking precisely that.

             “Your…your grandfather?” I asked, hoping to hear her laughingly correct herself.

             She didn’t. “Yes, my grandfather, Albert John Foster.

             Suddenly I realized I was being rather foolish. I laughed, trying to keep the tremor from my voice. “Well then, obviously that wasn’t the man. I mean, I have to say it does look like him, but of course it couldn’t be. I don’t want to be nosy, but your grandfather must have died…well, quite some time ago, I imagine?”

             “1914, she replied, just a few months after the start of the First World War.” She looked at me steadily, those pale yet intense eyes seeking to read my thoughts.

             If they had been able to drill into my mind—and perhaps they did, as she seemed to have a clear understanding of what I was thinking—they would have witnessed a tussle between my rational, logical instincts, the gut feeling that the photograph did indeed match the man I had seen, albeit impossibly, and the desire to be able to believe this engaging lady and not contemplate the possibility that, despite appearances, she was suffering from some kind of dementia.

             Mrs. Foster got up and fetched the bottle of whisky from the sideboard, topped up my glass and her own, left the bottle on the small table by her chair, and eased herself down again.

             “Perhaps, Mr Jones,” she began, after throwing a few more coals onto the fire, “it would be useful if I told you a little about my grandfather.”

             I had no idea whether that would help or not, but just at that moment I could think of no reason to disagree, and at the very least it might give me time to sort out my own confused thoughts. I nodded slowly.

             She took a long, savouring sip of whisky, cleared her throat, and began.

            

             “My grandfather was born in 1885, in this very house. He was brought up in the area, went to school just down the road. Wilson Street, do you know it? The school is long gone, of course; there are some of those swanky new flats now where the school stood. Anyway, the family next door had a son, George, of about the same age, and he and my grandfather were inseparable. They went to and from school together every day, they played together every night and every weekend. By all accounts, they were quite well known in the area. A right couple of spivs they were too, always up to some scheme or other. As you can imagine, money was tight in those days, but this pair, Albert and George, they were always finding ways to make a few pennies extra; finding scrap and selling it, mending things, cleaning boots, scrubbing down horses, you name it.

             “As they got older, these schemes began to get more elaborate, and by the time they left school at fourteen, they were already making more money than their fathers. But unlike most kids, then or now, they’d not spent a penny of it—what they had left of it after putting something in the pot at home, of course. They saved it, every last penny. And as soon as they left school, they bought a bicycle and a knife-sharpening stone. I don’t suppose you know what the old knife sharpeners used to do, do you? Well, they’d ride around on their bicycles, shouting out all along the street, and people would come out with their knives. These bicycles could be stood up on a stand so that when they were pedaled, the big sharpening stone spun round. Then they sharpened the knives on it. Albert and George, they took it in turns and rode round with that thing day after day, all weathers, all over Birmingham. And as you can imagine, Mr. Jones, there were a lot of knives and blades in Birmingham!

             “After a year, they’d saved up enough to buy another rig, so then the two of them could both work at the same time. And neither of them was afraid of hard work. Five years later they were employing five knife grinders, they had the city covered, and they didn’t have to go out and sharpen knives themselves any more. They got into all sorts of other things, services like; and they set themselves up with premises. They had money coming in every week, and things must’ve looked pretty rosy right then; twenty-one years old, both married with young children, money in the bank, and nothing ahead but more and more of the same.”

             At this point she stopped to take a sip of whisky. As she did so, she smiled at the glass, then at me.

             “Albert had always a bit of a one for the demon drink, though…something I seem to have inherited.” She smiled to herself briefly. “George, he was teetotal, but Albert had always liked a drink and now he had enough money to drink pretty well as much as he wanted, didn’t he? At first it didn’t really matter; sometimes he’d come to work late in the morning; sometimes he’d need an hour or two before he could really do much. After a while, it went from coming in late to sometimes not coming in at all.

             “George did his best for Albert; he filled in for Albert when he wasn’t around, or wasn’t able to function. When he started not showing up, George would close up and go and look for him, usually finding him in bed, or occasionally sleeping on the sitting room floor if he’d not managed to get up the stairs or if his wife hadn’t allowed it. He tried to look after Annie, too, made sure she was okay for money even when Albert had spent what they allowed each to take from the profits.

             “Despite all this, the business continued to grow, and George insisted that Albert got his share, even though he was doing less and less to earn it. I don’t know if he ever resented that, but he didn’t do anything to change it.

             “Then, of course, the war came. By this time, Albert was more of a liability than anything; he’d turn up only once in a while, and when he did, he did nothing more than sit slumped in a chair and drink tea, or something stronger.

             “George had always been a patriotic fellow, from what I was told, and he must have realized that he couldn’t stand and watch others go and fight, even though he was running the business single-handed and looking after his best friend. But how could he do it? He couldn’t leave Albert in charge, the man just wasn’t capable.

             “I imagine he wrestled with that for a long time, but in the end his conscience won and he decided that the only way to arrange things was to sell the business as a going concern and bank the proceeds. That way, at least the money would be safe until he returned, and then he and Albert could start up again.

             “By this time the business had grown so big that it was worth over five thousand pounds. That, as I’m sure you can work out, was a huge amount of money then, Mr. Jones. He told Albert what he’d done only once the sale was complete. He made arrangements with the bank to pay Albert a reasonable sum each week, enough for him to live comfortably, but without allowing him to drink himself to death. Well, Albert didn’t like that one bit, and they had what I reckon was probably their first, maybe their only argument, and it was a blazing one. When George left to join up, Albert refused to go and see him off. Annie came, but not Albert.”

             She paused, and I could see a strange, distant look come into her eyes, as though a cloud were passing. “Albert, my grandfather, he did a very wicked thing, Mr. Jones. Something I’m not proud of, something I’m ashamed to tell you, even though I never knew him. While George was away fighting for King and country, Albert stole everything. Drunk he may have been, but he was canny enough. He found out that George hadn’t changed the terms of the account with the bank; Albert was a signatory to the account on equal foting with George. I haven’t a clue why George never changed that; maybe he forgot; maybe he didn’t want to think of his childhood friend reduced to being so untrustworthy that he would need to do it. Maybe he thought Albert wasn’t in a fit state to do anything about it. But whatever the reason, Albert found out, and he took it all.”

             She gave herself a top-up and leaned back in her chair. I could see that the telling had tired her. It hadn’t taken long, but it was clear that there was still a lot of pent-up emotion there, the weight of a lifetime of knowledge about the sins of her predecessor.

I gave her a while to recover herself. When I thought she was steadier, I asked her, “what happened to him?”

             She took a deep breath before replying. “Nobody knew about the money until after. Two days after Christmas 1914, exactly 100 years ago as of yesterday, he went out to the pub in the evening, as usual. The regulars there said he’d been there, throwing his money around, buying everyone drinks and throwing more than enough of it down his own neck. He left around nine pm, and…”

             She needed to go no further. I already knew: “…and he fell on the railway line and was killed,” I finished.

             Mrs Foster appeared to have shrunk even more over the last few minutes and now looked a tiny thing in her chair. She nodded. “Some people said he was drunk and fell. Others said he’d been hit with sudden remorse for what he’d done and killed himself. I’ve wondered all my life what really happened. Now, well, I think now I might finally know the truth.”

             “What truth?” I asked, realizing I was talking in a whisper, barely audible above the crackling fire and ticking clock.

             Mrs Foster stood up, momentarily holding the chair-back to steady herself, and returned once more to the sideboard. From it she pulled another album and brought it back within the warmth of the fire. She paged through it until she found what she was looking for.

             “Here’s another picture you might be interested in,” she said, passing the album to me. “It’s one of Albert with George, taken when they bought their new premises.”

             I looked at the picture and there were the two young entrepreneurs, beaming at the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders, excitement and pride showing in their faces. Above the two, painted on the wall of the brick building were the words ‘Foster & King Co.’

             “Perhaps,” she added, “I can stop calling you ‘Mr. Jones’ now?”

             I stared at the picture that simply could not be. I had no words, but even if I had been able to form in my mind what I wanted to say, my mouth was as dry as the Gobi. I wanted to reply, wanted to close the album, throw it in the fire, run away, leave that house, get that smell of lavender and furniture polish out of my head, never come back.

             But I did none of that. I sat and stared at the picture as though it had caught my gaze like a magnet and there was no way of releasing myself.

As I looked from Albert John Foster—knife-grinder, businessman, father, future thief, grandfather of Emily Foster, now well into her eighties—to the childhood friend whose shoulders his arm was draped over, I found myself looking at my own face.

She’d known who I was from the start, it turned out. She recognized me as soon as she saw my face. And she’d realized the significance of the date, too. Old, Emily Foster may have been, but she certainly retained more or less her allocated set of marbles. George must have come back from the front, she guessed, having heard about Albert’s treachery. He waited for Albert to come out of the pub, confronted him, there was a fight, and either Albert fell or George pushed him.

George King was my great-grandfather.

It took a while for me to decide to send for it, and it took a while to come, but it arrived this morning and I have it now in front of me: George King’s army service record. I knew nothing about him, hadn’t even known his name or where he was from. But I’m looking now at this simple piece of paper, at the few words upon it that I’ve now read for the dozenth time, knowing, yet not wanting to know, what they’re telling me.

65374 King, George Pte    Killed in action     Dec 27 1914

So Emily Foster was right, though not in the way she thought: George King did come back.