Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Beatrice expected to need her trusty A–Z map book to locate the address Neil had given her when he’d called to say his grandfather would be delighted to meet her, and asked whether she was free on Sunday. Her carefully worded email to the Irish National Adoption Contact Preference Register had left her Hotmail account several days before, but from what little she knew about bureaucracy she wasn’t expecting a response any time soon, so she’d taken Neil up on his offer – she might as well continue with her own investigation in the meantime.
As it turned out, she did need the A–Z – but only to consult the index and flick through to the page it led her to.
It was the same page she’d consulted multiple times already, from the first time she’d used the map to find Damask Square. The paper was already dog-eared and smudged with the prints of her fingers, grimy after getting off the bus or Tube. Tracing her fingers over the grid from the top and right of the page, she found they met at a location just a couple of hundred yards from Damask Square.
It was one of the council estates just off the main road – Beatrice had walked past it almost every day. Past, but not through – there’d been no need for her to deviate from her accustomed route and, besides, part of her had felt apprehensive about venturing into the estate, as if she didn’t belong there; it wasn’t for the likes of her.
Well, all that was about to change.
Pulling back her hair and checking her reflection out of habit, Beatrice tucked the map into her purse and headed outside.
It was a hot summer day. She’d expected when she arrived in London that the city would be permanently shrouded in fog, either raining or about to rain. This spell of glorious weather had taken her by surprise, and she still never quite trusted it. Within a few feet of leaving the house, she realised she was dressed too warmly in her jeans, college sweater and sneakers, and could feel perspiration springing out on her top lip. It wasn’t quite as stifling as New York at the height of summer, but it came close.
If she went back and changed, she’d be late. She’d always had it drummed into her by her mother that lateness was the height of rudeness, and she didn’t want to be rude, so she carried on.
The council estate wasn’t bordered by a high wall; one minute she was outside of it, the next she was there, surrounded by low buildings and taller ones, squares of unkempt grass and paved areas with children’s play equipment in them.
She’d steeled herself to expect gangs of marauding youths, selling drugs or at least using them, and she found herself clutching her purse extra tightly by her side. But there were no gangs, either – just a group of women and children in their Sunday best, chattering as they strolled home from church; an old man walking a greyhound; three teenage girls in headscarves sitting on a bench, sharing a packet of sweets and giggling over their mobile phones.
The individual buildings weren’t marked on Beatrice’s map, and the estate was larger in real life than it had looked on paper. She passed Osprey Court – a long, four-storey building – and Eagle Heights – one of the tall towers – and deduced that Hawk Heights must therefore also be a tower. So she lifted her eyes and headed for the two remaining towers that loomed over her, piercing the clear blue sky.
Then she heard the sound of running feet behind her and wheeled around in fright.
But it was only Neil, hurrying towards her, smiling. He was wearing either the same shorts he’d had on the day she met him or an identical faded camouflage-print pair, and a green-and-white striped T-shirt. Beatrice felt relieved – her decision to dress down, albeit too warmly for the weather, was vindicated.
‘I thought it was you,’ Neil said. ‘I recognised your hair.’
Reflexively, Beatrice swished her ponytail – then wished she hadn’t.
‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Thanks for meeting me.’
She held out her hand for Neil to shake. He looked taken aback, but did so.
‘You’re welcome. Gramps’s flat is in that building over there – looks like you were headed in the right direction.’
‘Is he—’ Beatrice began, then stopped herself. All the questions she wanted to ask – Is he very old? Is he very poor? Why does he live here, of all places? – seemed even ruder than being late would have done. ‘Has he lived here long?’
‘Forty years,’ Neil said. ‘He and my nan moved here when it was built, with my dad and my aunties. The post-war housing boom, you know – loads of families got moved to places like this. They thought they’d really come up in the world – and not just literally.’
Wherever they were before must have been pretty bad , Beatrice thought.
‘So he must know the area backwards,’ she said.
‘Like you won’t believe. He can chatter on for hours about old Mr Miggins whose wife ran off with the window cleaner and the Hassans’ daughter who’s a professor at Cambridge now and the two babies that were swapped at birth in the… Sorry.’
Beatrice looked at him, confused, then laughed. ‘Don’t be. I wasn’t swapped at birth – I was just adopted.’
‘Okay. I was worried I’d dropped a clanger there.’ He smiled. ‘But whether he’ll know anything about this Doyle family I don’t know. Not just that it was a long time ago – from what you said it sounds like they didn’t really stick around here.’
‘No, but if he could even remember that they were here at all, it’d help. I feel like the house I’m living in might just be the one my birth mother’s family owned, but equally it might not. And if it’s not, then maybe I could find the right house and maybe there’d be someone there who’d know something.’
‘Well, I guess we’re about to find out.’
She followed Neil up a few steps to the entrance of the building and watched as he pressed buttons on the metal panel by the door, his fingers moving swiftly and surely.
The intercom crackled and he said, ‘It’s me, Gramps. Me and Beatrice.’
There was another crackle and a buzz, and Neil pushed open the door.
‘Let’s hope the lift is working,’ he said. ‘It goes on the blink sometimes and then poor Gramps is stuck up there on the seventeenth floor until they get it fixed again. His legs aren’t what they were and they’ve never been all that.’
‘What if it goes on the blink when he’s out?’ Beatrice asked.
Neil laughed. ‘Good question. Then he has to call the cavalry – that’s me – and I take him to Mum and Dad’s.’
But it turned out that the lift was working, and it bore them up to the seventeenth floor without incident. They emerged on to a concrete walkway bordered with metal railings, beyond which the ground looked very far away. Beatrice followed Neil along a row of doors, some a uniform dark red, others painted blue or yellow or stripped back to wood and varnished.
‘Here we are.’ He stopped and knocked on one of the red doors. ‘He’d have come and waited for us, but Mum nags him to keep the door closed and use the peephole.’
‘Because of burglars?’
‘Because of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He gets them in and argues with them and the poor buggers have to practically declare a hostage situation to get away.’
Whether the peephole was used or not, Beatrice couldn’t tell, but the door opened almost immediately. In front of her stood an old man – at least, he was almost standing, bent nearly double over a walking frame. He was tiny, shrunken with age, his hands mottled and bony on the metal bars, the wrists protruding from his clean white shirt thin as a bird’s legs. His hair was a shock of white, and his eyes when he peered up behind thick glasses were bright blue.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ he said, reaching out a hand to Neil as if he wanted to embrace him.
Neil leaned over the walking frame and hugged his grandfather. ‘Good to see you, Gramps. This is Beatrice, who I was telling you about. My grandfather, Jack Isaacs.’
‘Lovely to meet you, Mr Isaacs.’ Beatrice gingerly took the fragile hand in hers. ‘Thank you for inviting me over.’
‘It’s always good to see a new face. Especially a lady friend of Neil’s – and come all this way to visit me.’
Beatrice glanced at Neil, her eyebrows raised. She lived less than a mile away. And surely he hadn’t said…? Neil responded with a rueful grin and a shrug that could have meant anything.
‘I’m living in London for now,’ she explained. ‘But I’m from Philadelphia originally – hence the accent, I guess.’
It was too late to correct him on the girlfriend front – Mr Isaacs was leading the way into the flat, moving confidently but painfully slowly, the wheels of his walking frame bumping over the linoleum floor and the dark Oriental rugs that covered most of it. Beatrice followed him down the hallway and into a living room.
It was like stepping into a time capsule. The sofas and armchairs had worn cushions on wooden frames, the fabric clean and the wood lovingly polished. The walls were papered in a floral print up to the picture rail and stripes above it, the colours long since blurred by the sunlight that flooded in through the window occupying an entire wall. Heavy mahogany bookcases were stacked with worn paperbacks and thick, cloth-bound non-fiction volumes, interspersed with framed photographs, also faded to ghostliness.
‘Take a seat, my dear.’ Mr Isaacs gestured towards the sofa. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘Let me do it, Gramps,’ Neil urged. ‘You sit down and chat to Beatrice.’
Neil turned and left, and Beatrice found herself stepping towards the old man, gently taking his arm and helping him down into an armchair. She perched herself on the sofa at right angles to it, squinting against the light from the window.
‘So you’re a student of local history,’ Mr Isaacs began.
‘Um… not all local history,’ Beatrice admitted. ‘Although I’m sure it’s all completely fascinating, of course. But I’m interested in the houses around where I live – Damask Square. Where the garment district used to be. The big, old houses. Especially the one I live in. And Neil said you might be able to help.’
‘The family’s lived here in the East End for ages.’ Neil came back into the room carrying a tray holding a teapot, three cups and a plate of biscuits. ‘I see Mrs Singh down the corridor’s still baking for you, Gramps.’
‘She thinks I’ll starve if she doesn’t,’ the old man joked. ‘I think I’ll lose what I have left of my teeth if she does.’
Before the conversation could segue into chit-chat about the neighbours, Beatrice asked, ‘So your family’s lived here a long time?’
‘We came here as refugees,’ Mr Isaacs said.
Beatrice felt a chill of horror. ‘From Nazi Germany?’
‘Oh no.’ The old man sighed. ‘They weren’t the first to persecute the Jewish people, and they won’t be the last. My grandparents fled from Warsaw during the pogrom in 1881. They hoped they would be able to go on to America but they ran out of money. So they reached the East End and there they stayed.’
‘And they worked here, in Spitalfields?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Worked and lived, four or five families to a house, all employed in the garment trade.’
‘You’d call it a sweatshop, now, wouldn’t you, Gramps?’ Neil interjected.
‘You probably would. In the beginning, they were just glad to have a roof over their heads and food on the table. The industrial unrest came later – the tailors’ strike of 1889… but you’re not here for a lecture on labour relations, are you?’
‘It’s fascinating,’ Beatrice said. ‘I’d love to know more. I had no idea – I mean, I knew garment workers lived in the area, but I thought they were mostly Irish.’
Mr Isaacs laughed. ‘The Irish were long gone by the time we arrived. Most of them, at any rate. That’s how it is – people flee one problem, they find another. Sometimes they stay, sometimes they move on. And when they move on, others come. Like waves on the seashore. After the Jews, the Bangladeshis came. Then the Windrush people, then others from Eastern Europe after the Cold War. That’s how it goes.’
Beatrice felt a swell of frustration. Interesting as the old man’s stories would no doubt be for her to listen to, they weren’t leading her anywhere. She was reminded of the men in the Clonmara pub, with their meandering chatter, hoping she’d stay and drink with them so they could flirt gently with her and prove to themselves they’d still got it.
But they’d told her about the big house the Doyle couple had bought. They’d been quite definite about that.
‘So there were no Irish people left when your family came?’ she pressed.
‘Barely any – or not so’s you’d notice. Big Irish community up in Kilburn, if that’s what you’re interested in. But they came over to work on construction sites, not at sewing machines.’
The old man sipped his tea and crunched a biscuit, his palm beneath his chin to catch the crumbs.
Then his eyes seemed to clear as he remembered, and he laughed. ‘There was one couple, though. One crazy Irish couple.’
‘What happened?’ Beatrice asked.
‘It’s not funny. Not really. But we laughed about it at the time. Young pair from Dublin, they were. His great-grandparents had worked in the area back in the day when there were Irish here, silk weavers. Then they went back home and made their fortune over there.’
‘But this couple came back?’ Neil prompted.
‘They came back. Newlyweds, they were, wanting to buy a piece of their family history. More money than sense. And they bought the house where my family worked – lock, stock and barrel. Turfed us all out. But they never lived there.’
‘Why not?’ Beatrice leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, an untouched biscuit in her hand.
‘Because the war came, see. You wouldn’t want to stay in London with bombs falling round your ears when you could scarper back across the Irish Sea, would you?’
‘But you stayed? You were here in London the whole time?’
‘I was. I never got drafted because of my legs. Polio, it was, when I was a child. But I could still make boots, and I made them, from morning until night, first in that house and then in a factory nearby, once the Irish couple took it off the owner.’
‘So after they bought it, what happened? They just left it?’ Beatrice’s heart quickened.
The old man cackled. ‘I shouldn’t laugh at others’ misfortune. But it was a long time ago. The young man came over a couple of years later, to check on his investment. Never mind there was still a war on – like I told you, more money than sense. The house was still standing – but a couple of days later, he wasn’t.’
‘He was killed?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Killed by a German bomb. Leaving his young widow over in Dublin. I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t know anything more about it, really – just that. We laughed and laughed about it at the time – it was the talk of the neighbourhood. You had to get your laughs when you could in them days.’
‘Can you remember anything else at all about them?’ Beatrice urged. ‘Their name, or where the house was?’
‘Course I can,’ the old man said. ‘Doyle, they were called. He was Gerald Doyle. I don’t recall the young lady’s name, if I ever knew it. And the house was over on Damask Square, just a short walk from here. It’s still standing today. Number five, Damask Square.’