Long Time Coming: A Novel - By Robert Goddard Page 0,1
the Mayfair gambling den where he happened to be hunched over the baccarat table one night in the autumn of 1940. Meanwhile, my father, favoured, he’d often point out, with a less expensive education than his brother, worked for a shipping agent in Dar-es-Salaam and fought for his country with the Eighth Army in north Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he transferred to the agent’s London office, where my mother was working as a typist. Courtship, marriage, parenthood and suburbia duly followed.
My earliest memories are of our house in Stoneleigh. It backed on to the railway line and on fine mornings Mum would take me into the garden after Dad had left for the station so we could wave to him as the Waterloo train rumbled past. The scene changed for good when Grandma and Grandad died within a few months of each other the summer I was eight. Dad inherited what he’d never describe more specifically than ‘a tidy sum’. It was enough for him to quit the shipping business and buy a guesthouse in Paignton, the seaside resort where we’d spent several summer holidays. He needed a lot of persuading by Mum to take the plunge, though. She was always the more enterprising of the two. My father was a cautious man, fretful with the slightest encouragement. But deceitful? I’d never have said so. Until now.
Paignton was a wonderful place to be a child. Zanzibar, as Dad named the guesthouse, was only a few minutes from the beach. Sun, sea and sand were my summer-long companions. The sideshows on the pier; travelling fairs on the green; open-top bus rides to Torquay; rock-pooling at low tide: the real winner from the move to Devon was me.
Ordinarily, I’d have needed to fix that thought firmly in my mind when I got off the train in the middle of a chill grey March afternoon. Torbay Road, running between the station and the Esplanade, is a depressing drag to the adult eye of bucket-and-spade shops and slot-machine joints. A walk along it, rucksack on back, suitcase in hand, had promised to test my spirits. Never were the oily charms of Houston likely to seem more bountiful.
As it was, though, I barely noticed my surroundings as I made my way towards the seafront. A dead uncle was waiting for me at Zanzibar. And a mother with a lot of explaining to do.
Zanzibar started life as one of a terrace of Victorian houses in a cul-de-sac off the Esplanade. Like most of its neighbours, it subsequently acquired the standard trappings of the local tourist trade: dormer window in the roof, striped awnings over the other windows and porch, palm tree out front (supplemented in the season with pot plants and hanging baskets), AA and other accreditations prominently displayed, illuminated vacancies sign suspended in the ground-floor bay. It had been my home from the age of eight to eighteen and in many ways still was. It was stuffed full of memories. It held a part of me, however far or long I strayed.
The awnings were currently retracted. The palm wore a weather-beaten look. And the fully lit NO VACANCIES did not signal brisk business. But it did have one guest, of course – one very special guest. Unless you regarded him as a member of the family, which I wasn’t sure I did.
My mother must have been looking out for me. The front door opened as I approached and she appeared, pinnied and permed as ever, smiling her wide, toothy smile at the sight of her only child. ‘There you are, dear,’ she called. ‘Come along in.’
We hugged in the hallway, the lingering fragrance of her lily-of-the-valley soap summoning the past with instant ease. How had the journey been? Was I hungry? What could she get me? It was the usual home-coming litany, recited with no reference to the news she’d broken over the phone. I opted for tea and a slice of Dundee cake and followed her into the kitchen, which Bramble, the waste-of-space cat she’d acquired since my father’s death, vacated as we entered, with the hint of a glare in my direction.
‘Where is he, then?’ I asked as she switched the kettle on, sensing she might launch blithely off into a series of questions about my career and the former fiancée she’d never met (and now never would) if I didn’t set the agenda.
‘You mean Eldritch?’
‘No, Mum. I mean the other ex-con you’ve taken in.’