The Name We Never Mention

a short story

The bus trundles forward, stops again, caught in the snarl of traffic on Bayswater Road. Standing wedged between a man wearing a navy blue turban and a girl in what smells like a new leather jacket, I am happy to be back in London after three months working in New York. Less happy about the duty visit to Mother I am about to make.

The smell of the leather jacket triggers a memory. I am eleven years old, hurtling along a country road in Uncle Roy’s Jaguar, leather seats sticky to boy legs in shorts. It is some summer Sunday. Always the day Uncle Roy came to visit.

Except,suddenly, he didn’t.

The man in the turban gets off at the next stop, the girl in the leather jacket the one after. As she gets off I see a fifty pence piece on the floor. I pick the coin up ignoring a feeling that I should leave it there.

I get off the bus at Marble Arch. Memories of Uncle Roy, accompany me as I walk from the bus stop to Mother’s apartment. Things he’d say to me — “ a chap always needs a little cash in his pocket,” as he slipped me half a crown, taking care my parents didn’t notice. And — “there are things a fella has to know about that his ma and pa can’t teach him,” — letting me have a tiny taste of the brandy in his hip flask. And those rides in his Jaguar — fancy going for a spin, young fella? — Mother at the door calling, ‘don’t drive too fast.’ He always did. We’d tear along country roads, scaring horses in the fields, I felt like we were flying. When I spoke he listened to me. He made me feel grown-up, important. And then he was gone.

Mother lives in a vast old Victorian building as long as a row of suburban semis. Once a hotel, it was converted to luxury apartments in the eighties. The entrance hall and the corridors are always empty. Mother talks about her neighbours — Mrs Creasy-Samuels with her asthmatic Pekingese, Mr Lowe who taught history at Charterhouse school, the spinster Elliot sisters and their charity work — I’ve never seen any of them.

The door is barely open when she calls, ‘Gordon, is that you?’ ‘Who were you expecting? The Holy Ghost?’ ‘Don’t be blasphemous and hurry up. You are late and I want my tea.’

In the kitchen, I fill the kettle, tipping a little water onto the geranium in the window- she never remembers to water houseplants. Ham sandwiches and a shop-bought cake are ready. I take the good China from the cabinet that stood in the kitchen in Melton House when I was a boy. I can see Uncle Roy leaning against it, telling tall tales of his life in London and his trips to the south of France while Mother buttered bread.

Mother had a heart attack last year. Not a major one, thank god. But the doctors issued medications and warnings, suggested lifestyle changes she hasn’t implemented. It’s another thing we don’t talk about. All the time I was in New York I was afraid of the phone call from a London hospital followed by the frantic booking of a flight to a bedside vigil. Thank God it didn’t come. But it made me admit time could be short. There are things I don’t want to leave unsaid.

As I slice the St Michael’s coffee and walnut cake, arrange it on the cake stand, I’m back in Melton House.

I’m Thirteen years old, wondering why I have been sent up to my room instead of sitting down to tea when I am not in disgrace. I crouch at the top of the stairs, listening to raised voices from the sitting room — Father and Uncle Roy, who’s been staying for a week.

‘The money was on my desk when I went into town this morning, gone when I came back. Muriel and Gordon were at the dentist till four, so the only person in the house all afternoon was you.’

‘Listen, old man, I am a bit desperate for the readies just now, I admit it, but I am not a bloody thief!’

I watched the road down which he must come every Sunday for weeks after that. No one explained why he never came back. Four Months later Uncle Roy was killed in a car accident on a narrow twisting mountain road, driving from France to Italy.

‘Why are you looking at me that way?’ Mother demands as I carry the loaded tray into her over-furnished, over ornamented sitting room. ‘If you want to ask a question, ask, don’t stand there looking it at me.’

I have so many questions — Was there ever any evidence that he took the money? Is that why he never came back? Why didn’t you speak in your brother’s defence when Father accused him? I don’t know how to ask any of them. I don’t know how to say a name that has not been spoken in our family since 1969.

I hand her a cup of tea, offer sandwiches like a Bloomsbury hostess, all the while looking for a way back from the many diversions Mother set up to lead us away from Uncle Roy. But was it just Mother? Didn’t I have a hand in their creation too? Why else have I never asked my questions before? Why have I accepted the family silence about the man I loved like a second father?

I cut the cake, give Mother a slice, and think of the fifty pence coin in my pocket. I almost didn’t pick it up, feeling that some things are not meant to be disturbed. But if not me, someone else would have to.

I say his name aloud for the first time since 1969.

Mother crumbles the cake on her plate but doesn’t eat it. ‘Do you ever wish you could turn the clock back, Gordon? Undo certain -mistakes?’

I can’t reply. I just sit, turning and turning the fifty pence coin in my pocket, wishing I had never been the one to pick it up.