The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [7]
I stand there trying to get Eulalie to listen to me. Plainly she isn’t suited to do any work anymore, if she ever was. She’s useless, and I’m just praying to squeeze some of the last brain activity out of her when in comes a short, skinny, sickly looking black-haired fellow in shirtsleeves who takes a piece of brown bread out of his tucker bag, pulls the hard crust off it, and drops it in the old lady’s lap. She looks down at it and nods, like at an old friend. The fellow stands behind her and watches me. He seems a likely candidate for my heir. I ask my question: “Do either of you know a Mr. Barnabas Davies?”
Eulalie goggles at me, but then just gnaws at her bread and looks at her feet. The bloke opens the negotiations with “What if we do?” and I counter with the industry-standard “Well, then I have another question for you.” He has to pose a bit more, so we get a “Who are you anyway?” which always earns a “That depends, don’t it?” Finally, we arrive at “She might know of Davies. But if he wants her now, it’s a little late, isn’t it?”
“You never know, son, I work for very powerful men,” and he chews on that for a bit, and away we go: yeah, yeah, Davies is a name the young fellow knows, but still Eulalie don’t say a word, just takes a bottle of beer from her young man.
The fellow starts coughing up pieces of the story, here and there, for me to gather up and fit together. This one, Tommy, is one of Eulalie Caldwell’s brats, one of eleven that saw the light of day and cleared their first year. Tommy knows the name Barnabas Davies only because Eulalie used to “babble on and on” about Barnabas when Tommy was a boy. “Barnabas: the one true love of her life, the man who would’ve made her a happy woman in London, but it wasn’t meant to be. Christ, what a song.” I’m thinking, That was an easy case, I have my boy and now we get on to changing his name, job done. But no: her next man was Tommy’s father, and he stayed around longer than Davies had, living with her and the kids for a few months of Tommy’s life, even returning later on to father child number four, but he was never of the “quality” of the mysterious Davies, come and gone like the wind, promising, as he set off to sea, to return for the lovely nineteen-year-old he’d spent a weekend with (on). No, it turns out Tommy is child number two. He has a full sister (child four), and there’s a flock of half siblings, tragic stories he now wants to share with me since I’m there and he thinks I asked, and to which I listened with no interest as they had no bearing on my business: a long and tedious recital of stillborns, hunger, broken promises of advancement from this or that lying toff, here an unwilling but profitable prostitute, there a nasty marriage, one boy killed at Gallipoli, another working at a station in the north, all the way down to the thirteen-year-old girl standing right there in front of me (no name in my records).
Of course, how damned dull this all was, like poverty always is, and when Tommy was done singing all this, we worked back to the main question. Where was Tommy’s older sibling, sired by Davies, Eulalie’s child number one? And only then does Eulalie look up at me, and she starts to make an odd noise and then she’s crying, by which I mean her nose is dripping like a tap and her lips are shaking, but no tears are coming. “Oh, Paul,” she says, and you can’t even imagine how angry Tommy looks—not at me, but at the drunk hag sitting in front of him who only now has managed to put two words together. “Shut your mouth, why don’t you? Get off your date and clean something, you bloody bitch,” and the crying woman manages to shuffle out of the room, with the youngest girl following her out, calling Tommy nasty names.
Back to the raging, wheezing little man’s tale: Paul Barnabas Caldwell was a “year or two older” than Tommy, so that meant born in 1892 or 1893, which fit my bill. Tommy hated Paul. He grew up loving him, of course—he’s your older brother, you love