The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [126]
‘So what happened?’
‘Marjory Pegg took him in. Her stipend was modest, of course. But she loved him. And the collection plate of a Sunday in St Luke’s was felt by most of its parishioners to be a worthwhile obligation.’
‘So the parish paid for his keep?’
‘In strict terms, yes. But the people here wouldn’t have put it like that. They’d have called it caring for one of their own.’
‘What kind of boy was he?’
She shrugged. She stared at her hands. ‘He was taken thirty years before I was born. So this is hearsay. But it’s the most truthful hearsay you’re ever likely to get. He was good at football and cricket. He liked to read adventure stories. He made friends easily. I don’t doubt in the autumn, he scaled the wall and stole the odd apple from Bradley’s orchard.’
‘They all did that?’
She smiled. ‘A rite of passage.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘an ordinary boy.’
Mary Reeve looked at him. ‘Let me tell you about my uncle.’
William Reeve had left school at sixteen and gone to work as a railway clerk in Machynlleth. He caddied in his spare time to help save for his own clubs and course fees. By twenty, he was a scratch golfer and went on to win several amateur tournaments in Wales and the northwest of England. In 1940, at the age of twenty-two, he was called up to fight in the war. He saw action in Italy. He was eventually commissioned and rose to the rank of captain. He was awarded a DSO. And he did not leave the army until three years after the end of the war in 1948.
‘My uncle said his rank owed everything to the army’s need to field potential winners in inter-service sporting tournaments,’ Mary Reeve said. ‘But he couldn’t joke the medal away. He was a brave, kind, modest man. I suspect he was a formidable soldier in the execution of his duty. But he chose an unusually quiet life, once the choice was his to make.’
Seaton said nothing. Sometimes it was the best way of all to ask a question.
‘I’ve often wondered whether it was his choice, entirely. The limitations. The strictures. Oh, they seemed self-imposed. But you can’t help wondering, speculating. I very much suspect my uncle lived a life curtailed, Mr Seaton.’
Now, he did ask a question. ‘Why?’
It was very quiet in Aberdyfi, in Mary Reeve’s handsome, stone, inherited house. Her refrigerator trickled, self-regulating. And a quartz kitchen clock ticked spasmodic seconds on the wall. But there was none of the noise a city dweller, like Seaton was, would readily associate with life. There was no human noise. There was no passing traffic on the road outside.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
William Reeve’s study was lined and mounted with more golf memorabilia than Seaton would have thought it possible for one room to accommodate. Properly displayed, he thought there might be sufficient artifacts to fill a small museum. There were wooden shields with brass plaques screwed to them and silver trophies topped by cast or sculpted figures in plus fours. There was a cracked and yellowing collection of balls, buckets filled with shafts, the leather smell of old grips and varnish and linseed oil. But the room was a room, rather than a shrine. It was a monument to the game, not to Reeve himself or his golfing accomplishments. There were photographs, but their subjects all had the familiar look of sepia champions from some golden age of a game about which Seaton had only a vague passing knowledge.
Mary Reeve spoke with her back to Seaton as she rummaged in a bureau in the furthest corner from the door.
‘When my uncle was thirteen, his father took him as a special treat to Hoylake to see the final rounds of the Open at Royal Liverpool. They sneaked under a rope into the gallery and saw Bobby Jones play the back nine that won him the championship. Nineteen thirty. It was Jones’s last championship round in any tournament.’
Seaton said nothing. She straightened and turned around.