September Song Read Online Free PDF

it. Otherwise I’ll come back to haunt you.’
    â€˜Scout’s honour,’ I said, putting both hands up in a Churchillian victory salute.
    She sighed and leaned back. ‘All right, then.’ She paused and sighed again. She looked dreamily over my shoulder, out of the window, at Wanstead Flats, but she was really staring into the past.
    And then she told me her story.
    It was a bleak little tale and not an uncommon one. If the telling hadn’t been quite as flat and matter of fact, it would have made a nice old-fashioned melodrama. Young girl, who is poor but honest, meets charming gent who, after he’s had his wicked way, turns into moustache-twirling villain and leaves her in the lurch and, of course, in the family way. As Daff told it, she might have been young and poor, but she was far from honest, and the charming gent, the son of the owner of the laundry she worked in, was neither all that charming nor much of a gent. The baby, though, was real enough. Born in July 1928, named after her grandmother, Eugenia Higgins, and dumped without any ceremony into an orphanage somewhere. Daff thought it might have been run by a local convent. I could only think of one.
    â€˜How—’ I started.
    â€˜I know what you’re going to say, Tony. How could I? Well, I didn’t have much to do with it. It was a hard pregnancy, a harder birth – in fact that was the reason Les and I never had children – and I was very ill and weak and in no state to stop it.’
    â€˜Actually,’ I said, ‘I sort of understand that. What I was really wondering was how you could call her Eugenia.’
    She gave me a good, old-fashioned, Daphne look and sniffed dismissively. ‘That wasn’t up to me either,’ she said. ‘Mum took care of everything: registering the birth and all that. I hardly saw the little mite.’ She paused. ‘I’m not much of a one for sentiment, Tony, but I’ve always wondered what happened to her. And I’d like to say sorry for not looking after her.’ She paused again. ‘Do you think you can find her for me? Before I  . . .’
    â€˜I can try, Daff,’ I said. ‘I can try.’
    She sighed and leaned back on the sofa. She looked exhausted. The bags under her eyes were green. ‘Thanks, Tony,’ she said. ‘What will you tell Les?’
    I shrugged. ‘A little bit of the truth,’ I said.
    She sat up again, looking anxious.
    â€˜That I’m looking for a long-lost relative. He doesn’t have to know any details. If he presses, I’ll tell him it’s a cousin or something.’
    â€˜That’ll do,’ she said and fell back again. ‘Now bugger off, before I fall asleep on you.’
    Les hadn’t really done justice to the Barolo at lunch, which meant that I had, so I decided to walk from Daff’s back to the Antelope to clear my head a bit. It also meant I could drop in at the Osborne Arms on the way and have a chat to someone.
    The Osborne is a big, old barn of a boozer on the corner of Crescent Road and Church Road, a hundred yards or so from where my parents’ house had stood. The bomb that took them must have rattled a few windows and smashed a few glasses there. It’s not a particularly notorious pub or anything. Nobby Clarke, the local bookie, hangs out there with a few other local rascals, but the real villains drink a little further west, up Whitechapel way.
    It was just after six when I pushed open the big, old green door and went into the almost empty bar. Nobby was already sitting in a dark corner, a glass of whisky in front of him, reading the Evening News . He’d carefully folded it over and wasn’t so much reading it as annotating the sports pages with the stub of a blunt pencil, which he occasionally licked. He looked up when I came in and nodded, but we hardly knew each other and I had never been a client. His gold pinkie ring glinted,