Dying Flames by Robert Barnard Read Free Book Online

Graham, “then I wasn’t the father. We had a brief little romantic friendship about eighteen months before the family moved away. Do you remember Peggy, Percy?”
    â€œAye, I remember her. And her brief romantic friendships. Proper little bobby-dazzler she was. Talented too. They say she was a brilliant little actress. Played Saint Theresa or something in a school play. Ted and Mary were over the moon.”
    â€œIt was Saint Joan. I was in the play too.”
    â€œWere you though?” said Percy, looking at him appraisingly, like a tailor. “Wouldn’t have put you down as the acting type.”
    â€œSmall part.”
    â€œAnyway, we heard nothing but that play for months. I mind her father talking about her, standing where you’re stood now. Boring the pants off us, if the truth be known, but we all liked her and could see she was something out of the ordinary. Still…”
    Graham waited, but nothing came.
    â€œStill?” he was forced to ask.
    â€œStill, talent isn’t everything, is it? Anyone who’s had children, or had to do with them, knows that. You think one of them’s the brightest knife in the box, and then something happens and they spend the rest of their lives in dull jobs that go nowhere. And sometimes it’s nothing that happens, but them just reaching their top, the limits of their talents, and not being able to push themselves any further up.”
    â€œWas that the case with Peggy? She reached her top?”
    â€œOh, no. Something happened. I suppose I’ve more or less told you what that was, haven’t I?”
    â€œYes, you have.”
    â€œThat wasn’t the official line. According to her dad and mum she’d had the offer of a place in drama school. As a consequence they were moving closer to London—Romford it was—so she could take it up and still live at home.”
    â€œYes, I knew they went to Romford.”
    â€œOh, you heard, did you? That at least was true. Dicky Mortlake—we buried him ten years since—was driving through Romford a few months after they upped sticks and left, and he saw Peggy walking with her mother, very pregnant. So that was what it was, which frankly was what we’d all guessed anyway.”
    â€œHad you just guessed that because she was pretty and young, and just the age to be careless about precautions?” asked Graham, lapsing into the circumlocutions of his youth.
    â€œPartly, maybe,” said Percy, remembering. “But she was always…flighty.”
    He looked as if he wanted to say no more, but Graham pressed him.
    â€œHad lots of boyfriends?”
    â€œAye, she did, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. Her manner was…let’s say it wasn’t modest, not what we expected then from a schoolgirl. I said she was flighty. I think I mean she was flirtatious. She’d come at you with little remarks and double meanings and sexual provocations—even when she was with much older men, like me. Mostly we made a joke of it, but who’s to know whether there weren’t some who fell for it. The father of the child could have been one of the boyfriends of her own age, but equally it could have been any man in the village, most of us included.”
    â€œDid her parents know nothing about her ways?”
    â€œCourse not. Can see you haven’t got teenage children. The parents always get duped—I expect it’s been going on since the Garden of Eden. Peggy never did anything while they were by. She was Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp when they were around. To this day Ted has never said who the father was—or even whether he knows who the father was. That’s how much he and Mary were hurt and surprised by it.”
    Graham stopped, his pint halfway up to his mouth. He looked around at the other men at the bar.
    â€œBut Peggy’s father’s dead, isn’t he?”
    â€œNot so far as we know,”