Master of the Moor by Ruth Rendell

under your own table.’
    Joanne got to her feet ponderously. Her belly swayed, her ankles were like those of a woman withdropsy. ‘I go climbing hills every day, of course. Like a mountain goat, aren’t I, Kev?’
    There was laughter at that, shamefaced from Mr Newman. Joanne fetched more biscuits, her current craving. Stephen hadn’t much to say. The first thing he had thought of when he awoke that morning was that it was his mother’s birthday, 25 May, and he had been thinking about it ever since, as he always did on that day. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, she must be celebrating it. She and her husband and Barnabas and Barbara …
    ‘You never told me about that old Mr Bale, Lyn,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘You never told me he’d had a heart attack coming round from the anaesthetic. I had to hear it from Kevin’s mum.’
    ‘How could I tell you when I didn’t know?’
    ‘Well, I’d have thought you’d know that, working next door but four or five or whatever it is. And there’s no need to colour up like that, it isn’t as if it matters.’
    ‘Do you mean he’s dead?’ said Lyn.
    ‘No, of course he isn’t dead. I’d have said if he’d been dead but Kevin’s mum said he was on the danger list.’
    The conversation, in which neither Stephen nor Dadda took part, then turned upon whether ‘danger list’ was merely a figurative term or if hospitals actually maintained such ominous catalogues. Stephen wondered if Dadda also remembered what day it was. Probably, for he forgot nothing, his memory was prodigious. But it was impossible to tell what went on behind that massive, tortured brow, perpetually corrugated as if in a continual wince and recoil from life.
    It was a family gathering, though one very different from what was now taking place in Tace Way, that had first alerted Stephen to the true facts of his descent.

5
    Arthur and
Helena Naulls had had their Golden Wedding party in November about the time of Stephen’s own twenty-first birthday. Before that he hadn’t known Helena’s wedding date. Who but a genealogist knew his grandmother’s wedding date? But he had always known his mother’s birthday and at primary school he had been allowed to make her a birthday card. He could still remember it, a picture of a house and a tree and a sun with rays like a starfish. Three weeks later she had gone off with a long-distance lorry driver.
    Her birthday was 25 May and her parents had been married in November, though not perhaps the previous November. They had been married for fifty years, but was his mother forty-nine or only forty-eight? There was no one he could ask. The idea of asking Dadda!What he did was to go to Holy Trinity Church and look at the parish records where he found that his parents’ wedding date was also May — the 27th. Birth dates are not given on marriage certificates, only ages, and his mother’s was there as twenty-five, which meant she must have been born in 1926 and have been twenty-seven when he was born. Stephen was almost sure this wasn’t so, that she had been twenty-eight when he was born and thirty-four when she ran away. Perhaps there had been a muddle because her birthday and her wedding date were so close together.
    He puzzled over the dates on the backs of photographs, most of which seemed to have been taken in May, and he tried to get from his aunts the precise age gap between his parents and between his mother and Uncle Stanley. Their answers were always, ‘A couple of years’ or ‘Oh, three or four years.’
    The true facts came out simply and when he wasn’t even looking for them. Looking for his own birth certificate for his own marriage, he found his mother’s too — in a desk in the house in King Street. The Holy Trinity marriage entry was wrong. Brenda had been born in May 1925 and therefore conceived during the previous August when Helena was still second housemaid at Chesney Hall.
    The other clarification followed swiftly from a