A Book In A Month - Chapter 4

Simon Simpsons' hat sat on the dining table, still surrounded by the detritus of a loving couples' life; a life together that had become so valueless as to be cast away. My God, thought John to himself as he passed by on his was to his kitchen, is this all our lives boil down to? Can my life be crystallized down to a few valueless things in a box?

As Clara was leaving, the night before, she had told John that she was going to get to the bottom of this mystery. She told her father that she was both puzzled and, for reasons she could not explain, upset by her father finding the box.

John made himself his usual cup of instant coffee and pulled a couple of biscuits out of a somewhat mangled wrapper. He liked a Digestive or two with his coffee. Clara suspected it helped mask the harsh, dusty flavour of his preferred drink. Certainly, that was her reason for risking her svelte figure by eating his biscuits when she quaffed his bargain basement beverage. The aroma of Johns' coffee preceded his return into the living room. He sat in his favourite chair, having first moved the papers he had placed there the day before and picked up his new Book of Indian Birds in his free hand. As usual he balanced his cup on one wooden arm rest and his biscuits on the other. He took his ancient reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and placed them over the ones he was wearing, rested his elbows on the padded areas of the chair arms and brought his book up close to his face. John was in heaven,

*

Clara had a short gap between clients during which, she generally wandered along the corridor to Janes' practice room. They had three slots a week that they both kept clear so that they could meet up for a chatty break together. Today, however, Clara had decided to see if she could track down Natasha Simpson. The box had turned up locally. The note had referred to a Natasha. It took no more than this for Clara to determine that the owners of the hat and the pearl necklace box were closely related, father and daughter, in fact. She knew it was a long shot, but why not, she wondered? Clara telephoned Liz on the reception desk to ask her to ring through to Jane and let her know she could not hook up this morning, as she had a prior engagement. Then she opened Google on her computer and settled in to research Natasha Simpson.

Clara realized, when her telephone rang, that twenty minutes was not long enough for her to track down Natasha. Her next client was on the way. She would have to continue this later.

*

At home, Clara had spent a very long evening, that had flowed into night that felt even longer, scouring the world wide web in the hope of finding someone with the name Natasha Simpson. There were, actually, quite a large number of them scattered all around the world. None of the possibilities was old enough to be the person Clara was searching for. It was possible that one of these women was a daughter, or grand daughter of Natasha, but how would Clara differentiate? She was beginning to loose heart. John had been no help at all, earlier in the evening, when she had gone to his flat to cook him an evening meal. He felt that as Simon had produced only one daughter, Janice, that this Natasha was not his daughter. John was adamant that Simon had only married once. 'No second wife, means no second daughter', he said. 'Face it, it's unrelated. No, she's unrelated to him, you, me. She has nothing to do with us. Don't go wasting your time on this. It's a fools errand. Stick to tracing my side of the family. You were getting somewhere with that.' The note to a daughter was, in his opinion, typical of the unrelated things that are often found in job lots. The fact that any two, or more things are sold together, does not mean that they have always belonged together.

Clara was convinced that if this Simon Simpson was almost certainly her grandfather, then the rest of the items in the box must have been his too. If her hunch was right, that would make Natasha his daughter. John said that, in his opinion, she was fantasising.

Like many people, being told that she was fantasising made Clara focus in on her idea. She was developing a proto-obsession. She knew, at this point, that the two hours she had already spent trying to trace Natasha was merely the tip of a huge iceberg. Once at home she would carry on until sleep forced her to quit for the night. And that is exactly what happened.

The next morning dawned bright and fresh. Clara walked to her clinic, said a breezy hello to Liz on reception and walked along the corridor to her consulting room. The Guru next door popped his head out of his room and said good morning. She smiled and said, 'Mornin' Joseph,' and let herself into her room. Clara unlocked a drawer in her desk and picked up a pile of papers, client notes for the day and went through them. She was careful to prepare her paper work each evening before she went home, in order to mitigate against the chance of a problem on the way to work delaying her arrival. As long as she walked through her door ahead of her first patient, she would, she knew, look professional and well prepared. These things were very important to Clara. She had always been a cautious person, some friends had accused her of being a control freak. She preferred to think of herself as well prepared and, therefore, relaxed.

Today was not a normal day. Today, all Clara wanted was to have her clients hobble into her consulting room and dance out again as quickly as possible. This would leave her unstressed, not having to do any extra work on any ones' feet. Work that would eat into her 'down time'. For Clara the ten minutes she allowed between clients was for preparation, now, though, it was to transmute into research time. Who was Natasha Simpson? Where was Natasha Simpson? Did she exist, or was her father correct about the items in the box being unrelated?

*

Clara spent the next two weeks surfing the internet looking for Natasha Simpson and drawing a blank. John spent two weeks telling her to stop being a 'silly girl'. This was unhelpful. Even so, Clara had decided to change tack and go over her notes on their family tree. She had spent many hours studying her family history and had amassed a decent set of documents chronicling the births, deaths and marriages of her ancestors. It was a hobby she had found surprisingly exciting. Rather like fishing, she often thought, boring to look at, but for the angler there is always a chance of the big one. It's that tantalising possibility that keeps people casting their hooks. They are the ones who become hooked in the end. Hooked on the possibilities, not on the activity itself. And that was exactly what had happened to Clara. She had no living relatives that she knew of, apart from her father, but she had many lurking about in the shadows of past times. Deep down she was hoping to find a branch of the family that was still going strong some where out there. That she had latched onto the Natasha Simpson person so desperately was not lost on her. She knew herself too well. Naturally, she could see that John had not made any such connection and as a result he was left puzzling about her motives for pursuing the matter. What did it matter that she wanted a wider family, any family. If this was a way of satisfying that need, it was harmless and there was always the hope that she might strike lucky one day. You never know.

Clara was beginning to use every moment that she was alone, either on the internet, or wading through her family records in search of something that might point the way to the ever more fictitious Natasha Simpson. She was having a problem understanding Simons' movements. As with all records, there are often gaps, and his were no exception. As far as having an idea of when people shuffled into and out of life and the major landmarks in between, her notes were very good and were supported by copies of birth, death, christening, and marriage certificates. She also had records of apprenticeships for family members going back into early Victorian times. No matter how hard she looked, Clara could not find any mention of Simon Simpson having a second daughter. She would have to check out her grand mother, Violet. She had been Simons' wife for forty years. If she had produced a second daughter, surely her dad would know about it, especially as the child had celebrated her eighteenth birthday. It's not, she thought, as if she had died in infancy. Families sometimes can't bring themselves to talk about a child's death and, as a result, later generations don't realise the child ever existed.

Clara began to trawl the old familiar web sites for information. It was time consuming and engrossing. She revelled in it. It became clear that there was no second child. Clara's mother was an only child born to a family that as part of the military, travelled the world, living in the colonies for years on end. Everything about Violets' family appeared to be settled, and clearly recorded for all to see.

The question was, why was the note included in the job lot. Was there a daughter called Natasha in the family and if there was, where did she come from?

Clara felt, deep down, that she wanted Natasha to be part of her family. After all, it would throw a spanner in the works. This would no longer be a family on the edge of extinction. There might be little Simpson babies in the world, bravely carrying the family genes on to a new generation. Or, of course, there may not.