Two plus Two Makes Five

By luigi_pagano

Mon, 08 Jun 2020

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“Come on uncle, spill the beans. Am I Hungarian?”

“You silly sausage. What makes you say that?”

“I have been watching a repeat of the TV comedy Open All Hours in which Arkwright mentions that Granville's father was Hungarian and now that I know about mother and Ferenc...”

“... you just put two and two together and made five. You are completely off the mark, my darling. Do the maths: Ferenc was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan in 1997, your parents got wed the following year and you were born in the year 2000, ergo the Magyar could not have been your procreator.”

“Oh, I see. Maths was never my forte but I am a good reader and I have been reading some interesting stuff recently.”

“A romantic novel, a number-one best-seller?”

“Not quite. It is a detective story whose devious plot I am try to unravel but I think I have identified the main suspects.”

◊ ◊ ◊

I am sitting with Uncle Jeremy on a wooden bench in Postman's Park, so named not after our local postie's profession - even though Noddy likes to think it was - but because of the old General Post Office building which stood nearby when the garden opened in 1880.

We are keeping the required distance between us, give or take a centimetre or so, and taking advantage of the warm sunny weather which we are told will not last past this weekend.

On another bench there is a man reading a newspaper. Are we being spied upon or am I paranoid? I feel reassured when he's joined by a woman with a little dog and they walk away.

This is the point when an amateur investigator like Miss Marple or little me, who has taken over her mantle, would reveal to have solved the crime and expose the culprit to the assembled crowd.

This is not possible in this instance: not only there is no gathering as only my uncle and I are now the only two persons in the park but also the proof that I was supposed to provide is very circumstantial.

Although there was still a lot of material in the trunk in the loft that I hadn't yet examined, as a result of a draft letter by my mother that I had found in a bundle, I had formed a half-baked theory of what had happened in my early childhood.

It was a puzzling missive. It was written after my father had disappeared and therefore not addresses to him. It started:

“Dearest, I shall soon go back to Kabul on an assignment so I leave the decision about a DNA test and the possibility of adoption entirely to you. Take care. Cesca”

The signature was unusual; all the other letters were signed 'Francesca' and the use of its diminutive suggested some sort of intimacy.

I decided it was time to be blunt and ask my uncle a direct question.

previous episodes in series 2: