Bingham Crosses the Bar

Bingham is asked to travel to Wolverhampton to accompany the mother of an old university friend, Clive Salmon, to her son’s funeral. This is during the coronavirus lockdown in the summer of 2020; nowhere is open on the road and Bingham is fatigued by a journey without a break. After the funeral he stays on with Juliana Salmon, partly as company in her time of immediate grief, partly to help her cope with Clive’s bungalow.   There he meets a young man of mixed race, Arthur Malcolm, and his fiancée, Eunice, who is of Afro-Caribbean descent. Arthur has been brought up by his mother, Irene, because his father deserted the family when the boy was a toddler. His mother having passed on a few months earlier, Arthur is keen to find his father, as the only family he will have at his wedding, to be held as soon as the pandemic passes. After meeting the young couple, Juliana talks of the early years when the first immigrants arrived from the Caribbean, apologising that local people were not as welcoming as they might have been but that this stemmed not from bigotry but fear.   A few days later, Bingham meets Arthur and Eunice again. They are keen to help Juliana with looking after her son’s bungalow until it can be sold, and it is while Arthur is giving Bingham a hand moving furniture that Eunice invites him, socially distanced, into their immaculate garden for a coffee. Here, talk is of the forthcoming wedding and Arthur’s sadness that he has never known his father, a father who his mother was reluctant to discuss. Bingham offers to help find the missing man, asking for any photographs, certificates, letters and addresses of Irene’s friend they might possess.   Bingham begins his search while still in Wolverhampton and meets Claudia who was Irene’s friend. She tells Bingham of their early lives and the negative affect of the colour bar; in particular, she places stress on people’s attitudes to mixed marriages. She points out forcefully that Irene would not want Paul Malcolm a