Forgive Me (13 page)

She knew she loved him and wanted to say so,
but she didn’t quite dare, not yet. After all, they had only been an item for one
whole week, but that remark seemed to confirm he felt a permanence in their relationship
too.

Word had got around at Oakley and Smithson
that she had a boyfriend, and who he was, and back at work on Monday she was teased
about it constantly. Pictures of hats with notes attached from the other girls, saying
they’d picked this one out for her wedding, appeared on her desk. She put on her
jacket one evening and found the pockets were full of confetti, and in the staff room a
silly wedding-present list had been pinned up, with everything from a three-bedroom
detached house to a tin opener on it. People had written their names and funny comments
beside some of the items.

But Eva didn’t tell Tod about any of
this; she was afraid he’d feel he was being pushed into a corner.

On the Friday evening Eva picked up the keys
for the studio on her way home. She was really excited and expected that Tod would be
ready to drive to London. But when she got home he was sunbathing on the grass in the
front garden in just a pair of shorts.

‘How long is it going to take for you
to get ready?’ she
asked him. ‘I planned to go straight
away, just in case it’s too awful to stay there and we need to find somewhere
else.’

He didn’t get up, just grinned at her.
‘I don’t fancy being in London for the weekend if it’s going to be
good weather. Let’s leave it till next weekend?’

Eva felt she’d just had her balloon
popped. ‘But I’m really excited to see the studio. We don’t have to be
in it all weekend, we could go to one of the parks with a picnic,’ she
pleaded.

‘But I’ve already told the lads
we’d be going down the pub tonight. Josh is having a party tomorrow night too. I
wouldn’t want to miss that.’

Not wanting to look possessive or demanding,
Eva swallowed her disappointment and managed to force a smile. ‘What if I go to
London by train tomorrow on my own then?’ she suggested. ‘I’m dying to
see the place and I don’t think I could stand to wait another week.’

‘Will you be back for the
party?’ he asked.

That wasn’t the reply she’d
expected. She’d thought once he realized that her heart was set on seeing the
studio he would change his mind and go with her. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll
feel much like it after a long day in London. Especially if there’s a lot of
cleaning to do. But you go anyway.’

He got up and kissed her. His body was warm,
silky and smelled of suntan lotion, and she immediately felt aroused.

‘I won’t enjoy the party without
you there too,’ he said, nuzzling at her neck with his lips.

‘That’s a fib, you’ll have
far more fun without me.’ She laughed, only too happy to forgive him anything when
he made her feel dizzy with desire. ‘But if you can bear to leave the sun for now,
I could show you some fun things to do indoors.’

Eva caught the train to London shortly
after seven the following morning. She hadn’t slept very well because she was
nervous about finding her way around London on her own. She
hadn’t been there more than five times, and always with her mother. She was very
excited to see the studio of course, but it would have been so much more fun if Tod had
come with her.

She had hoped he would change his mind at
the last minute, but he didn’t even stir when she took a shower, so she crept out
without waking him. In a small wheeled suitcase she had packed a variety of cleaning
materials, tea bags, bin liners and other essentials, plus some old jeans and a T-shirt
to work in. She would take some photos before she moved or cleaned anything, so she
could show Tod when she got back.

Paddington Station was extremely busy and,
as she was apprehensive at finding her way on the tube, she got a taxi to Pottery Lane
in Holland Park.

Olive had told her that Holland Park was a
smart area with big houses but warned her that the smaller side roads going down towards
Ladbroke Grove were very different. She said she had lived near there during the 1970s
and parts were quite squalid, so Eva wasn’t to expect too much. She added that she
thought the studio might be just a couple of rooms above a garage.

As the taxi took her through Notting Hill
and on down to tree-lined Holland Park Avenue, Eva was pleased to see that the big
houses Olive had spoken of all looked very similar to those in the best parts of
Cheltenham. There were restaurants, a couple of trendy gift-type shops and a
delicatessen too. As the taxi turned off into Portland Road the houses were slightly
smaller and terraced, the front doors opening straight on to the pavement with no
gardens, but they were still very smart with black painted railings.

She assumed that the taxi still had quite a
way to go, so
when the driver pulled up suddenly by a pub called The
Prince of Wales, she was taken by surprise.

‘That’s Pottery Lane,’ he
said, glancing at her over his shoulder and pointing straight ahead up a much narrower
street which went off at an angle. ‘It’s difficult to stop there, it’s
too narrow.’

Eva thought for a second he’d made a
mistake, for although the houses in the narrow street were tiny and humble compared with
those behind her, they certainly weren’t squalid. It had the look of a mews,
because some of the houses had been converted with a garage beneath them. She could see
they’d been built in the last century as workers’ houses, and many of them
were still just plain yellow brick, but some had been painted white or pastel shades,
and it looked like a very desirable place to live. The street sign confirmed she had
been brought to the right place.

After paying the driver she stood for a
little while just looking down the street. She hadn’t for one moment considered
how much her legacy might be worth. It was enough that she’d been left something.
But even though she knew nothing about London house prices, she could tell this area was
way out of the league of ordinary people. The quality shops she’d seen, the number
of BMWs, Mercedes and other smart cars parked on Portland Road, all pointed to this
being a yuppie ghetto.

But No. 7 stood out like a rotten tooth in a
row of healthy ones. Upstairs there was one huge grimy window, when almost every other
house in the row had two or three smaller windows which were in proportion to the
building. There was a garage or workshop beneath, a front door to the left of it and a
small window too. The doors were battered and the grey paint was peeling off; the little
window was so thick with grime she couldn’t see through it.

Taking a deep breath she put the key in the
lock on the front door and turned it, but there appeared to be something behind the door
preventing it from opening. An image of a body lying behind it sprang into her mind. But
telling herself that was stupid, she slid her hand around the crack. To her relief it
was only a mountain of mail which she was able to push aside.

An appalling fetid smell and the buzzing of
flies greeted her, making her stomach turn over. She froze momentarily, nervous of going
any further.

With her hand over her nose she went in. It
was very dark and she had to open the front door again to see. To her right was the wall
of the garage with a connecting door, but to her left and straight ahead appeared to be
just one big room. As she edged her way gingerly forward she saw pinpricks of light and
realized that the window right at the back was boarded up.

The whole floor area was strewn with
rubbish: paper, takeaway food containers, old cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, beer cans
and bottles.

She stood on the spot, terrified that the
smell was something far worse than decaying food and afraid to take a step further for
fear of what she might step on. But as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw an
open-tread staircase to her right, set against the back wall of the garage. She also saw
that all the walls were covered floor to ceiling in black graffiti.

Her initial reaction was to back away. She
had never seen or smelled anything so appalling; it even made the seedy rooms of the
friends she’d visited during her goth period look like palaces. But she knew if
she did back off now, she’d only have to come back some other time and deal with
it.

She tried the light switch but no light came
on, and her heart sank even further.

It seemed to her that squatters must have got
in, for surely no ordinary tenant would leave a place in such a state. The only piece of
furniture still intact was an ancient deck chair. Other pieces – chairs, a table and
remnants of a chest of drawers – had been roughly chopped up.

The smell made her gag as she edged her way
forward through the mess. The kitchen area was in the left-hand corner by the boarded
window. To the right was a back door, but the glass was broken in that too and boarded
over. The door lock was very stiff, and it took her several attempts to turn it. But as
she opened it, and light flooded in, the room looked even more hideous.

The kitchen cupboards had been ripped out,
leaving only a filthy sink unit and an equally filthy electric cooker. Eva gingerly
turned on the tap and was relieved to find that the water hadn’t been turned
off.

With a sinking heart, she tried to recall
the photographs of herself and her mother that had been taken here some nineteen years
ago. But though she did remember one where her mother was wearing a vivid green jump
suit, and a matching band around her hair, she couldn’t remember what the
background of the room looked like.

Taking her courage in both hands, she went
upstairs. The big room at the front had clearly been planned and used as an
artist’s studio because of the huge window, and there were paint splatters
everywhere. But there was only one narrow window at the side that opened, and the window
frames looked rotten. There was still more rubbish here, including a filthy
mattress.

The smaller room at the back, however, was
reasonably clear of debris, and it was decorated with a hand-painted frieze of teddy
bears.

That cheered her, because she guessed by the
age of it that
it had been painted by her mother, and finding a link
to her early childhood was something positive.

Finally the bathroom, and she gagged when
she saw the toilet was full of excrement. She flushed it, fully expecting to find that
it was blocked up. But to her great relief it wasn’t, and most of the mess
disappeared. She waited till the cistern had refilled and flushed it again, breathing a
sigh of relief when she saw the waste was all gone.

The lavatory was still filthy – as were the
bath and washbasin, but she felt she could deal with those.

Olive had told her that she must read the
meters, so she went back downstairs to find them. There was no gas, and the electric
meter was in a spidery built-in cupboard up by the front door. She jotted down the
reading before she forgot.

The walled backyard was as rubbish-strewn as
the house, but climbers from the houses on either side were tumbling over a trellis on
the top of the wall, and there were plants struggling through the debris too. She
didn’t think it would take too much effort to make it pretty.

She found a key hanging on the back door,
and it fitted the door through to the garage. She braced herself for more squalor but
surprisingly found that it was fairly clear: just a few old empty cardboard boxes, a
stepladder and an old suitcase with a broken handle.

To gather herself she stood in the fresh air
at the front door for some minutes. While she had expected an artist’s studio to
be dirty and shabby, she had allowed her imagination to build up a romantic picture of a
discarded easel and palette, paint brushes in pots and a worn chaise longue where models
posed. But the graffiti suggested the last tenants’ attempt at art had been
fuelled by drugs, and they were filthy people who had no respect for themselves, let
alone someone else’s property.

She wondered if these tenants had added to her
mother’s anxiety. She had been given Flora’s old building society passbook
and there had been monthly deposits of £600 up until eighteen months ago, and at that
time there had been a balance of over £8,000. Since then there had been no more
deposits, and Flora had made one withdrawal of £1,500 pounds in addition to smaller
amounts. Eva had no idea what she’d used the large sum of money for, she could
only suppose it was for repairs on her car or something similar, as there was no sign of
the money being spent on the studio. She wondered why Flora hadn’t got the tenants
evicted and relet it to someone who would pay the rent? Or had she seen what
they’d done to it and felt defeated?

Eva could understand that. But she
wasn’t going to let it defeat her. Yet at the same time she knew the cleaning
materials she’d brought with her were not enough. She needed a broom, dustpan and
brush, a mop, bucket and toilet brush. And a great many more bin bags. She also thought
she would try to get a Calor gas camping stove and a kettle to heat up water.

She needed to go and buy these things but
decided that, before she left, she would take photographs to show Tod just how bad it
was. She didn’t think she could adequately describe how horrible it was with mere
words.

Hailing a taxi on Holland Park Avenue, she
asked the driver to take her to the nearest hardware shop.

In less than an hour she was back in another
taxi. She had everything she needed, including an inflatable mattress and pump. The last
purchase had made her spirits rise a little, because it would mean she and Tod would
have something to sleep on when he came to see the place.

First, she changed into her old clothes.
Then she opened
the front and back doors and all the windows upstairs
to let some air in, then put on rubber gloves.

The stink was coming from rotten food in
takeaway cartons, and she gagged again when she saw maggots crawling over it. But she
shovelled it all up into bin bags, tied them up tightly and put them in the
backyard.