Forgive Me (19 page)

‘I was fine,’ she said, touched
by his concern and a little flustered at finding herself thinking how attractive he was.
‘No ill effects at all. But I’ve been more careful with my bag
since, and I’ve been very busy making plans. I’ll tell
you about them at the pub. But can I go and change first? I’m sure you
wouldn’t be seen dead with me looking like this!’

She scurried up the stairs, leaving Phil
standing at the back door and looking out into the yard.

It took her just ten minutes to have a quick
wash and put on a pair of pink jeans and a white T-shirt. She’d bought the jeans
in a sale at work when she embarked on the affair with Tod, but they’d been so
tight she’d never worn them. To her astonishment they were perfect now, so she
must have lost more weight. She had only a make-up mirror so she couldn’t see
herself full length. She wished she could.

Her hair was fine with just a brush. She
hastily applied some make-up and perfume, then she slipped on a pair of pink high heels
with ankle straps.

Phil was perched on a wooden crate in the
backyard. He looked up and smiled as she appeared in the doorway. ‘You look really
nice,’ he said.

‘Well, thank you, kind sir. Of course
I couldn’t have looked worse than I did when I opened the door to you
earlier.’

‘You looked OK to me,’ he said
lightly. ‘Before you came down I was just thinking that someone must have cared
for this garden once, it’s got a good feeling.’

‘I think that was my mum,’ she
said. ‘She loved gardening. Some of the plants like the clematis look old enough
to have been planted by her. I removed a lot of rubbish and pulled up lots of weeds, but
I want to plant up some tubs, get a table and chairs out here. It’s a real little
suntrap in the afternoon.’

He looked appraisingly at her.
‘You’re like a different girl today. Bouncy, smiley and – dare I say it? –
happier!’

‘I am,’ she said with a wide
grin. ‘You’ve been like a lucky charm to me. First, getting my bag back,
then getting a job, and now the kitchen. So let me feed you as a thank you.’

The Prince of Wales was a friendly pub. It had
a very mixed clientele – mostly yuppie types in the thirty to forty age group, but a
good proportion of working-class people too – and there was lots of banter between them.
Eva mentioned to the landlord, George, that she had just moved into Pottery Lane, and he
insisted on giving her and Phil a drink on the house to celebrate.

‘I used to eat here a lot when I was
working down the street,’ Phil said when they’d been given a table for two
in a corner. ‘The food’s not too poncey or expensive. They do a lovely
Sunday roast, and the people who drink here regularly aren’t toffee-nosed
either.’

‘If the boards don’t come down
off that window soon, I might become a regular, propping up the bar every night,’
she joked.

‘You’ve got a lot of guts, and I
like that,’ he said approvingly. ‘It must be tough to move to a new town
when you don’t know anyone. And then to get your bag snatched!’

‘I wouldn’t have met you but for
that,’ she said flirtatiously. ‘Thanks to your advice, I pulled myself
together. I’ve found myself a job in a bistro – only part time, but it will do for
now – and I think I’ve got my old optimism back. You and Brian have renewed my
faith in people.’

They ordered steak, chips and salad, and as
they ate Eva told him about the job and visiting the bank.

‘I’ve got enough money for the
kitchen and probably the windows, depending of course how much they’ll cost. But I
thought it was best to see if the bank would lend me some more later so I could put in
gas central heating and a new bathroom too. He seemed OK about it, and I can always get
someone to share with me to help out, as this waitress job is really only a stopgap
until something better comes along.’

‘I asked my mate John about doing your
windows,’ Phil
said. ‘I could bring him round tomorrow to
have a look, if you like. He hasn’t got much work on just now, and I’m sure
he’ll be happy to do it in stages to suit you. I’ll make good all the
plaster for you. I’d like to help.’

As the evening progressed Eva found herself
becoming more and more attracted to Phil. He had a lovely sense of humour, he was
interesting, and he was very interested in her too. He was comfortable to be with, as if
she’d known him for a long time. And he had real opinions of his own, not
half-chewed-over ideas gathered from other people – the sort she realized now that Tod
had. The word she thought best summed up his character was: honest. He told it as it
was, and he believed in doing a good day’s work for a day’s pay. He took
pride in his work and had no understanding of people who were lazy, or those who
expected something for nothing.

She liked the respectful way he had been
with Brian too – she’d sensed a strong bond between them, almost like father and
son. ‘Tell me about Brian?’ she asked. ‘Have you known him a long
time?’

‘He’s the salt of the
earth,’ he said. ‘Happily married with two kids he adores, a real craftsman
too. I’ve worked on lots of jobs with him, right since I was a stroppy young lad
who thought he knew it all. He’s always even-tempered, calm, caring – and a laugh
too. Trust him, Eva, ask his advice about stuff, he’s a really good
man.’

She had thought at first that his respect
for Brian might be because he didn’t get on well with his own father, but she
found that wasn’t so. He told her his father worked on the railways, and his
mother had a few cleaning jobs, and he was proud of them.

‘When I was a little kid, I used to
think we were rich just because our house was always neat and tidy,’ he chuckled.
‘You see, the estate we lived on was a bit rough, and most of
my
mates’ homes were squalid. Their mums had fags hanging out of their mouths, and
their dads got drunk a lot. But our mum was always there when we got home from school,
in a clean pinny. She baked cakes, knitted us jumpers, and our garden was really pretty
with loads of flowers. I never realized that we were better off than others just because
Dad did lots of overtime and didn’t drink, and Mum did all those cleaning jobs
while we were at school. They were careful with what money they had – Dad even had an
allotment and grew all our vegetables.’

‘They sound lovely,’ Eva
said.

‘They are. I see that now of course,
they’ve got all the right values. But I still went through a stage at fifteen or
so of rebelling, wanting to be a hard case like some of my mates. I wanted a motor bike,
to hang around on street corners, and I used to bunk off school too, sniffing glue and
stuff. If Dad hadn’t come down on me like a ton of bricks, I would have ended up
in serious trouble. But he talked to me, took me fishing and to football, and he got me
an apprenticeship as a plasterer and talked me into playing rugby, going running and
stuff.’

‘To keep you out of
mischief?’

‘Partly that, but he also thought I
could let off steam that way. I still play rugby for a local team and I still go
running. But it was men like Brian that I worked with who really pulled me around. They
teased me out of sullen moods, showed by example how to be a real man, and they kept an
eye on me too. I found men like them could be a good laugh too, it was them who made me
realize how lucky I was to have good parents.’

Eva found it touching that he appreciated
what others had done for him. It made her think of Olive and how, by taking her on at
Oakley and Smithson, she’d been able to help Eva break free from people who were
pulling her down.

‘I did my share of rebelling,’ she
admitted to Phil. ‘And for much longer than you. My excuse was that I didn’t
fit in with the sort of girls that were approved of. I didn’t really fit in at
home either. I wasn’t clever like my brother Ben, or stunning-looking like Sophie.
I suspect I became a goth to shock my parents into noticing me.’

‘A goth!’ He spluttered with
laughter. ‘I can’t imagine that.’

‘Thankfully, I’ve got no
photographic evidence of it.’ Eva laughed. ‘I think it was the happiest day
in Mum’s life when I bundled up all the black stuff and put it in the
dustbin.’

‘Will you tell me about your
mum?’ he asked. ‘Or is that a taboo subject?’

‘No, it’s not taboo.’ She
went on to explain how she’d never known that Flora had been a successful artist
when she was younger, or that Andrew wasn’t her father. ‘All I know about
her past has come from old friends of hers who turned up for her funeral. One of them
told me the name of the man who shared the place in Pottery Lane. They think he is my
real father. I was thinking of trying to track him down. Do you think I
should?’

Phil shrugged. ‘I’d want to.
Even if it turns out he isn’t your dad, he might be able to throw light on things
you don’t understand.’

Eva felt the conversation was getting a bit
too heavy and one-sided, so she lightened it up by asking him if he liked
travelling.

‘So far I’ve only been to Ibiza,
Benidorm and Goa. But I’d like to go to a great many more places. How about
you?’

‘Only family holidays in France and
Spain,’ she admitted. ‘I got as far as applying for my own passport when I
was eighteen, as I’d been on the family one before. I talked about going off
somewhere, but never did. One of my stepdad’s lame excuses for telling me he
wasn’t my real dad was that I
might need my birth certificate
for a visa and I’d see his name wasn’t on it.’

Phil nodded in understanding. ‘Well,
you’re going to show him what you’re made of, aren’t you?’

Eva smirked. She’d had that same
thought many times in the last few days. ‘Yes, I intend to. I bet he knew how
awful Mum’s old studio was and hoped I’d fall flat on my face with it. But
thanks to your help and advice, I don’t think I will.’

‘That’s what mates are
for.’ He grinned. ‘We are mates now, aren’t we?’

Later that evening Eva sat for a while on
the crate in the backyard, just enjoying the fresh air, even though it was dark. She
heard the landlord at the pub ring the bell for last orders, and she marvelled that in a
little less than a week here, she’d begun to think of it as home.

Phil had caught the bus home after their
meal. Outside the pub, as they were saying goodbye, she thought he was going to kiss
her. It had been a strange moment – half of her wanted him to, the other half was
afraid. But all he did was kiss her cheek and say he’d see her tomorrow when he
called with John about the windows.

She turned to watch him walking off down
towards the main road. He had a good walk, light on his feet and his back straight.
He’d left her with a warm glow inside, a good, secure feeling. He had said nothing
to suggest he fancied her, but a sixth sense told her he did. That could be wishful
thinking on her part; she certainly wasn’t going to make any move on him to find
out, because it would just be humiliating if he didn’t respond. Maybe that
question about being mates was his way of telling her he didn’t see her in that
light?

She wasn’t ready to embark on another
relationship, anyway. What was important to her now was to raise her own
self-esteem. She was never going to allow anyone to feel sorry for
her again.

Until the windows and kitchen were done she
couldn’t do much in the house, but she could make a start on the backyard.
Tomorrow, after Phil and John had been, she would buy some gardening tools, some plants
and tubs, and maybe a table and chairs too.

The prospect of transforming the grubby
weed-strewn yard into something beautiful was really appealing. First thing tomorrow
morning, she thought she would get out here and scrub the paving stones clean.

While she was at it, she’d mentally
scrub Tod and Andrew out of her mind too. She couldn’t move forward as long as she
kept looking over her shoulder.

Eva stood in her backyard and admired her
new French doors, feeling ridiculously emotional. ‘Don’t they look
wonderful?’ she said to Phil, who was cleaning up dropped plaster from the floor.
‘I can’t believe how they’ve transformed the room. It looks twice the
size, really modern and airy.’

It was Sunday afternoon, and two weeks had
passed since Phil first brought John, his window man, round to meet her. Like Brian,
John was another middle-aged man, tall and skinny with little to say for himself, but he
was a fast worker. He had begun the job with his son Rory on Thursday, knocking out the
old boarded-up window and door. Even the old sink, cooker and the graffiti didn’t
look half as bad with sunshine and fresh air coming in. Eva had watched entranced as he
began laying bricks to take the frame for the new doors.

Even the weather was on their side, as June
arrived with hot sunshine. On Friday they had set the uPVC frame in, returning on
Saturday to put on the doors. Eva had been horrified by all the mess, rubble, old
cement, dust and bricks in the backyard, but John and Rory had taken away every last bit
of it that evening, including all the bags of rubbish and the mattress in the
garage.

Phil had come round today to make good all
the plaster, and he’d skimmed the kitchen area and the right-hand wall of the room
too. He said he was coming back to do the rest of the room once Brian had installed the
kitchen units.

‘If you don’t look round at
that,’ Phil said, nodding at
where the units were stacked in
front of the graffiti-covered wall, ‘you wouldn’t think it was the same
place.’

All Eva could do was grin with delight. The
doors had cost £1,000, which seemed an awfully big chunk of her money, but they were
worth it. John was coming back in two weeks to do all the other windows in the house.
And Brian had said he would fit the kitchen during the coming week, as he had a couple
of spare afternoons.

Everything was going well. She really liked
working at the bistro; Marcia, the other waitress, was fun. And the owner Antonio seemed
to like her too. The short hours gave her time to work on the garden, and she was
getting to know her way around London.