Forgive Me (21 page)

‘Not if they are like the last ones
here,’ he said. ‘They lived like pigs, rooting around in their own filth.
Music blaring out all night, fights and rows all the time. We were delighted when they
left.’

‘It certainly looked like a pigsty
when I arrived,’ she said. ‘But I’m getting it into shape
now.’

‘That’s what I called
about,’ he said, running a finger around the collar of his shirt as if he was a
little nervous. ‘We saw you’d put on new doors at the back.’

‘Yes, they are a great improvement on
a boarded-up window.’

‘Are you planning to replace the front
windows and door too?’

‘Yes, I am,’ she said, a little
baffled that he thought this was an appropriate way of welcoming a new neighbour.
‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I am concerned that you might be
intending to put in plastic window frames there too,’ he said.

Eva could only stare at him in astonishment
for a moment. ‘And my window frames are your business, because …?’

‘Well, plastic does rather lower the
tone,’ he said in a pompous manner.

She was flabbergasted. ‘Well, Mr
Francis,’ she said in her most icy tone, ‘I own this house, and if I want to
have window frames made of play dough, plastic or solid gold, it will be my choice and
mine alone.’

‘I’m only speaking out because
you are young and probably don’t appreciate the history of these houses,’ he
retorted.

‘Oh, I do,’ she smirked.
‘They were thrown up for the workers at the pottery, probably funded by the
pottery owner who lived in one of the more salubrious Georgian houses nearby and paid
them a pittance.’

‘There’s no need to take that
attitude with me,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t have if you
hadn’t been so rude and un-neighbourly,’ she said. ‘Now if
you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.’

She shut the door in his face, smarting with
anger.

A few minutes later there was another knock
on the door. Thinking it was her neighbour back again, she wrenched the door open ready
to lay into him.

But it was Brian.

‘Oh, thank goodness!’ she said.
‘Am I glad to see you!’ She blurted out what had just happened.

‘Bloody snob.’ Brian sniffed
contemptuously. ‘These flaming yuppies around here get right up my nose. I agree
that a Georgian house should have traditional sash windows with wood frames, but this is
just a little Victorian working man’s house. And it don’t make no sense to
stick in windows that need painting every year.’

‘I can’t believe anyone could be
so snotty,’ she said, her face flushed red with anger. ‘Who the hell does he
think he is?’

‘You’ll have to get used to that
sort of crap if you live around here,’ Brian said. ‘Gentrified areas always
attract snobby arseholes. If they had their way, they’d tear down the
council houses and the people who live in them would be dumped
somewhere else, then they’d build a wall around the whole area to make sure no
common folk got in again.’

‘What makes some people so
mean?’ she said, her anger fading and now replaced by hurt. ‘Why
couldn’t he just have welcomed me, asked how I was getting on and if I’d
like to come in for a cup of tea?’

Brian patted her shoulder in sympathy.
‘Because he’s one of those “I am it” prats. He probably made his
pile selling insurance and pensions, and he’s terrified that his house – which he
considers “an investment” rather than a home – might come down in value. My
gran was born around here. She’s told me how it was in the 1950s. It were a slum
area then, all the way from here down to Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Grove. She talked
about the race riots in Notting Hill, and how that bastard slum landlord Peter Rachman
stuck half a dozen West Indian families in just one room. It weren’t such a
desirable place to live in then. Your poncey neighbour is just afraid it might go that
way again.’

‘Was it still slummy in 1968?’
Eva asked. ‘I think that’s about when my mother bought this
house.’

‘Yes, it would’ve been – not as
bad as Westbourne Grove and Ladbroke Grove, but still pretty grim. They made that film
Blow-Up
, with David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, here in Pottery Lane in
1966. I think that was the start of “arty” people moving here, because it
was much cheaper than Chelsea or Hampstead.’

Brian asked her to hold the end of his
measure against the sheet of Formica, while he marked off where he needed to cut it, and
as she helped him she told him about the stuff of her mother’s that Phil had found
in the attic.

‘It was so exciting to find her
paintings,’ she said. ‘But the other box of stuff feels like she left it
there on purpose for
me to find. Everything in it seems to be a clue,
like in a treasure hunt, and I’ve got to work out what it means.’

‘What did she die of, Eva?’ he
asked

‘She killed herself,’ she said
bluntly.

She expected him to be shocked, but he
looked as if he already knew what she was going to say.

‘Phil told you?’ she asked.

Brian shook his head. ‘No, he
didn’t, he wouldn’t break a confidence. I just suspected it was something
like that, because people who have recently lost someone close do tend to tell you what
they died of. Besides, there was something about you that first time I came here with
Phil, you looked like a lost and frightened puppy.’

Eva told him the whole story then: about
Andrew, and then what happened with Tod. ‘So I packed my bags and came
here,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It seemed the only thing to do, even if this
place was a tip.’

‘If you was my girl, I’d have
wrung that lad’s neck,’ he said stoutly. ‘But then if you was mine,
you wouldn’t have moved away with your mother hardly cold – whether you was my
blood or not. You’ve been through it, no doubt about that. But you’re a
brave little thing, a real sweetheart, and I think you’ll do well for yourself
here in London.’

Once Brian had fixed the worktops Eva
whooped with delight at the finished result. It was all very simple, just grey and
white, but though it was a small kitchen it would be very practical. ‘It looks
marvellous,’ she said. ‘Like something out of
House &
Garden
.’

Brian laughed. ‘Well, I don’t
look in them hoity-toity magazines,’ he said. ‘But I like it when the ladies
I do kitchens for act like a kid in a Wendy house.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’
she asked as she ran her hands over the worktops and opened cupboards and drawers.

‘Yes, you are. I bet you’ll be
down here half the night tonight, arranging knives and forks in the drawers, stacking up
your saucepans and stuff.’

‘I haven’t got much to put in
here yet,’ she giggled. ‘But it is my first home. And I bet your wife was
the same with hers?’

He was adjusting the doors so they hung
correctly, and he looked up and grinned. ‘We had two grotty rooms by
Shepherd’s Bush market back then. We had mice, just two gas rings, and we had to
share the bathroom with four other couples. But we thought it was wonderful, because
we’d been living with her mum up till then, and she gave me earache the whole
time.’

‘Did you do it all up?’

‘Not really, we didn’t stay in
that place long enough. I worked all hours to get a deposit to buy a house. We moved in
there two days before the first baby came. The big thrill then was having our own
bathroom.’

‘I keep wondering how my mum felt
about this place when she first bought it,’ Eva said. ‘It has got a nice
vibe about it. I must have been born in a hospital near here, my pram must’ve
stood here somewhere. It’s strange thinking about that.’

‘Pity she never told you
anything,’ he said. ‘But I guess she must’ve felt a bit ashamed that
she was a single mum. My sister got up the duff in 1968, she was only seventeen, and
even if it was all Flower Power and rock concerts then, my dad went ape shit, there was
the shotgun wedding an’ all.’

‘So your niece – or is it a nephew? –
is only two years older than me.’

‘Niece. Yes, and a right little
cracker she is. And her dad and mum are still together. We all wonder what all the fuss
was about now. But that’s just the way it was back then. Things didn’t
really change till the mid-seventies.’

‘Yes, I can see that’s how it was
for most people. But Mum was supposed to be a free spirit, a bit wild and stuff, so I
don’t see why she would be ashamed of me being illegitimate.’

‘Then maybe it was your stepdad who
had the hang-up about it?’

‘You mean it was his idea to pretend I
was his baby?’

Brian shrugged. ‘Maybe. His parents
might have been old-fashioned and wouldn’t approve of him marrying a single
mother. Have you ever seen pictures of their wedding?’

Eva shook her head. ‘I don’t
think there are any. Mum said it was a very small, quiet one. She never even said where
it took place.’

‘You might find that out in the
diaries. My guess is they got married in secret and then told the family they’d
done it a lot earlier than they really did. I expect Andrew wanted to protect her from
gossip!’

‘So if he loved her enough to do that,
and to bring me up as his own, why did he turn nasty later?’

Brian scratched his head. ‘Who can
say? People change. Sometimes one of the partners loves more than the other one. I know
people who are bitter because they didn’t get what they expected out of it. There
are dozens of reasons for a change of heart. I’d guess that you were just the
easiest one to have a pop at. But I promised you some lessons on using an electric drill
– and that’s going to be a lot more useful to you than finding out what happened
between your mum and stepdad.’

That evening Eva went through the box of
baby clothes; she thought she might take the best ones to a charity shop. But when she
got to the bottom of the box, she found another small box. It was a pretty pink one –
the kind a present for a
baby might have been put in. Opening it, she
found a very tiny pink matinee jacket, matching bonnet and bootees, and a little dress,
only big enough for a newborn baby. The dress was nylon, overly frilly, and the
hand-knitted jacket, bonnet and bootees were very lacy with satin ribbons. She
couldn’t imagine that her mother had picked them out – she had always said she
loathed fussy baby clothes. But maybe someone dear to her had made them for her and that
was why she’d kept them and packed them away so carefully. Maybe Eva’s
grandmother?

Eva lifted out the tissue paper from the box
to repack the clothes, and to her surprise there was a black and white photograph
beneath it. It was of a tiny baby, lying in a pram, and Eva was certain it was her. But
if it was, why had Flora always claimed there were no pictures of her as a newborn baby,
because she didn’t have a camera then?

The diaries were proving hard to read. For
one thing, the entries were rarely dated, and Flora had an irritating way of using
people’s initials rather than their names. And in the first diary she hadn’t
once said where she was. If she hadn’t numbered them, Eva wouldn’t have even
known in which order to read the diaries.

She also wrote in what seemed like riddles.
‘Wishing M would stop behaving like I was still six.’ Obviously the
‘M’ was for mother and she was still in Cornwall, as there were many other
references to nagging and wanting to go to ‘L’, which must mean London.
Although she wrote ‘arrived in L, and it’s so huge it’s scary’,
she didn’t say what part of London, or whether she was with anyone else. Later on
she mentioned The Bistingo, and this appeared to be a restaurant she worked at, as there
were many entries referring to possible friends, again only using the initial when
describing someone who had come into The Bistingo on different
occasions. ‘J’ was mentioned most, as owing her money, getting on her
nerves, or having no talent. So was ‘J’ male or female? A lover, or just a
friend?

She thought that the only way she was going
to make any headway was to note down anything she thought might be relevant, even if she
didn’t understand it, and then try to contact Patrick O’Donnell to see if he
could throw any light on it.

But for now she had too much else to do. She
needed to buy cooking equipment and crockery. One saucepan, two plates and enough
cutlery for one didn’t justify even having a kitchen. She needed to get a
telephone line installed, arrange for John to come back and do the other windows, get
quotes for central heating and a new bathroom suite, and decorate the house. Brian had
told her today that she would need to give all the woodwork, doors, skirting boards and
the banister a really good rub down before applying undercoat, then at least two coats
of gloss paint. Likewise any holes in the walls upstairs would need to be filled and
rubbed down before painting. That all sounded very boring and a lot of hard work, but
she supposed she would have to do it properly. Until it was done, she couldn’t buy
furniture or put carpets down.

‘You’ll have to wait,
Mum,’ she said, putting the lid back on the pink box. ‘I suppose as you kept
your secrets for twenty-one years, a bit longer won’t make any
difference.’

Saturday turned out to be a really good
day, still warm and sunny, and fun too because Phil arrived at ten ready to finish
skimming the living-room walls.

Eva didn’t admit to him that
she’d been up at six that morning; she’d made herself scrambled eggs on
toast, delighting in the new cooker, the shiny sink and the taps that
were easy to turn on. She’d eaten it in the garden looking back through the
French doors so she could gloat over the new kitchen. Then she’d put a load in her
new washing machine and hung it outside on an airer. She just wished Tod and Andrew
could see her now; she felt as if she was putting two fingers up to them.

Almost the first thing Phil said when he
arrived was that he’d like to take her out for a meal that night.