Forgive Me (36 page)

‘Well, yes,’ she said.
‘What sort of house did you imagine then?’

‘Something a lot humbler.’ He
grinned. ‘You’ve never so much as hinted that you lived in a
palace.’

Looking at the Georgian house through
Phil’s eyes she supposed it did look very grand, but she was shocked at how
neglected the garden was. The grass had been cut, but the flower beds and the drive were
overgrown with weeds.

She was very nervous at seeing Andrew.
She’d phoned him two days earlier while still in the Lake District and he had been
very chilly. She said she had a dilemma that she needed to discuss with him, and he
began to say her dilemmas were of no interest to him. It was only when she said it was
to do with her mother in Carlisle that he agreed to see her today at five thirty. Just
the fact that Carlisle triggered a response suggested he knew something.

Eva went to the front door and rang the
bell; somehow, she knew Andrew would be affronted if she went to the kitchen door. She
would have felt easier if Ben and Sophie were there. But Ben was in Leeds, and no doubt
Andrew had sent Sophie out.

Andrew looked flushed when he opened the
front door. She wondered if he’d been drinking.

‘Hello,’ she said, and
introduced Phil to him.

Andrew looked very hostile. ‘Do you
think it’s appropriate to bring someone else along when we need to talk about
family business?’ he said in icy tones.

‘Yes, I do,’ Eva said more
firmly than she felt. ‘We are an item, and he was with me in Carlisle, so I want
him here.’

She shot Phil an ‘I told you so’
look. He gave a little shrug.

Andrew extended one hand to indicate that
they were to go into the sitting room.

As they walked into the hall Eva noticed
that Rose must still be coming in to clean, as everything looked much the same as it
always had. But when they entered the sitting room she saw straight away that
Flora’s painting of the Cornish beach had been removed and replaced with a print
of a Venetian canal.

Phil sat next to Eva on one sofa, while
Andrew took an armchair opposite. ‘What is this?’ he said without any
preamble or the offer of a drink.

Eva had rehearsed what she was going to say
over and over in her head, but the stony expression on Andrew’s face made it hard
to get the words out.

‘As you so kindly informed me you
weren’t my father, I wanted to find out who was,’ she began. ‘You
already know about Flora’s diaries, and while I was in Pitlochry – where she lived
for a year until a short time before my birth – I found out that no one there knew she
was pregnant.’

Andrew didn’t react to that, so she
cut to the chase. ‘Flora left both a photograph and a painting of a row of shops
in Carlisle. It transpires that on the 1st of April, 1970, a three-day-old baby girl was
taken from outside one of the shops in that picture, and has never been found. I think
there is a possibility that baby was me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’
Andrew exclaimed.

‘I really do hope my fears are
ridiculous,’ Eva retorted.

‘And I’m looking to you for some
facts to prove it isn’t true. For a start, which hospital was I born
in?’

‘How do you expect me to know? I
hadn’t met your mother then,’ he said.

‘She must have told you, women talk
about that kind of thing. Was it in London or somewhere else?’

‘I seem to remember her saying it was
a home birth.’

‘A first baby born at home? I
don’t think that’s even allowed,’ Eva said. ‘Where? At the
studio?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

She knew with utter certainty that he was
lying. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, his back hunched, looking down at his
knees; even his voice didn’t have the conviction he normally spoke with.

‘How old was I when you met?’
she asked. ‘And how did you meet?’

‘What’s that got to do with
anything?’

‘I want to understand Mum’s
frame of mind,’ she said wearily. ‘Look, I came here because I’m
hoping you can reassure me that she was my birth mother. Unless you can tell me
something that will convince me, I’ll have to go to the police. They’ll soon
find out the truth – and once that cat is out of the bag, there’s no putting it
back.’

He glanced up at her and then looked at
Phil, as if weighing them up.

‘You were two months old or
thereabouts when I met her. I was staying with a friend in a flat just around the corner
from the studio. It was a Saturday, and I was having a lunchtime drink sitting outside
The Prince of Wales because it was warm and sunny. She was there too, rocking the pram
backwards and forwards to get you to sleep. We got talking, she said she was waiting for
a friend. I don’t think she was – a friend would have called at the house. My
guess was that she
was lonely. It can’t be much fun being on
your own with a young baby.’

‘So did she say where my father was?
Why she was on her own?’

‘She said she’d made the mistake
of having an affair with a married man up in Scotland. She’d left there because
she didn’t want people knowing her business. And anyway, the tenant she’d
had in her studio had finally left, so she could move back in.’

‘OK.’ Eva thought that sounded
plausible. ‘So how long after that did you move into Pottery Lane with
her?’

‘A couple of weeks or so later. I was
paying rent at my friend’s place, but I was spending most of my time with Flora,
and it made more sense to help her financially.’

‘What did she tell you about my
father?’

‘Nothing much. It was a brief fling
and afterwards she found out she was pregnant.’

‘A name?’

‘If she did tell me, I don’t
recall. Surely even you remember how little your mother talked about her
past?’

Eva didn’t like his scathing tone, but
she let that go. ‘But if she’d had me all alone, I can’t believe she
didn’t ever talk about that time. Was she coping when you met her? Did she seem
calm and serene? What?’

‘She was very untidy, stuff
everywhere, and she said it had been hard at first. By the time I met her she’d
got you in a routine and you were a placid baby. Not that I knew anything about babies
back then. But I don’t remember you being any trouble. You were always out in the
pram in the garden with her. Anyway, I was out at work during the day.’

‘If she had a home birth there
would’ve been a midwife,’ Phil said. ‘And don’t health visitors
come, and all that?’

‘That was all over by the time I came
on the scene.’ Andrew
shot Phil a look that implied he
didn’t expect to be questioned by him.

‘But surely she spoke about the
birth?’ Eva asked. ‘Women do – if not to you, then to her
girlfriends.’

‘She made the odd reference to it
being an ordeal, but nothing specific,’ he said. ‘As for girlfriends, there
was only really that woman Lauren, who came to the funeral. And she didn’t turn up
until you were four or five months old. Flora wasn’t one for
girlfriends.’

‘So you haven’t got any proof
that she actually gave birth to me?’ Eva said, trying to push him and get a
reaction.

‘Have you got any proof that she
didn’t?’ he retorted, and his eyes flashed with anger. ‘Why on earth
would you want to think otherwise, Eva? Is this your Cinderella complex again? You
always did like to make out you were the one no one cared about. Are you so desperate
for attention that you like to think you were snatched by a maniac?’

That stung, but Andrew had always been one
for cutting remarks.

‘Now you are being ridiculous,’
she retorted. ‘You started this, remember, by telling me you weren’t my
father. All I wanted was to find out who my real dad was. But as it happened, Mum left
diaries, baby clothes, my birth certificate and other things at Pottery Lane, and I
believe she left them there for me to find.’

‘Flora was one of the most
disorganized women I’ve ever met. If she left things there, it was just because
she forgot them – not for anyone, and especially not you.’

‘OK then, so why did she take her life
on the very day that baby in Carlisle would have been twenty-one?’

‘Pure coincidence,’ he snapped.
‘Really, Eva! Have you based this whole ridiculous idea on something as flimsy as
that? You want your head examined.’

‘I hope it is pure coincidence,’
Eva retorted. ‘As I said, I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something
which would convince me it was just that. I don’t need my head examined at all. I
could easily get the proof I need by requesting a simple blood test. But it would be far
better for all concerned if I didn’t have to go down that road, as it involves
talking to the police.’

Andrew’s body language changed
immediately. He dropped his eyes from hers, rubbed his hands on his thighs and looked
nervous.

‘I shouldn’t have told you I
wasn’t your real father the way I did. I’m sorry for that,’ he said,
and his voice was no longer strident. ‘But your mother hurt me badly and I was
lashing out. You were old enough when Ben and Sophie were born to remember what a good
mother she was. Can you possibly imagine her stealing another woman’s
baby?’

‘No, I can’t. That’s the
problem,’ Eva said. ‘But I do know she lost a baby before me, and that she
was depressed because of it. And tell me, why did she stop painting? That’s
another thing that doesn’t make sense to me.’

‘There’s no mystery about that,
it was because she was lazy,’ he said. ‘Before I met her she had to paint to
keep herself, it was the only thing she was good at. But once we bought this house all
she wanted to do was be a mother, do some gardening, a bit of cooking and float around
in her vintage clothes.’

‘I don’t call that being
lazy,’ Eva said with some indignation. ‘Three children create a lot of hard
work.’

‘Yes, maybe, but most women get at
least a part-time job once their children are at school. But not Flora, she had enough
difficulty getting the breakfast things washed up. A job was beyond her. Stop thinking
of her as some kind of mystical heroine, Eva. She was idle, self-centred and perhaps
mentally ill. Sadly, I didn’t realize the latter – but then, as
you must have realized by now, she was very good at hiding things.’

Eva looked at Phil to get his reaction to
this.

‘What’s this got to do with
him?’ Andrew snapped. ‘He didn’t know your mother.’

‘He knows a lot more now, thanks to
the diaries she left. And a whole lot more about you too.’

‘What do you mean by that?’
Andrew’s eyes narrowed.

‘I think we ought to go.’ Phil
got up, reached down for Eva’s hand and pulled her up. ‘I think Mr Patterson
has said all he’s got to say.’

Eva wasn’t satisfied with what
she’d been told; she had hoped to hear Andrew say something tender about Flora.
But Phil was right, she wasn’t going to get anything more from him. And she
probably shouldn’t have goaded him by suggesting she had some information about
him either.

As she walked out into the hall with Phil
right behind her, she saw the Cornish painting leaning against the wall.

She turned back to Andrew. ‘What are
you going to do with that picture?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Give it to a charity
shop, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it here any more.’

‘May I take it then?’ she asked.
‘Sophie or Ben might like it when they get a home of their own.’

‘I doubt that, but take it if you want
it,’ he said brusquely. ‘I never liked it.’

Eva thanked him and picked it up. Phil
opened the front door and they both walked to the car outside. Andrew came out into the
porch and watched them.

‘Well, that’s it then,’
Eva said, looking round at him as she put the picture on the back seat of the car.
‘I’ll check at the local clinics and hospitals to see if I can find any
evidence of
where my birth took place. But if I can’t find that,
then I will have to go to the police.’

Andrew stepped out of the porch towards
them. ‘Have you for one moment thought of what this will do to Ben and
Sophie?’ he asked, and there was a plea in his voice.

‘Have you thought what all this has
done to Eva?’ Phil said, moving himself between the pair of them. ‘You
rejected her at the time she needed a father most. That was shameful. She doesn’t
want to find out that the woman in Carlisle is her mother, or that Ben and Sophie
aren’t her true brother and sister. But she has the courage to face up to what
Flora may have done, and to try to put it right. She should be admired for that. And if
you had any guts, you’d help her.’

Without waiting for a response he opened the
car door for Eva so she could get in, then walked round the car and got in himself,
started it up and pulled away. Eva looked back to see Andrew just standing there. She
didn’t know if it was her imagination but he appeared to have shrunk, as if some
of the stuffing had been knocked out of him.

‘What a bastard!’ Phil
exclaimed as they pulled out on to the road. ‘No wonder you moved out right after
the funeral. I felt like decking him for the way he spoke to you.’

Eva didn’t respond. She hadn’t
for one moment expected Andrew to be overjoyed to see her, but she had hoped that he
would meet her halfway in resolving the bad feeling between them. He had, after all,
known her since she was a tiny baby, and they had both loved Flora. But it was painfully
clear he had no feelings for her whatsoever, and perhaps never had.

She sat wrapped in thought all the way to
the M5, till they were heading towards London. ‘What do you really think,
Phil?’ she blurted out. ‘I’m too close to get any kind
of perspective. Does Andrew know something he wasn’t telling
us?’

‘If you mean, does he know Flora
snatched you and has concealed it all these years? I doubt it,’ Phil sighed.
‘Why would anyone do that? But I don’t think he married Flora for love. Just
the way he talked about moving in with her makes me suspect he had his eye on the main
chance.’