Forgive Me (43 page)

‘I’ve brought you work as well
as a drink,’ Patrick said, waving a bottle of brandy with one hand, the other
firmly holding Flora’s painting wrapped in brown paper.

‘The brandy would’ve been
enough,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ve got enough work to last me till they carry
me out in a box.’

‘Ahh, but I thought you’d like
this little job,’ Patrick said as he followed Nathan down the passage to his
studio at the back of the house.

The house was a beautiful Edwardian semi
with three floors and a basement. Rosemary, Nathan’s wife, lavished all her time
and energy on it now that their four children had all left home. The wood floors were
polished, not a speck of dust sullied the lovely antiques, the cushions were always
plumped, and the curtains were draped to perfection. But Nathan’s studio was a
different story, and he claimed he never allowed Rosemary to set foot in it.

Books covered two of the walls – not
arranged neatly, but thrust in wherever they would fit. An ancient sofa with stuffing
coming out of the arms was by the fireplace. Two large
trestle tables
were covered in everything from paints, cleaning materials and brushes to piles of
papers and works waiting for collection, or to be started. There were several easels by
the huge north-facing window, each with paintings on them, and the floor was littered
with crates of chemicals, old newspapers, paint-splattered overalls and other
equipment.

‘I think you’ll quite enjoy
doing this,’ Patrick said once they were sitting on the sofa. ‘It’s
not an Old Master!’

As Patrick removed the brown paper
he’d wrapped it in, Nathan grinned. ‘Why, it’s an Old Mistress!’
he exclaimed. ‘And it looks like she’s been in a fire!’

Patrick chuckled. He had told Nathan about
Eva getting in touch with him, and that Flora had died, but little else. ‘She
has,’ he said.

He then proceeded to tell Nathan about the
fire in Pottery Lane, though not that it was believed to have been started by her
stepfather. Nathan had been to Pottery Lane many times when Patrick and Flora were
together. But despite being such good friends, Patrick didn’t feel it was right to
tell him the whole story. ‘I told her I’d ask you to clean it up and reframe
it. It’s the only one of her mother’s paintings that survived the fire, and
it’s important to her.’

‘I’d forgotten what a good
painter Flora was,’ Nathan said, looking at it carefully. ‘Such a shame she
gave up, she had a rare talent. It won’t be difficult to clean it, though I expect
under the ash and soot there’s twenty-odd years of grime too. I’ll just take
the frame off now, so I can assess it better.’

He got up and went over to one of the
tables. ‘You can make yourself useful and pour me a drink,’ he said.
‘This is a hideous frame. I suppose her philistine of a husband, thought a gilt
frame would make it look more valuable?’

Patrick laughed. He found two dirty glasses
and rinsed them out in the sink.

‘My God! Flora didn’t intend
anyone to remove this frame easily!’ Nathan exclaimed. ‘I’ll have to
break the frame to get the canvas out.’

‘That’s no great loss,’
Patrick said.

As he was pouring the brandy, he heard the
frame crack and then Nathan mutter something. ‘What’s up? Broken a
fingernail?’ Patrick joked.

‘There’re letters or something
in the back of it,’ Nathan said. Patrick turned to look and saw his friend
standing there with a sheaf of foolscap paper in his hands. ‘I think Flora
must’ve hidden this. It is her writing, isn’t it?’

Patrick moved quickly to take a look.
‘Yes, it is.’

He read the first page, which was dated
April 1986, the year Eva was sixteen. By the time he’d got to the bottom he felt
faint, as if his blood had suddenly been drained away.

‘What’s up, Pat?’ Nathan
asked. ‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet.’

Patrick couldn’t answer for a moment.
Just from the first page he knew that this was Flora’s explanation – or perhaps it
should be called a confession. He would have to read on to know exactly what it was.

But for the fire it might have stayed hidden
behind the painting for a hundred years or more. He had a feeling that was what she had
planned – it had been the writing of it which had been important to her. By putting it
down on paper she had hoped to find some kind of absolution, rather like making a
confession to a priest.

‘What is it, Pat? You’re scaring
me now,’ Nathan said.

‘I’m scared too,’ Patrick
said. ‘I need to take it home and read it.’

Sonia Banbury looked down at Freya Carling
in the hospital bed and felt a rush of pity for the girl. She looked much younger than
seventeen: her face was almost as white as the pillowcase, with dark circles beneath her
eyes. She had light-brown hair that was straggly and dirty, and she was terribly thin.
‘How are you feeling this morning, Freya?’ she asked.

‘Much better, thank you,’ the
girl said, but her voice was little more than a husky whisper, and her blue eyes were
clouded with anxiety.

‘Sister tells me you have a severe
chest infection, but the antibiotics they are giving you will soon sort that out. I
believe they are going to keep you in until the infection is clear. Now, can you tell me
where Sue, your mother, is at the moment?’

‘She went to Spain,’ Freya
whispered. ‘But that was nearly two years ago, and I haven’t heard from her
since.’

‘Do you have an address for
her?’

‘No.’ Freya’s eyes filled
with tears. ‘She said she’d send me a ticket to come and join her when she
was settled, but I haven’t even had one letter or a postcard.’

‘Who did she go with?’

‘Some man,’ Freya sighed.
‘She never told me his name. But that’s how Mum was – always a man in her
life, and they always let her down.’

Sonia sensed this was true by the utter
resignation in the girl’s voice. She also sensed that Freya had been let down,
over and over again, and maybe her mother had taught her she should expect it to always
be that way.

‘So tell me why you were living in that
place on the fells?’

‘I had nowhere else to go,’ she
said.

‘You said last night that you lost
your job. Where was that, and where did you live then?’

‘I worked in the bakery – I’d
been there since I left school. Before Mum left for Spain she arranged for me to lodge
with Ena Willoughby. She let me live there cheap, as long as I helped her out with the
cleaning and stuff.’

Sonia nodded. She knew Ena Willoughby by
reputation as a rough loud-mouthed woman who offered long-haul truckers bed and
breakfast. Mostly they slept four to a room, and the sheets were rarely changed. It was
generally thought that Ena had a price list for her personal services too.

‘So what happened at the bakery? Was
it Harris’s, the one that closed down?’

‘Yes, they were going bust,’ she
said, and her eyes filled with tears again. ‘I was happy there, but when I had no
wages to pay the rent Ena said I could make more giving the drivers …’ She
paused, clearly unable to say the word ‘sex’. ‘I didn’t want to
do that, it’s dirty. But she said if I had no money, I couldn’t stay there.
And then she told me to sod off.’

‘You should have gone to talk to a
social worker,’ Sonia said. ‘They would’ve helped you get benefits and
somewhere else to live.’

‘Mum said social workers screw up your
life,’ she said.

Sonia tried hard not to roll her eyes.
She’d been a social worker before she joined the police and knew what people like
Sue Carling meant by such remarks. Social workers tried to show their clients how to
curb their destructive behaviour. But mostly it was a fruitless exercise, as the clients
usually ignored all advice. Then when their lives fell apart, or their children went off
the rails, they had the cheek to scream from the rooftops that it wasn’t their
fault. The public were quick
to use social workers as the whipping
boys for the whole of society; no one these days seemed to believe that people should
take responsibility for their own lives.

‘That isn’t true, Freya; they
are there to help people in difficulties. Didn’t you have any friends or relatives
who could help you?’

The girl shook her head. ‘I thought I
would be able to find another job straight away, but all I could get was some casual
work washing up in a restaurant. You need a deposit to rent a room, and I didn’t
have that.’

Sonia knew that most people who ended up
living on the streets were caught in the same situation. Sadly, the longer they lived
rough, the dirtier and less employable they became. But with Freya being so young, if
she’d asked for help she would have got it.

‘I’ll get someone to come and
talk to you while you are still in here,’ she said. ‘No more living rough –
you could have died of pneumonia out there. Now, is there anyone who might know where
your mother is? A friend maybe?’

Freya gave her a long sad look. ‘Mum
didn’t have no friends, only people she used.’

Sonia was only a child at the time
Sue’s baby disappeared, and she’d known nothing about the case – not until
it was reported that a young woman in London believed she might be that child. Reading
through Sue Carling’s case notes she couldn’t feel any real sympathy for the
woman, as she sounded like the mother from hell.

Freya’s poignant statement about her
mother having no friends said so much about her own mindset. She was a kid who had been
brought up in the shadow of her sister’s disappearance; she must have heard the
gossip that Sue had killed and buried the baby, and always felt like an outcast.

Sonia thought that even the most
dysfunctional woman
who had lost a baby for whatever reason would
treasure the next one and always keep it in her sight. Yet she’d callously gone to
Spain leaving a vulnerable fifteen-year-old in the care of a harridan who was well known
for her lack of morality, without any thought as to what might become of her.

And yet, despite the terrible start in life
she’d had, Freya seemed a nice kid.

Patrick didn’t ring Eva immediately
and tell her what had been found in the back of the painting. He needed to read it
several times more and think about her reaction first.

The woman who had written the diaries that
Eva had found was the Flora he knew. The cryptic style was typical of her – sarcastic,
vague, often lacking in feeling. And yet she could be very funny too. It had been no
surprise to him that she didn’t date any of her entries, because she had never
been organized about anything. He hadn’t even asked Eva if Flora had written about
losing their baby, because he knew she wouldn’t have. She had always kept anything
that was important to her locked away, inside her.

He could see her now, lying in that bed in
Hammersmith Hospital, her red curly hair too vivid against the white pillow and hospital
gown. Her mouth was a scarlet gash, because she’d put lipstick on in a desperate
attempt to hide her sorrow. But her eyes gave her away – not just the red rims, but the
bleakness in her gaze. They had always danced with mischief or sparked with passion.
That day they were dead.

Patrick had called an ambulance late on the
previous afternoon when the pains started. By the time they reached the hospital she was
losing blood. The baby was dead already, but she had to go through with a normal
delivery. He wasn’t
allowed to go into the delivery room with
her; he had to wait outside, hearing her screams. But unlike the other expectant fathers
pacing the corridor, he knew there would be no joy for him and Flora when the screaming
stopped.

It was just on midnight when she
haemorrhaged, but he didn’t know that until much later. He had to draw his own
conclusions as to why the doors of the delivery room suddenly burst open and she was
rushed past him on a trolley. All he was told by a young nurse was that Flora had been
taken to theatre with ‘complications’.

He had never been a man for praying before,
but he did that night. He found the hospital chapel and got on his knees, begging God to
save her. He was still in there at four in the morning when that same young nurse came
to tell him what had happened. She said that he might as well go home, as Flora was now
on a ward recovering. He wouldn’t be allowed to see her till the visiting hour in
the afternoon.

Hospitals weren’t like that any more,
thank goodness. Maybe if they’d allowed him to be involved, to comfort Flora and
to be with her as she came round from the emergency operation, she wouldn’t have
slipped into that dark hole where no one could reach her.

He remembered going into the little nursery
when he got home, looking at the frieze of bears and the second-hand cot they’d
bought and painted white. The blankets and sheets were still in their cellophane
wrappers, waiting to be opened and the cot made up. He picked up a little white coat
he’d bought for the baby, buried his face in it and cried.

When he got to the ward the following
afternoon her lipstick told him straight away how her mind was working. They could have
the most unholy row and then, when she was tired of it, she’d put new lipstick on
and suddenly start
talking about something else. He’d admired
that attitude once. But that was before he realized that she didn’t deal with
issues, she just brushed them under the carpet, where they festered, only to rear up
again at another time.

‘Don’t look like that,’
she said reproachfully – presumably because his face showed the deep sorrow he felt for
her and the baby they’d lost. ‘It was an awful thing to happen, but maybe
there was a good reason for it.’

Now, in the 1990s, women were encouraged to
have counselling; they got to see their baby, and what went wrong was explained to them.
But back then there was nothing – no counselling, no advice on how to deal with the
grief, and precious little sympathy. Yet although he knew very little about the effects
losing a baby could have on a woman, his instinct told him that they should talk about
it and cry about it together. But Flora wouldn’t do that.