Forgive Me (51 page)

‘We had a row this morning. I said
something very hurtful. I seem to get sad about everything these days, even because the
bears have gone from this room. And that’s really silly, as they were covered in
soot.’

Patrick stroked her hair gently. ‘When
you have a baby I’ll paint more bears for him or her.’

‘I’ve done something really
stupid,’ she whispered. ‘Phil will be even angrier with me if I tell him,
because he said I wasn’t to do it.’

‘You’ve ordered a
Rolls-Royce?’ he joked. ‘Or is it just a very expensive dress?’

‘I wish it was something like
that,’ she sighed. ‘You see, I sent the statements off to Ben and Sophie.
Phil said they were too young. I’m panicking now in case he’s
right.’

‘Oh dear,’ Patrick sighed, but
he rubbed her back soothingly. ‘Last time I saw you both, Phil told me his views
on that. My opinion was that there would never be an ideal time to read something so
dreadful but that, young as they were, they had every right to see something their
mother had written. I even told Phil that I felt the longer you kept it back, the more
likely they were to hold that against you.’

‘So you don’t think it was wrong
of me?’

‘I do think you ought to have told
Phil what you intended to do. You are a couple, and such things should be shared. But
Phil is a good and compassionate man, not an ogre. He’s not going to bite your
head off for doing something you thought was right.’

‘But what if Ben and Sophie do go off
the rails because of it? I’ll always feel responsible for that.’

‘You must stop feeling responsible for
everyone,’ he chided her, putting his finger under her chin to lift it and look at
her face. ‘You might be officially twenty-two today, but that’s very young
to be a mother hen. You need to have some fun, splash out a bit, be rash and
bold.’

‘I seem to have forgotten how to have
fun,’ she admitted.

‘Then you must remember,’ he
said. ‘Now, patch it up with Phil this evening. This place is nearly ready to
sell, and you must make plans then together about what comes next. You
look pale and listless, I think you need a holiday. That will get you focused
again.’

Phil had said similar things to her many
times, but she always took it as criticism. Coming from Patrick it sounded caring, and
she wondered why she got things so mixed up.

‘I’d better go down and make the
tea,’ she said. ‘Don’t let on I’ve said anything to you, will
you? I’ll apologize to Phil on the way home. I’ll make it right between us
again.’

‘Good girl. I’d like to take you
both out for lunch next Sunday. There’s a lovely place down by the river in
Chiswick. I want you dressed up all pretty and a big smile on your face.’

An hour later, as Phil drove Eva towards
home, she turned to him. ‘I’m really sorry, Phil. I’ve been awful to
you for weeks now, but what I said today was unforgivable. I don’t know why I said
it. I think I must be losing my mind.’

He was clenching his jaw. When he
didn’t answer immediately, she was afraid he’d say that an apology was
useless now and he’d had enough.

But after a few moments he glanced round at
her and reached out to take her hand. ‘I’m sorry too that I didn’t
insist you talk to an expert on these things after the fire. It’s pretty obvious
to me now that the fire and finding out the truth about Flora unhinged you a
bit.’

‘You mean you think I really am losing
my mind?’ she asked in horror.

Phil chuckled. ‘Not as in needing a
straitjacket or a spell in the funny farm, but I’d say you were clinically
depressed. That is of course unless it’s because you wish you weren’t with
me?’

‘Of course not,’ she exclaimed.
‘You are the one good thing in my life.’

‘There’s more than one good
thing in your life,’ he reproved her. ‘You have lots of people who care
about you. You’ve got
a job you like, and enough money coming to
set you up for ever. You are young and pretty, you’ve got plenty of love to give,
and the world is at your feet. You’ve got to find a way of seeing that, and give
up dwelling on the past.’

She didn’t reply immediately, just sat
there looking at her lap. ‘In my defence can I just say that it’s a year
today since Flora died? And it’s my real birthday.’

‘Is that a defence or an
excuse?’ he said. ‘But Happy Birthday anyway, and let’s go out tonight
to celebrate it with a slap-up meal?’

A warm feeling ran through her. One of the
things she loved most about Phil was the way he didn’t sulk or bear grudges.

‘That would be lovely,’ she
replied. ‘But then you are always lovely. I’ve got the day off tomorrow.
I’ll make an appointment at the doctor’s, get my hair done and clean the
flat up. I think if I try to think positive, I can prevent a trip to the funny
farm.’

He squeezed her thigh. ‘Get some
holiday brochures. And ring some estate agents to get them to value the house. That
should keep you from moping!’

At half past eight they were sitting at a
table in the Italian restaurant they both loved in Chiswick. Phil had ordered a taxi, so
he could drink. They started on a bottle of wine while they looked at the menu.

It was good to be out in a busy place
surrounded by other people enjoying themselves, and Eva found herself sitting back and
relaxing in a way she hadn’t done for a very long time.

They talked about places where they’d
like to live: Phil said he thought a village in Buckinghamshire would be good, while Eva
said she fancied living by the sea. But they both
agreed, if they had
to stay in London, Chiswick would be ideal. It felt like a village, it had the river and
it was easy to get out into the countryside from there on the M4.

While they were eating their main course the
music began – a duo playing guitars, who made their way through the tables singing
Italian songs.

‘We should go to Italy for our
holiday,’ Eva suggested. Patrick talked about it often, and had made her want to
see Florence and Rome.

‘I don’t mind where we go, as
long as it’s warm and the food’s good,’ Phil said with a smile.
‘And I can make love to you to the sound of waves breaking on the
shore.’

They were both quite tiddly when the taxi
came to take them home, and Eva nestled happily into Phil’s arms in the back
seat.

‘This is what’s
important,’ Phil whispered to her. ‘Just you and me, and a night of love
ahead of us. We’ve got it all, babe. Don’t let’s fight any
more.’

As Phil and Eva were sitting in the
restaurant being serenaded, Ben and Sophie were driving down from Leeds to The
Beeches.

Ben had asked Sophie up for a long weekend
with him in Leeds. Once he’d read the statement Eva had sent him, he knew he must
let Sophie read it while they were together.

The large manila envelope addressed to him
had been posted to his old flat, and it hadn’t been redirected to the halls of
residence where he’d been living since October. It was pure chance that he
happened to call round there to see a friend and saw it lying in a pile of other mail on
the hall table.

He thought it was only junk mail, as his
name and address were typed. Once he opened it and found it was from Eva, he knew why
she’d typed it – she was afraid he wouldn’t open anything with her
handwriting on.

She was right about that; he would have
binned it unopened. And as he began to read the contents, he wished that was just what
he’d done. He only read the first page as he stood in that grubby draughty
hallway. Instead of going into his old flat, he had to rush out to his car, drive away
and find somewhere away from other people to read the rest.

He had believed, until he read Flora’s
statement, that the worst experience he would ever have in his life was his mother
killing herself. That still haunted him; he had once described it to a friend as like
having some sort of growth inside him. A benign one – he knew it wouldn’t grow or
kill him – but it
was just there, something he felt compelled to prod
at, and feel the ache. And it would never go away.

But as he read his mother’s story that
ache he’d learned to live with grew into real pain.

He had fully understood why Eva wanted to
discover who her father was, and he was as intrigued as she was about their
mother’s time in Scotland. But he hadn’t for one moment believed her insane
idea that Flora could have taken some other woman’s baby and brought it up as her
own.

Then there was her conviction that his
father had tried to burn her house down with her in it! That was so far-fetched, it was
laughable. Yet neither he nor Sophie had laughed, because they’d seen what it had
done to their father being taken off for questioning like a criminal and having The
Beeches searched. Hadn’t they all suffered enough in just one year?

Ben had always taken Eva’s part in the
past. He knew his dad had hurt her badly, and she must have felt totally isolated when
she rushed off to live in London. When he visited her there she didn’t tell him
what had gone wrong with Tod, but he’d guessed the guy had dumped her. She’d
had a struggle to make the house habitable, and she was only working part time as a
waitress. He knew too that he had disappointed her that weekend by going off to see some
friends.

But none of that was a good enough reason to
blame their father for the fire, and Ben had felt he must distance himself from Eva. He
was inclined to agree with his father’s opinion that she’d got mixed up with
a rough crowd again. Possibly she’d been taking drugs too, which would account for
her paranoia. He thought it was likely that when she went off to Scotland with the man
she later took to The Beeches, whoever she’d been keeping company with till then
didn’t like it, and he torched the house when she returned.

Yet as Ben read his mother’s words,
hearing her voice as if she was talking to him, he wasn’t quite so sure he was
right to dismiss Eva’s claims. He totally believed that his mother had stolen Eva;
no one would make up something like that, and he knew women sometimes got very low after
losing their own child. But he didn’t want to accept that his father was a bully
and a blackmailer.

At the first reading he thought his mother
had lied about his father’s behaviour to justify herself, but by the second
reading incidents that he hadn’t understood at the time came back to him.

One which stood out in his mind most clearly
was when he was about eight. He woke in the night to hear banging and shouting. He got
out of bed and went downstairs, and through the open door to the sitting room he saw his
father struggling with his mother. She was crying, the coffee table was turned over and
there was broken china on the floor.

He was frightened and he ran back to his
room. His father came after him, and he made a joke of it, saying Mummy had tripped over
the coffee table and was upset because she broke a vase she really liked. The next day
he’d asked his mother about it, but she said exactly the same as his father. She
even said she was silly to make such a fuss about a broken vase. But that didn’t
explain the big bruise on her arm or the fact that she was limping. He looked in the bin
too – there were broken cups and glasses, but no pieces of a vase.

There were so many other times too when he
had a feeling something was badly wrong. He had memories of Mum with puffy eyes, of her
shouting to him to help clear up before Dad got home, and of her looking scared. There
were the long silences and tense atmosphere when Dad was home, with Mum scurrying around
to appease him with drinks or cake. Ben had always wondered why she never stood up for
herself when his father laid down the law about what he wanted. Or
why she would laugh, dance and sing with her children when their father was out, but was
always so quiet and subservient when he was in.

When Ben was about sixteen, he remembered
helping her to prepare vegetables for a dinner party. He asked who was coming, and
she’d told him. But she sighed as she said the names and wrinkled her nose, the
way she always did when she didn’t like something. He asked why they’d been
invited, if she didn’t like them.

And she’d replied, ‘It
doesn’t matter how I feel, your father wants them here.’

Ben had come downstairs to the kitchen later
that evening. He could hear the guests talking in the dining room, but to his surprise
his mother was in the kitchen, just standing there, staring into space. He sensed
something was wrong and asked what it was.

She smiled at him, and cupped his face in
her hands. ‘Just escaping from the boredom,’ she said. ‘They are the
most tedious bunch of right-wing morons I’ve ever met.’

‘Can’t you pretend you’ve
got a headache and go to bed?’ Ben suggested.

‘No, I can’t. I’ll have to
go back in there and be nice. But this is our little secret. Don’t you say
anything to Dad.’

With hindsight many other incidents took on
a different hue. He had heard his father speaking on the phone and been puzzled that he
wasn’t using his usual brisk tone – often he waved Ben out of the room. Were those
other women he was speaking too? How many of the nights away from home were really
work?

Ben was absolutely certain by the third
reading that his mother had been entirely truthful. There was such clarity, no flowery
adjectives, no attempts to pull at heart strings, just a
plain
statement of facts. And the financial transactions could be checked. He even felt her
deep fear that she would lose her children, if she went against her husband.

Yet despite Ben’s disgust at how his
father had entrapped her, and his growing conviction that his mother was driven to
suicide, he still couldn’t really believe his father had tried to kill Eva. Why
would he? He didn’t know of this statement’s existence then. He hadn’t
met Flora at the time she took Eva, and so he could never be charged with being an
accessory. So why would he take such a huge risk?