Forgive Me

by Lesley Pearse

  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.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  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 l
osing 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.

  Months later when she turned on him and made his life a misery, he had put it down to her having no heart. But now, as he read this long statement from her yet again, he realized that she’d just grown a thick shell around her heart, thinking she was protecting herself.

  Her statement wasn’t from the Flora he knew. There were no sharp comments or sarcasm, nothing cryptic that you had to struggle to understand, just an account of what she’d done, and the consequences. But as horrified as he was, he felt he’d found the nicer, kinder sister of the Flora he fell in love with all those years ago.

  Although she had written it retrospectively in 1986, and underlined this heavily to make it quite clear, she had begun the confession with the date: 1 April 1970.

  Today, sixteen years ago, I took a three-day-old baby girl from outside a betting shop in Carlisle. It was raining and I just wheeled her little pram to two streets away where my car was parked, put the carrycot on the back seat, folded up the wheels and put them in the boot, then drove to London with her.

  Patrick brushed away a stray tear and carried on.

  I intend to hide this somewhere where it may never be found, and I have asked myself what is the point in writing it if no one ever reads it. But the point to me is that I have a need to put it on paper, and that perhaps when I’m done I might even be brave enough to go to the police and confess.

  I went to Scotland after I lost the baby Patrick and I were expecting. I knew I was growing crazier by the minute, being vile to Patrick and anyone else who came near me. I thought if I was entirely alone, in a peaceful place, I could heal myself.

  It almost worked. There were good people there – especially Gregor, who made me laugh again and paint. I’m not sure if I really loved him, or just wanted to, but it did feel like love at the time. When I found I was pregnant again, I really thought I could be happy with him for ever. But at only a few weeks, in early December, I miscarried and the craziness came back even worse than before.

  I had never told Gregor I was pregnant – perhaps because a sixth sense told me I might lose it. So I did what I always seemed to do in those days: I was nasty to everyone who cared about me, withdrew into myself, and then lay low.

  Six months before that, Scotland had looked so beautiful. But after the miscarriage I found it ugly, and all through January and February I holed up in that little house by the river, in bed most of the time, thinking constantly about committing suicide. By late March I knew I had to get away, and I slunk out like a thief in the night without saying goodbye to anyone.

  I didn’t go straight back to London, even though Patrick had left the studio. I stayed in Edinburgh for a few days, then went down to the Borders – a night here, a night there – and ended up in a village not far from Carlisle. I went into the town one day and I was having a cup of tea in a cafe when a very pregnant woman of about twenty-five came in. She ordered tea and a cake, then found she had no money. The owner of the cafe wouldn’t let her have it without any money. I felt sorry for her, because it was very cold, so I paid for her.

  She was very rough, her accent was so thick I could barely understand her, but I gathered she didn’t want the baby she was carrying. She expected the social workers would take it from her anyway. I left then – I found what she said upsetting, and it played on my mind all that night.

  A few days later, on the 1st of April, I decided I would go back to London. My plan was to go into Carlisle first to buy some new canvases, then drive on down as far as the Lakes, stay the night there, then continue on to London the next day. I was told there was an art shop in Botchergate but I couldn’t see it, so I parked my car in a side street, and walked up the road a bit to see if I’d missed it. I went into a newsagent’s to buy a newspaper, and while I was in there I saw that woman again, passing by the window. She’d had her baby and she was pushing it in a small green pram. I remember thinking that the baby couldn’t be more than a few days old, and I couldn’t believe she’d brought it out on such a cold, rainy day.

  Perhaps it was fate that as I was walking back to my car, I saw the green pram left outside a betting shop. I looked in the pram and saw the tiny baby; she was wearing a pink bonnet and crying. Instinct made me rock the pram. I couldn’t see through the shop window, because it was covered over with pictures of racing horses, but I knew the mother was inside, I could hear her voice shouting as she watched a race on the television. I knew I ought to open the betting-shop door and tell the woman off for leaving her baby outside, but suddenly I took the brake off the pram and wheeled it away.

  I wasn’t thinking clearly at all – although, in my defence, once I’d put the carrycot part of the pram in my car, and folded the wheels and put them in the boot, I did drive back on to Botchergate where I’d found her. I told myself that if the mother was outside, frantic because her baby had been taken, I’d give her back straight away and tell her what a lousy mother she was.

  I stayed parked in that street for some time. I saw a couple of men go in to put a bet on, and another three come out. But the mother didn’t emerge. So I drove off.

  I wish I could claim I was shocked by what I’d done, but all I could think of was that I’d lost two babies, and there was that woman stuck in a smoky betting shop while her brand-new baby was out in the cold and the rain. I felt the baby was meant for me.

  I was so calm. On the
other side of Carlisle I stopped in a side street and took the waterproof storm apron off the carrycot. There was a bottle of milk made up, wrapped in a nappy to keep it warm, tucked down the bottom, and there was a new tin of baby milk too, which she’d clearly bought earlier. In my mind that was further proof the baby was meant for me.

  I got the baby out and fed her there in the car. She took the bottle like a dream, and all I could think while I cuddled her was that I’d rescued her, and no further harm could come to her.

  Putting her back in the carrycot, I drove away and didn’t stop till I got to Preston. Eva – I decided to call her that – was fast asleep, the rain was pelting down outside, but we were snug and warm.

  In Preston I found a branch of Boots that I could park outside, and I bought another couple of bottles and teats, plus other baby essentials, including a packet of disposable nappies, and then drove off again.

  Eva slept the whole way to London – I suppose that was the motion of the car – and it was just as well, as I couldn’t make up a bottle with powdered milk anywhere without drawing attention to myself. I guessed that Patrick would have left the little nursery at the studio just as it was when I lost our baby; he wasn’t the kind to pack it all up without my permission. And knowing it would all be there still – clothes, bedding, even a sterilizer – I felt I was taking our baby home.

  Looking back at that day, sixteen years on, I find it astounding that I didn’t panic or worry about anything. Eva felt like mine from the moment I held her in my arms. Instinct took over, and I seemed to remember all the advice I’d read in baby books before.

  Patrick put down the statement, because his eyes were swimming with tears. He could remember Flora reading baby books all the time when she was pregnant; he used to tease her about it, because he hadn’t expected her to become so maternal.

  She was right, he hadn’t touched the nursery; he couldn’t bring himself to. He was also glad he’d cleaned the studio thoroughly before he left it back then. He’d been tempted to trash it just to spite her, but in the end he couldn’t.