‘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.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
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 h
er 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?
‘What are you thinking about?’
Sophie’s question startled Ben out of his reverie.
‘Same old stuff,’ he said, glancing sideways at her.
Their weekend together had started out badly. Sophie had arrived looking like a tart in a very short leopard-print skirt, a black lace shirt that left nothing to the imagination and boots with four-inch heels. She had expected a weekend of wild student parties, and she sulked when he explained he had got her a guest room in the halls with no question of her taking anyone back to her room. He had intended to wait until Sunday before showing her the statement. He wanted her to have one day of shopping and chatting and drinking with his friends before he had to break the news. But she showed him up on Friday night – not just by the way she was dressed, but by being rude to some of the girls Ben liked, being too full on with two of his friends, and guzzling down drink like she had a death wish.
He had to almost carry her up to the guest room, and she threw up on the landing before he could get her into the room. It took him about half an hour to clear it up, and at one point she came out of the room again and shouted that he was a drag because he wouldn’t take her clubbing.
She looked pale and shaky the next day when he met her in the refectory for breakfast, but she was still eyeing up his friends and kept going on about wanting to go to a club that night. She didn’t even apologize for showing him up the previous evening and expecting him to clear up her vomit. Then when she asked why he was being such a bore, he lost patience with her and blurted out about the package he’d got from Eva.
That did bring her round quickly. He told her the main facts of Flora’s statement and suggested they go somewhere quiet where she could read it herself and they could talk about it.
He took her to a cafe he knew that had a room at the back with old-fashioned booth seats. And there, armed with coffee, Sophie read it.
As she read, Ben watched her. He despaired over the way she’d changed since their mother had died: the tarty appearance and the rough people she was hanging around with. And her general belligerence was awful. She was eighteen now, and she kept saying she was old enough to do what she wanted. But Ben felt she was as lost as Eva had been when she went through her goth period.
‘I can’t believe it!’ she said at one point, her eyes full of tears. ‘Could Dad really be that evil?’
They talked through many aspects of the story, both bewildered that the home they had always thought of as happy, had only been that way because their mother made it seem so.
‘There is one thing,’ Sophie said. ‘Dad did suggest a few weeks ago that we both see a solicitor and sign our half of the house over to him. He made it sound like a really good idea. The Beeches is too big, and we could both have smaller places of our own. He said now was the time for us to get a foot on the property ladder and have our independence.’
‘I hope you didn’t agree,’ Ben said. ‘Eva warned us about that.’
Sophie shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t take any notice of Eva. Dad’s the one that knows about property, not her.’
‘If he was on the level, he’d just put it on the market in all our names, then the solici
tors would divide up the proceeds when it was sold. Do it his way and he could walk off with the lot.’
‘He wouldn’t do that, he loves us.’
‘He said he loved Mum too, but he didn’t mind hitting and blackmailing her.’
‘We can’t be certain this is true,’ Sophie said desperately, pushing the statement away from her in defiance. ‘Mum could’ve written it when she was upset about something, and exaggerated.’
‘You don’t really believe that,’ Ben said. ‘No one writes a pack of lies and then hides it. Nor do they change their will just a few weeks before they kill themselves unless they don’t trust the person they were previously intending to leave everything to.’
‘But you surely don’t believe Dad tried to kill Eva?’
Ben shrugged. ‘How could he have done? You said he was home that night.’ He sensed Sophie squirm. ‘You were speaking the truth, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said.
But she dropped her eyes, and Ben knew she was lying.
They had spent the rest of the day mooching about Leeds, half-heartedly looking in the shops and trying to put aside the question of what they were going to do about this statement. Ben felt they should confront their father with it; Sophie wasn’t so sure, because she was still living at home with him.
After having a meal they went to the cinema to see Final Analysis with Richard Gere and Kim Basinger. One of Ben’s friends in Leeds had asked them both to his parents’ house for Sunday lunch. On the way home to the halls of residence, Ben asked Sophie if she wouldn’t mind toning down her appearance for the day. Predictably, she was offended and stalked off to bed. Yet to Ben’s surprise, this morning she was dressed in jeans and a sweater, with very little make-up.
It turned out to be a good day. Mr and Mrs Price, Rod’s parents, welcomed them warmly to their rambling and comfortable house in Bramhope and fed them an enormous roast dinner – the first one Sophie and Ben had eaten for weeks. Rod’s two sisters and his brother were there too, and after lunch they all lay around in the drawing room watching television and chatting. Ben couldn’t help but compare it with past Sundays with his parents. He didn’t ever remember all of them relaxing together like this. Sophie enjoyed it too; on the way home she said she wished she came from a family like the Prices. But at least a nice day with them had stopped her thinking about what would happen when she got home.
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