Insurance. His occupation on her birth certificate was given as clerk and Louise knew now, with sad certainty, that her father had risen no higher.
Her mother part-owned a thriving hotel.
Yet once he had been a pilot. In that old photograph, there were wings on his uniform tunic.
‘Did you fly Spitfires?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said her father, speaking at last. ‘Lancaster bombers.’
‘Oh,’ said Louise. She looked at the plump, ageing man who did not want to meet her gaze. ‘Where is Farland Road?’ she asked. ‘The address on my birth certificate?’
‘It’s just round the corner,’ her father said. ‘Your mother sold up and moved.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ said Louise. ‘Not at all. I don’t remember a thing about those early days.’
‘Your father gave your mother the house outright,’ said Betty Hampton. ‘He was paying it off for years.’
So that was how her mother had got her original capital! She’d used the money to good advantage. She was worth a great deal more now, in terms of cash, than her father. But what was he worth as a man?
‘It seemed best to leave you alone, Louise,’ he said now. ‘Not upset you by making claims. If your mother had stayed nearby, maybe we’d have kept in touch – I don’t know. But she whisked you away – disappeared with you. I didn’t know where she’d gone.’
‘She told me you were dead,’ Louise reminded him.
‘I expect she thought it was kinder to you – a clean break,’ said Betty, who approved of what Freda had done.
‘You don’t look at all like your mother,’ her father said. ‘You’re a pretty girl, Louise.’ He looked pleased, saying this.
‘You’re married,’ said Betty pleasantly, more relaxed now that it seemed this was purely a social call. She’d noticed Louise’s ring.
I’m a widow, I’m lost, Louise screamed inside. I’m trying to pick up my life and find out who I am.
Aloud, she simply said, ‘Yes.’
I’ve a daughter, Tessa, who’s only six years old and who would like a kind grandfather somewhere in her life, she added inside her head, but instead of telling them any of this, she stood up. There was no place for her here; she was an intrusion and a reminder of things they preferred to forget.
‘I must go now,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
‘Not at all, Louise. We’re glad you did, aren’t we, Jim?’ said Betty, rising too. As she saw Louise to the door, she did not offer to give her their new address, and Louise did not ask for it. She knew she would never see them again. In her handbag were snaps of Tessa, both as a baby and more recently. There was no point in getting them out. These people had nothing to do with her.
Betty closed the front door before she had reached the gate. Louise did not see her father standing behind the net curtain, watching her leave.
She walked quickly down the road, a sick feeling in her stomach and her heart thumping again, but without any, panic. This was no attack of the gremlins; this was rage.
Once round the corner, she stopped. Farland Road, they had said, was not far away. She might as well take a look at where she had lived as a child.
She asked a woman pushing a pram where it was.
12
The house was built of dull, brownish brick. Long windows under a gabled roof reflected the March sunlight, giving them a blank appearance. The front door was painted yellow.
It should be green, Louise thought: dark green. She stood by the gate of number 33 Farland Road and looked up at the tall, narrow, Edwardian house with the short flight of stone steps leading to the front door.
She opened the gate and walked up the path. There was a wide letter-box, made of brass and gleaming, set into the front door, and a heavy brass knocker. Louise climbed the steps and lifted the knocker.
It was easy to reach; there was no need to stand on her toes, she thought, and knew that, long ago, she had had to do that to announce she was there, outside.
A loud, single thud echoed through the house as she let the knocker fall. She heard sounds from within, and as the door opened she knew that there would be a seascape painting on the wall at the left, and a coat rack on the other side of the hall. Steep stairs would ascend at the rear.
The front door opened, and a blonde girl with an inquiring expression stood revealed. In a strong accent, she said, ‘Yes? What is it, please?’
Louise looked past her.
The hall was painted white. Several small prints hung at the left; there was no coat rack on the other side but a large central heating radiator with a shelf above, on which some small porcelain figures were displayed. At the back of the hall, the stairs rose steeply to the upper floors. They were not covered with the green and brown carpet like jungle undergrowth which Louise expected but in plain apricot colour. The banisters were painted white, and more prints hung in groups on the walls.
‘Yes, please?’ the fair-haired girl was repeating.
Louise brought her gaze back to the smooth, youthful face.
‘Louise Hampton,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for Louise Hampton. She lived here, once.’
‘Is no Hampton here now,’ said the girl earnestly. ‘Is Mr Renton and Mrs Renton. Since some years.’
‘It was some time ago,’ Louise acknowledged. ‘She was only a child – eight or nine years old.’
‘Mrs Renton is out now. Is coming home this afternoon,’ said the girl. ‘You come back. She tells you then.’
A wail came from somewhere inside the house.
‘Is the baby,’ the girl said. ‘You come again. You ask to Mrs Renton.’
Louise shook her head slowly.
‘Never mind,’ she told the au pair girl. ‘It doesn’t matter now. I think it’s too late to find her,’ and she turned and walked away, leaving the girl staring after her in bewilderment before the increasingly loud yells from her charge prevailed.
Her room had been on the top floor, Louise knew; the route upstairs was through the deep jungle growth, menaced by lions and tigers. She had a white chest of drawers and her clothes hung in a white-painted wardrobe. Her curtains were blue, with small daisies on them, and there was worn dark blue haircord on the floor.
Her parents’ room was on the floor below: twin beds with a wide space between, and beige silky counterpanes. The curtains were beige too, and the carpet.
In the kitchen, her mother would be cooking the supper; savoury smells would greet her; there would be dripping toast for tea on cold days after school. Her father, when he came back from work, would kiss her, his soft moustache brushing her face, and would give her a toffee from a bag he kept in his overcoat pocket. Her mother mustn’t know about the toffee, for sweets were bad for the teeth. Her father would slick down his thinning sandy hair with a brush, looking at himself in the glass to make sure he was neat. She remembered now that he never went into the kitchen to greet her mother; he’d go into the sitting-room where he’d read the paper, and Louise would do her homework at the table beside him. She didn’t have much homework yet; she was rather young for a lot. Sometimes there wasn’t any, but she’d pretend there was and would read or draw, because she liked being there with her father. Later, he’d read to her, or she’d sit on the floor with a book. They wouldn’t talk much, but it was cosy. Sometimes he’d play records, rather softly, for her mother didn’t like loud symphonies or choirs.
Louise seldom had a friend in to play, she recalled, though sometimes she went out to tea with other little girls. Her mother didn’t encourage socialising; children around made a mess. Besides, Louise was to work hard and get to the grammar school.
Then one day the house was empty. There were no curtains, no furniture, no one inside, when she came home from school.
Louise almost screamed again, standing in the road, remembering that day.
She missed the 2.15 train back to Berbridge, and there wasn’t another until an hour later.
Louise didn’t know
what happened to the time in the interval between leaving her father’s house and reaching the station. She’d walked blindly round the streets, her head full of images from the past, coming back again to stand opposite 33 Farland Road while memory crowded upon her.
She’d stood there, screaming, eight years old.
Then, from the next house, number 35, which now had white window paint and a blue front door, her mother had come stalking out to rebuke her over the fence dividing the paths.
Louise had been too hysterical to hear the sharp words but her mother had marched down the one path, up the other, and caught hold of her roughly, shaking her, ordering her to be silent, finally slapping her, and at that Louise had ceased screaming.
They had gone into the neighbour’s house, where tea was waiting, but Louise had eaten nothing nor drunk the milk the neighbour had poured into a tall glass with a wavy pattern on it. Louise could see the tea table now, with the milk, bread and butter and raspberry jam, a dundee cake.
A taxi had come and she and her mother had driven away, with some luggage. They’d gone to a railway station and got into a train. She’d asked where they were going and her mother had answered, ‘You’ll see in good time.’
Hours later, when it was quite dark, they’d left the train at a small, remote station, dimly lit. It seemed to be the middle of the night. Louise had slept for a while in the train. Then there’d been a ride in a car, for quite a long way, and at last they arrived at a large house which Louise couldn’t see very well in the dark. She’d been put to bed in a small room with a sloping attic roof: her home for the next two years.
Much later, she’d asked where her father was. Now, so many years afterwards, Louise could remember that he hadn’t been at home for some time before this terrifying incident, but she’d been given no explanation for his absence. It was at the hotel in Wales that her mother had said he was dead.
Louise walked blindly round the quiet residential streets of Putney, remembering. Never once did she have an attack of her gremlins, but she took no heed at all of where she was and it was a long time before she returned to the present.
She heard a clock strike two, and remembered her train.
It was hopeless to expect to catch it now, though she ran back to the High Street and found a taxi fairly quickly.
Tessa would be all right, she thought in the train. She’d been warned and she’d go straight home. She’d done it often enough before.
But always, before, Louise had been there when she came in; Tessa had never returned to find the flat empty. Now she would return, as Louise had done herself so many years ago, to find no one there.
It wasn’t the same. She had a key and could get in, and the furniture – all their possessions – would be there. Louise tried to console herself, arms clutching each other across her body, as the train carried her back to Berbridge.
Mrs Cox, she thought: she’s not often out so late. Tessa will go down to her if she’s frightened.
It had not been a normal day.
Mrs Cox sat in her basement room watching the window and wondering what Louise and the man were doing. After the morning’s departure with Tessa for school, they had not returned. He’d been there all night again – the third night running. Mrs Cox would have complained to the landlord if she hadn’t had other plans.
Throughout the day, she waited and watched, only leaving the window to prepare her lunch and to visit the bathroom. Once, in the afternoon, she went out to see if the green car was parked outside, but it was not.
By the time Tessa was due back from school, she was certain there was no one in Louise’s flat, but she knew they now went, most days, to the school together.
She was ready, though, in case this should be the chance she had been waiting for.
At twenty minutes to four the small pair of legs that she had seen skip lightly by, in company, that morning, moved slowly past the barred window, alone.
Mrs Cox felt a surge of excitement. She got out of her chair and moved closer, watching for the adult pairs, but no one else came, and Mrs Cox, after only a short pause for thought, went out to the kitchen to fetch the mug with the Peter Rabbit pattern upon it which Tessa always used when she came to the basement flat. Into its base she poured, straight from the bottle in the bathroom cupboard, a large measure of Mavis’s chloral hydrate; then she crushed and added some of the white sleeping tablets. She took the mug back to the kitchen and added a generous amount of drinking chocolate powder and plenty of sugar, for she knew the chloral hydrate had a bitter flavour. The prepared Mars Bar was still in her bag and she took it out. It would be a nice treat for the child. She poured some milk into a pan and placed it ready on the gas stove. All was prepared.
There was enough chloral hydrate left for several strong doses, and more white tablets, too, if this wasn’t enough, Mrs Cox thought. But Grace had never awakened after consuming the contents of her mother’s blue capsules, all those years ago.
Her hand on the door that led from her living-room into the basement well, Mrs Cox paused and glanced round. Her eyes rested on the oak chest, in which was the mohair rug that would make a soft nest for a sleeping child until she could be disposed of.
Mrs Cox smiled to herself and opened the door. She climbed the steps that led out of the well and walked round to the twisting iron stairs.
Tessa felt quite forlorn when she found that her mother was not waiting for her outside the school. It was a long time, now, since she had walked home alone. She set off slowly; perhaps she would meet her mother on the way. Busy all day at school, she had not thought about the mysterious errand that had taken her mother to London; business, Mummy had said. She had said the train might, just possibly, be delayed, but as Tessa trudged on she began to fear that her mother had had one of the attacks that had once been so frequent. Her feet dragged as she walked through the recreation ground, going slowly, hoping her mother would be coming towards her or perhaps waiting by the swings.
She wasn’t. There was only a mother with a pram and a very small toddler in the play area. Tessa put on speed as she crossed the football pitch, for sometimes there were bigger children there, boys who called out rude things when she went by alone, but there was no one there today.
She walked through the gates and along Shippham Avenue, hurrying past the holly bush on the corner because of the dragon, not stopping to see if he snorted with fire today. She turned into Oak Way, sure that her mother would be at home by now but fearful of finding her pale and trembling again. She walked slowly past Mrs Cox’s basement windows and up the twisting stairs to the flat. Forgetting about the key round her neck, she rang the bell.
No one came.
Tessa felt a strange sensation in her chest, a panicky flutter. Then she remembered her key. She took off her red gloves and stuffed them into her pocket. She fished inside her clothes and found the key, pulled it out on its long tape and fitted it into the lock. She turned it and went inside.
The flat was so quiet. She knew at once that no one was there, though she called out, ‘Mummy!’ and then, more desperately, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’
This had never happened before. Her mother may not have met her at school every day, but she had always been here, ready to hug her and welcome her home.
Tessa slipped off her satchel and hung it on the back of the hall chair. She went into the sitting-room. Her mother had plumped up the sofa cushions and straightened everything before they all went out that morning. In the kitchen, the breakfast dishes had been washed up and left in the rack to dry. It had been nice having Alan there for breakfast the last few mornings. If only he were here now, Tessa thought, she’d feel better.
Tears came into her eyes. She was frightened, but that was silly – she was a big girl now, nearly seven, and no longer a baby. Her mother would soon come from the train, in a taxi, probably, as they had done together after visiting Grandma in Cornwall. She’d want tea. Tessa would get it ready – have it waiting when Mummy arrived.
&nb
sp; The doorbell rang.
Mummy? But Mummy would come in with her key.
Could it be one of those bad men her mother had said she must never talk to? But they didn’t come to your house, did they? Mummy always put the chain up on the door at night, though, so perhaps they did. Tessa put the chain on before opening the door. She peered through the crack.
Mrs Cox stood outside.
‘Mummy’s not here,’ said Tessa, and her lip trembled.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Cox, and her voice was strong as she felt triumph near. ‘Open the door, Tessa, and let me in.’
Tessa fumbled with the chain, finding it difficult, now, to undo, but she managed, and Mrs Cox stepped inside. Tessa felt better already.
‘Mummy’s in London,’ she said. ‘On business.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Cox. Was she, indeed? What sort of business? In one of those shady hotels with her fancy man, no doubt, she thought grimly, though they’d had no qualms about carrying on here in what had been, until lately, a respectable house. She knew just what to say to Tessa.
‘You must be a brave little girl,’ Mrs Cox said, peering down into Tessa’s face.
Mrs Cox had long grey hairs on her upper lip, Tessa saw; she’d noticed them before. They weren’t very nice. They twitched as she spoke. There were some on her chin, too.
‘Mummy’s had an accident – a bus knocked her down,’ Mrs Cox said. ‘She’s in hospital in London. You’re to stay with me until she gets better. I’ll take you to see her soon. Come along with me now.’
The world spun around Tessa. She felt sick and giddy. Her heart thumped and her mouth went dry. She allowed Mrs Cox to take her hand.
Mrs Cox noticed the satchel on the chair. She picked it up and carried it down; it wouldn’t do to leave that behind.
Tessa had felt quite hungry when school was over, but her appetite had gone by the time she was sitting at the table in Mrs Cox’s back kitchen.
Mummy was hurt – run over by a bus and in hospital. Daddy had been in hospital too, after being hit by a lorry, when out in his car on the way to work, and he had never come back.
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