by Stella Duffy
Saz stopped at the door and turned back to look at him. Patrick stood up and lunged towards her. For a moment she wondered if he was going to smack her in the face. He grabbed her hand, hard. Then stopped, softened his grip, bent his head, kissed her hand and followed her meekly through to his father’s office. He also whispered “patronizing cunt” beneath his breath.
By the time Patrick triple-locked the house and they set off back to London, another five cabinets had been methodically sorted and there was a solid selection of new possibilities for Saz to take home with her. They had a thin pile of Eva Freeman’s medical records which might possibly throw some light on what Sir Gerald had referred to as her illness in the year Patrick was born. Saz was delighted to note that the doctor who had been treating her then was the same man Leyton had quoted as stating Lillian Hope was in perfect health. Clearly this Doctor Lees was some sort of link in the adoption chain – she made a mental note to find a way to check Chris’s mother’s medical records too. There was also another letter she decided to take back with her, a request from Richard Leyton for Gerald Freeman to speak with another of his clients. Saz’s interpretation of the legal jargon was that Leyton seemed to be asking Patrick’s father for a reference. Patrick didn’t know the Jonathan Godwin referred to in the letter but, as he pointed out, he hadn’t thought he knew the Marquands either. Leyton may well have been asking simply for an endorsement of his great conveyancing skills. Though Saz was hoping for more.
Along with a pile of papers dated around the time of Patrick’s birth, Saz was also taking home a slightly more sensitive collection, basically anything marked “Private” or “Confidential”. She had Patrick’s permission to go through the lot, though he asked her to be careful. “I want to know about my parents. But if you open any of that and find it’s a pile of love letters from my father’s mistress—”
“He had one?”
“More than one if the gossip columns are to be believed. I’m not interested in any of that sort of thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Definitely. I have a right to know about me, no matter what they wanted. But there are also things he should be allowed to keep private. If he’d have wanted me to know about lovers or any other secrets, he’d have told me.”
Saz refrained from pointing out the same reasoning could be applied to the adoption in the first place – she didn’t think it was especially appropriate while Patrick was driving at seventy miles an hour down a very narrow country lane. She was, however, glad she’d kept aside the two pale pink letters she found among some travel documents, intending to look through them without Patrick present. Just in case. Her reasoning, though, was less to do with Patrick or his father’s delicate sensibilities, and rather more to do with her assumption that one personal secret might well know more about others.
She nodded and asked, “Anything else you’re not interested in?”
“My father was a successful man, there’s bound to be a few dodgy deals he didn’t want known. Naturally, anything like that would have stayed with the personal files. Use your discretion.”
Saz frowned, wondering where she was going to draw the line between what was safe to report to Patrick and what would send him into another towering rage, “And your reasons for not wanting to know?”
Patrick shrugged, braked suddenly and swerved into a side path to avoid an oncoming tractor travelling almost as fast as they were. “Stupid fucker!” he screamed into his rear-view mirror and then drove off again, not noticeably disturbed and certainly not choosing to slow his speed to a safer winding-road rate.
“I just don’t want to know any more shit. If you find out things about my birth parents, then tell me. But as far as anything else goes …” Patrick took the car up a slip road and onto the motorway, deftly crossing the two lanes of heavy traffic to plant himself in the fast lane and settle at just under ninety-five miles an hour, “I only just got my father back in the past few years. We were becoming real friends. I don’t want to lose that entirely. Certainly now that I’m a father myself, I have a very different view of my childhood. I don’t want to lose any more.”
Saz nodded, understanding, if not completely agreeing, with his desire to hold onto some kind of rosy glow. “Yeah, fair enough. I’ll do my best.” She closed her eyes and settled down to listen to Pulp blaring from the perfectly placed speakers. Jarvis was singing about fathers and sons and Saz knew she was walking through alien territory.
FOURTEEN
Sara’s dreams were of a huge redbrick building, windows facing out, but no light coming in. Long dark corridors of Edwardian prepossessing – pressing down and possessing her. Heavy shadows looming over, double-lit by the bright of harsh sun and the light of her closed eyes. Sara saw, eyes-closed, watching through her own skin, everything flesh-tinted, bloody not rosy. It was full summer outside, the world beyond the red brick was hazy and sweaty, it walked past her building in slow motion, labouring under a yoke of June into July into August and still the rain did not break. Waves of thick heat melted skyward from the pavement, then fell heavier still on the passing walkers. Strolling stumblers. Sara did not walk by in the street. Sara was far inside the thick walls. Inside there were whitewashed paths, curtains moving in no-breeze. Inside she was frozen.
Sara was not alone. There were several of them in here, there may have been many, Sara did not keep her eyes open long enough to count those around her, feeling the closeness of their skin was enough. Misfits, anti-social, no-fit.
There was no satisfaction of darkness, no retreat, just the constant light that fed growing things, fed on growing things. A cold light of examination, blue and piercing. Sara kept her eyes shut tight. She would have slept if she could, sleeps whenever she can. She answered their questions and made the rounds and was again good girl, learnt to be quiet girl. But she could not make the face of the happy girl. The hot summer had stilled happiness, slowed it to a single pulse, mouth opened wide and head thrown back in silent laughter, image frozen in rictus of a scream.
Sara was sleepwalking, deep into winter.
FIFTEEN
Saz spent the afternoon on the telephone. She left a message for Chris asking him if there was any way he could get hold of his mother’s medical records – specifically those from around the time he was born. She left another message for Carrie asking if she’d ever heard of Jonathan Godwin, and then she was delighted when Gary actually answered his telephone and she could speak to him rather than a machine. She gave him the good news about Lillian Hope. Gary was less enthusiastic than she might have hoped.
“It’s not at all certain that this Doctor Lees is giving the mother’s real name, Saz.”
“No, but there’s not a hell of a lot of reason for him to lie. This is a confidential letter sent to the only other person who knew about the baby sale.”
“Still doesn’t mean anything.”
Saz groaned down the phone line, “Gary, it’s all we’ve bloody got so far. There’s no movement at all on Chris’s birth parents and this roundabout way is the closest I’ve got yet. Maybe it’s the birth mother’s real name, maybe the doctor isn’t lying about her …”
“Maybe she’s not dead and gone to heaven. It’s a lot of maybes.”
“Yeah, but none of them are that far-fetched either. Just get onto it, will you? Please? At least you know which part of the country to look.”
“She probably moved away long ago.”
“You didn’t. You only live five streets away from your parents’ place.”
“A good twenty minutes actually. A whole different town.”
“My point being you could have moved to the big city, but you didn’t. You just moved down the road. Maybe she still lives in the wilds as well.”
“Gillingham is hardly wild.”
“It was last time I looked.”
“And what is it you want me to do about this Jonathan Godwin?”
“I don’t know, run him through some database or something. Tell
me what you find out.”
“Run him through a database? Saz, you have a very strange idea of how I conduct my working life.”
“I’m sure I do, Gary, but believe me, my limited knowledge of your office life is more than I want to have. I’m perfectly happy to drag myself across London to see you in every bloody fringe venue in town. And then talk for three hours afterwards about the complexities of your character. Or how you just have to get a better agent. And how hard it is trying to be an artist in this hard-bitten world. You know I’m willing to support that part of your work. You know I always have.”
Gary grudgingly agreed with her analysis of his other career, “Yeah?”
“But really, far as your money job goes, I don’t need to know how it happens, I don’t care. I’m only interested in the results.”
“Mercenary bitch.”
“Through and through. Call me when you know something and I’ll have a pressie for you. ’Bye.”
Saz put on a fresh pot of coffee and ate her way through a half a packet of dark chocolate Hobnobs while flicking through the phone book, her heart falling at the pages of J. Godwins. A strong cup of coffee in front of her, she was just about to get stuck into the pile of Gerald Freeman’s papers when the phone rang. Hoping it was Gary back to her already with good news, she answered it rather than let the machine take the call. Big mistake. For the next forty minutes Saz listened as her old friend Judith slagged off her even older friend Helen – now Judith’s ex-girlfriend. Of course the bitter rant that started about Helen’s new lover ended with Judith bemoaning her inability to win Helen back and her heartbreak at the thought of the rest of their lives apart. Even if Helen was a two-timing, callous, deceitful bitch. Saz managed a few insignificant utterances and otherwise contented herself with shuffling through the pages in front of her as quietly as she could so Judith wouldn’t hear. Not something she could do when, ten minutes after Judith finally got off the phone, Helen popped in “for a quick coffee”. Coffee turned to whisky and tears, and she was still there when Molly got home from work at seven, stayed for dinner, drank two bottles of wine and three good-sized brandies. Apparently the new relationship wasn’t going especially well.
At one in the morning when Helen eventually fell into a waiting cab and Molly staggered off to bed, Saz pulled out the love letters she’d started to look through while Judith was on the telephone. Both written in purple ink on pale pink paper, the paper so fine it was almost tissue paper, they were addressed to “Darlingest Gerry” and signed with a flurry of uneven kisses from “Dearest Sukie”. Both letters were overflowing with soppy sentimentality interspersed with some unpleasantly coy sex references. Neither of the soft pink missives were dated, though one did mention Gerald’s son, and as they were so obviously records of an affair, they must have been from before Patrick’s mother’s death. The second letter was a little more specific. At the bottom of the final page, most of it recalling their last “delicious cuddlings”, Dearest Sukie revealed her true colours to Darlingest Gerry. And they didn’t look especially pink and fluffy. A coda was scribbled in the bottom right hand corner: “I do so want you all to myself, dear Gerry. Sometimes I actually pray that her sickness comes back, properly. I want her all gone. Aren’t I the naughty one?”
Saz put the letter back on top of the pile. Patrick’s mother had first had cancer when he was nine, then she’d gone into remission until the second bout which killed her, slowly, in the two years before he turned fourteen. So Sukie must have been with Gerald Freeman somewhere between 1968 and 1973. Anyone who worked her lover as well as she did in those letters had to have uncovered some of the truth. And Patrick had said the gossip columns had often referred to Sir Gerald’s mistresses, which meant all Saz had to do was check through the society pages for those years until she figured out who this Sukie was. Then she’d go and talk to her. A summer-of-love pink paper bimbo from the days of grass and roses shouldn’t be too hard to find. Unless of course she’d remodelled herself and was now living happily in Kensington. Running a multi-national chain of shops. Or a posh brothel. Or the government.
When Saz climbed into bed just after two she wondered about the propriety of waking the pregnant one for middle-of-the-night sex. Or “kissy-and-stuff” as Sukie had called it. But the evening with Helen had exhausted them both and the added thought of this Sukie and Sir Gerald Freeman hard at “kissy-and-stuff” rather put her off. Instead she slid into bed, wormed her way across the king-size mattress to where Molly lay right on the edge. Always the possibility that she might fall to the floor during her night’s sleep, never any proof that she had. Saz wrapped herself around Molly’s warm back, slipped her arm under Molly’s to stroke the barely rounded stomach and imagined she could feel inside, was holding the sleeping baby, curled inside its mother, curled inside its mother.
Saz woke with Molly at six-thirty when they were both surprised by a severe bout of morning sickness – which looked like it might stretch irritably into early afternoon sickness. Looking after an increasingly depressed Molly meant that not only was Saz’s running routine knocked out for another morning, but she was also forced to leave her enquiries about Sukie and her requests for Gary until later in the day when Molly had finally sloughed off her nauseous daze and gone into work. Though not before Saz presented her girlfriend with the pages she had found of Patrick’s mother’s medical records.
“And you’d like me to decipher this lot for you?”
Saz was cautious, “I’d be really grateful.”
“Medical school doesn’t specialize in teaching you how to read the forty-year-old case notes of long dead strangers” – Molly peered at the pages – “in absolutely appalling handwriting.”
“I know. But it would help to know if Patrick’s mother was really ill at the time or if that was the cover story for her non-pregnancy.”
“And I suppose it would help if we found out she couldn’t get pregnant at all, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably. It would add to the other confirmations of our suspicions, anyway.”
“It’s hardly ethical, babe.”
“Mmm. Buying and then lying to your kid for the whole of his life isn’t especially ideal behaviour either.”
“That’s true. All right, I’ll have a look and see what I can do.”
“And anything you can find on this Doctor Lees?”
“Him too.”
Molly left for work and Saz watched her head down the road towards the tube, the tall, lean woman walking out in bright sunshine, nothing other than a stretch of her stiff shoulders to indicate her tiredness, her difference this summer from last. Saz and Molly were both concerned about the sickness. While at least two of their friends had been ill for the full terms of their pregnancies, and they had heard all the stories about how each pregnancy was bound to be different, Molly’s illness that morning had thrown them both. What she was going through was already far from typical and anything even slightly unusual had them both worried. Worried but hiding it from the other so the fear didn’t spread. Which simply meant the unspoken anxiety blossomed far too easily into unpleasant irritability. They were both treading very carefully.
By the time she finally got down to work it was too late to do anything much about Sukie, and Saz had to content herself with booking a library time to go through old press cuttings – at ten the next morning. Sleep looked like it would have to wait until the weekend. She had a little more luck with Gary, in that she was at least able to talk to him in person, but despite the excessive nature of the bribes Saz was offering, he’d not had enough time to manage anything yesterday afternoon and, further, declared himself far too busy to do anything other than real work for at least another day. Either he really did have too many dead people to file, or his disdain of “sell-out” theatre meant that Saz’s offer of dress circle seats to the latest Hollywood-actor-in-West-End-triumph just wasn’t quite as enticing as she’d hoped. Then again, perhaps he knew she was lying about the tickets.
; Annoyed by her lack of progress, Saz made herself sit down and sort through a couple of boxes of papers. Hours later she knew rather more than she could ever have wanted to about land purchase options in France, Scotland and southern Spain. She knew that Gerald Freeman thought his world had collapsed when his wife died – and that for some time, especially in his business dealings, it seemed that it had. She knew he had rallied a few years later and taken his company into the aggressive ’80s with extreme force. She knew he’d had several disagreements with various shareholders and advisors – chief among them was Richard Leyton – about the diversification of his business in the late ’70s. Not everyone had been as aware as Sir Gerald of the boom potential of the plastics industry. Even, and Patrick had guessed right here, its potential in the burgeoning arms trade. Saz was glad that as yet she didn’t have any definite deals to report. She did though, find something that Sir Gerald and his solicitor were in complete agreement about – the necessity of keeping Patrick’s adoption entirely secret. Saz was starting to get the impression that Richard Leyton was more in control of the situation than Gerald Freeman. She found six different letters, dealing with a range of concerns from Patrick’s initially slow development at school, to the arthritis-related condition he had suffered in his early teens. According to Gerald Freeman, Patrick’s treatment would have been more successful if his doctors had had access to Patrick’s complete medical history. The solicitor, however, was the one calling the shots about how much information could be passed on. And according to all the letters, how much was absolutely none at all. At least nothing more than Doctor Lees’ initial assertion that Lillian Hope had been completely healthy at the time of her son’s birth. Saz didn’t know an awful lot more about Patrick’s adoption, but she knew for definite that she intended to have a serious talk with Georgina Leyton at the earliest opportunity. No matter how suddenly her father had died, if she had sent all those papers back to Freeman she must have made some attempt to sort through his business first. And if she hadn’t, then Saz would just have to ask her to give it a go. She wasn’t prepared to be fobbed off a second time.