This Lovely City

by Louise Hare

  She took her breakfast – a round of toast and a cup of tea – back up to Delia’s bedroom and watched out of the window as she ate, perched on the low windowsill. The street outside looked very much like her own but there were subtle differences. Delia’s mother was often chatting to one or other of the next-door neighbours as she hung out her laundry or sat outside in the morning with her cup of tea. Mrs Marson was on speaking terms even with the family at the very end of the road. Ma never spoke to any of their neighbours, not even Mrs Ryan if she could help it. When they’d first moved in, a few of the women had been come round to the house and knocked on the door. The welcoming committee. Ma had offered them tea and they’d brought homemade cake. Coffee and walnut, Evie remembered. She’d been given a sliver on a saucer and told to stay upstairs out of the way while the grown-ups talked but she hadn’t been able to resist peering through the bannisters, waving to Mrs Foster who, with her husband, ran the clothing stall on the market where Ma bought Evie’s school uniform. Mrs Foster had looked confused and Ma had been in foul mood afterwards. There was no repeat visit and Ma had said good riddance. Without Evie she had no one. Just her cleaning jobs and her sewing work on the side. She must be lonely. She always had been; wasn’t that why she’d tried to save Evie from the same fate? Suddenly she understood why she’d felt so out of sorts since leaving home: she knew exactly why her mother had done what she’d done. It didn’t make it right, but she could at least listen. Maybe even forgive.

  She knew it was a terrible idea even as she put on her coat and headed out into the light grey drizzle. Ma would turn everything until it was all Evie’s fault and she’d end up feeling ten times worse than she did already. But there was also the tantalising chance that she might bump into Lawrie. He’d asked for time alone but she wasn’t exactly defying him. He’d told her several times that she would feel better if she sat down with her mother and talked. He couldn’t very well go back on that now.

  She checked her watch: church services would be coming to a close and Ma should be home by the time she got there. Walking briskly until she reached the station, she dawdled the rest of the way. Turning the corner onto her street she saw Rathbone’s car and felt a jolt of fear, like an electric shock. She could see him in the car. Doing a crossword from what it looked like, as if that were a normal way to spend a Sunday. Was he waiting for Lawrie? Catching her breath, she looked back as she knocked on her own front door; it didn’t feel right to let herself in.

  ‘Evie?’ Her mother stood in the open doorway, her mouth trembling as she tried to dampen her wide smile. ‘Come in, love. Please.’ She stepped out of the way.

  ‘Hello, Ma.’

  Her mother led her into the front room, as if Evie were an important guest and not her own daughter. The room was freezing and Evie kept her coat on as she sat.

  Her mother stood, her hands wound up in her apron. ‘I’ll stick the kettle on, shall I? Did you want to stay to eat? I’ve not got a proper meal, I’m afraid, just a bit of ham and some cold potatoes left over from yesterday, but it’ll stretch for both of us. If you like.’ She was nervous.

  Her mother bustled out as Evie perched on the edge of the sofa feeling a decade older than she had the last time she’d been in this room. She stood and walked to the mantelpiece, picking up the same photograph that had so fascinated Lawrie, of that long-ago summer’s day in Trafalgar Square. She remembered how excited she’d been about that day. Walking around London like tourists, something she and her mother never did. Eating in a restaurant for the first time, Aunt Gertie showing her how to tuck in a napkin so that she didn’t spill gravy down her best frock. She’d fallen asleep on the bus on the way home and it had felt like a dream when she woke the next morning. The photograph was proof that it had really happened, arriving in a stiff, cardboard-backed envelope with its Devon postmark two weeks later.

  ‘That was a lovely day, wasn’t it?’ Ma came back in with the tea tray. She’d even opened a packet of biscuits to mark the occasion.

  ‘We don’t have many photos, do we?’ Evie put the frame back. ‘Not much to remember us by.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Evie turned to look at her mother, standing there bewildered, a hand pressed into her aching back. ‘It’s just that Delia’s family, they go to the seaside every year and get a family picture taken. You can walk into their front room and see their lives all lined up in chronological order. And I’m not saying that I wish we could have gone to the seaside or anything like that. I know we couldn’t afford it. But all these other photos are older than I am.’

  ‘You think it’s because I was ashamed of you. You think I never wanted to have our picture taken because I didn’t want to be reminded.’

  ‘You shoved all my school photographs away in a drawer, Ma. What else am I supposed to think?’

  ‘Wait there.’ Ma left the room and Evie heard her heavy tread on the stairs.

  Evie sat and nibbled on one of the ginger biscuits her mother had laid out, trying to remember why she’d come. This was already awful, just raking up all the noxious feelings she’d pushed down over the years. She stood again, reaching out for her handbag, hoping to sneak out before her mother reappeared.

  Too late. Ma walked back in, an old shoebox in her hand. She placed it reverentially in Evie’s lap. ‘There you go.’

  Evie touched the box, her finger making a print in the dust that tickled her nose, making her want to sneeze. The cardboard felt soft and flimsy beneath her fingertips, time and neglect having depleted its strength.

  ‘What’s in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Old photographs. Just because I don’t keep these things on display, it doesn’t mean I don’t care. I do, Evie, else I’d have binned them all. See?’

  Ma hovered over her like a parent watching their child open Christmas presents but Evie felt like she was holding Pandora’s box in her lap.

  ‘Family photographs?’ She dared to lift the lid and pull out a fistful of aged photos. On top were three copies of the same image, a posed family portrait taken in a studio. A young smiling man with his arm around a woman the spit of Evie’s own mother. In her arms was a baby wrapped in a woollen blanket.

  ‘My parents,’ Ma said, perching on the arm of the sofa. ‘And your aunt when she was a baby.’

  Beneath was an almost identical photo but this one pictured Gertie as a little girl of two or three wearing a gingham dress with a large bow in her hair. A new baby lay in her mother’s arms.

  ‘This is you?’ Evie pointed and Ma nodded.

  The man, Evie’s grandfather, didn’t look how she’d imagined. In her head he’d become a Dickensian character, a Thomas Gradgrind type of man who had cared only for his own reputation and nothing for his daughter’s happiness. The man whose image she held in her hand looked as though he’d only just managed to stop laughing, probably at his eldest daughter who stood there with her arms folded. He looked a friendly sort of a chap. Just a normal father and husband who was evidently proud of his three girls. There was her own mother as a baby. The blanket was embroidered, large flowers adorning it. Even in black and white Evie recognised it.

  ‘I kept that blanket. I wrapped you in it when you were a baby.’ Ma watched Evie trace the pattern with her finger. Yes, she remembered, the blanket had been white, the daisies still bright yellow. She had taken it to Devon, for Annabel. She hadn’t seen it since. She didn’t trust herself to be able to ask without unleashing the pain that she was fighting to ignore, but she was sure that Ma had taken the blanket along with Annabel. It was some comfort to imagine that her daughter had something of hers to remember her by.

  ‘He doesn’t look anything like I imagined, your father,’ Evie said, trying to take her mind away from thoughts of Annabel. ‘I pictured him as a bitter and twisted old man but he looks… ordinary. Quite handsome, in fact. Friendly.’ Not the sort of man who throws out his own daughter and refuses to meet his own granddaughter.

  ‘He was fri
endly. And funny. Gosh, we used to laugh. But he also held some despicable views on anyone he saw as an outsider. He was a complicated man. I loved him very much and he told me that I broke his heart when I chose to keep you. I told him that he’d already broken my heart by forcing me to make that decision.’

  ‘You chose me? Over him?’ Evie had never heard this before. She’d always assumed that he’d thrown Ma out and that was that.

  ‘He arranged for me to go the home on Cedars Road and told everyone that I’d gone to stay with a relative. That was what gave me the idea of sending you to Devon. I’d never have let you go in one of those homes Evie, never. Once the baby – you – had been handed over for adoption I was supposed come back and get on with my life as if nothing had happened. But I still hoped that David might somehow find out and come back for us. Stupid, really. He had no idea about you and I’d told him I didn’t love him, to get rid of him. I had to make sure he left London because of your grandfather. He’d already had him beaten up and I knew he could arrange far worse. He knew some bad people through his job. And you were a part of David. I wanted to keep you with me.’

  ‘David?’ Evie had never even heard his name before. ‘What happened exactly?’

  Ma got up and walked over to the sideboard where she’d left the tray. She poured the tea but Evie could see her hands shake.

  ‘Ma, leave it. I don’t want any tea.’

  ‘Something stronger?’ She opened the sideboard door. ‘I bought a new bottle of Scotch.’

  ‘Ma, will you just sit down and talk to me. Tell me what happened with my father. You can manage that, can’t you?’

  A small nod and her mother came and sat beside her, facing her.

  ‘I met him at a dance. It wasn’t my sort of thing really but your aunt talked me into it. This was when she shared a flat in Balham with one of her girlfriends. She said that Pa was treating me like an old housewife, cooking and cleaning for him for little thanks. I was to stay the weekend with her and she’d take me out. And that’s when I met David. I was nineteen so only a little older than you. Gertie was thrilled. She and this other girl, I can’t remember her name now, they were headed to France for the Easter holidays with some boys they’d met. She gave me the key to their flat and we used to go round, me and David. It was innocent at first, just talking and I’d sometimes cook a meal. It was just somewhere we could be together ’cause I knew Pa would kill me if he saw David.’

  ‘He found out, though.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ma shook her head, staring at the wall, her mind lost in the past. ‘I met him at the tube station one day and he kissed me out on the street. It was the only time since the dance that we’d been so obvious. And someone saw. Next time I saw David he had two black eyes and a busted lip. He’d ended up in hospital thanks to your grandfather, not that he did it himself, you understand. He was at home eating a pie that I’d cooked for him, knowing all the while that my David was getting beaten half to death.’ She rummaged in the apron pocket then gave up and blew her nose on the apron itself, pulling it from around her waist. ‘I knew it was no good. Neither of us had any money and he didn’t even have a job. He was a student, you see. I told him that I didn’t love him, that there was no point in us going on if it meant risking his life. Last time I saw him he said he’d booked passage to go home and he waited for me to tell him not to go but I didn’t. It was only a month or so after he’d left that I realised you were on the way.’

  Evie had always assumed she was the product of a one-time mistake, her own father just as unknown to her mother as Sam had been to her. Ma had let her believe that for eighteen years rather than tell her the truth.

  ‘Why keep this such a secret?’ she asked. ‘You loved one another. Why is that shameful? I thought that you must have hated my father, that he was no good.’

  ‘Gosh no, he was the best man I’ve ever met, Evie. I never meant for you to think badly of him. I just didn’t want to remember him, or remember that I was the one who sent him away. I thought you’d be angry, that you’d think it was my fault.’ Ma reached from the shoebox and rifled through it, picking out a new photograph. ‘This is him.’

  The photograph had been taken by the seaside. Brighton Pier, Evie read, her breath quickening as she saw her younger mother standing hand in hand, smiling, with an equally young man. Her father. They looked so happy, gazing into each other’s eyes instead of the camera lens, the same age, near enough, as Evie and Lawrie were now.

  ‘We went to Brighton one Saturday. David was always complaining that he missed the sea and I thought it would be fun to have a real English seaside day out.’

  He stood tall, much darker than Lawrie, smart in his white shirt and his jacket done up with one button. It must have been a warm day as her mother wore a short-sleeved dress, her cardigan slung over an arm. Her dark curly hair was pinned up and her smile was so wide that Evie realised she’d never seen her mother this happy. Behind them was clear sky and the railings of the famous pier.

  ‘I almost lost this. They post them to you afterwards, you see, after they’ve developed them, and like a fool I gave this address. Well, of course your grandfather opened the envelope even though it had my name on.’ She smiled. ‘He threw it in the bin but I managed to sneak back and rescue it. I hid it in amongst the family photos ’cause I knew no one would throw them out but my father didn’t like to look at them after Mother died. He didn’t want to dwell on the past, he said.’

  ‘David loved you very much,’ Evie said, unable to tear her eyes from her father’s face. ‘And you loved him.’

  ‘You’re very like him, you know. He was very clever. And very stubborn.’

  Evie laughed. ‘I always thought I got that from you.’

  Her mother didn’t reply. Evie looked up and saw that she was crying.

  ‘Oh, Ma!’ It felt natural to open her arms and pull her mother close. All they had left was one another. ‘Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘You’re right to hate me.’ Ma pulled back and blew her nose once more. ‘I should have told you everything years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe if you’d known the truth, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.’

  ‘It’s not too late. We can start again, can’t we?’

  ‘Evie, I took your child from you.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘I promise you, honestly, I thought I was protecting you but I realise now… it was selfish of me. I was thinking of myself and I had no right to make that decision for you.’

  ‘No. You didn’t. I won’t forget what you did but I know why you did it.’ Evie patted the box. ‘I could have grown up in one of those awful children’s homes but you gave me a proper home. You made sure that Annabel had a proper home. I can’t promise anything, but I don’t want to cut you out of my life. I don’t want us to end up like you and your father.’

  Her mother smiled. ‘Evie, you don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that. Now come on, let’s have something to eat and then I’ll show you the patterns I was looking at for your wedding dress.’

  Evie’s heart sank. She hadn’t told her mother that Lawrie had found out about Annabel. That there might not be a wedding. She just smiled and followed Ma next door to the kitchen, sitting as her mother brought out the leftovers and two plates. There were dirty dishes in the sink and there were stale crumbs on the table top, multiple mug rings when before Ma had never let a single one settle.

  ‘There’s something else you should know,’ Ma told her as they began to eat. ‘I’m leaving London.’

  ‘What? When?’ Evie paused, her fork halfway to her mouth.

  ‘Soon. I’m not sure when exactly. Gertie invited me to Devon. She’ll sell this place and we’ll live off the money, I suppose.’ Ma shrugged. ‘There isn’t anything keeping me here, is there? I’ve no real friends. What am I going to do with myself once you’re married?’

  Evie was still deciding whether or not to tell her about Lawrie when the doorbell chimed.

&nb
sp; Ma frowned. ‘Who on earth’s that at this time on a Sunday?’ She got up and Evie hoped that whoever it was didn’t frighten easily. Her mother wouldn’t shy away from giving them a piece of her mind.

  ‘Evie!’

  She heard her mother shout and had just pushed her chair back when they arrived, two policemen, grabbing her arms as she tried to stand. They took no consideration over the fact that she was a woman, barely five feet four and hardly a threat to them, wrenching her upright so quickly that she thought her arms might come free from their sockets. This, then, was what they’d done to Lawrie only a few weeks earlier.

  Rathbone appeared in the doorway, cigarette in his mouth as always. ‘Evelyn Coleridge,’ he said, ‘I am arresting you for the murder of Annabel Coleridge. You are not obliged to say anything but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.’

  ‘Ma!’ Evie shouted out as they handcuffed her and pushed her before them, heading out towards the street. ‘Ma, what do I do?’

  ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll sort it.’ Her mother called out. She was trapped on the bottom stair, one of the men holding her back as they took her daughter away. ‘Don’t worry, Evie. Just do what they say.’

  ‘Sensible woman, your mother,’ she heard Rathbone chuckle behind her.

  There were two police cars outside, sirens off but their lights flashing, enough to draw a crowd. There was nowhere to hide. Evie’s vision blurred with tears of shame as they shoved her into the back of one of the cars. Everyone had seen them take her away. Everyone would find out what she’d done.

  25

  He knew that something had happened from the number of people standing out on the street. Early afternoon on a Sunday – everyone should have been indoors, the women sweating over a hot oven as they prepared the best roast dinner that coupons could provide, their husbands putting their feet up and smoking a pipe. As Lawrie walked past, they turned to look, something in their pointed gaze sending a shiver through his body.