‘I don’t know that I can take much more in,’ Fleur said. ‘Yesterday was such a horrible shock and yet a good day, too. Do I have to be here when she comes?’
‘Not if you don’t want to. It might be best if you’re not.’
‘But you’ll tell me everything she says?’
Emma had swallowed. It would depend on what Caroline had to say and she would use her own discretion as to what she would report back to Fleur.
For answer Emma had smiled warmly at her and Fleur had given her an unexpected hug, assuming Emma was saying that yes, she would tell her everything.
And now Fleur had gone to the ice cream parlour for the afternoon and she’d gone readily enough and not put up any objection as Emma had thought she might. Perhaps the romance of the purse with the Italian coin in it was pride of place in Fleur’s mind. Fleur liked serving up ice cream sundaes to people, so she said. And she was learning Italian. Emma hoped with all her heart that Fleur’s youth would mean she could accept her new circumstances more easily.
‘My Italian’s better than nonna’s English!’ Fleur had laughed at the tea party the day before when she’d had to translate something nonna had said to Ruby in her mother tongue. How good that laugh had sounded.
Emma had told Fleur she would drive over to Torquay and pick her up in the car when Caroline had gone. Seven o’ clock at the very latest, she’d said. That should give her and Caroline enough time to say what needed to be said to one another, shouldn’t it?
Ah, here was Caroline now. And dressed more glamorously than the day before if that were possible. Like a film star. And then Emma remembered that Caroline had told Seth she was going to America to break into films. Perhaps she had.
Emma hurried out into the hall, ready to open the door before Caroline’s knock. A last minute check on her hair and to see that her petticoat wasn’t hanging down below the hem of her skirt and Emma was ready for anything.
‘Caroline,’ she said, opening the door with a nod. She did not offer her hand. This could hardly be called ‘greeting’ could it? To greet implied one was happy to see the other person. Dancing with the devil had to be better entertainment!
She ushered Caroline inside.
‘Some place you have here,’ Caroline said. ‘Fishing must have been good in Canada.’
‘Legal fishing,’ Emma said, turning her back on Caroline to lead the way into the drawing room. Digest that, she thought, because she knew what Caroline had implied with her reference to the profitability of fishing. Seth’s pa and brothers had smuggled other things onto their boats apart from fish and been gaoled for their practices. ‘Follow me,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Take a seat.’
Emma waved an arm over the two couches and the two single armchairs. Take your pick, the gesture said. Caroline chose the single chair with her back to the window, and sat down.
Emma had to be in control of this, if control could be the word with the entire forest of butterflies she had fluttering inside her was anything to go by. She’d made a pot of tea, guessing that Caroline would be on time. She had been.
‘Milk?’ Emma asked.
‘Yes, but after the tea goes in, not before.’
No please Emma noted. And there was no thank you either when Emma handed her the cup and saucer which Caroline placed on the side table.
‘So, why are you here?’ Emma asked.
‘To see Fleur.’
‘Not today. It’s just you and me today.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I prefer not to tell you that for the moment. But not being here was her choice. That I can tell you.’
‘I only have your word for that.’
Fleur had said those very words to Emma the day before, and a shiver ran through her remembering. There was something in the way Fleur had looked at her then, and the same look was in Caroline’s eyes now.
Caroline crossed her legs at the ankles, and then placed her handbag, which had been on her lap, on the floor by her feet. She took off her hat and placed it beside the cup of tea on the side table.
As though she intends to stay for some while. She’ll be lucky!
‘I’m afraid that’s all you have. My word. How did you find us?’
Us, not me. Let her know we are a family, Fleur and I.
‘Dear old Bettesworth.’
‘The solicitor?’
‘Of course the solicitor. I was there dealing with my mother’s estate and he said, “Well, this is a coincidence, Mrs Jago. The second Mrs Jago to pass through my hands, as it were, recently.”’
So what Ruby had heard was true. Caroline had married Miles. And it sounded as though she hadn’t married again after his death – by hanging after he was run to ground by Matthew Caunter. Oh, Matthew, where are you? I need you now as much as ever. If only thoughts could conjure you up, like a magician’s rabbit out of a hat.
‘That was very unprofessional of him.’
Bettesworth hadn’t acted for Emma, but she knew he’d acted for the owner of Romer Lodge. Damn and blast the man. He knew about Fleur’s parentage, too, because Seth had gone to him to get Fleur’s name changed from Rose by deed poll.
She felt sick. Had Bettesworth said anything to Caroline about Fleur? She desperately wanted to know but she couldn’t ask. She’d wait to be told. Everything. However unpleasant that everything might be. She’d deal with it. She had to.
‘Be that as it may. But I think it just slipped out. “Romer Lodge,” he said. “Lovely house.” So I came over yesterday to see for myself if it was you or another Mrs Jago. Fleur – as you seem to have called her – looks just like her father. I’d have known her anywhere.’
The thought that Caroline might have seen Fleur out in town, or walking along the seafront, sent a chill through Emma. She’d been living in Romer Lodge for months – Caroline might have known that for months, too. What might she have said, or done, if she had met Fleur somewhere? Recognised her and made herself known? How shocking that would have been for Fleur.
‘Tell me why you’ve come,’ Emma snapped. While what she said might be true she hadn’t bothered with Fleur before – not even a card or a present on her birthday or at Christmas. Had she done that, then Emma – or Seth – would have been forced into telling Fleur about her birth. ‘Say your piece and go.’
‘Curiosity. It seemed like fate when Bettesworth mentioned your name.’
No burning desire to see your daughter, then? And there’s no way on this earth I’m going to ask when that was, show any fear.
‘Curiosity isn’t good enough,’ Emma told her. ‘Fleur’s emotions are at risk here. Anything else? Before you get out of our lives again.’
‘Just one thing. Seth wasn’t Fleur’s father. His brother, my late husband Miles, was.’
‘Does she have to sit there all the time?’ Fleur asked.
She jerked her head towards nonna sitting in the kitchen of the ice cream parlour, her arms crossed in front of her leaning on the table, peering through the open doorway into the café. Watching. Watching Fleur and Paolo as they served customers. A run of them today in the heat. All the tables were in use, every seat taken. Thank goodness it would be closing time soon. Six o’clock. She could tell Paolo about Caroline then. She still couldn’t believe what she’d been told. It was all a horrible dream. Except it wasn’t. And right now her birth mother would be at Romer Lodge with her … Emma. Fleur had carefully avoided saying ‘Ma’ at breakfast, or when she’d asked Fleur to sit down while she told her the whole story about how Caroline had turned up one day and left her, Fleur, on the table in the bakery. How could that be true? What sort of mother would do that?
‘Si. Nonna live here,’ Paolo said.
Well, she knew that, didn’t she? What Fleur wasn’t liking was nonna’s eyes boring into her, following her around the room as she made coffees, and served up the ice cream sundaes. As though she didn’t trust Fleur not to take money from the cash register. Or that she’d eat half the produce or som
ething. Steal a cup of coffee without paying for it. There’d been no time for that this afternoon. Paolo’s pa was out in what he called his ice cream fabbrica churning cream and adding fruit and nuts to make replacements for tomorrow, and it seemed most of Torquay had come in the shop, all wanting the most complex of ice cream sundaes made.
Fleur chopped angrily at a cherry and dropped the pieces onto the top of the sundae she was making. She drizzled cherry juice over the top. Another customer came to the counter and placed orders. There was to be no let up yet. It seemed busier than ever. And she knew if trade was good that Paolo’s pa would stay open longer.‘What would happen if your pa married again?’ Fleur asked. ‘Would she still live with him?’
‘Si. Or with me.’ Paolo ran water into the sink underneath the counter and put half a dozen dirty sundae dishes in it. He reached for the washing soda and tipped in a generous amount. Swirled his hands in the water to dissolve the powder. ‘It’s what Italian’s do. Is family. Always family.’
Fleur felt herself welling up. Family. Did she have one any more?
‘All right for some,’ she said, sniffing back tears.
Paolo looked at her sharply. He took his hands from the water and wiped them down the sides of his apron. Then he laid a hand on top of Fleur’s.
‘You not happy today,’ he said. ‘You no smile. You no like being with me?’
Paolo pulled a mock-sad face, and ran his hands through his mop of black curls.
Only a cadaver wouldn’t want to be with him. Especially when he smiled.
‘Of course I like being with you. Why else would I be doing this?’ She slammed a long-handled spoon into the sundae ready to serve it.
What I don’t like is not knowing who I really am. And I don’t like that nonna could be part of my future with her sour expression and her constant crying. God, she could live forever!
‘At the moment,’ Fleur said, as her anger gave way to sadness, ‘you’re the only thing that’s still real in my life.’
‘I no understand,’ Paolo said. He took the ice cream sundae from her. ‘I serve this. You wipe tears and you tell me what made you sad later. Troubles soon over.’ He gave Fleur a quick kiss on the cheek and hurried across to the waiting customer.
‘Over?’ Fleur said, knowing Paolo wouldn’t hear her. Besides, he meant the service in the café for the day, didn’t he? ‘For me, it’s only just begun.’
‘Tell me … that’s … not true,’ Emma said. She seemed to be gasping for air to breathe.
Her legs had gone weak, and her head seemed to be spinning. All the colours in front of her were meshing into one. Caroline’s face was going in and out of focus. Seth had adored Fleur, and she him. What would it do to Fleur to know Seth hadn’t fathered her? She had already been devastated enough to learn that Emma wasn’t her mother.
Caroline could be here simply to stir up trouble, and she was making everything up. Too much time in the film industry, if that is where she had been and that wasn’t all made up too.
‘I could, but that would be a lie.’
Emma picked up the sugar tongs and put a lump of sugar in her tea, even though she never took sugar. Slowly she replaced the tongs in the bowl. Even more slowly she took the teaspoon from her saucer and stirred the sugar, watching the bubbles rise and break on the surface of the liquid. Buying herself time.
‘And Fleur wasn’t born on July the sixteenth either.’
‘Go on,’ Emma said. This was becoming more farcical the more Caroline said.
‘The birth certificate you have and which I am sure you’ve now shown Fleur, is a forgery.’
‘Of course.’
Sarcasm, her mama had told her often, is a poor form of wit. But her voice had dripped with it with those two words, hadn’t it?
But she’d wait until Caroline told her when it was exactly that Fleur had been born. A shiver rippled up her spine as she waited because she could remember Beattie Drew saying, the first time she’d seen Fleur, that she was a bit small for a baby that was five months old. All Beattie’s babies had been twice that weight at that age. Well, Emma hadn’t queried it at the time. All babies were different anyway, weren’t they?
Except her own – the one she’d never had.
‘Fleur was born on September the twenty-second. In Plymouth. I have the laying in bill.’
‘I’m sure you have,’ Emma said. She’d play along with this for the moment. Sound calm, look calm, even though she was alternating between boiling hot and freezing cold with anger and anxiety inside.
She folded her hands in her lap and waited for the next instalment.
Caroline was taking her time, too, sipping at her tea now, dabbing the sides of her mouth with a handkerchief she took from her jacket pocket.
‘Have you had enough time to do the mathematics?’
‘Never my strong subject,’ Emma said. ‘You tell me.’
Most babies were born nine months after conception, give or take the ‘honeymoon’ baby of those who rushed to the altar.
‘Miles was, as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, in prison at the time of Fleur’s conception. But gaolors can be bought off. Miles’s was. I’d been seeing Miles before I took up with Seth, and then when Seth finished our relationship because of you, I took up with Miles again. Seth never was a good lover.’
Oh, yes, he was. Tender, caring, considerate. And Emma didn’t like him and his character being laid out before her like a slab of meat in the butcher that she might or might not want.
‘You do realise don’t you, Caroline, that in telling me all this I could go to the authorities. It might be an old offence but—’
‘But you won’t. Go to the authorities. Because then Fleur would have to know who her father really was. And you don’t want that, do you?’
No. Not if I can prevent her knowing.
‘You know I don’t. I can’t bear to think how she’d feel knowing her birth father was hanged for murder.’
Caroline smirked at her, as though she didn’t give a toss about her husband having been hanged. Where and when Caroline had married Miles, Emma didn’t care and certainly wasn’t going to ask.
‘There’s no need for her ever to know. That means, of course, that I want something from you now I’ve found you.’ Caroline waved an arm around the room. ‘Lovely silver. Beautiful furniture. Wonderfully soft carpets.’ Caroline slid her foot from side to side on the best Axminster money could buy. ‘Nice portraits. They must have cost a small fortune.’
‘Seth painted them.’
Emma’s portrait was on the left hand side of the large marble fireplace and Fleur’s was on the right. In Emma’s portrait she was looking sideways out of the window, at their garden back in Vancouver, a tiny landscape of its own in the background. Fleur had been ten years old when Seth had painted that particular portrait – she had at least a dozen others packed away carefully in the loft and Fleur had one in her bedroom.
‘Good to know he had one talent,’ Caroline said.
‘Let’s just cut this chit-chat, Caroline, shall we?’ Emma said. ‘How much – to get out of our lives again?’
Even if it means I have to give you every penny that I have, then I will. I’ve been poor in the monetary sense before and I could be poor again. It wouldn’t kill me.
‘Oh, I don’t want your money. I’ve made quite enough of my own. Before Miles’s death, and after it, although – if you ask me – half of everything you’ve got should have gone to him. And then there might not have been the need to falsify Fleur’s birth certificate to make sure she wasn’t denied her inheritance. The film industry pays well.’
The term ‘casting couch’ came to mind. Caroline was venomous trash wrapped up in expensive clothes. And the sooner Emma – and Fleur – saw the back of her the better.
‘What do you want, then?’
‘Fleur,’ Caroline said, a sickly sweet smile on her face. ‘I want Fleur. I want her to come back to America with me. I want her to see the life
I have there. I only get given the dowager duchess parts these days, but Fleur—’
‘Over my dead body,’ Emma stopped her.
Caroline’s smile vanished in an instant. What an actress!
‘Miles didn’t get his revenge back in 1913, or his share of his pa’s fishing fleet, he—’
‘It wasn’t his pa’s. It had been signed over to Seth.’
‘Can I go on?’ Caroline curled her lip in displeasure at having been interrupted. Emma gestured with the tiniest wave of a hand for her to continue
‘Miles didn’t get his revenge in 1913 because that interfering bastard, Matthew Caunter, got wind of his intentions. But that doesn’t mean I’d fail at the same task. And trust me, I’d apply myself to it.’ Caroline leaned forward in her chair and glared at Emma. Then she laughed. ‘Not right at this moment. Goodness, you’re shaking something dreadful, Emma.’
Well, who wouldn’t be?
‘Before we carry on with this conversation, Caroline, can you tell me why you want Fleur now, when you haven’t so much as sent her a birthday or Christmas card before?’
‘Because she’s young. Because she’s beautiful. Because I can see a film career stretching ahead for her. I have contacts. Contacts who can pull strings if strings need pulling. And because she is my daughter. Are those enough reasons for you?’
Because your own career in films is washed up, no matter how much make-up they pile on you, however much they dye your hair.
‘She’s a minor,’ Emma reminded her.
‘Tut, tut, Emma, I had you down as far more perceptive than that. If you don’t agree to her coming back with me then I might just have to let slip that Seth wasn’t her father. Because, you see, there are no witnesses to our conversation here today. But I can quite easily burn that laying-in bill if I have to. I am very good at setting fire to things. And besides, who’s going to believe you if you go to the authorities and tell them what I’ve said?’
Setting fire to things? So it had been Caroline who’d torched her bakery, hadn’t it? And with that one short sentence – ‘I am very good at setting fire to things’ – Caroline was letting Emma know she’d done it once and she could do it again. Burn Romer Lodge to the ground and probably with her and Fleur in it.
Emma and Her Daughter Page 16