‘Wow,’ she said, twirling a full circle and looking up at the galleried landing. ‘This is lovely, John.’
It was, too, just like the dream house she had drawn for him a long time ago. I’d have doors going everywhere…like a labyrinth…
‘Come on.’ He led her into a square sitting room. There was a study leading off, cosy but decent-sized enough to have a big desk, lots of bookshelves and a sofa under the pretty picture window that framed a view of a landscape garden in the making. There was a sweet little downstairs loo that she would have killed for in her pregnant state and a huge country kitchen area with knotty beams above her head, and a Belfast sink set in one of the thick wooden worktops, a walk-in pantry and a utility room just like the sort she had always thought would be really handy to have. There was a breakfast area round the corner of the L, and a couple of steps down to a separate dining room, leading out to a lovely light conservatory.
Whoever was moving in here would be lucky, Elizabeth thought, because they would never be able to leave it and find another better. It was the sort of house she hoped Bev was living in now. In peace, in the country, with a kind man who could make her forget her nightmares. She went back for a second look at the kitchen because it was so nice.
‘That’s lovely. Where did you get it?’ she said, examining the solid pine table that must have weighed more than she did–i. e. a ton and a half.
…I’d have a big heavy table that I wouldn’t ever be scared of scratching, that people would want to sit at and talk around…
‘I made it,’ he mumbled modestly. ‘Come on, there’s upstairs to see yet.’
She struggled up the wider than average staircase, having made enough complimentary vowel sounds downstairs. There was a bathroom facing her, then three sizeable bedrooms to one side. A spiral staircase led up to a vast loft area that was almost all windows. She was puffed out at the top of it, but it had been worth the climb. It would have been her fantasy room, her folly.
…I would have a room that caught the sunlight all day just for painting in…
The fourth bedroom had its own bathroom and a spacious dressing-room, just as she had drawn on her house, all those years ago. The windows looked out onto the stream, and when she unlocked one of them and opened it, she could hear the water shushing past and a duck laughing like Sid James. She had always wanted to live by water. Give or take the sea, this would have been her perfect house.
Her perfect house…
Then she knew.
He’s built this for me, she thought. He has been working flat out all these weeks, on this…for me. Her body locked, she stood there, looking at the stream as it danced past over the stones. He saw her back stiffen and he knew she had worked out why he had brought her here. His voice cracked when he started to speak.
‘There was only ever you, Elizabeth,’ he said, coming up behind her. ‘I never wanted anyone else but you. Every time I tried to put you out of my mind, you came back stronger than ever. No one even came close.’
She couldn’t answer him. There was a heartbeat in her throat that no words could get past.
‘I want you and the baby,’ he said softly. ‘I want you both so much.’
‘You can’t take on another man’s child, John,’ she said at last, dropping her head.
‘Why? Why can’t I? I’ve watched that bairn grow, I’ve seen it with you before it’s been born, I’ve felt it moving inside you. Don’t you think I’ve not come to love it as well? As much?’
‘But you’re not its dad and you never would be,’ she said, wishing he was. Wishing this was her bairn’s dad with all her heart.
‘Your dad isn’t always the one who started you off,’ he said.
‘Of course he is. How can you say that? You don’t know…’
‘I can, and I do know, because my dad isn’t my real dad.’
Elizabeth turned to face him. ‘Your dad isn’t what?’
‘I’m adopted. I never knew my real father.’
‘You’re making it up! You and him…for a start, you look so much alike!’
‘I’m not making it up, Elizabeth. I know, everyone says we look alike, but he’s still not my real father.’
He cleared his throat then he told her the two memories that had dominated his childhood. The first was his mam telling him to pick three toys to show to this smart-looking woman that was visiting. Then, when he’d rushed upstairs to pick out his best, he had his coat put on and buttoned up, and the woman took him away for a little ride with a suitcase in her car, but they didn’t go back home. Instead he found himself in a bleak, cold house with lots of other kids, bewildered and crying and not knowing what he’d done wrong or where he was, and desperate to get home to his mam. He’d only have been about three.
The second was just before he was five and a nice lady and big strapping man took him for a walk around the garden and said that they were looking for a little boy to come home with them that they could be a mam and dad to. He had to be a really special little boy though because they were really choosy, but they had thought he was very special and would he like to come to their house with them and be their son.
He had said he couldn’t because he was waiting for his real mam to come for him but she must have got lost. He sat at the window every night, still waiting for her, watching for her…and the lady’s eyes had filled up with tears and she had given him a big cuddle and it felt lovely because he hadn’t been cuddled before. She smelled sweet, like flowers, and she said he could come and try them out as a mam and dad if he liked. They had a big sloppy dog and a cat and a budgie called Whistle that sat on your finger and they’d got a swing in their garden.
Then the man had dropped to his haunches and said that if he were his lad they could go fishing together and his new mam would make them a picnic up and they could go and kick a football in the park and would he like that? He had always wanted his own swing because the big lads never let him play on the one in the Home and he would love a budgie that sat on your finger. The man had a kind smiling face and he really wanted to kick a football about with a dad and someone to cuddle him like the lady had just done, and so John had gone with them and he recovered most of the faith in grown-ups that he’d lost too early on. But not all of it, because there was a scar in his heart that ran deep and would never quite heal, and he saw the same scar in Elizabeth. She too knew what it was like to have been so little and lost in the dark woods that ran alongside the happy sunlit path of other people’s childhoods.
‘Oh John, love,’ said Elizabeth, watching the tears run down the big man’s face as he let her into that terrified little-boy place that lived on inside him where a part of him would always be sitting at a window waiting for his mam. He would never try and trace her though, there was no point. He could not face a woman who had put a child through that.
‘I didn’t tell you about it because there was no reason to, till now, and I don’t like to think back to how it was before them. Trevor and Margaret Silkstone are my real mam and dad as far as I’m concerned, and I couldn’t have wished for more love from any person I came from. I couldn’t have had better than them.’
She reached out tentatively to put a comforting hand on his arm, but he hijacked it en route and placed a tender kiss on its palm.
‘I love you and this bairn so much; you’d want for nowt,’ he said, sniffing back his tears.
Elizabeth’s heart was pounding in her chest. ‘John…’
‘Please, Elizabeth, just give me a chance to show you. I’m begging you…’
She pulled her hand slowly away. She couldn’t; there was stuff he didn’t know. She ripped herself away from his space. Life was so bloody cruel. However much she wished she could, she just couldn’t…
Damned stress incontinence, thought Helen, feeling very wet down below, although it was her own fault for drinking the equivalent of the Irish Sea in lemonade as she sat in the hot sunshine. Dismounting from the swing, she daintily picked her way back to the hou
se like a ballet-dancing crab. She padded across the kitchen as fast as she could towards the downstairs loo, to find that she was actually leaving a trail across the kitchen floor. It was then she realized that this was not stress incontinence, after all.
Oh help! My waters are breaking!
Chapter 50
Elizabeth got to the top of the staircase, and then every brake in her body slammed on hard.
‘What are you doing?’ asked some deep-buried part of her that was tired of running away from all she most wanted to run to. She could feel his pain heavy in the air; it mingled with her own and she knew this must stop, one way or another. There could be no more loose ends, no more not-knowing.
But would he still want me if he knew? she thought. How is this fair on him?
‘How fair is it if he doesn’t know?’ argued a clearer, stronger voice.
She owed him the truth but she was so frightened of seeing disgust for her in his eyes, she knew she would crumble to dust if he turned his back on her. But she did not want to, could not, would not, hurt this man any more. Whatever telling the truth of it all might do to her.
John stared out of the window at the peaceful scene of the countryside whilst the inside of him screamed with raw pain and confusion and wanted to close down and go to sleep for ever. ‘What now?’ his whole being seemed to cry, because he didn’t know where he would go from here or what he would do. He felt destroyed, numb, and not sure he could ever recover from losing her again. Not only her, because there had been the baby, too–a life he had watched grow within her and he had bonded with it as surely as if he was the bairn’s own blood. Then he heard the echo of slow footsteps. He lifted his head and looked at her as if she was a phantom that his mind had tricked him into seeing.
‘About the baby,’ she said, struggling with the words. ‘I want to tell you how it came about.’
‘I don’t need to know, I don’t care about that, Elizabeth. It doesn’t matter how—’He started to come forward but she held her hand up and stopped his passage.
‘Please, John. I don’t want to have any secrets from you…I need you to hear this now.’
She took the deepest breath her lungs would allow her to, then she told him.
Chapter 51
She had not wanted to go to the damned stupid party in the first place, but Dean had insisted it would be a right laugh. It was in a mate of a mate of a mate’s huge shabby house, but there would be loads of beer and food and lots of people he knew were going. So he said.
‘What would you do instead–sit in and be miserable and bring New Year in on your own with your cat?’ he had scoffed. He had gone on and on so much that in the end she had said yes to shut him up. He told her he was just meeting the lads first in their local for one–one pint, he emphasized–so she had to get a taxi and meet him there.
When she got to the house, she found it was full of students and loud music, and some seedy older blokes in even louder shirts trying to cop off with the young scantily clad female gyrators. She was so cross at herself for agreeing to come when she could have been at home in the warmth and the quiet–and yes, bringing in New Year by herself with a cat. She had tried to ring Dean but she could hardly hear what he was saying because of the loud noise of the pub music in the background, although she got the feeling he had heard more than he was letting on. He would be on his way in five minutes, he said, and she was to stay there. She had come off the phone knowing he was lying and tried to ring a return taxi only to find there was a two-hour wait. She booked one anyway, then went inside and got a drink from a sticky table, and out of anger drank it too fast, and it went straight to her head because she hadn’t had any tea.
She had another as well before the tall, fair-haired bloke came up and started talking to her. He had seemed nice, friendly–mature, despite being so young, and as much out of sorts as she was. He said he was waiting for a friend who hadn’t turned up yet, and he was going to give it another half an hour and then he was leaving.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she said. ‘There’s a two-hour wait for taxis. Have you far to go?’
‘Miles,’ he said, and groaned and went to get himself a consolatory lager. Then he came back to her and she found it was better talking to him than standing there fuming by herself, plus it would help the time pass more quickly. He was doing History at some university down south, he said, although she could hardly hear him for the music. Then he laughed that she was far too lovely to be waiting around for a man and Elizabeth had pretended to be flattered. He was attractive, she remembered thinking, but it was very dark and she didn’t get a proper look at his face.
When she went up to the loo, he was waiting outside for her when she emerged. He had found a quieter place where they could sit and talk if she wanted, he said; kill the time until her taxi came, away from all that banging noise and booze and drugs. He didn’t do drugs, he said, they were for idiots. He led her to a little bedroom at the end of the upstairs corridor and jammed a chair up against the door so they wouldn’t be disturbed by anyone. It was nice just to sit down and kick off those stupid high heels she had put on, because her feet were killing her. Plus she had felt like someone’s granny in a dress amongst all those skimpy bra-tops and mini-skirts. He had brought her a drink up, although he had been a bit heavy-handed on the vodka, she noted.
They had just been talking, then it progressed seamlessly to flirting, then he had leaned over and kissed her. He’d been very gentle, and stupidly she had let him, not wanting to insult him by shoving him off. Then he eased her back on the bed and began touching her, and by then he had taken her polite small resistance as a green light. It was then she started to try and push him off. It wasn’t right, plus this student was less than half her age, for God’s sake. He was aroused though, and knew she wasn’t serious when she starting saying no because she wasn’t exactly beating him off with a stick. His drink-filled thought processes reasoned that she probably felt guilty for complying and so preferred to be overpowered a little. Some older women said ‘no’ when they meant ‘yes’–to override their embarrassment at being with a young fit bloke.
He was strong and pinned her down with his long limbs and she couldn’t move, could hardly breathe, and she yelped when he unzipped himself and entered her. He was proudly well-endowed and rock hard, and he knew that was every woman’s fantasy and pushed harder and harder, pounding into her, encouraged by her cries. Then he caught sight of her frightened face by the half-light of the streetlamp shining through the curtains and he knew immediately that he had got it terribly wrong. He threw himself backwards away from her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sobering up in a flash. ‘God, I’m sorry. I thought you wanted it.’
‘Well, I didn’t,’ said Elizabeth. She hurt, inside and out.
He was pacing up and down, his voice shaking as much as his body, and he started sobbing.
‘Please don’t get the police. I truly didn’t mean to hurt you…I really thought you wanted me. I’m clean–I don’t have any diseases or anything…Oh God, I’m so sorry.’
He tried to help her adjust her clothing but she thrashed out at him, hands clawed, nails bared like a feral cat, and he backed off to show her that he meant her no harm.
‘Please, I…I’m sorry…I got it so wrong. I’m not a…’ The unsaid word frightened him and he tore the chair away from the door and ran from it in a blind panic.
She sat there until her mobile rang. It was Dean telling her that he’d be there in half an hour, although the jolly backdrop told her it was a lie. He had been caught up in a round, he explained. She switched him off mid-flow, wiped her face and straightened her clothes. Then she stiffened her back, went down the stairs, out of the front door and, with her shoes in her hand, Elizabeth walked the three miles home.
Chapter 52
John stared at her unblinkingly and she didn’t know what that look was in his eyes–disgust…pity? She couldn’t tell, for the part of her brain that deciphered body language ha
d closed off in a panic to protect her.
‘You should have gone to the police,’ he said quietly, his voice croaky.
‘I did go the next day,’ she said, ‘but what could I say? I got drunk with a stranger and then went into a bedroom with him of my own free will? Me at thirty-eight and him at nineteen or whatever?’
She had walked into the police station and waited in the queue. There were two receptionists there, a nice friendly one dealing with an old lady, and a snotty one who had Receptionist’s Syndrome, which gave some people behind a front desk the illusion that they ruled the world and that everyone else was scum under their feet. Maybe if the other receptionist had been free, things might have been different, but she got the pinched-face one who looked at Elizabeth in a way that suggested if she was here to report something that had happened to her, she probably had only herself to blame for it.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
She had hard, unpitying eyes, and just as Elizabeth’s mouth opened, she saw Sergeant Wayne Sheffield come out of an office behind the glass partition looking for something. He’d thickened out and lost half his hair, but his lips were still as thin, his eyes small, piggy and set closer together than had always seemed right. She stumbled backwards before he caught sight of her and crashed out of the door into the street.
The receptionist sighed disparagingly and called, ‘Next!’
Outside, Elizabeth calmed herself and thought about going back in and trying again. Then she pictured Wayne Sheffield being the one to rake over her details, whilst knowing her history, remembering their sordid encounter all those years ago; the words ‘leopards’ and ‘spots’ playing in his brain, because even though her wild days were long behind her, she would always be that same slag to him. Then if her case did stumble to court, all those past mistakes she had made would lift themselves out of their shallow graves and present themselves to the prosecuting counsel to colour exactly what sort of person she was, to stop a young man’s life from being ruined. She couldn’t ever let her past come back. She didn’t want her baby tainted by it.
The Yorkshire Pudding Club Page 33