Why Don't You Come for Me?

by Diane Janes

  Jo watched the garden transform itself into an illustration from a children’s story – Winter Holiday perhaps, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At around eleven o’clock the sound of feet stamping beside the front door alerted her to Shelley’s arrival. She had come to deliver their Christmas card, and at Jo’s invitation was easily persuaded to divest herself of coat and wellingtons while Jo located their card and made some tea to have with mince pies. The November floods had drifted her back into the orbit of her neighbours. She had returned Shelley’s books, and even exchanged an uneasy greeting with Gilda when they passed one another in the lane.

  ‘Is Sean out, enjoying the snow?’ Shelley asked, cupping her hands round the warm mug.

  ‘He’s still in bed. I expect he’ll want to take the sledge out when he gets up. Harry’s family are supposed to be coming up for Christmas, so if this carries on the kids will have a whale of a time.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll still come, if the weather’s like this?’

  ‘I suppose so. They’ve got a four-wheel drive. More fun for Sean if Harry’s here.’

  ‘Isn’t Gilda’s daughter home? I bet she’d like to go out sledging.’

  ‘Sean thinks younger girls are beneath his attention.’

  Shelley shrugged. ‘I would have thought he’d be glad to have someone to throw snowballs at. And I bet he’ll be interested enough in a couple of years’ time. That girl is going to be absolutely stunning. I don’t mean to be rude, but she doesn’t get it from her mother, does she?’ Shelley took a dainty bite of mince pie and masticated thoughtfully, before saying: ‘This is nice. Did you buy them at Booths? My mum used to make her own and you could have paved the streets with them – they were all pastry and no mincemeat.’

  ‘Mine used to buy them,’ said Jo, ‘when she remembered.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘We’re supposed to be going down to my parents for Christmas.’ Shelley paused for another mouthful of pie. ‘Although I don’t think we will if this weather keeps up. Brian won’t be broken-hearted, I can tell you. My dad’s driving us all crazy with his family tree. He started with the online census, but now he’s going off all over the place, looking at old gravestones and heaven knows what. You can hardly get in the door these days before he’s producing a huge long chart and going on about great-uncles no one has ever heard of, and people emigrating to Canada in 1850. I can’t keep up with it, and Brian isn’t interested at all.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it is very interesting unless it’s your own family.’

  ‘And believe me, not always then.’

  After Shelley had gone, it occurred to Jo that she could have asked her to pop their card for the Perrys through the door of Throstles as she passed, although asking someone else to deliver your Christmas card was a bit lazy, surely. And anyway, trudging along the lane in the snow to deliver them yourself was very traditional, very A Christmas Carol. That was the proper way to do it. What had Brian said about people managing before things had been mechanized? Not that the tradition of exchanging cards went back all that far, but never mind.

  The card destined for the Perrys was propped up on the back of her desk in the office, where it had been left with Shelley and Brian’s when she took all the others to the post office. It struck her that she could not walk to the Perrys without passing The Old Forge. She had never so much as considered adding Gilda to her Christmas-card list, but there was something very pointed about walking straight past the woman’s gate with a card in her hand which was obviously destined for the only other permanent residents. Gilda was part of their tiny community, too. She thought of the way Gilda had saved the day when she spotted the overflowing beck in the nick of time; Gilda tugging on the rope, while the rain beat down on her shiny, black-clad shoulders … Gilda always being the last person to be picked for teams, the only Christmas cards to appear on her desk coming from one or two of the kinder girls who pitied her – although not enough to make her their friend. It was Christmas, after all, and Gilda was her neighbour. Peace on earth and goodwill to all men.

  She rooted out the box of unused cards and selected a snow scene (nicely appropriate) for Gilda, writing inside With best wishes from Jo, Marcus and Sean. Then she addressed the envelope to Mrs G. Iceton & Miss R. Iceton, pushed the card inside, sealed it down and propped it against the one she had written a couple of weeks before for Maisie and Fred.

  It was still snowing hard, so before leaving the house she wrapped the two envelopes inside a plastic bag to keep them dry. The snow on the drive was pristine except for Shelley’s footprints, which had already been partially obscured. Strange how heavy snowfall brought its own special intensity to everything, that special hush, the acute brightness, in spite of poor visibility and a leaden sky. She avoided Shelley’s tracks, preferring to scrunch into the virgin snow, sinking almost to her ankles at every step before the compressed snow beneath her feet brought her up short. If this went on they would need Mr Tyson with his snowplough, never mind a four-wheel drive.

  Even after a heavy snowfall The Old Forge did not manage to look picturesque. Gilda had been in residence for nearly a year now, but there had been no sign of any improvements. No builder’s vans parked outside or planning permission notices tied to the gate. Perhaps Gilda was doing it up herself, from the inside out.

  Either Jo’s approach had been observed or else coincidence was in play, because just as she reached the front door it was opened by Gilda’s daughter. Shelley was certainly right about Rebecca Iceton – she was extremely pretty. It must make Gilda so proud to have a daughter who had turned out like this.

  ‘I brought your Christmas card,’ Jo said, fumbling with her plastic bag, while the girl stood just inside the door, regarding her with an uncertainty which might have been no more than shyness. ‘What do you think of this weather?’ Jo groped for something suitable to fill the silence. She had to get her glove off in order to separate the two cards, and the glove was proving stubborn. ‘Will you be out sledging, later on?’

  ‘I don’t have a sledge.’

  ‘We’ve got at least two,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure Sean will be out later – when he gets up. I’ll tell him to call for you, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The girl continued to look uncomfortable. Jo wondered if she was remembering their first encounter in the lane; or perhaps Gilda had actually instructed her to steer clear of the strange woman who lived at The Hideaway. When she handed the card over, Rebecca said ‘Thank you’ again. As she was shutting the front door, Gilda’s voice came from somewhere at the back of the house. ‘Is there someone there, Becky?’ Jo was still on the front step, taking a moment to replace her glove and reorganize the plastic bag around the Perrys’ card, and in the stillness of the snowy hamlet she heard the girl’s voice clearly through the closed door. ‘It was the woman from across the road, bringing a Christmas card. Shall I open it? It’s addressed to both of us – although she’s got my name wrong, as usual.’ The voice was growing fainter as the speaker retreated down the hall and any reply was inaudible.

  Jo froze on the spot. In what way was the name wrong? Why would Rebecca’s name not be Iceton, the same as her mother’s? It was not as if Gilda had kept her maiden name, which might have explained it. What other reason but that this was not Gilda’s daughter at all? She set off almost at a run towards Gilda’s perpetually open gate, nearly forgetting in her hurry that she still had the Perrys’ card in her hand. She almost turned back towards The Hideaway, but stopped herself just in time. She must walk calmly and quietly to Throstles and deliver the other card. She must not let Gilda – if she was watching – realize that she had overheard.

  And Gilda might be watching. Gilda was always watching – she had been watching from her bedroom window that night when Jo had returned from Claife Station, and again from her bedroom window when the beck flooded – except that one of those events could only be seen from the front of Gilda’s house and the other from the back. No wonder s
he had been turning things over and over in her mind, because subconsciously she had known all along that Gilda was lying when she said that she just happened to be drawing her bedroom curtains that night. Gilda’s bedroom was not at the front but at the back – she had given herself away the night of the floods. Of course, Gilda could have moved from one bedroom to another, said the devil’s advocate in her mind, but Jo was not really listening.

  How would it work, exactly? Supposing you saw someone you really hated, had always hated and longed to get back at: someone who had something which you had not got but badly wanted. What would you have to do, if you had taken the ultimate revenge and stolen their baby? She swung the Perrys’ gate open so violently that snow sprayed off it in all directions, plastering itself against her jeans and cagoule, some of it dropping in icy dollops down her boots, but she scarcely noticed. You would have to pretend to everyone that the child was yours. It would be much easier to pull it off if you had money to take you to different places, plenty of cash to set yourself up with an instant kit of cot and pram and so on. Difficult to explain to friends and relations how this child had suddenly appeared in your life – but if you didn’t actually have that many close relatives … or friends … Gilda was an only child, and her parents had been getting on when they had her. They might have been dead by 1998. What about the husband she claimed to have had? (Ouch, the Perrys’ letterbox was vicious.) Maybe the husband was just a figment of Gilda’s imagination, or maybe the marriage had been short-lived, so that he was off the scene by the time she took Lauren.

  ‘Hell-o-oo.’ Maisie had been alerted by the snap of the letterbox and was standing on the step, waving aloft the envelope Jo had just delivered.

  ‘Hello, Maisie. Can’t stop.’ She had already made it to the gate. It was a bit rude, but she didn’t look back. Provided you didn’t look back, you would neither be turned into a pillar of salt, nor snared by Maisie’s invitation to join her for a festive sherry.

  But why call the child something different? Surely that just drew attention to the fact that she wasn’t yours. It was because you would sooner or later need documents. Children only had their birth certificate. You would have to apply for someone else’s birth certificate, then come up with some plausible reason why the details didn’t fit properly – could you make that work, or was the whole thing just plain crazy?

  By now she was passing The Old Forge again. She forced herself not to look up at the place, concentrating instead on where she was putting her feet. The falling snow had softened the set of prints she had made coming the other way. The outlines were there, but the imprints left by the soles of her boots in the bottom of each hole were already gone. It would be impossible to get a car along the lane now.

  When she opened her own front door, Sean was just coming downstairs. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve just dropped a card off with the neighbours,’ she said as casually as she could. ‘Becky at The Old Forge is home, but she can’t go out sledging because she doesn’t have a sledge. I guessed you’d be going out later, and we’ve got the wooden sledge and at least one of those cheap plastic ones in the garage, so I said you would call for her on your way out. I hope you don’t mind.’

  Sean didn’t look exactly pleased, but he didn’t argue. ‘I want something to eat first’ he said.

  ‘Of course. You’ll need something warm before you go out. What would you like? A bacon sandwich, maybe? I’ll make some porridge, if you like.’

  ‘A bacon sandwich, please.’ He regarded her suspiciously, noticing the way her eyes looked glittery and overexcited – although he supposed that might be because she had just been out in the cold.

  Jo often took herself off somewhere else while he ate whatever food she had prepared, but today she hovered around in the kitchen, humming snatches of a tune, opening and shutting cupboard doors in a vain search for nothing in particular. Sean regarded her warily, wolfing down his sandwich as quickly as he could. He would have taken it upstairs, but she had very pointedly put out a knife and table mat, along with the ketchup which was de rigueur for the consumption of bacon butties.

  ‘You won’t forget to call for Becky – is that what you call her, Becky?’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know what her other name is?’

  ‘Becky Iceton, I suppose.’

  ‘No, it isn’t Iceton; it’s something else.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sean sounded disinterested.

  She sat down at the table in the chair opposite him. Sean still had at least two or three mouthfuls of sandwich to deal with. He began to fiddle uneasily with the ketchup bottle.

  ‘Sean, will you do something for me?’

  He didn’t make eye contact. ‘What?’

  ‘Will you find out what Becky’s other name is? Just ask her – casually – don’t make a big thing of it, and don’t tell her that it’s me who wants to know.’

  Sean hesitated, uncomfortable beneath the weight of her full attention. ‘OK. But what’s the big deal?’

  ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s just something I want to know. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ He stuffed the remaining lump of bread and bacon into his mouth and stood up to make his escape.

  ‘You won’t forget?’

  His mouth was too full to attempt an answer. A trickle of ketchup was escaping from the corner of his mouth, like a cheap effect in a vampire movie. He flapped his hand up and down a couple of times in a gesture she was intended to read as, ‘All right, calm down.’

  Jo watched Sean cross the lane, dragging a sledge from each hand. The snow had eased now, as if in blocking the lane and turning the garden into a Fred Swan painting its work was done. As he was on the point of leaving she had called out casually, as if by way of an afterthought, ‘Bring Lauren back when you’re finished. I’ll do some hot chocolate and mince pies.’

  ‘Becky,’ he said impatiently. ‘Her name is Becky.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I meant Becky.’

  He didn’t bring her back with him, of course. He had probably forgotten, or else she had declined. Jo did not bother to ask which. They had played out in the snow for more than two hours, and Sean needed to change out of his wet clothes before he was ready for the promised hot chocolate. When he reappeared, she only managed to contain herself for as long as it took to place his mug on the breakfast bar and put a couple of mince pies into the microwave. ‘Did you find out what Becky’s last name is?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s Ford.’

  ‘She didn’t ask why you wanted to know?’

  ‘No.’ Sean’s voice was contemptuous. ‘I said, like it was just conversation, that I was glad I wasn’t at the very beginning or the very end of the alphabet, because that way you’re never first or last when you get called out to do stuff at school, and she said she wasn’t at the very beginning either. Then I said, I’m H for Handley, and she said she’s F for Ford.’

  ‘That was clever.’ He had just gone up several notches in her estimation.

  ‘I’m not a complete amateur. So why do you want to know?’

  Jo was ready for the question and embarked on a convoluted, but entirely untrue story about Gilda’s having been married to someone who might have been an old school friend of someone else, but not wanting to ask a direct question in case she put her foot in it. She could see that this was working just as she had intended, with Sean obviously wishing he had never asked, and breaking in at the first possible opportunity to say, ‘Yeah – whatever.’

  She left him in the kitchen finishing his hot chocolate. She had not been idle during his absence. If Shelley’s father had begun his family researches via the computer, that must mean there was a way of accessing people’s birth certificates. She had found a site where, by registering herself and paying a fee by credit card, she could search the official indices of births, deaths and marriages online. You could not see an actual birth certificate without applying by post, but by looking up Lauren’s entry, she had established that the basic i
nformation shown in the index included mothers’ maiden names. Now all she had to do was check the birth of Rebecca Ford.

  Her hands shook as she brought up the site and keyed in her search. There were two pages of Rebecca Fords, but none of them had a mother whose maiden name had been Stafford. She kept staring at the screen, going back from one page to another to double-check. And all the time the blood pounded in her head, making her feel giddy, setting up a pain behind her eyes. A combination of shock and rage coursed through her. She had long suspected that Gilda’s so-called daughter was one and the same as her own, but it was a very different thing to have proof of it.

  And now she had her proof, what next? Should she ring the police? It was a Sunday afternoon and they were cut off by the snow. What would happen if she told the police? She knew enough about red tape not to imagine that a friendly constable would simply take her word for it, tell Lauren to pack her bags and move across to The Hideaway. Any delay at all would afford Gilda the opportunity to make a run for it, taking Lauren with her. They could be out of the country within hours.

  Alternatively, the authorities might arrange to take Lauren into care while they made up their minds about whose daughter she was. She thought of Ma and Pa Allisson, who were probably dead by now. Foster-parents, or a children’s home. She thought of Lauren, with her boarding-school accent and nice clothes, thrown into a lion’s den shared with the kids of criminals, drug addicts and various other inadequates. She remembered the smell of cabbage and wee in the hall, the scuffed furniture in common rooms decorated with posters of pop stars and cartoon characters, always torn at the edges and missing their Blu-tack from one corner. The bits of last year’s tinsel trapped under yellowing Sellotape in the corners near the ceiling, faded duvet covers on the beds with washed-out Barbie dolls or Ninja Turtles on them – things which people thought kids liked, but which you would never have chosen for yourself. None of this must be allowed to happen.