by Diane Janes
There must be some other way. She could not simply spirit Lauren away as Gilda had done, so many years ago. Apart from anything else, the girl would not come with her. The prospect of Lauren rejecting her was akin to having a bucket of icy water tipped over her head – but Lauren had grown up believing she was Gilda’s daughter and that her name was Rebecca. What would her reaction be when she found out the truth? Would she want to stay with Gilda? Well, that wasn’t an option, because Gilda would go to prison, of course … but how would Lauren take that? Would she blame Jo for Gilda’s incarceration? Children did not invariably react in the most logical of ways.
It probably wasn’t a bed of roses having Gilda for a mother. Jo knew what it was like, being trailed everywhere by someone wearing a mustard-coloured number from a jumble sale, with a purple chiffon scarf wrapped around their head. Having a mother who was persistently out of touch with the way the rest of the world worked, but bridled at any suggestion of falling in line. Then again, what sort of alternative to Gilda would Lauren see in her – someone she only knew as the weird woman who had jumped out at her one day in the lane?
And there was her schooling – she and Marcus could not afford school fees. Lauren would have to attend the local comp, like Sean. She might like having a stepbrother – they had not exactly been the best of friends so far, but at least they’d been out sledging together – that surely counted for something.
She remembered the various bargains she had tried to strike with God. She wanted what was best for Lauren. She wanted Lauren to be safe, well and happy: those things were more important than anything else. If she knew that Lauren was all those things, wasn’t that better than actively making her unhappy? It was not as if she knew whether Lauren was happy or not. But if she was happy, and being forced to return to her natural mother would make her less so …
No, no, no. That would mean Gilda had won. A person should not be allowed to profit from their crime – that could not possibly be right. From somewhere at the back of her mind a memory of a social worker emerged, a woman having a bad hair day, pontificating on television: ‘When making a custody decision, the interests of the child are paramount.’ Suppose they decided that Lauren should stay with Gilda, irrespective of her crime. Would Gilda even get a custodial sentence? Only the other day a man had been given a suspended sentence for poisoning his ex-wife – as if permanently disabling her in the process was a matter of small account. These days the courts seemed capable of anything. No doubt the usual psychiatrist would be wheeled in to explain that it wasn’t really Gilda’s fault – she’d had a tough time as a kid, which meant that she had been temporarily suffering from some kind of compulsive disorder and was now full of genuine remorse for what she had done. Rather than punishing her, a judge was just as likely to decide that since Gilda had taken good care of Lauren, it was a first offence and she posed no obvious threat to any other children, a bit of litter-picking on Saturday afternoons for the next six months by way of community service would put everything right.
Jo thought about the cuddly dog waiting patiently on the spare-room bed. She pictured baby Lauren in her pyjamas, still pink from the bath, as she was carried upstairs and laid sleeping in her cot. Tears splashed on to the desk, narrowly missing the keyboard. She had never quite managed a happy ending for herself, but perhaps she could engineer one for Lauren. They would have to let Lauren decide. It must be done between themselves – no police, no social services, no tawdry children’s homes, or well-meaning foster-parents. Lauren should not suffer as she had done. Sometimes, if you really love someone, you have to let them go.
She went upstairs to change her clothes. She would have to put her big coat and wellingtons on top, but she wanted to look smart for the moment when Lauren understood that she was looking at her real mother. It took her some time to decide, practicalities weighing heavily in favour of most other considerations, so that she eventually ended up wearing her best jeans and a cheerful multicoloured sweater, bought on a visit to Bowness three years before and hardly worn since.
An early dusk was falling. When she opened the front door she was immediately aware of that heightened quiet brought by the snow. The temperature was already well below freezing, and the snow creaked in protest as it compressed beneath her boots. There was a light on above the front door of The Old Forge, just as if she was expected. And all the time that sense that this could not really be happening.
It was Gilda who answered the door on this occasion.
‘I need to talk to you. Can I come in?’
‘Of course,’ Gilda said, stepping back in a stance of invitation, although her expression was wary. Jo dragged off her boots and stood them upright on the front step before following Gilda along the hall, which was dimly lit with a single energy-saver and had a roll of carpet lying along one side of it, which had to be stepped over in order to access the sitting room at the back of the house. There was a fire blazing in the grate, but to Jo’s eyes this was about the only cheerful thing in the room, which suggested not so much someone’s living accommodation, as an abandoned stage set into which disparate props from half a dozen other plays had been randomly dumped for storage.
‘Sit down.’ Gilda indicated a chair from which she had removed a copy of a TV guide in passing. Jo sat. She was half disappointed and half relieved not to find Lauren in the room. Gilda tossed the TV guide on to a miscellanea of magazines and newspapers which stood several feet high on top of what might have been an old-fashioned needlework box, then lowered herself into the chair she had obviously been occupying before her visitor’s arrival, so that she faced Jo across the hearth rug.
Now that she was here, Jo found that it was not easy to know how to begin. She had effected no rehearsals, simply hoping that the right words would come when she needed them – which they did not. She cast about the room helplessly for a moment until her attention fell on a life-size stone cat which was sitting on the hearth.
Gilda saw what she was looking at. ‘We call him Timmy,’ she said. ‘Becky would like a real cat, but cat hair and I don’t get on.’
‘Lauren had a cat.’ Jo spoke so quietly that the last word was almost drowned by a crack from the fire. Gilda automatically extended her foot to rub out the spark which had leaped on to the rug. ‘She called him Puddy,’ Jo continued. ‘She had him with her on the day she was taken.’
Gilda frowned momentarily before saying, ‘Oh yes – Lauren was your daughter, wasn’t she?’
‘Is. She is my daughter. Does she still have Puddy?’
Gilda frowned again – harder this time, so that her eyes narrowed to shadows beneath a deeply puckered forehead. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What cat are you talking about? Do you mean this cat – Timmy?’
‘No, I mean Puddy. Does Lauren still have Puddy?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gilda repeated, ‘but I’m afraid you’ve lost me. What is it you’ve come to see me about, exactly?’
‘Where is Becky at the moment? Can she hear what we are saying?’
‘I doubt it. She’s up in her bedroom, listening to something on her iPod, I think.’
‘I know the truth, Gilda. I know that Becky is Lauren.’
‘Dear God – you’re mad! Absolutely mad!’
‘No, I’m not. Becky isn’t your daughter. I’ve checked up. Her name is Rebecca Heidi Ford, and her mother’s maiden name was Parsons, not Stafford.’
‘Well, that’s no secret. Rebecca Ford is my adopted daughter, and her mother, Heidi Ford née Parsons, was my friend. I adopted Rebecca when my friend and her husband died. As it happens, I can’t have children myself.’
‘You’re just saying that,’ said Jo, but her voice wavered.
‘I cannot believe that you have come over here to confront me with such a half-baked tale. Imagine how upset Becky would have been if she had heard what you said. And how dare you obtain a copy of my daughter’s birth certificate! Whatever possessed you? It’s horrible to think that you must have been checkin
g up on us, watching and spying …’ Gilda appeared to be gripped by a mounting sense of outrage. She stood up and took a few steps towards the window, before returning to grip the back of her chair as if she could hardly contain herself.
‘I didn’t get a copy of her birth certificate. I looked it up on the internet.’
‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe people’s birth certificates are on the internet.’
‘Not exactly – not the whole certificate.’
‘I should think not.’
‘She’s the same age,’ Jo said. ‘She’s got blonde hair—’
‘So has half the population.’
‘And – and I didn’t believe you’d been married.’
‘I suppose you tried to check that up, too.’
‘No.’
‘I suppose you just took that as read. It would be like you to assume that I couldn’t get a husband if I wanted one.’ A strange smile crossed Gilda’s face. Bitter, while at the same time knowing and in control. The smile of one who knows their adversary, and is capable of inflicting great damage. It was the sort of look which made Jo instinctively want to flinch away.
‘I thought I saw you there – in Barleycombe – that day she was taken. And then you were watching the night when I went to the rendezvous on the postcard.’ Jo’s voice shook. She knew that at any minute she would succumb to tears.
‘What postcard? What on earth are you talking about? You know what the trouble with you is, Joanne Savage? You’re as barmy as your mother. When I first knew you it just manifested itself in your being a nasty little piece of work, but now you’ve gone completely over the edge – just like she did. Look at yourself. You’re a wreck, a laughing stock. Oh, you thought you’d got it made, with your nice little business showing rich tourists where Wordsworth ate his supper, but it’s all gone wrong again now, hasn’t it? Of course they’re still at the stage of being sorry for you, Maisie and Shelley and the others, but they don’t know the half of it, do they? Did your first husband see it coming, when you pushed him over the cliff? You got away with it, too, didn’t you? Not like your mother. Still locked up in Broadmoor, is she? And how about Marcus, is he watching his back? Because he certainly ought to be.’
‘Stop it!’ Jo stumbled to her feet. ‘Stop it. My mother’s dead – and I’m not Joanne Savage any more. That’s all behind me now, all those terrible things.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Gilda spat. ‘I don’t think anyone forgets that easily. I don’t. Remember that time you all got me in the toilets, shoved my head down and flushed the chain? Or burning my homework with Colleen’s cigarette lighter, so I’d get into trouble for not handing in my assignment? Remember the names you called me? That way you all had of sticking out a foot, so that I tripped over it? You see, I don’t forget things, either.’
‘But that wasn’t me. It really wasn’t. I didn’t do any of those things – it was the others. I should have stopped them, I know I should, but I was afraid of them, too.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Gilda jeered. ‘Oh, yes – it’s always someone else, isn’t it? You picked on me at school and you think you can do the same now.’
‘I don’t. I’m not. I’m truly sorry about what happened to you at school,’ Jo sobbed. ‘But my child – someone took my child.’
‘Well, maybe that was your punishment. Maybe that’s how life works: what goes around, comes around. You give someone hell, and it comes back at you in a hotter form. And being the victim is still your trump card, isn’t it? It kept you out of trouble at school – poor Joanne, we have to make allowances because she’s had such a rough time – and now you think you can come here and make accusations, and then when someone calls your bluff, you turn on the tears and start to bleat. Someone took my child,’ Gilda mimicked cruelly. ‘How dare you come into my home, trying to upset me and my daughter, pushing your particular brand of lunacy into our lives.’
Jo stood up and made her way unsteadily into the hall, almost falling over the roll of carpet on the way. ‘I’m sorry. I can see that it was wrong … I just thought …’
‘I don’t want to hear any more. Get out of my house.’ Gilda marched down the hall behind her, a threatening presence before which Jo cowered at the front door, where it took her an age to fumble her feet into her wellingtons, while tears cascaded on to her hands, blurring her vision, muffling her voice, as she repeated over and over again that she was sorry, that she should not have come.
The cold outside took her breath away. Gilda had shut the door at her back, but the outside light was enough to see by. Her own footprints were mixed up with the tracks made by Sean and Rebecca earlier in the day, all of them now frozen into a lethal skid pan. She picked her way around this bumpy patch of ice, seeking the relative safety of the virgin snow. Shame lashed her as she trod a wavering path across the lane. How had she reached such a dark place? How could she not have foreseen this obvious flaw in her perverted logic? Gilda’s daughter was adopted. She had followed a false trail, wrought of her own imagination and despair. If Gilda was right, then she should end it now, before she did something really terrible. If she walked the other way along the lane, turned up the footpath through the woods and carried on until she reached the moor, she would only have to sit down among the cluster of rocks in her drawing place and she would surely be dead by morning. She had once read that hypothermia was not a painful death. Strangely, it was not the thought of death that deterred her, so much as the thought of the darkness among the trees. It reminded her of the night when she had gone to Claife Station, not knowing what unseen horror might be waiting for her there. And if she killed herself, who would be left for Lauren? Unless, said a voice in her head, Lauren is already dead. Maybe Lauren wants you to do it. Maybe she is waiting for you on the other side. Perhaps that is what lies just out of sight, those shadowy watchers that you are afraid to confront … maybe it’s Lauren and Dom, hand in hand, waiting for you.
But it was already too late. She had reached the house and was stamping the snow from her boots. When she got inside she ran upstairs, buried her face in the duvet and wept hysterically.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sean had not realized that his stepmother had left the house, but he was aware of her return because he heard the front door slam and her feet on the stairs, followed by the sound of her bedroom door closing. When she had not emerged by eight o’clock, he put a frozen pizza in the oven, then went around the ground-floor rooms, switching on lights and closing the curtains and blinds. He did not like uncurtained windows after dark, with their ever-present sense that someone might be on the opposite side of the glass, looking in. Not that there was ever anyone around, but it felt spooky – even on nights like this when the combination of moonlight and heavy snowfall made it easy to see into the garden without switching on the outside lights. It occurred to him that it would be pretty neat to go sledging by moonlight. Maybe it was something they could do when Harry came.
He looked forward to Harry’s visits. He sometimes talked to his old mates online, but it wasn’t like being able to hang out with them. The kids at school were OK, but they already had their own friends, who they seemed to have known for ever. They didn’t deliberately exclude him, but they didn’t bother to include him either. He missed his old mates, and the comfortable familiarity of a mother who could be relied upon not to take off without telling anyone where she was going, who would always provide meals at predictable times and who could yell at him with impunity because she didn’t have to be seen to be making a serious effort to like him all the time.
He remembered the artificial jollity of his first Christmas at The Hideaway – in less than a week they would be playing out the same farce again – except that she was getting worse and worse at managing to play her part. You never knew where you were with her. Only that morning she had appeared to be in a fairly reasonable mood, but there was something up with her again now. At one time she had seemed quite scary (he still had the knife, currently slip
ped into an old box which had once housed Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Seven), but lately she just seemed pathetic. He wondered what she was doing now. Just sitting on her own, staring at the carpet, probably.
He couldn’t imagine why she was so interested in Becky. He had not minded being asked to find out her last name. In fact, he was pretty pleased with the way he had managed it. Nor had he really minded taking Becky out sledging, because things like that were more fun when there was someone else to have a laugh with and he had sort of said he would call for her again tomorrow.
Jo lay on her bed for a long time. She tried to empty her mind completely; not to facilitate remembrance, but in order to forget. Imagine if the accusations she had levelled at Gilda travelled beyond the four walls of The Old Forge. Gilda could easily tell other people what she had said – she might even go to the police and make a complaint of some kind. Harassment. It might constitute harassment. Suppose Gilda did something spiteful, like sell the story to the papers. Tell them how she, Jo, went about accusing innocent widows of having stolen her child. That awful excoriating shame of publicity. Everyone would know who she was. Marcus and the business would get dragged in; he and Melissa would be furious.
She crawled under the duvet without bothering to remove her clothes, then lay there trying not to think. If only she could blot everything out by falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.