41

Tilda

The sun is hot on my face and Eli is sleeping at my feet. I close my eyes and breathe in the warm, sweet scent. I love the smell of lilac. It is a beautiful spring day and I am wearing the new dress that Daniel bought me. It has been four months since I started looking for Stevie but he is still lost. It seems that he has disappeared as successfully as we did all those years ago, and all the wizardry of new technology has yet to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat where he is hidden. There have been false hopes and false alarms and many trails that have just grown cold. I tried finding Auntie Wendy and found her obituary instead. She died ten years ago of a heart attack, just a year after Uncle Bill, and Karen emigrated to Australia soon afterward with her husband and two little boys. Her brother, Kevin, still lives a few streets away from Wendy’s old house, and he told me what he could. He remembers only bits and pieces: the day Reg collected the things from our old house; Wendy’s fury at whatever it was that Reg had told her; Stevie sitting at their kitchen table on the day he came home looking for us with his head in his hands, sobbing. It meant precious little to Kevin at the time, but now, to me, every scrap of information is precious. The O’Flahertys had grown up and moved away, Teresa taking her mother to live with her after Mr. O’Flaherty gently died while happy and drunk in the pub one afternoon. She comes back every now and then to visit old friends and Kevin promised to give her my number and ask her to call me when he saw her next. I didn’t hold my breath. “Oh ye of little faith,” Daniel had said. And he was right. Yesterday I went to see Mrs. O’Flaherty.

Mrs. O’Flaherty had her own bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom in an annex to Teresa’s smart new four-bedroom, mock-Tudor detached. At nearly ninety she was a physical miniature of the woman I remembered, but her warmth and spirit were undiminished.

“May God in heaven preserve us! It’s Miss Tilly,” she cried, as I stood hesitating in the doorway. “She’s come back home to Blighty!”

She patted the seat of the chair facing her, and as I sat down, she took both my hands in hers.

“Let me look at you.” She examined my face with her watery eyes. Once they had been the color of a summer sky, but now they resembled the winter sea.

“You look well, Miss Tilly. And happy. There must be a man.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled. But Mrs. O’Flaherty knew I wasn’t here to talk about now. I was more interested in then. But first, I had to ask, “What do you mean, ‘back home to Blighty?’”

“From Van Diemen’s Land?” She chuckled at my uncomprehending “shipping forecast” face. “Like the song?”

She sang her explanation in a cracked but still tuneful voice:

“Far away from my friends and companions,

Betrayed by the black velvet band.”

The song meant so much to me, but I had no idea what Mrs. O’Flaherty meant by singing it to me now. She saw the confusion in my face and started again at the beginning. She hadn’t known at the time what my mother had done, but she had suspected that something wasn’t quite right.

“I thought at the time they had simply parted. It must have been hard. Your mother loved you both but it didn’t seem to bring her any joy. You could see the hurt in her eyes. And as for your daddy, I’m sure he loved Gracie and he worshipped you, but he was a handful sometimes—like another child for your mother to mind. And he certainly had an eye for the ladies, but I don’t think he ever strayed. I didn’t know what to make of it. Then when he lost his job there were rumors of course; that he’d gone back to Ireland; that he was working in a pub and giving readings; even that he’d gotten another woman. And there were cruel things said about your mother by ignorant people with small lives who knew no better. But that’s all they were: rumors, tittle-tattle and nasty gossip.”

“But he didn’t lose his job, he was sacked, wasn’t he?” I remember the entry in my mother’s diary and the furious rows just before he went away.

“Apparently so. He was supposed to have gotten into a fight with one of the other men. He accused Stevie of being a fraud and taking advantage of grieving folks with his readings. Punches were thrown and the other fella came off worse. But that’s only what I heard. It was so long ago, and I don’t expect we’ll ever know the truth now. I’m not sure it even matters anymore.”

It does to me.

After we disappeared, Wendy told Mrs. O’Flaherty about my mother’s first lie, which I knew about, and a second about emigrating, which I didn’t.

“Wendy was so angry with her, but I felt sad for all of you. Your mother was a broken woman, looking for something to fix her, but she’d a good heart. She tried so hard on that birthday of yours. I remember she looked like a ghost but she was the one who was haunted.

“And then you put the tin lid on it by setting the shed on fire.”

She shook her head and chuckled softly to herself, but even after all these years I can still taste the tears and the smoke.

* * *

High up in one of the lilac trees a blackbird is singing and, despite the constant hum of traffic, I can just hear the sound of the waves. This place is a little heaven of fresh green, foaming mauve, sunshine and birdsong. I sit with Eli and wait. I have no idea what we are waiting for but I have a feeling that something or someone is coming.

* * *

I sat and drank tea with Mrs. O’Flaherty from blue-and-white willow-pattern cups and saucers.

“When that man came to fetch your things from the house, Wendy was sure she saw your mother inside and she was furious. But even more so when she heard from the chap that your mother was taking you and emigrating to Australia. ‘Joining the Ten Pound Poms,’ he said.”

I tried to swallow the tea past the lump lodged in my throat. Among the photographs on the windowsill there was one that I recognized from the old house. It was the white-haired lady I used to see at St. Patrick’s sitting behind Mrs. O’Flaherty. She followed my gaze, and then my train of thought.

“We missed you at St. Patrick’s. But I used to light a candle for you.”

“All those candles I used to light for my dad . . .”

She took hold of my hands in hers again and squeezed them tightly.

“A candle lit in God’s house is never wasted, Miss Tilly.” Then she continued, gently, “I know what you want from me, child, but I don’t know where he is. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

She hadn’t even seen Stevie when he’d been back to Wendy’s.

“The only thing I know for sure is that he did come looking for you, but Wendy told him what the man had said and he went away with his heart broken. They all believed you’d gone. And so did I. Until now.”

She shook her head in disbelief and then fixed me with her steady gaze.

“Don’t you give up, Miss Tilly. You can still find him. And I hope and pray with all my heart that you do.”

Before I left I promised I would visit her again, with Daniel, and that if I did find out anything about Stevie, I’d let her know. But where the hell was I going to look now?

Bermondsey?

* * *

Here in the public gardens, heavy plumes of tiny starburst blossoms bow the branches of the lilac trees, and the blackbird sings on under sunshine and a bright blue sky. It was here my mother sat with blood on her new dress. It was here to her hometown that she brought me, the safest place, the perfect double bluff. Who would search for an arachnophobe in a spider’s web? Here, where she was cruelly cut off by her parents and abandoned by her god. Here, where my mother’s illness began, and where, just pregnant with her first child, she watched another die. She hid us in the last place in the world where anyone who knew her, especially Stevie, would look. It probably never occurred to her that the Australian story would actually work. Even though Queenie was here to support her, it was still the birthplace of all her terrors. But even so, she came back. Because of me. Her love was absolute.

I press my back into the hard wooden slats of the bench and stretch my arms behind me. The sun and scent of lilac are seducing me to sleep. Footsteps break the charm. Eli is sitting up and staring intently across the gardens. The elderly lady might easily have been one of Queenie’s friends from the look of her. She walks with a stick but her frail frame is still proud and straight. She has the posture of a dancer and the look of a showgirl. Her gray hair is spun into a candyfloss chignon fixed with two pearl hairpins, and her lips are a slash of red Chanel. Her female companion is about my age and looks as though she has stepped straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She is carrying a red balloon. They make a striking pair but it is the older woman who unsettles me most. She is somehow familiar. I don’t recognize her face. I don’t know her at all. But somewhere there’s a connection from her to me, like a ley line. It makes me nervous and I look away. I pass the time with fifteen Hail Marys, two Our Fathers, and five The Flight from Bootle’s. The poem and the prayers are my worry beads. When I look round again, the women are gone, but the red balloon is tied to the wooden bench where they were sitting. I feel sick, but nonetheless I am compelled to look. The bench is in the sunniest spot of the gardens, and a brass plaque glints against the blistered varnish of the dark wood.

In loving memory of a precious daughter, “Bunny” Joy,

who was tragically killed, aged 6 years,

and her devoted father, Valentine,

who couldn’t live without her.

Forever loved.