It took a while, but eventually she found it, tucked into the back of an old manila folder she’d brought away from the flat when she cleared out Flora’s personal possessions. There had been half a dozen of these folders piled up in the wardrobe in the back bedroom of the flat, and Eve had sat on the carpet there and looked through the first two, finding they contained bank statements, insurance forms, NHS records and various other official records of Flora’s life. Many of the documents were faded and illegible, most were out of date, and all of it could probably be thrown away. Presuming that the rest of the folders contained a similar mix of irrelevant records, Eve had piled them up and taken them home to sort through at a later date.
Now the piece of paper lay in front of her on the kitchen table and she ran her palms across it, flattening it out, pressing down on the creases that had been there for years. She had studied it so intently over the last ten minutes, that the faded black ink and words felt familiar, even though she had never set eyes on her birth certificate before this evening.
Her full name was at the top – Evelyn Mary Glover – along with her date of birth and the name of the hospital where she’d been born. Under the section titled Mother, was Flora’s name, followed by her place of birth and her address. But the section for Father was blank.
Eve kept looking at it, wondering how Flora had felt when she registered her baby’s birth. Was she embarrassed at having to leave this empty space on the form? Was the lack of a husband and father for her child made all the more painful, by having it recorded and publicly witnessed?
Eve’s mobile rang and Gav’s name lit up on the screen. She couldn’t face speaking to him now, so ignored the call. But he was a persistent bugger: when the phone rang for the third time, she gave in and picked it up.
‘Hey doll, no need to snap my head off,’ shouted Gav. ‘Just wanted to let you know that the meeting with Gleesons has been moved forward tomorrow – they’ll be in at 8.30. See you then!’
He rang off and she swore at the handset. Gav knew she couldn’t make it into the office that early – even if she threw Daniel through the school gates as soon as the caretaker unlocked them, distance and traffic meant she’d be doing well to get to her desk by 8.45am.
She put the phone down again and looked at her birth certificate. Why had she never seen this before? Probably because there had been no need. Flora had applied for a passport on her behalf when Eve was fifteen, before the two of them went on their first foreign holiday to France. From then on, her passport was the only official proof of identity Eve had ever needed when she applied for a driving licence, opened bank accounts and submitted job applications. She and Ben had never married, and she hadn’t needed to produce her own certificate when she registered Daniel’s birth. So, this creased, faded piece of paper had stayed hidden away for forty-five years – which was probably just as Flora had intended.
Eve went upstairs and poked her head around the door of Daniel’s bedroom, listening to the regular rise and fall of his breath. It would be so good to get these problems at school ironed out. She’d left a voicemail yesterday for Ben, but was still waiting to hear back from him. She probably should have said what it was about, but was it really too much to expect him to communicate with her and return her calls? All she wanted was someone to help share this load, to agree with her that Daniel was a normal little boy and his miserable old bat of a teacher was blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
She went back downstairs and poured herself a glass of wine, then sat at the kitchen table studying the birth certificate again. There was a hollowness inside her chest and a deep fatigue that seemed to be affecting every muscle in her body. She wanted to crawl up to her bed, pull the covers over her head and stay there – well away from all of this. Not just the worry about Daniel, but the mystery about her father. For a day or so after reading her mother’s letters to Alan, she’d felt shocked – unable to process this new information that so dramatically affected her. She was the same person she’d been in the days, hours and minutes leading up to that night when she sat in bed surrounded by discarded envelopes, but she also felt entirely different. How could anything be the same now? How could she be the same?
But after a while, even this extraordinary discovery began to feel less strange. It was a bit like bereavement, she realised: the initial horror and shock gradually lessened but, as acceptance took their place, a whole new gamut of emotions needed to be addressed. Thinking back to the words her mother had written, she began to feel overwhelmed by the predicament of a young woman who had been left on her own to deal with pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood. What an awful burden for her mother to have carried, all by herself. Eve knew how hard single motherhood could be, and Flora had been forced into a situation where she went through it too.
There was anger stirring inside her now as well. Whoever Alan Baker was, or had been, he didn’t fit the image Flora had created of her father. That man had been six feet tall with dark brown hair. His birthday was on 4th March and he’d grown up in London and worked for the civil service. He liked cricket and rugby. He didn’t smoke. He loved the theatre and the first film he’d taken Flora to see had been Mad Max. He was a good card player and his favourite band was The Rolling Stones. The meal he always ordered when they ate out was roast beef; his favourite colour was blue; he was a dreadful dancer. He drove a dark green Rover; he wore size ten shoes.
These were just some of the things her mother had told her about the man she didn’t remember. Was any of it true? Maybe all those characteristics and traits also applied to Alan Derek Baker – or had done during the brief summer when he and Flora had been together. But however perfect he sounded on paper, the man her mother had fallen in love with – who then got her pregnant – didn’t have the decency to answer any of her letters or offer to support her while she carried his child.
As a result, it seemed that – in his absence – Flora had created a picture of the perfect husband and father. She turned Alan Derek Baker into Alan Derek Glover. That was clever, Eve realised: it meant Flora didn’t have to change her surname; she was already Flora Glover, so she just told everyone she was a Mrs instead of a Miss. She then created a character who had adored them both, but had been tragically taken away from his loving family too early, dying in a car crash when Eve was eighteen months old.
At least that part of the story was total rubbish: Flora obviously had no idea what had happened to her lover, but had invented an accident because it was a neat, tidy ending – as well as vaguely glamorous. Plenty of famous people had met their end in a similar way – James Dean, Grace Kelly, Princess Diana… well okay, not plenty, only a handful really that Eve could think of. But it was still a more interesting way to kill off an imaginary husband, than a heart attack.
Over the years Flora had told her so many snippets and stories: places she and Alan had visited together, jokes they’d shared, things Alan had done with baby Eve. According to Flora, he had sung to her, danced with her, read to her at night. He had dabbed bubbles on her nose to make her laugh in the bath, he had chosen and bought her very first pair of shiny black shoes with silver buckles. He had pushed her around the park on a little tricycle with a long handle at the back.
Flora once told her that the three of them had been away for a long weekend in the Gower, a few weeks before the accident that took his life. They’d stayed in a hotel in The Mumbles, and sat on the beach nursing newspaper parcels of fish and chips. Flora had told Eve she’d only been walking for a few months so was still unsteady on her feet, staggering across the sand, picking up shells and bringing them back to show her parents. Alan had teased her with chips: holding out one at a time, a dab of ketchup on its tip.
Obviously, none of that was true. The man hadn’t even been around.
Eve folded up the birth certificate and slid it inside the brown envelope. She didn’t need it, so for now it could go back where she’d found it in Flora’s manila folder. At some stage she might put it in her desk in the corner of the sitting room, beside Daniel’s birth certificate. But for now, the mere sight of it was too painful. She wanted it to be hidden away, so there was no chance of her coming across it again by accident.
She went next door and collapsed onto the sofa with her glass of wine. There was a property programme on the television: a couple had been persuaded to spend thousands on upgrading their existing house, rather than move.
‘It’s amazing!’ the woman was saying, as she walked around her new kitchen. ‘I never imagined I’d live in a house like this!’
The place was a sea of vast plate glass windows, smooth speckled granite, self-closing drawers and cupboards with no handles. It reminded Eve of the apartment overlooking the Suspension Bridge.
She couldn’t concentrate, and went across to the desk in the corner of the room and took out Daniel’s birth certificate, rereading the familiar details. She could vividly remember everything about the day she and Ben had gone to register his birth. She’d been looking forward to it, because it felt like an important occasion, one which marked the official start of this young life. They’d booked an appointment for midday and were intending to go out to lunch somewhere afterwards. She had imagined them sitting in a little bistro, treating themselves to champagne, clinking glasses across the table as their tiny son dozed in his car seat beside the table.
But Daniel had been fractious and whiny all morning, and by the time they left the register office he was howling so plaintively that her breasts were leaking milk in sympathy. It was pouring with rain so they sat in the car while she fed him, then they got soaked walking to the restaurant, where the smell of fried food turned her stomach and made them both short-tempered and snappy. It had been one of those days which should have been so wonderful but which, yet again, went wrong and ended with her and Ben driving home in resentful silence.
But even if his parents weren’t still together, at least Daniel would grow up knowing and seeing both of them, and being reassured they loved him and that his life wasn’t based on a series of stories fabricated by his mother. That was what was hurting Eve most of all, right now: the fact that everything she had grown up believing, everything her mother had ever told her about the father she’d never met, had turned out to be a lie.