‘I’m here, Mum,’ Alex called, closing the front door of Corner Cottage behind her. Her mother had chosen her own home for their meeting. The most comfortable surroundings for her, Alex supposed.
Her mum appeared from the tiny dining room. ‘I’ve got coffee and sandwiches,’ she said, with an unconvincing smile. ‘I thought I could spread things out on the dining table for us to look at. I don’t know what I expected to find when I picked up Angela’s things in London but some of it makes me glad I decided to go. All of it does, really, if I’m honest. It isn’t a bad thing to shed tears over secrets your mother shares with you.’
Nodding, Alex followed into the room. She couldn’t think of anything to say other than how she wished, had wished for a long time, that Lily had shared her secrets with her daughter before. The dining-room table was covered with slim piles of papers and photographs; piles Alex wished were thicker. There were two wooden boxes, one painted with bright colors, faded in places, the other carved but dried out and showing some cracks.
Lily smiled at her. ‘Not a lot for a lifetime, is it?’
‘We’ll make the best of it.’ Alex smiled. She couldn’t help feeling excited. Apart from what little her mother had shared at the Black Dog with Harriet and Mary at the table, this was the first time she could hope to learn more about who she really was.
Her mum glanced up from studying a photo in a silver frame. ‘Are you all right, Alex? You sound really tense. Is it because of all this?’ She waved at the things on the table. ‘Or has something else happened?’
Alex considered. ‘There are some troubling things going on, Mum. Gladys’s behavior for one. But really, I only want to think about us – and all this, for now. What’s the framed picture?’
Lily picked it up and gave it to Alex. ‘You don’t have any idea who these people are but they’re related to me – and to you. What do you think?’
‘I’ve never seen any relatives before,’ Alex said, going to a window to look at a picture of a girl and a young man – scarcely more than a boy either, she supposed. They looked like an incredibly happy pair of teenagers. ‘Who are they?’
When Alex looked at her mother she saw she was crying. ‘My mother and father,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Angela and Simon Devoss.’
Alex stared. ‘Devoss? I’ve never heard that name before.’
‘Simon Devoss was my father’s name. I didn’t know that either, not until I picked up my mother’s things.’
Alex looked at the photo again, at the girl’s curly hair, her laughing eyes looking up into the man’s face – and at him staring back at her, an arm around her back, a big hand possessively clasping a small waist. Angela’s dress had a sweetheart neckline and it looked white with small flowers all over the material. Simon wore a dark, flattering suit, white shirt and striped tie. He had a rose in his buttonhole. Angela held several long-stemmed roses of a pale shade.
‘This was their wedding photo,’ Alex exclaimed. ‘Wasn’t it?’
Lily made no reply and Alex kept her eyes on the photo.
‘I …’ Lily cleared her throat. She wrapped an arm tightly around her middle and waved the other hand in front of her face as if dismissing both her tears and trembling mouth. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m being too sensitive.’
‘You are not.’ Alex moved closer to her mother and pulled her close. ‘You don’t have to be stronger than anyone else – and you don’t have to be strong for me anymore. You’ve always been there for me, I never doubted I was safe and loved – and cared for. And you were young when I was born, Mum. Young but grown-up at the same time.’
She fell silent, afraid she would put her mother off from telling all the things Alex wanted so badly to know.
‘Read this first,’ Lily said, giving Alex some lined paper with a card attached. ‘This starts at our beginning really. We don’t have anything earlier. Sit down. I’ll bring in the coffee and sandwiches.’
Alex pulled a chair up to the table. First she read the card, then started what her grandmother had written on sheets of lined paper that looked as if they’d been torn from a school workbook. When she finished she crossed her arms on the table and rested her face on top.
She closed her eyes and thought about two people with every right to love one another and the cruel fate that had taken that love from them.
‘Your mother was punished so many times for what she didn’t do,’ Alex said when she heard her mother come into the room again. ‘She fell in love with someone she’d known all her life and married him. How could her own parents treat her as they did? How could his – especially when she was expecting their dead son’s child.’ Pausing, Alex thought about what it all meant. ‘Mum, you have relatives somewhere. From both of your parents.’
Her mother shook her head. ‘No. They could never be anything to me.’
‘But I’m related to them, too.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Lily picked up a pile of papers. ‘Would you want to know any of them? These are drawings I did for Angela in the years after I went into foster care.’
Alex looked at one crayon picture after another. They mostly showed a woman and a child and Lily had sorted them to show how they changed as she had grown older. ‘I wouldn’t want to know those people,’ Alex said. Was that true?
Gradually they worked their way through everything on the table. Alex took her time, lingering over photographs of people she didn’t know although her mother pointed out herself as a small girl, and some of the people she had lived with when they had taken Angela and Lily under their wings.
‘Take it all home,’ Lily said, surprising Alex. ‘It’s as much your history as mine. Take your time. We might want to have the pictures copied properly, make an album for you even.’ She started gathering everything up. ‘I’d like to hang the little wedding picture in my bedroom.’
Still she showed no sign of talking about the story of Alex. Surely she knew how much her daughter needed to understand her own beginnings.
Reaching back, Lily pulled the long silver chain she’d always worn from around her neck. Alex was so used to it she never gave chain or medallion a thought. Her mother gave it to her.
‘My name is on the back,’ her mum said. ‘And it’s got an engraving on the other side.’
‘Lily Mary Edwina,’ Alex murmured. ‘My baby’s name, too. I like the cross and the roses on the front.’
‘It’s yours now. If you want it.’
With a smile, Alex slipped the medallion around her own neck. ‘Of course, I want it. Thank you. But won’t you miss it?’
‘I’ll be glad you have it, and so would your grandmother – and grandfather – have been. Let’s have this coffee while it’s still hot. Then I’ll put everything into a bag for you to take home.’
They carried their coffee and the plate of sandwiches into the living room with its small, leaded, bow window and floral damask curtains. A fire in the grate was burning low and Alex put on more wood. Her heart thudded harder and harder. Please let Mum tell me the rest of the story now. Please don’t let her find it too hard to start.
They sat in soft-seated spindle chairs on either side of the fireplace and Alex’s mother pulled a red Chinese trunk she used as a coffee table between them.
‘Eat some sandwiches,’ she said, setting down the plate. ‘You’re too thin, Alex. I think you overdo the worrying.’
It was hard not to laugh. ‘I’ll remember you said that.’ And with luck her mum would throw off the unhappy cloak she’d been wearing for weeks and everyone around here would feel better.
‘What’s bothering you about Gladys?’
Alex felt like standing over her mother and demanding she stop avoiding issues. ‘We can talk about it another time. It’s probably nothing.’
‘I don’t believe you. The look on your face says you’re worried, or upset.’ Lily set down a sandwich without taking as much as a bite. ‘Look, Gladys has known us since I first went to Underhill when you were little. She was so good to me – and to you. If I worked in the evening, she babysat for you. Something’s happened and you’re not telling me.’
Just like part of my entire life happened without me knowing anything about it? ‘I think Gladys and Frank had a spat, nothing more.’ She didn’t think that but it filled a gap for now. ‘Mum, why did you decide to live in Underhill?’
Sometimes people turned pale but Lily’s face not only became white, it took on a chalky quality. She sniffed and gulped at her coffee, settled her eyes on Alex’s. ‘I spent a couple of weeks there once and I was very happy. When … when I could finally think clearly and realized I had to make a way for the two of us, I went back there and I was lucky. I had enough money to rent that little flat next to the Lymers and I got a job at the Black Dog. I was so young-looking everyone was nice to me, even the younger men who might have been a problem. Yes, I was very lucky to be in the one place where my life had … well, I liked it a lot around here. There was this camp they held for young people who intended to go to university.’ She turned her face away. ‘That wasn’t to be but I learned a lot there and I was in the open air for the first time – clean, open air. I’d always lived in London, you see.’
This was it. ‘And you had met my father around here, hadn’t you?’
Lily looked into the fire and after a while, she nodded, yes.
‘Was he as young as you?’ If so it would have made it hard to think of taking on a family.
‘Not quite. Alex, there’s something else I’ve got to tell you about, something serious that worries me. I never thought I’d have to talk to you – or anyone – about it but I don’t have a choice anymore.’
Alex put her cup and saucer on the sheet of glass that covered the top of the carved trunk. ‘Please just explain, Mum. I’m more than grown up so please don’t try to hide anything from me. Anything at all.’
Lily didn’t meet her eyes. ‘I got a call from someone whose name I don’t want to say. If I can, I’ll forget it. I did that once and I can do it again, so don’t ask me to tell you. She was a social worker when I was expecting you. The foster family I lived with then was lovely and they cared about me, but they were old-fashioned and they didn’t know how to cope with the questions that started. They tried to carry on but the jabs got worse and they had children of their own to consider. Times were different, Alex. So, well … my social worker took me into her home. She was single with a nice house. There weren’t any money worries for her and I suppose she got an allowance for my care, too. She kept me until you were born and took me back to her home afterward.’
Alex chewed her bottom lip and watched her mother’s changing expressions, the way she swallowed awkwardly and looked away frequently.
‘We were with her a long time, Alex. I thought she was wonderful. She was kind and she loved you so much.’ Looking up she added, ‘She loved you too much – too much. I felt funny sometimes because she did everything for you. And for me. We had everything.’
‘What are you saying, Mum? Or what aren’t you saying?’
‘What she wanted was to set me up with a new start. I would get back into school, go to university, have all the things I’d always wanted. The catch was, you – she wanted you. She could give you a perfect life.’
Alex rubbed her face. ‘A social worker. Where was all the money from?’
‘Inherited. That’s what she told me and I believed her. I still do. I don’t know why she wasn’t interested in having her own baby – perhaps she couldn’t. I don’t care. Perhaps she doesn’t like men. It doesn’t matter. She had made me an allowance, a generous one, and I saved almost all of it. I didn’t need to spend the money. When I said I was taking you and leaving, I wanted to give all the money back but she wouldn’t take it. Afterwards I was grateful for that because it got me through – that and the job at the Black Dog. And the kindness of strangers like the Burke sisters and Gladys Lymer. And you were a good little soul – I could have you at the pub when I had to and you were an angel.’ Alex’s mum smiled. ‘What happened?’
Alex smiled back. ‘That’s an old joke, Mum.’
‘Sweety, that woman went nuts on me. She tried to take you away anyway. She told me she could have me put in a home because I had endangered my child. The things she said were crazy. The people at the child protection services place were her friends and she insisted they would stand up for her.’
‘What did you do?’ Even trying to imagine what her mother had gone through was impossible. ‘You were so young and she had all the power.’
Getting up, Lily flexed her shoulders and raised her chin. ‘I went to the agency myself. I didn’t accuse Beverly Irving of anything, just said I was ready to go out on my own and was there any reason why I shouldn’t. They told me it was fine as long as I could prove I had a plan and you would be safe and well-cared for. I had the plan and that was it. I went back and packed. When I told that woman what I’d done she backed off as if I’d slapped her. Then she threatened me and said she’d find me and get you for herself in the end, but I left and never saw or heard from her again.’
Carefully watching her mother, Alex said, ‘Sit down again, Mum. You said this person’s name, Beverly Irving, but it doesn’t matter if I know her name. She’s gone from our lives and that’s all that matters.’
Lily remained standing. ‘She’s not gone, Alex. And she wants to make us suffer for what she lost, what she still believes – all these years later – should have been hers. And she talked about how I intend to spoil the life she has now and how she won’t allow it. I never did anything to hurt her and I never would.’
‘Have you seen her again?’
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘Why are you afraid of her again? How could she have any idea where we are?’
‘I think she does. And I think she’s got a lot of misconceptions about us wanting to hurt her. She threatened us. She said she would hurt someone I love if I don’t do what she asks.’
Alex swiped at her moist brow. ‘That’s senseless.’ She shook her head and went over to hold her mother’s shoulders. ‘You’re imagining things that won’t happen. It’s so far in the past it’s never going to touch you again. Forget it.’
Her mother stroked Alex’s cheek. ‘Sweety, yesterday after I picked up my mother’s things, I got a threatening call from that woman. She knew I’d been to the agency and picked up my mother’s things. She’s found us again.’