fifteen

I parked in The Battledown car park, stepped out into the chill night, and walked back around to the front of the spot-lit building, a handsome, classy double-fronted villa, French Colonial style, with a glossy black front door and portico. A wide flight of stone steps led up to the entrance.

I rang the bell. Almost immediately the door swung open and a woman my age greeted me. Her warm smile and friendly manner marked her out as the same person who’d answered the phone that morning even before she’d uttered a word.

“Hi,” she said, “my name’s Sarah. You must be Kim. Your mother’s waiting for you in the lounge.”

I gave a clumsy smile, wondering how much Monica had told a stranger, how much her story had emerged with edited highlights. I walked inside on legs made of tin, every step seeming to emit a slight squeak of resistance.

“Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?” Sarah said.

“Tea would be nice, thank you.”

She guided me into a room in which one half was set out for breakfast. Lovely paintings of Cheltenham adorned the wall. Monica sat on one of two sofas opposite each other near a front facing window. She stood at my approach, and did the same ‘kiss kiss’ thing she’d performed in my office. I forced a smile.

Sarah let out a genuine sigh of pleasure. “So nice, how long has it been, you two?”

We spoke in unison. “A while,” my mother said.

“A couple of decades,” I said.

Some of the shine vanishing, Sarah invited me to make myself at home and left us to it.

I sat down and looked into my mother’s eyes. I’d already made my mind up that I would hear her out. We sat awkwardly for a few moments and exchanged a couple of pleasantries. “So?” I began, wishing I didn’t sound so much like Blofeld quizzing James Bond in one of those old movies.

My mother took a deep breath. “I won’t lie to you, Kim. I left your father all those years ago because I met someone else. I fell in love.”

This was no surprise to me. An affair, my father had told me more than once. Tacky and sordid, is how it had been put across, which was fair enough. My mother had chosen her lover over us.

“I can’t expect you to know what it was like being married to your dad,” she continued. “But it wasn’t easy. Older than me by almost fifteen years, it was very much a traditional relationship, more common in those days. He went out to work and I stayed at home with you kids. He was a good worker and provider, your dad,” she said with fond recollection. “But, of course, being a vet he was out all hours in all weathers. Life was fairly unpredictable.”

I resisted the urge to ask whether she really believed this a mitigating factor. I don’t know whether she read it in my face, but she coughed and cleared her throat. “The thing is, I was lonely and, whatever you’ve been told, your dad wasn’t happy. He couldn’t have been …” She tailed off, swallowed, “And he liked a drink, or two.”

So what Luke said was true. I leant towards her. “Did he ever hurt you?”

“Only with words.”

A knock at the door and Sarah returned with a tray of tea and a plate of biscuits, homemade, by the look of them. I was glad of the distraction. She set it out and left. My mother did what mothers do. It must have been strange for her to ask her daughter of thirty-six years whether she took sugar in her tea, whether she liked it weak or strong.

“I’m not making excuses, Kim,” she continued once we were settled again, “really I’m not, but I’d like you to have some idea what it was like for me.”

I understood her need because I was no ordinary listener; it was what I got paid for. I nodded assent. She issued a short, grateful smile. “When I told your father that I wanted to leave him, he grew extremely angry. I’ve never forgotten it,” she said, paling with the memory. “He told me that I could go, that he would be glad to see the back of me, but he also told me that if I tried to take any of you away, he would come after and kill us.”

Most people would have jumped, but I knew my dad and his taste for the dramatic, which could be deeply unpleasant if you were on the receiving end. He’d owned two legally held licensed shotguns. Occasionally, I’d heard him issue idle threats to others, usually when he was in his cups. I’d never taken them seriously. Mouth and trousers, I’d thought. I’d also thought him a jerk.

“You believed him?”

“I did.”

“You were afraid of him?”

“I was.”

“Then how could you bear to leave three children in the care of a man who was that unstable?”

She glanced away, glanced back. “Your safety was never in doubt.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

She suddenly took hold of my hands, which felt soft and warm and, I guessed, motherly. “Kim, he threatened to kill me. I’d embarrassed him, brought shame on him. Where we lived, it was a small population. Close. Parochial. Incestuous.” She didn’t need to point this out. I knew only too well. I also recognised the law of unintended consequences when living in a semi-rural community and things went wrong. It could be very Game of Thrones, with one faction vying with another. “He wasn’t having me back, but he would not let me leave with you. That was his punishment. He was of a different generation, do you see?”

Yes, I got that. All the dads at school were younger than mine, and with different generations come different views, some of them cemented in the dark ages, I’d thought more than once. “But a threat to kill?” I said in disbelief. I disengaged from her grasp as easily as she’d disconnected from my life.

“As long as I went quietly,” she continued. “Mine and your safety were assured.”

So that’s why she’d treated me with such studied unease when I’d tracked her down. She was doing it to protect me, or so she’d have me believe.

I drew away. It was a difficult sell and I wasn’t sure I bought it. She probably detected my resistance, which is why she changed tack.

“Do you still have the cottage in Devon?”

I nodded. My inheritance, I’d been trying to sell it for months, but it wouldn’t shift and I’d taken the Slade family home off the market.

“Next time you’re there, go up into the attic and check the floorboards.”

“Check the—?”

Her eyes flashed. “Do it.”

So you want to play the authoritative mother? I curled my lip. Her face fell. She knew she’d overplayed her hand. “I’m sorry, Kim. That was really unforgiv—”

“Dad has been dead for over half a decade. Why didn’t you come before?”

She gave a world-weary smile. “For many years I moved around. I couldn’t bear the pain of not seeing you. It was easier that way. I also worried how you would take it.” And afraid of the reaction it would provoke, I thought. Well, now you know. “I hoped that you’d got your lives sorted. I had no desire to come back and mix things up.”

But you have and the timing couldn’t be worse. “This man,” I said. “Your lover.”

A shadow passed behind her eyes. She looked as vulnerable as a sleeping baby. “He died four years after we went away. Road accident,” she said, bleak and sad.

I had become something of an expert in the lexicon of loss. Death tapped me on my back with a long, hard skeletal finger, and whispered like mother, like daughter. “I’m sorry. That’s hard.”

She didn’t disabuse me. “Afterwards, I was forced to create a new life for myself. With few credentials, I took all kinds of paid menial work and finally managed to get a job as a live-in housekeeper for a judge and his wife. I’ve been living in Edgbaston in Birmingham for the past twelve years.” Another shadow slipped across the back of her eyes. She didn’t explain and offered me a biscuit, which I declined.

“I spoke to Luke after your call,” I told her.

Her face immediately brightened. “Did you? Tell me all about him.”

So I did and, before long, I realised that we were getting on well, that she was intuitive and interested and interesting. For a screwed up life, she hadn’t done too badly. She had lived and for that I was glad.

“He asked me to tell you to get in touch.” I gave her his number. She looked so pleased and grateful, I almost felt mean for harbouring such unpleasant thoughts about her. My biggest problem with her story remained. It’s too easy to discredit the dead.

“Are you going back to Birmingham after your visit?” I said.

The shadow returned. I felt like one of those bomb disposal experts tentatively feeling the way for unexploded devices.

“No, my employment situation has changed.”

“Oh?”

She put down her cup and saucer with a clatter. I realised that I’d done the verbal equivalent of stepping on a land mine. “A couple of months ago, Judge Hawkes discovered that he had terminal cancer. A few days ago, I went into his bedroom and found him dead in bed.”

Fear trickled down my spine. Not death again.

“He’d committed suicide. Booze,” she said, her voice empty, “I suppose to give him Dutch courage, and then he’d tied a plastic bag over his head.”

Unbidden, I pictured a dead man’s eyes and ruptured capillaries. I thought about air escaping and running out, polythene sucking in and sticking fast. Compression. Extinction.

“It made me think that life is too short,” I heard my mother say. “It made me realise that I needed to see you more than ever.”

Pain flashed through my shoulders. I changed position. As I snapped back to the present and looked into her face, I saw my own needy, haunted reflection. I got it. She was asking for my help and support without realising that I was the last person on earth capable of offering it.