Forgive Me (6 page)

She had only walked about a hundred yards
when she saw headlights coming towards her, and as it got closer she recognized the car
as hers. Ben was driving it. He’d passed his driving test a short while ago, but
he wasn’t insured to drive. Spotting her, he did a U-turn in the road, and jumped
out.

‘Where have you been? I’ve
searched all over for you,’ he said frantically. ‘I’ve been so
worried. Dad was horrible, I’m ashamed of him.’

Ben had always been sensitive and caring
about others, and Eva was so touched by his anxiety for her. She felt she had to make it
better for him. ‘Yes, he was horrible. But I
suppose he’s
hurting and needed to lash out at someone. I just wish it hadn’t been
me.’

‘I shouted at him and said he should
be ashamed of himself.’ Ben put his arm around her awkwardly. ‘I said if he
felt he had to tell you, then he should’ve picked a better time.’

‘Did you and Sophie know all
along?’

‘Of course we didn’t. It was as
much of a shock to us as it was to you. But as far as I’m concerned, nothing will
change between us. You’re still my sister,’ he said as he wiped his damp
eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Thank you, Ben, that means a
lot,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now, though.
I think it would be better if I moved out. But I really don’t know anything about
this studio. Do you?’

Ben shook his head. ‘Nothing at all.
But if it helps, I think Dad was ashamed when you ran out. He said he’d been
telling Mum for years she should tell you the truth. Sophie said he was cruel too. She
said it was bad enough losing Mum and she didn’t want to lose you too.’

‘Did she?’

‘Yes, she did, and she meant it. But
come on home now, you’re like a block of ice.’

Eva got into the car, and as they drove she
told him what she’d been thinking while she was in the field. ‘What else is
there we don’t know about? It’s scary, thinking you know someone well and
then you find out you don’t know anything.’

‘I wish I’d never found out Dad
could be like that,’ Ben said tartly. ‘It’s as if everything we
believed in has collapsed. I’d better warn you that Sophie is freaking out again
too. She thinks Dad wants to move away. She’s an imbecile sometimes; Dad never
said he wanted to sell the house, only that he couldn’t. He isn’t going to
dump us.’

‘It looks like he wants to dump
me,’ Eva said glumly. ‘We haven’t even got through the funeral yet. I
dread to think what else will come out of the woodwork then.’

On the morning of the funeral Eva woke to
the sound of heavy rain.

She got up and went to the window. Her room
looked out over the garden wall on to the estate of new houses. She could see that the
patio on the nearest one was awash.

The last few days had been really
spring-like with warm sun, and she’d hoped it would remain that way for the
funeral. Now the thirty or more people coming back here afterwards would have to be
indoors; the house was big enough for that, but it would have been less stressful if
some of them could have been out in the courtyard.

Flora’s post mortem had shown she had
no medical problems. Eva had been hoping against hope there would be something, as at
least that would make sense of why her mother chose to end her life. If there was
another man in her life, that hadn’t come to light either. But then Eva had known
that was never a possibility because Flora rarely went out on her own. She was always at
home.

Her death had been the most terrible thing.
Just thinking about it made Eva’s chest so tight she could hardly breathe, and she
wondered how she would ever get over it. Then for Andrew to tell her he wasn’t her
father in such a nasty way had crushed her even more. He had made an apology of sorts
the following night, his excuse being that he was upset and had drunk too much. But
however much she wished she could forgive him, she found herself running his words over
and over in her head, just as she was constantly dwelling on how
she’d found her mother.

She had never had the kind of affectionate,
jovial relationship with him that she’d observed other people seemed to have with
their fathers. He had always been stern and critical, and had never invited any kind of
confidences. Her mother had often rolled her eyes at his lack of compassion and sense of
humour and told Eva that she must make sure before she got married that her man had both
those important qualities.

It was funny how she kept recalling similar
remarks her mother had made. Had she been trying to tell her that the marriage
wasn’t a happy one?

Yet Eva felt Andrew was being honest when he
insisted he’d tried to make Flora tell her the truth for years. He said he had
been afraid that if she ever asked for her birth certificate, she would see her
mother’s maiden name Foyle was on it, and a gap left where her father’s name
should have been. He said Flora had always promised she would tell Eva the truth at an
appropriate time.

‘Each time you reached a milestone –
your sixteenth birthday, then your eighteenth – I insisted she told you,’ he said.
‘But she always said, “Not now. I’ll know when the time is
right.” But I was always afraid that you would need your birth certificate at some
stage. Do you remember just before Christmas when you said you’d like money for
your twenty-first, rather than a party, because you wanted to go to Thailand with a
friend at work? Well, that made Flora panic; she thought you’d need a visa, and
for that you have to produce a birth certificate.’

Eva did remember talking about wanting to go
to Thailand. She also remembered that her mother got very
uptight about
it. She even said it was selfish to go away with a friend rather than have a nice family
party they could all enjoy.

‘You aren’t trying to say that
was the reason she killed herself?’ she asked him incredulously.

He was looking at her accusingly.
‘Well, I think it certainly played its part,’ he said. ‘She was
terrified of how you would react.’

‘Then why didn’t you take over
and tell me yourself?’ she snapped at him. ‘And don’t you dare say
that it was because you were afraid to, because you didn’t have any problem
spitting it out the minute she was dead!’

‘Oh grow up, Eva,’ he said
scornfully. ‘You know the truth now, so deal with it.’

That cold dismissive response was like a
knife through her heart. She was certain that any other man who had brought up a child
as his own from babyhood would have reassured her that he’d always loved her, even
if she wasn’t his biological daughter. But she didn’t have the words to say
how deeply wounded she felt, and she was also certain that even if she did, it
wouldn’t make any difference to him.

‘I suppose you don’t want me in
the house any more then?’ she said in an attempt to get him to say he still had
some feelings for her.

‘I certainly think it would be best if
you moved out after the funeral,’ he replied, turning away from her as if he
couldn’t bear to look at her. ‘After all, you do have a place to go to
now.’

Since that night she’d stopped calling
him Dad. The word stuck in her throat.

It had been very tempting to leave the house
immediately. She had a little money saved – enough to stay in a bed and
breakfast for a few weeks – but she didn’t go, because of Ben and Sophie. They
were bewildered and hurting, and right now they needed her.

A few days ago Andrew had gone out to dinner
with a colleague straight from work. Eva made spaghetti Bolognese for Ben, Sophie and
herself, and Sophie began talking about the dressing-up clothes they used to keep in one
of the rooms in the attic.

‘I used to think it was magic that
there was always something different and new in there,’ she said. ‘Remember,
Eva, when we found the two princesses’ dresses?’

Eva did remember; she was about eleven, and
Sophie eight. They had gone up to the attic to play and the two dresses were hanging up
– one gold to fit Sophie, and a midnight-blue one for her. Eva knew Mum had made them
because she’d seen her come back from the market with the satin, and Mum had put
her finger to her lips when Eva asked what it was for. But she hadn’t seen the
finished dresses before. And they were marvellous, each with a train and an Alice band
headdress decorated with jewels to go with them. There was a purple cloak for Ben
too.

‘She was so good at making us
surprises,’ Ben said wistfully. ‘We played in those outfits so much.
Remember the play you wrote for us, Eva? You made us rehearse it nearly every day before
we put it on for Mum and Dad.’

Eva laughed. ‘The two princesses were
competing for the hand in marriage of the prince. Sophie and I had to do all kinds of
tasks to show how accomplished we were.’

Ben laughed then. ‘And I had to do
quick changes to be your servant and test your skills. All I really wanted to do was
strut around in the cloak being the prince.’

‘Mum clapped so hard when we finally
performed it for her and Dad,’ Sophie said with a thoughtful smile. ‘She was
the best actress, she made out she had no idea what we’d been
doing up in the attic for weeks.’

‘We used to have a lot of fun playing
together,’ Ben said wistfully. ‘She once said to me, “Stick close to
your sisters as you grow older, Ben. You three will need each other when I’m
gone.” Do you think she knew then that she wasn’t going to grow old with
us?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Eva
said, seeing that Ben’s lower lip was trembling with emotion. ‘I think she
only meant that she wished she’d had brothers and sisters to share things
with.’

‘But she wasn’t always fun and
happy,’ Sophie reminded them. ‘What about that time we tried to make plaster
rabbits with that rubber mould? She flew right off the handle, and all we’d done
was spill a bit of plaster in the kitchen.’

‘And that time you collected flower
petals to make perfume.’ Ben grinned at Sophie. ‘I thought she was going to
kill you.’

‘Well, to be fair, you had made a mess
in the kitchen with the plaster. And you did pick off all the flower heads in the
garden, Sophie. Anyone would get mad about that,’ Eva pointed out.

‘She was a bit irrational sometimes,
though,’ Ben admitted. ‘Remember her throwing that dish of lasagne at the
wall because Dad said he was bored with it? I could’ve understood it if
she’d done it while he was there watching her, but she waited until he’d
gone out.’

‘She was afraid to throw it in front
of him,’ Sophie said. ‘He’d have gone mental.’

Sophie’s incisive remark surprised
Eva. She’d always thought her younger sister wasn’t aware that her father
had a nasty side. But she wasn’t going to agree with her, as Sophie was quite
likely to tell tales later. She thought she’d better change the subject.

‘Getting back to what Ben said earlier
about Mum wanting us to stay close. We will, won’t we?’

‘Of course,’ both Sophie and Ben
agreed.

Eva smiled at them. If they felt like that,
perhaps there was even hope that Andrew had only reacted the way he had because of his
grief and that in time he’d come round too.

But there was no evidence of it yet. He
wasn’t drinking as much now, and he hadn’t been nasty to her again, but an
atmosphere hung around the house, heavy with unspoken recriminations on both their
parts.

She wanted to talk about it all to clear the
air. She thought of offering him this studio she knew nothing about, to convince him she
was not guilty of any kind of conspiracy with her mother. But he avoided being alone
with her, and she felt he was just waiting for the funeral to be over so that he could
tell her to go.

That was what made her confide in Olive. She
didn’t want to – it was bad enough that Olive knew her mother had taken her own
life – but she had to tell someone. It was all whirling around in her mind till it
reached the point where she felt she might go mad with it. As it was, it turned out to
be the best thing she could have done. Olive explained about wills and what
‘probate’ meant properly. She said it might be months before it was all
settled and the property came to her, so the best thing was to move out right after the
funeral, and at that point to go and speak to the solicitor.

Eva had decided that was what she must do,
but she couldn’t help wondering how Sophie and Ben would cope when she left. They
had never done anything around the house; she doubted they even knew how to work the
washing machine. In the last couple of weeks she had tried to get them to help her out,
because she was doing all the cooking, shopping, washing and tidying up. But although
Ben tried,
Sophie refused point blank, and Andrew took the view it was
women’s work. Eva was afraid everything would fall apart without her there.

‘That isn’t for you to worry
about,’ she told herself as she went to have a shower. Ben would be going to
university in the autumn anyway, and it might make Sophie less self-centred if she
didn’t have someone looking after her all the time.

It rained remorselessly all day. When they
got back to the house after the funeral, Ben directed the parking on the drive, Sophie
took umbrellas and coats, and Eva offered drinks.

‘Your children do you great credit,
Andrew,’ Eva heard a large woman in a very theatrical black hat remark. ‘I
wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d retreated upstairs. It must be awful for
them.’

Eva wished she could go and hide. Most of
the people who had come back to the house were strangers to her; there were only a
handful of family friends and neighbours. She wondered who all the strangers were, and
how they knew about the funeral, as Andrew hadn’t said he’d contacted
people.

The clergyman was a stranger too, and though
Eva knew he’d called at the house to talk to Andrew about Flora, it was all too
obvious that he didn’t know her personally and that he was uncomfortable holding a
religious service for a suicide.