Charlie (31 page)

Charlie shook her head. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘You may in a while, because that was when she found out DeeDee was still in your father’s life,’ Beryl said. ‘I’m not going to go into that now, we can talk that through at some more appropriate time. All I’ll say now is that was the time when things began to turn sour.’

Charlie frowned. She wanted to know more, but she sensed Beryl had started on this tack for another purpose than throwing light on the past.

‘Go on,’ she urged.

Beryl shrugged. ‘I just felt that I couldn’t let this day end without saying my piece about your mum. Sylvia
was
difficult, impossible sometimes, neurotic, selfish and often mean-spirited. But when you are thinking about her tonight, as I know you will, remember that chameleon. She had become like that because of circumstances. It was the only defence she had.’

All at once Charlie understood what Beryl was trying to do. The kindly woman had been distressed all day because no one, not even her daughter, had recalled any happy memories of Sylvia. All at once Charlie felt ashamed, and she stumbled across the kitchen to the older woman’s arms.

‘She did love you,’ Beryl whispered as she stroked Charlie’s hair. ‘She wasn’t much good at showing it. But she often told me how she felt and I saw that love and pride in her eyes, the sorrow that she felt because she couldn’t express it.’

Andrew came into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw the women embracing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, turning to go.

‘It’s okay, Andrew,’ Beryl said. In her heart she knew Sylvia had killed herself to release her daughter from the burden of looking after her. She couldn’t tell Charlie that, not now, it would be too disturbing, but perhaps in time the girl would come to see it for herself and appreciate it was done out of love for her, rather than self-interest. ‘We’re done here now, aren’t we, Charlie?’

Charlie lifted her head, sniffed and wiped away her tears. ‘I think perhaps you all ought to go now,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the bar to open, Beryl.’

Beryl slipped away into the living room to leave her nephew with Charlie for a few minutes.

‘Do you really want me to go too?’ Andrew asked, his blue eyes wide with hurt.

Charlie sighed. Just last night she had talked to him, explained how she felt, and she thought he understood. ‘You came down here for a holiday,’ she reminded him, ‘but because of all this you haven’t had one. You’ve got a few days left, so make the most of it.’

‘But I’d rather be with you,’ he said bleakly.

‘No,’ she said more firmly. ‘I can’t be what you really want, not yet, and it will just spoil things. So let me get back on my feet, on my own.’

‘Can I phone you?’ he asked. He sounded like a small boy.

‘Yes, of course you can,’ she said. ‘But leave it till you’re back in London. I’ll write to you in a few days, maybe in a letter I can explain myself better.’

‘You don’t mean a “Dear John”?’ he asked, but he smiled as he said it and his tone was teasing.

Charlie smiled too, for what she felt was the first time since she found her mother was dead. ‘Of course not, silly. You’ve been the best friend any girl could have this last week. But all this has kind of distorted things, hasn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘There’s no suppose about it, it has,’ she insisted. ‘So let’s just let time sort things out for us, shall we?’

As Charlie watched Andrew, Ivor and Beryl drive off, her heart swelled with gratitude and affection. She couldn’t imagine what she would have done without them. She was especially touched by Beryl’s attempts to make her understand her mother. She thought she must talk to Beryl again in a week or two when she was calmer and find out what else she knew.

The flat felt very eerie now. Apart from the day she’d first viewed it, she’d never been here alone before. She’d been in and out several times in the week, tidying and cleaning, but Andrew or Beryl had always been with her.

Now it was all hers. That little daydream which she had so often escaped into when things were bad had come true. She could move the furniture around to suit herself, get rid of anything she disliked, throw a brick through the television screen if she wanted to.

Yet as she sat on the settee, looking around her, she was surprised to find she felt nothing. No pleasure, no guilt or even sorrow. Just emptiness. The sympathy cards on the mantelpiece and window-sill, the vase of beautiful flowers which Andrew had brought her this morning and said were to stay here, rather than go to the cemetery, didn’t seem to have anything much to do with her mother.

All the real symbols of Sylvia had gone. The walking frame and wheelchair had been returned to the hospital, the big, ugly glass ashtray had been thrown into the waste bin in a moment of rage, the piles of magazines were now being read by a neighbour. Maybe if she switched the television on and saw Hughie Green introducing
Opportunity Knocks
, Sylvia’s favourite programme, she might just feel her mother’s presence. But she had no idea what day of the week it was on, and besides, she had no wish to try that.

Beryl’s description of Sylvia being a chameleon made a great deal of sense. It explained why she had always brightened up when Jin came home, how she managed to be such a vivacious hostess. Now Charlie could see too why Sylvia had always maintained a glamorous appearance back at ‘Windways’; she had to, it was a way to disguise her sense of worthlessness.

Perhaps that was why she lost interest in her appearance once they moved here? A chameleon would take on drab colouring in drab surroundings. The only time she had sparkled in the last year was when she was taken away on holiday. Yet she must have had moments of her old gaiety and warmth when Beryl and neighbours visited her, or they wouldn’t have put themselves out for her the way they did.

It hurt to think Sylvia had never placed enough value or importance on her daughter to change her colours now and again for her. But that, Charlie knew now, was the real core of her pain.

‘Well, it’s all over now,’ she said aloud, and her voice sounded strained and unnatural. ‘You’ve got the freedom you always believed you wanted, so forgive her.’

She wandered around the flat for some time, picking things up, opening drawers and cupboards, then shutting them again without touching anything. She knew that soon she would have to go through her mother’s things properly, take the clothes and give them to neighbours or a jumble sale, go through those boxes of letters and personal things which Sylvia had refused to unpack or even look at since they moved here. Maybe in there she’d find a few answers to all the many things which still puzzled her.

As she stood in Sylvia’s bedroom she began to cry. Back at ‘Windways’ there would have been countless good memories trapped in the sunny bedroom, of lying between her parents as they planned the day ahead, or stormy nights when they’d let her come in with them, of pillow fights, being read stories, and opening her stocking at Christmas.

She wished she could lie down on the bed and draw on the comfort and security she’d felt as a child, but it made her shudder. It had been remade with clean covers, yet the image of her mother lying dead in it was imprinted on her mind. There was no whiff of perfume, no lacy negligée, manicure set and pots of nail varnish strewn around as there had been back at ‘Windways’, just Sylvia’s hair-brush and mirror on the dressing-table, a wool dressing-gown hanging on the back of the door, two paperback books on the bedside cabinet and a faint lingering odour of vomit and cigarettes.

‘Let me find some good memories,’ Charlie pleaded aloud, her voice echoing in the clinical room. ‘I want to remember you as you used to be at speech days in a lovely hat, or dressed for a party, not like this.’

It was homework that finally halted her tears. Back in her own bedroom, sitting at her book-covered desk in front of the window, with the door firmly closed on the rest of the flat, she felt safer.

There were no poignant reminders of the past in this room. The floral curtains had come from the spare bedroom at ‘Windways’, as had the matching cover on the single divan, but they were impersonal. The small desk was from her father’s study, but he’d never used it as such, he’d had a much larger one he sat at, this one had merely been used as a surface to dump papers on.

Even the view from the window evoked no reminders of the past. The river Dart was a long way off, the green hills on the opposite bank she’d never explored.

In fact when she came to think about it, there was a whole world out there far beyond those green hills, waiting for exploration. Cities, towns, villages and other countries. She had one more term at school to get through, then she could leave Dartmouth for good. Sell up everything here, pack her bags, say goodbye and start afresh somewhere new. London, and Andrew, might come first, she’d see how she felt when the time came.

With that she picked up her pen and began to tackle her maths.

Chapter Ten

Charlie walked slowly past number 12 Hazelmere Road, scrutinizing the big Victorian house carefully as she went. It was a bit neglected, and the garden was full of spilling bags of rubbish, but it wasn’t as bad as some places she’d seen. Besides, the tree-lined road itself was very nice, so checking her watch first to make sure she wasn’t too early, she turned back.

It was a Friday in mid-July, three months since her mother’s death, and she was in Hornsey, north London, with a six o’clock appointment to meet three girls who wanted someone to share their flat.

Since sitting her exams and leaving school, Charlie’ d also given up the tenancy on the flat in Dartmouth and her job at the Royal Castle Hotel. Many people including her employers and neighbours had expressed the opinion that she was being too hasty, disposing of the flat and selling the furniture, and advised her to stay on for at least the summer, but she knew the time was right to leave.

Few people knew just how desperately lonely and sad she’d been in these past few months. Her neighbours saw her going off to school and to work in the evenings and because she appeared so calm and hard-working, and rarely mentioned her mother, they believed she had put the past firmly behind her. But in reality there were few nights when Charlie didn’t cry herself to sleep; just walking through the front door brought on searingly painful memories of Sylvia.

Beryl had been right in saying that before long Charlie would recall many incidents from her childhood. Some nights they came in rushes, tumbling over themselves as if asking to be examined. Sometimes they were funny ones, of her mum sitting astride the arm of the settee pretending to be Calamity Jane driving a stage-coach and singing ‘The Deadwood Stage’. Sometimes they were sweet ones, like the time Charlie had chickenpox and Mum painted spots on her face too, in sympathy.

Then one night the memory of that incident in London which Beryl had mentioned came back. Charlie remembered a rather grand hotel suite, with a central sitting room cluttered with bags and boxes from their shopping spree. They were getting ready to go out to dinner that evening. Jin was shaving in the bathroom, Sylvia was still in a negligée, and Charlie was wearing a red velvet dress and patent-leather shoes, wriggling as her mother brushed her hair for her, when the telephone rang.

Charlie was never given any reason why that telephone call ruined the evening. All she remembered clearly was that suddenly Sylvia was screaming at her father at the top of her voice, they didn’t go out to eat and she was sent to bed and her parents kept on shouting at one another.

Charlie’s bedroom was the opposite side of the sitting room to her parents’ one, but she heard her father go out later, leaving her mother still sobbing. She lay in bed for some time listening, then eventually crept in to see her. Sylvia was lying across the bed face down, she didn’t even seem aware her daughter was trying to cuddle and comfort her.

‘I’ve lost him now,’ was all she said, over and over again.

Sadly Charlie’s memory stopped there, she couldn’t even remember the next day, or the trip home. But Beryl was right; looking back, it was around that time when Sylvia’s black moods began, the rows became more frequent, and her father stayed away more often.

Now, with the benefit of more information and more adult eyes, Charlie could understand what a terrible shock it must have been for her mother to discover Jin was still seeing DeeDee. Although Charlie still thought her mother was spineless not to fight back, bring it into the open and insist her husband made a choice between her and DeeDee, perhaps Sylvia thought having only half a husband was better than gambling the lot and ending up with nothing.

It was this thought which finally made her pluck up the courage to go through the many boxes of letters, papers and photographs that had been sent over from ‘Windways’, but what she found merely confused her further.

There were dozens of loving letters from Jin to Sylvia, some dated as far back as 1956, right up until the autumn of 1969. Some came from as far away as China, others on hotel notepaper from Harrogate, Bath and Winchester. There were Valentines, Christmas and birthday cards too. It didn’t seem feasible to Charlie that any man would pen such emotional letters if he was living with a mistress.

There were dozens of old photographs too, apart from family ones, and some of these she felt were taken in one of his clubs. She wished she’d insisted Sylvia had gone through these boxes, maybe then she could have discovered who everyone was.

The only substantial thing she found was a small newspaper cutting about the opening night of Jin’s first club, the Lotus Club in Carlisle Street. It was dated 14 April 1952 and there was a picture of Jin with Sylvia opening a bottle of champagne. Sylvia was described as his fiancée, Jin said they hoped to be married very soon.

It was this cutting more than anything which determined Charlie to go to London. Common sense told her she wasn’t going to find her father if the police couldn’t. Yet if she could just find a few answers to the hundreds of questions about her parents’ earlier life together there, and this other woman, then maybe she’d find some peace of mind.