Nest of Sorrows (40 page)

‘Oh dear. We are tetchy, aren’t we?’

‘“We” are not tetchy at all. “We” are bleeding furious. The injunction still stands. You are not to contact me and you are to stay away from my home. The limit is, I think, a mile. So bugger off.’

‘Still the complete lady, I see.’

‘In response to the perfect gentleman.’

He stared at the road ahead. ‘Melanie needs you. She’s got to that age, some big exams coming up too.’

‘She seemed all right to me. I do see my daughter, Geoff. We meet on a Saturday . . .’

‘And she’s been here.’

‘Yes.’

He decided to go for a different tack. ‘Mother can’t cope any more. She’s seventy-five now and she has trouble with . . . well . . . with her bowels.’

Kate smiled grimly. ‘So? What else is new? I got your mother’s bowels served up for breakfast, lunch and supper over a period of fourteen years . . .’

‘That is hardly a savoury comment to make, Kate.’

‘Your mother is hardly a savoury woman. We had everything from the common cold to bloody gangrene and suppurating leg sores for every meal. But I’m not going to start about your mother; if I did, we’d be here all day and most of next week.’

‘You’ve always hated her. Why? Why, though? A poor harmless old woman . . .’

‘She’s about as harmless as one of those Australian spiders that bite you in the vitals when you’re on the loo. But no, I will not be drawn on that particular subject. Save to say that you could never see your mother for what she is. Until we can see our mothers clearly, we can have no separate identity. That’s why you’re such a blurred person.’ She paused and looked at his troubled face. ‘You’ve still no idea where you went wrong, have you? It’s hopeless. You use women, Geoff . . .’

‘There’s no need for all this. Come back, I’ll put Mother in a home.’

She shook her head. ‘Putting her away will solve nothing.’

‘But you just said . . .’

‘Go away. You are practically on my property, and if you don’t move, I shall implement the injunction immediately.’

‘Kate!’

She slammed the car door and began to walk away. He wound down his window. ‘Come home! There’s never been . . . anyone like you. I can’t . . .’

Kate stopped in the middle of the road, then sauntered back to the car. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t live without me,’ she said quietly.

‘It’s been a half-life. I didn’t know how much I cared until you’d gone.’

‘Stop it. This is hurting me. Haven’t you hurt me enough?’

Tears threatened in his large brown eyes. ‘I’m sorry. The other women, everything, I’m sorry. Please?’

‘No. I’m happy here, happier than I’ve ever been.’

Sadness quickly turned to temper. ‘I’ll break in!’ he shouted desperately.

She stepped back a pace or two. ‘And I’ll break your sodding neck, after the court has dealt with you. Now, go away.’

A few middle-aged Sunday strollers pretended not to notice this exchange, but Kate was wise to the Crosby people, she knew they were taking it all in. Yet she didn’t care.

‘Divorce, then?’ he yelled as she crossed the road.

‘Yes,’ she replied with volume and enthusiasm. ‘This place is full of drop-outs anyway, what would one more matter?’ This was said to annoy the passers-by, and Kate immediately felt ashamed of herself. Perhaps she did care after all? ‘Divorce me!’ she screamed. ‘Get it over with! But stay away from my house!’ She marched inside and slammed the door hard.

Steve was waiting with open arms, as ever. ‘Come on, now, don’t fret. What’s the point of getting yourself into a lather about it? He’s bound to find out in the end . . .’

‘Yes,’ she wailed. ‘And what will he do then? What will he do when he finds out about the abortion I never had, and about the child I hid from him? He has parental rights and I have denied him access. Think what a good solicitor would make out of that, Steve.’

‘They don’t take a child from its mother. Not without a damned good reason.’

She stepped back a fraction. ‘He always said I was unfit. I’ve had a psychiatrist. He’ll tell them I’ve had a shrink and that I’m not fit to be a mother, won’t he?’

Steve tutted, folded his arms and shook his head. ‘And your headmaster will tell them – whoever “they” are – that you run a special care unit efficiently, imaginatively and effectively.’

She wiped her tears on the sleeve of her coat. ‘Will I win? Will I?’

He tickled her under the chin. ‘Let the war start first, Kate.’ He stared at the closed door. Battle was about to commence at any time. Somewhere in his bones, Steve Collins felt that.

Kate had always thought of Crosby as a funny old place, and living here over a period of some eighteen months had scarcely altered her opinion. Although the settlement was steeped in history, having taken its name from the Norse and Scandanavian words for ‘village’ and ‘cross’, it somehow seemed, at first glance, to have little identity of its own.

Bootle, which was just down the road, was another matter altogether. Bootle had managed to become Liverpudlian, whereas Crosby housed a somewhat ‘cultured’ population that seemed either geriatric or itinerant. The former group had lived in the village forever, while the latter comprised those who were putting their children through the three public schools, or commuters who worked in the city.

There were, in fact, two Crosbys. There was Great Crosby where Kate lived – a vast sprawling mass of largely subsiding houses – and there was Little Crosby. To live in Little Crosby, one almost needed a letter from the Pope, for the community was solidly Roman Catholic, as was its parish church. Kate loved Little Crosby with its cluster of stone cottages, and she spent many hours reading about its history of religious purges and secret chapels.

But the more she got to know about the larger Crosby, the more fascinated she became. In Moor Lane there stood a working mill where locals bought wholemeal flour to bake their bread. Coronation Park housed an ice-age boulder, which item had been carried down by glacier from the Lake District, while the site of St Michael’s Well, which stood on what used to be the village green, was marked by a suitably ancient wooden cross. There were some strange place names too. She never discovered the origin of Sniggery Wood, a place owned by the public since the jubilee of George V and Queen Mary, but she did get to the root of Endbutt Lane’s beginnings; Endbutt was a corruption of endboat, as this avenue had once held the terminus for Liverpool-bound canal boats. So while Crosby was, in its own way, an interesting place, it was a place of another people’s past, and it was Bolton that Kate continued to miss.

In the here and now, Crosby village was simply a suburb of the city, a collection of shops, supermarkets and houses. It was not a market town, and Kate, coming from the largest market town in England, longed for the personality provided by a three-times weekly influx of business. The people of Crosby were kind on the whole, but they seemed aloof and terribly self-contained in comparison to the Bolton folk. As Kate’s doctor told her, ‘Here, you could die and no-one would notice until milk bottles stretched to the gate. In Bootle, where I used to work, sickness brought help automatically. If you want neighbours, move to Bootle.’ Kate didn’t feel like moving to Bootle. This was because of her long-term plan for Michael. If she could continue successful as a cartoonist, if the money carried on rolling in, then the lad could go to Merchant Taylors’. That he was going to be bright enough she did not doubt, while her faith – or lack of that commodity – in the state system of education remained unaltered.

In the evenings, after Michael had gone to bed, and after she had finished commissioned cartoon work, Kate worked on her magnum opus which, like Topsy, grew and grew. It was a reading scheme, a scheme without words. Because she understood children’s love for comics, Kate was trying to invent an educational programme in strip form. Infants did not need the printed word; she was giving them the opportunity to write, with their teachers’ help, their own first reading book. The cartoons were funny, simple at first, then gradually becoming more detailed in order to extend a child’s spoken vocabulary. She had confidence in this system, but she needed a publisher to share her views, and the time was coming when she would show what she called ‘The Play Away Scheme’ to some educational boffin who would, no doubt, tear the concept to pieces. But before leaving teaching, she wanted to make her mark.

On the Sunday after Geoff’s ‘visit’, she was working on the sixth and final book in the set. Steve was in the kitchen with Michael when the knock at the front door came, and he immediately scurried through to Kate’s living room with the child in his arms. ‘Well?’ he whispered.

Kate flung down her pencil. ‘It can’t be,’ she said quietly. ‘The injunction . . .’

‘It might be. What the hell do I do?’ His face was white with tension; the child’s cheeks were white with flour. ‘Shall I take him out? This can’t go on, Kate. We can’t spend the rest of our lives on the run. And what if Melanie lets it out? What if . . . ?’

‘Take him out.’ The doorbell rang shrilly. ‘When I open the front door, you nip out of the back.’

With a huge sigh of frustration, Steve grabbed Michael’s anorak from a chair and went back into the kitchen.

Kate composed herself, pushed her hair from her work-damped forehead, then walked into the hall. ‘Now!’ she stage-whispered. Both doors opened simultaneously, Kate gasping aloud when she found Chris standing in the porch. The back door closed softly. ‘Chris! Whatever . . . ? I mean, come in . . .’ She pulled Christine into the hallway so that Steve would not be seen sneaking through the side garden with the child.

As soon as she was in the house, Chris burst into tears. ‘I tried to stop it, Kate. I took my key back and gave him his, but the weekends were so lonely. It was all right in the week when I had Robert and the others, but when Santosh took the baby back every Friday . . . Oh, what have I done?’

Kate studied the distressed woman. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Chris? Come in, come right into the sitting room . . .’ She watched through the window as Steve drove off with Michael fastened into the rear seat. They were in the front room now and Kate gestured towards the sofa, offering Chris a seat.

‘You mightn’t want me to stay.’ There was a hysterical edge to the voice. ‘Not after what I’ve done.’

‘What have you done? I can’t imagine you doing anything really bad.’

‘I’ve come here for a start, haven’t I? Maureen Carter told me I wasn’t to come. Mind, she didn’t know I had your address.’

Kate sat in a fireside chair, crossed her legs and waited patiently.

‘He made me help to find you. Last year, it was.’

‘Geoff?’ Kate felt the hairs on her neck rising as her flesh crawled with this new knowledge. All along, he had been aware . . .

‘I did everything he told me. Everything. I tried so hard, especially after I got Robert . . .’

‘That’s your little foster-boy, isn’t it? Maureen told me . . .’

Christine’s face lit up momentarily. ‘He’s beautiful. I got babysitters and went to classes for Robert. He’s clever, you see. So now I’ve got my English and maths O’levels and I’m doing history next. I want to be good enough. Good enough for him and for Santosh. Santosh is a proper accountant again and I’m . . . I’m going to marry him. We have to get married in the registry because Santosh is not a Christian. I have no-one to confess to . . .’

‘Congratulations!’ Kate leapt up and shook her friend’s hand. ‘On both fronts. I’m glad you’ve taken the classes and I’m delighted about Santosh. Do you love him?’

Chris moaned and turned her head away. ‘Yes. But I want you to forgive me.’

‘What for?’

Chris spread out her hands in an imploring gesture. ‘For . . . for sleeping with your husband! I had to tell you. There’s no-one else to tell.’

‘Oh.’ Kate hurriedly squashed a bubble of laughter, arranging her features into what she hoped was a semblance of sympathy. After all, sleeping with Geoff had probably been a mortal sin in Chris’s book, and should therefore be treated accordingly. But it was hard not to laugh, because she had never seen herself as a mother-confessor.

‘We had this row after we found you. I knew he wanted you back, I knew he wouldn’t ever marry me. All I want is to be married, Kate. Married to a man I can love. At first, when Derek died, I thought I’d never want another husband. But I do, I do! Santosh is so kind and caring, I could never tell him about me and Geoff. Geoff was awfully upset, Kate. I told him he was too old for me and he went away and . . .’

‘And sulked.’

‘Yes. But we still got together again.’

Kate wiped a hand across her brow. ‘We all have talents. Geoff’s is for sulking. Go on. Talk to me, I’m not angry.’

Chris sniffed loudly. ‘Then I got Robert. It was fine at first, I didn’t notice the weekends. But then I got lonely again and . . . and . . .’

‘You ran next door for comfort.’

‘Yes.’ The woman on the sofa gulped back the choking tears. ‘I need the loving, Kate. I need . . . well . . . to be touched. Geoff wasn’t as caring or as gentle as Derek, but . . .’

‘He was better than nothing? Look, forget him.’

Chris shivered. ‘I begged him to marry me. Humiliated myself, I did. I thought if you weren’t coming home, then he ought to marry me.’

Kate snorted with anger. ‘He’s not good enough for you, love.’

Chris’s face wore a puzzled look as she mopped her cheeks with a scrap of handkerchief. ‘Eh? He’s a managing director!’

‘He’s a fool. A pompous, overbearing and spoiled little brat. Chris, he has to have his shirts folded just so, a crease in a hanky can cause world war in that house. Put one foot out of place at his works’ functions and he’ll have you thrown in jail. A drop of milk on a tablecloth drives him out of his mind for the day. Please, Chris, stick to Santosh. He’s a good man and . . .’

‘BUT I’VE BEEN SLEEPING WITH GEOFF!’

‘So what? Do you want all of Crosby to know? And will you give up your chance of happiness with Santosh and Robert just because of a small adventure?’ Kate rose to her feet and stamped away to the fireplace where she stood arms akimbo, staring at the wreckage before her. ‘Look what he’s reduced you to! When did you last have a good square meal? Have some pride, girl.’