Risking It All (6 page)

I heard my voice, distant, floating out on the air. It said, ‘Hello. I’m Fran.’

She said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Fran.’

Everyone was glad I was here, Clarence, Sister Helen, my mother. I had never felt so lost in my life.

Then Sister Helen closed the door and left us, me, Gan and the woman in the bed, together.

Ganesh was shuffling about behind me. I introduced him hastily. That bit, at least, was easy.

He said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Varady. I just came to keep Fran company.’

‘It’s nice to meet you,’ she said, and held out a thin white hand. Ganesh walked over to the bed and took it. He held her hand for a moment then said gently, ‘I’ll wait outside.’ He glanced at me. ‘I’ll be around, Fran.’ And he was gone.

I edged over to the bed and sat down in a wicker chair, not because I was relaxed, but because my legs were wobbly. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t want to stare. She seemed quite calm and was studying me with large pale-blue eyes.

My memory of her was of a small, attractive woman with thick dark-blonde hair. She’d hardly any hair at all now, just wisps combed neatly back. In contrast to her thin hands, her face was round, cheeks full, and the skin beneath her eyes was puffed. I wouldn’t have known her. Only her voice struck a chord in my memory. Not exactly recognition, but something familiar which hit me mid-chest and made me feel almost physically sick. I hoped I wasn’t shaking. I felt as though I was. Every nerve in my body quivered.

‘Your friend is nice,’ she said. She was handling this much better than I was. It seemed unfair. She was ill. I was fit.

‘Yes, he is,’ I muttered, adding, ‘but he’s only a friend, nothing heavier, in case you were wondering. It works better that way.’ I knew I sounded awkward. People don’t understand about me and Ganesh and it’s not easy to explain.

But she smiled and nodded before disconcerting me by saying, ‘You’re as I thought you might be, Fran. You’re pretty.’

I was taken aback. ‘In this outfit?’ I indicated my clothes.

‘They don’t matter,’ she said. She looked away, her eyes seeming to focus on nothing in the room, perhaps on something in her imagination. ‘I used to like clothes,’ she said. ‘Always sewing and altering, do you remember? What a silly thing to fuss about.’

I’d forgotten, but in a flash of memory I saw her now, seated at a treadle sewing machine which had belonged to Grandma. It was a wonderful contraption, that sewing machine. When not in use, it looked like a table with a fretwork metal footplate fixed between its side supports. When needed, the machine itself was lifted out of a recess within the table and sat on top. That was the image I saw, Mum bent over the wheel, which hummed round, powered by her foot on the plate, the length of material moving steadily under the hammering of the needle.

When I was small, I liked to play with that treadle machine when it wasn’t in use. I rocked its footplate back and forth with a satisfying clank and gave my toys rides on it. I pulled open the little wooden drawers in the table, stuffed with coloured silk thread, buttons and lengths of something called bias binding which stretched if you pulled it. (Though that was strictly forbidden, as it rendered it useless.)

Grandma had bought that machine in a junk shop soon after her arrival in England in the fifties. She’d used it to set up a little dressmaking business. At one time, she’d got quite a reputation for wedding dresses. She still got the odd request for a wedding dress when I was a kid. I have memories of yards of white satin pinned on a headless, armless canvas torso on a single polished wooden leg. I acted out little plays in which I had the title role and that dressmaker’s dummy was my leading man. There were other materials connected with weddings. Silk which rustled, shot taffeta which changed its colour as you moved it. That was generally for the bridesmaids’ dresses. My favourite was mauve. I longed to be a bridesmaid so I could swank in shot taffeta, but no one ever asked me. Needless to say, no one asked me to marry them, either, so I didn’t get to reign over all in ballooning skirts over stiffened gauze petticoats. I imagined Grandma’s brides floating down the aisle looking like the Good Witch in
The Wizard of Oz,
the one who travels by bubble and floats in to help out Judy Garland.

I’m still unlikely to walk down the aisle. But if I did, it wouldn’t be in a white dress, and not only because now I’m older, I’m less keen on ballooning skirts and tinselly glitter. I wouldn’t wear a wedding gown of any design for the simple reason that Grandma isn’t here now to make it for me. I wouldn’t want one made by anyone else.

One thing was for sure. I could never have learned to sew for myself. Grandma tried to teach me to use the treadle, but every time I started rocking the footplate, the whole tabletop machinery ran backwards, sending the material towards instead of away from me. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was trying to tell me something about my future.

Now, with all these memories flooding back for the first time in years, I wanted to cry. I felt that desperate. But I couldn’t cry. I needed to say something but could only think to ask her how she was feeling. Even that seemed an impertinence. She was dying.

‘Not too bad today,’ she said, and added, ‘it must have been a shock when Rennie Duke found you and told you about me.’

‘Yes, it was a bit.’ The image of Clarence Duke came to me and I asked, ‘How did you choose him? Did he advertise?’

‘Oh no, that is, he does advertise sometimes. But I know him of old. I worked for him for a while. That’s why I chose him, I knew he was good.’ She smiled. ‘And he wouldn’t charge for his services, for old times’ sake.’

‘That’s nice of him,’ I said lamely. It seemed un-Clarence-like, the image of loyal friend not squaring with the seedy little character I’d met.

‘I expect you didn’t like him much.’ She had a way of going to the heart of things. Perhaps approaching death gave you insight. ‘Don’t be put off by Rennie. He isn’t all bad. As a PI he’s very good.’ She shifted a little in the bed and I wondered if she was, despite appearances, in pain.

‘I hoped you’d come,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see you again – and I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘I don’t want explanations,’ I said quickly. ‘They’re not necessary.’

‘Oh, explanations?’ Her large blue eyes looked amused. ‘There aren’t any I could give you, not for why I went. Nothing you’d understand. I could tell you I’m sorry, and it’d be true. But it wouldn’t help, would it? Even if you believed me, and just now, you probably don’t. I hope you will one day. It was a terrible thing I did to you in walking out when you were so young. But sometimes you have to make hard choices in life, and whatever you choose, you have to live with it afterwards.’ She waved a hand to stop any reply I might want to make.

As it was, I couldn’t have replied at once, which was as well. I’d probably have blurted out that yes, we’d all had to live with her decision. But then I felt ashamed because what she was saying, that she would be wasting her time apologising, was what I’d said to Ganesh. Only I’d said it in anger, and she said it in a simple way which somehow made things seem logical. But then she said something which put them out of sync again.

‘I wanted to see you, Fran. It’s nice to know you don’t hate me so much you wouldn’t come. There’s something very important I need to tell you. Something that happened after I left Stephen. I need your help, Fran.’

‘Is it something I really need to know?’ I asked, my voice sticking in my throat. I felt a spurt of resentment. Was this why I was here? Why hadn’t she asked, how are you, Fran? What are you doing? Where are you living? As to the last, it was better she didn’t learn I was dossing in Hari’s garage. But she could’ve asked.

‘Yes, you should know it, and you’re the only person I can tell about it. When I have, you’ll see why. Whether you’ll understand is another matter.’

She folded her thin hands on the coverlet. She wore no rings. I wondered if she’d left her wedding ring behind when she’d walked out, all those years ago. Her nails were clipped short as tidily as Sister Helen’s were.

‘I didn’t leave your father for another man,’ she said. ‘In case you all thought I did. But after a while, I did meet someone else. We weren’t together very long, only a few months. Then he left.’

So she, too, had been dumped. It was hard not to feel a glimmer of satisfaction. I’m not proud of all the feelings I had then, just telling you what they were.

‘There was a further complication,’ she was saying. ‘I was pregnant.’

‘This man’s child?’ I said. ‘I mean, you weren’t, when you left home?’

‘No, not Stephen’s child.’ She paused, picking at the top sheet with her fingers. ‘I didn’t try to contact the father of the baby. I knew he wouldn’t want to know anything about it, and besides, I’d no wish to have him back in my life. I had the baby in St Margaret’s maternity hospital, a little girl. I called her Miranda.’

Just like that. This time yesterday I’d had no family. Now I was acquiring relatives faster than I could take it in.

I asked hoarsely, ‘Where is she? Where’s – my sister? How old is she?’

‘She’s twelve now, just coming to her thirteenth birthday,’ my mother said. ‘As to where she is, I don’t know. Let me tell it in order, Fran, or it will get confusing. In the same ward, at the same time I was there, was a young woman called Flora Wilde. She was a nice young girl with a nice husband who visited and brought flowers, sat by the bed and held her hand. I envied them so much because I had no one to visit me. They’d moved down to London only recently from the North. She’d had a little girl too, the same day Miranda was born. But Flora and Jerry Wilde weren’t blessed with a healthy baby as I was. Their little girl was very frail. Flora had been told she’d be unlikely to have another. It was a miracle she’d had that one. She had a condition which resulted in spontaneous miscarriage and had lost two or three babies in the early weeks. She’d spent most of her pregnancy lying in bed, frightened to move. When I took Miranda home, she and Jerry had to leave their little mite in the hospital. I thought about them a lot.’

My mother’s formerly colourless face had become flushed. I realised all this was stressful for her. I asked her if she wanted anything, should I call Sister Helen?

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve got to tell you it all, now, today. Tomorrow I might have a bad day and not be able . . . I know this must all sound sudden and rushed, but I haven’t got time to do it any other way.’

‘It’s all right,’ I soothed.

She relaxed and picked up her story in a dogged, rehearsed way. She’d been practising this in her head, ready for when I came.

‘I found it very hard to manage with the new baby. I only had part-time work and had to pay a neighbour to mind Miranda. It left me almost nothing. One day, I was walking home from work past the hospital. I walked everywhere. I couldn’t afford the bus. There, just coming out of the hospital gates, were Flora and Jerry Wilde. They were both in a terrible state, and when they saw me, Flora set up a great howl. Jerry came hurrying over. He told me their baby had died. They had been warned of the possibility, but for a while she’d done so well that they’d allowed themselves to hope, even to be optimistic. Then, suddenly, everything had fallen apart. I felt desperately sorry for them. It seemed all wrong. Here was I with a healthy baby I couldn’t afford to care for properly, and there they were, comfortably off, longing for a child, Flora unable to have another . . .’

My mother stopped.

My heart in my boots, I said dully, ‘I can guess what you’re going to tell me.’

I supposed she’d had no choice but to give up the baby for adoption.

‘It seemed right at the time,’ she said defensively. ‘It seemed meant. They had registered the birth of their little girl, refusing to believe she’d never come home, so there was a proper birth certificate for a Nicola Wilde. They had no family or close friends in London and they’d had no time to notify anyone further away of the tragedy. No one knew their child had died, and if the poor little soul was cremated quietly in a private ceremony, there was no reason anyone should – not if they brought home an infant of the right age and sex. I explained my circumstances to them and asked if they would like to take Miranda. I knew she’d have the best possible home and loving parents and no one need ever know. She’d just take on the identity of the dead child. Instead of Miranda Varady, she became Nicola Wilde.’

Now just wait a minute! This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. A private, totally unofficial arrangement? A baby just handed over to people who, after all, were as good as strangers? People who’d take away her identity and give her a false one? This was what she’d done? No wonder she couldn’t tell anyone, only me.

‘It was crazy,’ I exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you go through the proper channels? They could’ve adopted her legally.’