Risking It All (7 page)

‘I wasn’t sure of that!’ She was growing animated and it wasn’t doing her any good. Her breathing had become laboured. ‘You know what happens when social services get a foot through your door! They’d have taken Miranda into care, fostered her out with someone I knew nothing about, and there’d have been no guarantee the Wildes would’ve been allowed to adopt her. This way, no one knew. I had to make a decision on the spot. I hadn’t got time to think it over. Once the Wildes had told anyone at all that their baby had died, it would be too late. It was then or never.’

‘But didn’t anyone ask you where your baby, my sister, was?’

‘I was on my own, who cared about me?’ She rolled her head from side to side on the pillow. Then, with an air almost of triumph, added, ‘I moved, several times, to different areas. You know how it is. I wasn’t a council tenant. I rented private rooms. No one cares, Fran.’

Yes, I knew how it was. London is full of single women on the move. A fair number of them have a baby or even a couple of little kids. If the support services were infallible, there’d be fewer tragedies, fewer horrendous court cases, fewer battered or dead babies. Instead, the courts, the social services, the charities and all the others struggling to deal with those who fall through gaps in the system are stretched to breaking point, groaning under the load.

So little children die despite being on an ‘at risk’ register. Elderly people die cold and hungry for all the winter heating payments and the day centres. Mentally ill patients released into ‘care in the community’ get no care at all, stop taking their medication and descend into spirals of violence directed against themselves or others. Runaway kids sleep on street corners and are picked up for prostitution. I’d seen it myself. In my early days on my own, I’d been approached by kindly men or women offering me a ‘job and a roof, good money’. I’d always ducked out and run for it. Such people don’t like being refused.

My mother had been one more woman with a baby. Local council departments are delighted to cross someone off their list if they get a phone call saying that person is moving elsewhere to be someone else’s problem. Delighted to have someone who doesn’t keep asking for things. Too busy struggling to cope with those demanding help to have time to worry about those who don’t.

If you want to lose yourself, London must be one of the easiest cities to do it in.

My mother with her baby had simply faded from view. No one knew. No one had asked. No one.

‘Included in the people who don’t know,’ I said aloud, ‘is Miranda – or Nicola, as she is now. What if she finds out?’

‘How could she? And they can hardly ever tell her. There’s a proper birth certificate for Nicola Wilde. There’s no reason why she should ever find out.’ My mother struck her thin hand on the bed.

Of course; a birth certificate. All you need in life. Heck, this is a country where you can go to earth and turn up as someone else. We have a culture which makes it easy. No one’s required to carry identification, except to enter specific buildings. It’s not illegal to use an invented name unless you use it in a criminal deception. (There’d be an awful lot of authors and actors in gaol if it was.) You want to be someone else? You find out the name of someone deceased, who’d be about your age if alive, in a given locality, and you write off for a birth certificate. With a birth certificate, you can be someone else. My sister had become someone else. The Wildes, obviously in deep shock and, psychologically speaking, in denial at the loss of their baby, had made it so. If later they’d realised the wrongness of what they’d done, it was by then too late.

‘Take it easy,’ I soothed. I poured my mother a glass of water. She sipped at it while I tried to work out what was coming next. I had a fair idea.

‘You’re going to ask me to find her, find Nicola, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘I can give you the Wildes’ last address.’ She looked at me pleadingly. ‘Don’t refuse, Fran. I wrote it out ready, just in case you came and I – I wasn’t able to give it to you.’ She was scrabbling beneath the pillow and pulled out a crumpled envelope which she shoved into my hand.

My fingers closed on it automatically. It was warm with her body warmth. A warmth soon to be extinguished. But this wasn’t the time to let emotion stop me saying the obvious. ‘Look,’ I argued, ‘you said there was no need for Nicola Wilde ever to find out she’s really Miranda Varady. But if – and it’s pretty unlikely – I were to find her, well, that would let the cat out of the bag, wouldn’t it? Me jumping up saying, “Hi! I’m your sister, Fran !”’

‘But I don’t want you to do that!’ She clutched at my hand and the envelope got crumpled up even more. ‘All I want is for you to find out where she is and try to get a look at her. Hang round and wait till she comes home from school, something like that. Then come and tell me what she looks like. You see, I don’t know, or I didn’t until today, know what either of you looked like now. I knew that the image I’ve carried in my head’s been out of date. You were a little girl. Miranda just a tiny baby. The only thing that’s seemed important to me these last weeks has been knowing what you both looked like now. That’s why I asked Rennie Duke to find you, that and to try and make some sort of peace with you. Now here you are, I’ve seen you. As to making peace, I hope we can do that. I’m grateful to you for coming. I can understand how hard it’s been for you to decide to do it. Mir—Nicola is another sort of problem. I can’t ask her to come here. I can’t see her myself. I want you to be my eyes, Fran. Also, I want the Wildes to know that I’m not going to be around much longer, so if they have still been worrying that I might change my mind one day and claim Miranda back, well, I’m not going to, am I? All I need is for you to make my farewells for me. There’s no need to go into details.’

‘But if I start asking questions about these people’s whereabouts, someone’s bound to get suspicious. I mean, what excuse can I give?’ Surely she could see how awkward it would all be.

‘When you find the Wildes,’ she repeated obstinately, ignoring my objection, ‘just tell them I haven’t got long. I don’t want to go without telling them how grateful I am for all they did for me. Tell them, Eva wanted to send her love. That’s all. Miranda needn’t be brought into it. They’ll understand.’

No, they wouldn’t. They’d be petrified. Even if I didn’t mention Miranda – Nicola – they’d guess what all this was about. A secret they’d been burying for nearly thirteen years and which they’d believed was known only to three people, themselves and my mother, was known to a fourth – me. I hated it. I hated every part of it. I hated the deception being forced on me and long practised on someone who was my half-sister. I hated the deception my mother and the Wildes had been practising on themselves for the past thirteen years. Of course, it had seemed easy at the time. My mother tells the neighbour who’s been caring for Miranda that the baby’s gone into care. Miles away, a young couple with a baby move into a house somewhere, perhaps on a new housing estate. No one questions them. They can produce the necessary birth certificate which will get the child into school, get her a passport, get her any legal document she needs. Relatives living a long distance away, who knew the Wildes’ baby was poorly and in intensive care, are told that the baby is now well enough to go home. Do they question that? Of course not. They’d be overjoyed.

But they were all wrong about no one ever finding out. It was there in the maternity hospital records, if anyone cared to check. Mrs Flora Wilde gave birth to a baby which died a couple of months later without ever leaving the hospital. But then, who was going to check? I was. I was checking on them. This was the part I hated most of all.

I replied as gently as I could because it was obvious how much she was counting on me and the extent to which she had persuaded herself it would be as simple as she’d explained it. ‘Suppose I don’t find her?’

‘But you will,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve got a sort of sixth sense about it, Fran.’

Great. A thought struck me. ‘Why didn’t you ask Clarence – Rennie Duke to find her? He found me.’

She looked a little embarrassed, avoiding my eye. ‘It’s not the sort of information I’d put in Rennie’s hands. Not even a bit of it, not even if I left out the child and just told him I wanted to contact the Wildes. He’s – too thorough. Can’t we just leave it at that? He’s been a good friend to me, he found you. But that was a different matter. It didn’t involve other people. Rennie, well, he might be tempted.’

I understood well enough. I remembered him telling me of his childhood playground blackmail schemes. Because that was what I was prepared to believe they’d eventually become. Originally he’d only wanted to bargain with bullies to be left alone. I accepted that. But I’d seen his face, heard his voice, when he told me about it. A puny little kid, the butt of practical jokes and rough usage, had suddenly found a road to power and he’d learned how to use it. How many other kids had he checked up on, found out some little secret about, and then demanded payment in kind for his silence? No, my mother couldn’t tell him about Miranda-Nicola. She couldn’t even give him a hint which might put him on the trail. To Rennie it would have suggested money in the bank.

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘You mustn’t tell anyone else, Fran!’ She sounded desperate. ‘I told you because you’re my daughter. Miranda is your sister. Blood protects blood, Fran. I haven’t even told Sister Helen. Swear you won’t tell anyone.’

‘There’s Ganesh,’ I said. ‘I might need his help.’

‘No, no one!’

She had pushed herself off her pillows and looked so distressed I had to take five minutes calming her. There was still one question I had to ask, even if it upset her again.

‘When all this happened, were you working for or did you know Clarence Duke? Because if so, he must—’

She was shaking her head vigorously. ‘No – I met Rennie Duke later. He knows nothing of my having a daughter – other than you. He thinks you’re my only child.’

I bit my lip but let it go. She’d worked for Duke. She knew him better than I did. On the other hand, two things she’d told me about him made me anxious. One was that she didn’t entirely trust him, any more than I would. The other was that he was a good private detective. Add to that the fact that I knew he liked ferreting out people’s secrets. I knew I couldn’t discount Rennie, as she called him, much as she was assuring me I could.

There was a discreet tap at the door. Sister Helen put her head through the gap. ‘Everything fine?’ I realised she was giving me a hint that my visit had lasted long enough.

‘I’m just going,’ I said. I pushed the envelope into my pocket.

‘Eva takes a nap around now, don’t you, dear?’ she said to my mother.

My mother smiled at her and then turned her head on her pillow to look at me. She did look exhausted. ‘Don’t forget, Fran.’

‘I won’t,’ I said, thereby committing myself. I added, ‘I never hated you.’ It was true. I could hate what she’d done, but not her. I’d obliterated her memory and thought of her as dead, but that wasn’t because of hatred. It’s betrayed love which has to be forced into some secret place and locked up because it never loses the power to hurt. ‘I’ll come again,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to come. We didn’t get much time to talk about you. Come back and tell me all about yourself.’

I thought Sister Helen had a curious look in her eyes as I passed her on my way out. It wouldn’t do to underestimate her, either.

Chapter Four

Gan had been waiting for me outside the hospice, sitting in the car and studying
MicroMart
magazine. As I got in, he folded it and asked simply, ‘Everything OK?’

I said, ‘Yes.’ That was it. We drove back to London in near total silence. However, as we neared the end of our trip I told him how grateful I was for all his support that day.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said, avoiding a motorcycle messenger.

‘You drove me there and back. You were there. That’s enough.’

‘Any time,’ he said.

We exchanged glances. Gan smiled and returned his attention to the traffic. Despite what I’d said to my mother about my relationship with Ganesh, it’d be plain hypocritical of me to claim we never, either of us, had thoughts of taking it further. Of course we did. But the obstacle wasn’t just his family’s entirely understandable objections to a liaison of any sort with me. After all, what family in its right mind would welcome me as a new member? I think what really stopped us, stopped me certainly, was fear of tampering with a relationship which worked, only to find we’d got ourselves into a relationship which wasn’t working. That sort of situation isn’t reversible. You can’t go back to being the way you were before. So we leave things as they are. It’s safer.

Mind you, I sometimes get the impression Gan is waiting for me to sober up, settle down and turn into a model citizen. Then he and I can open up that dry-cleaning business he’s always on about. I tell him it’s the last line of business I’d ever go into and I can’t think why he wants to. Just the thought of standing over the steam press all day is enough to turn me off completely. In fact, I don’t fancy any sort of shop. Look at Hari. After working all day, he spends most of his evening balancing the books and messing round with orders and VAT returns. To me he’s like a mouse on a wheel, running round and round. No wonder he worries.