Risking It All (8 page)

I felt badly about not being able to tell Ganesh everything my mother had told me, and especially what she’d asked me to do. But perhaps it was better Gan didn’t know, certainly not while he was driving the car. He’d hit the roof and rightly warn me in no uncertain terms that I was getting into something I’d probably regret.

I already regretted it, but it didn’t stop me, the next morning, getting ready to tackle my task. Delay wouldn’t help. Get on with it and get it over, that was best. Moreover, the quicker I was about it, the less likely it was Gan would find out. I can only fool him for so long.

Before leaving, I read through for the umpteenth time the letter my mother had pressed into my hand the previous day. It was short and selective, written in a kind of code for my eyes only. She had probably worried that circumstances might result in someone else opening it. I wondered if the person she was worried about was Sister Helen. Well, if she had jibbed at putting down in writing every detail of the story she’d told me, it was certainly wise of her. It was pretty explosive stuff, powerful enough to blow away at least three people’s private lives.

I scanned the letter. She’d simply asked me to check the given address, which was in Wimbledon, and discover if ‘old friends’ Jerry and Flora Wilde still lived there, or where they’d gone, and to find out how they and ‘their family’ were.

‘Tell them, Eva sends her love and not to worry,’ were her closing words.

There was nothing there which anyone else reading it should suspect referred to anything other than my mother’s terminal illness. Nevertheless, once I’d memorised the address, I burned the note. I had this feeling at the back of my mind all the time that I had to cover my tracks. I couldn’t rid myself of the thought of Clarence Duke, or Rennie, as my mother called him. He was out there somewhere, and the more I thought about his attitude when I’d rung on Sunday morning, the more his casualness seemed suspect. My caution was already in vain, but I didn’t know that then.
Beware
Clarence!
I told myself.

Furtiveness was, in fact, the order of the day. I dropped Bonnie off in the storeroom and peered through the door into the shop. When I was satisfied both Hari and Ganesh were busy serving customers, I slipped into the shop, grabbed an A – Z from the shelf and scurried back into the storeroom with it. I found the street I wanted, promised Bonnie I wouldn’t be long and fed her a bar of some chocolate-flavoured sweet. (I know chocolate is bad for dogs but I’ve not heard the substitute stuff is.) Then I sauntered nonchalantly back into the shop.

Gan was still serving a customer. I slipped theA – Z back into place and made for the door. As I passed the till, I reached across to put some coins on the counter, muttering, ‘Choccy bar!’ and then bolted out before anyone could ask me any questions. I could feel Gan’s eyes tracking me mistrustfully. He’d have questions when I got back, all right.

Travelling a long distance by London Underground gives you plenty of time for thought, especially if any part of your journey is on the elderly rolling stock of the Northern Line. My thoughts made me feel depressed and apprehensive. I gazed resentfully at the youngster seated opposite me. A headset clamped his yarmulke to his curly hair and he was lost in the world transmitted to him by his transistor radio. He was lucky. The rest of us stared morosely at our surroundings, the tatty seats, the sweet papers and bits of free newspaper littering the floor. We rattled along at a snail’s pace to Embankment, where I transferred myself to the District Line for a long, slow journey to Wimbledon. By the time I got there, I was pretty well all Tubed out. My mood hadn’t been helped by having opposite me from South Kensington to East Putney a young woman with a baby in a buggy. He was a nice little kid with curly hair and blue dungarees. Every now and then the mother leaned forward to speak to him and he listened carefully. Adult and tiny child had already built a real relationship. Anyone coming along to bust it up in any way, at any time, would be taking a grave responsibility on his shoulders. I wasn’t seeking to bust up the Wildes’ bond with the girl who thought she was their natural daughter. I only wanted to satisfy a dying woman. But fools rush in and all the rest of it. I suspected I was being spectacularly foolish and was glad I didn’t have Ganesh there to tell me so.

Much of the latter part of my journey had been overground. From West Brompton onwards there were so many trees and grass and stuff I might’ve been forgiven for imagining I was travelling out into the country. As we finally rumbled into Wimbledon, I glimpsed prosperous-looking Edwardian villas just before they were blotted out by the bulk of a DIY warehouse. Would the house I was going to be like that?

Wimbledon’s shopping centre was a busy place but with none of the controlled lunacy of Camden High Street, with its sellers of exotica of all kinds. The shops here in SE19 were nice, steady high-street names selling nice things to people with taste. Nothing here like the pair of fluorescent rainbow-hued platform-soled sandals I’d spotted in Camden and secretly hankered after. None of the huge model boots, tanks, skulls, you name it, attached to the upper frontage of the shops. No one talking to himself. No one like me, unless you counted a solitary
Big Issue
seller who was bucking the trend but getting nowhere. Here people didn’t just walk past him, they actually took time to refuse. I parted with a pound coin to support a spiritual colleague. He looked surprised.

Well, now I’d seen the place and it was time to work out what I was going to do next. I took refuge in the Prince of Wales pub for a coffee and a place where I could sit anonymously to plan my strategy. I had realised that if I was going to knock on doors I had to look reasonably respectable myself. Now that I’d seen the area, I was glad I’d taken the trouble. I wore clean jeans and a navy blazer I’d discovered rummaging through a local church jumble sale. My sweater looked new, because it was – though it had been bought at one of those shops which sell ‘imperfect’ goods with the labels cut out. I could ring any doorbell reasonably sure I didn’t look as if I was casing the place prior to break-in.

The pub, to my great relief, presented a familiar aspect, an old London tavern with maroon anaglypta on the ceiling, apricot and maroon anaglypta walls, lots of dark wood and flickering slot machines. Some of the furniture looked as if it had been there since the place was built. It held a sprinkling of men downing elevenses pints and talking business, and a couple of elderly women having an early meal. Watching them made me hungry. I’d intended only to have a coffee but I ordered a bowl of pasta and, while I waited, tried to get my ideas straight.

When I emerged three-quarters of an hour later my ideas were no clearer and I’d had to force myself out on to the street. The temptation to hide in the warm pub for a couple of hours and then go home had been great, but I’d resisted it. I felt quite noble – and doomed.

The house proved to be a thirties-built semi, with bow windows and a bit of mock-Tudor woodwork, in a depressingly respectable street. People here painted their front doors, polished their windows and kept their cars washed. I could see why the DIY store had set up here. Any house that hadn’t already been revamped was in the process. This was commuterland, and there was an air of understated prosperity about it. I could see why my mother had thought Nicola (as I had to call her) would be better off with the upwardly mobile Wildes than in a squalid bedsit with her natural mother, farmed out half the time to a neighbour who probably hadn’t much cared.

Because most of the houses were older few had garages. Some residents had solved the problem by sacrificing their front gardens to hard-standing for a car. On such an asphalted area before the house I was about to call at stood a nippy little Fiat. I took that as a sign someone was home.

For a minute or two after ringing the bell I thought I might be wrong. Then, from some distant recess of the house, came the sound of an outraged infant yell. Feet clattered towards the front door. It was jerked open by a thin young woman in a short kilt, sweater, black tights and penny loafers. Her long fair hair hung dead straight in two expensively cut wings. She had a pointed nose, thin lips and frosty eyes.

‘Yes?’ she asked curtly.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. (There was another outraged yell behind us even as I spoke.) ‘I’m looking for Mrs Flora Wilde.’

I’d considered whether to ask after ‘Mr and Mrs’ or just one of them. I’d decided it would be less suspicious if I took the latter option.

‘Wrong house!’ she said impatiently and began to close the door. The yelling started up more insistently than ever. She paused in closing the door to turn and shout, ‘He wants his Ribena, Marie-Cecile!’

The yelling was now interspersed with the sounds of someone with a heavy foreign accent trying to placate someone else who was intent on kicking in the kitchen door. I felt sorry for the au pair, but she’d given me the chance to ask a further question.

‘Perhaps they’ve moved,’ I said. ‘This is definitely the address I was given for Flora.’

The pointy-nosed one scowled at me and flicked back her gleaming hair curtains. ‘We’ve only been here two years. We bought from some people called Georgievich. I don’t know who used to live here before that. How long ago was it?’

When I told her it was perhaps as long as twelve years, she said triumphantly, ‘Well, there you are! You can’t expect people to still be in the same place twelve years later, can you?’ It then occurred to her that given my age, I was asking about someone who would have lived here when I was a child. I saw suspicion dawn in her eyes. ‘That’s an awfully long time ago.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said breezily. Damn it, I didn’t know how long the Wildes had lived here, or when. My mother had said it was their last address. How many had they had before this one? I should have asked her. Come to that, how many had they had after leaving here? When you’ve got a secret, one way of hiding it is to keep moving, as my mother had done. My flimsy strategy hatched over coffee and pasta was already revealed as less than watertight.

Since I couldn’t think of a convincing explanation for my lack of precise information, and knew better than to attempt an unconvincing one, I simply ignored the implied question. ‘I’m not surprised to hear she’s moved. But sometimes people stay for years in one house, don’t they? I thought there was just a chance they’d still be here.’

By a stroke of luck, I’d struck a chord. She had been watching me, biting at the spot where her lower lip ought to be. Now she brightened, as if she’d had an idea. ‘You could try Mrs Mackenzie at number thirty-nine. She’s lived here for donkey’s years. She may have known these people you’re looking for.’

From the kitchen regions came an almighty crash, a scream and what sounded like profuse lamentations in French.

‘Got to go!’ said the woman. ‘Bloody hell, can’t that girl do anything right?’

The door was slammed. I walked away feeling quite glad that I wasn’t a harassed young mum, even with a semi-detached mock-Tudor lifestyle, my own little runabout car and an au pair. I just don’t think that domesticity and I would get along. Don’t get me wrong. I like kids. What I don’t like, I suppose, is responsibility.

Perhaps, I thought ruefully, I take after my own mother. Perhaps, given a family to look after, I would, as she had, walk out.

I didn’t like to think I had been the sort of little horror who was making Marie-Cécile’s life a nightmare. But perhaps I just didn’t remember far enough back. True, at kindergarten I was the one who had managed to upset the poster paints and unintentionally pulled down all the classroom decorations just before the Christmas party started. I was the one who, when builders were working at my primary school, had discovered that they’d gone to take a break leaving a pile of sand temptingly unguarded. I’d then led an infant work detail armed with anything which could be used for carrying, and diligently removed it, scoop by scoop, to an area behind the boilerhouse. There we set to work to turn it into a castle and had got up to the turrets before being discovered.

Add to that frequent spats with the neighbours, all of whom I’d managed to upset one way and another. As when I’d attempted to do a kind turn to a friendly and hungry-looking cat by opening a tin of sardines and putting it down on the floor for him. He shoved his face into it and it got stuck there, wedged on his jaws. The poor thing ran round demented, unable to see, dripping sardine oil and cannoning off the furniture. It was ages before Dad managed to catch him. Then we had to clean him up before his owner saw him. By now he distrusted our entire family and spat and scratched as we tried to remove oil from his fur and bits of sardine from his ears. All this before my disruptive progress through the private school, my eventual expulsion and the humiliation of facing Dad and Grandma which I’ve already told you about.

‘Face it, Fran,’ I told myself. ‘You were ghastly.’

Mrs Mackenzie had net curtains at her bow windows. Her tiny front garden hadn’t been sacrificed for a car but was paved with chequered tiles and shielded from the pavement by a clipped privet hedge. Her front door was varnished dark brown and had twin glass panels in it, long, thin and pointed like church windows. Between them was stuck a little notice. It read: